The heart of the matter: those CRU files!

This letter to Andy Revkin of the New Times, DotEarth, is an excellent statement of the genuine issues raised by the CRU “hacked” emails.  The issues are serious.  Highlighting is by me.  I found this text at Jeff Id’s blog, The Air Vent, but it is linked in many places.

Oh, and if you want to jump to a really juicy email instead of reading this long letter, check out this one.  Seems they weren’t so confident in their long-term projections after all, nor in their repeated denials (are they the denialists?) that the models had failed to predict a current sustained stalling of temperature rise.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ * ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear Mr. Revkin,

I am writing to you to express my concerns with the content of the emails and documents that were recently obtained and released from the University of East Anglia. In my opinion, many of the comments in the blog articles about this incident have taken extreme positions that cloud the importance of the information that is contained in the documents and emails. With that in mind, I would like to take a moment to describe what I feel are the critical lessons that can be learned from this incident.

So that you understand my perspective, I have been labeled as a climate change skeptic, a contrarian, anti-science, and denialist. I have been referred to in a derogatory fashion (and have even been the subject of an entire, somewhat condescending post on RealClimate concerning analyses I had done on the Steig Antarctica paper) because I have questioned the results of several influential articles on climate change. I feel these characterizations are unfair, as I believe that humanity is contributing in a meaningful fashion to the observed rise in global surface air temperatures. I have witnessed several of my contemporaries being labeled in similar fashion in spite of the fact that they, too, believe the same.

 This illustrates the polarization of the climate change debate that is a dangerous impediment to the science. It appears that unless one believes that catastrophic consequences will necessarily result unless a certain set of draconian measures are taken, that one is dismissed as a crackpot, a liar, and is insinuated or directly accused of having been paid off by corporate interests. This produces a destructive environment for discussing the science of climate change.

As a skeptic, I can say in no uncertain terms that the emails and documents from the University of East Anglia do not show that AGW is a falsehood or hoax. Claims that “global warming is dead” (as I have seen) are not supported by those documents. On the other hand, claims that “the science is settled” are shown to be an exaggeration.

While vocal skeptics such as Steve McIntyre have been vilified by several influential scientists, the content of the emails demonstrate quite clearly that many of the concerns were legitimate and that this was known by the scientists who repeatedly and publicly denied the veracity of those claims. These include, but are not limited to:

· The concern that the significance statistics for MBH 98 were benchmarked to an inappropriate type of noise. Despite public claims to the contrary, Dr. Mann states clearly in email 1059664704.txt that the calibration residuals were “significantly red” for at least two cases. This validates the McIntyre & McKitrick criticism that the confidence intervals and benchmark significance statistics were incorrectly calculated and that MBH claimed greater statistical significance for their reconstruction than was supported by the data.

· The concern that the WMO 1999 main graphic, MBH 98, and several other reconstructions included in the IPCC spaghetti graphs had inappropriately spliced instrumental temperatures onto the end of the reconstructions. Despite Dr. Mann publicly stating that “No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstrution. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum,” on RealClimate, it is quite clear that this is exactly what was done in emails 0966015630.txt and 0942777075.txt.

· The concern that without either stripbark foxtails, bristlecones and/or the Yamal chronology that the hockey stick shape in the 20th century was greatly reduced. Despite pre-publication discussion and disclosure of review comments of the Wahl & Ammann and Ammann & Wahl defenses of MBH in which the McIntyre and McKitrick claims were dismissed as “total crap”, none of these individuals checked WA and AW closely enough to see that they performed not a single reconstructions that did not include at least one of the offending chronologies. They also express concerns that there are methodological problems with MBH, but were more concerned with defending MBH than disclosing factors that they know may partially undermine the result or increase the uncertainty of the result. This may be seen in emails 1102956446.txt, 1108248246.txt, 1122669035.txt, and others.

· The concern that the Yamal selection used in Kaufman 2009 and other papers was only a subset and, if the full chronology is used, that the answer changes in a non-trivial fashion. In a string of emails, it can be seen how several of the most influential scientists begin discrediting this concern before they had even researched the claim to see if it is legitimate. As it turns out, it is a legitimate concern, though claims of fraud by some bloggers do not seem substantiated. Rather, confirmation bias seems far more likely. These are in emails 1256760240.txt, 1256735067.txt, 1254756944.txt, and others.

As you may be aware, this is only a partial list.

These serve to illustrate not that the scientists involved are engaged in fraudulent behavior for personal gain, but rather that they feel that it is their right or duty to be the gatekeepers of what information is allowed to be seen. I think it is clear that the scientists believe that they are correct. I think it is clear that they use this belief to justify actively engage in censoring their own results (and pressure others to censor theirs) to prevent full disclosure of the uncertainties involved in the methods they employ. I think it is clear that they use this belief to justify attempts to discredit legitimate criticisms, in some cases with the knowledge that those criticisms are accurate. I think it is clear that they use this belief to advocate suppressing free expression on the internet. I think it is clear that they use this belief to attempt to manipulate the peer review process to present their results in a way that lends more credibility to their conclusions than otherwise would be the case. This is advocacy, not science. It in no way invalidates AGW theory, but it does call into question the certainty with which these scientists claim to understand the magnitude of the AGW effect – and, by extension, the magnitude and timing of the anticipated consequences.

This naturally leads into another important lesson: the insular nature of this relatively small, yet incredibly influential, group of scientists leads them to believe that it is their right to decide who should be privy to data and code. As a party to several of the FOIA requests of the University of East Anglia and CRU, I find myself appalled at the cavalier manner in which several key individuals handled FOIA requests. Some of the most telling emails are 1106338806.txt, 1212009215.txt, 1212063122.txt, 1214229243.txt, 1219239172.txt, and 1228412429.txt (among others) which indicate coordinated activities to prevent release of the data due to who was requesting it rather than the legitimacy of the request, to delete or destroy relevant data, and collusion with the FOIA officers to deny requests without properly examining whether the request was legitimate. While I do not believe that this activity should result in any kind of criminal prosecution whatsoever, I do believe that it should result in some form of corrective and/or disciplinary action by the appropriate institutions.

It is my hope that the above issues, not the unsubstantiated claims that AGW is “dead” or AGW is a “hoax”, are the issues that have traction. Otherwise, it is possible that these irresponsible claims – which are easily dismissed – will drown out the very real need for reforms to make climate science more open and accessible. Conversely, it is possible that these irresponsible claims could derail grants for additional research and damage support for many important mitigation activities that to this point were seen as not controversial (such as increased recycling efforts, development and increased commercialization of alternative energy, and similar efforts).

This letter is not intended for you to publish (though you may, as long as you do not quote it out of context). It is intended to provide you with a perspective from a “skeptic” who feels that the important lessons of this incident have not been well-carried by either the blogs or the media coverage. I write to you specifically because, although we may differ in our opinion of whether AGW is a presently a “crisis” and what the ideal mitigation/prevention activities might be, I have read enough of your column to believe that you are honest and forthright, and that you welcome hearing multiple sides of the climate debate. I enjoy your work (even when I disagree with your conclusions) and wish you continued success.

“Ryan O”

Those climate models…

Finding out what's in the black box!

I often wonder why the global warming doom-gloom-soothsayers have so much traction in the world.  Like right wing conservatives, they like to claim that they are victimized by a hostile establishment press, but the NYTimes, a pillar of the establishment, is certainly with them.  Check out the 230 comments on Andy Revkins DotEarth blog regarding the recent email disclosures from the CRU.  The Editors’ Selections, with the purpose of

…highlighting the most interesting and thoughtful comments representing a range of views.

includes 4 posts, all firmly in the camp of “How dare they publish this!  This is just normal science. Face it, global warming is a fact!!” So much for a range of views…but no matter.

But why do intelligent and scientifically literate people, including some who are quite reasonable, e.g., Andy Revkin, feel so confident that the AGW hypothesis has been established beyond doubt?  Frequently – check out those Selections – references are made to mountains, avalanches, piles…etc. of data that prove the point.  I think something is missing here:  I think it is the global circulation models (GCM) run on super computers that clinch it.  But there is very little peeking into those models – they are essentially a black box for most people:  numbers go in, Apocalypse comes out!

Without the models, there would be no terrifying scenarios, disturbing graphs showing steeply rising temperatures over decades to come, no tipping point doomsday model runs.  There would be some hard data (CO2 rising), a mountain of ice core, satellite, and surface data from which some would infer a clear trend, correlation, and causal mechanism;  there would be an interesting hypothesis about positive feedback amplifying the otherwise manageable temperature rise that might be caused by CO2 increases and that might or might not happen; there would be the same endless scientific haggling and argument over the way the numbers are handled by statistical routines and whether this or that presentation of the data is appropriate and meaningful; there would be no consensus.  The advocates of AGW would be a determined and inventive bunch, but they would be hard pressed to demonstrate that the rest of the world should abandon the null-hypothesis, i.e., climate and CO2 have always fluctuated- what’s so different now? -  and adopt their hypothesis.  Computer models change all that.

The GCMs give the AGW crowd the cover to say that they can predict (not with certainty, of course…) the future trend of the climate.  It gives them the supposed justification for stating that they have uncovered the “forcing function” that precisely quantifies the impact of CO2 concentrations on the climate.  It provides them with a rationale for assserting that their understanding of feedback mechanisms is corrrect and that their predictions are reliable.  This role of computer models is not often examined, rarely questioned, certainly not in the popular press.

It’s worth taking a look at the writing of Daniel Botkin, a scientist who was present at the creation of computer modeling in ecology, and who has a lot to say on the role of models in scientific investigations.  His basic point is that models are valuable tools for understanding a natural system, for trying out ideas of how changes in one thing may affect another, but they are not very good for making predictions.  His essay, Science and Soothsaying, is a good starting point.

Another critical view of computer modeling is the Pilkeys’ book Useless Arithmetic.  Orin Pilkey (not to be confused with the climate scientists father and son, Pielke Sr. and Pielke Jr., also with a jaundiced view of modelers’ work) is most known for his controversy with the US Army Corps over its penchant for pouring millions of dollars into pouring sand on eroding beaches.  These wasteful projects are often supported by very impressive computer modeling.

In thinking about this topic, I keep returning to a book published almost twenty years ago, Ice Time.  In its chapter, The Machine’s Eye, the author makes the point that the study of climate had become, in large part, the study of climate models.   He traces the rise of supercomputing in the investigation of climate, and notes that it has become “big business.”   The author is relatively uncritical of the use of the models, but he focuses more on their use to understand the mechanics of the climate system rather than to predict the future.  The chapter is the only extended discussion in layman terms that I have ever seen of just what computer models of the climate do, and how they are put together.  For that, it remains a very useful discussion.

Late Note on Revkin’s Blog:
Here’s some interesting comments following the controversy-click the number for link to full text:

From a physicist who values scientific culture:   265. Frederick  UK

November 22nd, 2009
2:48 pm

… I cannot say whether AGW is a valid theory…What I can say is that Mann & co. have so undermined the scientific process that their results lack credibility. This has been a dark period for science. It seems that politics and science do not mix.

We need to put this behind us and get serious scientists who are not afraid to have their methods and results questioned. At the end of the day, there is nothing more convincing than facts and proper results. We need transparency but what we have here is a travesty!

From a true believer distressed at Andy Revkin’s lack of faith:  269. Wayne Hamilton Springdale, UT

November 22nd, 2009

2:48 pm

Your Dot Earth blog has changed since I started reading and contributing several years ago … I thought it functioned very effectively in describing the threat of anthropogenic climate change.But in recent months… you’ve become increasingly even-handed in balancing the opinions of AGW skeptics and proponents… You now seem to give equal time and credence to the knowledgeable and to the ignorant.

I’m sorry to report that your latest article on the CRU hacking gave me the impression that you no longer believe in the consensus of international science and the importance of that fact. It makes me sad to say this, but I’m no longer interested in following your Dot Earth blog. Good bye.

Also this one, with a potent warning for Revkin that goes to the heart of “he said, she said” journalism (emphasis added):  261 John M.   San Francisco

November 22nd, 2009

2:48 pm

Hi Andy,

Comparing your NYT article on the controversy to the raw data, I find you are slanting the story, minimizing it, acting more like a press agent than an independent, hard-driving reporter. For example, you write:

“Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information.”

The emails themselves clearly reveal an effort to withhold information, but you are describing this only as an assertion by skeptics.

Your article makes no mention at all of the obvious, and possibly illegal, effort to evade requests made under UK Freedom of Information laws.

A far better analysis can be found here: http://www.powerlineblog.com…

Andy, you are risking your credibility here.

John M.

That natural feeling

Gardens in western civilization are heavily weighted with symbolism and mythic allusions.  We visit them to vicariously experience Eden, to see a tamed version of Nature, which is fearsome in the raw, to escape the gridiron of the city, to revive our spirits by contact with Mother Earth, and so on.  Prospect Park, in Brookly, NY, happens to be in the Park-as-garden-as-Eden mode, as opposed to the more formal gardens you might see in Paris, say.  For my money, it is far superior to its much more celebrated brother, both by Olmsted, Central Park in Manhattan.

Sometimes Mother Nature intrudes on our little faux naturel versions of au naturel living, and often, we people don’t like it one bit.  The New York Times had an article the other day about a swan spat, involving two families of mute swans (they make noise, but they’re called mute).  One male patriarch is trying to run the other family off his turf, and he’s getting pretty agressive about.  Some local residents are horrified, and they are trying to redress this imbalance of forces by helping the persecuted family of swans and cygnets.  (Oh yes, they are all sooo cute!)  Park officials and workers, wisely, are refusing to get involved, and want nature to act this out on its own.  The woman in the video at the link provided above teaches literature at Hunter College.  I wonder what her specialty is – English Romantic poetry?

I recall a personal experience in that twin Edenic enclave, across Flatbush Avenue from Prospect Park, the utterly gorgeous Brooklyn Botannical Gardens.  There is a large and beautiful Japanese garden within it, and the centerpiece is a sizable pond with some ornamental posts.  During one visit when I walked by the pond, there was a large crowd of visitors  ooohing and aaahing so I went to see what the commotion was about.  Several families of ducks were swimming about with their very young ducklings, fluffy and brown, kept close.

As I was leaving that day, I passed by the pond again, and as I approached it, I passed several people leaving with stricken faces.  Some children were crying.  What was the problem?  I went to the edge of the pond amidst people shaking their heads and turning away in disgust or confusion.  On one of the ornamental posts in the pond was a Black Capped Night Heron, often seen roosting there.  In its large and powerful beak, it was holding a duckling that it was maneuvering down its gullet.

It was a teachable moment.

Malthus on my mind

It just so happens that I have been reading Thomas Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population these days – another one of those famous books that I’d never gotten around to.  And it just so happens that Norman Borlaug died yesterday.  And it just so happens that T. R. Malthus keeps coming up in discussion about consumption, scarcity, the environment, global warming, etc.  Consider this riposte by Paul Krugman regarding feedback on earlier post of his.  It’s all related.

Some would say that Borlaug, the Nobel Prize winner, showed Malthus the door when he ushered in the Green Revolution.  (He rejected that term, though.)  Food supply didn’t have to inevitably fall behind the growth of population.  Except that Borlaug remained worried about population growth throughout his life and feared that if the rate of increase wasn’t checked, his work would have done no more than bought a temporary reprieve from famine to the world.  Borlaug, who seems to have been a deeply compassionate and extremely sensible man (see this address) was also criticized by many for a narrow technocratic approach to the problem of feeding the world – Simple, we’ll breed more productive wheat! – understood the wider context within which agriculture sits.  He wasn’t trying to get the developing world hooked on Western fertilizer and seed products – he was trying to feed the world.  He regarded such critics as elitists who didn’t worry about where their next meal, or their family’s meal, was coming from.

Oh dear, so much comes together here, not the least of which is just how great those 18th century thinkers were.  Did Malthus forsee it all?  Now we associate him with Carlyle’s remark about economics being the dismal science:  nothing but famine, war and pestilence bring production and consumption into balance, that’s the future.  Dismal, yes, but that’s not what Carlyle was talking about anyway. And Malthus was just trying to introduce some hard nosed good sense into a discussion too much dominated by optimistic good feeling of people like Condorcet.  In situating ourselves within Nature, the universe, we have not advanced much beyond Rousseau and Voltaire’s argument of more than 200 years ago.

Krugman’s gripe was with people calling him a (neo) Malthusian when he ranted about congressmen being treasonous to the planet and the sky falling and all that climate change stuff.  But he was way off base, as this commenter pointed out:

“[Krugman wrote] We only think Malthus got it wrong because the two centuries he was wrong about were the two centuries that followed the publication of his work.”

Only an economist could say that with a straight face.

Shorter version: “Malthus was wrong because his theory had zero predictive ability”.

Yes, I thought of that too.  If only Malthus had published his work in 1598, he would be looked upon as an undisputed master of analysis and prediction!   On the other hand, just this evening, here at a conference on water resources and climate change, a speaker remarked that maybe bringing the Green Revolution to India wasn’t such a “wise idea” because a significant consequence has been unregulated and unrestricted pumping of groundwater for irrigation, which is bringing the nation to the point of  massive water shortages.  Maybe Malthus should have written about water supply instead of grain supply, although it comes to the same thing in the end.

Or does it?  The same speaker said we should never underestimate our ability to adapt, an intellectual mistake that neo-Malthusians make a lot.

Nature’s soft passementerie

Today, in rainy weather, I went for a walk in this nature preserve in my town, a scant 5 miles from Manhattan.  In the photo, it looks like a park with large soft lawns, but it’s actually a swampy marsh with a path constructed through it.  In the rain, I can see how the water fills the channels and where it flows, and the colors look soft and rich.  The birds act differently too.

The essence of a garden, or park, is the joining of the path and nature.  Nature has no paths; they are for man.  Of course, this area is “restored”, and has been much abused by man, and the path through it is carefully built, but still, one has the feeling, especially in the rain, of tramping through a place without humans.  Even though residential quarters are often only a few yards away!

Here are those soft passementeries I was thinking of.  Inviting us into it, to rummage and grope and get lost.  As in a woman’s closet of dresses.  Sloththrop gets lost in just this way with Katje, but he’s always getting lost…

A profusion of leafy things, none of them with names that I know.

The object of my walk.  I took a sample of the water for examination under the microscope.

Crystal Ball

Friedman’s column in the NYTimes today, Mother Nature’s Dow, was typical of his work – filled with “big” ideas, poorly thought out, emotional, enthusiastic, and totally superficial.  One commenter suggested that he was rallying the Global Warming troops in the wake of the article on Freeman Dyson, the world-famous skeptic, that appeared in the Times Magazine and the recent cold weather!  (Hot weather is always evidence of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) – cold weather is just a random variation…)  What really got me was the comments of this sort, which were many:

the skepticism toward climate change never ceases to amaze me. the weight given to climatologists who discount man-made climate change is horribly out of balance with those who are sounding the alarms (and have been for a good decade – with increasing intensity). we are witnessing earth’s change at a rapid rate. we already have irreparable damage to some ecosystems. now is not the time to be an ostrich. and the apathy of many people who do recognize this truth is deeply disappointing.

Yes, the planet is changing, it always is changing.  Yes, many ecosystems are being damaged, mostly by destruction of habitat as a result of human settlement.  And why does the increasing intensity (stridency?) of the “ones who know” mean that they are right?  Often that signals that a person is wrong!

Human Beings and Original (Environmental) Sin

Among the comments I read were many that seemed to stop just short of calling for forced population control.  Humans are a harmful virus, you see.  This is part of the “religion of environmentalism” that Dyson talks about, often sympathetically.  I noticed another example of it on walk through a nature preserve near my house.  Some trees there have metal plates with messages on them about ecology that were done by local school children.  One stated that we are destroying our source of oxygen every day by a given amount (I forget the figures.)  This was a reference, I believe, to deforestation, but were these children also apprised of the growth of oxygen producers in some areas?

Having just finished reading about Cotton Mather and his role in the Salem Witch Trials, and having my head filled with thoughts about Old Time Religion, the plaque seemed a lot like an old fashioned religious motto intended to make you feel bad and remind you of your essentially sinful nature…so you could think of this occasionally after you go back to your normal life.  Yes, walkers will see this plaque and shake their heads:  “How true – out of the mouths of babes…”  And they will climb  back into their cars (maybe a Prius) and drive away.

Let’s get real.  I make a few predictions and such:

• Human population will continue to grow for a long time, although the rate of increase is likely to continually slow.  This population will need lots of energy.  I suspect that coal, for good or ill, is going to provide a lot of it.
• Saving energy is good for all sorts of reasons – why waste it or anything else?  But we are not likely to be 100% energy self-sufficient here in the USA, not if we don’t want our economy to grind to a halt.  Priuses and coiled light bulbs, and more efficient homes and transit will use vastly less energy, if everyone used them now, but they don’t, and by the time they do, if they do, there will be more of us.  So at best, we can hope for a slightly decreasing rate of increase in our energy consumption in the near term.
• Stopping population growth won’t happen, and isn’t a realistic goal for any near-term, unless we are willing to resort to a police state.  At least that would have the added benefit of putting the lid on our consumer culture so that the fewer people wouldn’t continue to consume more, but I’m not looking forward to it.
• Everyone says nice things about “sustainability” but few really think it through.  What does it mean?  How much are we willing to NOT have as we move through the 21st century?  How thoroughly can we rework our societies, and not have massive civil unrest, in our search for clean energy?  Not much, I think.  After all the “cosmetic” green stuff is worked through, short of social breakdown or revolution, we will need more energy.  I bet coal supplies a lot of it throughout the world.  Coal can produce electricity, and electricity can replace oil.

Not too pretty, eh?

Silent Sea, Salton Sea

When I was in school, I picked off the shelf a copy of Oriental Despotism:  A Comparative Study of Total Power by Karl Wittfogel and learned of his thesis, not widely shared today, that this sort of government has its foundation in something he called hydraualic civilization. These are societies that depend for their existence on huge, government directed irrigation works.  My imagination was set on fire by the notion of what I later termed “Hydrologic Radicalism.”

Today, this sort of radical engineering is not in favor, not after the disasters of the Aswan Dam, the killing and disappearing of the Aral Sea, and the use, re-use, and use-again of the Colorado River until the unfortunate Mexicans are left with only a salty, meagre trickle into the Gulf of Baja California where once a life-giving torrent flowed.  Treaty be damned!

My interest in Big Water, most familiar to the general public via Roman Polanski’s film “Chinatown,” led me to the Salton Sea.

This enormous inland lake lies east of San Diego on the other side of some mountains the make that entire region a desert.  The Salton Sea submerged the Salton Sink, which was the lowest point in North America before that, a place of honor now held by Death Valley.  When I was a boy, the Sea was still a resort destination in the winter, a place for the Rat Pack glitterati to boat and fish and drink when they tired of nearby Palm Springs.  My interest in it was piqued recently when I read about Albert Frey, an architect who designed in the Desert Modern Style, and built the Salton Sea Yacht Club.

This modernist paradise has seen better days.  You can see a very nice assortment of ghost town photos of the area on flickr, here.  The decay of the area, precipitous since the 1970s, made it a good setting for the neo-noir film, “Salton Sea,” with Val Kilmer in the lead.  Vincent D’Onfronio plays a meth lab monster who lost his nose to drug snorting and earned the nickname, Pooh Bear.  He’s pretty creepy.

So how did this dead sea come to be?  The satellite image at the top tells the story.  The dense patchwork of rectangles at the north and south end of the Sea are irrigated agricultural fields.  The southern area is known as the Imperial Valley, one of the most productive industrial agricultural sites in the world.   Desert soil is often very rich growing material – to make it bloom, just add water.  Some real estate types had been eyeing the locale for decades when a successful canal building venture was finally launched, and settlers were drawn from across the world to settle and farm the valley.   In the course of building this Garden of Eden, there was a slight miscalculation regarding the construction of the hydraulic gates and barriers.

There was unusually high water in one of the tributaries, and the works failed.  Water will seek a low point, and the entire flow of the mighty Colorado River rushed in with a torrential vengeance.  The cascade created some low waterfalls which were washing away the soil “like powdered sugar,” and they began backcutting the stream bed at nearly a 4000 feet each day, i.e. , the falls were moving upstream at that rate.  Crowds turned out to watch this “cosmical plunge of a great river.”  Parallels to the Biblical Flood and the results of man’s hubris were on everyone’s lips.  The Sink was filling up at a rate of  a half-foot a day.  More than four times the volume of soil removed for the Panama Canal was washed away.  Radical, man!  You can read all about it in this paper I wrote for a master’s level class in geography.

When it was filled, everyone thought the Salton Sea would just evaporate away on its own, but it didn’t.  The drainage from the vast irrigated fields surrounding it, and from some springs to the north of it, kept it filled.  Someone had the bright idea in the 40s to turn it into a desert resort after WWII, and it flourished for a while.  Like the Dead Sea in Israel, however, it has no outlet, and stuff just accumulates in it over time.  This includes salt, fertilizer, pesticide, and other chemcials that feed algae and make life for fish unpleasant.  The large population of fish that grew from some initial stocks began to die off, and the Sea became the stinking stagnant mess it is today.  Plans are floated now and then to clean it up, but prospects are dim as it would be a very big and expensive job, with uncertain results.

Stop by sometime when you’re cruising through So. Cal. and you want to see and smell something different!

Religion falling, religion rising

A recent study shows that Americans are less self-identified with religion than ever before.  Still, the impulse yet lives…

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.

Bill McKibben, with his anguished cry of loss for our pre-lapsarian existence, The End of Nature, comes to mind.

As Freeman Dyson points out in the review of a book about global warming from which this excerpt is taken, this is not a bad thing in many ways.  But it is not science.  He has more to say about the actual science of global warming here:  Heretical Thoughts.

Mr. Green

Today, the New York Times had a fascinating article about jungles and rain forests in Central America.  It seems that as old rain forests are being eroded by settlement, new ones are springing up.  While a piece of farmland in New England might take 100 years to produce a tract of second growth woodland that approaches, at least to the untutored eye, the nature of the original woods, in the tropics, the process might take only fifteen or twenty years.

As people move to the cities for higher incomes, farms are being abandoned and left to be reclaimed by the jungle.  Some estimate that the new forests are growing in area at a rate nearly three times the rate that the old ones are being cut down.  Of course, the new growth is not the same as old growth, at least not when it’s new!  And some of the forest will be fragmented and far from old growth areas, so there are hurdles to a regeneration of the ecology of it, but it does suggest some interesting management strategies.

One of the biggest controversies, it seems, is how to account for the newer growth in the carbon inventories that have become so popular.  A new growth forest isn’t all that different from old growth from the standpoint of carbon dioxide intake – it just won’t have the same diversity of flora and fauna – but this notion doesn’t sit well with some environmentalists.  They fear a license to chainsaw the old under the false sense that it’s being replaced even as it’s destroyed.

The Times, with its usual cuteness and superficiality on scientific matters, refers to the newer growth areas as faux forest.  That should be faux forest.  Ha ha…Tacky tacky.  But then, only time is needed to make faux authentic.

The article concludes with a quote from a scientist:

Still, the fate of secondary forests lies not just in biology. A global recession could erase jobs in cities, driving residents back to the land.

“Those are questions for economists and politicians, not us,” Dr. Wright said.

Yes, well, it takes a geographer…like George Perkins Marsh, the original environmentalist!  In his amazing book, Man and Nature (1864), he examined this interaction of human culture and the landscape in a way that had never been done before.  He demonstrated that it was human actitivy that was responsible for flooding in many regions of Europe (cut down the trees and the moutains can’t absorb heavy storms…), he showed that the landscape of northern Africa had been turned from woodland to desert by millenia of grazing herds, he discussed micro-climates, and he was active in creating the enormous Adirondack Park in New York State, after it had been completely denuded of trees.

His eco-orientation, wholistic approach to environmentalism, subtle appreciation of the man-landscape system is rare today when everyone is a specialist a technical sub-field.  The basic lessons of his book, Man and Nature, are still mostly appreciated in the observance, not the breech! That is, when we destroy a landscape, we notice and decry the hand of man upon the world.  But when it happened outside of our lifetimes, we assume it’s natural!  How many people mourn the loss of Europe’s forests, which used to cover 80% of that continent?  How many people exult and gush over the beauty of the English countryside, nature’s bounty, without realizing that most of it is the quiltwork of human agricultural husbandry over 2,000 years?

This is a cultural side-effect of mass-urbanization in the modern era.  We don’t quite know what nature looks like.

More Green

Spring is sprung, and I found myself with a big fat DWR (Design within Reach) catalog on my table that asks the question (square of grass front and center on the cover) “What is green?” Looking through the catalogue, I had the feeling that I was participating in an irony so blatant that I wondered if I was missing a secret joke. From the look of the pages, green is MONEY!

DWR has nice stuff, some fascinating, some beautiful, some just a bit weird. Aside from the odd accessory and some very well designed and affordable chairs, the furnishings it showcases are on the expensive side. Some are extremely expensive, and virtually none of it is for the great mass of the consuming public. Ikea, maybe. Walmart, never! So, green in DWR becomes another in the long series of political/cultural ideologies as fashion statement. In this case, the statement of a certain hip, well heeled, highly educated, and eco-sensitive slice of the consuming public.

I don’t mean to knock DWR – they have nice stuff, as I said. It’s not their fault we live in the silly world we do. Hippydom became a fad too. I recall reading an account of the Arts and Craft movement in America that pointed out that in American houses, the ceiling beams were often simply hollow simulacrae rather than hefty oaken supports – image over substance. So it goes…

Green has been on my mind: Soylent Green, and green architecture reviewed in this nice book from Taschen. It starts with a lengthy philosophical survey/rant on the history of architecture from the eco perspective. It’s hard to tell sometimes whether he is advocating or critiquing the more extreme and outlandish views of the apocalyptic fringe of environmentalism, but the book itself is handsomely done – as always with Taschen – and has some fascinating buildings in it.

Red = Menace

So much for the “yellow peril.” It was red all over. During the Cold War, we were used to seeing lots of red ink spilled across maps, portending the onslaught of the communist hordes from the east. You can check out this post at strangemaps that adds some “perspective” to the Red Menace.

Here, I’m talking about a different sort of red, the type that signals danger, alert, alarm, something bad happening! Color is used in maps for all sorts of reasons, including just making them easier to read, but often, in “thematic maps,” i.e., maps that convey information and data about a particular topic, the colors are related to a scale of values that is described in a key, or legend. The image below is from a recent article in the New York Times Science section about the mapping of the impact of humans on the oceans of the world. This map shows the distribution of shipping lanes over the seas.

Link to original article.

Notice that red is the highest value, i.e., “most impact.” Clearly, that’s bad, isn’t it? But…how are we to know? Compared to what? Maybe it’s all horrible. Maybe none of it is. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I’m not saying that’s true, but the map doesn’t illuminate this point, while it does give the clear impression, with all that red splotched around, that humans are just mucking up the oceans everywhere!

Well, not quite everywhere – the southern hemisphere looks okay. What if we had chosen a projection of the earth like this one? The effect would be quite different, less alarming, less informative?

Maps tell stories, and the mapmaker decides what to emphasize and what to downplay…suppress. Color and cartographic projection are part of that storytelling. No problem here, except that for some reason, people tend, I think, to regard maps as purely scientific documents that are totally precise and objective.

One could see the map in the NYTimes, and the others to be found at that link, as part of a sustained effort to propagandize for the view that the earth is fragile, in need of support and tender care, and that the cause of the problem is the brutish, unthinking behavior of stupid, destructive humans. Is this a true story or a myth?

Environmental Golden Rule

Those of you who have wasted your time reading my blog probably realize that I am quite skeptical about many of the arguments presented by the Global Warming Crowd, Al Gore in particular. Lest it be thought that I am not a serious conservationist, I now present my Golden Rule of Environmentalism.

PRESERVE HABITAT

As a scholar once said of another pithy summation, “All else is commentary.”

By committing ourselves to the preservation of habitat, so many questions are made simple, or even unnecessary. Global warming, caused by inefficient use of resources, will take care of itself. Urban sprawl, non-point water pollution, acid rain, all are covered under the rubric of habitat preservation. The only motivation for this is an ethical one: the belief that other living things have a right to exist just as we do, and that we should take care not to extinguish their species. Everything flows from this simple imperative, but if one does not accept this, then it all unravels. The apocalyptic environmentalist often fears the consequences of industrialization out of simple self-preservation or fear for his or her progeny. This is justified, but it doesn’t get at the root of the problem, and it frequently leads to silly arguments and alarmist statements about how we are “destroying the earth,” “poisoning the earth,” or putting civilization in great danger…take your pick. Well, are you afraid for civilization or for the non-human inhabitants of the planet? Make up your mind.

You don’t have to choose between them, but you do have to think.