Burning Fossil Fuels Almost Ended All Life on Earth - The Atlantic

This would be a great read even if it were just science fiction. Beautifully written, start to finish.

Burning Fossil Fuels Almost Ended All Life on Earth - The Atlantic:

Unsurprisingly, there’s no life in these ghastly rocks (even most plant life checks out at temperatures not much more than 40 degrees Celsius), making them exceedingly difficult to date.

“There’s absolutely nothing to date in any of these rocks because everything’s dead,” says Knapp. “But what we can say is that this is definitely Permian.”

...

“I see [a few] possibilities. The first is that things just really got that crazy. Shit happened. The second is that we just really don’t understand positive feedback loops yet. That’s the scary option. The third is that you can’t do it without a supercontinent. We need to be studying these time periods when carbon dioxide caused problems, because right now we don’t understand them at all. It should be a national priority to study the Permian to figure out what the hell happened.”

...

At the top of the canyon the rocks gave up their Martian hue at long last, and were etched with the geological traces of tranquil lakes and river channels and even dinosaur footprints. Up in those rocks the Earth was finally recovering, and the reptiles of the Earth’s most storied age—the Mesozoic—were making their tentative claims to a world that they would come to rule for more than 100 million years. But down here along the dusty trail was the end of the Permian, and the planet was still fighting for its life.

...

Their precious cargo was the lifeblood of civilization. The empty train cars were returning from the nodes of civilization, like spent red blood cells, to this giant, unyielding pump of geological energy in the prairie... They were shuttled along the infrastructural aorta before branching into capillaries where they’d deliver their carbon to far off power plants to be metabolized near cities, by metropolitan mitochondria.

The phrase "global weirding", referring to the strange signs in the fossil record leading up to the Permian extinction, recurs in the article. I can't help thinking that would make a great name for a science-explainer YouTube series...

Trump Administration’s Strategy on Climate: Try to Bury Its Own Scientific Report - The New York Times

Trump Administration’s Strategy on Climate: Try to Bury Its Own Scientific Report - The New York Times:

In publishing the assessment, White House officials made a calculation that Mr. Trump’s core base of supporters most likely would not care that its findings are so at odds with the president’s statements and policies.

That view is supported by Steven J. Milloy, a member of Mr. Trump’s E.P.A. transition team who runs the website junkscience.com, which is aimed at casting doubt on the established science of human-caused climate change. “We don’t care,” he said. “In our view, this is made-up hysteria anyway.”

 

From Mann, Michael. The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (Kindle Locations 1248-1257). Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition:

[Steven J.] Milloy is no scientist, but he’s darned good at playing one on television — Fox News, to be specific — where he is presented as an environmental science expert. Milloy, in this capacity, regularly calls out the “junk science” implicating tobacco products in human health ailments, pesticides in environmental ailments, and fossil fuels in our current planetary ailment.

What Milloy has failed to disclose while busy presenting himself as an independent “junk science” expert on Fox News is that, as noted earlier, he has accepted payments from Phillip Morris, ExxonMobil, and Syngenta for his advocacy efforts. When journalist Paul Thacker reported these facts in the New Republic in 2006, he also reported the reaction from Fox News, which claimed to be unaware of the financial ties and gave Milloy the lightest of slaps on the wrist, conceding only that “any affiliation he had should have been disclosed.”

Natural gas firms have a proposal to convert home heating to hydrogen | Ars Technica

Good for the U.K.:

Natural gas firms have a proposal to convert home heating to hydrogen | Ars Technica:

The UK has been more aggressive about curbing carbon emissions than the US. In 2015, the country stated that its goal was to close all coal-fired power plants in the country by 2025, and in 2017, the UK electrical grid had its first coal-free day.

I have wished for most of my adult life that the leadership of my country could see economic advantage in pushing toward clean energy, increased energy efficiency, and so on.

If you follow the Fully Charged show on YouTube, by now you've seen lots of ways in which the U.K. is pushing ahead of the U.S. EVs, home batteries and smart grid technology, and more - there's a lot of innovation around energy production and efficiency in western Europe in general.

On the fundamental interconnectedness of all things

From twitter:

Michael McFaul - @McFaul: Hey @Grady_Booch , I want to learn Python. Whats your recommendation for how at my stage in life?

Grady Booch - @Grady_Booch: Hey @gvanrossum you have another fan.

Professor Michael McFaul is a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia. Grady Booch is perhaps best known for developing UML. Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python, the programming language (and community) that has made my professional life so interesting. Suddenly I wonder whether anything on twitter is real ;)

Laurence Tribe explains all the ways Whitaker's "appointment" is illegal

Yes, Whitaker's Appointment Is Unconstitutional. Here's How To Challenge It. | HuffPost:

[The Attorney General Succession Act] created a line of succession... which would require the position to be filled in this case by the sitting deputy, Rod Rosenstein. It’s hard to imagine what legislative action could be clearer, unless the Senate is expected to pass the law again, now with the added words “and this time we really mean it.”

[Whether or not Sessions was fired] matters because of the Vacancies Reform Act... For the purposes of the VRA, “vacancies” aren’t created by firing. So if a court were to conclude that Sessions actually “resigned,” then Trump and Whitaker could argue that, because of the VRA, anyone working for the Department of Justice could fill the vacancy for up to seven months (210 days).

Yet even if a court were to agree both that Sessions resigned and that the VRA applies ... any federal court will recognize that the Constitution trumps all. And that’s where the big guns get introduced.

The Constitution in Article II permits Congress to empower “the President alone” to appoint “inferior Officers.” All other “Officers of the United States” ― known as “principal officers” ― must be appointed “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.”

The attorney general, however, is a principal officer entitled to Senate confirmation... But Whitaker was never confirmed by the Senate to his new post, nor to any position in the line of succession to that role, or even to any position with similar responsibilities...

So being time-limited – Whitaker serves, as we’ve noted, for at most 210 days – can’t in itself erase the need for Senate confirmation.

Empathy

I'm a software developer from the early 1980s - a stereotypical asocial type, not very empathetic, not very well able to understand the world from the perspective of another.

In 2015 an old friend boiled up on social media, aroused by the prospect of Syrian refugees coming to the United States. "Will you fight? I'll fight!" he announced to everyone.

He wasn't alone. Many in the U.S. saw the refugees as terrorists, because of 9/11, Afghanistan, etc., and as cowards, because they were fleeing. "I would stay and defend my home!"

The news at the time carried images of apartment buildings gutted and flattened. What was there to defend? Friends and families lay crushed beneath collapsed concrete or pulped by shrapnel. Who was left to protect?

It was noted even then that climate events had helped trigger the Syrian civil war. A severe drought had killed livestock, raised food prices, made farmers flee from their fields to the cities. The civil war, triggered in part by their government's inability to relieve suffering, had made Syrians of all kinds flee for their lives.

By 2015 I'd traveled a bit. At times I'd lived, very briefly, without heat and running water. That mild experience gave a weak sense of what the world must be like for those refugees. No heat, no water. No food. No shelter from the elements. No place to relieve oneself. No clean clothing - nothing clean.

Try to stop after each of those items. Imagine what your life would be like without that one thing.

I'm lucky: life gave me experiences to compensate a little for my lack of empathy.

This morning the news describes the destruction in California.

Shirley Hertel returned to her Thousand Oaks home Friday morning after watching it catch fire on TV just hours before.

The sight left her in tears.

...

“I don’t even know that I even understand what happened here,” [said Shirley Hertel, a Thousand Oaks resident].

She took the fire — and the water damage she had just fixed in the home last month — as a sign that she should leave the city she’s lived in her whole life, she said. Her other daughters and granddaughter live in Kentucky, she said, and she wants to watch her grow up.

“This will always be my home, but Kentucky is where I’ll live,” she said.

Her home has been destroyed. There is nothing left for her to defend in Thousand Oaks. She is fleeing California for Kentucky.

At least she doesn't need to worry whether Kentucky will let her in.

U.S. citizens are now among the planet's refugees. Will this concrete experience bring us a little empathy?

---

The Oakies were also climate refugees. But the dust bowl was a long time ago. It can no longer give us empathy through experience.

What can bring us empathy is just as likely, in this case, to bring us a Malthusian mess, with less food, water and livable earth divided among more people.

Read it, and weep

We have become a heartless, stupid people. 'Vaya con Dios:' the impossible life of a judge on the US immigration frontline | US news | The Guardian:

On Improving Campaign Coverage

Jay Rosen yesterday produced an interesting twitter essay: 'Campaign coverage: the road not taken.' There was a path the American press could have walked, but did not. This alternative way was illuminated as far back as 1992. Our political journalists declined it. And here we are. This thread is that story. One of the problems with election coverage as it stands is that no one has any idea what it means to succeed at it. Predicting the winner? Is that success? Even if journalists could do that —and they can’t — it would not be much of a public service, would it? A very weird thing about horse race or “game” coverage is that it doesn’t answer to any identifiable need of the voter. Should I vote for the candidate with the best strategy for capturing my vote? Do I walk into the voting booth clutching a list of who’s ahead in the polls? In 1992, the @theobserver in Charlotte, NC teamed up with @Poynter to pioneer a different way to cover elections. The idea was very simple: campaign coverage should be grounded in what voters want the candidates to talk about. Which voters? The ones you are trying to inform. This came to be called the "citizens agenda" approach to campaign coverage. It revolves around a single question. Here is the question: "What do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes?" From good answers to that everything else in the model flows. A few things about that question, "What do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes?" Notice what it is not. It is not "who's going to win?" It's not "who are you going to vote for?" And it's not "which party would do a better job of addressing..." The whole purpose of the citizens agenda approach is to find an alternative to the horse race style in campaign coverage, which starts with "who's gonna win?" What are the keys to winning? How close is the race? Which tactics seem to be working? What do the latest polls say? The horse race style is the default pattern. It's easy to criticize, and I have done that. A lot. But the default has some impressive strengths. It's repeatable in every election, everywhere. It creates suspense and thus audience interest. It tells you where to put resources. Here’s how the alternative style — the citizens agenda in election coverage— works. First you need to know who your community is. If informing the public is the mission statement of every good journalist, then identifying the public you’re trying to inform is basic to the job. If you can identify the particular public you’re trying to inform — and you know how to reach those people — then you can ask them the question at the core of the citizens agenda. “What do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for your vote?” The key is to pose this question (for months) in every possible form. Interviews with reporters. Focus groups with researchers. Call and leave us a message. Email us. Tweet us. Text us. Fill out this form. Speak up at our forum. Comment on our Facebook page. Talk to us! In addition to those inputs, the polling budget has to be redirected. Away from the horse race, toward the organizing principle in our revised approach, “What do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes?” You can poll for that. But it is not normal. Put it all together, and the journalists covering the campaign have what they need to name, frame and synthesize the citizens agenda. The product is a ranked list, a priority sketch. The top 8-10 issues or problems that voters most want the candidates to be talking about. The citizens agenda, an exercise in high quality public listening, is both a published product (tested, designed, packaged properly for multiple platforms) and a template for covering the rest of the campaign. It tells you how to "win" at campaign coverage. Or stop losing. But you have to get the list right. If you can spread out and properly canvas the community, ask good questions, listen well to the answers, transcend your limited starting points (your bias) and piece together an accurate and nuanced understanding, then you have something. The template has multiple purposes. It helps focus your “issue” coverage and voters guide. It informs your explainers. And it keeps you on track. Instead of just reacting to events (or his tweets...) you have instructions for how to stay centered around voters' concerns. When a candidate comes to town and gives a speech, you map what is said against the citizens agenda. When your reporters interview the candidate, questions are drawn from the citizens agenda. If the candidate speaks to your editorial board, you know what to ask about. But it goes beyond that. Synthesizing a citizens agenda at the beginning creates a mission statement for your election coverage later on. Now you know what you’re supposed to do. Press the candidates to talk about what your readers and listeners want most to hear about. The citizens agenda approach in campaign coverage (sorry for the dorky name) also tells reporters, editors and producers how they’re doing. Because if you’ve done the work and your list is accurate, the candidates will have to start talking about the items on that agenda. That’s how you know it’s working. That’s how you know you’re winning. Now you can press for better answers, and dig deep on things you know people care about. Public service! This I can tell you. If reporters ask the people they’re trying to inform, “What do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes?” no one is going to reply with, “You’re down five points in the latest polls. Realistically, can you recover?” The citizens agenda approach in campaign coverage was first tried at the @theobserver in Charlotte, NC in 1992. I wrote about that adventure in my book, What Are Journalists For? in 1999. I explained it again in 2010 at my blog. http://pressthink.org/2010/08/the-citizens-agenda-in-campaign-coverage/ So it's been out there. My own read is that it never took off because this is not what political reporters want to do. They want to hang with the pros. They want to pick apart the strategy. The best ones (and there are some very good ones) want to explain what the candidates are appealing to. In us. Yesterday, @Sulliview gave a grade of C-minus to the campaign press. “Too many journalists allow Trump to lead them around by the nose,” she said. “With the president as their de facto assignment editor.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/defensive-caravan-fixated-and-trump-obsessed-the-media-blow-it-again-just-not-as-badly/2018/11/04/e4c9efcc-deb7-11e8-b3f0-62607289efee_story.html And I agree with that. But here's the kicker... You can’t keep from getting sucked into Trump’s agenda without a firm grasp on your own. But where does that agenda come from? It can’t come from you, as a campaign journalist. Who cares what you think? It has to come from the voters you are trying to inform. A demonstrable public service, the citizens agenda approach puts the campaign press on the side of the voters and their right to have their major concerns addressed by the people who are bidding for power. This is the road not taken. Now I have to add that good reporters on the campaign trail spend a lot of time listening to voters. This happens. They ask about the issues on voters' minds. But it’s pitched to who’s ahead and why. To which appeals are resonating. To the sophisticated professionals who cover elections, the “citizens agenda in campaign coverage” sounds — let’s be honest — a little too earnest, a bit minor league. Civics class, as against drinks with political insiders at the Des Moines Marriott. I know this. I get it. Thing is, the only way up from the hole they’re in is to pitch their journalism at an electorate they understand better than the politicians who are leading it off a cliff. You don’t get there with a savvy analysis of who’s going to win this round. You have to represent. 6 November

The Trump Administration's Fuel Efficiency Math Is All Wrong - The Atlantic

This is what you get by deleting unpleasant facts. The Trump Administration's Fuel Efficiency Math Is All Wrong - The Atlantic:

The fine print of the proposal says that “newer, safer cars” will prevent 30 deaths every year at most—a far cry from the claimed 1,000. But an EPA memo included in the proposal warns that safe will increase traffic fatalities, leading to 17 more deaths every year.

In any case, “a large portion” of the lives that safe claims to save ... arise instead from an erroneous calculation spat out by a broken computer model; and an assumption—never advertised by the Trump administration—that Americans will drive less when forced to buy less fuel-efficient cars.

At a crucial moment in the scrappage model’s analysis, it mysteriously deletes roughly 700 billion miles of nationwide driving from its simulation of the Trump rollback. It does so due to a nonsensical assumption that owners of old cars—cars built between 1977 and today—will drive much, much less under the rollback than they would under the Obama-era rules.

Read the whole article. The Trump administration seems intent on using lies and distortions to justify its prejudices.