Month: November 2009

The president brought several major players together tonight for a pep-talk before his Tuesday talk on Afghanistan. The way Ambers describes the likely proposal makes my heart sink.

The suspect in the murder of four cops in Seattle coffee shop has a history:

Maurice Clemmons, the 37-year-old Tacoma man being sought for questioning in the killing of four Lakewood police officers this morning, has a long criminal record punctuated by violence, erratic behavior and concerns about his mental health. Nine years ago, then-Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee granted clemency to Clemmons, commuting his lengthy prison sentence over the protests of prosecutors.

The base won't like that, will they?

It reads as if it were offered yesterday in response to "news" that UEA had somehow destroyed its original data:

“Can this be serious? It is now impossible to create a new temperature index from scratch. [The unit] is basically saying, ‘Trust us’.”

In fact, the quote was from a blog-post written months ago in response to CRU conceding that it had used data for some climate stations that it did not physically possess. This is very old news, in fact, dressed up to add hysteria to the latest story. Pielke explains all here. And stands his ground:

I suggest instead being open and simply saying that in the 1980s and even 1990s no one could have known that maintaining this data in its original form would have been necessary. Since it was not done, then efforts should be made to collect it and make it available (which I see CRU is doing). Ultimately, that will probably mean an open-source global temperature record will be created. If you believe — and I see no reason to suspect otherwise — that such an open-source analysis will confirm the work of Jones et al., then you should be welcoming it with open arms.

Yes they should. And if this sorry tale helps bring all the original data to light in one open-source place – so anyone can pore over it with as much attention to detail as they wish – it will have a happier ending.

It's hard to read exactly what is going on and who is calling the shots in an Iranian regime that is divided within itself, despised by a large majority of its population, and veering from one signal to another. But the working hypothesis that what has really been going on these past few years is an internal coup by the Revolutionary Guards, made brutally manifest by the response to the Green Revolution, is confirmed by news today of a defiant upping of the nuclear ante with a pledge by Tehran to build ten more nuclear enrichment plants and to decrease cooperation with the IAEA. Whether this is a serious threat or not is in dispute:

Some saw the actions as saber-rattling against the United States, its allies, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, and even doubted whether Iran could build 10 plants. "They don’t have the capability. They’d like to have it," said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and National Security in Washington. “You have to look under the surface. They’re mad about the IAEA resolution.” “It’s playground behavior in a way," he said of the Iranian statements.

Practically speaking, it means that Iran has now all but completely isolated itself from international support.

With China, Russia and India backing Friday's IAEA admonishment of Iran, the mullahs have thrown a tantrum. I tend to share Juan Cole's skepticism that Putin or Hu will ever agree to real sanctions on Iran, but recent events have certainly made real international sanctions more likely. Indeed, if you support such sanctions, you will surely have to admit that Obama's steady diplomacy, his work with the Chinese and Russians, and his willingness to let France and Germany take the lead at times has isolated Iran more successfully than Bush's sabre-rattling ever did.

The Times article says so. CRU says not. The implication of data destruction is actually misleading:

The research unit has deleted less than 5 percent of its original station data from its database because the stations had several discontinuities or were affected by urbanization trends, Jones said.

“When you’re looking at climate data, you don’t want stations that are showing urban warming trends,” Jones said, “so we’ve taken them out.” Most of the stations for which data was removed are located in areas where there were already dense monitoring networks, he added. “We rarely removed a station in a data-sparse region of the world.”

Refuting CEI’s claims of data-destruction, Jones said, “We haven’t destroyed anything.The data is still there — you can still get these stations from the [NOAA] National Climatic Data Center.”

In fact, according to RealClimate, all the original raw data can still be found at the meteorological services where they originated. This discussion and the many comments were helpful to me and may be to you. More raw data here and here. I generated the graph above from here.

The struggle for the fate of Christianity – in motion since the earliest times – has often devolved into a fight about whether Christians should seek worldly power or eschew it. It is a question constantly faced by Jesus in the Gospels himself, and it is one always resolved in Jesus' case by using love. Jesus had no politics. He sought no earthly power. But humans who live in a fallen world must live with power and under it. And in this fundamentalist age, where Christians and Jews as well as Muslims have embraced the power of government and law and war to reimpose their literalist beliefs, the battle is intense.

The defining element of Christianism is the pursuit of worldly power -  which is why I refuse to give these politicians and operators the term "Christian." The move into politics was a decision made by the Christianist right two generations ago. Its main vehicle is the Republican party, but it is not entirely partisan, as the remarkable story of "The Family" by Jeff Sharlet reveals.

"The Family," we now learn, is now part of a war to launch new anti-gay laws in Uganda that resemble legislation that preceded mass killings in Rwanda and Serbia in recent years (and, of course, the Shoah before that):

The law would impose a sentence of life imprisonment on anyone who “penetrates the anus or mouth of another person of the same sex with his penis or any other sexual contraption.” The same penalty would apply if he or she even “touches another person with the intention of committing the act of homosexuality.”

The law requires a three-year prison sentence for anyone who is aware of evidence of homosexuality and fails to report it to the police within 24 hours. It allows for the prosecution of Ugandans who engage in homosexual acts in foreign countries. And it imposes a prison sentence of up to seven years for anyone who defends the rights of gays and lesbians.

The origin of this law is not just Ugandan; it is backed by American Christianists determined to punish, imprison or terrify homosexuals violating their religious edicts. Sharlet explains:

The Family is secretive, but not secret. You can go and look at 990s, tax forms and follow the money through these organizations that The Family describe as invisible. But you go and you look. You follow that money. You look at their archives. You do interviews where you can. It's not so invisible anymore.

So that's how working with some research colleagues we discovered that David Bahati, the man behind this legislation, is really deeply, deeply involved in The Family's work in Uganda, that the ethics minister of Uganda, Museveni's kind of right-hand man, a guy named Nsaba Buturo, is also helping to organize The Family's National Prayer Breakfast. And here's a guy who has been the main force for this Anti-Homosexuality Act in Uganda's executive office and has been very vocal about what he's doing, in a rather extreme and hateful way. But these guys are not so much under the influence of The Family. They are, in Uganda, The Family.

If you want to know what senators like Coburn, Ensign, and Inhofe really believe about gay people and our rights, look at Uganda. If you want to know what motivates the traditionalist Episcopalian break-away church, look at their leader, Archbishop Henry Orombi, who is a strong supporter of the Ugandan law. If you want to see who Rick Warren's long-time allies in Africa are, check out Pastor Martin Ssempa, a Warren acolyte, who also enthusiastically backs the bill – although Warren has publicly opposed it and has said “Martin Ssempa does not represent me, my wife Kay, Saddleback Church.”

Rip off the mask and see what these people would do if they could. 

(Update: I've amended the last sentence of this post to correct my impression that Warren has actually opposed the anti-gay law in Uganda. I conflated his distancing from Ssempe with opposition to the law. Warren is trying to have it both ways in public while privately enabling and abetting the stigmatization, terrorizing and murder of gay people.)

The latest news suggests that we will never be able to determine the significance of the UEA raw climate data before it was massaged for various reasons (some legit, others not):

This weekend it emerged that the unit has thrown away much of the data. Tucked away on its website is this statement: “Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites … We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (ie, quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

If true, it is extraordinary. It means that the data on which a large part of the world’s understanding of climate change is based can never be revisited or checked. Pielke said: “Can this be serious? It is now impossible to create a new temperature index from scratch. [The unit] is basically saying, ‘Trust us’.”

The trust is now over. The question is: how do we balance this lost data with other data and reach a satisfactory conclusion?

A new dimension to the classic work:

There's a lot of shameful positioning in the UEA emails on climate change and I agree with George Monbiot that those responsible should resign. But it is worth recalling some critical context: 

Do these revelations justify the sceptics' claims that this is "the final nail in the coffin" of global warming theory? Not at all. They damage the credibility of three or four scientists. They raise questions about the integrity of one or perhaps two out of several hundred lines of evidence.

The rational thing to do is to assess the data absent the papers suppressed or manipulated by these leaks. The irrational thing to do is to base a rejection of the entire climate change thesis on this affair.

His latest column, fanning the flames of climate change denialists, nonetheless marks out a position different from them:

I'm a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can't be very good to pump lots of CO2into the atmosphere but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.

Given the extreme difficulties of projecting climate into the distant future, Krauthammer's skepticism is indeed worth something. (I share Jim Manzi's view of the recent email kerfuffle.) And in the recent past, Krauthammer has advocated something the Dish strongly supports: a clear and simple gas tax offset by a payroll tax cut for economic, climate and national security reasons. His excellent piece on the subject can be read here. It concludes in advocating for a gas tax of around $1.25 or more to keep gas prices around $3. At the time of his essay, gas was at a rare low of around $1.65. Now it's back up to around $2.65. But surely a gas tax remains a good idea, even if it is less than might have been achievable last December. We could start with a 50 cent hike and add 50 cents a year. That and that alone wil prompt Americans to adjust their habits. Less than a year ago, Krauthammer argued that a big gas tax hike was

a once in a generation opportunity that we cannot afford to miss.

And yet, for some reason, the gas tax idea is missing from his current column. Why?

Here are his current proposals:

First, more research — untainted and reliable — to determine (a) whether the carbon footprint of man is or is not lost among the massive natural forces (from sunspot activity to ocean currents) that affect climate, and (b) if the human effect is indeed significant, whether the planetary climate system has the homeostatic mechanisms (like the feedback loops in the human body, for example) with which to compensate.

Second, reduce our carbon footprint in the interim by doing the doable, rather than the economically ruinous and socially destructive. The most obvious step is a major move to nuclear power, which to the atmosphere is the cleanest of the clean.

I know of no one opposing more research on either side of the debate, although the overwhelming conclusion of almost all the research is that man-made CO2 is indeed heating the planet dramatically and in a manner in which feedback loops, far from "compensating", actually intensify the effects of warming beyond even the direst projections. Nuclear power is indeed one part of the solution. But leaving no mechanism, even a low and slowly rising carbon tax, to combat CO2 strikes me as a shift from last December. Again one asks: why?

In the end, the conservative intelligentsia is much more invested in obstructing and thereby neutering Obama and the Democrats than in solving any actual problems in front of us. It's a game for them, and they play it with impunity.