Category Archives: Web Article Review

weather forecasting history

I recently wrote about earthquake forecasting and how many scientists think it is essentially impossible. But it is interesting to compare that with the state of weather forecasting in the 1800s:

Before the Royal Charter storm, FitzRoy had been agitating in London for government funding for collection of weather data. He and other Victorian men of meteorology knew that the more they could parse what the weather had done in the past, the better they could warn what it might do in the future. FitzRoy called the concept “forecasting.” To show just how ludicrous that idea seemed at the time, Moore unearths a telling 1854 Commons debate. When a scientifically enthusiastic member of Parliament suggested that amassing weather observations from sea and land could someday mean “we might know in this metropolis the condition of the weather 24 hours beforehand,” laughter broke out raucously enough to stop the proceeding.

Trump’s Banana Republic

Here’s what Fareed Zakariah had to say about the Republican Convention.

Over the years, I have watched campaigns in third world countries in which one candidate accuses the other of being a criminal, sometimes even threatening to jail his opponent once elected. But I cannot recall this happening in any Western democracy until this week. The Republican convention has been colorful and chaotic, but above all, it has been consumed by a vigilante rage, complete with mock prosecutors, show trials and chanting mobs. The picture presented to the world has been of America as a banana republic.

We have descended so far so fast that it is sometimes difficult to remember that this is not normal. It was only eight years ago that the Republican nominee, John McCain, interrupted one of his supporters who claimed that Barack Obama was an Arab and thus suspicious to explain that his opponent was in fact “a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”

Contrast that with the tenor of this campaign, which has been set from the top by Donald Trump, who has repeatedly insisted that Hillary Clinton deserves to be in jail. He even promised that were he elected, his attorney general would reopen the books and “take a very good look” at possibly indicting her, himself having concluded that she is “guilty as hell.” That might have happened in a Latin American country — 30 years ago.

earthquake prediction

Here’s an interesting article on earthquake prediction. Basically, it has eluded scientists so far and will probably continue to do so.

Since the early 20th century, scientists have known that large quakes often cluster in time and space: 99 percent of them occur along well-mapped boundaries between plates in Earth’s crust and, in geological time, repeat almost like clockwork. But after decades of failed experiments, most seismologists came to believe that forecasting earthquakes in human time—on the scale of dropping the kids off at school or planning a vacation—was about as scientific as astrology. By the early 1990s, prediction research had disappeared as a line item in the USGS’s budget. “We got burned enough back in the 70s and 80s that nobody wants to be too optimistic about the possibility now,” says Terry Tullis, a career seismologist and chair of the National Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council (NEPEC), which advises the USGS.

Defying the skeptics, however, a small cadre of researchers have held onto the faith that, with the right detectors and computational tools, it will be possible to predict earthquakes with the same precision and confidence we do just about any other extreme natural event, including floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes. The USGS may have simply given up too soon. After all, the believers point out, advances in sensor design and data analysis could allow for the detection of subtle precursors that seismologists working a few decades ago might have missed.

And the stakes couldn’t be higher. The three biggest natural disasters in human history, measured in dollars and cents, have all been earthquakes, and there’s a good chance the next one will be too. According to the USGS, a magnitude 7.8 quake along Southern California’s volatile San Andreas fault would result in 1,800 deaths and a clean-up bill of more than $210 billion—tens of billions of dollars more than the cost of Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill combined.

 

The Art of the Deal

It turns out Donald Trump didn’t write The Art of the Deal all by himself. Here’s what the guy who actually wrote it has to say in The New Yorker:

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”

ecological landscaping

I recent linked to an article by Odum on ecological landscaping, or sustainable gardening, or whatever you want to call it. Her article linked to a number of other articles in the mainstream press. These are the articles I would share with friends and neighbors if they were to express an interest (or quite possibly, skepticism) about my own gardening methods. I’ll grab an interesting paragraph from each. The articles also have lots of interesting pictures and links to even more articles.
“Outgrowing the Traditional Grass Lawn” from Scientific American

Experimenting with alternatives to grass lawns does not require banishing turfgrass altogether, however. As Smith’s research underscores, turfgrass has a useful property not easily matched by other plants: its impressive material resilience. Grass tolerates a lot of trampling without dying and will spring back when compressed by cleats and lounging people’s backsides. Some scientists are currently focusing on how to make regions of private lawns and public green spaces more attractive to native pollinators, without uprooting a lawn altogether. Emily Dobbs of the University of Kentucky and her colleagues visit golf courses in the state and persuade the managers to transform some out of the way spots into wild habitat by planting a mix of perennial, native, low-maintenance wildflowers that bloom from April to October—coneflowers, columbines, black-eyed susans, clover, hyssop, and goldenrod, for example. The owners of five golf courses, including one belonging to Marriott Hotels and Resorts, have agreed so far—and the results are astounding.

“What is Sustainable Landscaping?” from Daily Kos

A landscape based on a small palette of non-native species supports less than 10% of the insect species needed to sustain native birds (Bringing Nature Home). Replacing these landscapes with a diversity of native trees, shrubs, grasses and wildflowers supports the hundreds of species of native insects needed to sustain birds and other organisms such as frogs, toads, lizards, and bats, which help control annoying or dangerous insects such as flies and mosquitoes.  It also links together an increasingly fragmented landscape that isolates natural areas between areas of biological desert.

“It’s come to this, yards are the next frontier of conservation” from Fusion

Native plants boost insect populations significantly, Louderman said.

“In your backyard, if you have just a lawn and non-native plants, you’d find just about a dozen species of native insects. If you have native plants, you can usually find hundreds of almost all native and beneficial insects,” Louderman said.

These are not bad or dangerous insects, Louderman pointed out. In fact, the honeybee is the only one that might sting a human.

intelligence?

According to TheWeek.com, the “Turkey coup attempt was a surprise in diplomatic and intelligence circles, says House Homeland Security Committee member“.

Is this a rare lapse by the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence establishment? No, if you believe Tim Weiner’s book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Using mostly primary sources and declassified government documents, he makes a surprising but very strong case that the CIA was never very good at spying. This is why major historical events like the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 have caught our government completely by surprise, and why we have had trouble competently prosecuting wars from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq. The government and military just don’t have an accurate picture of what is going on or an understanding of the complex cultures and conflicts they are dealing with, and it leads to disaster. The CIA is pretty good at buying intelligence from allies that are good at spying on their neighbors, like Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, South Korea, etc., which explains our strong ties to many of these countries. So it is not too surprising that if something is going on inside one these countries itself, we would not be the first to know.

the fall of the U.S. republic?

This article on History News Network compares the current state of the United States to the Roman Republic a few decades before it fell.

By the second century B.C., the Romans believed they had achieved the ideal state: a republic with strong checks and balances that provided a voice for the common people while limiting the dangers of direct democracy. By the mid 140s B.C., victories in foreign wars had led to a massive expansion of Roman power. It seemed the Republic — stable, powerful, and immensely wealthy — would last forever.

But things changed. The economy transformed as Roman power expanded across the Mediterranean. As Rome began to import cheap grain from North Africa in quantities previously unimagined in the ancient world, grain prices plunged. Domestic small farmers were squeezed out of the market and off their lands. Rich landowners snapped up land from these struggling farmers, incorporating these plots into giant plantations worked by slaves from newly conquered territories. Many of these land acquisitions were illegal — but the plebeians were powerless to stop them. Forced to compete against slave labor and facing a nascent form of corporatization that favored the wealthy, the plebeians felt that they were cast aside as Rome ascended to greatness.

In response to these changes, the plebeians voted a slew of populist politicians to power. These politicians were called Populares. While some Populares genuinely sought to uplift the plebeian class, others learned to harness the power of the people in a cynical ploy for power.

– See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/163207#sthash.FccCVUPn.dpuf

Could the U.S. form of government really fall? I am not predicting that but I can envision a scenario where it is plausible. Let’s say a completely incompetent leader gets elected by the people (I’m not naming any names) and orders the military to do something so egregious it refuses to carry out the order. At that point, the Constitution would no longer be functioning, so what then? Congress could act quickly to impeach the President to maintain the appearance of order, while the military could temporarily maintain order until the Vice President or another civilian leader could be installed according to the letter of the Constitution. But if that sort of thing kept happening, the Constitution would be weakened each time until one day the civilian government might cease to exist. Sound far-fetched? Maybe, but within the realm of plausibility. Throw in some serious natural or industrial disasters, terrorist attacks, or major geopolitical conflicts and it could put even more strain on our system.

Mary Odum vs. Lawns

Here Mary Odum, Howard T. Odum’s daughter, talks about “a prosperous way down“. If someone named Odum thinks we are going down, there is a good chance we are. It’s pretty depressing stuff that seems like an individual could have little impact on, but later she suggests that doing away with your lawn is a good first step.

Many chaotic current compete for our attention, yet the speed with which they are occurring suggests we are in an era of tipping points. How does one describe the collapse of an empire—where do we start with so much chaos in the world, and a global world view that promotes the mandate for economic growth? Do we begin with politics, or culture, or the financial system, pollution, or even renewable energy? Those competing current events are all related, but only if we use systems thinking to view the picture at a larger scale. The focus of most people on single causes such as climate change, or politics, or tech-happy solar futures, is comforting, since reductionism to single cause issues creates solutions such as adding technology (and thus more energy and pollution) allows us to keep on with our lifestyles. We tell ourselves (or we read too much Grist or Treehugger who tell us) that we don’t have to do anything except to buy more technology—we can keep what we’ve got, and the problems lie at the larger scale with us as helpless victims. We can buy a Prius, or a solar panel, and just keep on trucking, while blaming a powerful other, such as a presidential candidate, or Exxon, when it is the entire system, including us, who is responsible. Voting for one political party or the other is inadequate. Staying quiet while xenophobia and gun violence takes hold of your country is inadequate. Focusing on single cause environmentalist issues is not enough.

Reductionism closes the conversation to the real problem of growth, and the big picture, creating denial and a comforting absolution to Business as Usual (BAU). Reductionism allows us to fit in culturally to a world whose religion is economic growth, but it is a form of self-deceit. Our mandate that insists on the economic need for growth has to change in order for us to accept our personal responsibilities in all of this, and not blame our problems on scapegoats or find solutions that just make things worse.

I pretty much agree with all this. It’s not that the ideal concept of “growth” or improvement in our standard of living is wrong at its core. There is no theoretical limit to how much we could improve ourselves. But as long as we are dependent on planet Earth and its resources, there is a physical limit to how large our ecological footprint can grow without causing overshoot and collapse. Some technologies enable us to reduce our footprint per person or per joule of energy used or per dollar exchanged in the course of our economic lives, but when we adopt these technologies we often just take it as an opportunity to add more people, use more energy and exchange more dollars. And of course, not all technologies reduce our unit footprint – many increase it. In aggregate, our footprint is continuing to grow, most likely at an accelerating pace. There are only two possible endpoints – either a serious setback that forcibly reduces our footprint for us (like, god forbid, catastrophic war/plague/famine), or a turning point in technology/policy that allows us to begin shrinking our footprint while still improving ourselves. While the latter is theoretically possible, I don’t see any evidence that we are anywhere near it. Instead, we pat ourselves on the back for small reductions in our footprint per unit of growth, or even a reduction in the rate of growth of our rate of growth! For example, a reduction in our annual carbon emissions, despite the fact that they are too high and every year they are too high makes the situation worse, not better. That’s not the system thinking that H.T. Odum advocated.

Which brings me to Mary’s lawn. Ecological gardening is one of those “simple things you can do to save the Earth”. Not sufficient, but necessary. So let’s do it!

We can be the change, beginning today. Plant trees, as they take a long time to grow. Convert your lawn to native plants. Stop irrigating, except for watering new plantings by hand. Stop using fertilizers and pesticides. Begin building soil instead of depleting it. Compost on your property, Return hardscapes to permeable surfaces, and use rain barrels and rain gardens to limit runoff. Use a corner to plant an organic vegetable garden if there’s room and sun, to add to your sustainability. Foster a complete ecosystem for the critters. And finally, talk to your neighbors and friends about the changes and why you’re doing them. While you’re at it, talk to the person who manages your kid’s soccer field, or the golf course. Why are you letting your children roll around on a carpet of pesticides, or eat food grown by a poison-maker?

NAFTA, Appalachia, and Trump

This article caught my eye just because (a) it is in the BBC and (b) it is about Martinsville, Virginia. It just so happens I was born in Martinsville in 1975 and lived there until 1985. Many of my relatives worked in the furniture and textile factories there between the end of World War II and when most of the factory jobs left in the 80s and 90s. Once upon a time Martinsville was an Appalachian manufacturing powerhouse and a place working class people could get decent paying jobs. Race relations were not perfect by any means but still, white and black and spanish-speaking working people shared in the relative prosperity. Workplace health and safety was also not perfect – my grandfather was minus a foot and an aunt was minus a few fingers at one point, although they were later reattached. Given all that, there was relative prosperity, health, and modern amenities for people whose parents and grandparents were subsistence farmers. The article talks about how NAFTA destroyed most of those jobs and most of that prosperity, and people are still bitter about it.

Now, I find the ideology of free trade attractive as a general principle. I think those industries were on the wane and those jobs were on the way out, and NAFTA just hastened them along. Still, it was a very abrupt and drastic change in Martinsville, and the people who were hurt are real people that I know. It illustrates that abstract measures of average economic prosperity that look good on paper have to be tempered with an understanding of what is going on with a broad cross-section of people across geographies, for example working class white and black and Hispanic people in Appalachia. People need viable options to be retrained and relocated in some cases to remain economically viable, and obviously their children need to be well educated. There has to be a safety net for the people who still fall through the cracks.

Sadly, the people interviewed in this article don’t seem supportive of the very policies that might help them, like universal health care. They were supportive of Obama but felt let down by him when he wasn’t able to deliver substantive change in their lives during his years in office. They don’t support anyone named Clinton because they associate that name with NAFTA. So, despite the fact that the people interviewed in this article are kind hearted, moral, and anything but bigots, which fits my personal experience in Appalachia, they are left with Trump as the only available choice that makes sense to them.

public buses vs. Uber Pool

This article talks about the idea of shifting from public bus systems to Uber Pool, and comes out against it.

Uber Pool’s cost disadvantage over public transit might disappear if a new pilot program in Boston catches on. This month, Uber announced that it would introduce monthly Uber Pool passes—like transit passes—for just $2 per ride, or less than the MBTA’s $2.25 fare. While these temporary low fares are no doubt a money-losing loss leader, if UberPool fares are anywhere close to the price of public transit it would seem like we’re probably looking at a massive shift from public transit to these sorts of ride-hailing services. And wouldn’t that be a good thing, if it’s both faster and nearly as cheap?

But here’s where the importance space-efficiency comes in. When one person switches from the bus to Uber, two things happen. One is that they get a faster trip almost by definition: A vehicle that makes many stops (the bus) is going to be slower than a vehicle that makes few or no stops (the Uber) unless the bus has some other advantage, like transit lanes that allow it to avoid traffic congestion. And the vast majority of American bus lines are given no such benefit.

The second thing is that they switch from a very space-efficient vehicle, where they probably take up only a few square feet on the road, to a very space-inefficient vehicle, where they take up many, many times more.

It seems to me there is a middle ground here. A technology like Uber Pool, whether in private or public hands, could put the right size vehicles on the right routes at the right times. On some routes at some times, that might be a golf cart, and at others it might be a double decker bus. A system like this could be very flexible and adaptable.  Of course, using our own muscle power for as many trips as possible is also an important part of the equation and if we really want to be sustainable we need to design our towns and lives so that is the best choice for the majority of our daily trips. Communication technology and even virtual reality are another part of the equation because they could allow us to have the personal interaction we need in our work and social lives without physical distance being a factor.