Third Fool From the Left

Ethon was looking hungry yesterday.  Eli asked him (cautiously and from a distance) what was up.  Turns out that he took a moving contract from Scrotum, to deliver Chris Monckton around the world where he could advance Mycroft's Agenda 21.  As the bunnies may recall, Joe Bast and the Heartland Mob had finally cottoned onto Chis' unwitting, but effective, role in the UN plan to subjugated the world.  Being from Chicago, and well funded by  Bankroll Barry, they had sent some associates to London to terminate the annoyance.

Fortunately, Mycroft had gotten a message from Peter Gleick (the matter having been discussed at the Heartland board meeting last winter, one of the memos held close) and was able to take measures to spirit Chris to safety and a world wide lecture tour, keeping one step ahead of the competition.

Unfortunately, there had been no time to commission a transportation module from W&H Giddon, Saddlers and they had to make do with what Scrotum could scare up at the Extreme Restraints Bondage store deep in the East End.

There were chafing consequences accounting for several pictures taken recently

Eli kept adding pins to the map as Ethon flew Monckton from Scotland, to Rio to Qatar to the Antipodes, assuming that the bird was being well fed and was quite surprised by the rather thin appearance of his friend.   The scam doesn't work anymore Eli, Ethon sadly told him.

Monckton is discovering that you can't get to the edge of crazy, there is always someone a bit further out than you.  Supporting a globe trotting lifestyle, a hunting lodge here and there, and the tailor is an expensive business and Chris has had trying times as funding for his main gig, denial of climate change, dries up.  Scrotum has been furloughed and is looking for work in Washington, it is so bad.  His Lordship has been trying birtherism, snake oil cures for everything from HIV to Graves disease, getting a gig in the House of Lords.  Poor lad, he got tossed out of a crazy Brit right wing party for being  "semi detached"


Well Ethon, Eli replied, surely, somebunnies, somewhere, maybe at the ends of the earth have a need for more Monckton.  Sadly, yes, said Ethon, but they don't pay very well;)

Add lead-bullet poisoning denialism to the crank magnetism list

This one was new to me:

Fresh off a wave of success in the state Capitol last year, animal welfare groups are taking aim at a new target this year: hunting with lead ammunition.

The Humane Society, Audubon California and Defenders of Wildlife are behind a major push to make California the first state to ban lead ammunition for all types of hunting....

....environmentalists say a statewide ban is needed because overwhelming scientific evidence shows condors, bald eagles and other birds are still dying from lead poisoning when they eat dead deer and other animals shot by hunters.... 

"These people want to ban hunting. Go to their cocktail parties and snuggle up to them, and that's what they'll tell you," said Don Saba, a member of the NRA board of directors.... 

Saba, a Tuscon, Ariz., resident who has a doctorate in toxicology from UC Berkeley, appeared last August at a state Fish and Game Commission meeting to question the science linking condor poisoning to bullets.... 

Scientists say it's clear bullets are to blame for the lead poisoning. They have published studies that match isotope ratios of lead in condors' feathers to isotope ratios in lead bullets.

Saba says that lead paint and other substances, like lead from batteries, also can have the same ratios, and that condors may be eating paint from old fire lookout towers, eating lead in dumps or finding it other ways. But researchers dispute those claims.

"What is lacking is any evidence -- and certainly no published evidence -- to substantiate their claims," said Don Smith, a professor of microbiology and toxicology at UC Santa Cruz.

Biologists track the birds with GPS and observe them closely, Smith noted. "They are not going to lots of fire towers to eat paint. They are not eating wheel weights off wheels," he said. "There isn't one shred of evidence they have to support any of that."

Evidence that they don't like, doesn't exist. One more for crank magnetism.

Ten years since the Iraq invasion, many more years with Iranian threat inflation

James Fallows thinks about the ten year anniversary of the Iraq invasion. He says he'd like to hear from the liberal war hawks and what they've learned.  I don't quite fit that category - not always a liberal for one thing, and was undecided rather than a supporter of the war.  I did believe the WMD stories, and that getting rid of an entrenched dictator could be enormously valuable (I've lived in two dictatorships and had a taste of them).

On the latter issue of overthrowing dictatorship, I think I've learned a distaste for putting American boots on the ground absent clear popular support, which is why I opposed the Afghanistan war expansion but supported doing what we did in Libya, and doing something and not the nothing we've done so far in Syria.

On the former issue of WMDs, Fallows makes an excellent point about "threat inflation", that threats are almost always portrayed as far worse and more imminent than is actually true, and gives some examples.  I've been thinking about Iran's nuclear threat, and it turns out in 2011, Christian Science Monitor had a good description of that over time.  Here's a condensed version:

1992: Israeli parliamentarian Benjamin Netanyahu tells his colleagues that Iran is 3 to 5 years from being able to produce a nuclear weapon – and that the threat had to be "uprooted by an international front headed by the US."

1992: Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres tells French TV that Iran was set to have nuclear warheads by 1999. "Iran is the greatest threat and greatest problem in the Middle East," Peres warned, "because it seeks the nuclear option while holding a highly dangerous stance of extreme religious militancy."

1995: The New York Times conveys the fears of senior US and Israeli officials that "Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought" – about five years away – and that Iran’s nuclear bomb is “at the top of the list” of dangers in the coming decade.

1998: The same week, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reports to Congress that Iran could build an intercontinental ballistic missile – one that could hit the US – within five years. The CIA gave a timeframe of 12 years.

I think we should forever rename Netanyahu as Bibi "Iran Will Have Nukes in 1997" Netanyahu, and never again take seriously anything he says.  As Kevin Drum says, we're also far better off to discount significantly any claimed threat elsewhere.


UPDATE:  thought I'd add that the new Republican willingness to cut the defense budget may be complicating budget negotiations, but otherwise it's a good thing and might lead to less adventurism.

The Blog of the New Sun

While no one was looking the sun has gone cold, more precisely the sun godess has decreased total solar irradiation by about 4 W/m² to 1360.8 + 0.5 W/m² from 1365.4 + 1.3 W/m²

ERB is the Earth Radiation Budget instrument, ACRIM is the Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiation Monitor, SORCE is the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment carrying the TIM, Total Irradiation Monitor.  The rest is left to the industrious reader.

What happened was that apertures in earlier instruments were not properly chosen, allowing excess light to be scattered into the sensor (right side of the figure below) resulting in higher TSI being measured.  The magnitude of the effect was determined in a purpose built testing facility at LASP.  The error is not without consequences As Kopp and Lean point out,

A nonzero average global net radiation at the top of the atmosphere is indicative of Earth’s thermal disequilibrium imposed by climate forcing. But whereas the current planetary imbalance is nominally 0.85 W/m² [Hansen et al., 2005], estimates of this quantity from space‐based measurements range from 3 to 7 W/m² SORCE/TIM’s lower TSI value reduces this discrepancy by 1 W/m²[Loeb et al., 2009]. We note that the difference between the new lower TIM value with earlier TSI measurements corresponds to an equivalent climate forcing of −0.8 W/m², which is comparable to the current energy imbalance.

 This does not directly affect the ACRIM/PMOD controversy, eg. whether there is a very slight warming of the sun over the last three solar minima, is warming by 0.003% or cooling by 0.011% or less per decade.  The effect on climate models remains an open question.  If anyone has more on this, please let Eli know.

UPDATE:6/2/2103 Showing the new solar irradiance series from Kopp and Lean

The expert exception to consensus reliance

I've really enjoyed Chris Mooney's Point of Inquiry podcasts, so it's too bad the latest one with pro-GMO activist Mark Lynas failed to wrestle significantly with real arguments about GMOs (Chris, you talk about GMOs too much to say you don't want to delve into technical issues).

One interesting issue did come out of the podcast - at one point Lynas says the Union of Concerned Scientists' rejection of the National Academy of Sciences position on GMOs is a contradiction of UCS arguments that we should rely on the consensus opinion on climate change.  I've argued something similar before, that the expert consensus should basically just plug in as fact in policy discussion, but there's one exception - if you yourself are an expert in that field, I think you could conclude that you're right and the consensus is wrong.  Presumably UCS could make this conclusion.

It takes a lot of hubris to conclude you're right and the other 90% of the experts are wrong. You might carefully examine whether you're missing something little or something big, and withhold judgment for a while. In the end though if you feel like you really understand the issue, you don't have a choice but to conclude what you conclude.

So what should happen next depends on who you are.  If you're the dissenting expert, you should work to move the consensus in your direction.  If you're someone else, the dissenter is just a dissenter, and only if there's enough of them to disrupt the consensus do we need to worry about them.

So no change to the big picture, but I disagree with Lynas that experts are required to toe the line of an expert consensus when they disagree with that consensus.

Your Sequestration