Right policy is defensive aggression for the Much Less Bad

Two interesting and warring perspectives on Libya and foreign intervention - I agree with main points of both.

The first by Shadi Hamid at Vox argues the intervention was a success - obviously not as compared to democratic Tunisia, but as compared to the most likely alternative scenario, Syria's, with two orders of magnitude more deaths. What I'd add to Hamid is that another alternative, complete victory for Qaddafi, would also have caused thousands of deaths, many more imprisoned and tortured, and active military intervention throughout Saharan Africa today by Qaddafi. Libya is obviously in bad shape, a 1980s Lebanon, but that's better than the alternative.

The second by Micah Zenko in Foreign Policy argues, accurately, that the seven-month military investigation quickly went beyond protecting civilians to regime change. I agree with the slippery slope between what was said and what was done (and quite possibly intended from the beginning). What Zenko doesn't do is analyze whether and where things were done right or wrong during the intervention, focusing solely on the issue of what Western leaders said they were doing. And the many predictions of a Western ground war intervention against Qaddafi, made by people who now proclaim how right they were to oppose any military action while ignoring Syria's outcome, were simply wrong.

Hamid says the solution to the problem identified by Zenko is defining aims broadly, maybe including regime change, but I disagree - the problem is moving from the original stated strategy. The foreign military intervention started too late and then intervened too much, doing too much of the fighting for the rebels. I don't know if doing less intervention may have led to more cooperation between rebel groups, or even negotiations with pro-Qaddafi tribes, but maybe Libya could've been better off.

The point is that there's a coherent policy that was almost followed in Libya and could be followed in Syria for military intervention - do it defensively in support of forces that are Much Less Bad than the dictator. Air strikes are appropriate to keep dictator armies from overrunning rebel-held cities, as was the case in Libya. Keeping it limited forces the rebels to win, hopefully through obtaining support, in new areas. Military support short of direct intervention, through weapons and training, but not the classic boots on the ground, could help them expand without taking too much of the leading role away from them.

You also don't need to have 100% confidence that the rebels are perfect Madisonian democrats, if they're clearly Much Less Bad than the people they're fighting, because you get a much better outcome, a Libya instead of a Syria. I'd say that the people we support at least need to give cursory support for democratic government though - otherwise there's little evidence that they're really better..

I am concerned that Clinton is oversupportive of military intervention, although she's miles better than anything on the GOP side. I hope she could support a limited and coherent doctrine for when intervention should and should not occur.

One last thought that I haven't seen elsewhere: people on the left who blame the current bad outcomes in Libya, Iraq, and Egypt primarily on Western actions are denying agency to the people and forces within those countries. Check your assumptions and possibly your biases. That's not to say Western and US leadership didn't screw up - they did - but the outside world is just a vector among other forces and not the all-responsible controller of what happens in other countries.

Accepting a limited role that may help to a limited extent is a much more realistic and better foreign policy, especially in what should be the very rare case of military intervention.

Electric on the water

Kind of along the lines of Eli’s Lighter-Than-Air musings, I wondered the other day about why tugboats couldn’t be electric. It’s not as if they need to go hundreds of miles. And it turns out the very initial steps are being taken on that, with prototype tugboat hybrids and an electric boat on the Erie Canal.

This isn’t the grand solution to marine traffic, but imagine at each port one set of tugboats took a massive boat 11 miles out, another set took it another 9, and then other boats did the same on the receiving end. That’s four percent fewer emissions from a 1000 mile journey. Not a huge reduction, but might as well take it. It also has some significant environmental justice and urban quality of life benefits by reducing pollution at urban ports where many poor and working-class people live and work.

Some ports have made initial steps to electrify marine transport, requiring cargo boats to turn off their polluting diesel engines when they’re docked, running their onboard machinery through a connection to shore power instead. Some similar steps have also happened at airports where planes are driven to and from gates by efficient land vehicles instead of using aircraft engines. So there’s precedent for piecemeal electrification.

More on the fantasy side, I wonder if there couldn’t be a category of shipping material that absolutely positively does not have to get there overnight, or very fast at all. Maybe drone cargo ships powered by solar, maybe with floating pontoon panels to add some extra oomf, could slowly get the material to wherever it needs to go. Maybe combine that with a SkySail.

99.9% of Nations Accept that Human Influence on Climate Is Today Dominant

Well, the 97% wars have never stopped, but Joe Romm gives it a try

The overwhelming majority of climate scientists — over 97 percent — understand that humans are the primary cause of climate change. This is one of the central facts about human-caused climate change that any climate communicator needs to keep repeating, for several reasons. 

First, it’s true, as Politifact detailed on Monday. The scientific literature is clear on this.

but Joe gets something completely wrong a couple of times in the post

The thing is, by 2013, the IPCC’s summary of the science — which are notoriously conservative in part because they require line-by-line approval by every major country in the world — concluded. “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”

 That should read

The thing is, by 2013, the IPCC’s summary of the science — which are notoriously conservative in part because they require line-by-line approval by every major country in the world — concluded. “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”

Somebunny want to list any countries that did not approve that statement?  And, of course the unanimous approval of the text in the Paris COP21 meeting of 191 countries is a small hint

California off-shore wind dreaming

I've been sitting on this for a long time, but California received its first offshore windfarm application last fall that sounds pretty interesting to me. Whether it's truly a good idea or not comes down to details, but I am concerned that some people may say they're open to offshore wind in theory and then oppose every proposal in practice.

The truth is that we need answers to variability in renewable power, and offshore wind is less variable. It's also more expensive, but maybe that's the price of reliability.

My one contribution is that I read they're situating it outside of marine conservation sanctuaries, which can't be fished commercially, and that commercial fishers have concerns with fishing around the wind towers. Seems like the logical place to put them is in the marine conservation sanctuaries - maybe they'll be a bit of a deterrent to people fishing where they shouldn't. Sierra Club seems open to the idea of the proposal being situated within a proposed sanctuary.

So again, it comes down to details as to whether it's a good idea. We Californians are very ready to proclaim ourselves first in a lot of things, though, and we're very far behind when it comes to offshore wind. I hope we catch up.

More information on the application here and here.

What they told me in law school about battery

The lawprofs said it was an offensive contact with another person, as a reasonable person defines offensive. The "reasonable person" found everywhere in legal theory implicitly consents to some level of physical contact in this world, the question is how much. It's a civil violation if done negligently, and eligible for criminal prosecution if done intentionally.

Florida law sounds a little different, just touch without consent, but implicit consent presumably raises its head again. I consulted my sister the Florida criminal defense lawyer, and she confirmed that battery can be all kinds of unusual contact - an unwanted kiss, a bite - and physical injury isn't required.

So consider a hand lightly touching someone's arm, like when Fields' hand brushed up against the garment of The Donald:

The reasonable person says that's not offensive and you can't press charges against Fields, even though Trump is asking if he can. Incidentally, I wonder if that touch is what set Lewandowski off, seeing someone treat Trump like you'd treat a normal human. And among Trump's mental instabilities is that he's a known germaphobe who might react strongly to any touch, but it's the Reasonable Person standard, not Coddled Billionaire/Germaphobe standard.

Going beyond what Fields did, I'd say briefly putting your hand around someone's arm also isn't offensive.

Let's take it two more levels up:  strongly grabbing someone's arm, enough to cause mild bruising, and holding the person back to halt forward movement. I'd say both of those, alone or together, cross the line into offensive touching and meet the technical definition of the crime. I'd also say that if I were a prosecutor, that barring unusual circumstances I'd use my discretion to not prosecute, telling the victim to go to civil court if they want to bring charges.

Lewandowski grabbed Fields hard enough to leave bruising, and more than stopping her forward movement, threw her backwards:

If I were the prosecutor and the victim wanted to press charges, I'd go ahead. That doesn't deny the fact that battery could be much worse than this (and all Fields originally wanted was an apology), but think of the implication of saying Lewandowski should escape prosecution. That's saying that this type of behavior is permissible.

There's a gender/size/aggressiveness bias to that argument:  if you're bigger/stronger and inclined to throw people mildly around, you get to do it. If you're smaller, be prepared to be thrown around without recourse.

I'd say that letting the victim decide whether charges go ahead, and victims don't always get to decide those things, is a good way to even the balance.

Two more comments: first, Lewandowski denied the incident a day after the news broke, three days after it happened:

@MichelleFields you are totally delusional. I never touched you. As a matter of fact, I have never even met you.

— Corey Lewandowski (@CLewandowski_) March 11, 2016

He said this when some unclear video was available but not the security camera we now see above that removed all doubt. In other words, Corey Lewandowski isn't just a liar but a sneaky little weasel liar who waited on his lie until he thought he could get away with it.

Second, I saw someone point out that the presidential pardon power is especially troubling in Trump's hands. He could get someone to do something illegal and then pardon the person. The only control is impeachment, and that's not an easy thing to do. Someone should ask Trump whether he would pardon Lewandowski if he's convicted, and his answer might be stupid enough to use against him.

Hooking

Eli and Jim Hunt (Great White Con) as mentioned here and there are engaged in a fun thing with the hard heads over at Bishop Hill.  OTOH Willard Tony protects his tiny flock by censoring Eli and many others,

Now there is all sorts of fanciful at both dens of denial, unicorns and such, but it occurred to Eli that there must at least be proxy records way back into the past for Arctic Sea Ice extent, and, indeed there is, from Reconstructed changes in Arctic sea ice over thepast 1,450 years by Christophe Kinnard, Christian M. Zdanowicz, David A. Fisher, Elisabeth Isaksson, Anne de Vernal  and Lonnie G. Thompson, Nature 479 (2011) 510.  It's open source so anybunny and their favorite hares can read it.

The top of the figure shows the multiproxy reconstruction of the sea ice extent going back a millenium and a half.  The blade pointing down (Willard Willard will explain that), is the decrease observed to 1995, As with all things this is not perfect.  For comparison, since the figure ends in 1995, the minimum sea ice extent in 2015 was 4.4  million sq km.
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Our proxy-based reconstructed history of late-summer Arctic sea ice extent over the period AD 561–1995 is presented in Fig. 3a along with the observed sea ice record. The reconstruction and observational record were smoothed with a 40-year lowpass filter to highlight the best-resolved frequencies (Fig. 2b). The uncertainty range around the reconstruction widens notably before about AD 1600 as a result of reduced proxy availability and consequent decrease in reconstruction skill. Within this uncertainty range, this reconstruction suggests that the pronounced decline in summer Arctic sea ice cover that began in the late twentieth century is unprecedented in both magnitude and duration when compared with the range of variability of the previous roughly 1,450 years. The most prominent feature is the extremely low ice extent observed since the mid-1990s (T1 in Fig. 3), which is well below the range of natural variability inferred by the reconstruction. Before the industrial period, periods of extensive sea ice cover occurred between AD 1200 and 1450 and between AD 1800 and 1920. Intervals of sustained low extent of sea ice cover occurred before AD 1200, and may be coincident with the so-called Medieval Warm Optimum (roughly AD 800–1300) attested in numerous Northern Hemisphere proxy records18, but the pre-industrial minimum occurred before, at about AD 640 (T3 in Fig. 3). Two episodes of markedly reduced sea ice cover also occurred in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (T2 in Fig. 3). However, by the mid-1990s the observed decrease in sea ice cover had exceeded the lower 95% confidence limit of these prehistorical minima.

It's the Number Density Not the Mixing Ratio

If Eli had a unit in any devalued paper currency for each time some fool uttered

@theresphysics @JoanneNova @MJIBrown @SouBundanga @p_hannam 0.003% increase results in what, four orders of magnitude greater heating? Hunh.

— Bad Alex (@BADALEX_) March 30, 2016

even when they get it right,

@BADALEX_ @theresphysics @JoanneNova @MJIBrown @SouBundanga @p_hannam It is wrong. 300ppm = 0.0003 =.03% For air = 8 E 15 molecules/cc

— eli rabett (@EthonRaptor) April 1, 2016

he would be swimming in carrots.

However, this being Rabett Run, Eli would like to show the bunnies a way of dealing with this.

There is a cute little number called Loschmidt, the number of molecules in a cubic meter of air at 1 atm and 0 ^oC, 2.686 7774(47) x 10²⁵ molecules/m³

CO2 is now at 400 ppm, so the number of CO2 molecule in a cubic meter of air is 1.07 x 10²² CO2 molecules/m³ at the surface.

The average volume occupied by each CO2 molecule is just the inverse or ~9.30  x 10^-23 m³ 

The spacing between CO2 molecules will be of the order of the cube root  ~4.5 x 10^-8 m or 0.045 microns.  Anybunny who wants can model this as a sphere rather than a cube.  4/3 π: to you

The wavelength of a photon that is absorbed by a CO2 molecule in the bending vibrational band is 15 microns,

Comparing the two the wavelength of the photon is about 330 times larger than the average spacing between CO2 molecules in air.

Not every CO2 molecule is going to absorb that photon, but there are an awful lot of CO2 molecules that can.

On average a 15 micron photon at the surface will travel a couple of meters before it is absorbed,

Eli Heads North

One of the things a smart bunny learns is that if you see something new to you in an area you really don't follow, everybunny else who follows the dots has seen it, but you have not seen them seeing it.  Yet, since on rare occasion they have not seen it because it is so obvious it is worth asking about and one might even learn something

Worse, in Eli's case, this is something that finally percolated through because of nonsense that Andrew Montford at Bishop Hill wrote trying to handwave the weird ice coverage this winter up north (yes, Eli knows everybunny and his brother in law is racing south to watch the Antarctic ice shelves collapse, but this is Rabett Run, Eli and Brian follow their own pipers).  Montford opined

As usual on these occasions, I take a quick look at the Cryosphere Today anomaly page, where I find the sea ice apparently still stuck firmly in "pause" mode.

As fate would have it Eli had been looking at this chart for many a year, and there, as discussed below, were things about it that well stood out to anybunny who spent their life looking at charts, things that were. . .and are . . . maybe. . . .interesting.

For example, it is clear that the nature of the anomalies changed somewhere around 2006.  The pattern of the anomaly between 2007 and 2016 is very different to that previously.  With a thirty day smooth, the post 2007 pattern is hard to miss

There is a clear minimum in September, not very exciting.  One can see this in 2013 and 2014, although not as clearly in the other years, but it is there.  However, there are also secondary minima in May/June in all of these years. 

Equally interesting is the period 1996-2006

Rather than the winter/summer pattern seen in the 2007-2016 period in the anomaly there is a roll off in all seasons, about the same loss of sea ice year round (e.g. the decrease each month was about the same or at least the month to month variation was smaller.  But what about before 1996

Eli will not engage in cycling.  HIt is true that because anomalies compare like with like, e.g. the ice area in the same month against some reference period (1979-2008 in the examples above) looking  just at anomalies can be tricky.  The boys from Bremen have a useful comparison of September minimum extent between 2012 and 1979-83

and if one looks at the period between 1979 and 2015 on the maps at Cryosphere Today the changing pattern in the September ice area is obvious. 

Oh yeah, Cryosphere Today has a useful reminder of the ability of an anomaly to hide the decline

c

There has been a pretty steady decline in arctic sea ice since ~ 1955.