Tonight, PBS is re-playing the Frontline special on the politics of Global Warming. I strongly recommend that you watch it, record it, TiVo it, or otherwise check it out.
UPDATE: If you missed it, you can watch the whole program on-line here.
It looks like Investors Business Daily is getting in on the “grasping at anti-global-warming straws” act. They write:
Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.
To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better “eyes” with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth’s climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.
And they’re worried about global cooling, not warming.
Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.
Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.
Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.
This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.
Tapping reports no change in the sun’s magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.
Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a “stethoscope for the sun.” But he and his colleagues need better equipment.
In Canada, where radio-telescopic monitoring of the sun has been conducted since the end of World War II, a new instrument, the next-generation solar flux monitor, could measure the sun’s emissions more rapidly and accurately.
As we have noted many times, perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth’s climate over time has been the sun.
Of course, never one to think critically when somebody tells him what he wants to hear, frequent anti-AGW commenter Number9 eats this up over at TennesseeFree.com:
Better hope this is not the case. It would make Global Warming look like a good deal. This has actually happened before. It wasn’t pleasant.
Of course, I pointed out in comments that for one thing, the Maunder minimum is still quite controversial as a cause for the “Little Ice Age,” and I’ve pointed out several times that the best information we have says that solar variance could account for at most a quarter of the warming we’ve been seeing.
But I’m not a scientist. I just do basic research. And, when I noticed that the IBD never actually directly quoted Dr. Tapping, and only talked about him (all of the direct quotes come from R. Timothy Patterson, a fairly well-known AGW denier), I decided to do something that the “fine journalists” over at IBD couldn’t be bothered to do: I contacted Dr. Tapping directly and asked him about it. Dr. Tapping responds:
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the message. The stuff on the web came from a casual chat with someone who managed to misunderstand what I said and then put the result on the web, which is probably a big caution for me regarding the future.
It is true that the beginning of the next solar cycle is late, but not so late that we are getting worried, merely curious.
It is the opinion of scientists, including me, that global warming is a major issue, and that it might be too late to do anything about it already. If there is a cooling due to the solar activity cycle laying off for a bit, then the a period of solar cooling could be a much-needed respite giving us more time to attack the problem of greenhouse gases, with the caveat that if we do not, things will be far worse when things turn on again after a few decades. However, once again it is early days and we cannot at the moment conclude there is another minimum started.
Thanks for the heads-up.
Regards,
Ken
Wait, what? A business magazine and a mostly right-wing web site took a scientists statements and work out of context in the service of a political agenda? Stop the presses!
Given the history of the anti-AGW movement and their ever-moving target, $10 says they ignore how wrong they were on this one, and instead seize on the “might be too late to do anything about it” part as their next windmill to tilt at.
NOTE: Upon requesting permission to publish the above, Dr. Tapping responds:
Please feel free to quote what I said. I think it is a real shame that we sometimes see the downside of the freedom of the web, and that an investment journal would quote reports like that without going to their source.
Clearly, Dr. Tapping is a tough man to get a hold of, given that John Q. Nobody in Memphis, TN [that would be me] was able to correspond with him twice in one day. Mental note: Don’t trust anything you read in the Investors Business Daily.
And extra-special thanks to Dr. Tapping for being so cooperative in all of this.
Cross-posted at TennesseeFree.com
(Or, as Uncle would say, “They have to lie to win.”)
Over at Tennessefree, poster Serr8d triumphantly produces a graphic that contrasts sea ice concentrations from yesterday’s date in 1980 against yesterday. (See the graphic here.) Quoth Serr8d: “Nice bit of rebounding, eh?”
Only there are two problems with his graphics, one minor and one major. The minor problem is that the 1980 graphic doesn’t include snow cover, while the 2008 graphic does, making the comparison look a bit more favorable than it ought to. But the major problem is that the dates he chose are in the winter! Anyone who knows a damn thing about the polar sea ice problem knows that winter isn’t the problem, summer is. And lookie what happens when you rewind five months from both dates, so that you have a late summer date to compare rather than a late winter date: there was substantially less sea ice this past summer than there was 28 years earlier. I don’t have exact figures, but from eyeballing it, I’d say it’s something like 33% less. See that graphic here.
And they wonder why I accuse them of cherry-picking.
Meanwhile, Serr8d also clings (for dear life) to the tired, old “it’s really the sun that’s doing it” even though solar intensity has been decreasing for the last several years, even as the planet continues to warm, and even though the most generous estimates say that solar activity could account for a quarter at most of current warming trends.
Still, if my past experiences with AGW deniers are any indication, the odds of a retraction, correction, or other mea culpa approach zero.
This is disturbing:
About a fifth of Arkansas teachers teach straight evolution, while another 30 percent teach “something along those lines,” according to a survey by state education officials. The other 50 percent don’t teach it, either because of their own weaknesses or community opposition. About 10 percent teach straight creationism.
Emphasis mine. 10% of Arkansas teachers teach straight creationism. If this is science teachers (and I have emailed the reporter for clarification), then 10% of science teachers are deliberately teaching something that is not supported by even so much as an ounce of scientific evidence. they are betraying their professional responsibilities and imposing the religious beliefs of some parts of the community upon their students, either out of personal moral failing or becasue they are afraid for their jobs.
And fear for their jobs was very real:
As governor, Huckabee funded a creationist museum and loudly endorsed the teaching of “creation science.” While his political allies in the state legislature twice introduced bills to ban the teaching of evolution, Huckabee presided over a school system that earned a “D” in science education and an “F” in teaching evolution. Only about a fifth of the science teachers in Arkansas taught evolution, though it was part of the school science education guidelines.
… But Huckabee’s obvious sympathies, and the intransigence of Fundamentalist school board officials, led Arkansas science educators to self-censor. Administrators cautioned science educators against using the “e-word” in their encounters with schools and students. At the Arkansas Museum of Discovery, the traditional state science museum, for example, museum officials removed an evolution exhibit amid a whispering campaign about the ire of conservative powers.
… Plenty of Arkansas politicians endorse creationism. In 2001, conservative state Rep. Jim Holt introduced a bill that banned the imparting of “fraudulent or false information”—specifically, the age of the earth or the origins of life—in Arkansas schools, museums or other state-funded programs. It died in committee, but a few years later, Mark Martin introduced another bill, which was squashed for procedural reasons. Huckabee isn’t on record about either bill. Nor did he comment on the ruckus over the anti-evolution stickers that the Beebe, Arkansas School Board removed from its science textbook in 2005 under threat of a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union.
When people talk about doing away with tenure or making it easier to fire teachers without proving cause, remember that they are also, intentionally or not, arguing for allowing school administrators to fire teachers who stand up for science and against religious indoctrination in our schools.
And, no, teaching evolution is not imposing religious beliefs. Evolution has nothing to do with religion. It is a scientific pursuit and it is taught becasue it is what the overwhelming scientific evidence supports. Claiming that evolution is imposing religious beliefs is either the result of not understanding what the words “religion” or “science” mean or a deliberate lie.
Last night, I watched a great NOVA episode, entitled Judgment Day: Intelligent Design On Trial. It’s an excellent program chronicling the six week federal trial concerning the Dover, PA school board’s attempt to interject intelligent design into the science curriculum. I was prepared to blog about this, and to recommend it (which I still do), when I learned that I’d be a little late with this. You see, I live in Memphis, and our PBS station was one of two in the country (Louisville, KY being the other) to refuse to broadcast the program when it originally aired back in November of 2007. According to the local paper, WKNO (our PBS affiliate) was “concerned about the controversial nature of the program.”
It continues to boggle my mind that I live in a country so backward and ignorant that a large percentage of the population refuses to believe something as basic as evolution. And worse, I live in a part of that nation that’s apparently even more backward and ignorant, if our PBS station views a documentary about a well-known trial to be “too controversial.” Remind me again why this is supposed to be the greatest nation on earth.
Look a this piece of propoganda from Senator Inhoe:
“Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming bites the dust,” declared astronomer Dr. Ian Wilson after reviewing the new study which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Another scientist said the peer-reviewed study overturned “in one fell swoop” the climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore. The study entitled “Heat Capacity, Time Constant, and Sensitivity of Earth’s Climate System,” was authored by Brookhaven National Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz.
…. The new study was also touted as “overturning the UN IPCC ‘consensus’ in one fell swoop” by the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Joel Schwartz in an Aug. 17, 2007 blog post.
“New research from Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Lab concludes that the Earth’s climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as the IPCC assumes,” wrote AEI’s Schwartz, who hold a master’s degree in planetary science from the California Institute of Technology.
The whole piece reads like that: its a mish-mash of “the sun is the cause” nonsense that has already been thoroughly debunked and breathless claims that the new study has disproved, “in one fell swoop”, global warming consensus. People interested in the truth would not trout out the sun causes it nonsense, and people who were serious about the truth would not breathlessly claim that one study — that hasn’t even been published yet and thus hasn’t had the full thrashing out in scientific circles it needs to be taken seriously — overturns anything, much less a scientific consensus with the enormous work behind it that the global warming consensus has. There are no qualifiers in these statements, not even a token “if this holds true …”, no discussion of why this study is right and the other work done on this issue to date has been wrong. There is no attempt, then, to grapple with the very real questions about this work — or any new piece of scientific work, for that matter. There is just the headlong rush into claims of certainty and victorious whooping that their enemies have been defeated. All that is missing is the phrase “nyah-nyah” and claims that their daddy can beat up yours.
No one with an ounce of honesty or intellectual independence could look at this as anything other than a crude piece of propoganda published by people with little interest in the actual truth of the matter. If global warming skeptics want to be taken seriously, then perhaps they should act more like adults and less like eight year olds at a ballgame.
Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, now that the paper is out, its been shown to be poor work:
Usually, I am happy to let RealClimate debunk the septic dross that still infects the media. In fact, since I have teased them about their zeal in the past, it may seem slightly hypocritical of me to bother with this. However, this specific paper is particularly close to my own field of research, and the author is also rather unusual in that he seems to be a respected atmospheric scientist with generally rather mainstream views on climate science (although perhaps a bit critical of the IPCC here). However, his background is in aerosols, which suggests that he may have stumbled out of his field without quite realising what he is getting himself into.
… His numerical values for t and C are 5+-1, and 16.7+-7 respectively (with the uncertainties at one standard deviation). It is not entirely clear what he really intends these distributions to mean (itself a sign that he is a little out of his depth perhaps), but I’ll interpret them in the only way I think reasonable in the context, as gaussian distributions for the parameters in question. He claims these values gives S equal to 0.3+-0.09, although he also writes 0.3+-0.14 elsewhere. This latter value works out at 1.1C+-0.5C for a doubling of CO2. But the quotient of two gaussians is not gaussian, or symmetric. I don’t know how he did his calculation, but it’s clearly not right.
In fact, the 16%-84% probability interval (the standard central 68% probability interval corresponding to +- 1sd of a gaussian, and the IPPC “likely”) of this quotient distribution is really 0.18-0.52K/W/m^2 (0.7-1.9C per doubling) and the 2sd limit of 2.5% to 97.5% is 0.12-1.3K/W/m^2 (0.4-4.8C per doubling). While this range still focuses mostly on lower values than most analyses support, it also reaches the upper range that I (and perhaps increasingly many others) consider credible anyway. His 68% estimate of 0.6-1.6C per doubling is wrong to start with, and doubly misleading in the way that it conceals the long tail that naturally arises from his analysis.
… He estimates a “time constant” which is supposed to characterise the response of the climate system to any perturbation. On the assumption that there is such a unique time constant, this value can apparently be estimated by some straightforward time series analysis - I haven’t checked this in any detail but the references he provides look solid enough. His estimate, based on observed 20th century temperature changes, comes out at 5y. However, he also notes that the literature shows that different analyses of models give wildly different indications of characteristic time scale, depending on what forcing is being considered - for example the response to volcanic perturbations has a dominant time scale of a couple of years, whereas the response to a steady increase in GHGs take decades to reach equilibrium. Unfortunately he does not draw the obvious conclusion from this - that there is no single time scale that completely characterises the climate system - but presses on regardless.
… In fact there is an elementary physical explanation for this: the models (and the real climate system) exhibit a range of time scales, with the atmosphere responding very rapidly, the upper ocean taking substantially longer, and the deep ocean taking much longer still. When forced with rapid variations (such as volcanoes), the time series of atmospheric response will seem rapid, but in response to a steady forcing change, the system will take a long time to reach its new equilibrium. An exponential fit to the first few years of such an experiment will look like there is a purely rapid response, before the longer response of the deep ocean comes into play. This is trivial to demonstrate with simple 2-box models (upper and lower ocean) of the climate system.
Changing Schwartz’ 5y time scale into a more representative 15y would put his results slap bang in the middle of the IPCC range, and confirm the well-known fact that the 20th century warming does not by itself provide a very tight constraint on climate sensitivity. It’s surprising that Schwartz didn’t check his results with anyone working in the field, and disappointing that the editor in charge at JGR apparently couldn’t find any competent referees to look at it.
Even more here, but the above gets the gist of the matter in an easily understandable fashion. One wonders if Senator Inhofe will offer a retraction. An serious man interested in the truth would.
More signs of the effects of global climate change?:
About twice as many Atlantic hurricanes form each year on average than a century ago, according to a new statistical analysis of hurricanes and tropical storms in the north Atlantic. The study concludes that warmer sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and altered wind patterns associated with global climate change are fueling much of the increase.
The study, by Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Peter Webster of Georgia Institute of Technology, will be published online July 30 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.
“These numbers are a strong indication that climate change is a major factor in the increasing number of Atlantic hurricanes,” says Holland.
The analysis identifies three periods since 1900, separated by sharp transitions, during which the average number of hurricanes and tropical storms increased dramatically and then remained elevated and relatively steady. The first period, between 1900 and 1930, saw an average of six Atlantic tropical cyclones (or major storms), of which four were hurricanes and two were tropical storms. From 1930 to 1940, the annual average increased to 10, consisting of five hurricanes and five tropical storms. In the final study period, from 1995 to 2005, the average reached 15, of which eight were hurricanes and seven were tropical storms.
This is suggestive because we know that the global climate has warmed considerably over that same period. It also is what one would expect to find if the Atlantic were warming: the extra energy in the water would translate to more storms being created and those storms that are created being more powerful. This study does not address the last question, however. It just looks at the frequency of storms. It does note that the ratio of hurricanes to tropical storms has remained the same. That could support the notion that global warming is not having an effect on the strength of severe storms in the Atlantic. It could also mean nothing of the sort: climate change could be making storms much stronger than they normally would be, resulting in the same ratio of tropical storms to hurricanes but more powerful hurricanes and tropical storms in general.
At any rate, this study looks to be more evidence that we are making the planet more and more hostile to our presence.
UPDATE: [tgirsch] Link
I would love to see this paper:
Verdes, now at Novartis Pharma, examined data on temperature anomalies, the strength of the radiation emitted from the Sun, and volcanic activity. The relatively recent increases in solar radiation, combined with reduced volcanic activity, contribute to the increase in world temperatures. However, Verdes’ analysis demonstrates that these natural causes do not completely explain the observed warming.
Verdes calculated the amount of non-natural influence required to match the increases in temperature observed in the last 150 years. He plotted the influence over time. Then, he compared it to the evolution of greenhouse gasses, taking into account the cooling due to aerosols. With allowances for error, he found that influences attributable to greenhouse gasses mirror the graph of non-natural influence needed to explain the observed temperature increase of recent decades.
His research shows that, if you look at global warming as a puzzle, and you put together the natural factors such as increased solar radiation and reduced volcanic activity, a hole remains. The human factors of greenhouse gas and aerosol emission complete the picture.
This makes intuitive sense — add up all the known effects and then see if they can account for the known change in temperatures. If they cannot, then either there is some natural factor or combination of natural factors that we are unaware of or human beings are causing the difference. When you take note of the other evidence in support of human contributions to global warming, this approach could act as strong corroboration of the existing scientific consensus. But I would liek to see the math, and I would really like to see how they deal with the issue of potential “unknown” natural effects.
Every new parent spends the first few weeks of their child’s life trying to get the little buggers to sleep for more than twenty minutes a t a time. Once they manage that feat, they spend hours of their lives standing over cribs, making sure their little ones are still breathing. Very few things are more terrifying to parents than SIDS –Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. One moment a perfectly healthy baby is snoozing in its crib. The next, it is dead, breath chased out of it as if by black magic. Now a small study seems to suggest a means of determining which children are at risk for SIDS:
One of the greatest medical mysteries of our time has taken a leap forward in medical understanding with new study results announced by Dr. Daniel D. Rubens of Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle. Rubens’ study published in July, 2007 in Early Human Development found all babies in a Rhode Island study group who died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) universally shared the same distinctive difference in their newborn hearing test results for the right inner ear, when compared to infants who did not have SIDS. This is the first time doctors might be able to identify newborns at risk for SIDS by a simple, affordable and routine hearing test administered shortly after birth. In the study, medical records and hearing tests of 31 babies who died from SIDS in Rhode Island were examined and compared to healthy babies. Rhode Island has a particularly robust database of newborn hearing test data.
… The SIDS infants in Rubens’ study showed a consistent four point lower score in their standard newborn hearing tests, across three different sound frequencies in the right ear, when compared to babies that didn’t die from SIDS. Additionally, healthy infants typically test stronger in the right ear than the left. However, in each of the SIDS cases studied, the right ear tested lower than the left, reversing the test results of healthy babies.
This is a small study, involving only 31 children from only one state. But the correspondence appears to be strong and if this is borne out, it could be a large step in saving children’s lives. Not only does a test for susceptibility to SIDS mean that children who need to be watched more will be, but the nature of the test — hearing screen — suggests a vector for further research into what causes SIDS:
It is known that the inner ear contains tiny hairs that are involved in both hearing and vestibular function. Rubens proposes that vestibular hair cells are important in transmitting information to the brain regarding carbon dioxide levels in the blood. He postulates that injury to these cells will disrupt respiratory control, playing a critical role in predisposing infants to SIDS.
This could be the beginning of a truly remarkable breakthrough in pediatrics.
Life works in mysterious ways:
A method for making instant steam, without the need for electricity, promises to be useful for tackling antibiotic resistant ‘superbugs’ like MRSA and C. difficile, as well as removing chewing gum from pavements and powering environmentally friendly cars, reports Nina Morgan in Chemistry & Industry, the magazine of the SCI. ‘The value of instant steam lies in creating truly portable steam that can be generated intermittently on demand,’ says Dave Wardle, business development director at Oxford Catalysts.
The company is already in talks with UK specialist steam supplier OspreyDeepclean about possible applications for steam cleaning hospitals, Wardle adds. An as-yet unpublished 2006 study at University College London Hospital, commissioned by OspreyDeepclean, showed that dry steam applied at temperatures ranging from 150 to 180 C could destroy bacteria, including MRSA and Clostridium difficile, in less than two seconds, without the use of chemicals.
Ina ll seriousness, this could be fantastic news. We as a culture have helped evolve, through our careless and over-use of antibiotics — a class of superbugs that antibiotics cannot kill. Without an effective means of fighting these bugs, mortality rates in hospitals will contiue to climb and there is the very real possibility that we will start seeing these bugs outside of hospital environments. Obviously, this method does nothing for people who have contract one of these infections, but it does appears as if it could work wonderfully as a preventive measure. A simple, effective, easy to use and almost instantaneous disenfciting process would go a long way to making our hospitals much more superbug resistant.
And giving us chewing gum free sidewalks, let’s not forgot …
The conservative New York City Journal has a profile of some recent research by Robert Putnam (the Bowling Alone guy who studies social isolation). He’s convinced immigration has a destabilizing effect on communities, and they’re convinced that’s bad news.
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.
Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”
In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.
Diversity does not produce “bad race relations,” Putnam says. Rather, people in diverse communities tend “to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” Putnam adds a crushing footnote: his findings “may underestimate the real effect of diversity on social withdrawal.”
Neither age nor disparities of wealth explain this result. “Americans raised in the 1970s,” he writes, “seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s.” And the “hunkering down” occurred no matter whether the communities were relatively egalitarian or showed great differences in personal income.
Note that “devastating”, “surprisingly negative”, and “crushing” are their terms, not Putnam’s. But even so, there is something going on here. Typically, the article gives little information just what it is. Putnam is not a crackpot, and his prior findings have mostly stood up. But this article gives no information at all on how the research was conducted, or what variables were controlled for.
In particular, the article makes clear he controlled for geography, age, and class, but it says nothing at all about how he even defined “diversity” (what groups - national, racial, religious, etc. - contribute to making a community “diverse”?), and it does not indicate whether he controlled for rate of population influx and outflux in a community independently of “diversity”. There is some suggestion he may not have: he refers to longitudinal effects, implying that disruption diminishes over time; if that is the case, then it’s clear that greater disruption occurs at a point in time at which “diversity” begins to affect a community, and diminishes at a later point in time - which immediately evokes a time-dependent phenomenon like population flux rather than a static one like ethnic percentages. Without information on that point, the findings described above do not distinguish between change in identity groups making up a community, or simply change in the individuals residing in the community, as cause.
I suspect that change itself - the accumulation of mere difference in a population, independent of its diversity - contributes significantly to Putnam’s findings. That is, I would suspect that communities undergoing significant population turnover while maintaining a fairly constant racial or religious makeup would demonstrate many of the same features as the ones Putnam studied. Not knowing your neighbors is probably the single greatest factor in not trusting them, and is a barrier to forming community groups and all the rest as well. (This would also explain why port-of-entry locales like San Francisco and LA show less sense of community, and rural South Dakota cowtowns show more. The latter have less “diversity” because they also have less turnover - nobody wants to move there.)
I would be willing to retract that hypothesis if, when his paper is published, it proves that Putnam did consider tenure in residence independently of racial/ethnic/religious diversity, but absent such a control I would think Putnam has no grounds for concluding that increasing diversity uniquely contributes to short-term loss of community other than by way of being simply a form of population turnover. The fact that his results disappear over time would seem to support such a supposition. (The article suggests that he believes communities respond to diversity by “constructing new identities”, but it doesn’t give any detail. It’s not clear what this means or what evidence he has for it.* Absent that evidence, again, it seems simpler to imagine that social tension diminishes over time simply because the residents get used to each other.)
This suggests something about the function of “diversity”, as well. There are certainly some features of “diversity” that inherently make it hard for people to get along: the experience of Muslim immigrant communities in England right now is a case in point. When certain practices among communities in contact are so incompatible that they make it materially difficult for them even to live together, there are problems. But a great deal of national, ethnic, or religious tension often seems to be of that mindless kind of bickering over issues that have no material impact - which is a sign that it is not really the diversity itself that is the problem, it’s people’s discomfort at living with others unlike them. And that, at bottom, is the problem of “difference”, not “diversity” as we use that term. It’s the same problem, whether it arises between racial groups, religious groups, or new neighbors: an inability to trust or to regard the other as a part of one’s circle because of the simple lack of shared background or experience. The flimsy rationalizations given - they’re “shiftless”, “ill-bred”, “infidels” - only point up the fact that the problem does not lie in any overt points of distinction between the groups, but merely in the fact of lack of mutual connection. Differences in race, ethnicity, cultural practice, and so forth can make those connections harder to establish, but it is the difference, not the diversity, that is the heart of the problem. And if that is true, there are two implications: that lack of community can be overcome in time (as Putnam appears to have shown), and there is no reason to fear diversity any more than there is reason to fear people moving from one location to another in the same country (both are disruptive, but for the same reason, and in each case those disruptions are manageable).
* Why is there such a firm rule that journalism dealing with technical matters or scientific research must always be written by someone completely ignorant of the topic and who knows nothing whatsoever about how science, math, or the research process work? I know that most reporters do not have detailed technical knowledge, but can’t they at least dig back down to their third-grade lessons on “the scientific method” and ask “what variables did you control for?” It’s simple: just say the words “what variables did you control for?” and write down whatever comes out as an answer, then put that in the story. You don’t even have to know what it means. Just say “what variables did you control for?” and print the answer. If that works out, you might consider going on to ask “Were these results statistically significant?”
An interesting article I found in eSkeptic, on the rift between ID supporters and traditional Creationists, is below the fold:
Tgirsch’s post has brought some of the usual anti-climate change talking-points. I want to deal with a few of them here in the service of a larger issue: the refusal of right-wingers to believe in environmental science. First the points.
Commentator Tman says:
No it doesn’t. If this was the case then we would not have had the period of cooling between 1940 and 1970. The point about CO2, which your article actually addressed is that the computer models haven’t been able to accurately predict the influence of CO2 in terms of global temperature. If you believe that “CO2 exacerbates those trends and causes additional warming” then why did the temperature fall between 1940 and 1970? This “incovenient truth” tends to send the CO2 models in to a tizzy.
There is a simple and well-known answer to this: sulfate aerosols. As I have linked before:
Of the other strand, aerosol cooling, Rasool and Schneider, Science, July 1971, p 138, “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate” is the best exemplar. This contains the quote that quadrupling aerosols could decrease the mean surface temperature (of Earth) by as much as 3.5 degrees K. If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!. But even this paper qualifies its predictions (whether or not aerosols would so increase was unknown) and speculates that nuclear power may have largely replaced fossil fuels as a means of energy production (thereby, presumably, removing the aerosol problem).
… The cooling trend from the 40’s to the 70’s now looks more like a slight interruption of an upward trend (e.g. here). It turns out that the northern hemisphere cooling was larger than the southern (consistent with the nowadays accepted interpretation that the cooling was largely caused by sulphate aerosols); at first, only NH records were available.
This is well understood and well accepted. Five minutes with Google would have proven sufficient. Heck, just reading the link in the original post would shown Tman the error of his position. His comments are filled with tidbits like that. Take this:
Then with the other planets they produce the facts about how these other planets warm and cool, but neglect to mention that the warming that is taking place whilst different in intensity and temperature for obvious reasons, has changed in correlation to our planets change in climate. So no, they didn’t address the gist of the question.
There have been claims that warming on Mars and Pluto are proof that the recent warming on Earth is caused by an increase in solar activity, and not by greenhouses gases. But we can say with certainty is that even if Mars, Pluto or any other planets have warmed in recent years, it is not due to changes in solar activity.
There are two big problems with the idea: the evidence for warming on Mars and Pluto is sketchy, while the Sun’s energy output has not increased since direct measurements began in 1978 (see Climate myth special: Global warming is down to the Sun, not humans). If increased solar output really was responsible, we should be seeing warming on all the planets and their moons, not just Mars and Pluto.
That is from the article linked to in the original post. But Tman just ignores it and writes something that is simply not supportable, and something he should know is not supportable.
But there is actually worse:
There is no scientific consensus in regards to how much of global warming is due to the effects from human activity
This is stunning in either its ignorance or its mendacity. The IPCC report laid out the scientific consensus pretty clearly, and it was all over the mainstream media:
“We can be very confident that the net effect of human activity since 1750 has been one of warming,” co-lead author Dr Susan Soloman told delegates in Paris.
The report, produced by a team tasked with assessing the science of climate change, was intended to be the definitive summary of climatic shifts facing the world in the coming years.
The agency said that it would use stronger language to assess humanity’s influence on climatic change than it had previously done.
In 2001, it said that it was “likely” that human activities lay behind the trends observed at various parts of the planet; “likely” in IPCC terminology means between 66% and 90% probability.
Now, the panel concluded that it was at least 90% certain that human emissions of greenhouse gases rather than natural variations are warming the planet’s surface.
That is a strong consensus, backed, in a very literal sense, by the weight of the scientific establishment. It is inconceivable that anyone who took this matter seriously would not know about this and not understand its meaning.
I have written about this before. Much of anti-global warming consists of discredited theories or outright and blatant lies. And yet these things are defended as if they were somehow worthy of anything but contempt.
And it is not just climate change that gets this treatment. It is something of a religious belief among a section of right-wingers that Rachel Carlson is mass-murderer because she got DDT banned and now hundreds of thousands of people are needlessly dying of malaria. Glenn Reynolds, for example, has made that notion something of a personal hobby horse for years now. The problem is that it is all nonsense:
The answer is that many lives have been saved because of Rachel Carson and it’s scandalous the way Reynolds and Karlgard mislead their readers.
Because of Carson, the agricultural use of DDT was banned, but not the anti-malarial use of DDT and it has continued to be used to this day. You can buy it from Yorkool Chemical:
… And banning the agricultural use of DDT saved lives by slowing the development of resistance. Furthermore this is exactly the case Carson made in Silent Spring, warning that overuse would destroy the effectiveness of insecticides:
…Karlgaard is also wrong to claim that malaria was almost eradicated. It was almost eradicated in some places like Sri Lanka, but then returned with a vengeance, not because DDT was banned (again, it wasn’t) but because mosquitoes developed resistance to DDT.
Reynolds and the people he links to have to know that they are wrong. They have to: the facts are so clear and plain that they command assent. But Reynolds and his ilk continue their dishonest smears. I’m not really sure why people abandon their rationality in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are wrong. I suspect that for people like Reynolds, the fact that the environmental movement and its preferred tactics have succeeded in protecting the planet where the Market that men like Reynolds worship had failed miserably is a bit too much to bear. That the dirty f-cking hippies were so spectacularly right and the cool, cool, considerate men of business and economics were so spectacularly wrong on this issue is something that men like Reynolds are not strong enough to face.
We often get into climate change debates here, so I was thrilled to see that New Scientist has created a list of the most common climate change myths, linking to the truth about each one of them, complete with links, references, etc. It’s very well-done, in that it discusses everything in simply language and at a high level, but provides plenty of links to the gory details. And it’s remarkably even-handed, warning against blaming things like Hurricane Katrina entirely on climate change.
What I find intriguing about it is that the list reads like a “greatest hits” list of objections that AGW skeptics generally give when claiming that the “science isn’t in yet” on climate change: global cooling, “the hockey stick has been disproved,” cosmic rays/the sun, “Mars is warming, too,” etc. Not surprisingly, all of these claims turn out to be almost total bullshit, often with just the tiniest grain of truth misappropriated to grant the appearance of legitimacy to fool those who don’t bother look at the details.
The GOP candidates’ debate included questions e-mailed from citizens. One wanted to know whether John McCain “believed in” evolution - “yes or no”. McCain hesitated, then said “yes”, then tried to elaborate. Mercifully, the moderator cut him off first, broadening the question to the entire group and asking “Is there anyone here who doesn’t believe in evolution?”
Here’s the GOP’s finest on a fundamental question of factual knowledge as contrasted with religious extremist insanity:
For the record, that’s Brownback, Tancredo, and Huckabee volunteering for the moron platoon. (Frankly, that 70% of the field got it right is better than I expected from this group, but little enough to crow about.)
Hat tip, and screen capture: Silent Patriot at Crooks and Liars.
There seems to be some sort of stupidity contest underway on the conservative blogs, triggered by this (old news) report from the London Times Online about rising temperatures on Mars:
Mars is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, writes Jonathan Leake.
Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.
Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.
The mechanism at work on Mars appears, however, to be different from that on Earth. One of the researchers, Lori Fenton, believes variations in radiation and temperature across the surface of the Red Planet are generating strong winds.
In a paper published in the journal Nature, she suggests that such winds can stir up giant dust storms, trapping heat and raising the planet’s temperature.
Yeah, the “could be natural phenomena” line was dumb. But not nearly as dumb as the reaction among conservative commentators.
It snowed in Cincinnati yesterday, exactly two weeks into spring. Glenn Reynolds believes, apparently sincerely, that that proves global warming isn’t real.
HAS AL GORE BEEN TO CINCINNATI LATELY? Because I’m visiting my brother here and drove the last hour or so through heavy snowfall. It’s freezing (literally) and it’s April. Ugh.
Greenhouse effect? Global warming? Faster, please.
Insty interpreted: “I’m a seriously stupid fucker who makes global-level policy recommendations on the basis of my personal religious, or in some cases, skin temperature, considerations alone. Complex planet-wide phenomena can be verified by what happens on one day in my direct line of sight.”
The New York Times Business section (so, OK, expectations aren’t high, but still . . .) has an article today on a lawsuit against the manufacturers of the artificial sweetener “Splenda”. The issue hinges to some extent on how the sweetener is synthesized, and the reporter tries to explain this horrifically complex process to the reader. It’s not a pretty sight.
From the “all linky no thinky” file. I’m certainly not endorsing any of these ideas, but it makes for interesting reading.
This is more KTK’s beat, but this raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions:
Genetic tests using blood samples already are used to diagnose some diseases and even personalize treatment.
Now it is possible to develop similar tests that reveal a person’s potential to become dependent on nicotine or marijuana or have antisocial personality disorder, University of Iowa researchers report online March 6 in the American Journal of Medical Genetics.
Such tests would not dictate who would become substance dependent or have behavioral problems, as genes do not function in isolation but are influenced by other genes and environmental factors, said the study’s lead author Robert Philibert, M.D., Ph.D., professor of psychiatry in the UI Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine.
“Our study suggests that analyzing the expression of genes in blood could indicate whether a person is susceptible to having a behavioral disorder. Having a particular gene expression change does not by itself predict that a person will act a certain way. However, it can indicate who might have a greater biological basis for engaging in behaviors such as smoking and alcohol or marijuana use,” Philibert said.
On the plus side of the ledger, obviously, is that this could me an immense help to people. It could help treatment, prevention, and rehabilitation in several ways. But health care in this country is largely provided by private companies whose interest is in making money, not in keeping people healthy. And now they are potentially being handed a tool for identifying people who could potentially require ongoing, chronic care. It is inconceivable that at some portion of the industry will not use that information to prevent the people in question from receiving care. Laws will be of little help; if a company’s bottom line can be greatly helped by finding a way around the law, most companies will find a way around most laws. Our system is simply constructed in such a way to provide incentives for people to avoid using tests like these. It is not unreasonable to suggest that, in total, this kind of research could actually lead to a decline in level of health and health care.
The system is broken. This research should be unalloyed good news. Instead, we have to wonder how many people are going to end up being dropped form their insurance coverage once these tests become widely available. There is something deeply, deeply wrong with that. And something wrong with the fact that we are still no closer to a true health care system in this country then we were ten or twenty or forty years ago. Doctors conducting research shouldn’t have to wonder if they are violating the precept “first, do no harm” because the economics of our health care system will lead to their new treatment/tests being the proximate cause for thousands or millions of people losing their abality to receive health care.
Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again.
It seemed to be a chronic disease. It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: "Kings. What a good idea." Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
