Month: October 2020

The Institute of Denial

When you are a Conservative party sorely lacking in factual support for your programs, you launder bad ideas through a far right wing “Institution” or “Center”.
It’s where you get a significant number of anti-science, climate denial, and now, Covid denial memes.

Hoover Institution Fellow David Epstein, at Hoover.org:

Without a doubt, it is a major challenge to accurately model and predict the course of climate change. Climate systems are highly chaotic, which makes it difficult to figure out the effect of any particular natural or human event on future climate changes. We should therefore proceed with caution before making bold claims that the main, or even sole, driver of climate change is the human generated increase in the carbon dioxide level, which now is approaching 415 parts per million.

Washington Post:

One of President Trump’s top medical advisers is urging the White House to embrace a controversial “herd immunity” strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, while taking steps to protect those in nursing homes and other vulnerable populations, according to five people familiar with the discussions.

The administration has already begun to implement some policies along these lines, according to current and former officials as well as experts, particularly with regard to testing.

The approach’s chief proponent is Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist and fellow at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, who joined the White House in August as a pandemic adviser.

CNN:

Twitter has removed a tweet from White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Scott Atlas that sought to undermine the importance of face masks because it was in violation of the platform’s Covid-19 Misleading Information Policy, a spokesman for the company confirmed on Sunday. 

Atlas wrote in a tweet posted Saturday, “Masks work? NO” followed by a series of misrepresentations about the science behind the effectiveness of masks in combating the pandemic.

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The Weekend Wonk: Senator Whitehouse on Dark Money and the Courts

Most important part of Senator Whitehouse’ exposition before the Judiciary this week starts at about 20 minutes in.
Lots of background details in first 20 minutes about dark funders etc.

But the last 10 minutes goes to understanding the motives and goals of those shadowy groups that have successfully brought the Supreme Court into the service of the 1 percent.

The key issues for Republicans in packing the court, as they have in the past 2 decades, is not abortion, gun rights, or gay marriage. That’s just drama for the rubes in the Fox News peanut gallery.

The real issue is that for the ultra-wealthy and powerful: there simply must be no obstacle, no agency, no power, that can limit their ability to do whatever they want to do. Not juries, not voters, not regulatory agencies, – nobody.
It’s a recipe to replace the law of the constitution with the law of the jungle, and it’s working.

Read Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains to understand the big picture.

The Climate Ad Project

Peter Kalmus (@ClimateHuman on twitter) is behind this effort, to engage a billion activists for a livable climate.

Peter is an incredibly passionate scientist with NASA JPL, and reminds us that he does not speak on behalf of NASA, JPL, or Cal Tech.

In Florida: Hints of a Climate Real Estate Crash

New York Times:

If rising seas cause America’s coastal housing market to dive — or, as many economists warn, when — the beginning might look a little like what’s happening in the tiny town of Bal Harbour, a glittering community on the northernmost tip of Miami Beach.

With single-family homes selling for an average of $3.6 million, Bal Harbour epitomizes high-end Florida waterfront property. But around 2013, something started to change: The annual number of homes sales began to drop — tumbling by half by 2018 — a sign that fewer people wanted to buy.

Prices eventually followed, falling 7.6 percent from 2016 to 2020, according to data from Zillow, the real estate data company.

All across Florida’s low-lying areas, it’s a similar story, according to research published Monday. The authors argue that not only is climate change eroding one of the most vibrant real estate markets in the country, it has quietly been doing so for nearly a decade.

“The downturn started in 2013, and no one noticed,” said Benjamin Keys, the paper’s lead author and a professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “It means that coastal housing is in more distress than we thought.”

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ReWilding May be Vital, and Practical

New York Times:

The twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss are intertwined: Storms and wildfires are worsening while as many as one million species are at risk of extinction.

The solutions are not small or easy, but they exist, scientists say.

A global road map, published Wednesday in Nature, identifies a path to soaking up almost half of the carbon dioxide that has built up since the Industrial Revolution and averting more than 70 percent of the predicted animal and plant extinctions on land. The key? Returning a strategic 30 percent of the world’s farmlands to nature.

It could be done, the researchers found, while preserving an abundant food supply for people and while also staying within the time scale to keep global temperatures from rising past 2 degrees Celsius, the upper target of the Paris Agreement.

“It’s one of the most cost effective ways of combating climate change,” said Bernardo B.N. Strassburg, one of the study’s authors and an environmental scientist with Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and the International Institute for Sustainability. “And it’s one of the most important ways of avoiding global extinctions.”

The researchers used a map from the European Space Agency that breaks down the surface of the planet into a grid of parcels classified by ecosystem: forests, wetlands, shrub lands, grasslands and arid regions. Using an algorithm they developed, the scientists evaluated which swaths, if returned to their natural states, would yield the highest returns for mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss at the lowest cost.

It was not enough simply to lay one result on top of the other. “If you really want to optimize for all three things at the same time,” Dr. Strassburg said, “that leads to a different map.”

A similar and complementary tool, The Global Safety Net, was released last month. It identifies the most strategic 50 percent of the planet to protect, filtering for rare species, high biodiversity, large mammal landscapes, intact wilderness and climate stabilization.

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Electrify Everything: You’ll Probably Save Money

Rocky Mountain Institute:

Buildings are quickly becoming a cornerstone of ambitious climate policy, as policymakers recognize they can’t achieve the necessary science-based emissions reductions without tackling this stubborn sector. This means states and cities across the country won’t meet their climate goals if new buildings in their jurisdiction include fossil fuel systems that lock in carbon emissions over the 50 to 100-year building lifetime.

The cost of such an ambitious transition is often the first consideration. Thus, to help inform these crucial decisions, Rocky Mountain Institute updated and expanded our 2018 analysis, The Economics of Electrifying Buildings. We examined the economics and carbon emissions impacts of electrifying residential space and water heating, now with seven new cities and additional methodology changes. Today, we are releasing the first set of our findings examining newly constructed single-family homes.

In every city we analyzed, a new all-electric, single-family home is less expensive than a new mixed-fuel home that relies on gas for cooking, space heating, and water heating. Net present cost savings over the 15-year period of study are as high as $6,800 in New York City, where the all-electric home also results in 81 percent lower carbon emissions over the mixed-fuel home.

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Barrett: Unwilling to Affirm Human Cause of Climate Change

A Supreme Court nominee that has not thought about climate change, or paid attention to what the President has said about climate change, is unqualified for that body.

https://twitter.com/blkahn/status/1316457529350721541?s=20

A Supreme Court nominee that has not thought about climate change, or paid attention to what the President has said about climate change, is unqualified for that body.

Below, the high degree of certainty from Michael Mann:

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Phoenix: Permanent Heat Wave?

Phoenix remains unrelentingly hot this fall.
I interviewed Phoenix TV Met Amber Sullins in 2016.

Washington Post:

The unrelenting and unprecedented heat that scorched Phoenix all summer, setting countless records, has carried over into the fall. Now it is poised to set another blistering milestone: the most 100-degree days ever observed in a calendar year.

On Tuesday, the mercury in Phoenix climbed to at least 100 degrees for the 143rd time in 2020, tying 1989 for the most such instances on record. The 1989 record could fall as soon as Wednesday, when a high temperature of 101 degrees is forecast.

Half of the days (143 out of 287) of the year so far, equivalent to 20.4 weeks, have hit 100 degrees. Several more such days are likely.

The intensity, frequency and duration of hot weather in Phoenix this year fits into an ongoing and expected trend in a warming world.

In recent decades, Phoenix has averaged about 110 days hitting 100 degrees or more per year. That’s up from about 75 in the mid-1920s.

In addition to tying (and soon breaking) the record for most 100-degree days, 2020 becomes the eighth year since 2000 that ranks in the top 10 for most such days since records began in 1896.

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My Question for Amy Coney Barrett

I’ll never be a Senator, but if I was, I have my own question for Amy Coney Barrett.

I posed this on twitter yesterday:

Judge Barrett, you are obviously a knowledgeable attorney, and my colleagues are covering a number of the legal issues that we need to examine in these proceedings.

Most of my constituents are not attorneys. I believe they want to take the measure of a new Supreme Court Judge, but lack the back ground to evaluate many of the finer legal points

What my constituents do expect from a  judge, is, however, quite simply, good judgement

You recently attended a crowded public event at the White House where there were no masks, no social distancing, and indoor group meetings, in the midst of an ongoing deadly pandemic

An event which a reasonable, well informed, and scientifically literate person would have seen as a possible super spreader event, and which, in fact, turned out to be such

As we consider you for the nation’s highest Judgeship, what do you think this decision-making tells us about your judgement? 

Do you accept the commonly understood science of disease causality and transmission?
This is relevant, in that you will no doubt be called upon to evaluate scientific issues. 

You also brought your children to that event, with no masks, seating them closely by a number of people who might very well have been carriers of the virus

If you put your own children, who I am sure you love, in this kind of position, what should we believe about your concern and care for America’s children, my children, their children, or the next 10,000 generations of children? 

UPDATE: Brad Johnson adds insight below

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