Fair to Partly Whalish

A Reuters news story ("World carbon emissions stall after almost 40 years of gains: IEA") reports that the International Energy Agency has finished their tabulating and concluded that the human race released 32.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2014, approximately the same amount as in 2013. In the same year, the global economy grew by three percent. So we know that we can have economic growth without worsening the emissions problem.

So everything's cool now, right?  We can stop worrying about global warming?

32.3 billion metric tons is 71.2 trillion pounds. That's about the same as 6 billion African elephants or 187 million blue whales. or 98 thousand copies of the Empire State Building. It's the same weight as 376 copies of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, fully loaded.

We do not notice the carbon dioxide that we add to the atmosphere, because it's invisible and odorless. But, if we could somehow put 187 million blue whales into the air each year and keep them aloft and visible, you'd pretty soon be able to see the problem. That's about four whales per square mile, distributed over the surface of the earth.

After a few years, the weather forecasters would be talking about "fair to partly whalish".

So no, we can't stop worrying about global warming. We need a lot fewer whale equivalents being injected into the atmosphere.

I'm Happy to Report that I'm Happy!

ScienceDaily has an article today on happiness and politics.

The article summarizes a research report (Wojcik, et al., 2015) that appeared in Science recently. A group of five psychologists have taken another look at the previously reported result that political conservatives are happier than liberals. That earlier research was based on what the research subjects reported. On average, conservatives reported being happier than liberals.

This new research ignores what people claim about their own happiness and instead focuses on observable behaviors that are linked to happiness. The abstract from the Science article has this quote: "Relative to conservatives, liberals more frequently used positive emotional language in their speech and smiled more intensely and genuinely in photographs."

So there you have it.  Conservatives claim to be happier. Liberals actually are happier.

This result actually tallies well with much of the essential message of Jesus. Happy ("blessed") are the meek who don't force their ways upon others, but instead appeal for agreement. Happy are those who give mercy instead of insisting on everybody (that is, everybody else) getting the punishments that they so richly deserve. Happy are those who try to achieve peace.

Happiness comes through following the two most important laws: Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Just in case you've heard and repeated that second one so many times that it has lost its meaning, go back and look at it afresh: In whatever way you would like to treat yourself, treat everybody else on the planet in the same way. Get rid of selfishness. Don't put yourself first. Put others ahead of you. Give liberally to others who need it.

Live that way and you'll be happier.




References:

University of California - Irvine. (2015, March 12). Political liberals display greater happiness, study shows. ScienceDaily. Retrieved from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150312142909.htm

Wojcik, S.P., Hovasapian, A., Graham, J., Moty, M., & Ditto, P.H. (2015). Conservatives report, but liberals display, greater happiness. Science, 347(627) 143-1246, doi: 10.1126/science.1260817

Arctic Surprise

An article in Discover reports that early March sea ice extent in the arctic has collapsed, likely producing a new record low.

The article highlights a new plot from the National Sea Ice Data Center, contrasting the current year's sea ice extent (the blue line) with the thirty-year average (heavy black line) and the range of values (grey area) between the +/- 2 standard deviation bounds. 

 

A word of explanation to those who don't think of statistics as their native language:  Anything outside the two-standard-deviation bounds is something that any scientist will regard as surprising. In practice, we use much more technical metrics, involving p-values, significance levels, statistical power, and other arcana. But a very good, quick and dirty approximation is that anything more than two standard deviations from its average is surprising, "statistically significant". It's in the realm of things that are unlikely to have occurred by chance, so we generally take these occurrences as probably indicating that something systematic is going on.

In this case, the "something systematic" is climate change. As with all individual weather phenomena, this observation is not ironclad proof of global warming.

But this situation has clear physics: Ice reflects daytime solar energy to space and radiates night-time heat from the sea, resulting in net cooling. The less ice, the less cooling. The less cooling, the less ice. A positive feedback can result, contributing to significant warming of the polar regions, melting of glaciers, and thawing of permafrost, resulting in release of methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide -- all of which results in more warming.

So it's especially galling that the other climate news story today (see this version from UPI) says that Florida officials, under Republican Governor Rick Scott, have clearly and unambiguously passed the word that Department of Environmental Protection employees are forbidden to use such terms as "climate change", "global warming", or "sustainability". It is telling that this policy was published only by word of mouth. Whoever gave this order did not have the guts to put it in writing. But a number of different DEP employees tell the exact same story, so I tend to provisionally accept it.

When the facts clearly tell one story but political or business or religious leaders dictate that nobody actually mention any of the facts, one conclusion leaps quickly to mind: Somebody has something to hide. Let's bring that out into the light of day and look at it.