Still, I've long understood that in extremis I am a "tax and spend" Democrat--unhappily so, but still so.
But I would not have cut NASA or the C-17 air transport, Joint Strike Fight components or the Army Corps of Engineers.
So it looks like 2009 has been declared the second-hottest year on record, according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. And the 2000s, on the whole, are officially the warmest decade on record—warmer than the 1990s, which in turn were warmer than the 1980s, which in turn beat out the 1970s. For the past 30 years, the Earth's been heating up by about 0.2°C per decade:
One of the biggest unpleasant climate shocks in recent years has been the discovery that the Himalayas are heating up much faster than the global average—a trend that most climate models had failed to predict, and something that's difficult to explain by pointing to greenhouse gases alone. And it's a critical issue, seeing as how Himalaya's glaciers provide water for more than 500 million people in countries like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and they're expected to shrivel away by 2035 or so.
Of all the different industry groups scrambling to shape climate policy in Washington--from electric utilities to Detroit automakers--one stands out as a bit unexpected: Wall Street. Financial giants like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have enlisted, all told, more than 100 lobbyists to roam the Capitol and influence the debate over how to curb greenhouse gases. There’s a reason for that: Any cap-and-trade bill that puts a limit on emissions and allows polluters to buy and sell permits will create a vast carbon market.
A few more things to say about those hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia. First, the latest news: It looks like the head of the university's Climate Research Unit (CRU), Phil Jones, is stepping aside temporarily while the entire matter comes under independent review. Seems fair. As I noted in my last post, some of Jones's e-mails sounded awfully unprofessional, especially the ones where he told other researchers to delete their e-mail correspondence.
On our homepage today, Marilyn Berlin Snell has a terrific interview with climatologist Stephen Schneider, the scientist who, as a grad student moonlighting at NASA in 1971, predicted that the effects of aerosol pollution could outweigh the warming effects of CO2 and bring about a bout of global cooling.
Not many Ph.D. students expect their research to generate outrage among Washington pundits decades later, but, as it turns out, that's exactly what happened to Stephen Schneider. Back in 1971, Schneider was studying plasma physics at Columbia and moonlighting as a research assistant at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. There, he co-authored an article for Science arguing that the warming effect caused by rising amounts of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere would be swamped by the cooling effect caused by aerosol pollution like dust and smoke.
Last month, rapper Kanye West interrupted an MTV Video Awards ceremony to protest the selection of Taylor Swift for “Best Female Video.” So widely did the fallout from this episode spread that President Obama soon weighed in against West (“He’s a jackass”). Obama himself would soon become the subject of a similar award-related imbroglio, when he was bizarrely chosen as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Pop quiz: You read a draft notice for a federal grant program containing the terms, “internal validity,” “quasi-experimental,” “regression discontinuity,” and “interrupted time series.” The program in question is:
a) A CDC program to fund pre-development of the porcupine flu vaccine
b) An FDA program to spur commercialization of an at-home test for polonium in your food
c) A NASA program to support design of a low-cost module that will allow humans to populate Venus
d) A Department of Education program designed to support and scale innovation in K-12 education
Answer: d). These and other Econometrics 101 terms can be found in the just-released prepublication notice for the new Investing in Innovation (I3) Fund at the Department of Education. What’s going on here? Are Secretary Arne Duncan and his deputies just showing off?
Actually, the structure they are proposing for this new $650 million fund deserves a close look. Last year, Sara Mead and Andy Rotherham called on the department to help bring successful educational entrepreneurs to scale, and to purposefully foster transformative educational innovations. It envisioned achieving these aims through two separate funds that the department would operate, but I3’s design could permit Duncan (and in particular, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement Jim Shelton) to pursue both goals.
It's been a long year--Barack Obama has faced, in rough order, John McCain, global financial collapse, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Blue Dogs, the Progressive Caucus, the Gang of Six, Glenn Beck, Representative Joe Wilson (R-Hissy), and the third of Republicans convinced he was born somewhere else. Of course, minus the birth certificates, roughly the same has been true for Hu Jintao and Nicolas Sarkozy, for Angela Merkel and Manmohan Singh. That's what politics is--a series of challenges, which are rarely won or lost completely. You get part of what you wanted (everyone with health insurance), and maybe you leave other stuff for another day (the public option). That's why we call politics the pursuit of the possible.
To be honest, I've never been terribly interested in the long-running pseudo-debate over whether global warming "stopped" in 1998. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's the dime version: 1998 was an exceptionally hot El Niño year, we're all agreed.
Sometime after the release of An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, environmentalism crossed from political movement to cultural moment. Fortune 500 companies pledged to go carbon neutral. Seemingly every magazine in the country, including Sports Illustrated, released a special green issue. Paris dimmed the lights on the Eiffel Tower. Solar investments became hot, even for oil companies. Evangelical ministers preached the gospel of "creation care." Even archconservative Newt Gingrich published a book demanding action on global warming.
It's hard not to scoff at the president's call for a return to the moon, Mars, and "beyond" if for nothing other than its political transparency. The president's sudden dose of the vision thing immediately endeared him to the thousands of aerospace workers in Florida, while costing him almost nothing before he leaves office. But, despite its narrow opportunism, the president's plan is important, because it thrusts the prospect of a manned mission to Mars back into the public sphere.
It's hard not to scoff at the president's call for a return to the moon, Mars, and "beyond" if for nothing other than its political transparency. The president's sudden dose of the vision thing immediately endeared him to the thousands of aerospace workers in Florida, while costing him almost nothing before he leaves office. But, despite its narrow opportunism, the president's plan is important, because it thrusts the prospect of a manned mission to Mars back into the public sphere.
