You Wanna Picture Or 1000 Words?

This is part of the problem, not the solution:

Of course, it's all according to plan. Link

Comment Link Broken

For some reason, blogger isn't letting me post a comment in my last post, so I'm putting it here instead until I figure this out.

Ritmo wrote:

At some point, science should be allowed to inform public policy.

Yes. There's an earlier post here where I praise Nature for publishing dissenting opinion on AGW.

As for Chu-- I have a tag for him.  I have been following DoE politics at least since the 1980's. My negative opinion of him stems from his stewardship of the agency, and not from his capability as a scientist.  I tend to dislike the sort of blind respect he garners, for example from POTUS during the Deepwater Horizon event. I looked for, but could not find, a video link to Chris Matthews when he, fed up with Obama's dithering said (paraphrasing) "If he says one more thing about his Nobel Prize I'm gonna puke."

If Chu were appealing to personal beliefs and feelings as a way to trump a stance on the issues about which politics is allowed to opine and governments obliged to seek empirical evidence, then as with Giaever, Pauling, Mullis and even Einstein (when he famously rejected quantum mechanics on theological[!] grounds), I'd say he's wandering too far afield from the mission asked of him.

The public trust and opinion of DoE at this point speaks for itself. If POTUS wanted to fix one thing with one fell swoop he could replace Chu with someone less adversarial towards the energy industries in America.

Of course we allow/encourage creativity and dissent to inform the scientific spirit in ways that will allow for superstitious cranks as easily as they will for genius. But shouldn't a public service be compelled to rely on the most accurate evidence possible? [Yes!] And when it comes to the projection of limited data on an evolving, real-life scenario decades into the future, is the precautionary principle and reliance on smaller scale models really too much to ask for?

If pharmacologists were allowed to treat animal toxicology the way Americans treat climate science, we'd have generations of flipper babies and other disturbing catastrophes to show for it.

The litigious nature of our country would see to the extinction of such polluters well before any agency need intervene

We rely on smaller preclinical studies to temper our willingness to proclaim an IND absolutely safe, no matter how notoriously difficult it is to extrapolate animal toxicology to safety in humans.
I think this is at it should be and the appropriate model for planetary real-time experiments in tinkering with the composition of the atmosphere, and for public policy generally.

The flip side of that risk does not allow for a favorable cost/benefit trade-off to the population as a whole.
One could call environmentalists overzealous, but their track record on giving us a cleaner and more sustainable planet is better than that of their adversaries. And I have a difficult time understanding why financial conflicts of interest are obvious and acted upon when it comes to petty crimes and personal matters, but not when entire industries and political factions are involved.

My scientific understanding would be greatly enhanced by an adequate explanation of that.

Let's consider the environmental movement and public perceptions.  I'm just old enough to recall the birth of the EPA and also the public sentiment at the time, perhaps best summarized in that brilliant advertisement of the American Indian paddling through the polluted water and shedding a tear.

Is there anyway, today, that such a simple and effective message could be used to promote the dispersion of CFL bulbs? I'm bothered by the dispersion of mercury into the environment which those bulbs foster. Smokestacks emit Hg too, but the emissions are more efficiently captured in a flue trap. Today's "big messages" are clouded with ambiguity.

Another example:  I seem to recall The Economist championing carbon taxes as an acceptable idea apart from any disincentive for CO2 production. The notion was IIRC, just an admission that such taxes would be "most fair."  Please correct me if I'm wrong on that.

Another Crack In The Façade

Nobel-Prize Winning Physicist Resigns Over Man Made Global Warming. Link

Manganese Is Neither Transgendered Nor Racist

The words manganese and magnesium are related. Their entwined roots stem back to a place called Magnesia in ancient Greece where they were both found in abundance. Some speculate that Spartan swords were exceptionally hard because of manganese content in their iron. Manganese's word history is parsed here and van der Krogt has his take here.

Manganese has been used since antiquity both to color and to decolorize glass. The Venetians perfected "glassmaker's soap," making high art with it.  Glass always contains iron in trace amounts and this imparts a greenish "coke bottle" tinge. The addition of manganese to the molten glass produces a reddish-brown tinge which equalizes the absorption across the visible spectrum and gives so-called colorless glass. More reading on colored glass can be found here.

Manganese also demarcates an important trend in the Periodic Table. Moving from left to right across the first transition metal series, i.e., Sc -> Ti -> V -> Cr -> Mn, each element adds one more positive charge to its core (and one surrounding electron). Yet those electrons can be stripped by oxygen. A tipping point is reached between manganese and iron. Manganese is the last metal in that series to exhaustively lose all of its valence electrons to oxygen. Thus the manganese atom in permanganate MnO₄^-, is fully oxidized back to having an argon core. But moving just one element further to the right (to iron) is just enough change in electronegativity that iron retains two valence electrons: there is a ferrate but no perferrate.

Ironically, despite its reputation for rusting, iron retains an inner core of two valence electrons, even when completely surrounded by rapacious oxygen. Iron is one step closer to the noble metals.

Climate Models Go Cold

Photo is from "The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters" by Logan Marshall (1912). Enlarge to read the faint caption "Theory" written on the ship. 

Scientist David Evans wrote a brief piece in the Financial Post called Climate Models Go Cold.*  He writes as a scientist formerly on the "gravy train,' making his point-of-view all the more credible. Evans understands all the data-even the ones not being talked about.

I'm reminded of the T.H. Huxley quote:

The great tragedy of science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Some time ago, I left the following comment on the Althouse blog.  Those comments now seem to have disappeared down a memory-hole, but I still stand by what I said then:

chickenlittle said...

Nobelist Steven Chu, head of the DOE and Obama's top science guru, is all on board the CO₂ is evil train. Link.

There is clearly an enormous investment in brainpower behind the notion that CO₂ causes warming.

Here is how I distill the problem(s) confronting us:

(1) How, if incorrect about CO₂, could the scientific consensus be so wrong?
  (a) Is the notion CO₂ causes warming now too big to fail?
  (b) Can the credibility of American (and world) science recover if wrong?

(2) If they are right about CO₂ causing warming, what would it take to convince the American people that they are correct?
  (a) Clearly something has gone wrong with the PR-people are not convinced.
  (b) The present administration appears to say: fuck 'em- they (the people) don't believe us? we're gonna force them. The possible techniques available to enforce compliance are downright un-American.

(3) What really bothers me as a sceptic of the CO₂ causes warming is that if the Copenhagen treaty is ratified and enforced, and warming does not occur, credit will be taken regardless of the true cause. To me this is a heads I win tails you lose proposition for the CO₂ causes warming folks. But more insidiously, it is the exact mechanism by which Science could ascend to the status of a quasi-religion: give the people "miracle, mystery and authority" and they will follow.

Sorry in advance for the longish post.

10/22/09 8:07 PM

________________
*Thanks to @SissyWillis for retweeting the link to Evan's article on Twitter.

Treat The Wealth Well

At the heart of Energy Secretary Chu's newly released Strategic Plan 2011 is a Native American saying:

Treat the earth well. It was not given to you by your parents, but loaned to you by your children.*

I think the budget guys have a similar philosophy:

Treat the wealth well. It was not given to you by your parents, but loaned to you by your children.

___________
*The quote may be found at page 2 of the linked pdf file.

Chu on this too

Point:

Overwhelming scientific evidence shows that CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels have caused the climate to change, and a dramatic reduction of these emissions is essential to reduce the risk of future devastating effects. ~ Steven Chu

Counterpoint:

Much remains to be learned about the cycling of carbon in the deep ocean. For example, a recent discovery is that larvacean mucus houses (commonly known as "sinkers") are created in such large numbers that they can deliver as much carbon to the deep ocean as has been previously detected by sediment traps.[6] Because of their size and composition, these houses are rarely collected in such traps, so most biogeochemical analyses have erroneously ignored them. (Link)

Nobel Intentions

Dr. Chu:  Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.

Mr. Obama: Well I won't raise the federal gasoline tax, that would be a mistake because it would put additional burdens on American families right now.

Dr. Krugman: Look guys, it's easy--ever since we went off the gold standard, we've been on the black gold standard. If we just print more dollars without producing more oil, the price of oil has to rise -as surely as the tides.  Remember, inflation rewards debtors!

Mr. Obama: So I can pay for my programs and cut oil consumption? The average American family won't feel it so long as they keep borrowing.  Win-Win!