Here is an interesting article about Moore, Oklahoma, which has been hit by four incredibly powerful tornadoes in sixteen years, which is statistically all but impossible. Beyond the sheer spectacle of it, and the fact that I’ve spent some time in central Oklahoma, the statistical side of it is interesting to me, as I sometimes find myself asked whether some system should be designed to withstand a storm that happens 10 times a year on average, 4 times a year on average, once every 10 years on average, once every 25 years on average, etc. We don’t have a million years of data to base these things on, and even if we did the climate seems to be changing, and even if it were not there is ultimately a judgment call involved about how much risk is too much given our finite resources we have to divide up among so many things.
…tornadoes are pretty rare. One thousand a year, scattered across the continent, does not produce many data points at the scale of an individual city. Most days, there aren’t tornadoes anywhere. That problem is exacerbated by the third issue: Scientists really only have about 50 years of really good tornado documentation. Essentially, Brooks told me, scientists can’t tell us whether what’s happened in Moore is abnormal because they don’t know what a “normal” amount of violent tornadoes is. With all of that, Brooks said, there’s not a good way to clearly tell the difference between patterns and pareidolia. After all, the human brain is primed to find significance in the random. In the creaky corners of our neural pathways, a jumble of rocks can become an old man, a coat hanger can become a drunk octopus, a bunch of craters on the moon give us a friendly smile. It’s so easy for a few random events to make one small town look like a tornado magnet. It would be harder not to see it.
Before I even talk about this Atlantic article on Venezuela, let me say that I don’t know enough about Venezuela to have much of an opinion on it or its politics. And the language in the article is not unbiased, but has an ideological bent. But here’s what it says:
What our country is going through is monstrously unique: It’s nothing less than the collapse of a large, wealthy, seemingly modern, seemingly democratic nation just a few hours’ flight from the United States.
Like I said this article is ideological, blaming the problems on “Chavez’s 21st-century socialism”:
A case in point is the price controls, which have expanded to apply to more and more goods: food and vital medicines, yes, but also car batteries, essential medical services, deodorant, diapers, and, of course, toilet paper. The ostensible goal was to check inflation and keep goods affordable for the poor, but anyone with a basic grasp of economics could have foreseen the consequences: When prices are set below production costs, sellers can’t afford to keep the shelves stocked. Official prices are low, but it’s a mirage: The products have disappeared.
When a state is in the process of collapse, dimensions of decay feed back on each other in an intractable cycle. Populist giveaways, for example, have fed the country’s ruinous flirtation with hyperinflation; the International Monetary Fund now projects that prices will rise by 720 percent this year and 2,200 percent in 2017. The government virtually gives away gasoline for free, even after having raised the price earlier this year. As a result of this and similar policies, the state is chronically short of funds, forced to print ever more money to finance its spending. Consumers, flush with cash and chasing a dwindling supply of goods, are caught in an inflationary spiral.
The Soviet Union taught us that there is such a thing as going too far with price controls, and such a thing as being overly reliant on oil revenues. Maybe leaders of this country missed some of those lessons of history and repeated some of those mistakes. But I also see another lesson here. The article talks about both the collapse in oil prices, which hit government revenues hard, and the severe drought caused by El Nino, which is causing both water shortages and electricity shortages because the country is dependent on hydropower. So whatever the decisions of political leaders, which I take no position on here, the country was clearly not ready for an external shock caused by environmental factors and changes in supply and demand of natural resources. It may be a microcosm for things to come on a larger scale elsewhere in the world.
The new scenario framework developed by the climate change research community rests on the fundamental logic that a diversity of socio-economic pathways can lead to the same radiative forcing, and therefore that a given level of radiative forcing can have very different socio-economic impacts. We propose a methodology that implements a “scenario discovery” cluster analysis and systematically identifies diverse groups of scenarios that share common outcomes among a database of socio-economic scenarios. We demonstrate the methodology with two examples using the Shared Socio-economic Pathways framework. We find that high emissions scenarios can be associated with either high or low per capita GDP growth, and that high productivity growth and catch-up are not necessarily associated with high per capita GDP and high emissions.
The U.S. government’s dominant ideology of free trade and globalization may have roots in U.S. government propaganda designed to provide hidden subsidies to Japan and Korea, our Cold War allies in Asia. And resulting financial deregulation in the 1990s may have been the beginning of the end for the U.S. empire.
Robert Paxton says Trump is pretty much a fascist. Although conditions are different and he doesn’t believe everything the fascists believed. Umberto Eco once said that fascists don’t believe anything, they will say anything and then what they do once in office has nothing to do with what they said.
3 most hopeful stories
Brookings has a new report on encouraging innovation in the water sector. A lot of it is just about charging more, and it should be fairly obvious why that is politically controversial even if it is the right thing economically. But the report did have an explanation of decoupling (p. 28) which I found helpful. Decoupling is an answer to the puzzle of how a utility can support conservation without losing its revenue base.
Better management of agricultural soil might be able to play a big role in carbon sequestration.
3 most interesting stories
Beyond: Our Future in Space is a new book on space colonization. It caught my eye because I also read Coyote by Allen Steele in April, which besides being a supposedly plausible story of near-future space colonization, was just a really entertaining read. Luckily, there are options for hiding our current planet if aliens decide they would like to colonize us.
Thank you, Eric Holthaus, for your entertaining, mildly sensational climate change coverage at Slate.
In a study released Wednesday, a new estimate of how much Antarctic ice would melt in a warmer world nearly doubles previous projections of sea level rise by the end of the century. And it might be even worse than that: The study did not explore the true worst-case scenario, and its lead author said the work is still incomplete. Taken together with recent results from other research teams—most notably James Hansen’s, just last week—it’s increasingly clear that consensus projections of near-term sea level rise, about three feet in the next 85 years, are likely an underestimate.
The latest information comes via a breakthrough in simulating the behavior of Antarctica’s vast and complex network of glaciers and ice shelves. That’s brought a more complete understanding of how warmer air temperatures—projected to surpass those regularly experienced on Earth at any point during at least the last few million years—are affecting the sea level. At the same time, the study provides new certainty that—should the world act immediately to curb carbon emissions at a scale far beyond current efforts—virtually all Antarctic ice melt could be avoided.
As some are suggesting about Trump now, in 1922 the New York Times said maybe Hitler was just saying those awful things to get attention. Ted Cruz, on the other hand, almost certainly means to do awful things if elected, like torture and kill civilians in foreign countries. Even The Economist doesn’t like Trump. None of the Republicans (or at least half the Democrats running for President) are likely to do anything about corporate dominance of the U.S. political system.
An IMF official uttered the words “economic derailment“. That sounds like it could be a real train wreck. Meanwhile Robert Gordon has expanded his pessimistic article on future growth into a book.
We use numerical climate simulations, paleoclimate data, and modern observations to study the effect of growing ice melt from Antarctica and Greenland. Meltwater tends to stabilize the ocean column, inducing amplifying feedbacks that increase subsurface ocean warming and ice shelf melting. Cold meltwater and induced dynamical effects cause ocean surface cooling in the Southern Ocean and North Atlantic, thus increasing Earth’s energy imbalance and heat flux into most of the global ocean’s surface. Southern Ocean surface cooling, while lower latitudes are warming, increases precipitation on the Southern Ocean, increasing ocean stratification, slowing deepwater formation, and increasing ice sheet mass loss. These feedbacks make ice sheets in contact with the ocean vulnerable to accelerating disintegration. We hypothesize that ice mass loss from the most vulnerable ice, sufficient to raise sea level several meters, is better approximated as exponential than by a more linear response. Doubling times of 10, 20 or 40 years yield multi-meter sea level rise in about 50, 100 or 200 years. Recent ice melt doubling times are near the lower end of the 10–40-year range, but the record is too short to confirm the nature of the response. The feedbacks, including subsurface ocean warming, help explain paleoclimate data and point to a dominant Southern Ocean role in controlling atmospheric CO2, which in turn exercised tight control on global temperature and sea level. The millennial (500–2000-year) timescale of deep-ocean ventilation affects the timescale for natural CO2 change and thus the timescale for paleo-global climate, ice sheet, and sea level changes, but this paleo-millennial timescale should not be misinterpreted as the timescale for ice sheet response to a rapid, large, human-made climate forcing. These climate feedbacks aid interpretation of events late in the prior interglacial, when sea level rose to +6–9 m with evidence of extreme storms while Earth was less than 1 °C warmer than today. Ice melt cooling of the North Atlantic and Southern oceans increases atmospheric temperature gradients, eddy kinetic energy and baroclinicity, thus driving more powerful storms. The modeling, paleoclimate evidence, and ongoing observations together imply that 2 °C global warming above the preindustrial level could be dangerous. Continued high fossil fuel emissions this century are predicted to yield (1) cooling of the Southern Ocean, especially in the Western Hemisphere; (2) slowing of the Southern Ocean overturning circulation, warming of the ice shelves, and growing ice sheet mass loss; (3) slowdown and eventual shutdown of the Atlantic overturning circulation with cooling of the North Atlantic region; (4) increasingly powerful storms; and (5) nonlinearly growing sea level rise, reaching several meters over a timescale of 50–150 years. These predictions, especially the cooling in the Southern Ocean and North Atlantic with markedly reduced warming or even cooling in Europe, differ fundamentally from existing climate change assessments. We discuss observations and modeling studies needed to refute or clarify these assertions.
Citation: Hansen, J., Sato, M., Hearty, P., Ruedy, R., Kelley, M., Masson-Delmotte, V., Russell, G., Tselioudis, G., Cao, J., Rignot, E., Velicogna, I., Tormey, B., Donovan, B., Kandiano, E., von Schuckmann, K., Kharecha, P., Legrande, A. N., Bauer, M., and Lo, K.-W.: Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming could be dangerous, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 16, 3761-3812, doi:10.5194/acp-16-3761-2016, 2016.
I’m going to try picking the three most frightening posts, three most hopeful posts, and three most interesting posts (that are not particularly frightening or hopeful) from February.
A variable carbon tax could be phased in a way that takes advantage of upswings in the economy without exacerbating the downswings.
3 most interesting posts
The U.S. election season certainly is getting interesting, although not really in a good way. ontheissues.org has a useful summary of where U.S. political candidates stand…what are the words I’m looking for…on the the issues. Nate Silver has an interesting online tool that lets you play around with how various demographic groups tend to vote.