Global Warming Somehow Contributing to Home Runs in Texas

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From the Guardian:

“Global warming?” he sniffed. “Well, whatever.”

Kinsler did appear to agree, however, that the conditions are subtly changing at the Ballpark. “It depends on where you hit the ball and what time of year it is,” said Kinsler. “Rudy is right in that balls you think you tagged will sometimes get knocked down at the warning track. But a lot of days early in the season, the ball jumps to center field, then by June, from the edge of the berm all the way around past our bullpen [in right field], you can go for several weeks at a time when anything hit in the air will fly out of there.”

(h/t Dan McKay)

Elephant Diaries: On Feeling Outnumbered

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We’ve always been outnumbered. It’s getting worse:

Packs of lobbyists fill two rooms outside the House and Senate chambers in Richmond every afternoon, watching the proceedings on big video screens, zapping legislators with e-mails the instant the lobbyists sense that one of their bills might be in trouble. The interest groups that hire lobbyists can rest easy; they’ve got the legislature covered.

Down the hall, the people’s representatives have a hangout of their own, the press room. But there, nearly half the desks are empty. Reporters have been called home, reassigned, bought out, laid off. Only one TV station in Virginia still has a reporter at the capital. Many newspapers have decided to cover the capital by phone, if at all.

(h/t Jim Belshaw)

The Dance of the Gasoline Prices

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Clearing out some old piles of reading material, I ran across an old CBO report from a year ago on gasoline prices. It seems so long ago, my obsession with elasticities (short term and long) and the effect of rising energy prices on behavior large and small.

Many drivers have responded to higher gasoline prices in the way that they drive, but overall the response has been very small.

Petroleum consumption

Petroleum consumption

Let’s check in, shall we, just for old times’ sake, on US petroleum consumption. I never tire of this graph, as our consumption falls off a cliff. You can seem consumption leveling off there in that cloud of dots during 2007, and beginning to drop in the first half of 2008. That’s the result of the price increase. Modest, as the CBO study notes. Then – yikes! Off a cliff. That discontinuity is on the demand side, unrelated to prices, because we are (or feel) broke.

Here, I’ll show you what I mean:

personal consumption spending

personal consumption spending

Spring?

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Spring?

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

I’ve got work to do this afternoon, but I’m completely distracted by the show outside. It’s been so dry here that I had to turn on some water in the backyard. That’s drawn the birds like nutso – juncos, sparrows and house finches mostly, but I saw a couple lesser goldfinches in the neighbor’s elm tree (which is starting to leaf out).

The picture is from the window in my home office. There’s a little house finch splashing ’round in the bird bath like he hasn’t seen rain in two months.

The lilacs are starting to leaf out too, and we saw a hawk swoop low from southeast to northwest as we were sitting in the back munching lunch. Official Inkstain Daughter Nora dropped by unannounced on a long walk. There are few things better in life than having your kiddo drop in and spending some leisurely unplanned time in the backyard listening to birds, moving a sprinkler around and chatting with your offspring.

As you can tell, though, I’m back at the computer. The work will commence. But the window’s open and I can still hear the birds.

It’s All About the Water

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It all comes down to water:

Two-thirds of the world’s population will face a lack of water in less than 20 years, if current trends in climate change, population growth, rural to urban migration and consumption continue, United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro warned today.

Worth noting that, given climate change commitment, only three of those four, involving the demand side of water, are actionable on a 20-year time scale. We’d better get on it.

(h/t David Zetland, whose answer of course, is markets!)

In Defense of Walter Sullivan

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When I was trying to learn the craft of writing about the earth, a geologist who was serving as my guide said I had to read Walter Sullivan’s Continents in Motion. The book was a revelation to me – for the skill with which Sullivan explained the science of plate tectonics, but more importantly for the nuance with which he explained how science works: the fits and starts, the struggle to find data, the even greater struggle to find theory to structure and think about what that data is telling us.

Walter Sullivan

Walter Sullivan

Which is why I was so saddened to see the glib trashing of Sullivan’s work by a know-nothing columnist today in one of those east coast dailies, out by Baltimore. The columnist accused Sullivan, the New York Times science writer who is in many ways the pioneer of our craft, of being “a megaphone for the alarmed” for his coverage of climate in a May 1975 article:

the New York Times was — as it is today in a contrary crusade — a megaphone for the alarmed, as when (May 21, 1975) it reported that “a major cooling of the climate” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950.”

How could Walter Sullivan have gotten it so wrong?

The answer is, he didn’t. Watch those selective quotes, there, Mr. Columnist!

Here, in fact, is what Sullivan actually wrote. We’ll start, shall we, wtih the first sentence:

The world’s climate is changing. Of that scientists are firmly convinced. But in what direction and why are subjects of deepening debate.

You really don’t need to go beyond that to realize Mr. Columnist has misquoted the late Walter Sullivan, who died in 1996 and is therefore not around to defend himself. But read on, because Sullivan’s great. He goes on to capture, in a piece better than any I have read, the rich texture of the science of the day:

Lack of agreement as to the factors that control climate change make it particularly difficult to assess current trends. Of major importance, therefore, is the debate as to the cause of such changes and the role of human activity in bringing them about.

Among the issues discussed: solar energy variations that could contribute to the ebb and flow of ice ages, new understanding of ice ages and the possibility of cooling because of aerosol pollution, but also the possible confounding factor of increasing greenhouse gases:

Carbon dioxide in the air acts like glass in a greenhouse. It permits solar energy to reach the earth as visible light, but it impedes the escape of that energy into space in the form of heat radiation (at infrared wave lengths).

I spent a great deal of time recently studying climate science during that time period (see here for the result). If newspaper journalism is the first draft of history, Sullivan’s work needs very little editing. It is anything but a megaphone of global cooling alarm, but rather a rich account of the complex science of the day.