CapitalistImperialistPig

My wack job friends the climate deniers have found a new problem to worry about: underpopulation. They are now worrying about "Demographic Winter:" The problem, it seems, is that nowadays girls just want to have fun, instead of fulfilling their biblically anointed function as brood cows. Or maybe they are worried about those still breeding Asians and Africans crowding out God's people.

H. sapiens, having killed off or at least survived all his close cousins, has occupied almost every ecology on Earth. We sometimes forget that almost none of these would be habitable without technology. Our most basic problem since leaving the African plains has been staying warm. The technological solution was clothing and shelter. Without these our ecological range would shrink by an enormous extent, and without them in the past, we would probably never have expanded much beyond Africa. Global warming presents a new series of challenges. Some of them are probably irresistible, like the drowning of significant coastal land. Others are problems for which solutions are already known. In the United States the most significant movement of the past 70 years has been the movement from cold climates into the South. This is primarily due to air conditioning, and especially, refrigerated air. Without them, the area around Phoenix Arizona would be almost unlivable. With them, it'...

Our war on drugs has been a huge failure, and the centuries old war on prostitution has been little better. Nonetheless, I am less than enthusiastic about legalization. The anti-drug and anti-prostitution laws were put in place because of the real evils that drugs and prostitution produced, and those evils haven't gone away. Rachel Moran, who was prostituted at age fifteen in Ireland, pushes back against the current push by Amnesty International and others to legalize sex work in this NYT Op-ed: I entered the sex trade — as most do — before I was even a woman. At age 14, I was placed in the care of the state after my father committed suicide and because my mother suffered from mental illness. Within a year, I was on the streets with no home, education or job skills. All I had was my body. At 15, I met a young man who thought it would be a good idea for me to prostitute myself. As “fresh meat,” I was a commodity in high demand. For seven years, I was bought and sold. On the ...

I'm not one of those centrists so despised by Paul Krugman who thinks that the truth always lies in the middle, even though the Central Limit Theorem suggests that it usually does. I did find it interesting that the short excerpt from Michael L. Bender's Paleoclimate drew attacks from a horde of denialists (mostly not on this site) and at least one "climate alarmist" as the deniers like to style us. One whom I greatly respect, by the way. If an article is despised by both sides it might just mean that the author is an ignorant asshole. That's not the case with Bender. He is a giant of Paleoclimatology, with a forest of papers and many thousands of citations for directly related work. He has a perspective based on a deep study of past climate change. It appears to me that those paragraphs drew scorn from the denier crowd because he asserts that human emission of CO2 can have large consequences for our climate. Eli was outraged, I guess, because Bender wasn...

I thought it was going to be about photon-lepton scattering, but it was still pretty good. Of course I had trouble keeping track of all the characters, so it probably helps to have a Rolodex of your West Coast rappers handy for reference. It also seems I might need a bit of Ebonics training to decipher both lyrics and dialog. The story of NWA, told from the perspective of a couple of key players.

I guess I've been bored, because I've been arguing with the climate change denialists again. Most of those I talk to are actually quite well-informed. They know a great deal. The only problem is that much of what they know isn't so. One of the things that always strikes me is their reaction to evidence. Any contrary evidence, even or perhaps especially if it's published in a major journal is dismissed as part of the conspiracy. Argument or evidence fitting their prejudices, on the other hand, is accepted as gold even if it comes from a teen-aged half-wit with a blog (poetic exaggeration, maybe). Anosognosia - "lack of insight" or "lack of awareness" - is believed to be the single largest reason why individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder do not take their medications. A result of anatomical damage to the brain, it affects approximately 50% of individuals with schizophrenia and 40% of individuals with bipolar disorder. Dealing with...

Paul Krugman, writing in the NYT , points out that the recent market turbulence triggered by China is part of a pattern of instability. But why does the world economy keep stumbling? On the surface, we seem to have had a remarkable run of bad luck. First there was the housing bust, and the banking crisis it triggered. Then, just as the worst seemed to be over, Europe went into debt crisis and double-dip recession. Europe eventually achieved a precarious stability and began growing again — but now we’re seeing big problems in China and other emerging markets, which were previously pillars of strength. But these aren’t just a series of unrelated accidents. Instead, what we’re seeing is what happens when too much money is chasing too few investment opportunities. More than a decade ago, Ben Bernanke famously argued that a ballooning U.S. trade deficit was the result, not of domestic factors, but of a “global saving glut”: a huge excess of savings over investment in China and other de...

How should we view the prospect of anthropogenic climate change? From the perspective of paleoclimate, it might not be particularly troubling, or even seem unwelcome. The present world is good enough for human habitation. However, it would improve if Greenland and Antarctica were unglaciated and habitable, and if there was more rainfall in areas that are currently deserts. For humans, in other words, the world might be more habitable if conditions resembled the high CO2 equable climates of the Cretaceous, Paleocene, and Eocene. The problem of anthropogenic global change, then, is not necessarily that we are heading for a less habitable planet. The problem is that both natural ecosystems and civilizations are aligned to the historic pattern of climate and water resources. Global warming will destroy this alignment is some regions. The most obvious example is sea level rise, which will render regions uninhabitable that are now occupied by tens or hundreds of millions of p...

During the Pleistocene Ice Ages, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere dropped by about 100 ppm relative to pre-industrial values. This drop intensified and perhaps prolonged them due to the decreased greenhouse effect (about 2 C of the 6 C cooling associated with the ice ages). Increased solubility of CO2 in the Ocean due to cooling is a large and obvious effect, but it is roughly balanced by two opposite effects: decreased solubility due to increase salinity and the destruction of biologically incorporated carbon by glaciers and increased aridity of the continents. Three other effects seem to play the crucial role. First, the biological pump that rains carbonate shells on the sea floor appears to have been more effective during ice ages, due multiple effect, possibly including transport of more iron laden dust into the Southern Ocean. Second, the rate of ocean overturning seems to have slowed, allowing CO2 to spend more time in the depths, and finally, the oceans appear to have b...

80% of my brain is song lyrics. Most of the other 27% is celebrity gossip. Doesn't leave much room for math.

Every year or so I travel to Montana, a journey that requires me to travel on several of the hated Canadian Regional Aeiro Planoes, or CRAP jets. These only slightly expanded cigar tubes with wings help put the travail back in travel, at least for non midgets. Frequently the stewardess greets me as I enter the door, invariably causing me to look up and hit my head on the sill. Hunching down, I crawl/stumble to my seat and, after managing to cram my minature (I seem to recall that it holds my toothbrush and a spare pair of socks) carry-on into the hobbit scale overhead bin, attempt to cram my troll-sized body into one of those seats originally designed for kindergarten use. The US/Canada border is often called the World's longest undefended border. Clearly this presents a nearly ideal situation for invasion and colonization. We could seize their assets (comedians, the health care system, the Perimeter Institute and all the provinces except Quebec) and probably make a profit on...