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The “Hockey Stick” Drives Conservatives Crazy The Wall Street Journey (my favorite newspaper) and its Editorial Page (my least favorite editorials) are showing their strange schism again. Friday’s (7.14.06) second editorial was headlined “Hockey Stick Hokum.” Whoo boy, what a piece o’weak thinking. What weak evidence. What strange rationalizations. Basically, the Fox-ites in print denied the current state of paleoclimate research in favor of the old, anecdote-based thinking about what’s been happening with global temperature changes over the past thousand years. They attack the original analysis that created the “hockey stick” graph (showing things have been heating up fast in the last century) by excerpting a new report commissioned by the House Energy Committee. The work was done by statisticians, not – heaven forbid – climatologists. Here are the graphics the WSJ editors used: The top graph is what we’ve had in our textbooks for decades, based on little more than historical

Whoa! As you know (better than I, a rank amateur) Blogspot has a “next blog” link in the upper right hand corner. Probably some of the other blog hosting sites have something similar. Anyway… I was “next-ing” through the random order the link provides. There is a lot of weird, and a lot of impressive stuff out there among the 40 million blogs (where did I get that number?). One that stopped me cold, and made me write this little bit, was a narrative of the last days of life and then the death of a loved one. Then a start of the coping. Try this if you want a measure of reality: http://jacksroadtorecovery.blogspot.com/ Hang in there, Becci.

The Great New Mexico Drought is cracked. Not broken, mind you, just cracked. Here in this marvelous little microclimate called “The East Mountains” (the east side of the mountains east of Albuquerque; actually the Sandias, Manzanitos and Manzanos), and especially in this valley between Raven Road, Kuhn Road, Skyland Boulevard and the Isleta Reservation, the rains have come and come and come. In the last three weeks, more than six inches of rain (and hail and sleet!) have fallen. The crunchy grasses and crackling pine needles have grown soft. Green of every shade has sprung from the plants and the ground itself, and all things with roots are rejoicing. I’m not sure how long it takes to rehydrate the cores of thick ponderosa trunks (they were only 25% of what they should have been in interior moisture – Roman candles awaiting ignition), but they have got to be on their way. Most of this water has soaked into the ground very quickly after each rain, bathing their roots. Only in the

Darn it! Ethanol, whether from corn, switchgrass or sugar beets/cane, really isn’t the magic bullet that will slay the dragon of our petroleum addiction. Neither is biomass fuel the magic wand that will poof! away our dependence on fossil and atomic fuels electrical generation. (Check out the wonderful dialogue of the learned in the “Letters” section of the 23 June ’06 Science Magazine. www.sciencemag.org [subscription’]) Of course there are no magic bullets/wands lying around these days anyway, except among Harry Potter and his ilk. The thing is, we shouldn’t get discouraged when our latest magic gets debunked. Ethanol, biomass, wind power, photovoltaics, geothermal, wave power, etc. have all had their moments in the “magic” circle. The genuine wizards recognize that the potent magic will come from the agglomerated minor miracles of the various “alternative” energy techniques. We (my learned wife and I) are on the verge of trying one of these minor alter

Many British journalists still say “2000 millions” rather than “two billion.” Something about the first way really sticks it to you that a billion is a lot more than a million. Yet one of the most common mistakes I hear from broadcast journalists is (mumble)-illions. My suspicion is that they are just not sure. My certainty is that the listener can’t possibly be sure from what they hear. I asked a bright young employee once “how many millions are there in a billion?” Answer? “Ten… NO, a hundred million in billion.” When I stated that there is a thousand million in a billion, the employee was incredulous, clearly thinking I had slipped a cog. Back to newscasters, you can frequently hear that sometimes they are more impressed with “87 million” than with “3.2 billion.” Perhaps if every newscaster reported that we are spending “$3192 millions” every week in Iraq*, the actual dollar cost might be more widely appreciated. *more or less

On the Monday, June 26 th Rush Limbaugh program, guest host Paul W. Smith was interviewing someone (name escapes me) on how foolish the “Libs” are to worry about global warming. If there are any real problems they are a half a millennium away. In last week’s Science Magazine (June 16, 2006) there is a modest article titled “Permafrost and the Global Carbon Budget.” The sub-head is “ Climate warming will thaw permafrost, releasing trapped carbon from this high-latitude reservoir and further exacerbating global warming.” This is new information, best I can tell. Check it out at www.sciencemag.org . (subscription; or at the library) It seems that most of the global warming models haven’t included much about the CO 2 and methane that will be released by thawing permafrost. There are such vast quantities of permafrost that it can contribute big time to a sudden acceleration of climate warming. The current warming trend driven by human-generated greenhouse g

The “net neutrality” debate is a big deal. It probably affects all of our lives, especially if we are shareholders in certain companies, either telecom, cable or net companies. And maybe if we are just every day users of the Net. Since it’s clearly a GIANT vs. GIANT debate, I have some trouble taking it too seriously. So stand by for a completely trivial observation. Tonight on The News Hour , PBS’s big nameplate, the spokesman for the Google, Yahoo, “big net” side was PAUL MISENER, Vice President for Global Public Policy, Amazon.com, Here’s the news. Mr. Misener is a dead ringer for Max Headroom ! He’s a good talker and a smart guy, holding up his side’s side really well. But he looks like MAX HEADROOM . What can I say? Is this perfect? Based on this and this alone, I am on the side of the mega-web sites in this argument. Max Headroom Am I right? Is this Kismet? How can anyone still be on the side of the telcos and cablecos? Misener can be seen at: http