Brad DeLong

Eric Rosten's Shtick Is Asking Dumb Questions: Harry Potter vs the Codfish Weblogging

Eric Rosten:

Dumb Question: Is Harry Potter Really Less Important Than Global Warming? - Bloomberg: This week’s dumb question was put to J. Bradford DeLong, who is professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a blogger, and a former Clinton administration Treasury official. 

The Grid: Can I ask you a dumb question?  Last week you wrote a blog post that asks why people seem to care more about “imaginary friends” like Harry Potter than about real stories from the past or even projections of the future -- whether it holds global wealth or global warming. Do you mind explaining a bit more why imaginary friends like Harry Potter are less important than imaginary issues like global warming? 

Brad DeLong: Hundreds of millions of people are greatly concerned with Harry Potter--he’s one of the most important things in life. What happens to him is what they most desperately want to know.

Why are they paying attention to the imaginary Harry Potter, instead of the man behind the curtain -- global warming? There are two billion peasants living in the great river valleys of Asia. Global warming either means more or less snow on the Tibetan plateau, which melts either faster or slower, which means either drought or flood or both. And none of these two billion people have enough resources to leave their land and move to the cities, because the land is what they’ve got.

Surely what happens to all two billion of them is a more important story than what happens to one single person, who doesn't even exist. Isn't it?

It’s not just the “eight million stories in the naked city.” It’s two billion. Why, if we can organize ourselves to have Harry Potter festivals, can’t we organize ourselves to deal with global warming?

The right answer is that we are jumped-up East African plains apes who have barely managed to evolve an inferior and inadequate kind of intelligence.

This is yet more evidence of how inferior and inadequate our intelligence is. 

7 Tesla Model S Owners Set Out to Recreate New York Times Reporter John Broder's Road Trip to Groton

TeslaRoadTrip on Twitter:

7 Tesla Model S Owners Set out Saturday 2/16 to recreate the NY Times Reporter's uncommitted test drive from Maryland to Connecticut and prove it can be done.

Elon Musk of Tesla Motors vs. the New York Times

What I think happened:

• Does the Tesla overstate its range? Yes, if you drive 50-55 with minimal heat/air conditioning. Reduce range by 10% if you drive 65. Reduce range by another 10% in winter with heat or summer with air conditioning.

• Does the Tesla battery retain its charge when it is cold? No. That's why you plug it in at night.

• Did Broder set the cruise control to 54? No.

• Did Broder turn off the heat, and did his feet freeze, and did his knuckles turn white as his body tried to reduce heat loss through the hands? No. Eventually he turned the heat down to 64 1/2.

• Did he think that running out of electrons would make for a more interesting story? Yes.

• Did he try to make the car run out of electrons before Milford? I can't say.

• Did he forget to plug in the car in Groton because he was trying to make the car run out of electrons? I can't say.

• Did he fail to stop on the road from Groton to Milford because he was then trying to make the car run out of electrons? Yes.

• Did he claim the car was dead even though it was not? Probably not--probably he did not understand that turning it off meant that with the battery so low it would not automatically restart.

---

And time to call this one for Elon Musk on points:

John Broder:

The phrase “the car fell short of its projected range” appeared in a caption with an accompanying map; it was not in the article.

And:

I do recall setting the cruise control to about 54 m.p.h., as I wrote. The log shows the car traveling about 60 m.p.h. for a nearly 100-mile stretch on the New Jersey Turnpike. I cannot account for the discrepancy, nor for a later stretch in Connecticut where I recall driving about 45 m.p.h., but it may be the result of the car being delivered with 19-inch wheels and all-season tires, not the specified 21-inch wheels and summer tires. That just might have affected the recorded speed, range, rate of battery depletion or any number of other parameters.

---

This looks very, very, very bad indeed for the New York Times:

A Most Peculiar Test Drive: You may have heard recently about an article written by John Broder from The New York Times that makes numerous claims about the performance of the Model S…. After a negative experience several years ago with Top Gear… where they pretended that our car ran out of energy and had to be pushed back to the garage, we always carefully data log media drives… In the case of Top Gear, they had literally written the script before they even received the car (we happened to find a copy of the script on a table while the car was being “tested”). Our car never even had a chance.

The logs show again that our Model S never had a chance with John Broder. In the case with Top Gear, their legal defense was that they never actually said it broke down, they just implied that it could and then filmed themselves pushing what viewers did not realize was a perfectly functional car. In Mr. Broder’s case, he simply… worked very hard to force our car to stop running….

In the Year 2525...

Charles Stross, procrastinating:

Charlie's Diary: I'm going to assume no alien invasions or total collapses of technological civilization or significant asteroid impacts, because all three of these are rare in the historical record…. I'm also going to ignore space colonization…. I'm going to assume that we are sufficiently short-sighted and stupid that we keep burning fossil fuels. We're going to add at least 1000 GT of fossil carbon to the atmosphere…. So the climate is going to be rather ... different.

Kudos to Modeled Behavior for Weighing in at Forbes on the Desirability of Carbon Taxes…

Kudos to Adam Ozimek for writing:

I will take Brad’s new advice and try to convince the readers of Forbes that a carbon tax is a good idea…. I am a proponent of carbon taxes…. [S]urely higher gas taxes are a good idea. In his Pigou Tax paper Mankiw cites on study that shows of the $2.10 optimal tax on gasoline, only 6 cents was due to global warming. The rest came from other externalities like congestion and accidents. Gas taxes also show us that international “coordination” is possible…. Noah [Smith] is correct that efficiently taxing a globally traded externality producing commodity does require global cooperation. But… many developed nations… [set] high gas taxes, and it’s time we got on board. This will be many times more efficient than CAFE standards…. I am also on board with Noah’s larger suggestion though that we should be heavily subsidizing basic research for clean energy….

[W]hile Noah is correct that carbon taxes and gas taxes are unpopular, so are the taxes that would be needed to raise the money for the research he wants. As Matt Yglesias points out, this money needs to come from somewhere. Better to be tax an activity that generates an externality to raise this money than to tax income or capital gains.

A final important reason conservatives should support taxes and research is because it will help the government get out of the energy regulation business in the long-run. If innovation drives solar and battery prices low enough, the energy sector may become no different than any other industry in producing limited externalities. Thus the special regulatory consideration it merits will no longer exist. That and of course it will help reduce the risk that we destroy the planet. Conservatives should care about that too.

The Arctic Icecap Melt

Global Warming: The Years the Locust Hath Eaten

KANSAS CITY, MO: 99 degrees: Back in the spring and early summer of 1993 it was my great honor and privilege to work at the U.S. Treasury for Al Gore's carbon tax proposal. There were three powerful reasons why we should then have started taxing carbon at an increasing rate:

1. A more energy-efficient U.S. economy would consume less Middle Eastern oil, and the world economy and indeed human life would then be less at hostage to the deeds of the God-maddened in the Middle Est.

2. A more energy-efficient U.S. economy would have been one with less traffic congestion--and time spent sitting in traffic is one of the greatest pure economic losses in the U.S. today.

3. Most important, by 1993 the odds were 95% that serious global warming from human-caused CO₂ and CH₄ emissions were on the way.

This Is an Actual Statement by Ryan Lizza: "Who Is Worse: Flat-Earthers or Round-Earthers Who Refuse to Speak Up?"

https://twitter.com/RyanLizza/status/221641633756753921

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

---

Oh. And the round-earthers not only are not silent--not only speak out--but also do stuff:

Nancy Pelosi:

American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009: [L]aunch a new clean energy economy—to create 1.7 million American jobs (with the Recovery Act); help reduce our dangerous dependence on foreign oil by 5 million barrels per day; keep energy costs low for Americans, protects consumers from price increases with lower income families seeing no cost; with no increase to the deficit.  Requires a reduction in the carbon pollution causing climate change from major U.S. sources of 17 percent by 2020 (the basis for America’s proposal going into the Copenhagen Climate Summit) and 80 percent by 2050, compared to 2005 levels.  Invests in new clean energy and efficiency technologies. Passed House June 26, 2009.

Harry Reid:

Climate Change: Global warming is one of the greatest challenges of our time.  The United States accounts for approximately 4 percent of the world’s population, yet it is responsible for about 25 percent of the world’s global warming pollution.  Our government must provide domestic and global leadership on this issue because we have a moral responsibility to leave future generations with a safe and habitable world.

Climate change will have enormous consequences for Nevada, the Great Basin, and all of the Southwest – average temperatures are currently rising, and it is widely predicted that climate change will decrease precipitation.  Drought will make farming and ranching tougher, increase the frequency and intensity of wildfires, and could drive many plant and animal species to extinction.  Some invasive plants, such as cheatgrass, are better suited to hotter climates, and are already replacing native vegetation.  These effects create serious challenges and could become catastrophic in the future if we fail to take action.

Climate change’s impact on our water supply could be the most devastating near-term impact on the desert southwest, which is why I have introduced legislation like the Drinking Water Adaptation, Technology, Education and Research (WATER) Act, the Water Efficiency, Conservation, and Adaptation Act, and the Water Infrastructure Resiliency and Sustainability Act.  These bills would help address the urgent need for more research and investment to improve the ability of America’s water systems to meet our nation’s escalating water supply needs, in light of reduced water supplies caused by longer droughts from hotter temperatures.

Barack Obama:

Climate Change: In December 2009, President Obama and other world leaders came together to negotiate the Copenhagen Accord, an important milestone in which, for the first time, all major developed and developing economies agreed to implement measures to limit their greenhouse gas emissions and to do so in an internationally transparent manner. In 2010, the Cancun Agreement confirmed and substantially extended the core elements of the Copenhagen Accord…. In December 2011 at Durban, the United States and the international community took important steps to make operational all of the key elements of the Cancun agreement, including a transparency regime to monitor and review mitigation efforts….

President Obama is pursuing a wide range of initiatives that reduce greenhouse gas emissions through clean energy technologies and policies. The Administration has made the largest clean energy investment in American history and these investments have allowed us to nearly double America’s renewable power generation since 2008….

For the first time, the United States is comprehensively cataloguing greenhouse gas emissions from the largest sources – an important initial step toward measurable and transparent reductions in carbon emissions, which will reduce air pollution and protect the health and welfare of the American people. In January 2012, the Administration launched an online tool that makes comprehensive greenhouse gas emission data publicly available for 29 different industrial categories and other large sources of greenhouse gas pollution.

President Obama has also directed the Federal Government – the largest energy consumer in the U.S. economy – to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions from direct sources such as building energy use and fuel consumption by 28 percent by 2020.  He also directed Federal agencies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions from indirect sources, such as those from employee commuting, by 13 percent by 2020. By meeting these goals, Federal agencies can save up to $11 billion dollars in energy costs and eliminate the equivalent of cumulative 235 million barrels of oil over the next decade. In 2011, the Administration released the first-ever comprehensive Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions Inventory for the U.S. Government, allowing agencies to leverage data to gauge the effectiveness of their renewable energy investments and their energy and fuel efficiency efforts….

Federal agencies are drafting their first-ever climate change adaptation plans to help ensure smart decisions that protect our investments and safeguard the health and security of our communities, economies and infrastructure from the impacts of severe weather, rising sea levels and other changing climate conditions….

Through the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), U.S. government scientists are conducting world-class research on global climate change. The USGCRP is a collaborative effort involving 13 Federal agencies to evaluate the current and future impacts of climate change, inform policy-makers and the public about scientific findings, and investigate effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deploy cost-effective clean energy technology.

Yes, the Global Warming Climate-Change Signal Is Emerging from the Weather Noise. Why Do You Ask?

Climate Central:

Ongoing Heat Wave in U.S. Rivals Events of Dust Bowl Era: During the past 30 days, a stunning 6,439 warm temperature records were set or tied in the Lower 48 states, including 240 all-time warm temperature records. For the year-to-date, warm temperature records have been outpacing cold temperature records by a lopsided 7-to-1 margin.

In a long-term trend that demonstrates the effects of a warming climate, daily record-high temperatures have recently been outpacing daily record lows by an average of 2-to-1, and this imbalance is expected to grow as the climate continues to warm. According to a 2009 study, if the climate were not warming, this ratio would be expected to be even. Other studies have shown that global warming increases the odds of extreme heat events and may make them warmer and longer lasting.

The individual records set during the ongoing heat wave tell the story of how unusual this event has been so far…

Yes, Global Warming Is a Real Threat. Why Do You Ask?

Kevin Drum:

Clouds Are the Last Hope of the Climate Deniers: The New York Times reports today that climate skeptics have pretty much run out of plausible pseudo-science to support their claim that global warming is a myth. Sunspots are a joke. Weather station innacuracy isn't an issue. Paleoclimate reconstructions seem to be fine. Urban heat islands aren't a distorting measurements. And no, it hasn't been getting cooler since 1998.

Car Culture

You know, cruising around New York in the back seat of a limousine is really quite pleasant--as long as it is 2 am, 7 am, or 10:30 am. But it is now about to shut down into gridlock...

Summer in March

Michael LePage:

Has global warming brought an early summer to the US?: North America has been experiencing unusual weather of late. After a mild winter over much of the continent, last week it experienced record-breaking summer-like conditions. In Canada, for instance, the thermometer in St John's, New Brunswick, hit 25.4 °C on 21 March, smashing the previous record high for March of 17.5 °C.

Wish-I’d-said-That Dep’t: Climate Change Edition « The Reality-Based Community

Mark Kleiman:

Wish-I’d-said-that Dep’t: climate change edition: The Reality-Based Community: Slacktivist:

The nefarious global conspiracy promoting the climate-change hoax continues to spread: The oceans are in on it. So are the maple trees of New England. And both Dakotas.

Department of "Huh?!": Oil Price Edition

The question:

Poll Results | IGM Forum: Gasoline Prices: Changes in U.S. gasoline prices over the past 10 years have predominantly been due to market factors rather than U.S. federal economic or energy policies, yes or no?

Which of these changes in U.S gasoline prices since early 2002 do Hoxby, Stokey, and Zingales think might have been due to changes in U.S. federal economic or energy prices rather than to changes in supply and demand?

I could see somebody arguing that the Bush-era step-back from financial market regulation led to the economic crash that led to the late-2008 collapse in gasoline prices, and that the subsequent revival was in large part due to the TARP, the stress tests, the ARRA, and QE. But somehow I doubt that that is what these three have in mind...

Water Will Not Long Be (Nearly) Free

Peter Orszag on how we need to invest more in our water supply, and do much more to conserve our use:

Atlanta’s Water War Is First in a Gathering Flood: There is an alarming global supply-demand imbalance, worsened by pollution and draining of underground aquifers reducing the available fresh water supply…. [I]n the past two decades, groundwater resources in Great Lakes communities like Chicago and Milwaukee have fallen by 1,000 feet. Our aging water pipes are another challenge… pipes account for about 70 percent of the cost of a water system.

So what can we do to preserve our access to fresh drinking water? One major need, as I have written about previously, is to address the pricing problem. The typical American uses 100 gallons of water per day, but in most places, prices aren’t adequately adjusted to usage. Prices that reflected usage would not only raise more money for addressing emerging water issues but also help raise everyone’s awareness of them.

Today’s low interest rates offer an ideal situation in which to finance investment in new or replacement pipes. We also need to invest in new technology -- from desalination to strategies for water reuse…. There’s no reason to wait passively for the next water battle…

Brad Johnson: Just When You Think Republicans Could Not Get Any More Detached from Reality...

…along comes Rick Santorum.

Brad Johnson:

Conspiracy Theorist Sweeps Tuesday's GOP Presidential Battles: Conspiracy theorist Rick Santorum swept Tuesday’s Republican presidential battles, winning the sparsely attended Colorado and Minnesota caucuses and non-binding Missouri primary on a platform anchored by his denial of global warming. “I for one never bought the hoax,” Santorum said at the Colorado Energy Summit on Monday, claiming that climate change is “an absolute travesty of scientific research that was motivated by those who, in my opinion, saw this as an opportunity to create a panic and a crisis for government to be able to step in and even more greatly control your life.”

Understanding the Literature of Economics: Plumbing the Depths of Ignorance Blogging

Simon Wren-Louis does a very bad thing by reminding me of this:

John Cochrane: Keynes left Britain 30 years of miserable growth…. Keynes disdained investment…. Keynes did not think at all about the incentives effects of taxes. He favored planning, and wrote before Hayek reminded us how modern economies cannot function without price signals. Fiscal stimulus advocates are hanging on to a last little timber from a sunken boat of ideas, ideas that everyone including they abandoned, and from hard experience…

Let's give the microphone to John Maynard Keynes, 1936, who as far as I can see had absolutely nothing to learn from Friedrich von Hayek about the benefits of the price mechanism:

In some other respects the foregoing theory is moderately conservative…. The State will have to exercise a guiding influence on the propensity to consume partly through its scheme of taxation, partly by fixing the rate of interest, and partly, perhaps, in other ways. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that the influence of banking policy on the rate of interest will be sufficient by itself to determine an optimum rate of investment…. But beyond this no obvious case is made out for a system of State Socialism….

[If we] succeed in establishing an aggregate volume of output corresponding to full employment as nearly as is practicable, the classical theory comes into its own again…. [T]here is no objection to be raised against the classical analysis of the manner in which private self-interest will determine what in particular is produced, in what proportions the factors of production will be combined to produce it, and how the value of the final product will be distributed…. [T]here is no objection to be raised against the modern classical theory as to the degree of consilience between private and public advantage in conditions of perfect and imperfect competition…. When 9,000,000 men are employed out of 10,000,000 willing and able to work, there is no evidence that the labour of these 9,000,000 men is misdirected. The complaint against the present system is not that these 9,000,000 men ought to be employed on different tasks, but that tasks should be available for the remaining 1,000,000 men. It is in determining the volume, not the direction, of actual employment that the existing system has broken down….

[T]he traditional advantages of individualism will still hold good. Let us stop for a moment to remind ourselves what these advantages are. They are partly advantages of efficiency — the advantages of decentralisation and of the play of self-interest. The advantage to efficiency of the decentralisation of decisions and of individual responsibility is even greater, perhaps, than the nineteenth century supposed…. [A]bove all, individualism, if it can be purged of its defects and its abuses, is the best safeguard of personal liberty… greatly widens the field for the exercise of personal choice… best safeguard of the variety of life… the loss of which is the greatest of all the losses of the homogeneous or totalitarian state. For this variety preserves the traditions which embody the most secure and successful choices of former generations; it colours the present with the diversification of its fancy; and, being the handmaid of experiment as well as of tradition and of fancy, it is the most powerful instrument to better the future.

Whilst… [the policies I recommend] would seem to a nineteenth-century publicist or to a contemporary American financier to be a terrific encroachment on individualism. I defend… [them] as the only practicable means of avoiding the destruction of existing economic forms in their entirety and as the condition of the successful functioning of individual initiative.

For if effective demand is deficient… the individual enterpriser who seeks to bring these resources into action is operating with the odds loaded against him. The game of hazard which he plays is furnished with many zeros, so that the players as a whole will lose if they have the energy and hope to deal all the cards. Hitherto the increment of the world’s wealth has fallen short of the aggregate of positive individual savings; and the difference has been made up by the losses of those whose courage and initiative have not been supplemented by exceptional skill or unusual good fortune. But if effective demand is adequate, average skill and average good fortune will be enough…

The sheer depths of the ignorance--the failure to have done and to do their most basic homework--that we have faced from the Right over the past four years has been literally indescribable.

It is in this context, I think, that you have to read our annoyance--indeed, our HSRILL!1!-ness at the concern-trolling of Tyler Cowen and company like:

Tyler Cowen: Krugman calls himself a Humean but has he studied and internalized the lessons from Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion? Is it easy to imagine the current Krugman writing rich multi-voiced dialogues which extend both his points and those of his intellectual opponents? Can you imagine the current Krugman writing something sufficiently multi-faceted that you might come away thinking — because of the piece itself — that the opposing point of view was the better one? Krugman has shown a remarkable and impressive capacity to reinvent himself, more than once. He could reinvent himself again — in a truly Humean direction — and become the most important American public intellectual — and perhaps intellectual — of his time.

There are, it seems to us (or, rather, to me), two intellectual sides here. One consists of a lot of people trying to grapple with a confused, uncertain, and near-desperate situation (and advocating policies like housing finance reorganization, nominal GDP targeting, expansionary fiscal policy, etc.). The other consists of a bunch of rather lazy ideologues who haven't done and won't do their homework talking bullshit and trash.

And now comes what claims to be a third side: the Tyler Cowens of the world who say that we are in some sense blameworthy for not making silk purses out of cow's ears--for not turning bullshit and trash-talk into "rich multi-voiced dialogues… sufficiently multi-faceted that you might come away thinking — because of the piece itself — that the opposing point of view was the better…"

Our response: Help us wash out the bullshit and clean up the trash, first.

Start by saying things like: Yes, right now it looks like financial markets are telling us that the United States--and Germany, and Japan, and Britain, and other credit-worthy sovereigns--have enormous amounts of unused debt and risk-bearing capacity. Right now there is a strong case for experiments to try to use that capacity to rebalance aggregate demand and supply--through more aggressive unconventional monetary policy, through banking and financial market policy, through fiscal policy. Such policies will run into problems of implementation, of sustainability, of public choice, and of appropriate unwinding strategies that will limit how far we can extend expansionary policies. But right now the position of the Right and the Center--the position that we need immediate contractionary action now before the bond market vigilantes come to kill us all--is simply wrong as a matter of evidence and as a matter of theory.

Say things like that.

Say them loudly.

And when our current task is done, then we can write subtle dialogues.

But crying "FIRE! FIRE!" in Noah's Flood is not attractive. And demanding that we somehow make crying "FIRE! FIRE!" in Noah's Flood is little but a second-order meta-cry of "FIRE! FIRE!", and is not attractive.

---

UPDATE: Note that it is not just us. I think of, among others, poor Jon Gruber--whose objections yesterday to demands for Single Payer Health Care or FEHBP-for-all were all ones of political practicality--standing there in Escapist Comics on Claremont giving the Heritage-Romney intellectual argument for the Affordable Care Act as optimal policy because all of its real advocates have shown exactly how lily-colored their livers are. And I think of people like Rob Stavins, who had hoped to be part of a centrist bipartisan environmental-policy coalition, and who find now that the Republicans who they had thought were technocratic carbon-tax advocates are as cowardly and as absent as…

Where Does Richard Tol's Claim That Tokyo Today Is 16 Feet Lower Relative To Sea Level Than It Was in 1900 Comes From?

William D. Nordhaus: "Energy: Friend or Enemy?" http://goo.gl/MFW6O

Krishnamurthy and Vissing-Jorgenson: "The Effects of Quantitative Easing on Interest Rates: Channels and Implications for Policy" http://goo.gl/bXwtw

Brad Plumer: CO2 Emissions Now Worse than in IPCC Worst Case Scenario

Brad Plumer:

Global CO2 emissions rising faster than worst-case scenarios - The Washington Post: [E]missions are now rising faster than the worst-case scenarios envisioned by the IPCC in its 2007 report. What would this mean for global warming?…. If emissions keep growing at their current pace, then the average prediction from MIT’s modeling is that the world could heat up 5.2°C by 2100. But that’s just the average. There’s a 9 percent chance that global surface temperatures could rise more than 7°C — truly uncharted territory…

It Is too Warming Blogging...

Yes, the hockey stick in climate is still there: >Chris Mooney: Score Another Victory for Scientists, Michael Mann and the Freedom of Inquiry.

Coal-Fueled Power as a Value Subtracting Industry:

Muller, Mendelsohn, William Nordhaus

"Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy": American Economic Review Vol. 101, No. 5, August 2011:

This study presents a framework to include environmental externalities into a system of national accounts. The paper estimates the air pollution damages for each industry in the United States. An integrated-assessment model quantifies the marginal damages of air pollution emissions for the US which are multiplied times the quantity of emissions by industry to compute gross damages. Solid waste combustion, sewage treatment, stone quarrying, marinas, and oil and coal-fired power plants have air pollution damages larger than their value added. The largest industrial contributor to external costs is coal-fired electric generation, whose damages range from 0.8 to 5.6 times value added. (JEL E01, L94, Q53, Q56)

Yes, Global Warming Is Very Real

Nobody has any business working for, contributing to, or voting for any candidate of this Republican Party in any general election. Nobody. Nobody at a all:

Arctic ice levels hit historic low, researchers say – This Just In - CNN.com Blogs: "The amount of Arctic sea ice has melted to a historic low, with the area of land covered by ice at the smallest level since scientists began observing it with satellites in 1972, researchers from the University of Bremen in Germany report…. Researchers, including those from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, had predicted earlier this summer that Arctic sea ice levels could reach extreme lows. But the University of Bremen physicists said there was uncertainty in July about whether the ice melt would surpass the previous record.

They said their studies indicated that continuing ice decline was related to man-made global warming. "It seems to be clear that this is a further consequence of the man-made global warming with global consequences," researchers said in their report.  "Directly, the livehood of small animals, algae, fishes and mammals like polar bears and seals is more and more reduced." As Arctic sea ice has continued to decline, it also has become drastically thinner overall, the report said….

The National Snow and Ice Data Center did not have updated data to confirm the German report but said it expected the historic low to be hit based on the past few weeks' data.  Its site is only up to date to September 6. The historic levels were reached two days later. The center said it would "make a preliminary announcement when ice extent has stopped declining and has increased for several days in a row" and said it would release monthly data for September early next month…

Joe Romm on Michael Mann and the "Hockey Stick"

Me? I had always thought that the "hockey stick" was more a measure of our ignorance of the pre-1800 climate--when you don't know much, your best estimate is going to be close to your sample mean and is not going to move around very much, while when you do know what is going on your estimates will track a quite possibly changing reality.

But since Mann and company first started their reconstructions, the evidence that we have now substantially exceeded past historic climate variability on a global scale has been piling up.

And now Joe Romm reports:

Climate Secret: NSF Quietly Closes Out Inspector General Investigation with Complete Vindication of Michael Mann: NSF Inspector General:  “Finding no research misconduct or other matter raised by the various regulations and laws discussed above, this case is closed.”

Two things we know with extremely high confidence:

1. Recent warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause (so the temperature history looks like a Hockey Stick).
2. Michael Mann, the lead author on the original Hockey Stick paper, is one of the nation’s top climatologists and a source of first-rate analysis.

We know these things because both the Hockey Stick and Mann have been independently investigated and vindicated more times than any other facet of climate science or any other climate scientist….  While the anti-science extremists who rule the Tea Party and the right-wing bunkosphere keep shouting lies about the Hockey Stick and Mann — and urging their followers to “shout down” science-based commenters on independent websites — the vindications of the science and the man are reported as quietly as if they came from the Whos of Whoville. And so after countless investigations — 3 in the U.K., 2 by Penn State, the EPA, the NOAA IG — that have all unanimously found the allegations against climate scientists and their research conclusions based on the hacked “ClimateGate” emails to be wholly unsubstantiated, a top GOP presidential candidate backed by the fossil fuel industry still gives voice to the Texas-sized lie (see “Denier Rick Perry Takes $11 Million from Big Oil, Then Claims Climate Scientists ‘Manipulated Data’ For Money“).

And so while Mann and the Hockey Stick were getting yet another full vindication (from Penn State) earlier this year, Fox News was trumpeting one final investigation:

But the final say will be in the hands of a skeptical inspector general at the National Science Foundation, the primary funder of the research into global warming. According to published documents obtained by FoxNews.com, the IG must determine whether Penn State’s investigation was adequate. The Office of Inspector General confirmed that it will review the misconduct charges. A spokeswoman told FoxNews.com that “in accordance with our research misconduct regulation, (45 C.F.R. part 689), when the OIG is provided with an institution’s investigation report, we review it for fairness, accuracy and completeness” — issues the investigation has already been faulted for….

The IG analyzed all of the charges “de novo” and concluded:

Finding no research misconduct or other matter raised by the various regulations and laws discussed above, this case is closed.

I have uploaded the full report here, but you can also go the NSF IG website here and insert “A09120086.”

Let me end with some key findings of the Penn State investigation:

“An Investigatory Committee of faculty members with impeccable credentials” has unanimously “determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities.”

His work “clearly places Dr. Mann among the most respected scientists in his field…. Dr. Mann’s work, from the beginning of his career, has been recognized as outstanding.“

So Mann isn’t merely a competent researcher.  He is one of the leading climate scientists in this country, which of course is precisely why the anti-science crowd has gone after him, much as they have with other leading climate scientists, including Hansen and Santer.

And that’s one more reason why the major media outlets who smeared and defamed him owe him an apology and a retraction — loud ones!

Recent Studies Vindicating the Hockey Stick:

1. Temperatures of North Atlantic “are unprecedented over the past 2000 years and are presumably linked to the Arctic amplification of global warming” — Science (2011)
2. GRL (2010):  “We conclude that the 20th century warming of the incoming intermediate North Atlantic water has had no equivalent during the last thousand years.“
3. JGR (2010):  “The last decades of the past millennium are characterized again by warm temperatures that seem to be unprecedented in the context of the last 1600 years.”
4. Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds (2009)
5. Unprecedented warming in Lake Tanganyika and its impact on humanity (2010)"

Where Is Our Carbon Tax Proposal?

I understand why the Republicans haven't proposed a carbon tax--they, after all, aren't worried about the deficit. They like the deficit because it gives them an excuse to cut spending, and once they have cut spending they can then cut taxes on high income Americans, recreate the deficit, and then cut spending again.

But I don't understand why Obama hasn't proposed a carbon tax.

Ryan Avent:

Climate change: It's hot out there: A "HEAT dome" is descending on Washington. It's hovering over much of America, actually, sending temperatures into triple digits (or the upper 30s, if you prefer). This is just the latest in what has been a remarkable series of extraordinary weather events. America's south is experiencing a record drought. So, too, is the horn of Africa, where a famine may impact millions of people. In late June, an airport in Oman recorded the highest ever low temperature; on the evening of the 27th, the mercury failed to drop below 107 degrees Fahrenheit. Droughts, floods, deadly storms: the news is full of them. While it's not easy to attribute any individual event to climate change, it is clear that a hotter planet translates into a higher frequency of extreme weather events.

When we emit carbon into the atmosphere, we impose a tiny negative cost on society as a whole in the form of more rapid global warm and a greater intensity of the accompanying social ills. Views of the magnitude of this cost differ. Many studies peg it at somewhere between $5 and $150 per tonne of carbon. Other  studies indicate that it could be far higher—perhaps more than $1,000 per tonne. But the cost is positive, and a crucial first step to dealing with climate change, therefore, is to charge people for the carbon they emit. If you put a positive price on carbon, this price will be reflected in the cost of transactions, people will internalise the effect of their behaviour on the climate, and emissions will fall.

This is a pretty straightforward policy solution, and it's one that's been embraced by economists and various other wonks for years....

[I]t's nonetheless noteworthy that in the whole of this major American fiscal debate no one has proposed taxing carbon. Forget the nitpicks; it would be easy to design a tax so that it didn't kick in right away, and so that its impact would be progressive. But people in Washington would literally laugh in your face if you presented a carbon tax as a good policy choice to include in a deficit-reduction package. Whether or not the American government wiggles through this self-created disaster without wrecking the economy, that's a good reason for long-run pessimism.

Jonathan Adler's Claim That Stripping the EPA of Its Authority to Regulate Greenhouse Gases Would Be a Good idea: For the Virtual Green Room

Jonathan Adler writes

The GOP’s Climate Anti-Policy: Yesterday the Energy and Power Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to remove the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.... This is a good first step on climate policy.... Stripping the EPA of authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act is a good idea...

Rebutted by Jonathan Adler, who in the same post writes:

The GOP’s Climate Anti-Policy: For years I have been arguing for a combination of policies that would include a) a revenue-neutral carbon tax, like that proposed by James Hansen, offsetting new taxes on carbon with reductions in income or other taxes; b) measures to incentivize and accelerate energy and climate-related innovation, including  technology inducement prizes; c) streamlining of regulatory requirements that hamper the development and deployment of alternative energy technologies, including (but not limited to) offshore wind development; d) policies to facilitate adaptation due to the inevitability of some amount of climate change, and e) elimination of policies that subsidize energy inefficiency and excess greenhouse gas emissions, including ill-conceived ethanol mandates (which, among other things, forestall efforts at reforestation).  Would this be enough?  Maybe not, but it would be a start...

If you want carbon taxes, you have to provide representatives with an incentive to vote for carbon taxes--and fear of an EPA-led regulatory regime that would be a (bad) second-best to carbon taxes is the only way to get to the first-best outcome. Strip the EPA of its regulatory authority, and you wind up at the third-best with an anti-climate policy.

Joe Romm: Tim Pawlenty Haunted By Past Of Trying To Help Protect Kids from Pollution

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/27/253159/tim-pawlenty-haunted-by-past-of-trying-to-help-protect-kids-from-pollution/

Just a note: all three of the people I know who have spent any amount of time with Pawlenty have been struck by how much less he knows about stuff than they expected...

The Fukushima Incident Heats Up

Charlie Stross:

Radioactive turd, meet punchbowl: If this report is true, then: a) Reactor 1 at Fukushima Daiichi melted down within sixteen hours of the quake (about eight hours after all active cooling was lost), b) TEPCO management knew about it, c) The press were systematically nobbled (an early report of the meltdown was withdrawn), d) Going by his rather extraordinary remarks during the subsequent weeks, the Prime Minister, and presumably the rest of the Japanese government, were systematically misled by TEPCO.

Meltdown

BBC:

BBC News - Setbacks at Japan nuclear plant: A reactor at Japan's crippled nuclear plant has been more badly damaged than originally thought, operator Tepco has said. Water is leaking from the pressure vessel surrounding reactor 1 - probably because of damage caused by exposed fuel rods melting, a spokesman said.... Work to restore cooling systems had been most advanced at reactor 1, the smallest and oldest at the site. But a spokesman for the power giant said when a faulty gauge had been repaired, it showed water levels in the pressure vessel 5m (16ft) below the level needed to cover fuel rods.

Joe Romm Defends Al Gore Against Richard Muller

UPDATE April 2, 2011: Rich Muller emails:

Dear Brad,

In the olden days, you would have checked with me before publishing something about me. It is interesting how the time pressure of blogging has changed the standards. You might consider writing an article about that.

Here is a guideline that I strive to maintain: I am often mistaken, but I never lie.

It would be good to discuss the facts of "An Inconvenient Truth" sometimes. In my book, "Physics for Future Presidents", I go into some details about the misleading statements former VP Al Gore makes. I'd be happy to send you a paperback copy.

Rich

---

Original Post March 29, 1011: Joe Romm:

Climate Progress: Muller launched the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study.... [A]s Muller revealed in a public talk last week, BEST’s results to date show “We are seeing substantial global warming” and “None of the effects raised by the [skeptics] is going to have anything more than a marginal effect on the amount of global warming.” Muller, clearly, isn’t a denier like Koch.  But he does share one thing in common with Koch — Gore Derangement Syndrome.... Brad Johnson has the story of just how far Muller will go to smear Gore:

Unlike Koch, Muller recognizes that fossil fuel pollution is threatening civilization, Muller argues that existing climate policy is corrupt and misguided, and that many leading climate scientists are guilty of academic fraud — just as Koch argues.... As with Koch, a particular target of Muller’s righteous scorn is Vice President Al Gore, whom he calls an “extremist” and “alarmist.” In a recent lecture at the University of California at Berkeley.... Muller claimed that Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was lambasted by esteemed climate scientist Dr. Ralph Cicerone, the head of the National Academy of Sciences:

Al Gore, when he talks about the polar bears being killed by the receding glaciers, no basis for that. In fact, let me jump ahead and tell a little story. Ralph Cicerone, head of the National Academy, said there are lots of things wrong in his movie, and Al Gore asked him to come and explain this to him, and he did come. And he said, “Well, what’s wrong with my movie?”

“Well, lots of things, like the polar bears. We track polar bears. Not a single polar bear has died because of retreating ice.”

And Al Gore turned to his movie producer and said, “So, why did we put that in?” The movie producer said, “Well, it really gets people emotionally involved.”

See, this is what politicians do. They put in things that they consider a real danger that represents what they consider to be reality. Doesn’t matter if it’s technically true or not. So, there’s so much misinformation on this field. Global warming is real. I am deeply concerned about it. I am leading a major study on global warming. But most of what made the newspaper headlines is either wrong, or backward, or simply exaggerated.

Muller’s story is not “technically true.” In fact, it’s false. The meeting between Gore and Cicerone that Muller describes is apocryphal.... Bill Skane, the Executive Director of News & Public Information for the National Academy of Sciences explained in an email that the supposed conversation never took place:

There was no meeting or conversation between Dr. Cicerone and Vice President Gore or his film producer regarding An Inconvenient Truth and thus no comment about polar bears. We’ve contacted Dr. Muller today about his speech and are hoping to hear back from him.... Dr. Muller’s remarks regarding Dr. Cicerone were in error....

Not only did the conversation not take place, Muller’s depiction of An Inconvenient Truth was false as well. Here’s the transcript of what Gore actually said about polar bears in his documentary, which was released in 2006:

Right now, the Arctic ice cap acts like a giant mirror, all the sun’s rays bounce off, more than 90%. It keeps the Earth cooler, but as it melts, and the open ocean receives that sun’s energy instead, more than 90% is absorbed, so there is a faster buildup of heat here, at the North Pole, in the Arctic Ocean, and the Arctic generally than anywhere else on the planet. That’s not good for creatures like polar bears, who depend on the ice. They’re now, actually, looking for other ecological niches. It is sad what’s going on in the Arctic ecosystem.

Unsurprisingly, Cicerone said essentially the same thing a year before Gore’s documentary came out, in testimony before the U.S. Senate:

The Arctic has warmed at a faster rate than the Northern Hemisphere over the past century. A Vision for the International Polar Year 2007-2008 (2004) reports that this warming is associated with a number of impacts including: melting of sea ice, which has important impacts on biological systems such as polar bears, ice-dependent seals and local people for whom these animals are a source of food; increased rain and snow, leading to changes in river discharge and tundra vegetation; and degradation of the permafrost...

My view is that "An Inconvenient Truth" is not perfect--for example, the "hockey stick" is much more a demonstration of our ignorance of pre-1800 climate than convincing proof of low climate variability in previous centuries relative to the twentieth century--but is on balance quite good on the issues...

Are There Any Changes in the Paperback Edition of SuperFreakonomics?

The paperback edition of Levitt and Dubner, SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance is coming out on May 24, 2011...

Anybody know if they made any corrections to the "global cooling" chapter?

As I said, if I were Levitt and Dubner, I would:

pp. 165-6: Change to no longer put "global cooling" in the 1970s and "global warming" today in parallel: The scientists in the 1970s who were worried about global cooling had neither the quantative evidence, the climate models, the understanding of forcing processes, or the peer-reviewed consensus that analysis of global warming has today. Placing the two in parallel is simply wrong.

pp. 165-6: Change to remove false claim that the quotes from Newsweek were the words of "scientists."

pp. 165-6: Change to remove false claim that Newsweek was accurately citing the 1975 NAS Study--which says not that the globe is likely to cool but instead that we don't know enough about climate to forecast trends, and tht we need to do more research.

p. 167: Change to make explicit the claim that switching to an all-vegetarian diet reduces your carbon footprint by about the same order of magnitude as does switching to a hybrid car. But do not say that cars and trucks do not "contribute an ungodly share of greenhouse gases." They do--it's just that human meat-intensive agriculture contributes and ungodly share as well.

p. 168: Change to make the point that the fact that our estimates of climate effects are imprecise is not an argument for doing less or waiting to offset global warming--it is an argument for doing more and doing more now. Uncertainty is not our friend at all

p. 169: Change. Currently massively confused about Marty Weitzman's work. Marty focuses on the chance and valuation of catastrophe. He concludes that a version of the precautionary principle is appropriate: when distributions have fatter tails than log normal--which Marty thinks they do--the right policies are those that minimize the possibiliity of catastrophe. Which means starting to act now.

p. 170: Change to no longer imply that James Lovelock has some special role or authority in climate analysis or climate policy.

p. 170: Change to debunk rather than approve of British conservative Boris Johnson's claim. Johnson's statement is simply wrong. It is not the case that "the fear of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery, and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful." We can measure greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, solar radiative forcings, and temperatures. We can tell whether acts of propitiation and atonement are working.

p. 171: Change the highly misleading: "When Al Gore urges the citizenry to sacrifice... the agnostics grumble that human activity accounts for just 2 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions, with the remainder generated by natural processes like plant decay..." that 98% of carbon emissions are part of an ongoing biological cycle is not an argument supporting an "agnostic" position. And Levitt and Dubner should not hve claimed that it is.

p. 171: Change highly misleading paragraph to stress that what is relevant is not the stock but the flow: not that human activity accounts for 2% of the flow but rather that but for industrial emissions one-third (and growing) of the stock of greenhouse gases would simply not be there today.

p. 173: Change to no longer dismiss out-of-hand global agreement on climate policy. Dubner and Levitt currently write: "when it comes to actually solving climate change externalities through taxes, all we can say is good luck.... [G]reenhouse gases do not adhere to national boundaries.... Nor does one nation have the right to tell another what to do." But if the big four--U.S., EU, China, and India--of 2050 do agree, they then have the cultural, economic, and diplomatic power to coerce the rest of the world. Reaching global agreement is a very reasonable prospect.

pp. 177-181: Change to tone down the puff piece on Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures--the subsequent pages contain a lot of clues that Myhrvold and company really don't know very much about what they are talking about.

p. 182: Change to debunk rather than approve of quote from Wood: "Everybody turns their knobs... so they aren't the outlier, because the outlying model is going to have difficulty getting funded..." Alternatively, back this claim up with some real evidence that it is so. (The climate modelers who I talk to say that it is not.)

p. 182: Change to debunk rather than approve of quote from Wood: "current climate models 'do not know how to handle water vapor and various types of clouds'..." Current climate models may not handle water vapor and clouds especially well, but they do handle them.

p. 182: Change to reinforce point that uncertainty in climate models is not an argument for doing less now but rather an argument to do more.

p. 183: Change to debunk rather than approve of quote from Myhrvold: "most of the global warming over the past few decades... might actually be due to good environmental stewardship." It's not.

p. 183: Change to remove false claim that worldwide particulate pollution is shrinking rather than growing. It is still growing rather than shrinking, and so still cooling the earth more with each passing year--it's only in the clean North Atlantic that heavy particulates been shrinking.

p. 183: Change to rephrase: "Nor does atmospheric carbon dioxide necessarily warm the earth"--other things equal, it certainly does.

p. 184: Change to remove false claim: "Yet [Ken Caldeira's] research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight."

p. 186: Change to debunk rather than approve of false quote from Wood: "most authoritative literature on the subject suggests a [sea level] rise of about one and a half feet by 2100."

p. 186: Remove false claim: "a most surprising environmental scourge: trees." Distinguish between (a) tropical trees, (b) temperate trees, and (c) boreal trees in regions where there is a great deal of snow cover.

p. 186: Remove false claim that the earth has been cooling "over the past several years."

p. 187: Claim that "coal is so cheap that trying to generate electricity without it would be economic suicide" needs much, much more backing-up: I can't see how it could possibly be true.

p. 187: Change to remove false claim: "A lot of things that people say would be a good thing probably aren't.... As an example he points to solar cells..."

p. 187: Remove claim that "The energy consumed by building the thousands of new solar plants necessary to replace coal-buring and other power plants would create a huge long-term 'warming debt'"--I cannot see how this could possibly be true. The overwhelming majority of power plants that are going to be in operation in 2050 have not been built yet, and building closed-carbon-cycle or non-carbon plants is not much more expensive than building open-carbon-cycle ones.

p. 188: Remove claim that "Myhrvold... has probably thought about such [ecological disaster] scenarios in greater scientific detail than any climate doomsayer."

When Crowdsourced Data Meets Nuclear Power - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

Alexis Madrigal:

When Crowdsourced Data Meets Nuclear Power: One of the key problems has been that people aren't sure whether to trust the official measurements, no matter how many of them there are. Today, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci addressed the issue of lack of trust in institutions in her essay, "If We Built a Safer Nuclear Reactor, How Would We Know?" I think I may have seen the beginnings of a way to build that trust in this crowdsourced map of Geiger counter readings from around Japan. It's one thing to blindly trust the experts. It's quite another to doublecheck them with a distributed network of 215 Geiger counters -- forcing them to earn that trust. This is DIY science with purpose.

Safe, Clean Nuclear Power

Michael Froomkin:

Death Rate Per Watt Produced | Discourse.net: I knew this, and the chart still is effective. And my kids were at first very skeptical last week when I tried to tell them that so far coal had killed far more people than nuclear power. (Of course the very worst case scenario for a nuclear plant is much worse than the very worst case scenario for any coal-fired plant; but the very worst case scenario for coal plants aggregated is…global warming.)

Iodine Poisoning and the Fukushima Radiation Leak

Charlie Stross writes:

An observation: [W]hen the definitive history of the Fukushima Daiichi accident is written, there will be a tally of casualties and fatalities.... I firmly believe that the fatalities will be dominated by iodine poisoning, self-administered by people in countries not exposed to emissions from the plant.

Piper Alpha: July 6, 1988

Tim Harfurd reminds us of Piper Alpha:

Piper Alpha - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Timeline of the incident

A new gas pipeline was built in the weeks before the 6 July explosion, and while this work disrupted the normal routine, the platform was operating as normal. The discovery of a small gas leak was not unusual and no cause for concern. Because the platform was completely destroyed, and many of those involved died, analysis of events can only suggest a possible chain of events based on known facts. Some witnesses to the events question the official timeline.[8]

12:00 p.m. Two condensate pumps, designated A and B, displaced the platform's condensate for transport to the coast. On the morning of July 6, Pump A's pressure safety valve (PSV #504) was removed for routine maintenance. The pump's fortnightly overhaul was planned but had not started. The open condensate pipe was temporarily sealed with a blind flange (flat metal disc). Because the work could not be completed by 6:00 p.m., the blind flange remained in place. The on-duty engineer filled out a permit which stated that Pump A was not ready and must not be switched on under any circumstances.

6:00 p.m. The day shift ended, and the night shift started with 62 men running Piper Alpha. As he found the on-duty custodian busy, the engineer neglected to inform him of the condition of Pump A. Instead he placed the permit in the control centre and left. This permit disappeared and was not found. Coincidentally there was another permit issued for the general overhaul of Pump A that had not yet begun.

7:00 p.m. Like many other offshore platforms, Piper Alpha had an automatic fire-fighting system, driven by both diesel and electric pumps (the latter were disabled by the initial explosions). The diesel pumps were designed to suck in large amounts of sea water for fire fighting; the pumps had an automatic control to start them in case of fire. However, the fire-fighting system was under manual control on the evening of July 6: Piper Alpha procedures required manual control of the pumps whenever divers were in the water (as they were for approximately 12 hours a day during summer) regardless of their location, to prevent divers from being sucked in with the sea water (fire pumps on other platforms were switched to manual control only if the divers were close to the inlet).

9:45 p.m. Condensate (natural gas liquids NGL) Pump B stopped suddenly and could not be restarted. As the entire power supply of the offshore construction work depended on this pump, the manager had only a few minutes to bring the pump back online, otherwise the power supply would fail completely. A search was made through the documents to determine whether Condensate Pump A could be started.

9:52 p.m. The permit for the overhaul was found, but not the other permit stating that the pump must not be started under any circumstances due to the missing safety valve. The valve was in a different location from the pump and therefore the permits were stored in different boxes, as they were sorted by location. None of those present was aware that a vital part of the machine had been removed. The manager assumed from the existing documents that it would be safe to start Pump A. The missing valve was not noticed by anyone, particularly as the metal disc replacing the safety valve was several metres above ground level and obscured by machinery.

9:55 p.m. Condensate Pump A was switched on. Gas flowed into the pump, and because of the missing safety valve, produced an overpressure which the loosely fitted metal disc did not withstand.[9] Gas audibly leaked out at high pressure, drawing the attention of several men and triggering six gas alarms including the high level gas alarm, but before anyone could act, the gas ignited and exploded, blowing through the firewall made up of 2.5 x 1.5 metre panels bolted together, which were not designed to withstand explosions. The custodian pressed the emergency stop button, closing huge valves in the sea lines and ceasing all oil and gas production. Theoretically, the platform would then have been isolated from the flow of oil and gas and the fire contained. However, because the platform was originally built for oil, the firewalls were designed to resist fire rather than withstand explosions. The first explosion broke the firewall and dislodged panels around Module (B). One of the flying panels ruptured a small condensate pipe, creating another fire.

10:04 p.m. The control room was abandoned. Piper Alpha's design made no allowances for the destruction of the control room, and the platform's organisation disintegrated. No attempt was made to use loudspeakers or to order an evacuation. Emergency procedures instructed personnel to make their way to lifeboat stations, but the fire prevented them from doing so. Instead the men moved to the fireproofed accommodation block beneath the helicopter deck to await further instructions. Wind, fire and smoke prevented helicopter landings and no further instructions were given, with smoke beginning to penetrate the personnel block. As the crisis mounted, two men donned protective gear in an attempt to reach the diesel pumping machinery below decks and activate the firefighting system. They were never seen again. The fire would have burnt out were it not being fed with oil from both Tartan and the Claymore platforms, the resulting back pressure forcing fresh fuel out of ruptured pipework on Piper, directly into the heart of the fire. The Claymore continued pumping until the second explosion because the manager had no permission from the Occidental control centre to shut down. Also, the connecting pipeline to Tartan continued to pump, as its manager had been directed by his superior. The reason for this procedure was the exorbitant cost of such a shut down. It would have taken several days to restart production after a stop, with substantial financial consequences.

Gas lines of 140 to 146 cm in diameter ran to Piper Alpha. Two years earlier Occidental management ordered a study, the results of which warned of the dangers of these gas lines. Due to their length and diameter it would have taken several hours to reduce their pressure, so that it would not have been possible to fight a fire fuelled by them. Although the management admitted how devastating a gas explosion would be, Claymore and Tartan were not switched off with the first emergency call.

10:20 p.m. Tartan's gas line (pressurised to 120 Atmospheres) melted and burst, releasing 15-30 tonnes of gas every second, which immediately ignited. A massive fireball 150 metres in diameter engulfed Piper Alpha, killing two crewmen on a fast rescue boat launched from the standby vessel Sandhaven and the six Piper Alpha crewmen they had rescued from the water.[10] From that moment on, the platform's destruction was assured.

10:30 p.m. The Tharos, a large semi-submersible fire fighting, rescue and accommodation vessel, drew alongside Piper Alpha. The Tharos used its water cannons where it could, but it was restricted because the cannons were so powerful they would injure or kill anyone hit by the water.

10:50 p.m. The second gas line ruptured, spilling millions of litres of gas into the conflagration. Huge flames shot over 300 ft (90 m) in the air. The Tharos was driven off by the fearsome heat, which began to melt the surrounding machinery and steelwork. It was only after this second explosion that the Claymore stopped pumping oil. Personnel still left alive were either desperately sheltering in the scorched, smoke-filled accommodation block or leaping from the deck some 200 ft (60 m) into the North Sea.

11:20 p.m. The pipeline connecting Piper Alpha to the Claymore Platform burst.

11:50 p.m. The generation and utilities Module (D), which included the fireproofed accommodation block, slipped into the sea. The largest part of the platform followed it.

12:45 a.m., July 7 The entire platform had gone. Module (A) was all that remained of Piper Alpha. At the time of the disaster 224 people were on the platform; 165 died and 59 survived.[11] Two men from the Standby Vessel Sandhaven were also killed.

Fukushima Friday

Assuming the reactors were successfully scrammed at the earthquake, decay has by now proceeded so far that we are now down to 0.2% of normal fission power.

Fukushima This Morning...

At current radiation levels, work an eight-hour shift at the plant gate, and get the equivalent radiation dose of a pelvic CAT-scan...

At current radiation levels, work for 2000 hours at at the plant gate, and get the equivalent radiation exposure of a one-shot short-term lethal dose...

The reactors are now putting out only half as much heat as they did Friday night--and only 1/200 of their full power (but that is still 19 megawatts)--and that amount of heat will drop by half in the next six months.

So it now looks to me at least like we probably won't have a serious wave of thyroid cancers in Japan from this over the next generation--unless something else goes wrong,,,

That Level of Radiation Would Get You to "Lethal Dose" Exposure Levels in 40 Days...

Retreat from Fukushima?

From the New York Times:

Latest Updates on Japan's Nuclear Crisis and Earthquake Aftermath: 10:22 P.M. Chief Cabinet Secretary’s News Conference: Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, is holding a news conference that is being broadcast live on Japanese television. Mr. Edano said radiation readings started rising rapidly Wednesday morning outside the front gate of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. “All the workers there have suspended their operations. We have urged them to evacuate, and they have,” he said, according to a translation by NHK television.

What Has Been the Best Source of Information About Fukushima?

What have you found to be reliable and up-to-date and comprehensible?

For me:

• http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/12/japan-nuclear-earthquake/
• http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/15/fukushima-15-march-summary/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents

Berkeley Roundtable: Japan's Aftermath: An Initial Assessment of the Nuclear Disaster in Japan

Wednesday, March 16 at 6 p.m.: Institute of East Asian Studies Conference Room; 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor

Roundtable Discussion including:

• Dana Buntrock, Architecture
• Cathryn Carson, History, and Associate Dean of Social Sciences (Moderator)
• Peter Hosemann, Nuclear Engineering
• Shinya Nagasaki, Nuclear Professional School, University of Tokyo, and Visiting professor, Nuclear Engineering
• Bozidar Stojadinovic, Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Jasmina Vujic, Nuclear Engineering

Henry Farrell: Epistemic Closure: Climate Change Edition

Henry Farrell:

The Monkey Cage: Epistemic closure - climate change edition: Via via Serendipity and Ethan Zuckerman, an article suggesting that partisanship and level of education have the same kind of interaction effect on beliefs about climate change that Bartels finds for economic inequality. Drawing on surveys of New Hampshire and Michigan Upper Peninsula residents, Lawrence Hamilton finds that:

The probability of perceiving global warming as a threat increases with education among Democrats, but decreases with education among Republicans. Only two respondents out of a thousand described themselves as "strong Democrats" or "strong Republicans" with less than an 8th grade education, so the crossover at far left in Fig. 3 should not be over-interpreted. Setting aside this extreme, threat perceptions are roughly similar among Republicans and Democrats with lower education. They are most divergent among those with higher educations. ... Earlier researchers found education (along with age) to be the most consistent predictor of citizen concern about the environment, and about climate in particular. ... The inconsistency marks a social shift away from patterns seen in older research. It reflects the efficacy of media campaigns that provide scientific-sounding arguments against taking climate change seriously, which disproportionately reach educated but ideologically receptive audiences. Among many educated, conservative citizens, it appears that that such arguments have overshadowed the scientific consensus presented by the IPCC reports and other core science sources.

The relationship is, to put it mildly, stark - the predicted probability that a strong Republican with postgraduate education will think that climate change is a threat is rather less than 10%. The article argues that this is a result of selective media consumption via the Internet.

The Internet and cable television news make it easier for us not only to process information selectively ourselves, but to selectively acquire information that has been processed already, when we only tune in to ideologically compatible Web sites, cable news shows and so forth .... The bias or selectivity of our sources can be higher than the newspapers, magazines or broadcast news that formerly supplied most current- events information. Narrowcast media, including many Web sites devoted to dis- crediting climate-change concerns, provide ideal conduits for channeling politically inspired but scientific sounding arguments to an audience predisposed to retain and repeat them. The power to repeat favored arguments has been vastly expanded as well, through forwarding emails or posting links and content online, in a process that can become "viral" as it motivates new readers to do the same.

This seems a plausible surmise, but it is unlikely to be the only mechanism involved. If Gentzkow and Shapiro are right, then there is less ideological segregation in consumption of Internet information sources than one might imagine e.g. from looking at blogs alone. It is possible, for example, that highly educated strong Republicans may be exposed to both contrarian and conventional sources of information on climate change, but trust the former much more than the latter because of partisan cues.

Andrew Jackson: A Report on What Brad DeLong Said in Ottawa at Canada 2020 Last Night...

Andrew Jackson writes:

The Progressive Economics Forum » Gloomy Days Ahead?: I attended an interesting forum on the economic outlook yesterday afternoon. Organized by Canada 2020, the speakers were noted US economist Brad DeLong (UCal Berkley, former senior Treasury official under Clinton, and Paul Krugman soul mate on macro issues at least), and our own David Dodge (who needs no intro.).

De Long’s main focus was on the US, and his key point was that - to his consternation and surprise -  continued very high unemployment and an economy operating well below potential are now failing to prompt an appropriate textbook macro-economic response. The original stimulus package was too small, and further stimulus is not on the table as the US focus turns to fiscal austerity. Meanwhile central banks are desperately seeking exit strategies from extraordinary monetary policy measures which helped save the day after the financial crisis.  Ditto in Europe. That adds up to continued stagnation for most of the advanced industrial world.

Dodge did not directly challenge this rather gloomy outlook. He did, however, argue that fiscal restraint today  - while perhaps a bad idea in macro terms - is needed to restore confidence that there will be restraint in place down the road. He conceded, however,  that the US will not get the help that Canada got in the 1990s in the form of falling interest rates and rising exports which helped offset the macro impacts of deep spending cuts.

DeLong and Dodge agreed that the current global economic situation remains extremely fragile, noting that the big crisis they had both expected before the Great Recession - a possible financial crisis precipitated by global financial imbalances and the huge US current account deficit  - could yet take place. If there is hope on that front, it is that China will see the need to shift to at least some degree to domestic demand driven growth, and will see currency appreciation as a tool to fight a growing inflation problem. Absent that, and rebalancing will have to be via sharp cuts to US consumption which will sink the recovery.

In some brief remarks on Canada, DeLong pointed to our obvious symptoms of Dutch Disease and counseled us to stave off the loss of manufacturing capacity by sequestering high resource rents in a sovereign wealth fund invested outside the country on the Norwegian model.

Needless to say, Dodge dodged that one.

I am always bad at remembering what was said--the adrenaline rush of being in front of a crowd seems to make me very bad at transferring short-term into long-term memories--but I thought that Dodge agreed that handling the current oil price shock via the Norwegian model would be a good thing for Canada, but that there were major difficulties caused by the structure of Canadian federalism: a federal Canadian excise tax on energy exports to fund a SWF invested abroad would be viewed as--and would be--a confiscation of the government of the Province of Alberta's resource holdings for the benefit of the voters of Ontario...

And Bank of Canada Governor Carney assured me at dinner that the amount of snow falling outside was not unusual for Ottawa in mid-March, and that I should return to Ottawa during their two weeks a year of summer sometime, and told a story about how Robert Zoellick's security team had not felt up to dealing with the polar bear threat...

Felix Salmon: John Cassidy vs the Bipeds

FS:

John Cassidy vs bipeds: Aaron Naparstek has a masterful demolition of John Cassidy’s bizarre anti-bike-lane rant, but he somehow skips over the most wonderful bit of all:

I view the Bloomberg bike-lane policy as a classic case of regulatory capture by a small faddist minority intent on foisting its bipedalist views on a disinterested or actively reluctant populace.

Yes, you read that right: the New York populace, it seems, is basically comprised of cars, to the point at which bipeds are “a small faddist minority”. Now it so happens that I’ve met Mr Cassidy a few times and he’s always looked perfectly bipedal to me. And for all that he enjoys parking his Jaguar XJ6 on Manhattan streets — he’s just written 1,250 words on the subject, after all — I’m quite sure that he always gets out and saunters happily among the other New York pedestrians as he makes his way to his dinner in the West Village. It can hardly have escaped Cassidy’s notice, on his regular peregrinations from car to restaurant and back, that New York’s streets are positively bustling with bipedal life... 8 million or so bipeds — birds not included.... His Jaguar XJ6 takes up about 100 square feet of street space; if everybody in Manhattan was so greedy, we’d turn the city into something more akin to Manhattan, Kansas.

And so New Yorkers turn to other modes of transportation. Primarily, we walk, taking up very little space while doing so. When we don’t walk, we cram lots of people into efficient vehicles like subways or buses. And sometimes we bike.... Driving a car, on the other hand, is an enormously expensive thing to do, with most of the costs being borne by people other than the driver. Yet here’s Cassidy, the economics correspondent of the New Yorker:

From an economic perspective I also question whether the blanketing of the city with bike lanes—more than two hundred miles in the past three years—meets an objective cost-benefit criterion. Beyond a certain point, given the limited number of bicyclists in the city, the benefits of extra bike lanes must run into diminishing returns, and the costs to motorists (and pedestrians) of implementing the policies must increase. Have we reached that point? I would say so.

Well yes. If indeed the limited number of bicyclists in the city was a given, then Cassidy might have a point here. But it’s not. Bike lanes attract bikes no less effectively than roads attract cars and the number of cyclists in New York has been growing just as fast as the city can create new lanes for them....

[Cassidy's] message... is that cars can and should be able to go anywhere in the city they like — that’s part of what makes them so great. Bikes, on the other hand, should be confined to a few “heavily used and clearly defined routes”, which would probably run parallel to existing subway lines....

Sorry, John... you surely know, even if you’re loathe to admit it, that traffic expands to fill the roads available.... Cassidy is convinced that the addition of bike lanes has increased the time he spends stuck in traffic, or looking for his beloved free on-street parking. (As Naparstek notes, his argument can basically be boiled down to “Street space should not be set aside for bike lanes. It should be set aside for free parking for my Jaguar XJ6″.) But the fact is that impatient motorists will always want to blame someone else for traffic, when, clearly, they themselves are the main culprit in that regard. Cassidy has no problem with the vast number of parked cars which take up precious road space in New York because he regularly aspires to transcending his bipedal nature and becoming one of them himself. But if you replace those parked cars with a healthy, efficient and effective means of getting New Yorkers safely around town, then watch him roar. Jaguars — whether they have four wheels or four paws — are good at that.

David Roberts: The Public Trusts the EPA

DR:

New poll: the public trusts EPA, loves the Clean Air Act, and wants Congress to butt out | Grist: As everyone knows by now, Republicans have launched a massive, coordinated assault on EPA, attempting to block its greenhouse gas regulations, its air and water regulations, and in some cases its very existence.... [T]he Republican attack on EPA is radically unpopular with voters across parties and demographics. The latest evidence comes from a nationwide survey done by the American Lung Association in partnership with polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.... The public overwhelmingly supports EPA in updating Clean Air Act standards and overwhelmingly opposes congressional efforts to block EPA. When it comes to clean air, the public trusts EPA far more than Congress.

Should EPA update Clean Air Act standards to make them stricter? Fully 69 percent of respondents somewhat or strongly agree, compared to 26 percent who somewhat or strongly oppose... independents line up with Democrats. Where 88 percent of Dems want standards updated, so do 68 percent of independents, compared with 49 percent of Republicans. (Note too that even among Republicans, support for strengthening standards outweighs opposition.)

Yet another key fact: The public does not distinguish greenhouse gas standards from other air quality standards. When asked about four specific regulations, CO2 standards were just as popular (77 percent support) as smog limits, even a hair more popular than vehicle fuel efficiency standards....

Republican agitprop doesn't seem to be having much effect. For instance, take the endlessly repeated point that EPA is "overreaching." Does the public agree? No....

This poll is in line with previous polls, and the conclusion is inescapable: The public likes clean air. They like the Clean Air Act. They trust EPA to set appropriate standards for both conventional pollutants and for greenhouse gases. And they don't want Congress interfering...

The Energy Intensity of GDP Curve

Courtesy of David Roland-Holst.

Yet Another Hockey Stick

Joe Romm:

Temperatures of North Atlantic “are unprecedented over the past 2000 years and are presumably linked to the Arctic amplification of global warming” : Study after study finds recent warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause.  The anti-science crowd keeps trying to debunk one or two old Hockey Sticks, but new ones crop up faster than a speeding puck. Science just published a new one, “Enhanced Modern Heat Transfer to the Arctic by Warm Atlantic Water” (subs. req’d), news release here, “Warming North Atlantic water tied to heating Arctic, according to new study.” I have pulled out the key graph — and it is one heck of a Hockey Stick.... derived from “planktic foraminifers in a sediment core.... This astonishing warming in the past century is clearly not, as the anti-science crowd likes to say, some sort of recovery from the so-called Little Ice Age (see “A detailed look at the Little Ice Age“), which, in any case, is barely noticeable in this data.   The lead author, Robert Spielhagen of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences said, “Such a warming of the Atlantic water in the Fram Strait is significantly different from all climate variations in the last 2,000 years.”  The fact is, over 90% of human-caused warming is going into the oceans — and it is melting ice whereever it goes (see “Deep ocean heat is rapidly melting Antarctic ice“).

Air temperatures in Greenland have risen roughly 7 degrees F in the past several decades, thought to be due primarily to an increase in Earth’s greenhouse gases, according to CU-Boulder scientists. “We must assume that the accelerated decrease of the Arctic sea ice cover and the warming of the ocean and atmosphere of the Arctic measured in recent decades are in part related to an increased heat transfer from the Atlantic,” said Spielhagen.

Here are the abstract and conclusion:

The Arctic is responding more rapidly to global warming than most other areas on our planet. Northward-flowing Atlantic Water [AW] is the major means of heat advection toward the Arctic and strongly affects the sea ice distribution. Records of its natural variability are critical for the understanding of feedback mechanisms and the future of the Arctic climate system, but continuous historical records reach back only ~150 years. Here, we present a multidecadal-scale record of ocean temperature variations during the past 2000 years, derived from marine sediments off Western Svalbard (79°N). We find that early–21st-century temperatures of Atlantic Water entering the Arctic Ocean are unprecedented over the past 2000 years and are presumably linked to the Arctic amplification of global warming….

Although we cannot quantify from our data the variability of previous AW inflow to the Arctic by volume, our temperature data series and the above observational link suggest that the modern warm AW inflow (averaged over two to three decades) is anomalous and unique in the past 2000 years and not just the latest in a series of natural multidecadal oscillations. Both effects—a temperature rise as well as a volume transport increase—introduce a larger heat input into the Arctic Ocean. Although there is no direct contact of the AAWL [Arctic Atlantic Water Layer] with the ocean surface in the Arctic, such an increased heat input has far-reaching consequences. The strong AW warming event in the Arctic Ocean in the 1990s caused a shoaling of the AW core and an enhanced heat flux to the surface , concurrent with decreasing sea ice. Recent oceanographic data from the Laptev Sea continental margin indicate the impact of warm AW-related water masses on the shallow (<50 m) shelf, a feature not observed before in a >80-year time series. The data also provide evidence for a significant heat flux to the overlying shelf waters. Even without any modification of the vertical heat transfer processes, the enhanced temperature contrast between the AW and the surface sea water freezing point (increased from ~5 to 7 K as identified here) leads to an increase in the vertical heat flux of ~40%. Any positive-feedback mechanism will magnify the effect of this flux increase on the ice cover. Complementing the strong feedback between ice and atmospheric temperatures, warming of the AW layer, unprecedented in the past 2000 years, is most likely another key element in the transition toward a future ice-free Arctic Ocean.

Why Friends Don't Let Friends Even Think About Supporting Republicans, Ever: Environmental Policy Edition

Daniel Weiss:

Bombshell: Bush EPA Administrator said the science necessitated action on global warming — President “overruled” EPA due to “Cheney … and Exxon Mobil”: On the eve of the new House Energy and Commerce Committee’s hearing (watch live here at 9:30 am) on legislation to block EPA from setting standards to reduce carbon dioxide pollution, Ranking Member Henry Waxman (D-CA) released a January 2008 letter from then EPA Administrator Steven Johnson to President George W. Bush.  Johnson’s letter told President Bush that the administration must make an “endangerment finding” that carbon pollution endangers public health and the environment.  He also told the president to use EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act to reduce this pollution:

The Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v EPA decision still requires a response. That case combined with the latest science of climate change requires the Agency to propose a positive endangerment finding….  the state of the latest climate change science does not permit a negative finding, nor does it permit a credible finding that we need to wait for more research.... Within the next several months, EPA must face regulating greenhouse gases from power plants, some industrial sources, petroleum refineries and cement kilns...

Unfortunately, Johnson was not allowed to implement this plan.  Politico reports that

Johnson was ready to advance on greenhouse gas pollution limits but Bush overruled him after hearing counter-arguments from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, the Office of Management and Budget, the Transportation Department and Exxon Mobil...

Energy and Environmental Policy: What We All Know

For the Atlantic Energy Efficiency Conference, Boalt Hall, February 11, 2011

http://delong.typepad.com/20110211-delong-environment.pdf

---

Open publication - Free publishing