A Change in the Wind

Wondering where all the rain has gone?

Now you know: 

From NOAA, via reporter Mark Grossi's Twitter feed. 

Santorum: Best line of the last GOP debate

Prominent lefties and journos independently say that Rick Santorum blew it in the last debate of the Republican primary, but surely he had the line of the night: From Dan Balz: 

When Romney noted that he had balanced the Massachusetts budget for four straight years, Santorum scoffed, saying that was required by the state’s constitution. “Don’t go around bragging about something you have to do,” he said. “Michael Dukakis balanced the budget for 10 years. Does that make him qualified to be president of the United States? I don’t think so,” he added, referring to another former Massachusetts governor.

Romney really is a kind of a GOP Dukakis, but without the joie de vivre. 

Reworking unemployment (oh, and the payroll tax cut)

From a front-page New York Times story today. Here are the details that were hidden in the fight over the payroll tax cut and the unemployment (UI) extension. 

Congress and the President agreed on some shockingly good ideas, including importing the concept of "work sharing" from (no!) Europe. 

The bill additionally expands “work sharing” programs that can help reduce layoffs at big businesses. In effect, businesses would have the option of cutting the hours of five workers by 20 percent each, say, rather than laying off one worker. The business could then use unemployment insurance money to help supplement the workers’ wages to make up for the lost hours.

[snip]

Economists also applauded the work-sharing provisions, which have found success in states including Connecticut and Rhode Island as well as in countries like Germany.

“Work sharing is an incredibly smart thing to do,” said Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, a research institution in Washington. “But it’s a tragedy that we didn’t do that on a large scale over the past four years.”

Yes. Sigh. 

The provision may help reduce layoffs in the coming years, Ms. Shierholz said, supporting the recovery. She also said that being laid off tended to hurt a worker’s earnings and career prospects down the road. Work-sharing helps to minimize economic pain and keep families afloat, she said.

This part of the bill was a bipartisan effort, evidently. Amazing if true. 

Climate scientist admits deception, engulfed in drama

Peter Gleick, the scientist, the advocate, and the MacArthur Fellow, who helms the influential Pacific Institute, today admitted in his column that he did something he shouldn't have in his on-going struggle with the right-wing climate change skeptics at the Heartland Institute: 

I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document [that came to him anonymously from Heartland files]. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else's name.

Andrew Revkin, the most-storied of all climate reporters, unloads on Gleick as I don't believe I ever have heard him unload before, in all the years I have been reading him in the The New York Times.

Gleick’s use of deception in pursuit of his cause after years of calling out climate deception has destroyed his credibility and harmed others. (Some of the released documents contain information about Heartland employees that has no bearing on the climate fight.) That is his personal tragedy and shame (and I’m sure devastating for his colleagues, friends and family).

The broader tragedy is that his decision to go to such extremes in his fight with Heartland has greatly set back any prospects of the country having the “rational public debate” that he wrote — correctly — is so desperately needed.

Yes. Sad to see the climate science go up in the smoke of this self-destructive drama. Already Gleick is getting damage control advice from a prominent Democratic politico, and lawyering up for the inevitable lawsuits to come. 

The surprise is that Gleick's confession is not mentioned on the front of either the Times nor Drudge, though Drudge does link to Miami's record-breaking heat.

Suspect Gleick will soon become all too famous. This scandal is far more dramatic and eyecatching than the hacked emails of the so-called Climategate affair, and comparable in some respects to the tabloid tricks that have cost Rupert Murdoch and his papers so dearly. 

The last great rock star

In 1967, perhaps the last great rock star...

...was born this day. 

Santorum: Global Warming is a dangerous world view

Leading in the national polls in the Republican party, at least for this week, Rick Santorum denies on Face the Nation that he ever said President Obama wasn't a Christian, though he implied as much yesterday with a remark about his phony theology.

Today he implies that Obama's faith has been corrupted by environmentalism: 

I just said that when you have a world view that elevates the world above man, and says that we can't take those resources because we're going to harm the Earth by things that are frankly just not scientifically proven, like for example the politicization of the whole global warming debate, I mean this is just all an attempt to centralize power and give more power to the government.

Obviously.

Global warming stresses bird marriages

Scientific American has been a surprisingly sexy magazine as of late, with Jesse Bering's classic ode to semen, and now a cheeky look at global warming and bird biology. The headline:

Climate Change increases mate-swapping in birds

A study by Carlos Botero et al in PLoS ONE reveals that, the mag says: .

Birds typically bond to one partner throughout a breeding season and sometimes nest with the same mate year after year. Before the 1990s, this phenomenon led scientists to believe that more than 90 percent of all species were monogamous, but thanks to improved genetic testing, we now know most birds actually stray from their partners.

Despite birds' long history of infidelity, extreme temperature fluctuations appear to be intensifying the effect. If global climates continue to grow more erratic, the affected areas could see a steady increase of promiscuity among birds, Botero says.

Translating this idea from the study:

We show that after controlling for potentially influential life history and demographic variables, there are significant positive associations between the variability and predictability of annual climatic cycles and the prevalence of infidelity and divorce within populations of a taxonomically diverse array of socially monogamous birds.

Real news may be the evolutionary logic revealed. To increase genetic variability, to better allow survival of young in a wider array of conditions, temperature stress drives infidelity in birds. 

h/t: Jess Zimmerman/Grist

Biz mag publishes climate science: Heartland burned

One of the most fascinating revelations from the internal docs leaked from the Heartland Institute is about the business journal Forbes, which recently has begun publishing real honest-to-God climate science news. Unlike the Wall Street Journal. 

Wrote Heartland in its "Climate Strategy" doc:

Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high profile climate scientists (such as [Peter] Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.

'Reliably anti-climate" -- truer words have rarely been spoke. It's fascinating -- but what has happened to Forbes? Today they published a long, thoughtful look at a Harvard conference that not only endorsed[pdf] the concept of cap-and-trade, but said this innovative emissions control method was much cheaper than expected, and would work even better with carbon dioxide than it did with acid rain.

Justin Gerdes wrote for the business journal: 

1) Cap and trade works:

The goal of Title IV of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, the Acid Rain Program, was to slash annual SO₂ [sulphur dioxide] emissions by 10 million tons from the 1980 baseline (26 million tons). The source of much of the SO₂ emitted in the United States was the nation’s fleet of coal-fired power plants. In a departure from convention, the legislation did not prescribe how power plants should slash SO₂; instead, beginning in 2000, the statute capped aggregate SO₂emissions at the nation’s 3,200 coal plants at 8.95 million tons annually, a reduction of nearly 50% from 1980 levels.

In other words, it's not only more effective than expected, it's cheaper too. Forbes still publishes plenty of deniers, but apparently their blacklisting of climate scientists is over. Amazing. 

How to "undermine" climate research with cash payments

As reported by DeSmog Blog, Climate Progress, Brad Johnson, and now the New York Times, internal strategy documents leaked from the climate change denier Heartland Institute flat-out state that:

At present we sponsor the NIPCC [Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Chnage] to undermine the official United Nation's IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports and paid a team of writers $388,000 in 2011 to work on a series of editions of Climate Change Reconsidered. 

Nearly $400,000 spent explicitly to "undermine" scientific research! Over $4 million spent last year. 

Today Heartland was apologizing to donors for the document leaks. The contributors, including one Anonymous Donor giving a $1 million or more a year, must be wondering if they're getting their money's worth. All that bank, and for what? A mock conference and a bogus report that barely pretends to be scientce and is "self-evidently nonsense," said the researchers at RealClimate. 

The docs also reveal that the Institute coldly dismissed two of its top fund-raisers for failure to bring in more than the millions they raised last year. Could the leaks have come in retaliation? 

Living alone and liking it: Wave of the future?

Not everyone is afraid of being alone; in fact, reports sociologist Eric Klinenberg in a sterling essay (with charts!) in the juggernaut known as The New York Times, about 40% of households in prosperous cities such as San Francisco and Boston are inhabited by "singletons," and up to 50% in D.C. and NYC. 

The decision to live alone is common in diverse cultures whenever it is economically feasible...Now the most privileged people on earth use their resources to separate from one another, to buy privacy and personal space.

Further, Klinenberg reports, living alone doesn't mean loneliness or isolation -- in fact, he says that single people often turn out to be more sociable that the marred. 

Still, it's a concept that takes some getting used to. Yes magazine posts a sweet video guide: 

A huge smokestack of war: Vaclav Havel

As a boy, I lived for a time in the country and I clearly remember an experience from those days: I used to walk school in a nearby village along a cart track through the fields and, on the way, see on the horizon a huge smokestack of war. It spewed dense brown smoke and scattered it across the sky. Each time I saw it, I had an intense sense of something profoundly wrong, of humans soiling the heavens. I have no idea whether there was something like a science of ecology in those days; if there was, I certainly knew nothing of it. It seemed to me that, in it, humans are guilty of something, that they destroy something important, arbitrarily disrupting the natural order of things, and that such things cannot go unpunished. To be sure, my revulsion was largely aesthetic; I knew nothing then of the noxious emissions which would one day devastate our forests, exterminate game, and endanger the health of the people. 

If a medieval man were to see something like that suddenly on the horizon -- say, while out hunting -- he would probably think it the work of the Devil and would fall on his knees and pray that he and his kin be saved. 

Văclav Havel, Politics and Conscience, 1984 speech

How far we have come on global warming -- not!

Yesterday Jason Margolis for The World had an absolutely first-class analysis of the presidential politics of global warming. He began with the GOP front-runner's silence on the issue, which Margolis contrasted against the GOP candidate of four years ago. Here's what John McCain said about climate change while running for President as a Republican:

“It’s real. It’s a danger to our planet, it’s a danger to the future of these young people who are in front of me and their children. And it’s got to be stopped.”

Amazing. Today Mitt Romney ignores climate change, while Newt Gingrinch describes his call for action on it "the stupidest thing he's ever done," and Rick Santorum calls global warming a hoax. 

Liberals and Democrats shouldn't self-congratulate, though, because President Obama is as silent on the issue as is Romney. He mentioned climate change in the State of the Union address only to say that nothing could pass Congress on the subject. That is, he blamed the GOP for the inaction.

And "we the people" are no better, as Margolis points out: 

Perhaps the president and the Republican candidates are simply following our lead. According to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, Americans ranked global warming as the least important of 22 priorities, just behind campaign finance reform.

Campaign finance reform -- John McCain's other signature issue. No wonder he lost. 

For a shockingly entertaining explanation of the power of global warming, take a look at the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Jerry Meehl talking about climate change...and steroids in baseball.

Clint Eastwood: It's halftime in America

A TV news station asks the horserace question about perhaps the biggest ad of the Superbowl this year: Clint Eastwood's. Which has to do with "Imported from Detroit" car company. Will this be as big a hit as was last year's adored Emimem commercial?

Short answer: Yes. As with the rapper, Eastwood risks his credibility as an artist by selling out in order to reach the widest possible audience -- but succeeds brilliantly.   

Forty-one years ago Eastwood was Dirty Harry, the character who first and most memorably in modern times raged against the government. To have the face of anti-government rage now appropriate the language of Ronald Reagan's most famous commercial and speak for Detroit and, implicitly, the government effort to save the city, the state, and the industry...well, that's huge. 

Romney attacks: Obama tugs gently at the heartstrings

Andrew Sullivan is not happy with Mitt Romney's victory speech in Florida:

8.44 pm. Everything this man says is a lie. He's doubling down on the big lies I tried to counter in that Newsweek piece. The president Romney is describing does not exist. Obama is demonizing and denigrating every sector of the economy? That is a pure lie. As is the repeated lie that Obama is an appeaser. Has Romney understood what has happened to the Iranian economy these past few months? Does he think Osama bin Laden thinks he was appeased?

Let me just say right now: this speech is the most dishonest, manipulative, disgusting series of lies I've heard in a very long time. And its core premise: that the president hates this country, whereas Romney believes in it. As I said: disgusting. I'm with Newt on this. The man will say anything to gain power.

David Corn tweets it simply:

Romney, in short: Obama is the other, other, other, other, other. 

How does the crack Obama campaign handle this? They try to show he's human. First, the president sings (briefly) Al Green, and Green, in the audience, declares that the prez "nailed it." Then, as New York magazine points out, David Axelrod sends out a photo of the Prez, taking good care of his dog. Inside the car. Unlike Romney's famous transportation of the family dog Seamus across New England in a crate on top of the car. (Today it's revealed that when the Romney family finally reached their destination, the Irish setter actually ran away -- all the way to Canada. Understandably.)

By contrast the Obama campaign launches a Facebook 'Bark for Obama" page, featuring loving pet owners and their cute dogs, completely with charming bumper stickers. Build that approval rating.  

Back on the trail, Romney is becoming legendarily awkward. Even right wing hawks and supporters are appalled at the geeky ineptitude of his rhetoric. Jonathan Chait has a theory why:

It’s easy to try to persuade somebody for whom you have basic respect. It’s persuading somebody whom you consider stupid — while you must conceal any trace of your disdain — that’s excruciatingly difficult. Romney’s awkward manner on the trail is the agony of suppressed contempt.

Maybe. But Ted Rall's idea is more fun:

In the 2012 Presidential election it will be one other versus another, apparently.