It’s Not Just CO2

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Finally found the time this evening to tack a comment onto a post at Roger Pielke Sr.’s blog, in which he suggested the media hasn’t been writing about a new NAS report because it “is inconvenient for those who view the radiative effect of human-caused CO2 increases as the dominant forcing of climate change.”

Roger’s been flacking this report in his blog, and I finally felt needled enough by his complaint about a lack of media coverage to read it. (And by “read it,” I mean “read the executive summary.”) It raises some interesting issues that are relevant to the climate writing I’m trying to do – the need to better understand effects at the regional level.

He’s wrong, I think, to blame the lack of media coverage on some sort of bias in favor of a simplistic picture of CO2 forcing. That assumes greater sophistication on the part of the reporters covering this issue than I think is the case. The more likely explanation, as I suggested in the comments, is that it’s a nuanced report with no obvious “bang them over the head” take-home point. Or William Connolley’s explanation may the right one – that we’re just stupid: “The media wouldn’t have a clue what it was about.”

If I were to write about it, though, I’d have grabbed at something different than what I think Roger wants me to. The report suggests that some of the secondary climate forcings that are not terribly well understood, especially tropospheric aerosols and land use changes, are significant at a regional scale: “Improving societally relevant projections of regional climate impacts will require a better understanding of the magnitudes of regional forcings and the associated climate responses.”

As I’ve written before, I’m a consumer of climate science trying to help inform policy choices at the regional level. This is the sort of thing I need.

Ben Bernanke and the ERA

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I know precious little about monetary policy. But I am inclined to enthusiasm about Ben Bernanke’s nomination to replace Alan Greenspan after hearing this on NPR about what might be called the “Bernanke-Jaffee Theory” on baseball’s hallowed “earned run average.”

The ERA is a measure of the average number of runs a baseball pitcher would be expected to give up over a full nine inning game. It’s is calculated based on the number of runners a pitcher allows to reach base who eventually score. The rub, as Bernanke and former Princeton colleague Dwight Jaffee came to undertand, involves runners who reach base on a pitcher’s watch, but only score later after a relief pitcher has entered the game.

The run is charged to the first pitcher, and the second pitcher gets off scot-free. Yet it took both events for the run to score. The result is that relief pitchers tend to have artificially lower ERA’s, as measured by their actual contribution to runs being scored, while the starting pitchers’ ERA’s are artificially higher, as Jaffee explained in the NPR interview.

This is a reverse manifestation of another inefficiency in the baseball marketplace that has always annoyed me – the obsession with the Run Batted In. When a player gets a hit that allows a player already on base to score, he is credited with a Run Batted in. This is the manliest of baseball statistics – a high RBI total. Yet two discreet acts are required for this to happen, and the first, the guy who got in base in order to be driven in, receives little credit in the hagiography of baseball commentary. Their contribution to this total can be measured in simple runs scored, yet one almost never hears baseball announcers waxing poetic about a players’ runs scored total over the previous season.

The wacky Sabermetricians (baseball statistics junkies) have come up with all sorts of variants of a statistic called “runs created” (see here for a discussion) to try to come up with a more meaningful number. I don’t pretend to understand them any more than I understand monetary policy. I just try to keep track of how many runs a player has scored. It’s a reasonable measure. But I fear we’re stuck with the ERA.

Inkstain Administrivia

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There was a great house ad that they ran on the front page of the South Pasadena Review once years ago when I lived there that had the phone number for you to call if you didn’t get your paper. It occurred to me that if I didn’t get the paper, I wouldn’t have had the number to call.

With that in mind, I’m posting now to explain that, if all goes well this evening, this blog will be converted to WordPress (so William and Ken can post comments). The practical importance of this is that those of you reading via RSS feeds will need to point to a new location. I’ll attempt to keep the old links working via a symlinks, but given my modest technical abilities, if you see posting on this blog drop to zero, you might wanna check your feed, as it is very unlikely that I simply had nothing to say.

If, on the other hand, you’ve been looking for an excuse to drop my feed, now’s your chance.

Climate Change Effects

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So the planet’s warming? So what’s so bad about that?

The question is trickier than it sounds, because in addition to being a noisy bit of the Climate Wars argy-bargy, it’s a big source of uncertainty for policy makers trying to understand what sort of adaption will be required and what sort of mitigation should be undertaken.

The problem is that there’s actually precious little data about how bad it really might be – where might crops whither and where might they prosper, and what’s the net difference? Where might water supplies dwindle, and where might they increase?

This afternoon in Science Express, a team led by Dagmar Schr?ter at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research published a serious and useful look at the question for Europe, matching up climate models with economic scenarious to try to get a clearer picture of impacts over the next century. Especially significant was what they called “water stress,” with lots of people living in places that in the future may not have enough water to support them the way they live today. Cropland declines significantly, and forest fires go up:

Among all European regions, the Mediterranean appeared most vulnerable to global change. Multiple potential impacts were projected, related primarily to increased temperatures and reduced precipitation. The impacts included water shortages, increased risk of forest fires, northward shifts in the distribution of typical tree species, and losses of agricultural potential. Mountain regions also seemed vulnerable because of a rise in the elevation of snow cover and altered river runoff regimes.

Not for sure the last word on the question(s), but a useful one nevertheless.

Phenotypic Plasticity

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I just got around to reading a fascinating news story and research paper in the Oct. 14 Science about biological response to climate change.

One can imagine a biological need for plants and animals to respond to changing climate. So as it gets warmer, for example, evolutionary pressure might favor birds that lay their eggs sooner in the spring. But Daniel Nussey and a team at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology and the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology found a much more interesting and subtle thing happening with a Dutch population of Parus major – the great tit.

For Parus major, climate change is a problem. As Elizabeth Pennisi explained in the Science news piece, the birds time their egg-laying so the chicks hatch when there are gobs of caterpillars to eat. With climate warming, that happens sooner in the year.

One can easily imagine a rather simple drift resulting, favoring earlier egg-layers. But the researchers found something more complex going on. The birds were evolving toward a greater “plasticity” in their egg-laying behavior. Rather than a fixed genetic switch that allowed them to lay eggs earlier, evolution was favoring birds that seemed to have more flexibility in their egg-laying in response to changes in climate. As Pennisi put it:

Most of the birds did not adapt and maintained their original schedule, and the numbers of surviving offspring have begun to decline. But there were some exceptions. Even in the 1980s, some individuals altered their behavior in accordance with the climate, laying eggs earlier in the warm years and later in the cool years. These climate-attuned females have twice as many surviving offspring.

Bugmenot Bugs Me

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When I’m cruising for nuke news for my NukeBeat blog, I am frequently annoyed at news web site registration. Here’s what I do: I register if I really want to read the story, or else (more frequently) I just blow it off.

Why don’t I simply use BugMeNot? Because it’s a violation for me of a pretty simple and quite effective principle of effective and sustainable human interaction. They’ve got something I want, and they ask for something in return. If I don’t want to give, I’ve no reasonable expectation that I should get. Why has this simple ethical principle, which is so usefully expected and honored in our face-to-face interactions, been so freely abandoned by such a large segment of the ‘Net community?

Look, a little sheepish BugMeNotting is no huge deal. This isn’t like genocide or something. But I’m frankly amazed at the brazen argument the BugMeNotters make (laid out in arrogant detail in a comment thread over at Poynter and in their own FAQ) – registration is bad – “waste of time,” “annoying as hell,” “breach of privacy.” But rather than just walk away from the deal, they argue this justifies cheating.

That’s a bad basis for sustainable human interaction.

Sox in Four. Please.

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I had the same conversation with a couple of different friends recently, baseball fans whose teams were long gone from the fall competition:

Me: “Have you decided who to root for in The Series?”

Them: “Sox. For Jim.”

They said it with a tone that suggested the choice was obvious, and needed no further explanation.

Our friend Jim is one of the best baseball fans I know, with a reverance for a good changeup and a great pick at second base. He’s also from the south side of Chicago, a White Sox fan deep in his childhood, in his genes, from the days (do these days still exist?) when The Ballgame on the radio was the soundtrack of summer. This matters to him in ways that most of us could never understand.

When the Sox made the series, he began calling around, hunting for tickets. There were none to be had in Chicago for anything less than a second mortgage on the house. But he called me yesterday afternoon to tell me he’d scored a pair for tonight’s game 4 in Houston.

I harbor no illusions about the baseball gods. They are not as one Almighty, choosing sides, that we might pray they choose Jim’s. They’re more like the Greek gods, squabbling and divisive. To watch a World Series is to watch their struggle play out.

Tonight, I will pray to those among the baseball gods who have seen Jim’s worthiness lo these many years, who understand what it means to see him sitting field level, 13 rows back down the right field line.

When he told me where the seats are, he said, “Foul ball territory. I’ll have to keep my head in the game.” I’ve never known him to do anything else. Baseball gods, I beseech thee, in the name of thy loyal servant Jim.