Doubt, about the science of tobacco consumption, DDT, and global warming

From The Climate Reality Project.

(Yes, there is a bias.  Several biases exist there simultaneously, actually, so we should say there are biases.  The most important for you to know about are the biases for good science and accuracy, especially historical accuracy.)

More:

• How Rachel Carson Spurred Chemical Concerns by Highlighting Uncertainty (dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com)
• “DDT Was So Safe You Could Eat It” – And Other Killer Myths Of Modern Technology (theglobalmail.org)
• The Sound Canadian Research Behind Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (activehistory.ca)
• What is the Next “Silent Spring”? (nature.org)

Graffiti: BIAS (Photo credit: Franco Folini, via Flickr) (Creative Commons)

Fruits of the Republican War on Education

You didn’t think it was working already?

This story appeared in the Los Angeles Times, which is why Republicans discourage newspaper publishing, and why they discourage programs to teach people to read well and remember history.

In South Carolina, a discrepancy on federal spending

Campaigning Republicans draw cheers with their calls for cuts to government programs. But the state benefits from such programs to a greater extent than many others.

By Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times

January 14, 2012, 7:55 p.m.

Reporting from Beaufort, S.C.—

When Rick Santorum stood in front of voters at a yacht club in this small town and pledged to slash government spending, especially entitlement programs, Nancy Garvin knew she had found her candidate.

Garvin, 54, said she was sick of seeing government squander money through agencies that don’t do anything, and wants expenditures cut “in half.”

Washington is throwing money away through a lot of wasteful spending,” she said, sitting at a picnic table beneath trees draped in graying Spanish moss.

But Garvin, whose husband, a carpenter, has been out of work for four years, depends on the very government she wants to see cut back. She collects disability insurance — it is what she and her husband have survived on as he’s looked for work. Her mother is on Social Security. Garvin herself used to work as a nurse at a hospital where many patients paid for services through Medicaid, another program using federal money.

Garvin’s views are similar to those of many Republican voters in this conservative state, where candidates pledging to cut government spending were met with resounding applause last week, and where former Gov. Mark Sanford tried to refuse federal stimulus funding on principle.

South Carolina and its residents benefit from government spending, more so than many other states. For every dollar the state pays in federal taxes, it receives $1.35 in federal government benefits. By contrast, California receives only 78 cents for every dollar it pays in taxes.

“We get more back from the federal government than we send in terms of revenue,” said Doug Woodward, an economics professor at the University of South Carolina. “But I’m not sure that a lot of voters would even care if they heard that. When they say they want to see less spending in the state, they’re referring to entitlement programs.”

Much of the money spent in South Carolina goes to the programs that make up a big chunk of the federal budget — defense, Social Security and Medicaid. The state has seven military bases, and received $7 billion in Defense Department spending in 2010. One in five residents in South Carolina receives Social Security benefits — compared with just 13% in California. As an aging state, South Carolina will be more dependent on federal programs such as Social Security in the coming decade, according to AARP.

“People want to see lower government spending, especially on the Republican side,” said Karen Kedrowski, a politics professor at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C. “But when they’re asked specifically about high-dollar items, including Social Security and defense, they are not willing to accept significant cuts.”

Kedrowski’s university recently polled South Carolina Republicans to ask about reducing the deficit by making cuts to government programs: 73% of voters said they weren’t willing to have their current Social Security or Medicare benefits reduced to address budget concerns. More than half said they weren’t willing to cut defense spending either.

It’s not just wealthy Republican voters in the Palmetto State who say they eschew entitlement programs, Kedrowski said.

“There’s also a disproportionate number of low-income people who vote Republican because they respond to the populist messages, even when it is against their economic interests to do so,” she said.

Sheila Barton, 56, runs a floral shop in Pickens, a town that Rick Perry visited recently to stroll down Main Street and shake hands with store owners and residents.

“Americans don’t want a government that’s playing a bigger role in their lives,” Perry had said at a speech earlier that morning. “No one’s ever come up to me and said, ‘We sure need to have more government in our lives.’”

Barton agrees — in principle.

“There’s a lot of things that are wasteful,” she said, but when pressed to name some, she said she couldn’t really think of any off the top of her head. Defense spending should be increased, she said, and people who have paid into Social Security should receive their benefits. And local government programs need more funding, she said — she’s currently a guardian for local children through the court system.

There is some evidence that South Carolina’s opposition to government spending might further strangle the state’s already weak economy — if it leads to cuts in Social Security. Roberto Gallardo of the Southern Rural Development Center says that economies in many small towns in South Carolina are increasingly dependent on Social Security payments.

The percentage of total personal income in South Carolina coming from Social Security’s Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance programs was 7.6% in 2009, up from 3.8% in 1970. South Carolina ranks eighth in the nation on the group’s Social Security Dependency Index, which measures how reliant local economies are on Social Security payments for job creation and consumer spending. Neighboring North Carolina ranked 23rd.

That means candidates have to walk a fine line here — promising to cut government to alleviate voters’ fears, while still preserving the programs that require most of the spending. How else to appeal to such voters as Clifton Anderson of Camden, who went to see Rick Santorum speak in a diner in Ridgeway?

“His ideas of downsizing government are most important to me,” said Anderson, about Santorum. He continued, in the next breath: “I also like his idea about strengthening defense.”

alana.semuels@latimes.com

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

How do we know? Who invented Santa Claus? Who really wrote “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas?”

The annual retelling, a Christmas tradition; an encore post from 2007

Thomas Nast invented Santa Claus? Clement C. Moore didn’t write the famous poem that starts out, “‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house . . . ?”

The murky waters of history from Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub soak even our most cherished ideas and traditions.

But isn’t that part of the fun of history?

Thomas Nast’s first published drawing featuring Santa Claus; for Harper’s Weekly, “A Journal of Civilization,” January 3, 1863 Nast portrayed the elf distributing packages to Union troops: “Santa Claus in camp.” Nast (1840-1904) was 23 when he drew this image.

Yes, Virginia (and California, too)! Thomas Nast created the image of Santa Claus most of us in the U.S. know today. Perhaps even more significant than his campaign against the graft of Boss Tweed, Nast’s popularization of a fat, jolly elf who delivers good things to people for Christmas makes one of the great stories in commercial illustration. Nast’s cartoons, mostly for the popular news publication Harper’s Weekly, created many of the conventions of modern political cartooning and modeled the way in which an illustrator could campaign for good, with his campaign against the graft of Tammany Hall and Tweed. But Nast’s popular vision of Santa Claus can be said to be the foundation for the modern mercantile flurry around Christmas.

Nast is probably ensconced in a cartoonists’ hall of fame. Perhaps he should be in a business or sales hall of fame, too. [See also Bill Casselman's page, "The Man Who Designed Santa Claus.]

Nast’s drawings probably drew some inspiration from the poem, “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas,” traditionally attributed to Clement C. Moore, a New York City lawyer, published in 1822. The poem is among the earliest to describe the elf dressed in fur, and magically coming down a chimney to leave toys for children; the poem invented the reindeer-pulled sleigh.

Modern analysis suggests the poem was not the work of Moore, and many critics and historians now attribute it to Major Henry Livingston, Jr. (1748-1828) following sleuthing by Vassar College Prof. Don Foster in 2000. Fortunately for us, we do not need to be partisans in such a query to enjoy the poem (a complete copy of which is below the fold).

The Library of Congress still gives Moore the credit. When disputes arise over who wrote about the night before Christmas, is it any wonder more controversial topics produce bigger and louder disputes among historians?

Moore was not known for being a poet. The popular story is that he wrote it on the spur of the moment:

Moore is thought to have composed the tale, now popularly known as “The Night Before Christmas,” on December 24, 1822, while traveling home from Greenwich Village, where he had bought a turkey for his family’s Christmas dinner.

Inspired by the plump, bearded Dutchman who took him by sleigh on his errand through the snow-covered streets of New York City, Moore penned A Visit from St. Nicholas for the amusement of his six children, with whom he shared the poem that evening. His vision of St. Nicholas draws upon Dutch-American and Norwegian traditions of a magical, gift-giving figure who appears at Christmas time, as well as the German legend of a visitor who enters homes through chimneys.

Again from the Library of Congress, we get information that suggests that Moore was a minor celebrity from a well-known family with historical ties that would make a good “connections” exercise in a high school history class, perhaps (”the link from Aaron Burr’s treason to Santa Claus?”): (read more, below the fold)

Clement Moore was born in 1779 into a prominent New York family. His father, Benjamin Moore, president of Columbia University, in his role as Episcopal Bishop of New York participated in the inauguration of George Washington as the nation’s first president. The elder Moore also administered last rites to Alexander Hamilton after he was mortally wounded in a tragic duel with Aaron Burr.

A graduate of Columbia, Clement Moore was a scholar of Hebrew and a professor of Oriental and Greek literature at the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan. [See comment from Pam Bumsted below for more on Moore.] He is said to have been embarrassed by the light-hearted verse, which was made public without his knowledge in December 1823. Moore did not publish it under his name until 1844.

Tonight, American children will be tucked in under their blankets and quilts and read this beloved poem as a last “sugarplum” before slipping into dreamland. Before they drift off, treat them to a message from Santa, recorded by the Thomas Edison Company in 1922.

“Santa Claus Hides in Your Phonograph“
By Arthur A. Penn, Performed by Harry E. Humphrey.
Edison, 1922.
Coupling date: 6/20/1922. Cutout date: 10/31/1929.
Inventing Entertainment: The Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies

Listen to this recording (RealAudio Format)

Listen to this recording (wav Format, 8,471 Kb)

But Henry Livingston was no less noble or historic. He hailed from the Livingtons of the Hudson Valley (one of whose farms is now occupied by Camp Rising Sun of the Louis August Jonas Foundation, a place where I spent four amazing summers teaching swimming and lifesaving). Livingston’s biography at the University of Toronto site offers another path for a connections exercise (”What connects the Declaration of Independence, the American invasion of Canada, the famous poem about a visit from St. Nick, and George W. Bush?”):

Henry Livingston Jr. was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, on Oct. 13, 1748. The Livingston family was one of the important colonial and revolutionary families of New York. The Poughkeepsie branch, descended from Gilbert, the youngest son of Robert Livingston, 1st Lord of Livingston Manor, was not as well off as the more well-known branches, descended from sons Robert and Philip. Two other descendants of Gilbert Livingston, President George Walker Herbert Bush and his son, President-Elect George W. Bush, though, have done their share to bring attention to this line. Henry’s brother, Rev. John Henry Livingston, entered Yale at the age of 12, and was able to unite the Dutch and American branches of the Dutch Reformed Church. At the time of his death, Rev. Livingston was president of Rutgers University. Henry’s father and brother Gilbert were involved in New York politics, and Henry’s granduncle was New York’s first Lt. Governor. But the law was the natural home for many of Henry’s family. His brother-in-law, Judge Jonas Platt, was an unsuccessful candidate for governor, as was his daughter Elizabeth’s husband, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Smith Thompson. Henry’s grandson, Sidney Breese, was Chief Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court.

Known for his encyclopedic knowledge and his love of literature, Henry Livingston was a farmer, surveyor and Justice of the Peace, a judicial position dealing with financially limited criminal and civil cases. One of the first New Yorkers to enlist in the Revolutionary Army in 1775, Major Henry Livingston accompanied his cousin’s husband, General Montgomery, in his campaign up the Hudson River to invade Canada, leaving behind his new wife, Sarah Welles, and their week-old baby, on his Poughkeepsie property, Locust Grove. Baby Catherine was the subject of the first poem currently known by Major Livingston. Following this campaign, Livingston was involved in the War as a Commissioner of Sequestration, appropriating lands owned by British loyalists and selling them for the revolutionary cause. It was in the period following Sarah’s early death in 1783, that Major Livingston published most of his poems and prose, anonymously or under the pseudonym of R. Ten years after the death of Sarah, Henry married Jane Patterson, the daughter of a Dutchess County politician and sister of his next-door neighbor. Between both wives, Henry fathered twelve children. He published his good-natured, often occasional verse from 1787 in many journals, including Political Barometer, Poughkeepsie Journal, and New-York Magazine. His most famous poem, “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas,” was until 2000 thought to have been the work of Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863), who published it with his collected poems in 1844. Livingston died Feb. 29, 1828.

More on Henry Livingston and his authorship of the Christmas poem here.

• Probably the most popular of Thomas Nast’s drawings of Santa Claus, “Merry Old Santa Claus,” Harper’s Weekly, January 1, 1881. From The Ohio State University Library’s Thomas Nast Portfolio.

Our views of Santa Claus owe a great deal also to the Coca-Cola advertising campaign. Coca-Cola first noted Santa’s use of the drink in a 1922 campaign to suggest Coke was a year-round drink (100 years after the publication of Livingston’s poem). The company’s on-line archives gives details:

In 1930, artist Fred Mizen painted a department store Santa in a crowd drinking a bottle of Coke. The ad featured the world’s largest soda fountain, which was located in the department store of Famous Barr Co. in St. Louis, Mo. Mizen’s painting was used in print ads that Christmas season, appearing in The Saturday Evening Post in December 1930.

1936 Coca-Cola Santa cardboard store display

• 1936 Coca-Cola Santa cardboard store display

1942 original oil painting - ‘They Remembered Me’

Archie Lee, the D’Arcy Advertising Agency executive working with The Coca-Cola Company, wanted the next campaign to show a wholesome Santa as both realistic and symbolic. In 1931, The Coca-Cola Company commissioned Michigan-born illustrator Haddon Sundblom to develop advertising images using Santa Claus — showing Santa himself, not a man dressed as Santa, as Mizen’s work had portrayed him.

• 1942 original oil painting – ‘They Remembered Me’

For inspiration, Sundblom turned to Clement Clark Moore’s 1822 poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (commonly called “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”). Moore’s description of St. Nick led to an image of Santa that was warm, friendly, pleasantly plump and human. For the next 33 years, Sundblom painted portraits of Santa that helped to create the modern image of Santa — an interpretation that today lives on in the minds of people of all ages, all over the world.

Santa Claus is a controversial figure. Debates still rage among parents about the wisdom of allowing the elf into the family’s home, and under what conditions. Theologians worry that the celebration of Christmas is diluted by the imagery. Other faiths worry that the secular, cultural impact of Santa Claus damages their own faiths (few other faiths have such a popular figure, and even atheists generally give gifts and participate in Christmas rituals such as putting up a decorated tree).

For over 100 years, Santa Claus has been a popular part of commercial, cultural and religious life in America. Has any other icon endured so long, or so well?

________________________
Below:
From the University of Toronto Library’s Representative Poetry Online

Major Henry Livingston, Jr. (1748-1828)

Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas

1 ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house,
2 Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
3 The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
4 In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
5 The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
6 While visions of sugar plums danc’d in their heads,
7 And Mama in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
8 Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap –
9 When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
10 I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
11 Away to the window I flew like a flash,
12 Tore open the shutters, and threw up the sash.
13 The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow,
14 Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below;
15 When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
16 But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny rein-deer,
17 With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
18 I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.
19 More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
20 And he whistled, and shouted, and call’d them by name:
21 “Now! Dasher, now! Dancer, now! Prancer, and Vixen,
22 “On! Comet, on! Cupid, on! Dunder and Blixem;
23 “To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
24 “Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!”
25 As dry leaves before the wild hurricane fly,
26 When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
27 So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
28 With the sleigh full of Toys — and St. Nicholas too:
29 And then in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
30 The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
31 As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
32 Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound:
33 He was dress’d all in fur, from his head to his foot,
34 And his clothes were all tarnish’d with ashes and soot;
35 A bundle of toys was flung on his back,
36 And he look’d like a peddler just opening his pack:
37 His eyes — how they twinkled! his dimples how merry,
38 His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry;
39 His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow.
40 And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;
41 The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
42 And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
43 He had a broad face, and a little round belly
44 That shook when he laugh’d, like a bowl full of jelly:
45 He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
46 And I laugh’d when I saw him in spite of myself;
47 A wink of his eye and a twist of his head
48 Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.
49 He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
50 And fill’d all the stockings; then turn’d with a jerk,
51 And laying his finger aside of his nose
52 And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose.
53 He sprung to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
54 And away they all flew, like the down of a thistle:
55 But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight –
56 Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Online text copyright © 2005, Ian Lancashire for the Department of English, University of Toronto. Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries. Be sure to visit this site for more information on this poem, on Maj. Livingston, and on poetry in general.

Nota bene: By no means should readers assume that I’m saying the authorship of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” is settled. There remains much controversy, and many people convinced that Moore was, indeed, the author. See this comment from an earlier posting, for example.

Floating over our problems

Do you ever dream of flying?

Natsumi Hayashi, a woman in Tokyo, Japan, posts a photo every day of herself, levitating nonchalantly around town and through life.

Great blog, great photos, fun stuff at YowaYowaCamera:

Natsumi Hayashi of Tokyo flies through the day, and has the photos to prove it at her blog, YowaYowaCamera.

Can you pick out locations from any of those photos?  Is there a good geography exercise in here somewhere?

More: 

• Yahoo! News slide show on Natsumi Hayashi’s photos

Ethics in climate science: How do we know what we know?

It’s almost an arcane fight, but it’s an important one — if you’re going to discuss climate science and the policies required to clean up pollution that causes destruction of our planet, can we at least agree to stick to the facts, the real facts?

John Mashey is a computer smart guy who jumped into the fray to point out that most opponents to doing anything to stop the destruction have a social or economic interest in stopping the action and continuing the destruction, something Mashey determined from looking at the networks linking the people involved.  There’s a lot of howling about Mashey’s pointing out that the emperor is a crook.  So far he’s been proved correct.

An academic group you probably never heard of, the National Association of Scholars, has an elected leader who decided to take after Mashey, rather than clean up the house.  Peter Wood writes a column for the  Chronicle of Higher Education, and sadly, their editorial mavens appear not to have fact checked it.  To their credit, they allowed Mashey’s response.

Comments are brutal.

Here’s how Tim Lambert described it at Deltoid:

John Mashey and Rob Coleman have a guest post at The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s blog replying to Peter Wood’s hit piece.

Wood’s article misused the platform of CHE. Its relevance to the concerns of CHE was minimal. It had little purpose but to damage the reputation of one of us, John Mashey, and the climate scientist Michael Mann, whom Wood has often denigrated elsewhere. The political false-association tactics were obvious. Climate scientists are under incessant attack, a fact strongly decried the day before Wood’s article by the AAAS Board. The muddy battlefield of blogs and media has now arrived on the CHE premises, easily seen in the comments.

If one tells the truth in climate science, one needs thick skin.  Go read Mashey’s piece before you read the comments.  More background from Lambert, here.

And the context you need:  Only one study on climate change has actually been retracted over the past couple of years — no, not any of those noting that warming occurs, not any of those that use the graph famously described as “a hockey stick,” but the piece that pulled together all the criticism of the science, at the behest of Republicans on the environment committees in the U.S. Congress, called the Wegman Report.  And it was John Mashey who assembled the extensive and sometimes elegant case that the Wegman Report was plagiarized and wrong.

This is, indeed, a case of trying to kill the messenger’s reputation.

Am I the only one suspicious that the National Association of Scholars may have been named to foster confusion about the authority of reports, say from the National Academy of Sciences, the long-time science advisory group to presidents whose reports urge action to stop climate change?  Notice their acronyms are the same.

Climate denialists on Texas weather 2011: Ain’t no heat wave, on average

You couldn’t make this stuff up.

In defense of his claim that Texas has not warmed over the last century (“Texas temperatures not rising; Wisconsin temperatures not rising”) and, therefore, Texas does not suffer from global warming, and therefore there is no global warming and no ill effects from warming, Steve Goddard posted this today:

Year-To-Date In Texas

Posted on August 7, 2011 by stevengoddard

Almost as warm as 1927, 1925 and 1953. Only a degree cooler than 1911.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/tx.html

It’s heading for 105°, but since it was 15° one day in February, that averages to 60°, so Texas is okay, according to Goddard.  In their drive to fuzz up the facts and surround policy debates with snark, the denialists will deny anything, leave no weather record untwisted, and deny the sweat on the nose on their face.  According to Goddard, snow in the Great Basin means no drought in Las Vegas, as shown by there being no drought affecting Lake Powell.

Remember Straight Dope’s Cecil Adams’s old line?  “Fighting ignorance since 1973 (it’s taking longer than we thought.)”  Yeah, that applies to climate denialists in quantity.

Here’s what’s going on in Texas right now:

• The odd return of La Niña, just two months after the previous ocean-weather phenomenon ended, means Texas’s crippling drought may extend into 2012 — AP in the Boston Globe;  Reuters Africa
  

  Drought now affects over a million square miles of the lower 48 states, or 32 percent, according to the Weather Channel. The most extreme cases of “exceptional” drought stretch from Arizona to Louisiana and parts of Georgia, covering almost 11 percent of the lower 48 states.The resulting lack of ground moisture prevents clouds from developing in the low-level atmosphere, making daytime showers near impossible.;

• Firefighters remain on high alert, despite record wildfires already this year in Texas (KTXS-12 in Abilene); despite snowfall in much of Texas this past winter with record cold, not enough precipitation fell to make it a normal water year; spring growth is now tinder-dry and poised to burn
• “Even the state’s feral hogs are hiding from the heat, postponing a new reality TV show about Texans gunning them down from helicopters.”
• Texas farmers are suffering from the drought and heat, big time.  Crops have been ruined.  Some ranchers sell off their herds, some claiming for the last time — because heat or drought, or both, destroyed the grazing crops used to feed the stock.  Here’s the view of climate change from the American Farmland Trust.
• See the video below from the American Farm Bureau on the Texas drought

•  Texas A&M says the drought of 2011 is the worst ever 1-year drought in Texas history; note how their press release describes the event, and the increasing heat:
  

  Preliminary reports from the National Climatic Data Center indicate that July 2011 was the warmest month ever recorded statewide for Texas, with data going back to 1895, [State Climatologist John] Nielsen-Gammon reports. The average temperature of 87.2 degrees broke the previous record of 86.5 degrees set in 1998. The June average temperature of 85.2 was a record for that month and now ranks fifth warmest overall.

  Rainfall totals were also unusually light across the state. The July monthly total of 0.72 inches ranks third driest, surpassed by the 0.69 inches recorded in both 1980 and 2000. This is the fifth consecutive month in which precipitation totals were among the 10 driest for that month, says the Texas A&M professor.

Drought and searing heat in Texas.  Caused by climate change?  That’s difficult to say, difficult to trace.  Made worse by climate change?  Most likely.

Dallas media track the consecutive days over 100° F.  It’s a form of misery index — people can recover from a day or two over the century mark.  But more than a couple of days and the heat begins to take a heavier toll on people, on plants and animals, on houses, on cars, on crops, on everything we do in Texas.  It’s difficult to make news make sense on weather stories.  Tracking the number of days over 100° gives a quick graphic for television news, and puts the story into the vein of a sports record story, a narrative people know.

Here’s how things stack up in Dallas, in terms of days over 100°:

Rank	Year	Consecutive 100° days
1	1980	42
2	2011	37 (and counting)
3	1998	29
4	1952	25
5	1999	24
6	1954	20
7	2006	19
8	2010	18
8	1978	18
10	1956	17

If one looks at the heat streaks, one cannot help but notice that all of the top ten streaks have come since 1952, and that three are in the last decade, five since 1998.  Brutal heat streaks appear to be coming more frequently, many close on the heels of previous heat streaks, and with greater severity.

That is what one would expect from global warming.

Moreover, the recent streaks show greater oscillations.  2011 also saw snow and freezing weather in Dallas, a rarity.  Greater oscillations in weather also would be expected from global warming.

Goddard offers a comparison of January to June temperatures — the coolest part of the calendar year, and leaving out most of the heat-streak days — and on that basis of a half-comparison, he suggests (doesn’t say — he doesn’t want to be caught lying outright) that there isn’t a warming problem in Dallas in 2011.

Heat stroke?  It’s a figment of your socialist imagination.  14 dead?  They probably were smokers.  Global warming?   Not if Steve Goddard can find a statistic somewhere that can be manipulated to appear to deny it.

What do his charts show for July and August of those years?

Finally, there is this:   Assume for a moment that there has been no significant warming in Texas as a complete landmass over the past 100 years:  Does that mean Texas is not battered by any warming that occurs elsewhere?

Of course not.  The current drought in Texas is thought to be triggered in no small part by the La Niña effect, a chilling of the surface of the Pacific in a broad band that stretches west of Peru for about 5,000 miles to the far South Pacific.  La Niña is a counterpart to El Niño, a warming of the same band of water that produces different, not-average weather effects.  The cycles are not well understood as to cause — there are good hypotheses being tested — but it has been observed that, especially in the latter part of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, these cycles are speeding up.  The best, not-disproven hypothesis is that these cycles react and speed up due to global warming.

So, to the best of our hypothesizing today, the Texas drought is a function of global warming, in timing, frequency and severity.

This demonstrates the ultimate problem with using a local temperature readings to make authoritative statements about global warming, even averaged over about a hundred million acres like Texas:  Problems of global warming are not always simply problems of temperature, and non-local causes may cause local effects that will not show up in temperature, especially local effects in precipitation, in timing and amounts.

Botanists, foresters, range scientists and biogeographers noticed effects of warming 50 years ago, with the migration of species northward, and up mountainsides.  Wildlife managers noticed altered migrations of game birds and non-game birds about the same time, migration alterations that continue to today.  Plant zones used by farmers and gardeners demonstrate a good deal of change, generally favoring warming, over the past century.  Evidence for warming is quite solid without a single temperature reading.

A bastion of average temperature non-increases, if Texas is one, may still be hammered by warming and its effects in the Pacific, and especially in the Gulf of Mexico.  Is it fair to say the entire system shows no signs of warming?

So we should ask:  Are temperatures and precipitation averages, frequencies, timing and totals, about average for the last century or two?  Then  the case for global warming is a bit weaker.

Dallas will eclipse the previous record string of 100° F days in the next week.  All of Texas is in severe drought, and most of the state is in extreme drought.  Sounds as if there is something going on with the climate.

Last year the denialism sites lit up with a report that a fourth grade student in South Texas had a science project that disproved global warming, and which won an award from the National Science Foundation.  It was a sad hoax.  The speed with which these sites pounced on the report should have warned us that a school of thought devoid of practical results from the lab bench or observation in nature gets too desperate for results, and will cut corners to claim them.  Goddard’s reports repeat the bad methodology of that hoax.

Richard Feynman once wrote, wryly, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”  Goddard and other denialists appear to read that wrongly, thinking that experts are not to be trusted, and that all experts are ignorant of all things, and therefore stupid.

Politics and especially the politics of science cry out for someone to read Feynman — actually read what he wrote.  Feynman said we should not assume all scientists are infallible.  He did not write that all scientists are fallible and wrong.

Hoaxsters frustrated: Alert called off at Nebraska nuclear power plant

Sometimes time and events just catch up to the hoaxsters.

In Nebraska, on Wednesday July 14, the Cooper nuclear generating station of the Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD) ended it’s “notification of unusual event” as floodwaters of the Missouri River retreated from the site.

Publicity photo from Omaha Public Power District

According to the Associate Press report, the alert for the nuclear power plant at Fort Calhoun remains in effect.  Fort Calhoun is upriver from Cooper, and lower in elevation in relation to the Missouri River.  Fort Calhoun also was offline and in cold shutdown when the alert was posted, because it had been in a refueling operation.  Fort Calhoun is operated by Omaha Public Power district (OPPD).

Publicity photo from OPPD

No damage was done to the reactor at either site.  Operations continued at Cooper.

Rumors of a serious incident aroused conspiracy nuts when a hoax report out of Pakistan claimed the Russian nuclear agency had said the Fort Calhoun plant was in meltdown.

No meltdown. Photo from OPPD

How with the hoaxsters spin it now?

More, resources:

• Story of the lifting of the notification at Cooper, at World Nuclear News
• Press release from NPPD, “Cooper nuclear station exits “Notification of Unusual Event’”;  “Cooper was in the Notification of Unusual Event status for approximately 23 days. There was no threat to plant employees or the public throughout the event. A Notification of Unusual Event is the lowest and least serious of four emergency classifications established by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for nuclear power plants. “
• Timeline of events at the Fort Calhoun station, from OPPD
• OPPD blog on the flood and preparations, and what to do during the flood

Earlier at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub:

• Troops back from Iraq and Afghanistan help protect against Missouri River flood
• Hoaxsters can’t be bothered with facts
• “Hoaxed Nebraska nuclear plant crisis update”
• “Nuclear power plant incident in Nebraska?”

Meanwhile, in the evolution debates, where we find the Mother of All Denialism . . .

Other fronts in the War on Education may have earned more attention here in the Bathtub, lately — and in state legislatures.  Threats from the dilution and elimination of good, hard science courses continue to pose problems, especially from creationists and their shyer, camouflage troops from the Chapel of Intelligent Design.

We need to stay aware of the creationist/creationism threat.  At its heart, creationism requires adherents to reject the facts of science, to reject the workings of science, and to reject the functions of debate about what is real, and what is not.  It is to me a rather simple discussion of the quality of evidence.

Eugenie Scott and her colleagues from the National Center for Science Education provide a great update in what is going on, with a great video, and an informative and troubling explanation of the links between creationism and the “unbelievers” in climate change.

Be sure to watch the first ten minutes, to see the video update on the fight to keep good science education in schools, especially the teaching of evolution.

UFOs? Obama-ordered news blackouts? No: Brain failures

Come on, you can figure out how this applies to those stories about Obama’s secret orders — or more accurately, the lack of those orders.  From Neil deGrasse Tyson and the argument from ignorance, presented at St. Petersburg College, Florida, 2007:

Tip of the old scrub brush to Neil deGrasse Tyson, and his Tweet.

Robert Johnson’s centennial, May 8: Memorial to the blues

May 8, 2011, is the 100th anniversary of the birth of bluesman Robert Johnson.

Robert Johnson -- one of two known photographs of the Delta blues legend

In a fitting tribute to Johnson and an important coming-of-age coming-to-senses moment, First Presbyterian Church in downtown Dallas announced plans to save the old Brunswick Records Building at 508 Park Avenue, a site where Johnson recorded songs in 1937 that changed the blues, changed recording, and left us a legacy of Johnson to study from his short life.

(On at least one day of those 1937 recordings, Johnson could have brushed shoulders with the Light Crust Doughboys, the Texas Swing legends, who were recording in the same building.  The Doughboys set their own pace and gave birth to Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.  Two of Texas’s greatest music legends, in the same building on the same day, both just stepping on the platform of the train to immortality.)

Saving 508 Park Avenue vexed Dallas for a couple of decades.  First, blues is not the music of Dallas cognescenti, though the world class musicians in town including Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s Jaap van Zweden tend to support the eclectic music scence and honoring musicians of all genres (and Texas is loaded with different music genres).  Second, while Park Avenue may have been a bustling business district adjunct once, Dallas’s city center suffered 50 years of decline after school desegregation.  Parts of downtown and Uptown begin to look prosperous again, but the southern peninsula of the city, away from the now-packed-with-performance venues Arts District, a freeway and ten blocks away from Uptown, with its back up against another freeway, part of Interstate 30 and the famous Dallas Mixmaster.

508 Park Avenue, Dallas, Robert Johnson's early recording site, photo by Justin Terveen for the Dallas Observer

Plus, the building is directly across the street from the Stewpot, a kitchen operated by First Presbyterian Church to serve Dallas large and unfortunately thriving homeless population.

Who wants to renovate an abandoned building that has homeless people as scenery for the better part of the day?

Big news this week:  508 Park Avenue was sold to First Presbyterian, who have plans to save the building (and recording studio!), add a performance amphitheatre at one end of the block, and a park at the other.  This is people-friendly development well ahead of its time — there is not a resident population in that part of the city to support such a venue — yet.

Last summer, it was the neighbors, First Presbyterian Church of Dallas, who made an offer to buy 508 Park Avenue and the adjacent building and empty lot. But the deal was contingent on the city allowing the church, which also operates the Stewpot, to tear down an unrelated building next door, at 1900 Young, and replace it with an outdoor amphitheater for church socials and concerts. The Landmark Commission went into last Monday’s meeting with angels on one shoulder and devils on the other: The commission’s task force suggested approval; city staff, denial. The latter would have sent 508 Park Avenue back into purgatory.

But Landmark OK’d the plan, and the church says it will restore 508 Park Avenue to its former glory, inside and out—including the construction of a real recording studio where Johnson once sat and played “Hell Hound on My Trail.”

The church promises: It has musicians lined up to participate, but it can’t yet reveal who. The church promises: 508 Park Avenue will be resurrected.

One hell of a birthday gift for a man who supposedly sold his soul to the Devil.

The second authenticated photo of blues legend Robert Johnson

So, on Robert Johnson’s 100th birthday (assuming he wasn’t really born in 1912 . . . another mystery for another time, perhaps), the news is that the legendary bluesman who burned out like a shooting star helped save one of the few examples of art deco building decoration in Dallas, when a group of Christians who help the homeless, decided to step in an update their downtown Dallas campus.

Every step of the way, it’s an unlikely story.  Truth is, in this case, much, much stranger than fiction.

Ovation Music released to YouTube the video of Eric Clapton playing and singing “Me and the Devil,” at 508 Park Avenue, in the same room where Robert Johnson sang for a record early on.  Johnson recorded the song at that same location on Sunday, June 20, 1937.

508 Park Avenue, Dallas, is already a memorial to Robert Johnson, to the blues, and to the city where these early blues hits were made.  The struggle remains to make the memorial accessible, and not threatened with destruction.

More, resources: 

• Story on the then-proposed restoration of the building, at The Delta Blues blog, last January
• Dallas Observer’s “Unfair Park” column from January 2009, on the plans to tear down the building; features a Google panorama view of the building from Park Avenue, in front of the building
• Dallas Morning News, May 2, 2011, “Plan aims to preserve endangered downtown building with rich music history” (Subscription may be required to see this)
• November 2008 story in Vanity Fair about what may be a third photograph of Robert Johnson, and the work of trying to put his history together
• A long post that purports to carry the facts about Robert Johnson, and certainly tells the stories (but some of the facts may be more legendary than fact); a useful background on Johnson’s life at Riverside Blues Society
• Oh, my, more mystery:  In which of these three graves does Robert Johnson really lie?  Is he buried at Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Morgan City, Little Zion Baptist Church in Greenwood, or Payne Chapel Memorial Baptist Church in Quito, all in Mississippi?
• Very good NPR story, “Robert Johnson at 100, Still Dispelling Myths;”  listen to the story here

Boston Tea Party: An anti-corporation protest?

Thom Hartmann said so.  In Hartmann’s reading, the 1773 Boston Tea Party was as much a protest against corporate oligarchy as a protest against government — quite the opposite of the way most Neo Tea Partiers see things.   Is he right?  Historians, what say you?

Hartmann relies on his copy of George R. T. Hewes’ book, A retrospect of the Boston tea-party, with a memoir of George R. T. Hewes, a survivor of the little band of patriots who drowned the tea in Boston harbour in 1773 (1834). Are you familiar with the book?

George Robert Twelves Hewes in 1835 at age 93, a veteran of the 1773 Boston Tea Party. Painting by Joseph G. Cole. CUNY image

More, and resources:

• George R. T. Hewes’ Retrospective in various formats for free download at archive.com
• J. L. Bell, of course, wrote about Hewes at his grand history blog, Boston 1775. (Here’s a sample post.)  History teachers, if you don’t have Boston 1775 bookmarked, you’re not doing your internet job

Columbus’s most prized possession

Columbus feared that King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella would not honor pledges they had made to him as recompense and honor for his great work of discovery on their behalf.  Before his final voyage, he assembled a legal document showing those promises made to him, and his work for Spain.

This illustrates, once again, the human dimension of the great drama of the age of exploration, of Columbus’s stumbling on to the America’s in his efforts to get to China.

The Library of Congress and the History Channel team up again to show off these grand snippets of history:

On January 5, 1502, prior to his fourth and final voyage to America, Columbus gathered several judges and notaries in his home in Seville. The purpose? To have them authorize copies of his archival collection of original documents through which Isabel and Fernando had granted titles, revenues, powers and privileges to Columbus and his descendants. These 36 documents are popularly called “Columbus’ Book of Privileges.” Four copies of his “Book” existed in 1502, three written on vellum and one on paper. The Library’s copy, one of the three on vellum, has a unique paper copy of the Papal Bull Dudum siquidem of September 26, 1493, which extended the Spanish claim for future explorations.

Borrowed with permission from Mr. Darrell’s Wayback Machine.

Astounding lightning strike photo — Chicago Tribune readers show proper skepticism

Amazing photo of two Chicago buildings struck by lightning simultaneously, by Chicago Tribune photog  Chris Sweda:

Dual lightning strike in Chicago, June 2010 - photo by Chris Sweda, Chicago Tribune

Among other things, the photo isn’t perfect enough to suggest post-shutter-snap manipulation — you can see from other photos that the rain drops on the window disappear with a focus farther away.

Blair Kamin writing at Cityscapes discussed skepticism from readers of the Chicago Tribune about whether the strikes were really simultaneous, or instead the result of a very long exposure.

Exactly the sort of skepticism anti-warmists should have exhibited when confronted with the story of a fourth-grade student in Beeville, Texas, disproving global warming, or the story of a Spanish solar energy company sending a bomb by courier to an anti-warmist, and then bragging about it.

Kamin offers a couple of paths by which a reasonable person can determine it was a chance photo, the photographer pushing the shutter release coincidentally with a double lightning strike (see the “postscripts” section of Kamin’s post).

Were they true to their warming science, in the anti-warmist world two camps would be forming.  One camp would argue the photograph was manipulated, a clever collage of two different photos, or maybe a clever use of miniatures; the other camp would argue that lightning doesn’t strike man-made objects.

Maybe, 4th grader disproves much warming in Beeville, not entire planet?

Hmmm.  News from Beeville is tough to come by when limited to calls that tend to catch school officials before they get to their office or after they go home (early, by most standards — but it’s summer, so we cut ‘em some slack).

But we can find more information on what would be an astounding, groundbreaking study by 4th grader Julisa Castillo, which has been advertised as disproving global warming.

Again from the Beeville Bee-Picayune, about five months ago:

Conclusion: ‘pretty creative’

by Scott Reese Willey
As world leaders meet in Copenhagen to draft legislation to rein in the release of greenhouse gases and stem climate change, an R.A. Hall Elementary School student is questioning the science supporting global warming.

Caption from Beeville Bee-Picayune: A.C. Jones High School student Zachary Johnson, above, looks over a science experiment entered in R.A. Hall’s annual science fair. Zachary and other members of the high school’s science club judged the exhibits. Photo from, and read more at: mySouTex.com - Conclusion ‘pretty creative’

“There is not enough evidence to prove global warming is occurring,” fourth-grader Julisa Raquel Castillo concluded in a science project she entered in the campus’ annual science fair on Tuesday.

Julisa studied temperatures in Beeville for the past 109 years to develop her conclusion.

She researched online data basis of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, the National Weather Service, and checked out books on climate change at the Joe Barnhart Bee County Library.

Her findings:

• temperatures rose and fell from 1900 to 1950.

• temperatures in Beeville cooled down over a 20-year period beginning in 1955 and ending in 1975.

• Since 2001, temperatures in Beeville have grown cooler year after year.

Close to 200 R.A. Hall students entered projects in this year’s science fair, said organizer Denise Salvagno, who also teaches the school’s gifted and talented students.

Fourth- and fifth-graders were required to enter projects as part of class work; however, students in grades first, second and third could enter projects if they desired.

Students in Ben Barris’ science club at A.C. Jones High School judged the projects.

“Some of these projects are pretty creative,” said Zachary Johnson, a senior at A.C. Jones and one of the judges. “You can tell a lot of the students put a lot of effort into their projects. Some of them didn’t put much effort into it but a lot of them did and, overall, I’m impressed with what I am seeing.”

Fourth-grader Kaleb Maguire proved that all tap water in Beeville was the same quality.

He took samples of water at 10 different sites across town and came to the conclusion that because the water originated at the same source — the city’s fresh water plant — the samples contained the same amount of alkalinity, pH and free chlorine.

Fourth-grader Amber Martinez concluded that worms subjected to music were more alert than those not.

And fourth-grader Sam Waters’ project was no doubt much enjoyed by his pet pooch, Lucky.

Sam wanted to know which meat his dog would like more. Turns out Lucky preferred chicken over both hotdogs and sausage.

Fifth-grader Savannah Gonzales found out that ants prefer cheese over sugar, but classmate Misty Nienhouse concluded that ants preferred sugar over cheese. Tessa Giannini’s science project also seemed to prove that ants preferred sugar over cheese, bread or anything else.

However, fourth-grader Faith Hernandez conducted a similar experiment and concluded ants preferred cheese over ham.

Yet, Jose Vivesos, a fourth-grader, concluded that ants prefer sugar water over anything else.

Nathanial Martinez, also a fourth-grader, built a working seismograph and demonstrated how it detected and recorded earthquakes.

Fifth-grader Jamison Hunter decided to see if money in the hand made a difference in someone’s heart rate.

He recorded the heart rate of each volunteer without money in their hand, with one dollar bill in their hand, two one dollar bills in their hand and three one dollar bills in their hand.

His conclusion: “From this experiment, I learned that everyone’s heart rate is different by how much money they hold,” he said. “No two people had the same results even with the test being done the same way.”

Read more: mySouTex.com – Conclusion ‘pretty creative’

Temperatures may have cooled in Beeville.  Can we extrapolate Beeville to the entire planet?

The title of the project may be a little bit ambitious.

[See earlier post on the issue here.]

More:

• From the same on-line news source:  “GREAT SCIENCE FAIR – 82 Skidmore-Tynan students enter projects in annual competition”
• American Spectator gets overexcited, and shows why American Spectator is not regarded as authoritative on any science issue
• Mind of Dan stumbles across the facts on the Castillo project, then wanders away
• Climate Depot offers between-the-lines evidence of plan to change name to Climate Information Dumpster
• Hyperventilating, junk science sites think 4th grade science trumps everything else (This is a clear demonstration that the “balanced education” program is dumbing-down science taken to an extreme — these yahoos can’t distinguish between a 4th-grade science fair project’s over-ambitious title and real science, anywhere.)

Beeville fourth grader disproves global warming?

John Mashey alerted me to this news story from the online Beeville Bee-Picayune via mySouTex.com:

R.A. Hall fourth-grader is science national champion

Caption from mySouTex: R.A. Hall fourth-grader Julisa Castillo (center) is the 2010 national junior division champion for the National Science Fair. Her project, “Disproving Global Warming,” beat more than 50,000 other projects from students all over the nation. She is pictured with her father, J.R. Castillo (left), and R.A. Hall Principal Martina Villarreal. Read more: mySouTex.com - R A Hall fourth grader is science national champion

R.A. Hall Elementary School fourth-grader Julisa Castillo has been named junior division champion for the 2010 National Science Fair.

Her project, “Disproving Global Warming,” beat more than 50,000 other projects submitted by students from all over the U.S.

Julisa originally entered her project in her school science fair before sending it to the National Science Foundation (NSF) to be judged at the national level.

The NSF panel of judges included former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, 14 recipients of the President’s National Medal of Science, and four former astronauts.

“Before she sent it off, she just had to add more details, citations for her research, and the amount of hours she spent working on it,” said Julisa’s father, J.R. Castillo.

In addition to a plaque, trophy and medal, Julisa has won an all-expenses-paid trip to Space Camp at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., which she plans to attend this summer.
Read more: mySouTex.com – R A Hall fourth grader is science national champion

The blog of the North County Times (California) has doubts.  There are signs of hoax.  While the Beeville Independent School District does have an R. A. Hall elementary, the list of winners of last December’s science fair does not include Ms. Castillo.  To go from not placing at the local school to winning the national would be quite a feat!

I suspect an error somewhere, perhaps in the title of the project, or in the understanding of what the title implies.

Most of the obvious hoax signs check out against a hoax:  Beeville exists (improbably Texan as the name may be), R. A. Hall is an elementary school in Beeville ISD.  The principal of R. A. Hall is Martina Villareal.  Beeville has a guy named J. R. Castillo (listed as Julisa’s father in the photo caption), and his photos at the site promoting his music shows photos of a guy who looks a lot like the guy in the photo here.  Most hoaxers wouldn’t go so far for accuracy on details.

Fun little mystery.  I have made inquiries with the newspaper, and hope to follow up with the school.  Stay tuned.  There may be a great little science project somewhere in here.

_____________

See update here: Quick summary, big title, project not quite filling those shoes. I’ve made inquiries at the paper and school district without answers; there’s more to the story, but not much.  A good project with a misleading title, for those who would be misled by a 4th grade science fair project.