Waldenswimmer

February 01, 2014

Saturday Morning Essay: The President Goes There: Climate Change Is Real.

The President's brave pronouncement was greeted by bemused tweets from polar bears, such as #longdistanceswimmer: "Do tell." Bark beetle #chewylarue sent a message from the Kenai Peninsula to beetles still working the decimated forests of East Texas: "Dudes! It's like Vegas up here - virgin spruce, females on the loose. Head north before they do something."

There is not much danger of that, not yet anyway. A few more Tallahassee blizzards or 100 percent melting of the Arctic ice cap might bring people around, but the media-narcotized American populace hasn't figured anything out yet. "Climate change is real." Okay, so what's that mean? I thought Kim Kardashian's butt was real too, and where did that get me?

In contrast to what the global warming advocates have predicted, a UN report shows the Earth has cooled for 15 years.

In spite of hysteria over the melting of ice caps that theoretically would put the entire state of Florida underwater, Antarctic ice has been growing for decades, reaching a 35-year high in 2013.

Humorously, a research ship attempting to prove global warming got trapped in unusually thick ice this January and had to be rescued by icebreakers.

Sometimes I find myself strangely reassured by contrarian voices, such as Mike Shedlock's blog at Mish's Global Trend Analysis. Mike is sharp on issues such as the real state of American employment, falling gasoline usage (because of our broke-ass status), and other ideas that cut against the grain of the feel-good mainstream media. Look what Mike has to say about "global warming hysteria:"

In contrast to what the global warming advocates have predicted, a UN report shows the Earth has cooled for 15 years.
In spite of hysteria over the melting of ice caps that theoretically would put the entire state of Florida underwater, Antarctic ice has been growing for decades, reaching a 35-year high in 2013.
Humorously, a research ship attempting to prove global warming got trapped in unusually thick ice this January and had to be rescued by icebreakers.

I had not seen that old hoary argument trotted out in a while: the Earth has cooled since 1998; how can global warming be underway if it's getting colder? Which U.N. Report does he mean? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is itself a U.N. institution; is that what he means, the IPCC itself, which up until I read Mish's dismissal of the hysteria I had understood as definitely among the hysterics.

Rather, I am against carbon trading schemes, taxpayer funding of green energy, and other silliness based on global warming hysteria.

In contrast to what the global warming advocates have predicted, a UN report shows the Earth has cooled for 15 years.
In spite of hysteria over the melting of ice caps that theoretically would put the entire state of Florida underwater, Antarctic ice has been growing for decades, reaching a 35-year high in 2013.
Humorously, a research ship attempting to prove global warming got trapped in unusually thick ice this January and had to be rescued by icebreakers.

In contrast to what the global warming advocates have predicted, a UN report shows the Earth has cooled for 15 years.

In spite of hysteria over the melting of ice caps that theoretically would put the entire state of Florida underwater, Antarctic ice has been growing for decades, reaching a 35-year high in 2013.

Humorously, a research ship attempting to prove global warming got trapped in unusually thick ice this January and had to be rescued by icebreakers.

Rather, I am against carbon trading schemes, taxpayer funding of green energy, and other silliness based on global warming hysteria.

In contrast to what the global warming advocates have predicted, a UN report shows the Earth has cooled for 15 years.
In spite of hysteria over the melting of ice caps that theoretically would put the entire state of Florida underwater, Antarctic ice has been growing for decades, reaching a 35-year high in 2013.
Humorously, a research ship attempting to prove global warming got trapped in unusually thick ice this January and had to be rescued by icebreakers.

In contrast to what the global warming advocates have predicted, a UN report shows the Earth has cooled for 15 years.

In spite of hysteria over the melting of ice caps that theoretically would put the entire state of Florida underwater, Antarctic ice has been growing for decades, reaching a 35-year high in 2013.

Humorously, a research ship attempting to prove global warming got trapped in unusually thick ice this January and had to be rescued by icebreakers.

Denialists love 1998 because it is such a good starting point for them. It was an extraordinarily hot El Nino year, and smashed temperature records worldwide; thus, if you begin there, it seems that the "rate of change" has slowed in comparison, say, to

One can clearly see the extreme year 1998, which (thanks to the record-El Niño) stands out above the long-term trend like no other year. But even taking this outlier year as starting point, the linear trend 1998-2013 in all four data sets is positive. Also clearly visible is 2010 as the warmest year since records began, and the minima in the years 2008 and 2011/2012. But just like the peaks are getting higher, these minima are less and less deep. - See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/01/global-temperature-2013/#more-16736

the rate of change from 1997 to 1998. Of course, one must point out that it's an extraordinarily stupid thing to do, and I will never be able to read Shedlock again without...well, I'll just stop there. I'll never be able to read Shedlock again.

Stefan Rahmstorf of the University of Potsdam, a brilliant atmospheric scientist and mathematician (German, notice) sums it up by noting that the recent slowdown in the "rate of change" is because of a persistent La Nina pattern which has countered the relentlessly rising CO2 and methane levels. This is not a cause for rejoicing, since signs of a returning El Nino are now at hand. If this occurs about the same time that China is forced to curtail smokestack releases from coal-burning plants (so the Chinese can resume breathing outdoors), we will see a sudden quantum jump upward in average temperature. China and India are probably holding down world temperatures by about 1 degree C with aerosol emissions, in effect, power plant "volcanoes." And when all of that happens, we can count on the mouth-breathing Shedlock to call it all "natural variation."

The warming effect of greenhouse gases is not really an "hypothesis." Without the simple physics of the greenhouse effect, life here would be very much like the no-life on the moon. It's astounding that people like Shedlock don't see something so obvious. If a new high jump record is set, do they begin questioning the law of gravity? One problem that it brings up, and this is the essence of Mr. Obama's attempt to say something rational in a country which is, overhelmingly, so frigging stupid: a guy like Shedlock sees global warming as an annoyance because all he wants to think about, and all he wants to do, is to make money. Since Obama is speaking to a legislative group that is controlled by people with exactly the same attitude, his diffidence (while appalling) is more understandable. It's human nature. If you're at the convocation of cardinals in the Vatican voting on a new Pope, you feel funny abstaining from a vote because you're an atheist. Such is the power of culture-wide ignorance, such as that which prevails in the United States. There are a great many science-denying imbeciles in the Congress, particularly on the Republican side, where idiocy is worn as a badge of honor and as a talisman of membership.

As for Mr. Shedlock's other anecdotal gotcha, about Antarctica, I guess he's nailed us there. We could point out a few things. If the world isn't warming why is the Arctic ice going away? It is going away; even George Will doesn't say much about that anymore, and think how dumb he is. Also, an important distinction: Antarctica is a continent. This means, Mr. Shedlock, that it's made out of land. It is hard for the warming ocean to flow under the ice on Antarctica because the ice is on land. The ice is thousands of feet high. At the other pole, the area you would call Arctica, there is no land. It is all water, liquid or frozen (the frozen part is called "ice.") If you look at a globe, you will see that Arctica is surrounded by lots of land, which has less thermal inertia than water, and I'm sorry to be so technical. Also, the large bodies of water with access to Arctica (these bodies of water are called "oceans") are free to flow into, over and under the ice at the North Pole.

So the two poles are different. Greenland, by the way, is in the North, and it's melting fast. But yes, one must concede your point, Mr. Shedlock. A research ship got caught in the ice pack off Antartica. Doesn't sound much like global warming to me, either, Mish! Or at least it won't until in a few years they hold America's Cup at the North Pole.

In such a country, with legions of Moes, Larrys & Curleys holding forth, it does seem brave to proclaim that climate change is real. Sad, but true.

Most scientists will argue that taking 1998 as the starting point automatically begets a false conclusion, as this year was particularly hot, thanks to strong El Nino conditions transferring heat from the oceans to the atmosphere.
“Taking 1998 as the starting year is a joke,” says Pieter Tans, a climate scientist who worked on the IPCC report. “Why not 1997 or 1999? Anyone doing this gets an ‘F’ grade in introductory statistics.
“It is too early for us to be able to say that the human-caused warming has stopped. I fully expect the long-term warming to continue because we know that our activities are causing the greenhouse gases to increase, and we can calculate based on very well understood physics, how the GHGs retain heat in the atmosphere.”
He adds: “There is no ‘Greenhouse Warming Hypothesis’. The warming expectation follows directly from established physics and chemistry.”
- See more at: http://www.rtcc.org/2013/09/23/global-cooling-how-will-the-ipcc-explain-15-year-temperature-hiatus/#sthash.oWEUdHsj.dpuf

Rather, I am against carbon trading schemes, taxpayer funding of green energy, and other silliness based on global warming hysteria.

In contrast to what the global warming advocates have predicted, a UN report shows the Earth has cooled for 15 years.
In spite of hysteria over the melting of ice caps that theoretically would put the entire state of Florida underwater, Antarctic ice has been growing for decades, reaching a 35-year high in 2013.
Humorously, a research ship attempting to prove global warming got trapped in unusually thick ice this January and had to be rescued by icebreakers.

In contrast to what the global warming advocates have predicted, a UN report shows the Earth has cooled for 15 years.

In spite of hysteria over the melting of ice caps that theoretically would put the entire state of Florida underwater, Antarctic ice has been growing for decades, reaching a 35-year high in 2013.

Humorously, a research ship attempting to prove global warming got trapped in unusually thick ice this January and had to be rescued by icebreakers.

January 19, 2014

Seminar at the End of the World

"Among other things, this whole discussion has ushered in, um, a golden age for economic history: I can’t think of a time when history has been as useful as a guide to current events (and current action, if only policymakers would listen) as it has since 2008." Paul Krugman, "Conscience of a Liberal" Blog, New York Times, January 17, 2014.

What an utterly weird thing to say at a time like this.

I can't think of a time when history has been more completely irrelevant to current circumstances as it is right now. The observation that we live in unprecedented times, while always true in some sense, is especially poignant now. We can't even use the weather of six years ago as a guide for present conduct; that's how much, and how fast, things have changed.

Such thoughts occupied my mind while visiting the Humanist House in Oakland on Monday night, to listen to a talk by Craig Dilworth, author of Too Smart For Our Own Good. (Craig is pictured above, center; this writer's own photo.) The central premise of Professor Dilworth's book is the vicious circle principle (VCP); in essence, and in very abbreviated form, the VCP maintains that Homo sapiens has always overshot the natural carrying capacity of the Earth for this species. When we were hunter-gatherers, we killed all the large game using spears or javelins. When the mammoths and other large protein sources became rare or extinct, we invented the bow and arrow so we could hunt smaller, quicker animals. When these prey began to deplete, we were at last forced to become sedentary (about 10,000 years ago), and to take up agriculture and animal husbandry. We became shorter, unhealthier, and disease-ridden from the ailments picked up from our domesticated food sources.

But our great trick for overcoming population constraints, which the natural world was always trying to force upon us, was technology. Through invention we could beat the system. Rather than succumb, as other animals do, to a loss of habitat or food source, we could come up with something to keep the game going, seemingly indefinitely. Through it all, the world population could continue to grow. When jeremiahs like Paul Erlich warned of future catastrophe if population was not brought under control, the opposition was loud (much of it emanating ex cathedra, from the Vatican). The Green Revolution was spawned, with heavy use of petrochemicals to fertilize crops and to provide pesticides. Genetic engineering gave us mutant (and patented) new strains of everyday staples, with high yields and their own disease shields, such as the capacity to produce tetracycline in their DNA.

First wood, then coal, then fossil fuels provided cheap energy which could maintain the vital heat of Homo sapiens in inhospitable climates so that latitudes where humans were obviously never meant to live at all could become densely populated. Food could be moved around so that the majority of humanity could escape the serfdom of agrarian life. Finally, the economy could be globalized, so that everything could always be available in every season.

It all took vast quantities of natural resources to establish and maintain. And now the great wheel of the Vicious Circle Principle is beginning to seize up. Technology can take us only so far. Providing for human needs depends ultimately on extractive processes from the land, sea and air, and the very act of obtaining and using these resources, such as oil, coal and natural gas, is pushing the ecosystem farther and farther out of equilibrium.

Thus, we turn to our old mainstay, the invention of new technology to get us through this rough patch where there are 7 billion people on Earth, where a hunter-gatherer lifestyle might provide for 100 million. We're straining against all the limits, and the demands of capitalist democracy add the further caveat that any "Green" technology must first prove itself in the marketplace before it can be widely adopted by civilization at large. This is the system which Mr. Krugman, whether he realizes it or not, is committed to defend, so he looks at capitalist political economies of the past as a guide to tell us how we can pump up "demand" for goods and services to get the economy humming again.

More comprehensive and deeper thinkers, such as Craig Dilworth (whom it was a pleasure to meet and talk to; he is as personable and humble as he is brilliant), realize that there is no necessary or inevitable congruence between the arbitrary timelines of capitalist market processes and natural ecology. We have to figure these things out in time, and that doesn't mean when electric cars become economically competitive with internal combustion engines. It requires an entirely different way of organizing human society.

Such insights occurred to Craig Dilworth during the 15 years he spent writing his book, much of it done in a cabin by a Swedish lake, sometimes with only his cat for company. Well, as I know myself - cats make good writing company, especially for big and difficult subjects. They have a very realistic way of looking at the world. We should probably begin to behave a lot more like them.

January 18, 2014

Saturday Morning Bummer: Climate 2.0

Brought to you by a cup of ~~bitter gall~~ Peet's French Roast coffee...

Paul Beckwith, the University of Ottawa physicist, chess master, and climate scientist, has taken the time to expatiate on the New Normal Weather and its causes, so I thought I would pass along his analysis. I first became aware of the "wavy jet stream" and its connection to the breakdown in the temperature gradient between the Arctic and the Equator through Paul's work. The jet stream, which used to flow west to east above America with regular seasonal variations (higher in the summer, lower in the winter) has now been "perturbed" by Arctic amplification (the observed tendency for the Arctic to heat up 3 to 4 times faster than the land masses of North America because of a loss of its albedo, or sun-reflecting capacity); or, in the parlance of our time, fucked up beyond all recognition.

The consequences are beginning to show up on a pretty regular basis. Paul predicts another Arctic "excursion" for next week, which will bring polar temperatures down to the Midwest and Eastern seaboard of the U.S. as far south as northern Florida. Meanwhile, California remains in an unprecedented drought. As one example, during calendar year 2013, Marin County's official measuring station recorded 10.21 inches for the entire year; this is one-half of the amount which fell during the previous all-time recorded low, in the epic drought of 1976. The assumption, always, is that normal cycles will return and replenish the local reservoirs. On a larger scale, the entire state of California and its 38 million people operate on the same principle. Here's a disturbing question: what if that "principle" no longer applies? Mr. Beckwith says it does not. There may be monster deluges from time to time ("atmospheric river storms"), but that sweet November to April moderate rainfall which I grew up with in California, just adequate for our needs, may be a thing of the past. Then what?

American Baby Boomers, liberal and conservative alike, came of age under the influence of Positive Thinking Woo-Woo, which pathologizes negative thought processes. This mind-set is not especially helpful under the circumstances; better to take to heart Mose Allison's sentiment that he don't worry about a thing cause he knows nothin's gonna turn out right.

Take it away, Paul:

****************************************************

The familiar global weather patterns that we, our parents, and our grandparents (and most of our distant ancestors, at least as far back as the last ice age remnants) have always experienced are no more. We have entered an abrupt climate change phase in which an energized water-primed atmosphere and disrupted circulation patterns give rise to unfamiliar, massive and powerfully destructive storms, torrential rains, widespread heat waves and droughts, and less commonly but occasionally widespread cold spells.

Why is this happening now? Sophisticated Earth System computer Models (ESMs), summaries of state-of-the-art peer reviewed climate science (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC), and mainstream science have generally put the climate change threat out to the latter part of the century. Global data from all parts of the world, but most noticeably the Arctic shows that reality is quite different from these models and mainstream thinking.

Just by looking out the window much of humanity now senses that something is very different, and uncomfortably wrong in their particular region.

Depending on location, vegetation is drying out and burning, or being toppled by very high wind events, or oceans are invading upon coastlines, or rivers are overrunning banks or drying up or both, while rainfall deluges are inundating other regions. In fact some regions are vacillating between massive floods and massive droughts, or record high temperatures and record low temperatures, even on a weekly basis.

As crazy as things are now, clearly they are not bad enough to wake up the general population enough to vote down denier politicians and demand extensive governmental action on the problem. Not to worry, that action is a sure bet in the near future, the only question is will it happen next year, or in 3 years?

In the meantime, many of us are doing as much as we can to educate people on the dangers we face and speed up the understanding of climate reality process. As much as we do, ultimately it is the hammer of extreme weather, causing, for example global crop failures or taking out a few more cities in rich countries that will take the final credit for an abrupt tipping point in human behavior.

The key to the disruption in the climate system is the Arctic.

Human emissions have inexorably increased levels of carbon dioxide and methane (Greenhouse gases GHGs) in the atmosphere sufficiently to cause an incremental overall increase of global mean surface temperature by 0.8 degrees C over the last century. Over the last 3 decades, the GHGs have caused sufficient warming in the Arctic to melt enough land-covered snow and ocean covered ice such that the highly reflective surfaces have been replaced by dark underlying land and ocean greatly increasing sunlight absorption causing Arctic temperature amplification of 3x to 5x and higher.
This has melted permafrost on the land and on the shallow continental shelves and has increased Arctic methane emissions, which on a molecule-to-molecule basis cause warming >150x compared to carbon dioxide on a short timescale. Arctic temperature amplification has reduced the equator-to-Arctic temperature difference, which is responsible for setting up global circulation patterns on the rotating Earth. Thus, the high speed jet stream winds which circumvent the globe become slower, and wavier, and weather patterns change.

Extreme weather events become stronger, more frequent, of longer duration, and act on new regions. In effect, the climate background has changed, so the statistics of all weather events changes. When the ocean tide comes in all boats rise, when the climate system changes all weather events change.
So how does the North American freeze of early January, 2014 and the upcoming late January, 2014 freeze fit into this picture? In our familiar climate, the polar jet stream flowed mostly west to east (with small north-south deviations or waves, with typically 4 to 7 crests and troughs around the globe) separating cold dry Arctic air from lower latitude warmer moist air. The latitude of the jet moves southward in our winter and northward in our summer.

In our present climate the jet stream waviness has greatly increased and eastward average speed has decreased. Not only that, but in early January there were only two troughs (over North America and central Asia) and two crests (over Europe and the Pacific up through Alaska and the Bering Strait).
The troughs had temperatures 20 degrees C cooler than normal, while the crests had temperatures 20 degrees C warmer than normal. These large waves and slowing of the jet stream are directly responsible for the changes we have been experiencing in weather extremes, Cold or warm, depending on your location.

January 12, 2014

The Light Carbon Footprint of the Dude, Concluded

The possibility exists, of course, that the Coen Brothers were making a movie about a stoned slacker living in the Venice Beach area around 1991, based on a guy they knew, and that's all there is to it. In point of fact, it's a pretty silly movie on some levels. The film has inspired a superstructure of analysis and exegesis that the frail and dubious plot can barely support. On the other hand, "Casablanca" has a plot even more flimsy, premised on "Letters of Transit" that have no basis in historical fact. So plot devices never settle the matter. The philosophical weight that a movie carries is always based on something more nebulous and elusive.

The "action," such as it is, takes place over the span of a few days. The Dude goes from a guy with a rug that really tied the room together to a guy with no rug to tie the room together. The various bounties he is promised for delivering ransom, or recovering money, by The Big Lebowski, Maude Lebowski and Jacky Treehorn, come to nothing. The Dude never makes a dime. He loses his old beater. He loses a friend, Donny, although he only directs five words to Donny during the course of the movie: "Home, Donny." "Thank you, Donny." He sires a child. He never bowls a single ball during the film.

The plot does not matter because the movie is really about a general feeling, an approach to life, and the contrived tale is only a vehicle for elucidating that. The Coen Brothers were capitalizing on something else that The Stranger alludes to in his closing summation. That we all feel a little bit better "knowin' the Dude is out there takin' 'er easy for the rest of us sinners." That the Dude abides.

At one point at the bowling alley, Walter Sobchak cries, "Has the whole world gone crazy?" The answer, as we all know, is yes. The world is completely insane. Friedrich Nietzsche (a guy Walter probably quoted by the wholesale yard at regular intervals), made the point eloquently: "Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule." The social dynamics that bring this reality about are obscure, but we know nonetheless that it is true. The world is crazy. The progress of modernity has brought us to the edge of the abyss. One of the two main topics of the Port Huron Statement, after all, was the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation. What could be more insane than a species that works diligently to ensure its own extinction?

Sometimes I think it is reasonable to ascertain the intentions of an artist by speculations on the unconscious influences on the auteur or creator. If I think about "The Big Lebowski" this way, I find it significant that in the opening scene in Ralph's, President George H.W. Bush is asserting that the aggression of Saddam against Kuwait "will not stand," a phrase which the Dude will pick up and use elsewhere (the Dude has a malleable quality that makes him prone to imitation, such as copying Maude's "parlance of our time" later in the movie). Yet what was Operation Desert Storm really about? Assuring Western access to Kuwaiti oil. George H.W. Bush had the candor to say so explicitly, in fact. Thus, the purpose of this war was solely to enable the United States to continue exploiting the very resource which had made Los Angeles into a dystopian nightmare of traffic jams and pollution. And, as we know so well now, has brought us to the edge of runaway climate change, threatening the greatest die-off of species since the Permian Mass Extinction. This is social madness on an epic scale.

Sometimes there's a man who sees this insanity and checks out in every way he can. I'm talkin' about the Dude here, the guy who fits right in there for his time. Whose laziness, whose refusal to contribute to or be a part of the Rube Goldberg contraptions of death and destruction of modern civilization can be seen as heroic. ("'Cause what's a hero?" the Stranger asks). As acts of rebellion and self-definition, as Albert Camus employed those terms. The Dude rebelled actively as a youth and came to terms with the futility of resistance. Modernity rolled on, grinding all in its path, until wars were fought, national treasure thrown away, in order to ensure the continuation of a wacko mode of life. So that what was left to the Dude was the oblivion of altered consciousness, of long soaks in the tub to the music of the humpback whale, to the soundtracks of Creedence and the bowling league finals.

Who's to say what the movie's about? It's a complex case, Maude, a lot of ins and outs, a lot of what-have-yous. But maybe the Dude was saying that not just The Big Lebowski but people in general were human paraquat: buzzkilling, toxic, materialistic and crazy. The Dude Abides in this world, but not of this world, and that is his final triumph.

January 11, 2014

Saturday Morning Essay: The Light Carbon Footprint of The Dude, Part Two

Brought to you by Peet's Major Dickason blend...

The Coen brothers have been known, in creating other works in their oeuvre, to borrow from the narrative frameworks of classical literature. Most well known is their use of Homer's The Odyssey for "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" I think something similar inspired "The Big Lebowski," and my candidate is Albert Camus and his novel, entitled suggestively enough, "The Stranger." Or for you Rosetta Stone fans out there, L'Etranger.

Think about it, as The Dude said to Walter Sobchak after El Duderino had finally tumbled to the fraud perpetrated by The Big Lebowski in order to steal one million dollars from a children's foundation. ("He yelled at me a lot, but he never did anything!"). The Dude is a man with no job, no assets, no ambition, no prospects, and the most unencumbered lifestyle imaginable. He has no spouse, no dependents, no pets and a Ralph's Club Card as his main connection to organized society. He is, of course, a fantasy; an actual person living in Southern California under such conditions would be homeless.

In his post-coital chat with Maude Lebowski, the Dude admits that his career "slowed down" after he worked as a roadie with Metallica on their Speed of Sound Tour. Metallica was formed in Los Angeles in 1981, and by all accounts its members were in fact a bunch of assholes, as the Dude notes. There was never a "Speed of Sound Tour" or an album by that name, so it's not possible to pinpoint when the Dude last worked. His routine in 1991, as he related to Maude, was mostly bowling and "the occasional acid flashback."

This studied indolence is reminiscent of one of my favorite passages from The Stranger, where Meursault, after returning from his mother's funeral and entertaining his girlfriend at his small flat in Oran, spends Sunday doing essentially nothing. This seemingly innocent episode is part of Meursault's undoing; when murder charges are brought against him for the killing of the Arab on the beach, the citizenry is outraged by the evidence of his indifference to his mother's death.

The Meursault of Venice, California, Dude Lebowski, has a similar desire: to be left alone to pass his days in a reverie of marijuana and White Russian suffused oblivion. He is an alcoholic and a pothead, but he is sane, kind-hearted, sympathetic and a nihilist without the "exhausting" part of turning it into some kind of belief system. Society will not allow him this for the period covered by the movie. He is physically attacked four times, by Jacky Treehorn's thugs, who push his face in the toilet; by Maude Lebowski's henchman, who punches him in the jaw; by the Sheriff of Malibu, who throws a coffe cup at his head; and finally by the Nihilists, whom he tries to hold at bay by thrusting his wallet containing four bucks at them. He is also drugged by Jacky Treehorn.

It all starts with Woo peeing on his rug in the opening scene; later in the picture, the Dude comes to terms with the idea that if he had just let this go, none of the misfortunes that later befall him would have occurred. His mistake was to fall under the influence of the badly-damaged PTSD victim Walter Sobchak, who is the true anti-hero of "The Big Lebowski." Walter is cruel, constantly berating and dismissing the mentally slow Donny; pulling a firearm on the mild, innocent Smokey for allegedly fouling on the next bowling lane over; screaming at the waitress for her "prior restraint" (which the Dude quickly and accurately points out is "not a First Amendment issue;" it's about disturbing the peace); and inciting the Dude to all kinds of nonsensical behavior based on drawing a "line in the sand."

As Brandt would say, "This is our concern, Dude." His poor choice of associates, perhaps the only ones left to him by his reductionist mode of living, does him in. At least for a while, but as we know: The Dude Abides.

It is left only to decide why the Coen Brothers were convinced that The Dude was the man for our times, why he fits right in there. Why sometimes there's a man, and we're talking about The Dude.

January 09, 2014

The Light Carbon Footprint of The Dude, Part One

The best movies are richly textured and deeply characterized, so that the viewer can in effect enter into an alternate reality and live there during the mesmerizing spell cast by the film. Films such as these can become cult classics. Two salient examples are "Casablanca" and "The Big Lebowski," the 1998 masterpiece written and directed by the Coen brothers.

"The Big Lebowski" is narrated, in desultory fashion, by The Stranger, a cowboy played by Sam Elliot who oversees the movie and appears a couple of times at the bowling alley where the Dude and his two friends, Walter Sobchak and Donny, bowl as a team. After an opening sequence in which a tumbleweed rolls through the brush, tops the ridge overlooking the L.A. basin, crosses a pedestrian bridge over the 405, and then makes its way on surface streets to the beach at Malibu, we see The Dude in Ralph's Supermarket (the location used in the movie was the Ralph's in South Pasadena), wearing his bathrobe, bermudas and sandals. He's there to buy cream, an important ingredient in what is apparently his main source of sustenance, White Russians. While he peruses the dairy section, and samples the cream, The Stranger extols The Dude's virtues as "the right man for his time," the time being about 1991 just before the American invasion of Iraq in Operation Desert Storm. The Dude is described as a "lazy man, quite possibly the laziest man in Los Angeles County, which would place him in the running for laziest worldwide." After writing a check, using his Ralph's Club Card (which we will learn from the Malibu Sheriff much later is The Dude's sole form of identification), for 67 cents (while the checkout girl scowls), The Dude gambols home to Venezia Avenue in Venice, where he lives in a garden court of bungalows a few blocks from the beach (the actual address is 608 Venezia, but the court was extensively remodeled in the intervening years and has lost its vintage Art Deco decadence). In a lovely sequence, The Dude trots along the curved sidewalk leading to his door in a kind of flying motion, smiling serenely as he anticipates another night of oblivion.

The improbable plot then kicks in. The Dude is mistaken for Jeffrey Lebowski, a Pasadena bigwig, and is manhandled by a couple of toughs sent by Jacky Treehorn, a Malibu pornographer. It seems that the wife of this other Lebowski (The Big Lebowski) owes money to Jacky and lots of other people, and the thugs are there to make The Dude pay up. This mistaken identity is the basis for everything that follows, a complicated narrative about a faked kidnapping by the Nihilists (who are in league with Bunny Lebowksi, the wife of The Big Lebowksi) to extort money from her millionaire Pasadena husband. As the thugs leave The Dude's bungalow, one of them (the "Asian-American" Woo) pees on an oriental rug.

The next day at the bowling alley, the Vietnam vet Walter (played by John Goodman), in his usual hysterical, PTSD manner, urges The Dude to confront this "other Lebowski" and to seek compensation for the damaged rug, given that "it really tied the room together." The Dude does so and is sent packing by The Big Lebowski (but not before scamming a replacement rug). While on the premises, The Dude meets Bunny Lebowski, and even sees her "Nihilist" friend floating drunk in the pool, an empty bottle of Jack Daniel's bobbing alongside. When Bunny mentions that her friend is a Nihilist, The Dude mutters, "that must be exhausting."

Shortly thereafter, The Big Lebowski develops a plan to use The Dude as the feckless "courier" to carry money to his wife's kidnappers. The Dude is unaware at the time he accepts the mission that the husband only pretends to load a briefcase with one million dollars; The Big Lebowski's real intention is to use the ransom demand as a cover for stealing money from a family foundation run by his daughter Maude and first wife. These various elements of deception carry the narrative forward to its conclusion.

The Dude has no visible means of support. It is established numerous times during the movie that he is unemployed. A friendly exchange with his landlord tells us that as of the 10th of the month, The Dude has not paid his rent. Toward the end of the movie, when the Nihilists try to strongarm The Dude, Walter & Donny, we learn that The Dude has four bucks in his wallet. He drives a late-70's vintage beater, which is involved in two wrecks, one major act of vandalism, a theft and joyride incident, and is finally burned by the Nihilists. None of this probably greatly diminished the car's Kelley Blue Book value.

The Dude's back story is sketched in at various points of the movie. We know that he was a student activist in college, and was one the authors of the Port Huron Statement, "the original, not the compromised later draft." Since Tom Hayden wrote most of this document, which was primarily about racism and the Cold War, as the founding manifesto for the Students for a Democratic Society in 1962, and that the movie takes place in early 1991, we know that The Dude must be nearing 50 years old (assuming he was around 20 in 1962). We know also, from an afterglow conversation with Maude Lebowski, that The Dude was one of the Seattle Seven, a civil disobedience trial in 1970 arising from anti-Vietnam War activism. In fact, there was a Jeffrey Dowd named as one of the defendants, and the Coen Brothers have acknowledged that Dowd inspired the character of The Dude. In later years, Dowd settled in Hollywood, became a screenwriter and part-time producer, and got to know Joel and Ethan.

In the second installment of this landmark series, we will explore why The Stranger declared that "sometimes there's a man" who "fits right in there," who's the man for his time, and that he was talking about The Dude. This deep philosophical question lies at the base of "The Big Lebowski" and its profound Weltanschauung, which has not been analyzed with the seriousness it deserves, a lacuna which I will strive to correct.

January 07, 2014

Weatherwise, It's Such A Cuckoo Day

Many on the Mouth-breathing Right have used the recent spate of extremely cold weather in the Midwest and Northeast, and "mega-storm" Hercules (currently pounding the hell out of the west of England with hurricane winds and fifty-foot waves), as further proof that this whole "global warming" theory is a giant hoax. Let me begin by saying, as always: I hope they're right.

On the off chance they're not, the scientifically curious among you may wonder what the connection is between "Arctic amplification" (our melting of the North Pole, in effect) and extreme weather events in the mid-latitudes. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, a leading light in the field of jet stream perturbation caused by the relative loss of the temperature gradient between the equator and the Arctic, explains her take on the matter in the video following. You may have something better to do, like watching a "Jersey Shore" re-run. On the other hand, if you're curious why the weather will be disturbingly weird for the rest of your life, and for at least the next one thousand years, you might be interested in Dr. Francis's brief presentation:

Let's let Ol' Blue Eyes take it on home...

....so just say the word,
and we'll catch that bird
to beyond the Milky Way!
Come fly with me, let's get the hell away.

[Bridge]
Once I get you up there,
Where the air is ionized,
You'll be surprised,
And hor-ri-fied.
Once I get you up there,
You'll be holding me so very near
You might even hear
All the angels sneer
Because of the weather!

[Rousing finish, con brio!]

Weatherwise, it's such a freaky day,
The tro-po-pause is a long-lost cause,
We've screwed the pooch I'd say!
It's perfect for a swinging Kool-Aid punch...to-day!
Come fly with me -
Pack up let's fly away!

January 04, 2014

Saturday Morning Essay: So Much for Those 13 Years of War

Brought to you by Peet's Major Kong blend...

My preoccupations with wondering how much longer we'll have a habitable planet sometimes take me away from the day-to-day absurdities of American foreign policy, such as this recent report:

From the National Security section of the Washington Post, Sunday, December 29, 2013:

A new American intelligence assessment on the Afghan war predicts that the gains the United States and its allies have made during the past three years are likely to have been significantly eroded by 2017, even if Washington leaves behind a few thousand troops and continues bankrolling the impoverished nation, according to officials familiar with the report.

The National Intelligence Estimate, which includes input from the country’s 16 intelligence agencies, predicts that the Taliban and other power brokers will become increasingly influential as the United States winds down its longest war in history, according to officials who have read the classified report or received briefings on its conclusions. The grim outlook is fueling a policy debate inside the Obama administration about the steps it should take over the next year as the U.S. military draws down its remaining troops.

These "16 intelligence agencies" are the same consortium that concluded, years ago, that Iran was not in fact actively seeking a nuclear bomb, a position which Iran happens to agree with. No one believes this, of course, and official policy is exactly contrary to this position, which often makes me wonder why the CIA and the rest of the spooks even bother. Now they're laying out the cold, hard facts about Afghanistan, which might be summarized this way: It was all for nothing.

We can't even give it a colorful, European-style name like The Thirteen Years' War, because that's taken. The Polish and Prussian Confederation fought that war against the Teutonic Order state between 1454 and 1466. That's too bad, because my college buddy who lives in Sandgate, England is studying these Numbered Wars and could have added an American version, out of nostalgia for the motherland. Alas, not to be. It remains the Afghanistan War, whatever that was.

The Spook Consortium that put together the NIE carefully notes that the progress that's going to be "eroded" is that made during the "past three years." That's interesting; the NIE, for some reason, does not go all the way back to Obama's "surge" of 2009, when, in imitation of his foreign policy idol, George W. Bush, Mr. Obama proved that he too could commit American soldiers to a pointless death. It worked, too:

Once President Zero took over, American GI's really got pushed into the meat grinder. Note those big spikes in 2009, the year of the "surge" and the years following. Those were the years we were doing something or other in Afghanistan, the same something or other that is going to be "eroded." I do not mention here the civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which seem mainly to have consisted of wedding parties and funeral corteges obliterated by drone strikes.

To be fair, most American liberals championed the Afghanistan war. I did not, and neither did the Sage of Boynton, the World War II vet who could see it was simply political cover: a way of appearing to "do something" about 9/11 that did not involve embarrassing the true state sponsors of 9/11, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. That story remains locked up in the famous (totally) redacted 28 pages of Congressional report. By the way, a couple of Congress people are again urging President Obama (as President Bush was urged before him) to release those pages in unredacted form, which are all about Saudi complicity in the attacks. Pardon me while I snort some Peet's coffee out of my nose.

President Obama got elected through calling the Iraq war "dumb," which it surely was. One cannot, however, call both American wars dumb any more than you can profess your atheism. Not if you want to get elected. Living Large American Lies is the modus operandi of American politics - opposing one war is okay, but you start to seem like a pacifist if you point out that the other war also makes no sense.

Reading between the lines of the second paragraph quoted up above, the NIE soft-soaps things a little by stating that the Taliban will become "increasingly influential." If memory serves, this was the rationale for the war, President Bush's notorious "casus belli." The Taliban, who harbored bin Laden, were in charge, and those who harbor America's enemies are equally...excuse me, I don't have the heart to type out the whole stupid thing. Bin Laden was in Pakistan virtually from the moment we invaded, and he never needed the dreaded Jungle Gym Complexes of Kandahar in order for the Saudis and Egyptians in charge of 9/11 to train in South Florida to crash American planes in New York and Washington, D.C. A more serious question is whether 9/11 needed bin Laden, but we've made sure there will be no answer to that question.

Summing up, the Taliban will be back in charge, as they were in 2001. Iraq has a Shiite dictator instead of a Sunni, although Iraqis as a people seem as firmly committed to blowing each other up as ever. Iraq, as a nation, is on much better terms with our arch-enemy Iran. A lot of people are dead, Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis and Americans. The real costs for America's Twin Dumb Wars in Iraq & Afghanistan are also reported in the Washington Post, as follows:

"The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion, taking into account the medical care of wounded veterans and expensive repairs to a force depleted by more than a decade of fighting, according to a new study by a Harvard researcher."

A good, solid, Thirteen Years' Work. We'll have to call it that and let it go.

December 28, 2013

Saturday Morning Saturday Morning Essay: Extinction, Reconsidered

Brought to you by Peet's French Roast coffee...

Naturally, as a supporter of the scientific method, I hasten to add that the Thursday edition of my Saturday Essay was about a global warming paper that apparently had no refereeing or peer review. The writing was definitely over the top; I've been reading a lot about global warming over the last couple of years, and I don't know of anyone else, no matter how dire a spin they choose to place on the available data and reasonable extrapolations thereof, who's talking about the oceans boiling and 120 degree C air temperatures in the year 2080. I just thought that Mr. Light (the author) provided a rousing, angry, human-bashing finish right up there with some of the best dyspepsia of Kurt Vonnegut on a downer day. Who can resist that?

Perhaps the paper in question was an example of the increasingly common "open access" method of publishing scientific articles. Indeed, the research scientist from the Great Southwestern University is so familiar now with this particular end-run around academic quality control that he's written a hilarious parody, "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down & Publish My Own Papers." A sample:

I'm gonna sit right down and publish my own papers,
And make believe they're peer reviewed
Referees they drive me nuts
They're ad hoc & anonymous
Nerds strokin’ their libidos
Shootin their little torpedoes...

No doubt peer review brings out the snark in a lot of competitive academics. On the other hand, maybe it makes it a little tougher to scare the shit out of your readers with unfounded claims.

Anyway, I favor the "intellectual commons" approach to discourse championed so eloquently by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty. An idea should stand or fall on its own merits, and must withstand the most withering criticism if it is objectively true.

I actually found the paper in question on a thread commenced by Guy McPherson on Facebook. It was Christmas, a slow news day, and the Near Term Human Extinction loyalists were out in force. The conclusions of this "paper" on the "methane bomb" were apparently accepted at face value by almost anyone, except a couple of "Extinction Deniers" who tried valiantly to inject some scintilla of hope, only to be attacked mercilessly for their Pollyannish addiction to "hopium" (as in hopium of the masses, I guess).

Speaking of Russian political history, it always astounds me how those of the Left hand side of things always manage to arrange themselves into warring factions. The Russian revolutionaries all opposed the Czar, but their hatred for his cruel despotism eventually took a back seat to the internecine struggles among the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Trotskyites. Recall that Trotsky was eventually assassinated more than 20 years after the Revolution by a Stalinist hit man who found him in Mexico City. The global warming movement has become sort of like that, too.

Personally, I am failing to see the upside of accepting the inevitable extinction of humanity 16 years from now. Especially when the hard science really does not point in that direction. I know the situation is bad; I know that humans have never resided on Earth when the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was at 400 parts per million. I know what the "hockey stick" of recent temperature trends looks like. It's scary what has happened to the ice masses of the Earth in so short a time frame. I'm not a global warming denier.

Still, to help things along, I posted a link on that thread to David Archer's analysis of recent methane papers, an analysis I discussed previously here at the Pond. David Archer knows his stuff. He describes in considerable detail how the methane beds and permafrost were formed in the Arctic Circle and along the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. He uses Henry's Law to support his argument that methane clathrates could not have formed at any depth shallower than 250 meters of Arctic water. The deeper they are, you see, the better, since dissolution of methane bubbles in the water column as they make their way to the surface is an important buffer, along with the fact that methane hydrates at depth are more resistant to melting in the first place.

I like Henry's Law. Henry's Law governs the solubility of gas in liquid under varying conditions. When you open a beer bottle, or pop a champagne bottle (maybe Tuesday night?) and hear that "pfft" or "pop" - that's Henry talking to you. That's the sound of the carbon dioxide escaping into the room, CO2 that has come out of solution. If you leave the beer bottle on the counter, eventually the beer will go flat, meaning the partial pressure of the CO2 in the beer will equilibrate with the CO2 level in the room. I was thinking: if you had done that little experiment in 1966 (perhaps the first time I would have done so), the beer would be flatter than it would be today. Not enough to notice, but still. Three cheers for global warming!

Others on the Facebook thread picked up my act of supreme dissidence (Objective Intellectualism, always a crime under totalitarian regimes, requiring re-education), and it got back to Guy. I was in trouble now:

Guy McPherson: "^ Infused with hopium, as is customary at Real Climate. They favor the "it'll all be okay" approach forwarded by the corporate media and the corporate governments of the world. As we approach the brick wall, they propose accelerating."

I don't think that's fair, and not just because I like David Archer. I find him a humane and circumspect fellow who really knows his stuff. Questioning whether we'll all be dead in 2030 is not the same, in my view, as saying "it will all be okay."

I guess that's what I get for being a Trotskyite. But I'm still thinking: if David Archer is wrong, take him on directly and disprove his analysis. Sittin' right down and publishin' your own papers is one thing; taking pot shots with only ad hominem attacks may be a good deal worse.

December 26, 2013

Saturday Morning Essay: On Graduating from Global Warming Class

Brought to you by Peet's French Roast...

From a paper provocatively entitled "The Non-Disclosed Extreme Arctic Methane Threat" by Malcolm P.R. Light, published a few days ago (https://sites.google.com/site/runawayglobalwarming/the-non-disclosed-extreme-arctic-methane-threat):

The Earth is a giant convecting planet, the underlying molten magma being heated by deep seated radioactivity and the oceans and atmosphere are its cooling radiator which allows the Earth the facility to vent this heat into open space (Windley, 1984; Allen and Allen, 1990). Mother Earth has carefully held the atmospheric temperature within a stable range necessary for oceans to exist for at least 4 billion years and nurtured the earliest bacteria to evolve into today's space faring humans (Calder, 1983).

The fouling up of the Earth's cooling radiator from Human emissions of greenhouse gases derived from fossil fuels will be counteracted by Mother Earth in her characteristic fashion by emitting vast volumes of deadly methane into the atmosphere from the Arctic regions. This will lead to the total extermination of all harmful biological species that produce greenhouse gases in the same way that Mother Earth did during the Permian and other extinction events. In this case however we have totally tipped the balance with our extreme carbon dioxide and methane emissions so that there will be no chance of recovery for the Earth in this time frame, because the methane release will cause the oceans to begin boiling off between 115oC and 120oC (Severson, 2013) in 2080 and the Earth's atmosphere will have reached temperatures equivalent to those on Venus by 2096 (460oC to 467oC)(Wales, 2013; Moon Phases, 2013).

Mankind's greed for fossil fuels will have completely destroyed a magnificent beautiful blue planet and converted its atmosphere into a barren, stiflingly hot , carbon dioxide rich haze. The earth will have moved permanently out of the magical zone (Circumstellar habitable zone, Goldilocks zone) where life (some of it probably highly intelligent) also exists elsewhere in the myriad of other solar systems that are located within the far reaches of our Universe.

Well, I must say, sir: that's really bringing it. Mr. Light is not shying away from identifying Who Fucked It Up.

With my course credits in hand, I naturally feel empowered to comment. This is not the way we discussed things in my virtual class room. David Archer, that is to say, who is a very skilled teacher, did not conduct the class with his hair on fire, and while we did discuss the fate of the other two "Goldilocks" planets (Venus and Mars), and we did touch on the topic of oceans boiling away and Venus suffocating beneath a blanket of CO2 so thick it's actually kind of like an atmospheric ocean, we did not talk about Earth in the same terms, now or in the future. The future being 2100, because it's sort of alarmist to talk about shorter time frames.

I prefer the statelier pace of global warming discussed in class. Such as the "Slug Theory," which is about the rate at which we belch CO2 into the atmosphere. Essentially, we have an atmospheric "budget" for doing so, and given the long-lasting nature of CO2 once it's up there, in some senses it doesn't matter how fast you emit it. It's the total load or "slug" that is introduced that matters. Currently, under this approach, we have emitted about half that budget since the beginning of the Industrial Age (about 500 gigatons of carbon). To keep global average temperature below the Magic Level of 2 degrees C increase, what we consider (probably unjustifiably) the safe range, we should avoid emitting any more than that amount again until we stop CO2 emissions altogether.

You can kind of sense that's absolutely the wrong thing to tell a species like Homo sapiens. You can have 14 drinks for the week, you tell the alcoholic on Sunday, and as many as you want (up to 14) on any given day, so long as you do not exceed that maximum. You can be assured your alkie will knock back ten drinks on Monday followed by the remaining four on Tuesday, followed by various acts of subterfuge to get around the limit for the rest of the week. (The drunk will be seeking "alcohol credits" by talking a teetotaller out of beginning a life of boozing.) This is more or less exactly the approach followed by the nations of the Earth since they began the dog & pony shows of "CO2 reduction" a couple of decades ago.

The Slug Theory is nice and linear, it has some pretty solid science behind it (climate sensitivity to CO2), it's given activists like Bill McKibben a full-time job, and it makes President Obama sound...presidential when he talks about "80% reductions by 2050" with a straight face. It also places humans in a better light. Sure, in our youthful exuberance about fossil fuels we went way over the line and blew through our allowance, about 531 gigatons so far. But now that we know what sort of mess we've made, we'll begin the process of building solar panels on the moon which will microwave their electricity back to Earth (a proposal as one part of a new energy regime to make up for the terawatts of energy we will lose when we stop burning fossil fuels).

Then this damn methane shows up like The Masque of the Red Death at Prince Prospero's crib. Natalia (or Natasha) was rueful about spoiling the party when we talked about this on the shores of the Laptev Sea.

"Is shame," she said.

"Is damn shame," I answered. "Is ruining a lot of perfectly good geophysics textbooks."

"Is I know," murmured Natasha, stricken.

Well, I'm sure we'll still get to build the lunar solar panels; but first we have to build this Star Wars array of methane blasters up here in this godforsaken tundra. Manned, or boyed, by a couple of 13 year-old American X-Box fiends powered not by fossil fuels, but by industrial quantities of Pringles and Jolt Cola.

December 21, 2013

Saturday Morning Essay: Life on the New American Plantation

Brought to you by Trader Joe's Dark Roast as the Tropic of Capricorn takes a direct shot from the sun...

From ZeroHedge: "Blackstone Group appears to be trying to oligopolize the business of renting single-family homes in the U.S.. As Bloomberg reports, after the housing crash left more than 7 million foreclosed homes in its wake, the investment firm has spent more than $7.8 billion purchasing about 41,000 single-family homes for rental conversion. The world's largest private equity firm has quickly become the largest landlord (of rental homes) in the U.S. and in October, Blackstone offered the first-ever "rental-home-backed" security on Wall Street. One has to wonder if this was the plan all along?"

Interesting idea. My older brother predicted The Great Foreclosure many years back. Maybe this, indeed, was the plan all along. Certainly at the time the prediction was made it seemed vaguely paranoid, but I have come to see that paranoia is a perfectly reasonable adaptive attitude in a world dominated by private corporations. To wit, it is not paranoid to think that they do not have your interests at heart, because they don't. If you think they do, even for a moment, you've been watching way too many Jimmy Stewart movies.

Get the American hoi polloi to mortgage their houses to the moon with adjustable rate mortgages, pump the consumer economy with equity loans, then when it all pops, scoop up all the distressed properties for pennies on the dollar and rent them to the people who used to own them. As a wise man once said, you'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

Calling this latest grift a "plan" might be a little too grand. Capitalism simply seeks profit "opportunities." Regarding Blackstone's raptor-like feeding frenzy as part of a conspiracy may be an example of the "ant in the sandbox" fallacy suggested by the polymath Herbert Simon decades ago; to wit, if you examine the path of an ant across a sand box, you will be impressed with the clever, efficient way he traversed the hills and valleys to follow a fairly straight line. When, in fact, all the ant was doing at every stage was making a choice to go left, right, over or down the terrain.

So it is with the Great Foreclosure. The Robber Barons got rich on fraudulent mortgage products, and now they're assembling new fraudulent Rent Backed Securities (RBS - that's even a good logo for Robber Barons) out of the wreckage. What else are they supposed to do? They're here to make money. L'argent, c'est moi.

At least someone is still getting rich in this country, something increasingly difficult for the ordinary member of the Booboisie. Blackstone and other financial predators are helped enormously by the Federal Reserve's policy of "exceptionally low interest rates for the foreseeable future." If you're big enough to borrow for practically nothing; then buy a house in Florida, say, for $100 k; then rent that 2/2 with lanai charmer for $900/month, annual income of $10,800; then even with a 10% management fee, your gross cap rate is around 10% a year. Bet you can't get that on your B of A money market, can you? Now if you're like Blackstone and can do this scam 41, 000 more times, you've got yourself a nice little business going. And you can build on that by bringing in investors on whom to pawn off the whole operation, pay them a nice 6% on their money, pocket 4% for having the brilliance (and corrupt connections) to pull this caper off, and essentially have no skin in the game. And then when the economy finally and completely collapses, maybe from an attack of acute nausea, Blackrock can let someone else hold the bag. Probably us again!

Sweet. It's the modern version of a sharecropper's life on the plantation, in a way, and it's what's left to the middle class now that the economy has been completely hollowed out by our decision to globalize and become an "open economy," as the Plantation Liberal Economists have always urged. As Gail Tverberg notes in her latest insightful post,

Economists, through their wholehearted endorsement of globalization, have pushed industrialized countries into a competitive situation which we are certain to lose. While oil prices tend to push wages down, competition with Asian countries makes the downward push on wages even greater. These lower wages are part of what are pushing us toward collapse.

I wonder to whom Gail could be referring? Well, this isn't a "Science" post so I certainly won't mention any names. Globalization and hyper-specialization of the economy, all guided by ruthless capitalism, are the status quo here on the Plantation, and Plantation Liberals always work within the status quo. If your specialized occupation, like assembling auto generators at a plant in Indiana, went away to a warmer clime where the workers aren't so fussy about "benefits," then you're just going to have to learn to do something else, such as Planning or Tanning, admittedly at a lower rate of compensation.

Maybe more "transfer payments" will help the new tenants to pay their new landlord. We can always print the money to send more cash to the poor to keep them in the houses as tenants which they used to own. And I'm sure Blackstone (probably a description of the company CEO's heart) will be reasonable and charitable lessors. Just get through the credit check, deposit the four months of rent, and pledge your youngest child as a security deposit. And if it doesn't work out, as a free gift to all applicants, a large cardboard box and map to the closest bridge.

December 14, 2013

Saturday Morning Essay: Homage to Corinth

Brought to you by Peet's French Roast French-pressed...

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. I Corinthians 13:11.

I'm sure any number of my readers can appreciate the irony of quoting Saint Paul and Carl Sagan seriatim.

One perspective to bear in mind at all times, when we indulge in contemporary Doomsaying, is that the human race is in fact, as a physical certainty, bound for extinction. We often forget that in our giddy New Age narcissism. During the second half of the Sun's main sequence, probably within the next 1.5 billion years, the luminosity of our closest star will increase to such an extent that the Earth's atmosphere will be effectively boiled away. That will be it for life on Earth.

So it's all relative, you know? It depends on the time frame you choose. We are desperate to head off disaster now in the hope we can be around to face certain disaster later. That's as good as it gets. The best case scenario. I didn't make these rules governing organic life versus implacable universe. I simply live subject to them.

The Sagan clip above is kind of thrilling in its insights. Facing his own extinction, Carl's deceptively simple description of the conundrum of modern human existence essentially says it all. The interview was nominally about Carl's book on the "demon haunted world" (the retreat in modern times into unscientific obscurantism), but Carl quickly pointed out that there was really nothing new about such thinking. It's just that in the face of modern technology and industrial civilization, it had become exceedingly dangerous.

It's sad that we've lost public intellectuals of Carl Sagan's caliber. No one has really taken the place of the likes of Sagan, Richard Feynman and a few others. Immensely intellegent thinkers with a comprehensive appreciation of the human condition in its broadest terms.

In my reading of physics books for the general public, such as Time Re-Born by Lee Smolin (currently in my regular Kindle rotation), an observation that recurs is the mysterious reality that the physical laws governing the universe can be represented by a mathematical system of human devising. If you throw a ball, as Galileo observed, the arc it describes as it falls to the ground will be a parabola. You can throw it high in the air, a fastball from the shoulder, a casual toss across the yard: always a parabolic curve. That curve can be stated as a simple mathematical function and graphed. Legend has it that Galileo was in church (of all places for him) when he noticed that the chandeliers, moving with the wind, had the same period regardless of the amplitude of the swing.

$T \approx 2\pi \sqrt\frac{L}{g} \qquad \qquad \qquad \theta_0 \ll 1 \qquad (1)\,$

And thus modern pendulum timekeeping was born, a simple technology that lasted until the 1930's. Naturally, Galileo had to be placed under house arrest.

In the environmental books of the late 1960's and 1970's, books by writers such as Barry Commoner, Paul Erlich, Wendell Berry, Herman Daly and the studies written by the Club of Rome group, this capacity for mathematical representation of Earth's realities was being deployed. When Paul Erlich estimated an approximate time for doubling of human population of about 37 years, he wasn't really guessing; he was using exponential algebra, the stuff you learn in high school. Such writers were not writing books full of ominous ecological warnings because they were hysterical or were showing off. They were performing services pro bono publico, as Galileo had done.

So why didn't these clear warnings do any good? I think that's what Carl Sagan is talking to Charlie Rose about. As Craig Dilworth describes in his majestic Too Smart For Our Own Good, we have been capable of amazing technological breathroughs in energy utilization (particularly fossil fuel use), nuclear weaponry, food production, electronic circuitry, materials science, medicine and many other technical fields. Yet the regulation of all this scientific know-how, and capacity for self-destruction, remained as ever in the hands of the scientifically illiterate - the kind of democratic government that a bell-curved demographic always elects. A Parliament of Morons.

The avaricious, venal, thoroughly corrupt "guardians" of our fate, bought-and-paid-for solons like James Inhofe of Oklahoma and Joe Barton of Texas, cast the environmental warnings as a threat to our "freedom," of our economic rights to prosper and live the American Dream. Environmentalists ("Eco-Nazis," as Rush Limbaugh would call them) were urging socialism disguised as self-restraint, and a government takeover of business, and regulation of "consumer choices" - an environmental police state. The warnings of climate scientists became a particular target of the Evangelicals, as Mr. Inhofe, op. cit., would describe. Man cannot bring about his own destruction because that's God's job. Economic freedom as defended by the demon-haunted Evangelicals: there's your perfect Doomsday storm, Carl. If you were only around to see how right you were.

The conservative, religious, obscurantist framing of the argument worked. In the Land of the Free, as Dick Cheney told us, conservation was "a personal virtue." It could never have anything to do with public policy.

And so it never really has.

December 07, 2013

Saturday Morning Essay: Mr. Krugman's Science of Black Box Economics

Brought to you by Trader Joe's North Beach Blend, brewed in French press...

Among our Plantation Liberal Economists, I only pick on Paul Krugman because he is the most visible. It's also fun because he's (a) extremely arrogant and (b) fundamentally silly. While he sees himself as an indefatigable champion of progressive causes, he is actually a kind of gift to the Republicans in a way that Rush Limbaugh is Christmas everyday to the Democrats. That is to say, a purveyor of ideas so palpably out-of-date and nonsensical as to be easily caricatured.

One such theme in Mr. Krugman's scientific essays is the Black Box concept of macroeconomics. As previously noted, Mr. Krugman pays very little attention to the particular composition of the American economy, what you or I might call "facts." His reference always is to "advanced industrial economies" or to historical records of the American economy, often dating back a hundred years or more. I think of Dr. K's analyses as a kind of "hydraulic" systems analysis. The variables of central bank interest rates or money supply are tweaked, and the variables of unemployment and GDP respond. If the results are not satisfactory after these dials are turned, the "fiscal policy" valve in the form of deficit spending by Congress is opened to achieve the right ambient pressure.

This pure, abstract approach allows Mr. Krugman to avoid the moiling, cacophonous debate among other analysts who talk about job offshoring and globalization, the effect of automation on the work force (of which Mr. Krugman was unaware, by his own admission, until a point within the last year), and the quality of jobs which are now produced by the American economy (that is, the McCrap jobs of baristas, burger-flippers, Wal-Mart aisle monitors, bartenders and food servers, almost all of which pay minimum wage).

Other analysts are not so lucky. For example, Herman Daly of the University of Maryland insists that economics is simply a subsystem of the ecological world (e.g., Reality) and not the other way around. Gail Tverberg (who has another fine essay just posted) believes in the fundamental importance of energy cost, on the tenable theory that nothing happens in the physical world without energy. The chart up above is of West Texas Intermediate oil prices; the recent decline in barrel prices, as we frack, squeeze tar sands, and dig for every drop we can find, probably explains the recent improvement in the McCrap Jobs market - Americans have a little more money to drive to McDonald's or to Wal-Mart to spend their food stamps. Jerry Mander and others note that capitalism seems to have run its course, has finished its work of destroying the natural world, and that survival depends on a different relationship between Homo sapiens and Mother Earth. Those in Shanghai, where the smog is now as thick inside buildings as outside during the worst days of pre-catalytic-converter Los Angeles, would probably tend to agree.

Such thoughts do not disturb the sense of serene mastery of the economic situation enjoyed by Mr. Krugman, Brad DeLong and the other Black Box economists. Certainly we must pay attention to the destruction of the natural world as a regrettable externality that should be remedied to the extent consistent with optimal GDP growth (the economy is performing "below potential!"). If we listen to their advice on the right Black Box settings, the economy will come around. It is only the pig-headed resistance of those who insist on looking at the world as a whole who stand in the way.

November 30, 2013

Saturday Morning Essay: Dispatch From the East Siberian Arctic Shelf

Brought to you by three gallons of Peet's Coffee....

I think that's it. It could be East Arctic Siberian Shelf. Or East Siberian Arctic Shelf. I can't think straight right now because my head's frozen. I understand, and accept, that the Arctic is warming at a rate about 3 or 4 times faster than the globe generally, but it's still colder than a well digger's nuts up here.

I'm waiting for Natasha to show up. You know her as Natalia Shakhova. I call her Natasha, but on the other hand she thinks my name is Boris. It's a private joke that only one of us is in on. My reference is obviously to Rocky & Bullwinkle, but Natalia is Russian, for real, and I'm not, even if I've gotten in the habit of starting all of my sentences, when I speak to her, with "is."

I'm wearing a wetsuit and standing on squishy ground on the shore of the Laptev Sea. This is real Solzhenitzen country out here, bleak, windswept, desolate, with the Arctic, covered with a thin layer of ice, stretched out before me. Yes, I have a tuxedo on under the wetsuit. As if you needed to ask. I don't know what Natalia will be wearing. I know it will be something pretty good. Global warming was a good field for her, because she's hot.

Natalia is the lead author on a couple of recent papers on Arctic methane. Her work was reviewed by David Archer of the University of Chicago on the Realclimate.org blog. David happens to be my prof on the Coursera.org course I'm taking on global warming. I knew all of this couldn't be a coincidence, so I called Natalia and made sure she knew about David's analysis (she did, of course), and pointed out the intriguing point Professor Archer had made about methane hydrates in the Arctic Sea.

Methane hydrate seems menacing as a source of gas that can spring aggressively from the solid phase like pop rocks (carbonated candies). But hydrate doesn’t just explode as soon as it crosses a temperature boundary. It takes heat to convert hydrate into fluid + gas, what is called latent heat, just like regular water ice. There could be a lot of hydrate in Arctic sediments (it’s not real well known how much there is), but there is also lot of carbon as organic matter frozen in the permafrost. Their time scales for mobilization are not really all that different, so I personally don’t see hydrates as scarier than frozen organic matter. I think it just seems scarier.

The other thing about hydrate is that at any given temperature, a minimum pressure is required for hydrate to be stable. If there is pure gas phase present, the dissolved methane concentration in the pore water, from Henry’s law, scales with pressure. At 0 degrees C, you need a pressure equivalent to ~250 meters of water depth to get enough dissolved methane for hydrate to form.

Let me jump to the conclusion: Mr. Archer doesn't think you're going to find methane hydrates in 50 meters of water, and that's supposed to be the scary part about the East Siberian Arctic Shelf - all that methane locked up in ice "cages" in shallow water along the largest continental shelf in the world, losing its ice cover, exposed to heat conducted downward from the dark surface of the water. Yeah, like pop rocks, alright: fiizzzzzzzz! Those hysterics over at the Arctic Methane Emergency Group have been free-riding on some of Natalia's research and talking about a "methane bomb" in a 2013 paper, although Natasha herself, ever demure and scientific, doesn't go there.

So Prof. Archer asks the question:

But these experiments spanned 100 hours, while the sediment column has been warming for thousands of years, so the experiments do not really address the question. I have to think that if there were some impervious-to-melting hydrate, why then would it suddenly melt, all at once, in a few years? Actual samples of hydrate collected from shallow sediments on the Siberian shelf would be much more convincing.

One answer that occurred to me: because the melting of the Arctic ice cap has occurred over a few years? But David Archer must be aware of this. Although he makes me a little nervous when he says that he would not be concerned with methane emissions in the Arctic unless they increased by "an order of magnitude." Uh, my gal Natasha's work records that the methane vents in the Arctic increased in size from a meter across to a kilometer across. I think that's 3 orders of magnitude. Nevertheless, Mr. Archer is right: why not just go down in the goop and grab a handful of Arctic sediment and see what's in it?

You rang?

"Is thinking we dive down and grab handful," I said. I'm wearing a black Borsalino just to be in character, although I'm talking on the phone.

"Is yes," Natalia says.

So here we are on the shore. Natalia shows up, but she's got that guy Semilitov with her, the Russian climate scientist who takes all those cruises with her around the Arctic during the summer, counting methane bubbles. They're both decked out in down jackets about three feet thick.

"Is thinking is better use submersible from ship during summer than dive in late November," purrs Natalia. Semilitov is wearing a smirk, like a KGB thug in a Bond movie. "Is agree," he says.

Is bummer, I think. I came a long way for nothing.

"Is local bar and lounge where can find Stoli on rocks?" I ask, unzipping the wetsuit to reveal my down-lined tuxedo.

"Is of course," says Natasha. "Is Russia." I love the way she says "Russia." Like a native.

After a couple of Stolis, Natasha tells me that American climate scientists hate this methane angle. "Is messing up neat models," she says. "Is, how you say, wild card. Better to worry about 2100 than say a few weeks from now."

Is spot on, I'm thinking. Semilitov is showing no signs of leaving, so I do. They casually mention that maybe I'd like to come along on the Arctic cruise next summer.

"Maybe take the dive in submersible," she says coyly. "Is room only for two."

November 27, 2013

Dmitry flicks it in

Dmitry Orlov has decided not to post Collapsarian blog posts at cluborlov.com anymore, or at least that is the impression I got from his most recent post and from an email he sent to me and to other readers who have bought his books or supported the site.

I certainly understand the feeling. He has a child now and he's probably tired of living on the boat. He may find himself in the position of joining the workforce again. This happens to new fathers; against all their better instincts, they drop "attitudes" in favor of responsibilities. A little of the quotidian always sneaks into the purest of ideologies. I read not long ago that Henry Thoreau's cabin at Walden was not actually that far from his mother's house. Occasionally, tiring of the solitude and the rough fare by the Pond, he'd sneak over there for something to eat and a little comfort.

That's the way real life works. You're here for one stretch between cradle and grave, and as you age it becomes increasingly clear that it had never mattered all that much whether you existed or not. The exceptions to this insight are very few and far between. Dmitry probably longs for that awful thing called normality once in a while, and I suspect it's because he seems like a very normal, well-balanced individual. It's difficult to feel normal if you're writing about the collapse of civilization all the time. Everything Dmitry writes may be true (I suspect most of it is), but in your one life you long for a little carefree time where you forget all about the heavy stuff.

Dmitry's unique perspective came about from his Russian provenance. He saw the Soviet "collapse" after communism packed it up and departed from the last of what you might call the Western, European-style countries. Anyway, that was his hook, and Reinventing Collapse was a funny, insightful book about the precedent that the Soviet Union set for the United States.

In a way, I don't buy that thesis at all. Granted, the United States and the Soviet Union are (were) both very large, creaking, mostly ungovernable nations, but there are essential differences, starting with the premise that the United States has always been for sale to the highest bidder. Since America emerged from the last vestiges of its agrarian past, about the time of the Great Depression (when the Okies and small-scale farmers were displaced by drought and national bankruptcy), America has been about business in a way that the Soviet Union never was before its collapse. David Halberstam's book The Fifties was, I think, very enlightening in this regard. We are the home of the chain hotel (Holiday Inn), the chain restaurant (McDonald's and all its follwers), the Big Box stores (Wal-Mart, CostCo), the mega-hardware store (Home Depot, Lowe's), the strip mall, the suburban housing tract, and most importantly, the concept that corporate power should be concentrated in huge holding companies that own very diverse and large businesses. On this latter point, whether Americans realize it or not, every meal they eat out, every processed food they buy at the market, every sundry (detergent, household necessities) they purchase wherever, every drug and almost everything else they routinely buy is sold to them by about 10 huge holding companies. And all communications are essentially owned by 6 large corporations, so everything you ingest with your ears and eyes is also owned by a corporate cartel. Except Waldenswimmer, of course.

These huge companies are multinational in character, with much of their business (and payroll) located overseas. They are nominally American, but the sinking mass of the American middle and lower classes here are more or less of marginal relevance to them, and only to the extent that Americans form part of their customer base. The American booboisie needs to be manipulated because the U.S.A. is still nominally a democracy, de jure, although de facto it is what Sheldon Wolin calls an "inverted totalitarian state," one where the government is owned by Big Business. We are not going to "vote" our way out of this situation, as Russell Brand, among numerous others (including Dmitry Orlov, most definitely) seems to get.

America is a corporate headquarters and tax haven which executes its business plans by means of a huge standing army, which does not often just stand around. We got this way because (a) power always tends to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands, even in a liberal democracy, since as money aggregates it can get rid of legal impediments such as high taxation and anti-trust laws, and (b) because America was the most innovative and naturally-blessed (our peerless real estate) nation on Earth. We also benefitted mightily from intellectual immigration to this country, made possible by the double-digit IQs in charge of Nazi Germany.

I don't think the United States is going to collapse in the sense that the Collapsarian community talks and writes about. For one thing, the emphasis is too much on Peak Oil. I've written before that I think Peak Oil represents a kind of deus ex machina for anti-American wish fulfillment. Some sensitive souls, such as James Kunstler, Dmitry Orlov and many others, are so appalled by the grisly ugliness of the American crapscape, with its chain everything and grotesque proliferation of hideous suburban grids, that they long for some way to predict confidently that it must fall of its own weight. That's where Peak Oil comes in: you posit that an economy runs on cheap energy, especially petroleum in the American economy, and this gives you a means of assuring everyone that it will all be over soon and an anodyne vision of Norman Rockwell's neighborhoods will materialize peacefully out of the formless void.

No, I don't think so. The lower 90% of the American populace has no way to go but down, until it reaches a rough parity with the hard-working masses in Asia who, after all, have many of the same employers as the Americans. The American multi-nationals are indifferent to the fate of their so-called "countrymen," indifferent to the environment (mountain top removal, fracking, pesticide and fertilizer flushes into the Gulf and oceans, plastic waste, soil erosion, CO2 emissions) and essentially react only when conditions become so dire that the American "platform" is threatened. We're inflating bubbles again through money printing to retard this natural contraction, and when the bubbles pop (again), we'll have nother "crisis" which will in fact simply be another step-phase down after the gooey soap is cleaned up. I think that's how we'll get there, in a ratchet fashion. We will even adapt to oil high prices, as in fact Americans have done since the 2008 financial crisis began. Americans drive 3% fewer miles now per year than they did 5 years ago, despite increases in population and the "recovery." Gasoline usage is way down, as people shift to fuel-efficient cars and just leave the car keys on the table in the hallway. `Or by the oil can fire under the bridge.

The dramatic immiseration of the American people (thanks, Rob Urie) since 2008 has made catastrophe prediction and doomsaying one of America's chief growth industries, and many, many writers and speakers have gotten in on the act. But it's not especially lucrative. Owning one of the Big Corporations is better for that, so the doomsayers drop out and flick it in. It's always nice to go over to Mom's house.

Waldenswimmer

February 01, 2014

Saturday Morning Essay: The President Goes There: Climate Change Is Real.

January 19, 2014

Seminar at the End of the World

January 18, 2014

Saturday Morning Bummer: Climate 2.0

January 12, 2014

The Light Carbon Footprint of the Dude, Concluded

January 11, 2014

Saturday Morning Essay: The Light Carbon Footprint of The Dude, Part Two

January 09, 2014

The Light Carbon Footprint of The Dude, Part One

January 07, 2014

Weatherwise, It's Such A Cuckoo Day

January 04, 2014

Saturday Morning Essay: So Much for Those 13 Years of War

December 28, 2013

Saturday Morning Saturday Morning Essay: Extinction, Reconsidered

December 26, 2013

Saturday Morning Essay: On Graduating from Global Warming Class

December 21, 2013

Saturday Morning Essay: Life on the New American Plantation

December 14, 2013

Saturday Morning Essay: Homage to Corinth

December 07, 2013

Saturday Morning Essay: Mr. Krugman's Science of Black Box Economics

November 30, 2013

Saturday Morning Essay: Dispatch From the East Siberian Arctic Shelf

November 27, 2013

Dmitry flicks it in

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