Everything is Climate Change?

 The NY Times blames the Vermont flood on "climate change". In reality it can be argued that the rain is a result of the cloud seeding effects of the Canadian fires. Perhaps then we blame the fires on climate change. And the wheel keeps turning.

You Really Can't Make This up

 The climate fanatics have gone to extremes in this one. In the Journal Prostate Cancer there is an article regarding the use of CO2 in prostatectomies and its impact on the environment.

Let me explain. If one is diagnosed with prostate cancer, often the approach is surgical removal of the prostate. In the process they use CO2 gas to inflate the area for better excision. Now the climate fanatics are concerned that these surgeries may add to the climate warming problem. I guess the worry about beer and sodas as well, but this is a special worry.

They note:

More than 4% of the global greenhouse gas emissions are generated by healthcare system. Focusing on the environmental impact of minimally invasive surgery, we assessed and compared the CO₂ emissions between Robot-assisted (RALP) and Laparoscopic Radical Prostatectomy (LRP). ... RALP generates substantially less CO₂ than LRP owing to the use of more reusable surgical supplies, shorter operative time and hospital stay.

 Yep, the old robot is better. Add AI and the robot may decide who lives and who dies also. 

Happy Earth Day folks!

Uncertainty

Back in the 1960s when I worked on Apollo and wrote my first book, one thing we knew, was that the world was filled with uncertainty. Send a rocket to the moon, and no matter what you do, the uncertainties of the measurements must be continually accounted for. Burn the retro rockets at the wrong moment and one has problems.

One can estimate and project but one must include the uncertainty of one's model as well as ones measurements. The estimate is what we think now. So then try and project forward and the uncertainty starts to get larger.

So where am I going with this? Climate change. We have uncertainty in old measurements, uncertainty in models but as I try to scan the literature no one has ever included these in the results or projections. The line going forward is faultless, no error bands. Why?

Good question. Any engineer would or must include them. Scientists it seems almost deny their existence.

Some Thoughts on CO2

Climate change, global warming, whatever, seems to be an ever growing concern. I am not a denier but merely one who says that if it is a problem then take care of it, by reduction and extraction. Not by taxing. You can't tax your way out of a brain tumor. Likewise you cannot tax your way out of excess CO2.

But one can extract CO2. In a Science paper the authors note:

The restoration of forested land at a global scale could help capture atmospheric carbon and mitigate climate change. Bastin et al. used direct measurements of forest cover to generate a model of forest restoration potential across the globe. Their spatially explicit maps show how much additional tree cover could exist outside of existing forests and agricultural and urban land. Ecosystems could support an additional 0.9 billion hectares of continuous forest. This would represent a greater than 25% increase in forested area, including more than 200 gigatonnes of additional carbon at maturity.Such a change has the potential to store an equivalent of 25% of the current atmospheric carbon pool.

Basically photosynthesis extracts CO2 and turns it into what we call biomass, plants. That is the simplest way. Now there are those who object to this analysis but it seems that this is all too common in this area. Dealing with mega effects of a global nature cannot really be handled in simple ways. Each time another investigator would say; you forgot about effect X etc.

In a similar vein a Nature paper extends this construct to examine a collection of natural CO2 extractions. Their proposed extractions are:

In this Perspective, we consider a non-exhaustive selection of ten CO₂ utilization pathways and provide a transparent assessment of the potential scale and cost for each one. The ten pathways are as follows: (1) CO₂-based chemical products, including polymers; (2) CO₂-based fuels; (3) microalgae fuels and other microalgae products; (4) concrete building materials; (5) CO₂ enhanced oil recovery (CO₂-EOR); (6) bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS); (7) enhanced weathering; (8) forestry techniques, including afforestation/reforestation, forest management and wood products; (9) land management via soil carbon sequestration techniques; and (10) biochar.

Now all of these are natural except for the BECCS method.

The bottom line is that there are a multiplicity of means to meet the demand. The question is; what next?

Technology vs Tax

In a recent MIT press release they discuss a carbon dioxide extraction technology which seems quite viable and cost effective. They note:

The device is essentially a large, specialized battery that absorbs carbon dioxide from the air (or other gas stream) passing over its electrodes as it is being charged up, and then releases the gas as it is being discharged. In operation, the device would simply alternate between charging and discharging, with fresh air or feed gas being blown through the system during the charging cycle, and then the pure, concentrated carbon dioxide being blown out during the discharging. As the battery charges, an electrochemical reaction takes place at the surface of each of a stack of electrodes. These are coated with a compound called polyanthraquinone, which is composited with carbon nanotubes. The electrodes have a natural affinity for carbon dioxide and readily react with its molecules in the airstream or feed gas, even when it is present at very low concentrations. The reverse reaction takes place when the battery is discharged — during which the device can provide part of the power needed for the whole system — and in the process ejects a stream of pure carbon dioxide. The whole system operates at room temperature and normal air pressure.

Thus is CO2 is an issue the solution seems to be technical not taxation. Economists continually fail to understand human nature and the very economic system they allege to explain. Taxing CO2 is a highly regressive tax. Implementing such a system as the above make eminent sense.

Precision and Accuracy

I remember from my first class in surveying, yes I took a class in surveying somewhere in the Catskills, we were told the difference between precision and accuracy. Precision is how detailed is your measurement, say in feet, 2.00136 feet. Accuracy is a measure as to how close to reality is that precise measurement. One can have great precision and horrible accuracy. People feel comfortable with precision. People are clueless about accuracy. Tell a patient that they have six months to live, and they can deal with it, horrible as it may be. Tell a patient that he has a 20% chance of survival, and the patient always thinks they are in the 20%.

Now to climate change or whatever it is called today. Stanford has an interesting piece on this issue. They note:

“Scientists who acknowledge that their predictions of the future cannot be exactly precise and instead acknowledge a likely range of possible futures may bolster their credibility and increase acceptance of their findings by non-experts,” said ...a Stanford professor of communication and of political science and a co-author on the paper. “But these gains may be nullified when scientists acknowledge that no matter how confidently they can make predictions about some specific change in the future, the full extent of the consequences of those predictions cannot be quantified.”

 They continued:

To find out, the researchers asked half of their respondents to read a second statement acknowledging that the full extent of likely future damage of sea level rise cannot be measured because of other forces, such as storm surge: “Storm surge could make the impacts of sea level rise worse in unpredictable ways.” The researchers found that this statement eliminated the persuasive power of the scientists’ messages. When scientists acknowledged that storm surge makes the impact of sea level rise unpredictable, it decreased the number of participants who reported high trust in scientists by 4.9 percentage points compared with the participants who only read a most likely estimate of sea level rise. The findings held true regardless of education levels and political party affiliation. Not all expressions of uncertainty are equal, ... said: “Scientists may want to carefully weigh which forms of uncertainty they discuss with the public. For example, scientists could highlight uncertainty that has predictable bounds without overwhelming the public with the discussion of factors involving uncertainty that can’t be quantified.”
 
What is most compelling  is that none of the curves we see promulgated have any error bands in them, NONE. What is the accuracy of the thermometer in 1886, 1929, today. Take sea level. One may logically ask; is the sea rising or the land sinking? Good question. We know that the outer banks move, they are plastic in nature, sand like plasticity. Can we measure rising versus sinking? Perhaps, but not with the accuracy we require. Back to accuracy again.

The problem is that for those of us who have spent their careers dealing with uncertainty, we accept it as a matter of course. However that group who accept it as day to day are not the rest of society. Indeed the climate folks need to be truly honest about their data, put some error bounds on them so we can understand, and "I don't know" is also a good answer.

Accuracy vs Precision, Ouch!

There is an MIT News bleeb on the development of a new climate model. They note:

The new model will be built by a consortium of researchers led by Caltech, in partnership with MIT; the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS); and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech manages for NASA. The consortium, dubbed the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA), plans to fuse Earth observations and high-resolution simulations into a model that represents important small-scale features, such as clouds and turbulence, more reliably than existing climate models. The goal is a climate model that projects future changes in critical variables such as cloud cover, rainfall, and sea ice extent more accurately — with uncertainties at least half the size of those in existing models. "Projections with current climate models — for example, of how features such as rainfall extremes will change — still have large uncertainties, and the uncertainties are poorly quantified," says Tapio Schneider, Caltech's Theodore Y. Wu Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering, senior research scientist at JPL, and principal investigator of CliMA. "For cities planning their stormwater management infrastructure to withstand the next 100 years' worth of floods, this is a serious issue; concrete answers about the likely range of climate outcomes are key for planning." .... Current climate modeling relies on dividing up the globe into a grid and then computing what is going on in each sector of the grid, as well as how the sectors interact with each other. The accuracy of any given model depends in part on the resolution at which the model can view the Earth — that is, the size of the grid's sectors. Limitations in available computer processing power mean that those sectors generally cannot be any smaller than tens of kilometers per side. But for climate modeling, the devil is in the details — details that get missed in a too-large grid. For example, low-lying clouds have a significant impact on climate by reflecting sunlight, but the turbulent plumes that sustain them are so small that they fall through the cracks of existing models. Similarly, changes in Arctic sea ice have been linked to wide-ranging effects on everything from polar climate to drought in California, but it is difficult to predict how that ice will change in the future because it is sensitive to the density of cloud cover above the ice and the temperature of ocean currents below, both of which cannot be resolved by current models

I recall decades ago examining random fields, my doctoral thesis, and how complex a problem they are. Now they are totally redoing models. Hopefully accuracy rather than precision is the end result. Then again should we question what we are being told, it is precise but is it accurate? Just a thought.

Global Warming?

Saw this guy today at Bronx Zoo! He has his own cot and toys. Somehow he liked the lounge chair and the sun.

Just for your information, he is at the top of the food chain.

Dog Days of August

In one of the left wing blurbs the author writes:

Heat waves are a growing trend across the globe. This summer, the Middle East has experienced record temperatures. July saw the heat index in Iran and the U.A.E. hit an almost unimaginable 140ºF. Actual temperature in the region hit hemispheric records of 129ºF. According to Live Science, most people will experience hyperthermia after 10 minutes in 140ºF. While we are not seeing temperatures go quite that high — yet — it is the unrelenting heat that kills. High temperatures combined with high humidity mean no relief. Even at night, temperatures do not fall sufficiently for the human body to adequately cool itself. In 2010, 55,000 people in Russia died in a heat wave. In 2003, 70,000 people across Europe were killed by heat.For decades, scientists have been warning that climate change ...

Well it just is August. For those of us who work outside, especially protecting ourselves from the rays of the sun, it is a challenge. But it is August. I have daily records for the past thirty years of hybridizing and frankly there is no substantial change. 

I recall the summer of 1964 at NY Tel, my summer job, with no air conditioning at 140 West Street. When the temps exceeded 90 for more than 4 days we got out at 2:30. That did happen frequently. Then I tool the Broadway Line to 242nd Street, from 95F to 120F in the subway! With a half million or more people at rush hour! Try that one on.

So have things changed much? Slightly but not warranting the hysteria. Data and facts are strange things. Just watch the dogs. BTW it is 64F in Moscow right now!

MIT and Climate Change

MIT announced its "Plan" to deal with Climate Change. To that end they announced:

...MIT has developed a five-year plan to enhance its efforts in five areas of climate action, whose elements have consensus support within the MIT community:

• research to further understand climate change and advance solutions to mitigate and adapt to it;
• the acceleration of low-carbon energy technology via eight new research centers;
• the development of enhanced educational programs on climate change;
• new tools to share climate information globally; and
• measures to reduce carbon use on the MIT campus.

The process is laudable but as one commentator noted:

You missed Step One...convince the skeptics of the validity of your conclusions. The non-believers are not bad people, they just do not understand the basis for your conclusions. To some the names of scientists and MIT itself are not convincing enough to get them to commit. They see MIT getting years of funding as self serving and therefore mistrust the conclusions.

Indeed the steps seems a bit self serving. MIT is already and has been at it for years examining alternative, ie non carbon based, energy, understanding the mechanisms behind various pollutants and carbon off shoots, as well as large scale networks and the like. Thus one wonders what is new here other than more overhead and possibly less research.

The comment indicating that the non-believers are not "bad people"  is quite valid and unlike those who attack anyone who thinks differently tends to use logic and facts and not vitriolic methods to communicate.

Unlike some who look at their political opposition as the "enemy" one must look at them as groups with whom they would engage in discussion.

Climate Change and the Academy

There are small groups forming on many campus locations whose goal is to eliminate any investments in what they see as "dirty energy" companies, and to support a program of "sustainability". At one extreme it is the banning of bottled water, never really drink the stuff, to reverting to a zero carbon footprint existence. Now I can appreciate that as I sit amongst my 4,000+ seedlings sprouting up around my office ready for their outside potting once the winter ends, it is the longest in 30 years here in New Jersey.

Now Harvard has had a bit of a time on this issue and their President has decided to answer the call to have a Campus wide discussion. As the Crimson announces:

University President Drew G. Faust will convene a panel about climate change on April 13, following several requests on behalf of a faculty group calling for an open forum about Harvard’s investment in fossil fuel companies.The panel will be moderated by talk show host and journalist Charlie Rose, who has interviewed Faust on television in the past. The roster of panelists is scheduled to include Harvard science and public policy professors as well as experts from outside the University.

The Harvard President has done a superb job on all she has handled and this is one way to address the campus debate. On additional consideration the choice of Rose is frankly quite wise. He has an amazing manner to evoke what a guest, presenter, position taker, really has to say, more so than any others in today's market. Unlike many other PBS types who spend time telling listeners what they think, Rose get to people and get them to tell what they think, which is useful.

This is an interesting approach and worth following.

In contrast MIT has a Sustainability Program. It allegedly purports to:

The Sustainability Initiative at MIT Sloan is built on the promise of a new future. We believe that environmental, societal, economic, business, and personal wellbeing are parts of an interconnected whole. The strains we face in each of these domains demand that we think differently and invent new ways of living and working. We are committed to creating a new vision for progress and prosperity and a world that will flourish and thrive for generations.  We empower students, faculty, researchers, and business leaders to join together in this endeavor.

 Somehow the above is reminiscent of my old days at MIT in the 60s with one small protest group after another. Now however they seem to set up Centers, appoint faculty, provide space and resources and put it on the students tab. Again, we see an ever growing cost of getting an education.

Climate and Hot Summers

NASA has announced that last summer was the hottest on record. Well I would beg to differ, at least my plants tell me so. NASA states:

The year 2014 ranks as Earth’s warmest since 1880, according to two separate analyses by NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists. The 10 warmest years in the instrumental record, with the exception of 1998, have now occurred since 2000. This trend  continues a long-term warming of the planet, according to an analysis of surface temperature measurements by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) in New York. In an independent analysis of the raw data, also released Friday, NOAA scientists also found 2014 to be the warmest on record.

 I ran their map program and obtained the following:

Now if one looks closely one sees that my area was not really that hot. It was Europe, East Russia and Canada that were hot and parts of Brazil.

Let us examine my backyard. Yes my very nice backyard, and my sentinel plants the Hemerocallis genus.

First we look at the date of first bloom on the three early species:

Now what we have plotted is the date of first bloom where the date is the number of days from January 1 until the bloom date. Thus the larger the number the colder the season. A downward sloping line means warming. H minor going back to 1990 shows warming. But last years was the 4th coldest in 25 years. Not the warmest. The same can be said of the other two species bu H dumortierii shows little evidence of warming.

Why plants? Well plants integrate climate over a year. They reflect what is happening in an integrated manner. They are better than surface measurements.

Now I looked at the date of mid cross. This is the date when I had reached 50% of my total crosses. It is an integral of an integral if you will. It looks across all hybrids and tells when the peak blooming occurs. The results are below:

Again 2014 was not bad. The 50% point was about July 19th. In contrast 2013 had July 8th, almost 10 days earlier. Also 2012 showed a date of July 7th. Thus from my few thousands of plants perspective 2014 was one of the coldest years on record.

I guess one really should look at the data. Plants are great creatures. The use the sun more than any other creatures so why not use them to tell us something. The reason is we really have so few Botanists. Perhaps we need a few at NASA.

Climate: Policy, Technology and Reality

I just read a piece in CFR by a Former Banking and Government official bemoaning what we do not know about Climate Change. What surprised me is that he says the following:

What we already know is frightening, but what we don't know is more frightening still. For example, we know that melting polar ice sheets will cause sea levels to rise, but we don't know how negative feedback loops will accelerate the process. As polar ice melts, the oceans absorb more heat, which causes more ice to melt. And the polar ice sheets have already started to melt.

But negative feedback often stabilizes systems, depending on where the poles of the system may lie. Yet he appears to be describing positive feedback which may often tend to destabilize a system.

If one forgot remeber:

Negative Feedback:

Out=GainForward*In- GainReverse*Out
or
Out=[GainForward/(1+GainReverse)]In

Note that Negative Feedback reduces output variation.

Positive Feedback:

Out=GainForward*In+ GainReverse*Out
or
Out=[GainForward/(1-GainReverse)]In

Note that Positive Feedback increases output variation.

Now this may be a nit but it does tend to demonstrate the problem we have with "Policy Types" who take words without meanings. Moreover the technical people all too often throw the words about as if they have both meaning and understanding.

This is a cooler summer than usual, but that is weather and not climate. Climate seems to be warming, but is that good or bad, depends one guesses where one is. But it would help if the Policy Types would get their words right or abstain from pretending they know whence they speak.

Income Inequality and Climate Change

The head of the AAAS wrote a letter to its members where he states:

Based on the evidence, about 97% of climate scientists agree that human-caused climate change is happening. Yet a large fraction of this country’s population and policymakers can’t seem to accept the fact that the climate is changing. It’s time to shift the debate from whether human-caused climate change is happening to what we can do about it.We need to make it clear that scientists believe that doing nothing now is extremely dangerous and could result in abrupt, unpredictable, and potentially irreversible changes with highly damaging impacts on future generations.

He links to the AAAS Report.  The Report iterates the above in high level. The Report, like so many others, expresses imminent dire consequences unless "we" do something. The problem is the we and the problem is that people really do not understand the consequences.

Frankly Income Inequality is the same. People always want more money and if they can get it from those who already have it then many are satisfied. Climate Change however is a bit more complex since the  taking away via taxes or even goods from many.

These two "threats" to our existence seem almost religious in their attempts to make "people understand".

The problem with Climate Change is; so what is the problem? It gets warmer, the ocean rises a bit, we are told it has risen a foot already and we see no change. Hurricanes? Frankly they have always been there but now we allowed people to move into areas well known for calamities and we insure them with people's taxes! Dumb? Yes, quite so. Climate Change is a "sky is falling" argument. It says that someday we will have massive problems but most people cannot relate to that. People can relate to not having more money especially if it is free, just look at Venezuela. It works for a while or at least until the economic system collapses.

Thus the key question is not the existence but the real consequences. So the oceans rise, never heard of Holland. So it gets warmer, the winters are too cold already. So some plants die off, plant ones that survive better. It is not the science of Climate Change but the consequences which are often seen as not that bad.

The same is with Income Inequality. Why is it bad? Like why is Climate Change bad? How does it or will it harm me?

Hurricanes, Climate Change and History

Let no disaster go to waste has often been the cry of the left. In a recent Science article they state:

Many climate scientists winced earlier this year when a well-meaning nonscientist tried to use extreme weather to argue that global warming is real. "We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science—and act before it's too late." 

That was (the) President ...a in his State of the Union address. The fact is, there is little or no evidence that global warming steered Sandy into New Jersey or made the storm any stronger. And scientists haven't even tried yet to link climate change with particular fires. 

Now for those of us who lived through the early 1950s on Staten Island we should well remember the hurricanes which were even worse, twenty feet of water flowing over the  shore. Is it s freak coincidence? No it is just a repeat of what happens every fifty years or so. Mother Nature has been doing this again and again. There are even Nor'easters. Storms happen and the causal link with any form of climate change is a true and oftentimes unsubstantiated stretch if not a false fabrication.

The article continues:

In March and September 2012, for example, climate and media researcher ... surveyed more than 1000 Americans. In September, 74% of those polled agreed that "global warming is affecting weather in the United States." That was up by 5% from March, after a summer of record drought, high temperatures, and powerful storms. And substantial majorities said global warming had worsened every one of six recent extreme weather events in the United States—from high temperatures to forest fires to a blustery "derecho." 

 A survey is NOT the way to do science. One should at least look at the history of the place. They continue:

Links between extreme weather and climate change are not only often scientifically suspect, they may also be a risky strategy for persuading the public to take climate change seriously. "What disturbs me is assigning anything that comes along to global warming," says professor emeritus of meteorology John M. Wallace of the University of Washington, Seattle. "That may work in the short run, but I don't think that kind of conversion has staying power." Indeed, surveys coming out on the 1-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy's landfall (29 October) show the concerns about hurricanes that spiked in the wake of the disaster have nearly faded away. 

 Fading away is the key problem. On Staten Island they went and totally disregarded history, almost recent history at that. The built a massive Hospital and Mental Health home on the very land that even thirty years ago would be under water in a rainfall. Then they built a road that made the lend a veritable bucket to hold any water flowing in. Namely the water would flow in but since the land was lower than the ocean side street it just stayed there and got higher. Much of the damage on Staten Island was due to building where one should not have done so and the very construction done by the City to expand roads. Global warming was not the problem, it was humans disregarding nature.

Trees: The Issue of Climate Change

I am a collector of trees, lots of trees. I collected dozens of Ginkgo seeds some twenty plus years ago from the New York Botanical Garden, ahead of an onslaught of Chinese nut pickers, and have planted and grown dozens of Ginkgo trees. I also have dozens of metasequoias. You see they are remnants of trees which have been around some hundred million years or more. No weak oak are these, they have seen massive climate changes and have more than prospered.

So when I read the op-ed today in the NY Times I was a bit surprised. They say:

Humans have cut down the biggest and best trees and left the runts behind. What does that mean for the genetic fitness of our forests? No one knows for sure, for trees and forests are poorly understood on almost all levels. “It’s embarrassing how little we know,” one eminent redwood researcher told me. 

 But what doe we have covering New York City streets? Ginkgoes. Why, they thrive on human pollution. They eat up CO2, the absorb all sorts of junk, they manage to thrive of the dogs and other mammals relieving themselves on their trunks. That have done this for hundreds of millions of years. The female shed seeds which smell putrid, although they roast to savory nuts. They are true survivors. And the Metasequoia, well it was down to its last legs in a valley in China when in the late 1940s someone brought out a few seed. Now it grows everywhere, humans have taken it to their heart and the things grows like a weed. Hundreds of feet tall, 3 feet or more per year!

So the problem with trees is the same as I guess Darwinism, there are the fittest which survive, survive independent of the human and survive with the help of the human. Redwoods are fragile, they will not grow anywhere. Ginkgoes will grow anywhere, literally. They will endure any extreme we throw at them. So what not reinforce that cycle, do away with wimpy trees, support the uber tree.

Green Technology and Realism

The recent issues regarding the DOE's "investment" in a solar panel company and its loss of more than $500 million bring to mind my long felt opinion of Government investments; really really dumb.

As the Hill states:

Republicans blasted ... administration officials Wednesday for green-lighting a $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra, a now-bankrupt California solar company with close ties to the White House.

The GOP attack at House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing focused on emails they said showed the White House tried to rush a final decision on Solyndra’s financing so that Vice President ... could announce approval of the loan guarantee at the September 2009 groundbreaking for the company’s new factory.

"The documents demonstrate that, when DOE was reviewing the Solyndra guarantee in 2009, it was well aware of the financial problems the deal posed,” ... chairman of the panel’s Oversight and Investigations subcommittee, said Wednesday.

First in my experience the DOE is one of the worst managed agencies around, except for the old AEC nuclear part. Second any Government agency has no clue as to how to make an investment. Those that do would never work in the Government, they would do! Imagine any GS 14 sitting on some Board. You have to be crazy t think they could even ask a sensible question.

The problem is we have hundreds of these follies. Again I remind all of the Broadband program, tens of billions down the proverbial rat hole!The market is a real thing, it should reward success and punish failure. Thus the TARP should never have been, let them fail, it clears the market. Instead we have trillions stored up going nowhere. GM and Chrysler, they too should have failed. Instead we shoveled out taxpayer money and they want more, like any addict. There is not rational for this mess.

Real Names on the Internet

There is a collection of legal entities who have decided that one must use a real name when using the Internet. In a recent positing of Ars Technica they relate the experience of Korea, South, not North, in banning those without real names. Now anonymity is not a right anywhere as is privacy, as one reads our Constitution. However one would like to have a right to be left alone.

Yet there are two forms of anonymity. Firs the type where I just want to be left alone, Walden Pond type if you will. Clearly our current Administration eschews that in toto, one need just look at health care. If I were to live in the woods off the land away from humanity, not having to pay taxes, I would have to find some health plan which in all likelihood I would never use. That type of anonymity has been destroyed. The second type is the type where I just want to throw stones and not have anybody find out, the type that wear a hoodie or face mask. That type is the type where they want to get in your face but do not want any return for their behavior.

The authors of the Federalist Papers were of the latter. They wanted to get in the face of those opposing certain aspects of the Federal form of government. Why? Ask some historians, but they were not the first.

The most entertaining parts of the Internet are often the comments. Here people have the feeling that they can and do say anything, stupid, inane, insulting, and the list goes on. One often laughs at the person who we do not know for their total lack of manners and knowledge. Yet rarely do they find out how bad they are.

Thus is there value to be unknown? Possibly. Yet someone's comments are all too often measured by who makes the comments. It is like Cable, we know most of those speaking are idiots, so we filter it out.

Trust But Verify

In the late 70s when I was working on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, CTBT, in the Carter Administration, the issue was how did one verify that the other side was not cheating. The problem was that large explosions could be monitored but small ones could not, easily. One needed many small seismographs located all over and some were even in Soviet territory.

But frankly that was the hard part. One you had the sensors there in country so that you could fairly well determine if a violation had occurred. Violations were simply an explosion of a weapon, a low yield and low profile weapon. We knew the seismic signatures and thus with high predictability we could make a definitive determination if an single event occurred.

But CO2 emissions, and total CO2 caps in turn, present a dramatically more complex problem. It is not one smokestack, not one city, not one type of event, it is an entire social system, a total ecosystem. It is a complex society and its total emissions or sources less sinks! We do not yet fully understand the physics of this, no less the chemistry, but we now want to monitor it by some less than precise manner and thus control a country's total economy. And just how was that to be accomplished?

NASA was to have launched a satellite almost a year ago and at the time as described by Reuters a year ago it was:

"The $278 million program launches its satellite on Feb. 23. For two years, the satellite will cover all of the Earth every 16 days. During each 16-day cycle, the satellite will take 8 million measurements of carbon dioxide.

Japan this month launched a satellite to measure carbon dioxide and methane, another greenhouse gas. Both launches come as about 190 nations try to agree on a successor climate change treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, which binds wealthy nations -- not including the United States -- to emissions targets through 2012.

NASA said the Japanese and U.S. satellites use different technology, fly in different orbits, and have slightly different missions. The Japanese satellite is focused on monitoring sources of carbon dioxide for treaties, while the U.S. effort focuses on what happens to the gas.

The U.S. technology measures light bounced off the planet. Carbon dioxide absorbs light in some frequencies, so the less light detected, the higher the concentration of carbon."

However the satellite, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory or OCO in NASA speak, failed it launch. As stated by NASA:

"A NASA panel that investigated the unsuccessful Feb. 24 launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, or OCO, has completed its report.

NASA's OCO satellite to study atmospheric carbon dioxide launched aboard a Taurus XL rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Feb. 24 at 1:55 a.m. PST, but it failed to reach orbit.

The Mishap Investigation Board led by Rick Obenschain, deputy director at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., verified that the Taurus launch vehicle fairing failed to separate upon command. The fairing is a clamshell structure that encapsulates the satellite as it travels through the atmosphere. The failure to shed the fairing mass prevented the satellite from reaching its planned orbit and resulted in its destruction.

The board identified four potential causes that could have resulted in the fairing not separating:

-- A failure of the frangible joint subsystem. A frangible joint is an explosive device that provides instantaneous separation of flight vehicle structures while maintaining confinement of explosive debris.
-- A failure in the electrical subsystem that prevented sufficient electrical current to initiate the required ordnance devices.
-- A failure in the pneumatic system, which supplies pressure to thrusters which separate the fairing.
-- A cord snagged on a frangible joint side rail nut plate. "

NASA has announced additional flights but funding is a concern. As announced in Nature today:

"The US Congress is ratcheting up demands for NASA to launch Earth-monitoring satellites that could help to verify the emissions targets currently being debated in Copenhagen...In a US$447-billion spending bill approved on 13 December (see Table 1), lawmakers told NASA to spend $50 million in fiscal year 2010 on a replacement for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), which crashed into the ocean near Antarctica in February after a rocket failure. "It looks like there is a future here," says David Crisp, the mission's principal investigator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. But by adding the OCO to NASA's already long list of Earth-science missions — and with no promise of future funding — some Earth scientists worry that Congress is asking the agency to do too much. Berrien Moore, director of Climate Central, a think tank in Princeton, New Jersey, says that he was both "pleased and worried" by the OCO funding because of the additional burden on the mission programme.

By measuring levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the OCO could provide baseline emissions data and act as a proof-of-concept that carbon sources and sinks can be monitored from space. The observatory would measure CO₂ changes to a precision of 1 part per million at a resolution of about 3 square kilometres — nearly 30 times that of the Japanese Greenhouse gases Observing Satellite ... which launched in January. Replacing the OCO will cost about the same as the original $280-million mission, says Crisp; if funding continues to be granted, the observatory could be launched as early as 2013.

That would require a much bigger budget for fiscal year 2011, but because NASA is one of several science agencies not included in a targeted doubling of basic-science funding ... it may well face a flat budget next year. "Or worse," says Moore."

Now for the current issues and Copenhagen. The NY Times reports the disagreement with the US and China on this very issue, verification. The article states:

"And the Chinese refusal to accept verification measures could also lead to calls for punitive tariffs on Chinese goods coming into the United States. The House bill allows for the imposition of tariffs on goods from countries that do not constrain their carbon output. A group of 10 Democratic senators wrote to Mr. Obama two weeks ago warning that the Senate would not ratify any treaty that did not protect American industry from foreign competitors who do not have to meet global warming emissions limits.

That threat could, paradoxically, help drive the Chinese to cement a deal here, an American official said. “Their No. 1 motivation is to avoid border tariffs,” the official said."

Or it could drive the Chinese towards a Japanese position in 1936-1941! The Chinese have a reasonable position for a country which is developing. Verification has and will remain a sticky point if it requires access to the sovereign territory of a nation. Especially is such intrusion would by necessity have to be as excessive as one imagine for CO2 monitoring. Japan did not like the pushing around it got in the 1930s and that in some ways led to the ability of the military to take control. I am NOT saying that the US forced Japan into its grossly immoral acts but that it may very well have set the stage for those who did.

Hopefully we are not as reckless with China, a nation which holds our debt! Verification is always intrusive. It means that you do not trust the other. That may be true but ironically the level of trust must be high before verification can work Ironic, but the old "trust but verify" of Reagan was really the equivalent of the old dictum, "Don't trust anyone, not even your father!"