Trump's anti-science transition team and some implications

On this blog, we have discussed Myron 'Evil Bastard' Ebell already, but how about science and the scientific community generally? I filled out the Nature US election result survey as scientists not only in the US but around the globe are stunned and most likely saddened by the outcome of the US presidential election. I filled the survey out as both a computational physicist and as a working naturalist, albeit sans a biology degree. I was interested in everything while at Uni., and if anything my promiscuous interests have only grown since. They grow even now.

With the sale of my computer services business I have little in the way of financial worries, but that only sharpens my skepticism for anything that could jeopardize the future of scientific funding; and funding for climate change science most acutely. I am not in the habit of cutting large pieces out of articles to fill up what should be internalized, processed and restated data. Anyone can do that; and most bloggers do this very thing.

Sorry about that minor but vital digression :)

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies chief Gavin Schmidt has not stated that he will resign if the Trump administration takes the most vile stance on climate change as many conservative news outlets have asserted. Reading comprehension is not a prerequisite for journalism, yellow or not. Of course there is lots of uncertainty.

If Trump nixes funding for climate change research and the US goes on to burn more fossil fuels as it now seems likely under a Trump administration, never again will the phrase, "It's the economy, stupid" have any weight. At NASA, there will likely be a brain drain as climate scientists - and other scientists as well - move to other countries that are not antithetical to the pursuit of knowledge. That is really what this comes down to; the US' anti-intellectualism is likely to have major blowback. CERN and the Large Hardron Collider aren't here, folks. The Chinese are committed to particle physics, while we have to rent time.

That was too much of a wrap-up in the body of a document. I don't outline these things. They are simply a stream of consciousness that usually is of an A, C, B, F, D style. If this blog ever gets any readers, I will compose posts in tighter logical progression. at least it is all original stuff ;)

Since I mentioned brain drain in the above ramble, here are the results of a brain drain poll conducted just after Trump's victory was announced. Trump had been amenable to keeping STEM graduates here via the H-1B program but it appears that Trump's new brain, Steve Bannon, is diametrically opposed to this position. This article was posted on 22 Aug. 2016. Why this wasn't reported is simply another reminder that the US press is a non-functioning arm of the checks to power.

More fear and loathing in Marakkech. I wish I was as hopeful as Erik Solheim who is quoted as saying:

"Trump’s pragmatism and business sense was likely to score over ideology. “It’s clear there is uncertainty because of some of the statements made before the election. But I am certain we have crossed the Rubicon. There is no way back on climate change.”"

With Ebell heading the EPA transition team, I am really sour on anything good happening at the federal level.

Then there is this from some of the faculty at Harvard.

Here's the quick response from the AAAS. I should point out here that one can join the AAAS and receive the journal Science as a free perk. Memberships start at $50/year..and if you opt into my scheme below, you'll be helping out in one of the best armchair ways!

Newsweek magazine asks: TRUMP: THE MOST ANTI-SCIENCE PRESIDENT EVER? Sorry about the all upper case. NEWSWEEK seems to be thrilled with the format :)

There has been much said about why Trump won. After trying to distill all of the reasons given which entailed accepting some things, and rejecting others, one set of traits fits both the Trump demographic of voters, and the Red states. This piece seems to best mirror the Trump voters I have witnessed online. In my ivory tower(a joke, folks) I do not know any admitted Trump supporters. The one person that I know that overtly supported Trump is a paranoid schizophrenic..not joking. He claimed that, "But Todd, he's bringing back jobs." This is simply not going to happen. Capital for production flows to where the cost of production is the least. Slap big tariffs on Chinese and Mexican goods, and other Asian and New World countries will become the centers of production. The immediate effect will be much higher prices for goods and a likely contraction of the US economy.

Ick. Enough armchair economics.

What can the US citizen do to counteract any Trumpian moves to defund science and other programs they deem worthy? My answer is both powerful and scary for the average person.

I am going to propose something radical here, and that is this; if you care about science funding and an inhabitable earth, take 25% of your federal income tax due, and directly fund the science organizations of your choice. I am going to call this 25 for Science. This will only work if it results in mass tax protests, so there has to high levels of participation. I am also going to implore that any other programs, or basket of programs, that get reduced funding or no funding under the Trump administration also get the 25 for x treatment. If large enough swaths of the populace do this, then enforcement of taxes due become untenable. Lots of people are not ready to truly govern themselves, and this is but a start, but the 25 for programs will surely shake the foundations(no pun intended). Do not forget the NGOs, as they too will need bolstering. I give 3% of all income to The Nature Conservancy, and do pro bono work for statewide programs. Every bit helps.

Lest you think my proposal too extreme, the future of the planet may be at stake; and hey, at least your money won't be going to these guys.

China to Trump...Suck on this!

Anyone that has been following the tragic joke that the US is playing on the planet, namely the election of DJ Trump to the position of President of the US, had undoubtedly heard his claims about climate change being a Chinese fabrication intended to hurt US business.

Well, yesterday, the The Empire Struck Back.

In the most typically used manner used to refute the short-fingered PE, the Chinese did it with facts!

During international climate change talks in Marrakech on Wednesday, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin reminded reporters that climate change negotiations began with the UN's International Panel for Climate Change in the 1980s, supported by the US Republican-led administrations under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. It was the EU and the US who brought full climate change awareness to China, he said, according to notes sent to CNN by a Chinese delegate traveling with him. Liu reiterated that climate change was not a hoax and that it was possible for Republicans to continue to support the process of addressing it, the delegate said. The comments are something of a slap in the face to Trump, who painted China as an enemy of America, claiming the Asian powerhouse was "taking our jobs and taking our money."

What Liu Zhenmin stated is of course, true. Here is a link to George H. W. Bush making the case for anthropogenic climate change. Here's the quote in 1990:

"We all know that human activities are changing the atmosphere in unexpected and in unprecedented ways."

We ALL knew it then, but what has happened in the interim that has caused people to doubt not only the continually accumulating mountains of data, but what they can see all around themselves?

The primary driver is the public relations industry. For the English speaker, here is a free primer on how the seeds of doubt were sown.

One of the petro-drenched pitchmen is none other than Myron Ebell, Trump's pick to lead his EPA transition team.

Not only is Ebell not a scientist, he is a paid crusader for business over everything. Here's the Wikipedia entry for this soulless creature. In his stellar career he has denied that big tobacco was liable for killing people. He was, and presumably is, against the Endangered Species Act, because he is a simple and mean-spirited person. These 'all business all the time' know nothings do not understand that without a habitable planet, there is not going to be ANY business.

Here is the shorter video of the evil grandfather spewing his bile denying climate change. Beware the bespectacled walking bag of bovine effluent.

Oh, it may or may not be common knowledge that when one burns a gallon(3.75l) of gasoline, it releases roughly 19lbs.(8.8Kg) of carbon into the atmosphere. Given that a gallon of gasoline weighs somewhere between 6 and 7 lbs., how can this be? This is a really good synopsis as to how this is so. It is beyond dispute. Myron Ebell cannot tell you how it is so, but you, dear reader, can now do this very thing :)

Not checked for anything. It is going live sans any filtration!

Thomas Friedmen to Donald Trump: Don't F*ck Up The Climate Any More That It Is F*cked Up

Friedman's Plea. There is a lot to like in Friedman's piece, but accuracy counts.

Let us add up Friedman's good points:

Friedman nails the facts on human climate refugees. Already people are emigrating toward the poles.

He also gets the average price per KwH correct, but the costs are lowering every day of every week. Technology and economies of scale are the big drivers here.

Friedman also gets other bits and bobs correct, and of course his big pitch could be cast in truer terms, but that would frighten people, and people in the US are already plenty frightened. The 750 word Op-Ed cannot give one a nuts and bolts understanding of any issue. Friedman gets extra points for adding this bit into the piece:

And as the climate physicist Joe Romm put it to me, do you really want to risk “going down in history as the man who killed the world’s last, best chance to avoid catastrophic warming”?

Well played!

The inaccuracies are some of omission, and some of commission.

1) Miami FL's current flooding issues. Miami has spent $400 million to raise areas of the city and to install electric pumps to put seawater back into the sea. This is an ongoing project, yet Friedman makes no mention of this effort.(src: Miami Mayor Tomás Pedro Regalado)Backup Src. Error of omission, or lack of all salient data.

2) India's investment in clean energy. India has invested a lot in clean energy, but has 300 million citizens without electric power, while sitting on massive coal reserves. India is going to use lots of that coal before India makes big moves toward renewables. Error of commission. Source.

Friedman is a neoliberal, hence most all of his stuff is couched in neoliberal terms. Even something so far above any theory of economic policy as the planetary future has to meet certain standards of economic viability.

Friedman is boring. On to better things in a bit.

COP22 Day 2 and More Data Mining

It looks like Day 2 of COP22 is shaping up to be a Trump Administration versus The World while UN Sec. Gen. Ban Ki-moon sought to assuage fears of a US pullout of the Paris Agreement stating in part:

"As a very successful business person, I believe that he[Donald Trump] understands there are market forces already at work on this issue, and that we need to harness these forces for the good of the planet."

I know that Trump is not a very good businessman as he has vastly under-performed the S&P 500 index with reinvested dividends since he inherited many tens of millions of dollars from his family, and would be wealthier today.(sources are everywhere)

Still, pretty shrewd politically.

In other COP22 news Sarkozy floats plan for carbon tariffs on US goods if Trump tears up Paris Agreement, and to his credit Sarkosy first proposed such a vehicle in 2010. Of course he's part of the French contingent that, along with the Chinese, fabricated the global warming hoax in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive. Or some such nonsense. Yep. That's our president-elect. Not a deep thinker, that one.

In later yesterday COP22 news, Reuters reported that Germany and the European Commission rejected -- for now at least-- a call for a carbon tax on US emissions. This could get pricey. The EU members trade greenhouse gases via a market; which yesterday traded at $5.79/ton(yes, that's the US measurement as we are too lazy to learn the metric system). At 5,334,000,000 tons(again US units) that would be a lot.

Despite what is so glaringly obviously in the best interests of the 7.1 billions of humans that do not live in the US, it will never happen as whatever the US says, goes.

Only the US, and those the US authorizes, can flaunt international agreements.

That's all from COP22.

Now, regarding yesterday's post concerning oceanic carbon scrubbing capacity declines, I have a bit more color.

The issue is simple chemistry(apologies to chemists). When the oceans absorb CO2, they become more acidic. Here's the chemistry:

The very definition of an acid is a substance that donates hydrogen ions. Thus, when every molecule of CO2 is dissolved in sea water, two hydrogen ions are released via the above reducing the pH, as carbonic acid is a product. The arrows represent the manner in which the reactants are reversible. That's enough chemistry :)

Without resorting to thermodynamic equations, colder water supports more gases dissolved per unit, so polar waters have grown the most acidic of all(terribly sorry about the lack of a segue there, but I am tired, and I will onlt rewrite if time and inclination warrant such)

Two takeaways here. One, the polar waters will lose their ability to absorb atmospheric carbon as they reach the saturation point, and two, as the polar waters heat those waters will radically lose their ability even faster due to heating. It is these types of feedback mechanisms that have been known about for a very long time, but only in the past few decades have people though much about doing anything about mitigating the worst effects of climate change.

Fun facts!: Joseph Fourier discovered the greenhouse effect in the 1820s. Following right along and dramatically expounding on Fourier's work was John Tyndall. "Tyndall explained the heat in the Earth's atmosphere in terms of the capacities of the various gases in the air to absorb radiant heat, also known as infrared radiation. His measuring device, which used thermopile technology, is an early landmark in the history of absorption spectroscopy of gases. He was the first to correctly measure the relative infrared absorptive powers of the gases nitrogen, oxygen, water vapour, carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, etc. (year 1859)." Tyndall did other amazing work, but this work really makes me feel how stupid humans are.

One more aside.. I cannot find this on the Interwebs, but it is inside one of James Lovelock's books or a news article from the early to mid 1980s. I'll need to paraphrase. Lovelock entertained the idea of going before the National Academy of Sciences(why not the Royal Society I know not)and proposing to pump millions of tons of CO2 and other gases into the atmosphere as an experiment. He asked, 'can you imagine how ridiculous that would seem?' But that is precisely what we as a planet have been doing for scores of years, but now it is billions of tons! I did not need the question. I have been espousing a cleaner, greener planet since the 1970s.

Getting back on track..

In shallower parts of the world's oceans where photosynthetic plant life flourishes, the carbon retention rate is 15 times that of even the best of forested terrestrial land according to The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). That's an older report(2009), but I have seen no contradictory data. Human activities are destroying these true 'lungs of the earth.' Sorry rainforests, I love you, but I have to follow the data.

The loss of coastal ecosystems at present is somewhere in the 4% to 7% annual range. Much as one might do in computing compound interest in savings or in the stock market over time, this loss too is compounded. This rate has been accelerating of late(see Waycott et. al.). The reasons are all anthropogenic. The losses come from runoff pollution, coastal development(an oxymoron if ever there was), fishing operations that use trawl nets, logging of mangroves, and aquaculture...in addition to acidification and coastal waters heating. It not only sounds dire, it is dire.

I'm not very fond of humans at present, but it is estimated that 1 billions of us get our protein in form of fish from these very ecosystems.

I have more to say, but I am going to close by giving you one film to view, and some popular books to read.

I finally watched DiCaprio's Before The Flood last night, and it was pretty good. If you are reading this there likely won't be much new information, but in this one instance I will recommend that you find a public torrent site, download the film and distribute it to your climate change denying family and friends. Nat. Geo. and Mr. DiCaprio offered free viewings prior to the release, and I feel certain that both bodies would encourage you to do likewise.

Books

Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life by E.O. Wilson. It's a Pulitzer winner, and a damned fine read.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert is another Pulitzer winner, and like E.O. Wilson, this staff writer for The New Yorker can really tell a story. I told her how much I enjoyed the book and how important I found it. I am going to send a brand new copy to her and have her autograph it.

No links to purchase film and books. Copy and paste titles into the search box of your favorite store for more ;)

That was way too much to try and accomplish in an hour, but I have bills to pay and I need food, liquids and rest :)

Oh. I would have really cleaned this thing up prior to posting but I am thinking in HTML and left no paragraph breaks in this rambling text. It's a dense block of text and I am posting from my tablet. Bad call.

Slowdown, ya move too fast

As day number two of two Conference of the Parties (COP 22)United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) begins in less than a day, the delegates have already been told some sobering news. The delegates were told that 2016 is almost certainly going to be the hottest year globally since we apes started being able to measure such things. The press release is from the World Meteorological Organization; and the link is to the body's press release.

With 2016 nearly guaranteed to break the instrumentally measured all-time hottest year(2015 will be downgraded to second hottest..until it's third), some media outlets are parroting this line: 2016 set to break heat record despite slowdown in emissions. This could well be short-term harmful from an ecological stand. If you simply read the headline it seems that "Hey, we're doing great! Not putting as much carbon into the air..terrific!"

The headline is not wrong, but it is misleading. There has been a slowing in the growth of carbon discharged into the atmosphere, but the trajectory is still upward. In one odd AP piece we find this:

"It is far too early to proclaim we have reached a peak," said co-author Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo. The study, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, says global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry are projected to grow just 0.2 percent this year. That would mean emissions have leveled off at about 36 billion metric tons in the past three years even though the world economy has expanded, suggesting the historical bonds between economic gains and emissions growth may have been severed. "This could be the turning point we have hoped for," said David Ray, a professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved with the study. "To tackle climate change those bonds must be broken and here we have the first signs that they are at least starting to loosen."

...and this:

China, which accounts for almost 30 percent of global carbon pollution, pledged to peak its emissions around 2030 as part of the climate pact adopted in Paris last year. Many analysts say China's peak is likely to come much earlier — and may already have occurred.

I would like to believe that, but then I would like to believe in God, too. I need third party evidence. The best evidence is that carbon emissions are up slightly year over year.

The stated goals of the UNFCCC are to keep global temperatures to a 2°C over pre-industrial levels. The linked to piece at the top of this entry shows that the earth is at least at the +1.2° point as of now.

President-elect Donald Trump needs to know that his wacky "clean coal" initiative won't really be clean, and even at that it is projected to cost the global community upwards of 17 trillion dollars to get everyone on board. Wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, and tidal would likely cost less to implement.

The one(that's ONE) clean coal plant under construction in the US is currently two years behind schedule and $4 billion over budget. Pipe cleaner dream. That was a cruel pre-election trick to have pulled on those in the former coal producing states. "Coal. Clean coal!" - DJ Trump Look at the chart in the link. Some of the greatest job losses in Appalachian coal country occurred under "De-Regulation Ronnie's" reign, and the only real uptick from a vastly lower starting point was during GWB's guiding hand. One has to remember, that graphic is not granular at all. That is all coal related jobs. From janitors to CEOs, they are all likely in there.

One last thing..

Up until now(or nearly now..see last link) the earth has been able to absorb roughly half of the atmospheric carbon we keep putting into the atmosphere. This is NOT the same as total sequestration as there will be a breaking point. The earth has given us a break -- for now. At some point the oceans are going to reach saturation point, and the land won't be able to help. Think of only thing...say, thawing tundra. This already does, and will accelerate the pumping of massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, and enormous amounts of methane. The oceans are already beyond maximum carrying capacity. See how quickly new improved data supersedes old data? The Woods Hole data was from 1.5 years ago. The Nature data was just published today.

I think I'll revisit the declining oceanic carbon sinks tomorrow and add some stuff about COP22 if there is anything new there.

Yesterday's post, apologies, and the way forward

I must apologize for the acrimonious nature of yesterday's post. I stand by it, but the tone was too harsh. I will do better over time...maybe.

The way forward is where I want this reboot to go. I am going to toss up some science links and provide commentary, but I see this morphing more into a climate change data dump with an emphasis on the nexus between climate change and politics. The incoming US president has some really scary people allegedly lined up for this dept. or that slot.

For instance, PE Trump has Myron Ebell heading his EPA transition team. If you open the link, you'll see a few of Trump's choicest global warming/climate change tweets as well as a host of other scary stuff.

Since I do not engage in ad hominem attacks, let us look at Myron(can you imagine the amount of time this guy spent inside high school lockers?) Ebell's scholastic training. Mr. Ebell has a B.A. in philosophy, and an M.Sc in economics. He states: "[I am] not a climate scientist. I'm just giving you the informed layman's perspective." He drops another pearl: "If science is going to be discussed in the public arena, then shouldn't people other than scientists be allowed to participate? Isn't that what a representative democracy is?"

I believe that all voices should be heard, but all voices should not be heard at equal volume. I have far more sci-cred than Mr. Ebell, but I too listen to real leaders in the field. One of my go to papers is Shaun Lovejoy's Scaling fluctuation analysis and statistical hypothesis testing of anthropogenic warming. While the paper's conclusions are clearly alarming, the figures and mathematics are delivered in the circumspect manner typical to most scientific papers.

Mr. Ebell is Fukushima and Chernobyl squared where acceptance of data sets that he is likely not well enough versed in physics and maths to understand without interpretation. He should be able to understand the statistical drill down of the various data sets, but unless you do this sort of thing on a regular basis, the gears get rusty. These is another set of thins that might be a bit of a hurdle for a non-physics person to need help with; and those are the symbol sets peculiar to physics.

<---//Begin digression I took two years of quantum physics baby courses, and the special maths one must know, in order to understand semiconductor limitations as process sizes shrunk and while I could pass the tests, I knew nothing of quantum theory until I was working afield..and then only after perhaps two years. Much like Feynman said, "One does not, by knowing all the physical laws as we know them today, immediately obtain an understanding of anything much." Truer words have never been uttered. End digression//--->

So, I can do the math as I used it - or variants of it - for 30 years. I am over that now. See this bit of tripe.

It seems unbelievably short-sighted to back out of the weak Paris Climate Agreement. Paris is far too little far too late, but it is a start. It is like the US ACA(Affordable Care Act ofttimes derisively referred to as Obamacare) for the global climate. It is nowhere near being the best solution, but one has to start somewhere or we'll be Venus. Okay, not real Venus, no unaided lead melting, but a really bleak place to inhabit.

I was going to respond to a commenter in a piece concerning CO2 and periods of waxing glaciation(I'm too much a stickler for accuracy to call them 'ice ages'), but it is not my job to educate people. The gist of the commenter's argument was this: "How come there were ice ages when CO2 levels were higher than they are today?" To fully answer this gets into some speculative stuff, and the paleo-climate data gets hazier and hazier the further back in time one goes. How does one answer such a query? If I had answered the question I would have kept my answer limited to the last 800,000 years. This eliminates nearly all continental drift. No need to bring up Gondwana and/or Pangaea unless pressed :) I also tossed out the "Snowball Earth" period as that would have taken the reader back some 715 million years. I also rejected pre-photosynthetic earth as old Sol was pretty weak from 4.55 billion years ago, but there was likely more energy from radiation sources and impactors..too complex. Lots of CO2 in that atmosphere, but not germane.

My answer is here. I will use a link to this post the next time this comes up. First of all, the graphic below shows CO2 fluctuations over the last 800,000 years. This data has been gathered by sampling gas trapped in ice cores -- a very reliable method.

As you can see in the past 800,000 years, there has not been a time - until the present - where atmospheric CO2 levels exceeded 300ppm. I should note, that since this image was compiled, Mauna Loa(the CO2 station for the northern hemisphere) stays above 400ppm all year round. We are terrific stewards of the earth! Just great!

Here is a graphic displaying "ice age" temperatures and volumes - which includes interglacials - going back 450,000 years.

Lastly, I have this .svg file showing temperature and CO2 variations(blogger says no dice to my nifty graphic, so it is now a jpeg). Each image tells a different story; and when taken together make a compelling argument that we have, and will continue to, pee in the only pool in which we can swim.

There you have it. A nice correlation. Even if the collective "we" stopped putting CO2 into the atmosphere today, the earth's troposphere(the air we breathe on terra firma) would continue to warm for approximately 40 years. Why? Because the world's oceans would release all the heat absorbed since the start of the industrial revolution..and maybe even earlier. So let us agree on 50 more years of warming if we ceased dumping carbon into the atmosphere now. It would still get a lot uglier before the climate levels off and then perceptibly makes the transition back to pre-industrial temperatures.

What fun!

I am more concerned about saving biodiversity than about saving humans. With 7.4 billions of us here I imagine a few will survive. I cannot fathom a planet with people, rats, mice, ticks and mutant bacteria. No thanks! What a pale world that would be.

Is Elon Musk seriously considering Mars? His eco-friendly stuff is to be lauded, but humanity needs to see that this rock remains habitable before pooping an another rock. He almost had the right idea. Smart buses with smart routes would be world's better for the earth to produce. That is a topic for another day.

In closing, I was championing mass public transportation in 1983. The ozone hole was becoming a 'thing,' and I gave impromptu talks to anyone that would listen about the crushing mass of humanity. I read The Population Bomb while in junior high school as well as Carson's Silent Spring before I was 14. I was a weird kid.