Mickey Glantz, a scholar whose work on societal-climate interactions has informed much of my thinking on these issues, has landed at the University of Colorado after his unfortunate departure from NCAR. Details on Prometheus.
Affixing Blame
WQ:
Massive amounts of money flowed into the United States because the Bush administration produced absurd deficits through an utter lack of discipline and ill-advised tax cuts in a time of war. Then we asked foreign investors and governments to buy our debt to finance our lack of discipline. Thomas Friedman has made a convincing case more than once that the Bush White House has never once asked the country to sacrifice anything to prosecute his war.
Go read the whole thing.
Defining Drought
If it happens every year, is it a drought?
Severe drought and prolonged water shortages have hit the hamlet and the surrounding area with such a regularity that the villagers, like Sarikuma, have almost lost hope of finding an effective solution to the problem.
“The dry season always brings a drought, which in turn leads to a water shortage. It is a regular cycle for us,” said the head of Munti Gunung hamlet, Ketut Karya.
It’s worth remembering Kelly Redmond’s definition of drought, which encompasses both climatological variability and the way human systems respond. From the August 2002 BAMS: “insufficient water to meet needs.” Facing a drought situation in an entirely predictable annual drought situation is clearly a human failure, not a climatological one, but whatever you call it, these people don’t have enough water.
Gasoline Shortages
EIA reported today that gasoline supplies remain thin despite that vague notion we all had that the hurricanes are so very last week:
[G]asoline inventories have declined to record low levels. At 179 million barrels, total motor gasoline inventories stand at the lowest level since 1967, based on monthly EIA data. Continuing reports of spot shortages of gasoline at some retail outlets where supplies have been most disrupted can be expected over the next several weeks.
Albuquerque Blogosphere Just Got Smarter
You’ll see a new link in the blogroll over on the right to Winthrop Quigley’s blog. Win’s a colleague at the Journal, a business writer who is very much part of my critical brain trust. His desk is the one I wander to first when I have a question about economics, but his range of interests goes far beyond economics. Not sure which category to put him in, but I’m happy he’s writing.
An Order of Magnitude for the Poor Folk
I don’t really understand what the $700 billion being discussed as a bailout for the mortgage/credit mess means, but here’s a nice benchmark for purpose of comparison:
At the start of Monday’s meeting, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the world’s rich nations to spend $72 billion a year to help Africa achieve U.N. goals to fight poverty, improve health and ensure universal primary education.
Markets and China’s Energy Consumption
Qiang Wang of the Chinese of Academy of Sciences had a letter in the 29 August Science magazine (behind paywall) about the critical issue of energy subsidies in China.
Rising global energy prices have caused a drop in consumption in the United States, but in China, not so much:
Source: EIA
You can see that higher global energy prices have only barely dented consumption in China. Wang argues that China’s energy subsidies are a big part of the problem:
China’s energy prices are mainly decided and controlled by the government. Because the government emphasizes social stability (1) over scarcity of resources or environmental cost (2), it sets the energy prices very low. For example, Chinese gasoline and diesel prices rose by less than 10% (3) in 2007, when global oil price nearly doubled. Moreover, in January 2008, the Chinese government decided to freeze energy prices in the near term, even as international crude oil futures have continued to surge (1).
Energy conservation and efficiency are hard to achieve because government-set prices encourage excessive energy consumption and waste (4). The low energy prices send a distorted market signal to consumers that there is no shortage of natural resources, indicating that enhancing energy efficiency is unnecessary and waste is justified. In 2007, sales of cars with large engines (3 to 4 liters) increased by a factor of 4.5 compared to sales in 2006, and SUV sales increased by 50.09%. Meanwhile, sales of more energy-efficient cars with smaller engines (1 liter) dropped by 30.90%, also compared to 2006 sales (5).
One of the key global problems in aligning energy consumption and production is the allocation problem caused by government subsidies in places like China.
Google Fun
I’m intrigued to find that Inkstain is the number one hit for “does andys pawn shop have guitars in fairfield”.
Hunting Flickers
I awoke before dawn this morning to the sound of the neighborhood birds waking up. It’s still warm enough to leave the windows open at night, but cool enough that we’ve started adding blankets to ward off the 5 a.m. chill. This morning there was a bird sound unusual enough to get my attention.
They say that skilled birders identify more by sound than by sight, but I’m only beginning to acquire the listening skills, so they feel clumsy and confusing. I tried to lie quietly and listen.
After a bowl of oatmeal and some stark newsreading, I took my coffee, binoculars and bird book out in the backyard to see if I could see what was making that intriguing sound. It was in the 60s F (maybe 17C), cool enough that I was glad I had my sweatshirt but not unhappy to be able to still go out barefoot in the morning.
There were the usual house finches and a couple of house sparrows – fewer than I have on summer mornings, but enough to entertain. The finches hop around in the high branches of the neighbors’ giant elm, and particularly love the very topmost branch of a tree a couple of houses away, front-lit against the blue morning sky to the west. In the distance to the west, I could see an occasional flight of pigeons. They never come to my house, but I often see them flying a few blocks away, some sort of commuting corridor between trash bins perhaps.
Sadie came out with me, as she does when I go out in the morning to watch the birds. While I sit and sip coffee, she has a patrol routine. This morning there was something particularly interesting in the pile of concrete blocks on the north side of the yard that required a great deal of sniffing attention. I imagined some small cowering rodent hiding in the fortress of spaces created by the voids in the pile, a giant dog nose poking perilously close to its pocket of safety. No rodent ever spotted, Sadie eventually lost interest and extended the range of her patrol.
Eventually, I heard what the Cornell people describe as a “peah” followed by the loud “”wik-wik-wik” – the sounds I had heard as I lay in bed. I had flickers on my mind, because Lissa and I had caught a glimpse of one down by the river yesterday, zooming from one cottonwood to the next. We have them here year round, but the number of sightings goes way up this time of year.
They were in the big elm somewhere, but the tree is mostly hiding place, not visible perch, and I didn’t get a glimpse until something relatively large (larger certainly than my little finches) took flight, with a dark tail and the barest glimpse of rust color as it streaked over my head and out of sight. I keep straining my ears to hear it again, hoping for a better look.
Eventually, I realized the last quarter of my coffee had gone cold.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus
There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an
imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated
the peer-reviewed literature even then.