Locks and guards

H. P. Lovecraft's novel The Lurker at the Threshold is, like much of his work, uneven.  At its best, it's atmospheric as hell, and has some scenes that will haunt your nightmares long after you turn the last page.  (I swear, I'll never look at a stained-glass window the same way after reading that book.)  It's the story of a man named Ambrose Dewart, who returns to rural Massachusetts after inheriting some property that had passed down in his family from a mysterious great-grandfather "whom no one in the family talked about."  Upon arrival, he reads a set of instructions that had come along with the deed, and finds a baffling warning that he should not damage a stone tower located nearby "lest he abandon his locks and guards."

It's a phrase that's peculiar and evocative, and it's stuck with me since I first read the tale when I was a teenager.  Especially since Ambrose proceeds to ignore the instructions entirely, knocks a hole in the tower so he can get inside, and unleashes chaos.

While overall it's a decent story, Dewart's actions always struck me as completely idiotic.  If you're in an unfamiliar situation, and you receive a set of ominous directives, why would you blunder in and do the exact opposite?  Especially when the implication is by doing so, you're getting rid of something that might be vital for protecting you?

I must say, though, that my sense that "no one would do something that stupid" may have to be revised, now that I've watched the last four weeks of actions by our so-called government here in the United States.

Just in the first month of Trump 2.0, he, Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the various other lunatics in charge have:

• withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization
• stripped funding from the Center for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, including ending research into cancer prevention and treatment
• proposed revoking the Affordable Care Act and making drastic cuts to Medicaid
• ended the CDC-led "Wild to Mild" flu vaccination campaign, just as flu-related hospitalizations reached a fifteen-year high of fifty thousand per week
• suggested that anyone on psychiatric medications, especially antidepressants and anxiolytics, should be taken off their medications and forced to go to mandatory "wellness camps"
• fired staff and cut funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, and National Hurricane Center
• withdrawn the United States from the Paris Accords
• fired staff and cut funding to the National Parks Service
• fired senior staff in the military, replacing them with Trump loyalists
• fired all the Department of Energy staff who oversee nuclear weapons safety

When this last one got out, there was so much public outcry that the administration reversed course and tried to rehire the fired staff, with only partial success.  It turned out that the person responsible for the cuts was Luke Farritor, a 23-year-old SpaceX intern -- one of the techbro hackers Musk now has infiltrating the Department of Justice, the Social Security Administration, and the IRS.

And not one Republican congressperson has stood up and said no to any of it.  Sure, there are some who are probably loving every minute of this, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and the spectacularly stupid Nancy Mace.  The scuttlebutt is that a lot of them are horrified, but are "scared shitless" to say anything because they're afraid of reprisals by Trump and his goons. 

The media, too, has been largely complicit, for which you can thank people like Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong.  It's being played as "eliminating governmental waste and fraud," but make no mistake about it.  These cuts are not because they're examples of fraudulent spending.  You bring in auditors to find fraud, not hackers.  These decisions are being made purely for ideological reasons (when they're not just idiotic mistakes, like the firing of the nuclear weapons staff).  Epidemics and pandemics sound bad, and things like mandatory vaccinations and mask mandates don't sell well with the MAGA "don't step on muh freedoms" crowd, so no more funding the NIH and CDC.  Can't admit that anthropogenic climate change is happening, because it'll piss off Trump's BFFs in the fossil fuel industry, so destroy NOAA, the NWS, and the NHC.  The National Parks Service stands in the way of opening up the parks to mining, logging, and drilling for oil and natural gas, so they've gotta go.

And we have to make sure the military is led by Trump's christofascist cronies.  The firings went all the way up to the Chiefs of Staff, where Hegseth axed two -- Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti and Joint Chairman Air Force General C. Q. Brown, Jr.  Hmm... the only woman on the Chiefs of Staff, and the only Black guy.

Wonder what the motivation was there.

See why I thought about Lovecraft's book?  Trump has had over two centuries worth of precedent basically saying, "Here's how to keep our nation and its citizens as safe as possible," and his response was, "Okay, I'm going to do exactly the opposite of all that."

Not that this was probably his conscious thought.  There's a lot of speculation about his being a Russian agent, and working to destroy the United States deliberately, and I find that dubious.  Thing is, he isn't that smart.  His thinking never goes beyond (1) this will get people to praise me, (2) this make me richer, and (3) this will keep me out of jail.  It's more a case of running roughshod through the government to pad his own bank account and keep one step ahead of the people who might try to stop him.

Yeah, if it causes chaos in the United States, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will be thrilled, but that's not why it started.  Trump is more a sticky-handed toddler loose in a museum.  He's likely to damage priceless stuff, but it's because he has the attention span of a gnat and zero impulse control, and throws hellacious tantrums when he doesn't get his way immediately.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ritchie333, Trump Baby Balloon at protest in Parliament Square, CC BY-SA 4.0]

As far as the other people in charge -- well, Musk is in it for the money, although you have to wonder why four hundred billion dollars isn't enough for anyone.  Hegseth, Vance, and Noem are loony ideologues; of all of them, they're the ones most likely to be true believers.  As far as RFK, who the hell knows?  You look into that guy's dead eyes, and it's anyone's guess what's going on behind them.

Look, I understand that government isn't perfect.  Not ours, not any country's in the history of humanity.  There are porkbarrel projects and waste and cronyism, and probably at least some outright fraud.  But you don't fix it by running around with a chainsaw (which, I shit you not, Elon Musk literally did at CPAC last week).  What this represents is a coup by a coalition of fascists and burn-it-all-to-the-ground opportunists, who are using as their public face a man who has never had any thought beyond personal self-aggrandizement.

And in four weeks, we've abandoned -- no, destroyed -- our locks and guards.  Maybe it's not too late to put the pieces back together and keep the monsters from getting loose.  I don't know.  But the Republicans now in charge of both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court had damn well better figure out where their spines are and stop this.

Or in another four weeks we may not have a nation left to defend.

****************************************

Things going "boom"

One thing that seems to be a characteristic of Americans, especially American men, is their love of loud noises and blowing shit up.

I share this odd fascination myself, although in the interest of honesty I must admit that it isn't to the extent of a lot of guys.  I like fireworks, and I can remember as a kid spending many hours messing with firecrackers, bottle rockets, Roman candles, and so on.  (For the record, yes, I still have all of my digits attached and in their original locations.)  I don't know if you heard about the mishap in San Diego back on the Fourth of July in 2012, where eighteen minutes worth of expensive fireworks all went off in about twenty seconds because of a computer screw-up.  It was caught on video (of course), and I think I've watched it maybe a dozen times.

Explosions never get old.  And for some people, they seem to be the answer to everything.

So I guess it's only natural, now that we're getting into hurricane season, that somebody inevitably comes up with the solution of stopping hurricanes by shooting something at them.  The first crew of rocket scientists who thought this would be a swell idea decided the best approach would be firing away at the hurricane with ordinary guns, neglecting two very important facts:

1. Hurricanes, by definition, have extremely strong winds.
2. If you fling something into an extremely strong wind, it can get flung back at you.

This prompted news agencies to diagram what could happen if you fire a gun into a hurricane:

So this brings "pissing into the wind" to an entirely new level.

Not to be outdone, another bunch of nimrods came up with an even better (i.e. more violent, with bigger explosions) solution; when a hurricane heads toward the U.S., you nuke the fucker.

I'm not making this up.  Apparently enough people were suggesting, seriously, that the way to deal with hurricanes was to detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of them, that NOAA felt obliged to issue an official statement about why this would be a bad idea.

The person chosen to respond, probably by drawing the short straw, was staff meteorologist Chris Landsea.  Which brings up an important point; isn't "Landsea" the perfect name for a meteorologist?  I mean, with a surname like that, it's hard to think of what other field he could have gone into.  It reminds me of a dentist in my hometown when I was a kid, whose name was "Dr. Pulliam."  You have to wonder how many people end up in professions that match their names.  Like this guy:

And this candidate for District Attorney:

But I digress.

Anyhow, Chris Landsea was pretty unequivocal about using nukes to take out hurricanes.  "[A nuclear explosion] doesn't raise the barometric pressure after the shock has passed because barometric pressure in the atmosphere reflects the weight of the air above the ground," Landsea said.  "To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane, you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion tons for a twenty-kilometer-radius eye.  It's difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around."

And that's not the only problem.  An even bigger deal is that hurricanes are way more powerful than nuclear weapons, if you consider the energy expenditure.  "The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required," Landsea said.  "A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20 x 10^13 watts and converts less than ten per cent of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind.  The heat release is equivalent to a ten-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every twenty minutes."

And that's not even taking into account that releasing lots of radioactive fallout into an enormous, rapidly moving windstorm is a catastrophically stupid idea.

So yeah, you can shout "'Murika!" all you want, but even a moderate hurricane could kick our asses.  It may not be a bad thing; a reality check about our actual place in the hierarchy of the natural world could remind us that we are, honestly, way less powerful than nature.  An object lesson that the folks who think we can tinker around with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with impunity might want to keep in mind.

Apparently Landsea's statement generated another flurry of suggestions of nuking hurricanes as they develop, before they get superpowerful.  The general upshot is that when Landsea rained on their parade (as it were), these people shuffled their feet and said, "Awww, c'mon!  Can't we nuke anything?"  But NOAA was unequivocal on that point, too.  Nuking tropical depressions as they form wouldn't work not merely because only a small number of depressions become dangerous hurricanes, but because you're still dealing with an unpredictable natural force that isn't going to settle down just because you decided to bomb the shit out of it.

So there you are.  The latest, quintessentially American, suggestion for controlling the weather, as envisioned by people who failed ninth grade Earth Science.  As for me, the whole discussion has left me in the mood to blow stuff up.  At least vicariously.  Maybe I should go watch the wonderful video of the amazing (and real) "Barking Dog Reaction," since if I actually blow something up, my wife will probably object.  

That's the ticket.  Things going boom.  I like it.

****************************************

Things going "boom"

One thing that seems to be a characteristic of Americans, especially American men, is their love of loud noises and blowing stuff up.

I share this odd fascination myself, although in the interest of honesty I must admit that it isn't to the extent of a lot of guys.  I like fireworks, and I can remember as a kid spending many hours messing with firecrackers, bottle rockets, Roman candles, and so on.  (For the record, yes, I still have all of my digits attached and in their original locations.)  I don't know if you heard about the mishap in San Diego back on the Fourth of July in 2012, where eighteen minutes worth of expensive fireworks all went off in about twenty seconds because of a computer screw-up.  It was caught on video (of course), and I think I've watched it maybe a dozen times.

Explosions never get old.  And for some people, they seem to be the answer to everything.

So I guess it's only natural that when hurricanes threaten, somebody comes up with the solution of shooting something at them.  The first crew of rocket scientists who thought this would be a swell idea just thought of firing away at the hurricane with ordinary guns, neglecting two very important facts:

1. Hurricanes, by definition, have extremely strong winds.
2. If you fling something into an extremely strong wind, it can get flung back at you.

This prompted news agencies to diagram what could happen if you fire a gun into a hurricane:

So this brings "pissing into the wind" to an entirely new level.

Not to be outdone, another bunch of nimrods came up with an even better (i.e. more violent, with bigger explosions) solution; when a hurricane heads toward the U.S., you nuke the fucker.

I'm not making this up.  Apparently enough people were suggesting, seriously, that the way to deal with Hurricane Irma was to detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of it, that NOAA felt obliged to issue an official statement about why this would be a bad idea.

The person chosen to respond, probably by drawing the short straw, was staff meteorologist Chris Landsea.  Which brings up an important point; isn't "Landsea" the perfect name for a meteorologist?  I mean, with a surname like that, it's hard to think of what other field he could have gone into.  It reminds me of a dentist in my hometown when I was a kid, whose name was "Dr. Pulliam."  You have to wonder how many people end up in professions that match their names.  Like this guy:

And this candidate for District Attorney:

But I digress.

Anyhow, Chris Landsea was pretty unequivocal about using nukes to take out hurricanes.  "[A nuclear explosion] doesn't raise the barometric pressure after the shock has passed because barometric pressure in the atmosphere reflects the weight of the air above the ground," Landsea said.  "To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane, you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion tons for a twenty-kilometer-radius eye.  It's difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around."

And that's not the only problem.  An even bigger deal is that hurricanes are way more powerful than nuclear weapons, if you consider the energy expenditure.  "The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required," Landsea said.  "A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20 x 10^13 watts and converts less than ten per cent of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a ten-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every twenty minutes."

So yeah, you can shout "'Murika!" all you want, but Hurricane Irma could kick our ass.  It may not be a bad thing; a reality check about our actual place in the hierarchy of nature could remind us that we are,  honestly, way less powerful than nature.  An object lesson that the folks who think we can tinker around with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with impunity might want to keep in mind.

Apparently Landsea's statement generated another flurry of suggestions of nuking hurricanes as they develop, before they get superpowerful.  The general upshot is that when Landsea rained on their parade, these people shuffled their feet and said, "Awww, c'mon!  Can't we nuke anything?"  But NOAA was unequivocal on that point, too.  Nuking tropical depressions as they form wouldn't work not merely because only a small number of depressions become dangerous hurricanes, but because you're still dealing with an unpredictable natural force that isn't going to settle down just because you decided to bomb the shit out of it.

So there you are.  The latest suggestion for controlling the weather, from people who failed ninth grade Earth Science.  As for me, I've got to get going.  My classes are starting the chapter on basic chemistry today, and I need to get to school to see if I can swing a way to do a demonstration for my class called the "Barking Dog Reaction."  That's the ticket.  Things going boom.  I like it.

Outrage saturation

Because I apparently don't have enough to worry about, as a teacher, with the approval in Senate committee of the amazingly unqualified Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, yesterday I found out that Donald Trump has tapped Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr. to lead a task force for reforming higher education.

Liberty University, which shares with Bob Jones University the moniker "The Buckle on the Bible Belt," has achieved notoriety among science-minded types for their staunch determination to teach young-Earth creationism as if it were actual, evidence-supported science.  They hire faculty on the basis of belief in YEC; an advertisement in the Chronicle of Higher Education said they were "seeking faculty who can demonstrate a personal faith commitment to its evangelical Christian purpose... compatibility with a young-earth creationist philosophy [is] required."  (Although it does make one wonder why anyone would want to teach there who wasn't a biblical literalist, a question I've also asked about the religious-belief requirement for working at Ken Ham's Ark Encounter.)

But about the scientific validity of what they're teaching, I can't put it any better than Richard Dawkins did:

If it's really true that the museum at Liberty University has dinosaur fossils which are labeled as being 3,000 years old, then that is an educational disgrace.  It is debauching the whole idea of a university, and I would strongly encourage any members of Liberty University who may be here, to leave and go to a proper university.

So the leader of this institution is the man who is being entrusted with the task of "reforming higher education."

Look, this goes beyond political affiliation.  There are plenty of conservative Republicans who are qualified to run the Department of Education and/or lead a reform of the American college system.  My contention is simply that Betsy DeVos is a doctrinaire know-nothing whose primary qualification seems to be that she gave big donations to the Trump campaign, and Jerry Falwell is a Christian extremist whose choice was almost certainly motivated by Trump's continual pandering to the religious right, who (for reasons that still escape me) continue in their support of him despite his lies, ego, narcissism, and long history of sexual assault and serial adultery.  (I am honestly looking forward to the next time a Trump supporter uses the term "values voter" or "family values," so I can laugh directly into their face.)

And it also brings up the question of what, exactly, Trump thinks needs to be reformed about colleges and universities.  About all I could find on that note are that Falwell believes there are "too many regulations" (this is becoming something of a mantra of this administration) and that colleges are "too liberal."

Well, Jerry Falwell is certainly the man to combat the latter.

But that's the pattern being established here; appoint people to government agencies whose aims apparently include destroying the agency they're leading.  Just two days ago, we had the announcement that Trump had appointed Kenneth Haapala, of the climate-denying, petroleum-funded "think tank" Heartland Institute, to be on the committee that oversees appointments to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

You read that right.  A guy who thinks that climate change is a hoax is going to be helping to lead the agency that monitors climate change.

If that wasn't enough, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida has just drafted a bill to close the Environmental Protection Agency entirely.  Apparently appointing Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a staunch fossil fuel advocate who is also a climate change denier, to the post of head of the EPA wasn't sufficient.  Gaetz writes:

Our small businesses cannot afford to cover the costs associated with compliance, too often leading to closed doors and unemployed Americans.  It is time to take back our legislative power from the EPA and abolish it permanently...  Today, the American people are drowning in rules and regulations promulgated by unelected bureaucrats, and the Environmental Protection Agency has become an extraordinary offender.

You have to wonder whether Trump's insistence on smashing the EPA might have something to do with his own businesses -- i.e., yet another conflict of interest.  Lest you think I'm engaging in idle speculation, here, take a look at this story that ran in The New York Times just yesterday. It describes a situation in South Carolina where Donald Trump, Jr. started a business venture called Titan Atlas Manufacturing, which tanked -- until Donald Sr. bailed him out by buying the failed business through a new company called "D. B. Pace" created solely for that purpose.  The problem is that Titan Atlas had allegedly been responsible for pollution and groundwater contamination at the site, and Donald Sr. and D. B. Pace are attempting to evade responsibility for the cleanup by claiming that the new company had nothing to do with the damage.

Guess which government agency oversees liability for corporate pollution?

Got it in one.

It's gotten to the point that I'm reaching outrage saturation.  I can barely even stand to look at the news lately, for fear of what new lunacy has been perpetrated by our leaders.

I have never before had so little faith that the people running our government have our best interest in mind, have any kind of foresight about what effects their actions will have, have the least idea what they are doing, or are actually even sane.

What I'm wondering about is damage control.  How can we minimize the havoc that will result from having dramatically unqualified people running things -- or appointing people unshakably hostile to the departments they're overseeing?  I wish I had a good answer to that.

Of course, at the moment, I'm having a hard time even answering the question, "Why am I not curled up in the corner of my office, weeping softly?"

Environmental witch hunt

Out of consideration for my readers, I try not to ring changes on the same topics too often, especially in rapid succession.  But today I have to write again about climate change, even though it was the topic of yesterday's post, because of a completely different idiotic thing that one of our elected officials is doing.

In this case, it's a Skeptophilia frequent flier Representative Lamar Smith of Texas.  Smith's virulently anti-science stance has been the topic of more than one post here, so it should come as no particular surprise that he's at it again.  This time, it's an expansion of his witch hunt against people at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to locate and censure any employee who even mentions anthropogenic climate change.

Last year, Smith issued a subpoena for any internal documents that contained the words "global temperature," "climate study," "hiatus," and "haitus."  He presumably included the last one not only to catch accidental misspellings, but to catch people who deliberately misspelled words so as to avoid getting caught in his word search, a technique often used by people on social media to avoid obscenity filters, as in the phrase "Lamar Smith is kind of a dcik."  But this week, Smith apparently decided that he wasn't snaring enough malefactors, because he expanded his search parameters, as follows:

In addition to the search terms originally selected by NOAA, please include the following additional terms: "Karl," "buoy," "night marine air temperature," "temperature," "climate," "change," "Paris," "U.N.," "United Nations," "clean power plan," "regulations," "Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)," "President," "Obama," "White House," and "Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)."  In order to capture all documents responsive to the Committee's subpoena, please provide any documents responsive to these additional search terms from custodians that have previously been searched.

So you're going to take an agency that studies weather and climate, and subpoena every document that mentions "temperature" and "climate?"  Seems like Lamar is going to go from not catching enough evil climate change documents to catching everything.  I'd love to see what happens when his subpoena results in the capture of 139,452 documents, all of which his committee then has to go through.

("Karl," by the way, is a search parameter because Thomas Karl is one of the scientists whose climate research Smith and his cronies are targeting.)

How, precisely, can this be labeled as anything but harassment?  This smacks of Joseph McCarthy's sifting through people's correspondence looking for any hint of communism lurking therein.  Worse, actually; because communism isn't fact, it's an ideology, and there was justification for considering what the Soviets were doing as dangerous.  Here, we're talking about science, for cryin' in the sink.  And as I mentioned yesterday, nature doesn't really give a flying fuck what your political stance is.  You can't spin data.

What Smith et al. are doing amounts to suppressing hard evidence, akin to the spokespeople for Big Tobacco covering up evidence of the connection between smoking and lung cancer, which they did successfully for decades.  People like this have no respect for the truth; they only care about furthering their own agenda, whatever the cost.

Representative Lamar Smith of Texas [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What is most appalling is that in both the House and the Senate, the committees that oversee scientific research and the environment are run by anti-science ideologues of the worst sort -- not only Smith, but people like Dana Rohrabacher (who once called climate change "liberal claptrap") and James Inhofe (who brought a snowball onto the floor of the Senate to prove that the world isn't warming up).

So their solution to having scientific findings that fly in the face of the way they'd like the world to work is to persecute the scientists.  Unfortunately, this approach doesn't work.  As we've established all too often, the universe doesn't care if you're happy or not.  Put a different way, we have the trenchant quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson: "The nice thing about science is that it works whether you believe in it or not."

Follow the money

There is nothing like blatant hypocrisy to put me in a blood-boiling rage.

It's even worse when the hypocrisy is coupled with mealy-mouthed self-righteousness.  That puts me in a condition that calls to mind the word "apoplexy."

And as Exhibit A, I give you: Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology.

How Smith ended up in a leadership role in the oversight of scientific research is one of those mysteries that even the Peter Principle is insufficient to explain.  Whenever Representative Smith opens his mouth, he utters such moronic statements that you have to wonder how he successfully got out of grade school, much less how he got elected to public office.  This is the man who said in 2009,  "The greatest threat to America is not necessarily a recession or even another terrorist attack. The greatest threat to America is a liberal media bias."  He claimed in 2014 that the policy of allowing immigrants to achieve US citizenship by serving in the military -- a policy that has been in place since the country's founding, and the awarding of citizenship to Baron von Steuben by George Washington -- was "President Obama aiding and abetting an immigrant crime spree."

But on no topic has he as vividly illustrated an understanding of the world that would be sub-par for an eighth grader as on climate science.  Smith is a diehard climate change denier, and in fact wrote an op-ed piece in 2013 that contained the mind-boggling line, "Contrary to the claims of those who want to strictly regulate carbon dioxide emissions and increase the cost of energy for all Americans, there is a great amount of uncertainty associated with climate science."

I'm not sure in what BizarroWorld a near 100% consensus amongst climate researchers constitutes "a great amount of uncertainty," but that is evidently Lamar's viewpoint.

[image courtesy of NASA]

What is most appalling about all of this is that one of the rallying cries of the deniers is "follow the money" -- implying that the scientists are getting rich off of fat government research grants, so they have every reason to cook the data to make it look like the world is warming up.  If there was no anthropogenic climate change, Lamar suggests, the funds would dry up.  So the scientists are inventing an ecological crisis in order to feather their own nests.

You have to wonder how the scientists are also conspiring to make the glaciers melt, surface seawater heat up, and creating an El Niño that is shaping up to the the most powerful one since records have been kept.  Mighty desperate, those scientists, to go to those kinds of lengths.

But you haven't heard the most appalling part yet.  Lamar Smith, who brands climate scientists as self-serving liars who are making shit up so they can get money, is now threatening Kathryn Sullivan, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with a subpoena -- in a move that is hinted to be only the first of a sweeping attack on anyone influential who is researching anthropogenic effects on climate.

"NOAA needs to come clean about why they altered the data to get the results they needed to advance this administration’s extreme climate change agenda," Smith said, a statement that ranks right up there with "When did you stop beating your wife?" in the Heads-I-Win, Tails-You-Lose department.

Of course, there are people who are just tickled to pieces about Smith's campaign of harassment.  Robert E. Murray, head of Murray Energy, the largest privately-held coal mining company in the US, thinks that Lamar is just wonderful.  The climate researchers are "not telling hardly any truth" [sic] about what the global climate is doing.  The world is actually cooling off, Murray says, which I'm sure will be a tremendous relief to all of you who listened to the scientists when they said that 2015 is almost certain to be the hottest year ever, shattering all previous records by a considerable margin.

Don't listen to those damn ivory-tower thermometer-wielding geeks, Murray says.  "They’re crony capitalists.  They’re making a fortune off of you the taxpayer."

And if you're not already mad enough, guess who funded the gathering at which Murray dispensed his wisdom?  The Texas Public Policy Foundation, a "nonpartisan research institute" that is still completely nonpartisan and unbiased after receiving the bulk of its funding from Koch Industries, Crownquest Oil & Gas, AEP Texas, ExxonMobil, VF-Russia, Texas Western Energy Corporation, ConocoPhillips, Devon Energy, Chevron, and Henry Petroleum LP.

Speaking of following the money.

And outside, the world continues to warm, the ice caps continue to melt, and the weather continues to destabilize.  As we speak, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change is going on, a conference that is very likely to follow in the footsteps of the ones before it in accomplishing nothing -- because science research oversight in our country is being kept in a stranglehold by anti-science loons like Lamar Smith and his counterpart, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, another climate change denier who astonishingly enough has ended up chairing the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

You know, by nature I'm an optimist.  I like to think that most of the time, most of us are doing the best we can to live according to our moral codes.  But when I find out about stuff like this, I start slipping over to the world of the conspiracy theorists, and that worries me.  I don't like to think that our country is being led by people who know full well that we're headed for an ecological catastrophe, and from a combination of greed, short-sightedness, and stupidity are willfully lying to the American people about it.

But increasingly, that's what looks like is happening.

Hums, bloops, and snores

Today I was perusing the online news and happened to note a link to LiveScience called "The Ten Top Unexplained Phenomena."  Contrary to its name, LiveScience seems to specialize in catchy little blurbs on stuff that hardly qualify as actual science, but do attract the attention because they're either about stuff that most everyone is interested in even if they won't admit it (e.g. sex) or stuff that many of us are curious about even though some of us think it's nonsense (e.g. the supernatural).  This particular "top ten list" was predictably ordinary, and listed several things as "unexplained" that I have a fairly good explanation for, such as psychic phenomena (explanation: people are gullible), UFOs (explanation: people are gullible), Bigfoot (explanation: people are gullible), and mysterious disappearances, such as that of Jimmy Hoffa (explanation: don't fuck with the Mafia).  But the last unexplained phenomenon on LiveScience's list was one I'd never heard of, so of course that caught my attention.

It's called the "Taos Hum."  The Taos Hum is, as you presumably have already figured out, a pervasive humming noise heard near Taos, New Mexico.  (Check out the Taos Hum Page if you're interested in more information, or in signing up for the Taos Hum email listserv. Of course there's a listserv.)  The Hum was featured on the television show Unsolved Mysteries a while back, wherein they tried to capture the hum on recording equipment and failed, so they instead created an audio clip that was what the hum allegedly sounds like, to people who can hear it.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

However, as anyone knows who's ever seen Unsolved Mysteries or other shows like it, they completely downplayed that the audio clip wasn't actually a recording of the real hum, but a simulation of a sound that may or may not exist in the first place.  It didn't stop them from acting all amazed and freaked out when they were listening to it, which made me want to scream, "You people just made this idiotic recording, and you're acting like it's real!  Are you crazy, or just stupid?"  But I didn't, because yelling at a video clip would make my family members ask the same question about me.

All of this, of course, is not to say that the Hum may not exist.  There are peculiar sounds in the world, many of them without a current explanation, and not all of which have proven impossible to detect.  An unexplained hum in Auckland, New Zealand, for example, was actually captured in a recording.  It is an acoustic signal that peaks at 56 hertz, near the bottom of the range of audibility for most people, and has yet to be explained.  But this makes it all the more odd that the Taos Hum hasn't been detected on sound equipment, much less recorded -- the Unsolved Mysteries people made it sound like making recording devices detect in that range is extremely difficult, when in fact it isn't hard at all.  A typical cassette recorder isn't very sensitive in that range, no; but with professional recording equipment, it shouldn't be a problem.

Another problem is how few people actually report hearing it.  Even a website that clearly considers the Hum to be real, and suggests as an explanation something that would be worthy of an episode of The X Files -- they imply that the Hum is either of supernatural origin, or caused by some secret government technology -- admits that only 2% of Taos residents can hear it.  Most people who've allegedly heard the phenomenon, when asked to listen to recordings of various low frequency sounds and identify which is closest, perk up when they hear recordings in the 50-80 hertz range, which is definitely in the audible range for most people with unimpaired hearing.  This raises the question of why, if it's as powerful as hearers say it is (some even say they can't sleep when the Hum is going on), everyone in Taos who isn't deaf hasn't reported the phenomenon.

Still, 2% is enough people that it deserves an explanation.  I tend to lean toward the idea that it's some form of tinnitus, combined with a dose of confirmation bias -- in this case, accepting an appealing lack of an explanation, and interpreting further anecdotal reports as evidence of its being some kind of grand mystery.  Once you think that the low-pitched ringing in your ears is a real phenomenon that is audible by others, you (1) pay more attention to it, and (2) become more and more convinced that it's true every time it subsequently happens.

I also must add, however, that I've been to Taos, and not only did I not hear any humming noise, I was immediately struck by the fact that there seemed to be an inordinately large number of Purveyors of Woo-Wooness -- Tarot card readers, palm readers, sellers of crystals, and metaphysical book stores.  Even at the time, before I'd ever heard of the Hum, it seemed to me a population of people who were primed to interpret everything with a mystical twist.

Of course, I could be wrong.  It's been known to happen.  After all, the Auckland Hum was shown to be a real phenomenon, and researchers haven't been able to find anything that explains it.  There are lots of unexplained noises in the world -- the most famous being the Bloop, which has actually been recorded by subs.  Of course, with the Bloop, there's a perfectly rational explanation; it's the noise made by Cthulhu snoring.  You think I'm joking.  Apparently the most common projected origin for the Bloops recorded by subs is right near the spot where H. P. Lovecraft said, in The Call of Cthulhu, stands the majestic sunken city of R'lyeh, where the octopoid god lies snoozing peacefully.  This fact should put the quietus on storming in there with subs and recording equipment.  It's not that I'm for impeding the progress of science, mind you; it's just that we ought to be careful.  Cthulhu, as far as I've heard, is not a morning person, and resents being awakened suddenly.  He also tends to wake up hungry, and with a serious case of morning breath.

On the other hand, honestly demands that I mention that in the case of the Bloop, there's a more likely explanation than the snoring of aquatic Elder Gods.  Just last year, some scientists over at NOAA found pretty good evidence that the Bloop is the sound of Antarctic ice sheets breaking up, distorted by being transmitted for long distances underwater.  Which is kind of a relief.  As interesting as the Lovecraftian pantheon is, I'd prefer that they weren't real, given the frequency with which his main characters had run-ins with Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep et al. and ended up missing valuable limbs.

But I digress.

Assuming the Taos Hum actually is a real, external phenomenon, and isn't just a case of collective tinnitus or a resonance generated by a critical mass of woo-woos, it definitely deserves some more careful exploration.  I'd volunteer, but it's getting kind of late in the year, and Taos is one place in the United States that is even colder and snowier in the winter than upstate New York.  So I think any investigative team I lead will have to wait until spring.  Call me a wuss, but freezing my ass off listening for a sound that only 2% of people can hear anyway doesn't sound that inviting.  So I'm not planning on a trip to Taos any time soon, and if you're a Taos resident, you'll just have to deal with it for the time being.  I'll do what I can on my next visit, but until then, you'll just have to hum along or else ignore it.

Climate change, sea ice, and regression to the mean

One of the least-recognized statistical phenomena, at least by your average layperson, is called regression to the mean.

Let me give you two examples.  Let's say that I gave some American, English-speaking students a true-or false test in Swahili, and told them to fill it in.  Their results, in other words, would be random, and you would expect (with a large enough sample size) that the average score would be right around 50%.

That doesn't mean, of course, that everyone got 50%.  Again, with a large enough population of test-takers, the scores would very likely fall on a normal distribution (also known as a "bell curve").  So far, nothing surprising here.

But suppose you took the top 5% of the test-takers -- the ones who scored well above the mean score of 50% -- and asked them to take a second test, this one written in Latvian.  What would happen to their scores?

The answer, of course, is that virtually all of them would fall -- not because they suddenly got stupider, but because their first scores were so far outside the norm that their second is extremely likely not to be.  If you gave all of the original students the test in Latvian, there would once again be that 5% who got anomalously high scores -- but it almost certainly wouldn't be the same students.

It doesn't need to be a random process to generate a regression to the mean.  I see this happening all the time with my students, who (I hope) aren't simply guessing answers randomly.  As a second example, let's say we have a kid who usually scores around 85%, and then she scores a 65% on a twenty-point quiz.  Her next score is pretty likely to rise -- even assuming that she studied the same amount on both of them.  The 65% was simply an anomalous low score.  Bouncing back up to 85% could just be a regression to the mean, especially given (1) how many factors can be involved in missing questions on quizzes, and (2) the fact that the difference between a 65% and an 85% on a twenty-point quiz is only four additional questions correct.

It's the reason why so many people expect "lucky streaks" (or unlucky ones) to keep going -- and they almost never do.  You're much more likely to see a regression to the mean sooner rather than later (or a "correction," as they call it in the stock market.)

So, the question I'm sure you're all asking by this point is: how does this relate to climate change?

Some of you may have seen recent articles, mostly in conservative media outlets, that have headlines like this one from The Daily Caller:  "Global Warming? Satellite Data Shows Arctic Sea Ice Coverage Up 50%!"  The author, Michael Bastasch, writes:

The North Pole is still there, and growing.  BBC News reports that data from Europe’s Cryosat spacecraft shows that Arctic sea ice coverage was nearly 9,000 cubic kilometers (2,100 cubic miles) by the end of this year’s melting season, up from about 6,000 cubic kilometers (1,400 cubic miles) during the same time last year... 

This is good news for the Arctic, but presents somewhat of a tough problem for environmentalists and some climate scientists who have been pummeled with evidence this year contradicting the theory of man-made global warming.

Scientists have been struggling to explain away the 15-year pause in rising global temperatures. Some have turned to solar activity or natural climate cycles to explain the hiatus in warming.

Oh, those poor scientists, always "struggling to explain away" stuff.  Well, sorry, Mr. Bastasch, but no climate scientist I've ever heard of has trouble understanding regression to the mean -- which is what you and your climate-denier friends, in your apparent ignorance, are referring to as a "pause."

Amusing, too, that The Daily Caller chose to illustrate their article on Arctic sea ice with a photograph of ice... that includes a penguin:

Be that as it may, let's see what an actual climate scientist has to say about this year's miraculous rebound, okay?  Here's what Andrew Shepherd, climatologist at University College London, has to say about the situation (quoted in an article in The Independent):

"The 9,000 cubic kilometres we measured in October is still very much smaller than the 20,000 cubic kilometres we estimate for the same time in the early 1980s. So today's minimum still ranks among the lowest for the past 30 years," Professor Shepherd said.  "The October figure is still a significant result and it's not to be underestimated, but it's not an unexpected result. We do see year-to-year variations in the sea ice due to changes in weather patterns."

Oh, and then there's this quote, from David Kennedy, deputy undersecretary for operations at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:  "The Arctic caught a bit of break in 2013 from the recent string of record-breaking warmth and ice melts of the last decade. But the relatively cool year in some parts of the Arctic does little to offset the long-term trend of the last 30 years: the Arctic is warming rapidly."

In other words: the previous years' ice coverage was so low that sooner or later, there was bound to be a cooler year.  It's just regression to the mean, even if the overall trend is still obvious to anyone who is not willfully blind.

Scientists look at patterns, not at cherry-picked data points that happen to support their favorite biases -- unlike the agenda-driven climate deniers who are (with luck) decreasing in number as the data piles up.  And the data is piling up.  NOAA's National Climatic Data Center just released November's Global Climate Report, and reported that the globally-averaged sea and land temperatures for November were the highest for that month since record keeping began in 1880.  "Aha," the deniers might say.  "Couldn't this just be an anomalously high number, just like our kid who got a 90% on a Swahili test that he couldn't read?  Aren't you committing just what you said was a statistical fallacy, in your opening paragraphs?"

Sure, could be.  Until you add the second thing that this month's report announced; that this is the 37th consecutive November, and 345th consecutive month, with an average temperature higher than the 20th century mean.

That, my friend, is a trend.  Show me a kid who can score higher than the mean on a test in Swahili 345 times in a row, and I'll show you a kid who is lying about the fact that he can actually read Swahili.

So, yeah.  Slam dunk.  Not that I expect that this will change the minds of the climate change deniers, any more than the retraction of the Seralini study will change the minds of the anti-GMO crowd, or the retraction of the Wakefield study will change the minds of the anti-vaxxers.  But it is becoming clearer and clearer that the people who are denying the existence of anthropogenic climate change are deliberately misinterpreting the data, or else ignoring it entirely.  The scientists, however they are portrayed as "struggling," seem to have a pretty good consensus about what is happening.

But unfortunately, nobody much seems to be explaining all of this to the layperson, leading lots of them to believe what the media is claiming -- that the climate is yo-yoing all over the place, and no one knows why, not even the scientists.  But what started out as legitimate questioning, back in the 1980s when the alarm bells on climate change first began to sound, has now turned into nothing more than "la-la-la-la-la-la-la, not listening."  Agenda-driven political organizations like the Heartland Institute are, at this point, no longer simply pointing out uncertainties in the data and analysis; they are lying outright.

To buy that this regression to the mean in the Arctic pack ice coverage is significant, and means that climate change isn't happening, requires you simultaneously to ignore a mountain of other data.  Meaning that you are coming to that conclusion for some other reason than science.  But the deniers don't want you to know that -- because a confused populace, who thinks that no one can know what's causing climate shifts and that (anyway) we couldn't do anything about it even if we did, is much more likely to vote to keep doing what we've always done.

Convenient for the powers-that-be, isn't it?