So The Blogger Formerly Known as Hindrocket noticed something the other day. Why, it’s a bit of a cool summer here in Minnesota! Which, you know, is sort of true, at least today — it’s a bit chilly for mid-July, just in the mid-70s. Usually it’s in the low 80s. That’s, like, five or six degrees difference!

This, of course, proves that global warming is false. Because, as everyone knows, cool weather in one city in the upper midwest on a given day disproves global anthropomorphic climate change:

I don’t think things are quite so bad this year, but if something doesn’t change pretty soon 2009 may go down in history, in some parts of the U.S. at least, as another year with barely any summer. Here in Minnesota and across the Midwest, temperatures are abnormally cold. I don’t know whether the phenomenon is world-wide–data that will answer this question have probably not been assembled, and may not be honestly reported–but the current low level of solar activity suggests that the cooling trend could indeed be universal.

Here in Minneapolis, the temperature never reached 70 degrees today–rather astonishing for the middle of July, our hottest month. Most days recently, it hasn’t been comfortable to be outdoors in the evening without a fire and a sweatshirt. It feels more like October than July. Thankfully, and unlike 1816, it hasn’t snowed; the worst consequence we fear is not getting any ripe tomatoes.

No ripe tomatoes! The horror…the horror….

Now, I, for one, appreciate Hinderaker bringing news of the ongoing tragedy of Minnesota only having highs in the low 70s and lows in the mid-50s during summer to the masses. Clearly, as every Minnesotan knows, things are dire; we might freeze to death, here in the cold. Because, you know, Minnesotans don’t know how to handle cold weather. Hopefully America will band together to help us in our hour of…

Knock knock knock!

Hello? Who’s there? Why, it’s statistics maven and all-around smart guy Nate Silver! What’s that, Nate? You say that The Blogger Formerly Known as Hindrocket might just possibly be wrong about something? Impossible! Hindy is always right, except when he’s wrong, which is almost always, but still. He’s got an anecdote! Look:

Today, walking down the street in downtown Minneapolis at 5:30, en route from my office to my parking ramp, I saw something I’ve never seen before: a man wearing a winter coat in July.

See! A winter coat, Nate! A winter coat. I mean, a guy was wearing a winter coat in July. Right, John?

Well, maybe not quite a winter coat, but definitely a fall/winter semi-parka with an unzipped, faux-fur lined hood. He was carrying a briefcase and looked like a businessman who was tired of being cold every time he went outdoors. In the summer.

Or, you know, a spring coat. They’re pretty much the same thing.

So what do you have to counter such a devastating, not-obviously-stupid anecdote such as that? What’s that? You say you have a wealth of statistics?

Indeed, it’s been pretty cool in Minneapolis for the past couple of days; the temperature hasn’t hit 70 since midday Thursday. But has it been an unusually cool summer? No, not really. Since summer began on June 21st, high temperatures there have been above average 15 times and below average 13 times. The average high temperature there since summer began this year has been 82.4 degrees. The average historic high temperature over the same period is … 82.4 degrees. It’s been a completely typical summer in Minneapolis, although with one rather hot period in late June and one rather cool one now. (Note: actual high temperatures can be found here and historical averages can be found here.)

Well, yeah, sure, if you want to use statistics, maybe this has been a normal summer. But John Hinderaker is way ahead of you, Nate Silver. I mean, just because you used quantitative measures to determine that something like the weather, which can be measured quantitatively, is normal, that’s no reason to think that you’re anywhere near as smart as the guy who once claimed that the Teri Schiavo memo written by Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., was obviously a fake because John Hinderaker didn’t believe Republicans were capable of doing dumb things.

I understand that some doofus has tried to claim that the Twin Cities are experiencing above-normal temperatures this summer, based on an apples-to-oranges comparison between a thermometer on top of a building at the University of Minnesota and an official ASOS at the Twin Cities airport. If you compare temperatures as measured at the airport station with normal temperatures as measured at the same station, the summer has of course been below normal.

And John Hinderaker backs this up with a link! Oh, wait, no he doesn’t. Still, Nate Silver, he hasn’t given you his biggest shot:

This guy, whoever he is, obviously doesn’t live in Minnesota. The fact that we are having an unusually cool summer is common knowledge, as reflected in this story from Wednesday’s Minneapolis Star Tribune: “Cooler-than-normal summer eases some pain of the drought”[.]

Ooh, burn! Yeah, Nate, what are you thinking, using statistics to prove something, when it’s common knowledge that we’re having a cool summer! Why, there’s an article in the Star Tribune which says things! Proof!

Now, even if Minnesota is having an exceptionally cool summer (which it isn’t, except compared to recent years), that wouldn’t disprove anthropomorphic global climate change; global warming doesn’t mean every day will be warmer for everywhere on Earth all the time. It means that the mean global temperature will rise, causing significant change in weather patterns (indeed, some parts of the world could be much cooler after global warming). But never mind that. Glenn Reynolds has already heh-deeded. So there, libruls.

Incidentally, both Hinderaker and Reynolds have neglected to take Silver up on this offer:

The rules of the challenge are as follows:

1. For each day that the high temperature in your hometown is at least 1 degree Fahrenheit above average, as listed by Weather Underground, you owe me $25. For each day that it is at least 1 degree Fahrenheit below average, I owe you $25.
2. The challenge proceeds in monthly intervals, with the first month being August. At the end of each month, we’ll tally up the winning and losing days and the loser writes the winner a check for the balance.
3. The challenge automatically rolls over to the next month until/unless: (i) one party informs the other by the 20th of the previous month that he would like to discontinue the challenge (that is, if you want to discontinue the challenge for September, you’d have to tell me this by August 20th), or (ii) the losing party has failed to pay the winning party in a timely fashion, in which case the challenge may be canceled at the sole discretion of the winning party.

Odd. It’s almost as if even they know that despite decrying the cold, cold summer of ought-nine, that anthropomorphic climate change is real and happening right now, and they’re just lying. But I’m sure that can’t be right.

Of course, by “Tyranny,” I mean we passed a fairly weak cap-and-trade carbon emission bill through the House of Representatives that will, hopefully, mitigate the damage from what could be the worst environmental catastrophe since the last ice age. But while those of us in the reality-based community think that the passage of Waxman-Markey is, you know, a prudent step in preventing the flooding of Florida and the end of Midwestern agriculture, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Sigh, knows better:

For the YouTube impaired, Bachmann states a number of completely made-up statistics showing that this measure would destroy the economy, and then declares, “But what is worse than this is the fact that now because of this underlying bill, the federal government will virtually have control over every aspect of lives for the American people. It is time to stand up and say: We get to choose. We choose liberty, or we choose tyranny — it’s one of the two.”

Because nothing says tyranny like weak, market-based restrictions on carbon emissions. It’s pretty much exactly the same as what’s going on in Iran, only worse.

Meanwhile, Glenn Beck decided to go after the bill by using a watermelon as a prop. Frankly, given Beck’s rather unique view of the world, this is barely worth mentioning.

A friend of mine who writes for the anarchist magazine The Fifth Estate recently sent me their headline story for Spring 2009, issue #380. The piece by Henry Reed discusses the exorbitantly long sentences given to “terrorists” who damage property as a way to protest damaging environmental policies, using the case of Marie Mason (”sentenced to nearly 22 years in prison… after pleading guilty to two acts of eco-sabotage”) as a lens for analyzing the phenomenon.

There’s a lot of interesting and scary information in the piece that highlights how much the huge penalties given reflect wounded capitalist ideology rather than actual criminal fears:

For several years I lived in an apartment building on a crowded residential street on one of the last ungentrified blocks in my neighborhood. In one year, the buildings on both sides of my dwelling mysteriously burned. In their place, condos were built. No charges were filed; the police, the courts, and the city government smiled upon these “accidental” fires. The lives of dozens, if not hundreds, of people were put at risk.

Mason and Ambrose, on the other hand, burned down an unoccupied research building in the middle of the night, far from residential housing. No one was intended to be hurt and no one was.

The difference is that their acts were an attack on the “marketplace” ‐ not on humans. Attack the marketplace and you are a terrorist in the eyes of the State. Threaten the lives of hundreds of low-income residents to build condos and you are an entrepreneur and an upstanding citizen.

But what really jumped out at me about the article was a tangent that relates to the issue at hand, but which I also felt suggested a deeper analysis:

Since when have ideas been part of a “marketplace”? Intellectual thought, at its best, has always been a deeply subversive enterprise, unconstrained by the society in which it germinates.

Situationist theorist Guy Debord declared that in modern society the commodity form had colonized all aspects of everyday life, and both Grey and Maloney’s statements illustrate this. They cannot even talk about ideas, which are free, without framing them in the language of the market. Socrates committed suicide as a testimony to the power of critical ideas to resist the social norms of society.

I found this latter quote very profound. An economy is only part of a functioning culture. It’s frightening how much everything, from human relationships to ideological pursuits, is rendered through the lens of capitalist economics. It’s frightening, and it’s unhealthy. My ideas are not a marketplace, and my personhood is not determined by my economic worth alone.

 Michael Steele appears to be angling to be the Sarah Palin of 2009:

We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? 

Well, if you believe the folklore, Erik the Red named it Greenland to trick Icelanders into emigrating there. (Iceland, meanwhile, was supposedly named so as to hide its lush green beauty from the mainlanders.) It’s also possible that “Greenland” is a corruption of “Gruntland,” grunt meaning ground, a reference to the shallow bays surrounding the southern, habitable land.

What is certain is that Greenland has not been a lush tropical paradise since the Triassic period, and that it’s been covered with ice for at least the past 110,000 years, which means that Greenland has been covered in ice for the entire history of behaviorally modern humans.

It also means that Michael Steele doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. But that’s well-established at this point.

Matt, noting a “both sides suck” article in the Times, writes:

Instead, out comes Andrew Revkin with a false equivalence article <a target=”_blank” href=”http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/02/25/revkin-dead-wrong/”>painting Will with the same brush</a> as Al Gore. Will’s sin is to say that the world is not getting warmer when, in fact, it is. Gore’s sin was to say that warming is happening (it is) and to illustrate the problems with this trend by referring to a chart that Revkin deems unduly alarmist but that Gore found in <em>The New York Times</em>.

Matt’s correct, of course. But Matt didn’t note another way in which Gore has acted better than Will — a way that reflects, I think, Gore’s superior approach to science. What did they do once the errors were pointed out? Gore acted responsibly; Will and the Washington Post did not.

The critique of Gore’s chart (a new addition to his presentation) came out earlier this month. Gore, presumably because he or his staff felt the critique had merit, removed the chart from his presentation.

Tigerhawk says that’s embarrassing, and I agree, it is a bit embarrassing — but only a bit. Occasional mistakes are inevitable when a book or presentation draws evidence from hundreds of sources. What would be seriously humiliating is if the error were fatal to Gore’s larger thesis, or if Gore refused to correct the error once it was credibly pointed out. But that one chart isn’t the foundation of Gore’s argument about global climate change. And by promptly correcting the error,¹ Gore has demonstrated how responsible writers act.

In contrast, George Will and the Washington Post have, so far, refused to admit, let alone correct, Will’s errors. Instead, the Post has compounded Will’s errors. And as for a prompt correction — it turns out Will has been repeating more or less the same error-filled column since 1992.

1. The exact timeline is unclear, but it appears less than a month, and maybe less than a week, passed between the critique of the chart, and Gore correcting the error. (back)

Nolan Finley, in the Detroit News, writes:

Growing up in the House, Dingell gained an appreciation for the institution and for its rules and protocols. [...]

That commitment to consensus cost Dingell his beloved job as Energy and Commerce chair. The far left wing of his party torpedoed him for striking a middle ground on environmental laws.

Dingell was booted out of his committee chairmanship for “striking a middle ground” only if you define “middle ground” as making common cause with global warming denialism. That’s why so many liberals are angry at Dingell — not because he has a “commitment to consensus,” but because his positions on global warming are, we believe, mistaken and damaging.

Dingell is actually great on many issues, but on energy and climate issues he’s substantively out of step with both the vast, vast majority of the relevant scientific experts. Substantively, Dingell’s position isn’t the middle — he’s the extreme.

Do you think that substantive policy positions matter? I do. I think that, based on substantive policy considerations, it made sense to give Dingell the boot from heading up that particular committee. That he’s willing to work with Republicans doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t face any consequences for his actual policy positions.

“I’m an anachronism around here,” he says. “I’m an institutionalist who believes the House has an importance beyond the work that it does. I believe that we ought to give the Republicans a say in the place. You get better legislation that way.”

How?

I’ve seen the compromises that were put into the stimulus bill. And they’re really, really bad. Once again, substantive policy positions matter — or they should.

For instance, encouraging middle-class people to buy new homes right now is a bad idea, because the housing bubble still hasn’t fully deflated, and new homeowners buying now will get screwed over and lose money when the value of their homes go down. There’s a lot we can and should do to help the middle class, but artificially lowering the costs of buying houses during a bubble is genuinely stupid.

Another example: We are going to have to spend money to repair schools sooner or later. No one questions that. But if we do it now, we can borrow the money at a virtually 0% interest rate; putting off this work for two years will force taxpayers to pay more for it. Furthermore, this is “shovel-ready” work, and excellent stimulus. What rational reason is there to cut this spending out of the stimulus (unless you’re against stimulus spending altogether)?

Republican ideas didn’t make the Senate bill better. They’re making it worse. And anyone who thinks these ideas are good ideas, is either ideologically blinded, or ignorant of economics.

Republicans right now don’t have any real reason to want the stimulus to work. Their best chance of regaining power is for the economy to tank; the lower unemployment gets, the worse off Republicans are. (By “Republicans,” I’m referring to powerful elected officials, not ordinary folks.) But I don’t think it’s rational to seek a compromise with people whose best interests are served by your bill failing.

I don’t think Democrats should ignore the other side with impunity. I think Democrats should ignore the other side when the other side is acting as if they want the country’s economy to fail, and when the other side not only has no rational ideas to contribute, but is contributing ideas that clearly make things worse.

When Republicans start having intelligent, constructive ideas to contribute, then Democrats should pay attention to them. Not before.

Like Iraq, Hurricane Katrina will show up repeatedly on this list. Its first appearance: Bush’s immediate response. Well, not immediate, of course — that involved partying and having birthday cake…but that shows up in the single digits.

No, this is Bush’s delayed response, the one where he woke up one day to find his advisers were demanding he do something, anything, to stop appearing to be the world’s biggest douchebag. As that simple act was beyond his ability, he decided to do this:

Because nothing says “Message: I Care” like looking out a window at a destroyed city when you’re flying 15,000 feet over it at 450 miles per hour. Heckuva job, Bushie! With hands-on involvement like that, I can’t believe that you didn’t actually come up with a decent response to the Katrina disaster, you know, ever.

Hey, what if you could have a house that’s much friendlier to the environment and costs about a tenth as much to heat? Passive houses are here:

Even on the coldest nights in central Germany, Mr. Kaufmann’s new “passive house” and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer. [...]

Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.

The concept has been tried before, but failed because of problems with mold and stale air. A new air circulating system, in which cold air gong in is heated by the warm air going out, has solved this problem.

But the sophisticated windows and heat-exchange ventilation systems needed to make passive houses work properly are not readily available in the United States. So the construction of passive houses in the United States, at least initially, is likely to entail a higher price differential.

Moreover, the kinds of home construction popular in the United States are more difficult to adapt to the standard: residential buildings tend not to have built-in ventilation systems of any kind, and sliding windows are hard to seal.

Sounds like the sort of thing that some sort of big green infrastructure investment stimulus package might want to invest in.

Governor Schwarzenegger (after five years, it still gives me the jibblies to write that) has proposed a 9% tax on veterinary services. Here’s some info from the fact sheet I received when we took Petey in for an eye infection:

In this weak economy, animal owners are already making tough choices. Adding sales tax to veterinary services will force owners to make difficult choices about the health and welfare of their pets.

• Pets are members of the family and an important source of companionship. This proposed tax could add approximately 9% to the cost of veterinary care. The result will be that many animals won’t get the medical care they need and they will be abandoned or euthanized.

• Shelter populations are increasing beyond capacity as many Californians lose their homes to foreclosure. If people can’t afford to take care of their pets, they may be forced to abandon them to shelters, adding to the overcrowding and financial strain.

• More than 800,000 cats and dogs enter California shelters every year at a cost to taxpayers of $275 million. As shelters become filled beyond capacity, more healthy animals will be euthanized adding to the emotional strain of shelter workers.

There’s more on the sheet, including information about food production animals.

I know there are more pressing issues out there right now, and I’ll admit that I feel a little guilty posting an action alert about the well-being of pets when the well-being of other animals (and, you know, humans) is under more severe attack. And a 9% tax, although high, isn’t the end of the world (says the middle-classer with a single, healthy cat).

But a tax like this says a lot about how people view both health care and animal welfare. We still seem to insist that a trip to the hospital is a product, akin to a new purse or car or TV, and a patient is a customer who can simply choose to forgo care if they don’t have the money. Animals are considered luxuries; if you want a pet, go for it, but it really should be a low priority. Even if everyone grants that animals like seeing eye dogs are necessary, it’s actually pretty revolutionary to think of animal companionship as a right instead of a privilege. What if you need a companion animal for your emotional health? What if you view animals as friends and family members with unique personalities? (Filthy hippie! Go back to Berkeley!) Is that dog still a frivolous luxury? Should that bird’s well-being be contingent on paying a tax? If humans shouldn’t be taxed on vital medical care, why should animals? Because humans are just better? Because humans can speak out against it?

So while this tax is a relatively small injustice, it has much broader implications for how we view the health of our animals.

Also, while these two situations are in no way on the same level, I think that if you take this mentality to its logical extreme, you end up in the camp that claims that basic rights like having children should be reserved for the middle class and up. If your job doesn’t pay you enough to take care of your dependent, then the problem doesn’t lie with your job - it lies with your stupid, selfish decision to care for a dependent. And there seems to be an arbitrary and invisible income line below which people simply lose the right to have families (whatever those families might consist of).

The official action alert is here.

**

Also, a mural on the face of the former Valley Cities JCC building is facing sandblasting. Here’s a photo from the Jewish Journal:

Image description: a building with a lively and detailed mural depicting children dancing, reproductions of old photographs, and human hands touching. The words “VALLEY CITIES JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER” are written across the top.

My grandmother died two years ago, and we held her memorial in this building. Sherman Oaks isn’t exactly the most happening city on earth, and when I approached the building on the day of the memorial, I was struck by the little oasis of art on a street that housed mainly strip malls and unadorned housing.

Again, it’s not the end of the world if this mural is destroyed. And the new owners of the building are certainly within their rights to change its appearance. Except, wait - don’t they have a responsibility to the larger community? If the residents of Sherman Oaks value the mural, if they derive pleasure from viewing it, if it’s a historical artifact (Yiddishkayt points out that it contains one of the view remaining public displays of written Yiddish in L.A.), then shouldn’t they have a say in whether it stays or goes? If residents of, say, gated communities have to comply with their neighbors’ aesthetic preferences by keeping their houses uniform, why doesn’t that logic apply here? Why are “tidy” adornments like lawns more desirable than “messy” adornments like art? Does it really all boil down to money and power, or are there deeper cultural forces at work here?

This is kind of a tangent, but this situation makes me think of public space. Who does public space (parks, medians, sidewalks, etc) belong to? The easy answer is a city - but who does a city belong to, if not its citizens? How many of you view public space as forbidden areas - places that you can look at and sometimes walk on, but aren’t allowed to alter? I’ve been reading up on the guerrilla gardening movement, which targets public space and uses it to grow food and other beneficial plants. Who gets to choose what grows on public land? Why do we feel like we have no right to the space in our own communities? Why does planting food alongside a sidewalk feel so subversive that guerrilla gardeners regularly do it in the middle of the night? (Interesting note: many gardeners report that city officials visit the sites - not to arrest them, but to thank them for their work.)

One possible argument is that, if everyone felt we had the right to use and alter public space, there’d be anarchy - people pulling up each other’s crops all over the place. And I’m sure some theft and vandalism would happen, but why is the fear of chaos so overwhelming that we don’t want to risk it? Why not tackle the underlying causes of crime instead of living in fear of it? And why tax my kitten for the misfortune of having a clogged tear duct?

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

Intra-Democrat fights are rarely this sweet. Waxman beats Dingell:

Representative Henry Waxman won the chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee, ousting John Dingell, the longest-serving member of the U.S. House.

On Shakesville, Oddjob comments:

THAT’S CHANGE!! …[T]he single largest reason why car fuel efficiency standards have not been meaningfully raised since the 1970’s is because Dingell has been the chairman of the House committee most responsible for such legislation, and he’s from Detroit. Waxman is a liberal and from California, the state where smog from automobiles has been the biggest air pollution problem.

This fight has been going on for years, but before now Dingell has held his ground. From a Greenwire report in 2006:

Climate, Pelosi said, is “a critical part of our agenda.”

Pelosi referred specifically to a global-warming bill from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), which many environmentalists have identified as one of the few measures on Capitol Hill to take the steps necessary to avert irreversible changes to the Earth’s climate. Last month, Pelosi cosponsored the measure.

But Dingell thinks the Waxman proposal goes too far too fast. “I have reason to believe,” he said, “it’s on the extreme side.”

Sane legislative responses to global warming are now much, much more likely.

You know, this is perhaps the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen, and I read The Corner:

You get that? Barack Obama’s a namby-pamby liberal idiot because he wants nuclear power to be “safe.” It’s totally safe! Which is why the GOP is planning on storing spent fuel in their backyards, next to the garden tools.

This isn’t just stupid, it’s the reductio ad absurdum of the Republican argument this year. “The liberals say we should think about things beyond the most facile level. Stupid liberals! Let’s go blow something up!” It’s reckless, and it’s embarrassing. If the Democrats were trying to argue using similarly fact-free terms, I swear, I’d vote GOP — because they’d be showing themselves to be fundamentally unserious about the very notion of governance. Which is exactly what the Republicans have shown themselves to be.

For the record, Obama’s totally right: nuclear power should be looked into, but it also should only be adopted if it can be done safely, with a certain knowledge of where we’re putting the spent fuel rods. And we need to answer a lot of questions — are we going to open up Yucca Mountain? Does John McCain really want the nuclear-fuel trains running through Phoenix? And is he going to say we should do this right now, with Nevada a swing state? What are our proposed standards for safety? Are we going to talk to our friends the French about their experience with nuclear? Or are we going to dismiss them because they’re France?

And these are just questions that I came up with off the top of my head. I would expect a man who wants to be president to think about this stuff more than I have over the past ten minutes. But that’s not how the GOP works anymore. And that’s why they’re going to lose next Tuesday.

Source: Grist. Curtsy: Ezra.

Obama, during a soon-to-be-forgotten controversy, said that Republicans take pride in being ignorant.

Here’s a relatively minor example that illustrates the point: During the saddleback forum (EconomistMom posted the relevant part of the transcript), McCain said:

My friends, we spent $3 million of your money to study the DNA of bears in Montana. Now I don’t know if that was a paternity issue or a criminal issue…

(LAUGHTER)

… but the point is, it was $3 million of your money. It was your money. And, you know, we laugh about it, but we cry - and we should cry because the Congress is supposed to be careful stewards of your tax dollars.

This is a argument McCain has reused year after year — it’s part of his stump speech.

So what is McCain talking about? The funding (which was actually $5 million, spread out over several years) was for a project that measures the population of grizzly bears by conducting DNA tests on grizzly hair.

“The main question we’re trying to answer is how many grizzly bears are now in the NCDE,” says Kate Kendall, who coordinates the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project. A U.S. Geological Service research biologist stationed at Glacier National Park, Kendall explains that wildlife managers can’t effectively protect, control, restore, or otherwise manage grizzly bears or other wildlife population unless they first know how many animals exist and whether the population is increasing or decreasing. [...]

An accurate number of NCDE grizzlies has eluded biologists for decades. Comprising Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall, Scapegoat, Great Bear, and Mission Mountains wildernesses, the ecosystem is one of the wildest and most inaccessible in the contiguous United States. Moreover, grizzly bears are among the most difficult animals to count. For decades, biologists thought a reliable population estimate of these secretive bears in the NCDE would be impossible to obtain.

Then came DNA hair follicle sampling. By snagging the hair of bears visiting lure stations or using rub trees, researchers can now identify individual animals and accurately estimate population size with the same DNA technology police use to solve crimes.

“In addition to being quick and relatively inexpensive, one major advantage of DNA analysis is that we don’t have to trap, tranquilize, collar, and otherwise handle bears,” says Kendall. “In fact, there’s really no interaction between bears and people.”

The project involves nearly 5,000 stations, some of them as much as 50 miles from the nearest road. Each station needs to be set up by trained technicians (among other things, you need someone who won’t get in trouble with bears despite wandering around in the woods with big bottles of extremely effective bear bait — the project has so far had nearly 100 bear sightings but zero bear-related injuries). The bear fur samples also need to be collected and the stations sterilized and reset for the next bear, and eventually dismantled. Each sample needs to be tracked (they use bar codes), packed, shipped, identified by DNA, and then the data needs to be interpreted.

First of all, let me just say: Damn, that’s really cool.

It’s a clever and innovative solution to a measurement problem that scientists recently thought impossible to solve. And without it, we can’t be certain if the grizzly bear population is going up or going down — which is important, because federal law requires the government to protect endangered species, and that can’t be done without good data.

Here’s some questions I’d like to see McCain asked:

1) On dozens of occasions, including just last week, you’ve cited the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project as a prime example of wasteful government spending. Can you tell us what the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project’s purpose is?

2) Are you opposed to tracking the population of grizzly bears to make sure they don’t go extinct? Are you opposed to protecting endangered species?

3) If you’re not opposed to tracking the population of grizzly bears, then what less expensive but equally effective means do you propose?

4) Why did you vote for a program that you’ve cited dozens of times as an example of useless government pork?

It’s possible Senator McCain voted for the program because he knows it’s a good program and a responsible use of taxpayer money. But Candidate McCain is so lacking substance — and so certain that the way into Republican hearts is through aggressive ignorance and mockery of good science — that he might discredit a program he knows is valuable in order to advance his anti-government, anti-science campaign. What matters to an empty shirt like McCain isn’t substance, and certainly not good science; the only thing that matters is votes.

Alternatively, McCain is such an ignoramus that he thinks the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project really is a bad idea. Finally, it’s possible that he’s been speaking against it for years, on dozens of occasions, without even knowing what the project does.

(See also: Scientific American, The New York Times.)

Michele Bachmann talks. Hilarity ensues:

We like to keep track of the, er, intriguing sayings of Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, the Christian Right champion from Minnesota. But this latest is really out there — Bachmann says we don’t need pesky environmentalists like Nancy Pelosi around, because Jesus already saved the planet!

“[Pelosi] is committed to her global warming fanaticism to the point where she has said that she’s just trying to save the planet,” Bachmann told the right-wing news site OneNewsNow. “We all know that someone did that over 2,000 years ago, they saved the planet — we didn’t need Nancy Pelosi to do that.”

Wowie wow wow wow. That’s some hardcore wingnuttery right there, right up there with the time she spied on a GLBT rally at the state capitol, or got “attacked” by evil lesbian secret agents in a Scandia restroom, or kissed George W. Bush after the State of the Union, or revealed the secret plan to partition Iraq, or explained how awesome it was that Minnesotans all have to work second jobs just to get by, or told us that Jesus had hand-picked her to run.

The sad thing is, not only is Bachmann’s statement scary to anyone who’d like the government to behave as if the Rapture isn’t coming next Tuesday (which, even if you think the Rapture is coming next Tuesday, is still solid policy), but it doesn’t even make any theological sense. In Christianity, Jesus doesn’t come to save planet Earth, he comes to save the souls of humanity. If Jesus had come to make Earth a pristine place, all he would have had to do was get rid of the humans. I don’t think that’s what he had in mind.

Matthew Yglesias writes:

One objection you often hear to pro-transit, pro-walking, anti-driving measures is a social justice argument that these measures will hit the poor hardest. In fact, as this Kevin Drum post makes clear poor people do relatively little driving. They differ from middle class and wealthy people in that utility bills take up a very large proportion of their income.

It’s true that poor people, on average, drive less than rich people. But what matters isn’t the absolute level of fuel usage, but how big a chunk of one’s income is taken up by fuel usage. According to the data in Kevin Drum’s post, folks in the bottom fifth of income in the US spend 10% of their income on gasolene, and about 12% on utility bills. In contrast, the richest fifth of people spend about 4% of their income on gasolene, and about 3% on utility bills.

So contrary to Yglesias’ claim, any policy that increases the cost of driving will definitely hit the poor harder than the rich. This should be no surprise, since virtually any economic hardship one can imagine hits the poor harder than the rich. This is why it’s helpful to be rich.

This doesn’t mean that we should oppose “pro-transit, pro-walking, anti-driving measures” as a matter of social justice. Avoiding those policies won’t prevent high gas prices, which are much more painful to the poor than the rich; and in the long run, doing nothing to transition away from a gas-based economy and infrastructure will be worse for the poorest 20% than the alternatives. What we should be doing is trying to change to more sustainable energy use, while simultaniously pursuing policies to reduce and mitigate poverty.

From Kevin Drum’s post:

…low-income houses spend 22% of their income on energy, while high-income households spend only 4% of their income on energy. If you raise the cost of energy, you hurt the poor far, far more than the better off.

Two things are worth noting. First, utility costs are a bigger problem than gasoline. On a percentage basis, the poor pay 7x as much for utilities as the well off, while they pay only 4x as much for gasoline.

I agree with most of Kevin’s post, but he’s mistaken to use “how much more do the poor pay compared to the rich” as his measurement of which is “a bigger problem.” If our concern is hardship, what matters is how big a percentage of one’s income is being spent — not how that percentage compares to what the rich spend. The bottom fifth of earners in the US are spending 10% of income on gas and 12% on utilities; for those folks the two problems are just about equal in size.

A few weeks ago I walked into my local supermarket to see that a 10 oz. bar of cheese was “on sale” for $5.39. I did a double take–maybe they meant two bars of cheese for $5.39. Generally, the sale on that brand of cheese is 2 for $4.00 or 2 for $5.00, but sure enough this was somehow supposed to be a sale. I’ve been complaining about this since last year–the cost of food is soaring. Last year, I could generally get out of the supermarket paying around $65-85.00 for two people, now I’m paying $90.00 or more. The higher prices seem to apply across the board–fresh produce, canned foods, flour/rice, and most dramatically dairy. Of course, I’m fortunate to be able to suck it up and pay the higher prices, but many lower income folks in this country and other wealthy countries are struggling, and in poorer countries, people are taking to the streets in protest because they are unable to feed their families.

A quick search of Google news indicates that we really are in a world wide food crisis. I’m not so sure that there is an actually shortage of food, but the crisis appears to be the cost. Some of the countries where people are struggling with soaring food prices, include–Afghanistan, Haiti, South Africa, Namibia, New Zealand, Ivory Coast, and numerous others. The situation is getting so serious that the United Nations (and the World Bank) weighed in last week :

The head of the UN World Food Programme has warned that the rise in basic food costs could continue until 2010.

Josette Sheeran blamed soaring energy and grain prices, the effects of climate change and demand for biofuels.

Ms Sheeran has already warned that the WFP is considering plans to ration food aid due to a shortage of funds.

Some food prices rose 40% last year, and the WFP fears the world’s poorest will buy less food, less nutritious food or be forced to rely on aid.

Speaking after briefing the European Parliament, Ms Sheeran said the agency needed an extra $375m (244m euros; £187m) for food projects this year and $125m (81m euros; £93m) to transport it.

She said she saw no quick solution to high food and fuel costs.

“The assessment is that we are facing high food prices at least for the next couple of years,” she said.

Ms Sheeran said global food reserves were at their lowest level in 30 years - with enough to cover the need for emergency deliveries for 53 days, compared with 169 days in 2007.

Several factors have been cited as causes for the food price crisis including: rising fuel cost, the shift towards biofuels (e.g. ethanol), population growth, the growth of capitalist economies, and weather patterns. The greatest criticism in the range of articles I read has been reserved for government subsidies for bio-fuels, specifically ethanol. Many feel that the shift to ethanol and bio-fuels is environmentally harmful, but now we can add soaring food prices and hunger to the list of arguments against bio-fuels1.

1. If you want more information of about the food crisis, these graphs from the BBC website have useful information about the food price crisis. The only additional point I would add is that (see the chart of trade balances) while some countries like the US will benefit in the area of trade, I don’t think that the average American is benefiting from this. A few corporate farmers may be getting rich, but the vast majority of people are hurting. We’re not hurting anywhere near as much as poor people in poor countries. (back)

The Union express, the paper of the National Distribution Union, is one of the better union newspapers in New Zealand. But there was an appalling article about climate change in their latest issue (not available on-line but it’s February-April 2008 with a Bunnings protest on the front cover). I think it typifies what is ridiculous about much discussion about the environment.

The article is called Be The Change and is based on the website of the same name.

My main objection is to the section called Save Money and the Planet, which gave all sorts of advice about what union members could do. Much of the advice assumed that you own your own home, and have capital to make upgrades, with suggestions to install insulation, and consider solar water heating. Then there’s the advice to turn off your heated towel rail and your second fridge.*

I am angry to read this nonsense in a union magazine, which is going to some of the lowest paid workers in the country. While some of NDU workplaces, such as mills, are well paid enough that workers might own their own home and a heated towel rail, many are not.

I regularly turn off my hot water heater, not for energy efficiency reasons, because it’s the only way I can pay my electricity bill. The idea that workers need to be lectured at how to save electricity is ridiculous. Low paid people know from saving money. What they don’t have is capital, some people can’t afford to buy a $6 light bulb now to save $20 over the course of the year.

There was nothing about landlords and government’s responsibility to provide better quality housing, and what unions are doing about that (which is probably because the answer is ‘nothing’). There wasn’t even any information about the schemes that some councils are running which subsidise landlords to install heat-pumps and installation.

I would expect a union magazine to be the one place you could find discussion of environmental issues that goes beyond individualistic moralising. That it didn’t, that all the Union Express had to say was the banal ‘be the change’ is a really bad sign. Recently discussion about climate change and carbon footprints have gone mainstream. Airlines and power companies want us to believe if we do our little bit then everything will be fine. Some environmentalists seem to see this as a victory, but it’s not, it’s distraction and co-option. Individuals can’t save the planet, anymore than they can end war. The way the world’s resources are used is not decided by consumers, but at by companies at the point of production. Action around climate change which ignores this isn’t so much rearranging deck-chairs on the Titanic, but telling the passengers to lose weight so it’ll sink slower.

* It makes me want to write a whole series of climate change advice in a similar vein: “Turn off the heating system in your spa pool when you are going to be away for a few days. Consider an energy efficient air conditioning system for your second home.” etc.

The BBC reports new discoveries in the field of animal research:

The study found African elephants reacted with fear when they detected the scent of garments previously worn by men of the Maasai tribe.

Maasai men are known to demonstrate their virility by spearing elephants… The elephants also responded aggressively to red clothing, which is characteristic of traditional Maasai dress.

However, the elephants showed much milder reaction to clothing previously worn by the Kamba people, agriculturalists who pose little threat.

The psychologists said they had expected to find elephants might be able to distinguish among different human groups according to the level of risk they posed.

They said: “We were not disappointed. In fact, we think that this is the first time that it has been experimentally shown that any animal can categorise a single species of potential predator into subclasses based on such subtle cues.”

It’s interesting that the article is focusing on the Massai as hunters, as Westerners have long held up the Massai as the quintessential “noble savage.” I don’t think the article or the study are playing into that, but it catches my eye to see them being used in the role of “fearsome hunter.”

Another thing I found striking: the elephants will run from any red clothing, but they’ll run farther and faster from red clothing that also carries the odor of Massai men than they will from red clothing that has been worn by members of another African group.

How do the elephants get this knowledge? Is it all experiential, or do they pass it down as they do knowledge about things like where mineral deposits that they need to acquire vitamins are?

And I had no idea that different ethnic groups had detectably different smells. Diet, I assume? And other lifestyle factors. I didn’t realize the divides in lifestyle were still large enough to produce that effect, although it makes sense, particularly in the context of something like one group’s continued tradition of hunting elephants.

Can’t decide if I like or hate the backgrounds.