Global climate change: it's time to think radical

Scientific American’s global climate change issue (9/06) outlined a painful and politically almost inconceivable approach to keeping terrestrial climate within the bounds of human evolutionary history.

Alas, each bit of research on climate change seems to worsen the picture. The latest article on methane release is typical (note my emphasis, below):

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Methane bubbles climate trouble

… Scientists from Russia and the US measured methane bubbling from a number of thawing lakes.

Writing in the journal Nature, they suggest the methane release is hastened by warmer temperatures, positively feeding back into global warming.

… "Thaw lakes in north Siberia are known to emit methane, but the magnitude of these emissions remains uncertain," the scientists write.

"We show that methane flux from thaw lakes in our study region may be five times greater than previously estimated."

… The study depended on the systematic deployment of bubble traps on two lakes in the Cherskii region of Siberia, supplemented by ground-based and aerial observations of a further 95 lakes.

Katey Walker from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and her colleagues calculate that across the region, thaw lakes lakes emit 3.8 teragrams (Tg, million million grams) per year.

The contribution of these lakes is small compared to the IPCC estimate of total global methane production, 600 Tg per year.

More than half of this total comes from human activities, notably farming.

The importance of the Siberian release may lie in the relationship between warming and methane production.

If a high release rate of a greenhouse gas is being triggered by rising temperatures, that will in turn stimulate still higher temperatures - a positive feedback mechanism…

These particular lakes produce about 1/150th of global methane, or 1/75th of what humans (esp. farmers — is that cow gas?) produce. So what’s the impact? This BBC news article is missing some context. This 1995 journal article helps:

… the total annual global source strength of atmospheric methane, an important greenhouse gas, is estimated to be 500 teragrams, with anthropogenic sources accounting for 340 teragrams. With an estimated sink strength of 460 teragrams per year, the annual increase of atmospheric methane is 40 teragrams.

So if 40 is the right denominator here, then this region alone is causing a 5–10% increase in net methane growth (we’ve apparently gone from 500 to 600 TG/year output in 10 years, but I assume agricultural sinks have also grown, so I can’t guess the actual net increase). Siberia is not the entire world of permafrost, so, bottom line, this probably does represent a significant increase in net atmospheric methane accumulation. It’s just hard to see that from the BBC article.

The feasibility of the almost unattainable ‘conservative’ path to climate restraint seems to have shrunk considerably. When the climate models are updated with the new data, it seems possible that we’ll need both the ‘conservative’ approaches and some new, fairly radical, technologies as well.

I can’t imagine the world my children will inherit …

General weirdness on the net: ultrasound, autism and satire

This is weird.

On August 7th Yale researchers published an article purporting to show a subtle derangement of neuronal migration in mouse fetuses (feti?) exposed to over 30 minutes of ultrasound.

On August 8th, writing in a disabilities blog I author, I cautiously noted that if one is hunting for a possible explanation of a rise in autism rates in the late 80s, it's worth looking at further experiments in this domain.

On August 19th, Wayne McDonald, wrote a satirical article relating ultrasound to autism and school violence -- inspired by the Yale press release.

On September 1st the Autism Society of America, to their almost immediate embarassment, referenced the ultrasound article in their weekly email newsletter - ASA-Net. (One assumes they are reconsidering their automated clipping service.)

Was there any connection between my August 9th posting and Mr. McDonald's satire? Probably it's merely synchronicity, but the web works in mysterious ways.

The story will be even more peculiar in the (very unlikely) event that there does turn out to be a real connection of some sort.

Mental illness, Zubaydah and the Republican right

DeLong contrasts Bush's description of Abu Zubaydah with Don (One Percent Doctrine) Suskind's description. Briefly, Bush claims Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader and that much value was gained from torturing him (ok, Bush doesn't use the word torture, instead he lies). Suskind says Zubaydah was mentally ill and was tortured because his captors were ... ummm .... nuts.

What makes this contrast plausible to me, beyond Bush's record of staggering incompetence and seeming organic brain disorders, is the right wing's rejection of the concept of mental illness. It's almost a pathognomonic feature of cultural conservatives that, for them, mental illness doesn't really exist, that it cannot affect judgment or decisions, and that delusions are fundamentally a form of deliberate deception. Medieval inquistors of witches shared a common value set, as do modern Scientologists.

It's easy to believe that Bush and his ilk, confronted with a mentally ill terrorist, would believe he was being deceptive, and would think torture would produce truth.

Greylisting: slouching towards weighted reputations of sending services

Years ago, I pointed out that the right way to deal with spam was differential filtering based on the managed reputatation of the sending service. This reasonable approach was greeted with ... well, almost nobody read it or listened with any interest. Jon Udell, who is brilliant, agreed that it was probably the way we'd go.

Basically, it's subtle, it's hard to encapsulate, and it's not sexy. So rather than get there quickly, we're slouching slowly in that direction. I was pleased to read about Greylisting recently -- it's one more step in the right direction.

BTW. The wrong direction is Microsoft/Intel's Palladium identity management technology, but, alas, we'll go that way too.

HyperScope: Does innovation live?

Shades of the 1990s, HyperScope is a reimplementation of classic hypertext and information representation in modern browser-side Ajax. Maybe innovation is not quite dead!

I'm particularly intriguted that the file format is OPML. It suggests that OmniOutliner could be adapted to generate these documents fairly readily ...

Attacking Inequality: Redistributing wealth

When the NYT hid its main editorialists behind a $50/year paywall, I put the WaPo OpEd column on my news page. Mostly I've been disappointed, DeLong is all too correct in lambasting the decaying WaPo.

I was surprised then, to read something interesting by Sebastian Mallaby (emphases mine):

Attacking Inequality:

Economic growth no longer seems to help the majority of workers; the proceeds flow to the top fifth or so of the workforce, and the top within the top has done especially handsomely. But the tough debate is what to do about this trend. The surprising answer is: tax reform...

... if you eliminated just a quarter of the subsidies in the tax code, you would liberate about $180 billion a year -- enough to finance a big expansion in the earned-income tax credit plus a cut in the regressive payroll tax. And this sort of redistribution would not risk higher unemployment or compromise economic growth at all. Democrats on the left and right ought to be embracing it.

Hmmphh. This was such a surprisingly clear invitation to electoral disaster (touch the mortgage tax break?!) that I figured Mallaby must be an agent provocateur. There might be a bit of that, but his bio is interesting ...

Sebastian Mallaby grew up in Britain and has been a correspondent in Japan and Southern Africa. He joined the Washington Post editorial page in 1999 after 13 years with The Economist of London, and is the author of "The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations," to be published in September 2004... [jf: Marginal Revolution loved the book]

Ok. Let's take him seriously then. This topic, of course, is the nitty gritty. It's the big problem, compared to which the rest of the culture wars are a side-show. It's the problem of the weak.

Sure our democracy is in an increasingly sorry state. Sure there are a lot of rigged games (CEO compensation, rampant insider trading). Sure the GOP program of financing education by local taxes is an unspeakably repulsive recipe for economic segregation and class stratification. Even so, the big problem is the one that made Marx (for better and worse) -- what duty do the strong owe the weak? Or, if you're a Libertarian, how much should the strong invest in the weak to avoid distasteful smells wafting over the walls? Even if our democracy is repaired, even if our regulatory bodies are restored, even if we finance education globally, still we will have the strong and the weak.

Mallaby's last sentence is telling. It's easy to miss it -- I almost did. As the strong accumulate more of society's economic output, the ranks of the unsettled weak grow. They are messy to dispose of -- eventually the prisons overflow, and other methods are tough on the squeamish. It won't work anyway, chop off the bottom 5% and there's a new bottom 5% -- that's the way statistics work. Ignoring mere compassion, if the Weak are not appeased we either grow an American version of Hugo Chavez (rather than the Teddy Roosevelt II we really need) -- or we will dispose of our democracy altogether.

Read the column. This is one of the significant challenges to our generation. (Global climate change and technological disruption are slightly bigger challenges -- perhaps too big for mere humans to manage.)

Windows Live OneCare: Firefox? What's that?

This is what Firefox users get when they sign up for the Windows Live OneCare trial:

In order to complete installation of Windows Live OneCare, you must be running Internet Explorer 6 or later as your Web browser. Please switch to Internet Explorer and then restart Setup by typing http://www.windowsonecare.com/purchase into the browser address field.

Antitrust? What antitrust? That's ancient history. The old restraints are fading fast. It's kind of sweet to see the old rabid pit bull back, even if it is showing signs lately of corporate dementia.

Live OneCare will eliminate all other consumer antiviral solutions within 1-2 years. You can't run a PC without antiviral software, and you can't run OneCare without IE. What's complex about that?

No problem here. I'll fire up my old copy of IE and install. We're an OS X household mostly, one day XP will run only as an occasional session within OS X. Microsoft will own that XP/Vista environment completely. I don't have a dog in that fight (I used to, but the rabid pit bull finished it off).

Update 9/26: I tried OneCare for a month or so -- free. It's really not ready for release. It's too hard to turn it off or control it, and it's too mysterious. Tries to hard to be invisible.

Dogs and non-euros

Our beautiful and very friendly looking, but somewhat irascible dog (Molly), died. We now have a somewhat demonic looking (Kateva) but actually friendlier mongrel. I can't say whether it's this change, or the transitions in American society over the past 15 years, but I have been struck by how many people are afraid of our dog. There seems to be an ethnic distribution to this.

The usual cliche is that black (african) americans are, on average, less accepting of dogs. My limited exposure would not contradict that, but I think it's perhaps inverting the question. I don't see a great deal of difference between black Americans and recent immigrants from everywhere outside of Euro-land.

So the peculiarity perhaps is in western europeans or "Euros", who seem culturally more accepting of dogs than most other ethnic community. There's a long history of working dogs in western europe, and I'm not sure that history occurred elsewhere. If true, it's the Euros who are "odd", not the rest of the world.

Dogs are much more popular in Japan than they were 30 years ago, and even in China there are now pet dogs, so perhaps things will change. I suspect, however, than as America becomes minority-Euro we'll see more "no dog here" signs. It will become harder to travel with the family dog, so we should see even more upmarket kennels ...

Vinge and Kurzweil on the Singularity

Update: It's Vinge and Doctorow, now Vinge and Kurzweil.

David Brin pointed to KurzweilAI note marketing Vinge and Kurzweil talking to NPR about the 'rapture of the nerds' (aka, the "singularity".

Kurzweil is a brilliant eccentric who seems a bit off-base to me, but I'm quite fond of Vinge's writings [1]. It will be interesting to here what the two of them say when stuck together. I'll have to use Audio Hijack Pro to make this a bookmarkable AAC file for my iPod(s).

If I do get to listen to the show, I'll add some comments here.

[1] Vinge is usually considered the 'father of the Singularity' and he's written the best fiction on the topic, but Greg Bear's original 'Blood Music' short story (not the later novel) was probably the first writer to connect a (squishy) Singularity to the Great Silence.

The crash of Comair 5191: fatigue and economic pressures

Salon's resident pilot-journalist, Patrick Smith, has written the best review of the recent Comair 5191 crash I've seen. This comment is particularly interesting, emphases mine.

What could have happened on Comair 5191 | Salon.com:

... If, on some level, regional flying is 'less safe' than mainline flying -- an academic distinction if ever there was one -- crew fatigue might be something to look at. Having been employed as a captain and first officer at regional carriers for the better part of seven years, I'll attest to the brutality of scheduling: short layovers with no access to food followed by multi-leg days of high-workload flying. Media reports claim the crew of 5191 may have had as little as eight hours break between duty periods, with an early morning check-in just prior to the incident. Tiredness is no excuse for what apparently happened, but I wouldn't be shocked if, months from now when the National Traffic Safety Board completes its dossier, fatigue is listed as a contributing cause."

The airline industry is being squeezed. If schedule-driven fatigue turns out to be a big factor the lesson we'll know the squeeze has gone too far ...

In Our Time: 18th Century Politeness and Reproductive Fitness

Lord Bragg and his guests are in fine form in this episode of the BBC’s In Our Time:

BBC - Radio 4 In Our Time - Politeness

... At the start of the eighteenth century in Britain a new idea stalked the land. Soon it was complete with a philosophy, a literature and even a society devoted to its thrall. The idea was Politeness. It may seem to represent the very opposite now, but at that time, when Queen Anne was on the throne and The Spectator was in the coffee houses, politeness was part of a social revolution.

How did the idea of politeness challenge the accepted norms of behaviour? How did a notion of how to behave affect the great wealth of eighteenth century culture? ...

Ms. Vickery did particularly well in both speaking of the era and demonstrating the conversational gymnastics championed by 18th century politeness. The show is also interesting for what it demonstrates about the biases of English intellectuals. There’s much discussion of literature, memes (they don’t use that word) and history (English civil war), but almost none of demographics (the population was exploding, I don’t know about gender ratios but it was a young nation), economics (growth of market economies), technology (in the absence of radio, people read aloud socially …) and evolutionary psychology (nee sociobiology).

I suspect demographics was and economics were big contributors to this curious and social craze, which we now regard with wistful amusement. I am struck, however, but the reproductive fitness (evolutionary psychology) aspect of 18th century politeness. Excellence at the coffee shop required extraordinary cognitive skills, including both ‘social’ and ‘asocial’ intelligence — and some fine motor performance as well. It’s hard to imagine a better way to test reproductive fitness in that era …

What is Senator Ted Stevens hiding?

A rare bipartisan motherhood and apple pie bill is killed in the senate. The murderer?

TPMmuckraker August 30, 2006 01:59 PM

... A spokesman for Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) just confirmed his boss was the man behind the secret hold on the Coburn/Obama spending database bill, which has captivated a segment of the political blogging community in recent days. ...

The suspicion, of course, is that Ted Stevens has many things to hide. Shame on Alaska for putting this man in office and keeping him there.

Lifespan is random

I'm very surprised. The data from human and animal studies seems very strong. Lifespan is pretty random and not clearly related to genetics. The article also implies it's not clearly related to behavior either ...

Live Long? Die Young? Answer Isn't Just in Genes - New York Times:

...A woman whose sister lived to be 100 has a 4 percent chance of living that long, Dr. Christensen says. That is better than the 1 percent chance for women in general, but still not very great because the absolute numbers, 1 out of 100 or 4 out of 100, are still so small. For men, the odds are much lower. A man whose sister lived to be 100 has just a 0.4 percent chance of living that long. In comparison, men in general have a 0.1 percent chance of reaching 100.

Those data fit well with animal studies, says Caleb Finch, a researcher on aging at the University of Southern California. Genetically identical animals — from worms to flies to mice — living in the same environments die at different times...

...Matt McGue, a psychology professor at the University of Minnesota who studies twins, contrasts life spans with personality, which, he says, is about 50 percent heritable, or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, which is 70 to 80 percent heritable, or body weight, which is 70 percent heritable.

“I’ve been in this business for a long while, and life span is probably one of the most weakly heritable traits I’ve ever studied,” Dr. McGue said.

Random. That's weird. Nothing like I'd expected.

Incidentally, ADHD is incredibly hereditable and men don't live that long.

Update 9/1/06: This article continues to puzzle me. Although the researchers note that animal studies show limited hereditability of lifespan, that's not true of dogs. Different breeds have very different lifespans -- from the 4-6 years of Great Danes to the 18+ years of one Australian mid-sized breed. Could it be that we're deceived by the relative genetic homogeneity of humans, who, after all, went through that 10,000 person evolutionary bottleneck less than 200K years ago? They do mention some families do show an exception to this rule ...

One practical implication of the data is that it suggests persons with long lived families should not stint on life insurance policies ... And that life insurers can make a bundle by charging more to persons with short lived families. These folks will pay more for life insurance, thinking that it's more likely to be needed, but in fact their lifespans are not all that predictable.

Update 9/8/06: Still chewing this one over. I think the aging rate/cancer tradeoff plays a role ...

Warren Jeffs, Orrin Hatch, Pedophilia and Fundamentalism: An 50 year old evil is confronted

Today the BBC reported the arrest of Warren Jeffs, a Mormon fundamentalist and alleged pedophile. That led me to dredge up some old memories.

First, an August 2003 posting on Jon Krakauer's excellent book on American religious Fundamentalism (Mormon Fundamentalism in particular, my post also links to a very good Atlantic article on how religions developer from cultic roots)

Secondly, I'll finish a draft blog post from a 2006 LA Times article, probably inspired by Krakauer's book, on the sexual abuse of children by these American Fundamentalists. Note the mention of Jeffs (emphases mine):

Blind Eye to Culture of Abuse - Los Angeles Times

COLORADO CITY, Ariz. — For half a century, while polygamous members of this remote enclave engaged in widespread sexual abuse and child exploitation, government authorities on all levels did little to intervene or protect generations of victims.

Here in the sparsely populated canyon lands straddling Arizona and Utah, members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or FLDS — an offshoot of Mormonism — live by their own rules.

The religious sect of about 10,000 portrays itself as an industrious commune of the faithful, choosing to live apart from a hostile world. But their simple lifestyle and self-imposed isolation have concealed troubling secrets that are only beginning to emerge.

Court records, undisclosed investigative reports and interviews by The Times over the last year show that church authorities flout state and federal laws and systematically deny rights and freedoms, especially to women and children.

"The fact that this has been going on all these years, and the fact that justice has not been there to protect women and children … from amazing civil rights violations — it is an embarrassment," said Utah Atty. Gen. Mark Shurtleff.

"I don't want to indict the states of Utah and Arizona, but mea culpa — we are responsible."

Among sect members, girls as young as 13 are forced into marriage, sexual abuse is rampant, rape is covered up and child molesters are shielded by religious authorities and law enforcement.

Boys are thrown out of town, abandoned like unwanted pets by the side of the road and forcibly ostracized from their families to reduce competition among the men for multiple wives.

Children routinely leave school at age 11 or 12 to work at hazardous construction jobs. Boys can be seen piloting dump trucks, backhoes, forklifts and other heavy equipment.

Girls work at home, trying to keep order in enormous families with multiple mothers and dozens of children who often eat in shifts around picnic tables.

Wives are threatened with mental institutions if they fail to "keep sweet," or obedient, for their husbands.

Warren Jeffs, a wiry third-generation church member, is the sect leader — a post that carries the title "prophet" and gives him virtually absolute control over the most intimate conduct.

Jeffs orders marriages, splits up families, evicts residents and exiles whomever he wants with no regard for legal processes. He even tells couples when they can and can't have sex.

But Jeffs is now a fugitive, listed on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list and accused by state and federal authorities of rape, sexual conduct with a minor, conspiracy and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. Former members say he continues to exert influence nonetheless...

... Despite years of such stories and allegations, public agencies on both sides of the state line have failed to act or been slow to intervene.

The sect's questionable ways were no secret in Utah or Arizona. Law enforcement, social agencies and politicians long knew that polygamy was practiced and that underage girls were married off to middle-aged and older men.

Employees and eyewitnesses say many underage marriages were performed in Room 15 of the Caliente Hot Springs Motel in Caliente, Nev., a few miles from the Utah border. The motel was once owned by FLDS leader Merril Jessop.

"We've heard about it, and were never able to substantiate it," said Lincoln County, Nev., Sheriff Dahl Bradfield. "But we didn't look very hard."

Officials also knew local laws in Colorado City and adjacent Hildale, Utah, were enforced by polygamous police officers and administered by a polygamous judge — and that police routinely referred alleged sex crimes to church leaders.

In 1953, acting on similar reports, Arizona Gov. J. Howard Pyle launched a massive raid, with about 120 police officers, on the FLDS. It backfired badly, however, and was regarded as a political disaster for Pyle, who lost his bid for reelection.

The political debacle, coupled with a fear of violating the sect's religious freedom, ushered in 50 years of official passivity and government inaction, even in the face of continuing reports of illegal conduct in the FLDS enclave.

The abusive conduct went on for so long, said Buster Johnson, a Mohave County, Ariz., supervisor, "because those with the power to do something about it turned a blind eye. I don't know how they sleep at night."

Recent disclosures have prompted a belated round of state and federal action, including stepped-up efforts by the FBI to arrest Jeffs.

The attorneys general in Arizona and Utah have launched separate legal actions, and a Mohave County criminal investigator operating out of a trailer in Colorado City has provided evidence resulting in a series of grand jury indictments against eight FLDS members...

... Charged with protecting and serving their community, Colorado City police have long had a reputation for protecting and serving church interests instead.

The force, which covers Hildale as well, is reportedly handpicked by FLDS leaders. Call 911 here, say state investigators, and it is the same as calling the FLDS.

Former police employees and state investigators say officers either ignore molestation allegations or send them to the church rather than to outside prosecutors...

... Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) once visited the FLDS church in Hildale and played the organ. He later defended the group when asked about its alleged abuses.

"All I can say is I know people in Hildale who are polygamists who are very fine people. You come and show me the evidence of children being abused there, and I'll get involved," he told local reporters. "Bring the evidence to me."

... In his successful 1991 bid for Arizona governor, Fife Symington wrote an open letter to the residents of Colorado City concerning their "family-oriented lifestyles," vowing never to do anything to "upset or question" their religion.

"Our policy was one of noninterference," he said recently. "The advice I got when running was this was an issue I wanted to stay away from."

The Mormon Church, which banned polygamy in 1890 and excommunicates those who practice it, has been quiet in the face of reported abuses, giving little support to groups trying to help victims of the FLDS.

... On the dusty edge of Colorado City sits a triple-wide trailer grandly named the Arizona-Mohave County Justice Center. The metal building is Arizona's first official presence in this town.

Inside, the handful of state employees includes social workers, a victim's advocate and a gap-toothed ex-cop named Gary Engels.

Engels, an investigator for the Mohave County attorney's office, may be the most effective lawman in the state. He has done in a year what the combined forces of Utah and Arizona did not do during the previous 50 years.

Through quiet detective work, he pieced together enough information for eight indictments of FLDS men who allegedly married underage women.

"He's produced impressive results even given the fact that he has an almost impossible assignment," Arizona Atty. Gen. Terry Goddard said.

Nonetheless, Engels said he saw only slow progress. Child abuse continues, he said, as do underage marriages and exiles of boys — though not so openly since he and the triple-wide came to town.

"I'm just getting started," Engels said.

Thirdly, see my recent comments on the cursed gender.

Men. Fundamentalism. Pedophilia and child abuse. The slow awakening of outrage and response.

Krakauer should get a Pulitzer. Engels may deserve some kind of medal of honor. Senator Orrin Hatch deserves a prize spot in Hell, next door to Jeffs.

Only Christians may govern

KKKatherine Harris, the GOP stalwart who delivered the nation to Bush:

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Republican Standard-Bearer Katherine Harris Says: It Is Sinful to Elect Jews and Muslims

...If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you're not electing Christians then in essence you are going to legislate sin.

Also, clearly, very sinful to elect atheists, agnostics, Hindus and other satanic heathens.

PS. It is surprisingly hard to get internet access when traveling in the American northeast.