Russell's Blog

When I was little, we used to have Smog Alerts in Los Angeles fairly regularly, sometimes for a few consecutive days. My elementary school used to keep us inside on those days, and I used to stand on the second floor balcony that overlooked the foothills, staring at the crap in the air. Around noontime, it looked like an overcast sky, but without the ceiling effect. It diffused all the way to the ground. Then, in the afternoon, the sky would explode in a malignant display of colors. The horizon was capped by a black line hovering above the ground with a mantle of crimson and orange, like the lips of a steamed muscle. The sun would squat over the ocean in a rust-colored splotch smeared across a quarter of the sky. Shadows turned the color of tea, and the air turned pinkish and cloudy like you were peering through gasoline. It looked genuinely dangerous.

Astonishingly, those days were a measured improvement over what my parents experienced. The smog used to be thick enough to obscure the sun completely, turning the daylight into a diffuse glow. Sometimes, it blocked enough of the daylight to create a sort of murky twilight. Here is the first known photo of LA's smog, from 1943 :

Beijing is like that, except the mantle of smog is much, much wider than the one that covered Los Angeles in its worst years. For the Olympics, China has been working to improve the situation, but the progress so far is not very impressive. Days with good air quality, called "Blue Sky" days, would be emergency smog alerts in Los Angeles. The Beijing Air Blog has some interesting data on China's ongoing battle with air pollution, though there haven't been many posts in a while. Here is Tienanmen Square on April 27, 2008, which was officially a Blue Sky Day :

The smog extends pretty far from the city. This is the shot from a train window about a hundred miles north of Beijing. The factory (refinery? LNG plan? cement factory?) is only about a mile or two away, and it's almost completely invisible.

I'm not going to delve into why this is a bad thing. Global warming, cardiopulmonary disease, lead, mercury, yadda yadda. You already know the arguments, or you can make your own. Here's a reason that doesn't require any sort of scientific background to understand. The day after I took the photographs above, a heavy thunderstorm scrubbed the smog out of the sky. This is what China is supposed to look like :

China is a damn beautiful country, when you can see it.

From somewhere above the Mongolia/Siberia frontier.

I suppose it is somewhat fitting that, on my way to visit the planet's newly crowned Number One Emitter of carbon dioxide, I should get a fantastic view of the patch of the planet that all this carbon dioxide is having the most dangerous effect. I visited Greenland in 1993, so it's interesting to see what it looks like 15 years later. Normally I think out-the-window shots are pretty crummy, but I think these make up for their poor image quality and composition by being pretty damn interesting.

This is the ice pack on the Davis Straight, between the west coast of Greenland and Canada. As you can see, there really isn't any pack ice. In August of 1993, we had planned to sail across the straight to visit the Baffin Island. We had abandon those plans because the pack ice was too heavy to navigate, even for our specially equipped vessel. We had to hug the coast of Greenland, following shipping lanes kept clear with ice breakers.

This is the west coastline of Disco Island. In 1993, it was kind of impossible to tell where the pack ice ended and the island started. Now, it's pretty obvious. After we visited Disco Island, we spent a few rough days hammering our into Baffin Bay. The noise of the ice crashing against the hull was awful. Imagine being trapped in a garbage can while someone beats it with a chandelier. We gave up and turned around after a few days of it.

This is Disco Bay. In 1993, I remember standing on the Greenland side. The pack ice on the bay had ruptured, but it was very thick and clogged with icebergs. The noise of the ice grinding and grumbling on the chop was so loud that it was impossible to have a conversation without shouting. Now, it looks like the Charles River in Boston around springtime.

Here is a glacier on Disco Island, just 'cause it's awesome.

On Saturday, I decided to head to the VA complex next to UCLA to watch the Global Warming & America's Energy Future Presidential Forum. I guess you could include it among the unending barrage of presidential debates we're suffering through. Having caught just enough of the last Democratic debate on CNN to ruin an otherwise enjoyable dinner, I was was pleasantly surprised that this forum turned out to be rather interesting.

The panelists asked sharp questions, but there was no attempt to "get" the candidates. There was a refreshing absence of false dichotomies, litmus tests and provocations. They just asked difficult, technical questions. For example, Edwards said that we ought to essentially ban coal, but that coal miners should not be made to bare brunt of this economic realignment because the problem is not their fault. He was asked the obvious follow-on question : That means compensation. How do we pay for it?

And then something astonishing happened. Edwards answered the question directly, and the panelists let him. He'd already explained that to reduce emissions, we need some kind of carbon tax. It's estimated that such a system would raise about 20-40 billion dollars a year, depending on the details of implementation (which is up to Congress). This block of money would be divided among three goals; remediation of environmental damage, research, and helping people in "dirty" industries get new, better jobs.

The audience was very enthusiastic throughout, but the enthusiasm crested highest on the occasions when the panelists, candidates and moderator insulted CNN, particularly Tim Russert. I guess this reflects the fact that the only thing less popular than Congress is the Media. If Wolf Blitzer had walked onto the stage, he would have been booed out of the hall. Child molesters are more popular than the Media.

The candidates don't have to use FOX or CNN as their forum. There are lots and lots of nonpartisan issue-oriented groups that would happily host debates. The questions will be less stupid, and the format won't be designed to maximize catfighting. Issue-oriented groups will listen to answers longer than 15 seconds without getting bored, assuming the candidates stay more or less on topic.

The biggest surprise, for me anyway, was that I felt a lot more confident about Hillary after hearing her speak without an idiot media stooge nipping at her heels. She made it very clear that she understands the issue of climate change, and that she understands the need for bold action. She has some specific proposals, but they aren't really unique from what Edwards proposes -- not that I fault her for that. It's pretty obvious what needs to be done, so all the serious proposals will tend to look about the same. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, because her intelligence has never been in question.

The trouble I have with Hillary is not concern that she would make a good president. I think she would do a pretty good job. At least as good as her husband did, and probably better. She is smart and capable, and her priorities are pretty much right. The problem I have with her is that I think she would make and awful leader for the progressive movement. She represents a view -- "The perfect is the enemy of the good" she said during the forum -- that is immiscible with philosophical leadership. She would be a competent administrator. She would work hard and push for the right things. But I can't see her galvanizing a new progressive coalition. She would leave the Democratic party in the same state her husband left it; hollowed out and fractured.

The electorate is crackling with a punishing voltage of dissatisfaction, and it isn't any mystery what is pissing people off. There are very real, terrible problems facing our country. People have a whole menu of issues to be pissed off about -- climate change, our inept counterterrorism policies, income inequality, health care, a hostile international community, our diseased financial system, the trade imbalance, Iraq, and more. And Washington is doing nothing to fix this stuff. Nothing.

On one terminal, we have three hundred million Americans who like to get shit done, and on the other terminal, we have a few hundred politicians in Washington who aren't doing shit. The system has been charging up for a very, very long time. We need a president who will be a big fat wire between these two terminals. We need a way to pipe our collective dissatisfaction into Washington until its denizens either get to work or vaporize from the political scene. I can't see Hillary doing that. She is a natural insulator; her natural instincts are to mediate and compromise. That's very admirable, and in a different situation would be highly desirable. But if someone doesn't hook the terminals up, eventually the whole thing will short out and we can kiss democracy goodbye.

Maybe I'm wrong about Hillary. A lot of people are enthusiastic about her, and that's a good sign. It would be nice if she stopped undermining the progressive part of the party, and started beating up on the GOP for keeping Washington paralyzed.

Also, I think a lot of people fail to appreciate what a great thing Dennis Kucinich is doing for the party. First of all, he's not undermining the Democratic part by running in a third party, like Nader did. Second, by running boldly to the left of the pack, he is flanking the other candidates, making them harder to attack. It's safer for them to take liberal positions because they will still be moderate on any scale that includes Kucinich. This something that happens frequently in Republican primaries -- there is an unpopular fascist thug, and the other candidates look nice and moderate by defeating him. Not that Kucinich is an exact mirror of that picture. He would probably be a center-right candidate in most functioning democracies. This highlights how important it is for the Democratic party to have people like him.

Now, if we had a few actual Communists in Congress, like most democracies, then moderate liberal politicians would have lots of maneuvering room. The Democrats could hold up practically any serious proposal, and it would look conservative when contrasted with the lunatic position from the Communists. Single-payer healthcare? Look, it's better than Communism, don't you think? You don't want Communism, do you? Great, so vote for our plan.

Anyway, I'm pretty disappointed that Barak Obama didn't come to the event. It was very unfortunate.

For various reasons, a lot of people remain very skeptical about global warming. The most often cited (sane) reason for maintaining this skepticism is that the data has been patched together from many different sources, and that no single source of evidence conclusively demonstrates that global warming is occurring. With such a complicated argument, perhaps there are alternative explanations, one might wonder.

The important thing about global warming is that it is a theory, and thus it is falsifiable. If there are doubts about the validity of this theory, we can design an experiment that would reliably falsify the theory if it were, in fact, wrong. NASA has designed and built such an experiment, called Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR). It would sit at the L1 Lagrange point between the Earth and the Sun, where it can continuously observe the Earth's daylight side. From this vantage, it would calculate an accurate, up-to-the-minute energy budget for the whole planet. It would also collect detailed measurements of the atmospheric and surface composition of our planet.

If anthropic global warming is a bad theory, then DSCOVR would shoot it down in a hurry. On the other hand, if the theory is correct, as most climate scientists have concluded already, DSCOVR would provide us with simple, conclusive evidence gathered with uniform methodology.

But the global warming skeptics, or at least the ones in Congress, have never been interested in actually falsifying the theory. They were much happier wallowing in ignorance.

Republicans didn't buy it. In 1999, GOP Congressmen put the project on ice, calling it the "Goresat," a "multimillion-dollar screen saver." Dick Armey, then House Majority Leader, quipped, "This idea supposedly came from a dream. Well, I once dreamed I caught a 10-foot bass. But I didn't call up the Fish and Wildlife service and ask them to spend $30 million to make sure it happened."

Lost in the grandstanding was the critically important science behind DSCOVR. In January 2006, NASA quietly canceled DSCOVR altogether, citing "competing priorities." Many in the scientific community are incredulous that such an important mission might be lost to rank partisanship. "Gore favored it," says Dr. Park. "This administration is determined that a Gore experiment is not going to happen. It's inconceivable to me." Climate analyst Trenbeth said, "It makes no sense to me at all either from an economic or a scientific viewpoint. That leaves politics."

Science ran a letter from Francisco P. J. Valero titled Keeping the DSCOVR Mission Alive. I will quote the relevant part since most people don't have access to articles in Science :

Our proposal was selected by NASA after rigorous scientific and technical reviews. Solar activity observations were added at NASA's request to satisfy scientific needs and NOAA's operational requirements for space weather monitoring. DSCOVR is firmly based on the ideas developed by the science team. The transmission of live images of Earth added to the educational outreach component of the mission but was by no means the primary objective.

Many scientists, both in the United States and abroad, view DSCOVR as one of NASA's most important and innovative Earth science missions. The satellite has been built and could still be launched in time to provide synergistic data coincident with current and future orbiting systems. It offers great potential both as a source of fundamental scientific observations and as a pioneering Earth sciences mission from deep space.

France and the Ukraine have offered to launch it for us, but NASA has rebuffed their offers.

Next time you find yourself arguing with someone about global warming, tell them that the experiment to prove or disprove it, once and for all, was canned by Congress when the Republicans were running it. By their own admission, they canned it because they wanted to humiliate Al Gore. All we have to do is launch the damn thing, instead of letting it sit in a box at Goddard Space Flight Center at the cost of a million dollars a year.

Like coal and gas power stations, nuclear power plants are heat engines. They produce power by exploiting the difference in temperature between two heat reservoirs. When most people think of a nuclear power plant (or any heat engine, really) the component that naturally dominates one's attention is the hot reservoir -- the reactor. The reactor contains most of the clever science and engineering, so it commands attention. But it takes two reservoirs of comparable heat capacity to make a heat engine.

Surprisingly, though, the electricity production of a given power plant is usually not limited by the reactor. We know how to build staggeringly enormous reactors, and even small reactors can be designed to run extremely hot. Rather, the generating capacity is limited by the heat capacity of the cold reservoir, which is a function of the natural environment in which the power station is situated. Nuclear reactors are cooled by water, so the generating capacity of a nuclear power plant is directly proportional to the quantity and temperature of water available from the environment.

So, what happens when there is a drought? Or a heat wave? Or both? The heat capacity of the cold reservoir shrinks, and the generating capacity of the power plant shrinks with it. It doesn't matter how big and fancy the reactor is if there isn't enough cooling water.

The water in the Tennessee River has gotten so hot this summer -- more than 90 degrees Fahrenheit averaged over a day -- that the TVA was forced to shut down one of the reactors at Browns Ferry. The heat capacity of their cold reservoir has shrunk so much that they can only operate two of their three reactors. The TVA is already suffering from reduced production at their hydroelectric stations due to drought conditions.

The lesson here is that nuclear power isn't simply a solution to global warming. It a technology that is threatened by global warming.

I know that individual events, however strange, can't necessarily be attributed to global warming. But... A tornado in Brooklyn?

It looks like CO2 emissions between 2000 and 2004 have increased, which probably isn't a surprise, but the reason why emission have increased actually is surprising. New Scientist reports :

The team then examined the changes between 1980 and 2004 in factors such as population, economic growth, energy efficiency and carbon efficiency (the amount used per unit of GDP). From this, they were able to determine why CO2 emissions accelerated after 2000.

They concluded that the rise in CO2 emissions is not due to a growth in global population, but a reduction in global efficiency. "We are not getting more efficient at using CO2 in the way we projected," explains co-author Corinne Le Quéré from the University of East Anglia in the UK.

The predictions used to estimate how much CO2 we will spew are based on the assumption that we will pursue more efficient technology. This is a reasonable assumption to make, even if there were no environmental impacts to consider -- more efficient generating technology is more profitable to operate. Inefficiency is, after all, wasted money. No one thought that people would be so idiotic as to harm the environment and waste money.

Evidently, up until the year 2000, we were doing OK. Then, suddenly, there was a surge in CO2 production and a sag in efficiency. One might characterize it as a surge in stupidity.

Let's see... what happened in 2000 that might have caused a surge in net global stupidity?