Everything under the Sun: Climate dynamics II

NOTE ON TEMPERATURES: Mostly, I'm using the Kelvin scale. Absolute zero (no thermal disorder) means T(Kelvin) = 0. Room temperature is 68 ^oF = 20 ^oC = 293 ^oK. The Earth's average temperature year-round is about 59 ^oF = 15 ^oC = 288 ^oK. Recall what our teachers tried to drum into us: T(C) = (5/9)*[T(F) - 32 ^oF] = T(K) - 273 ^oC.
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The earlier posting about climate dynamics left out the most important source of "difference" in the climate system: the difference between the Sun and empty space (empty of matter, at least). Almost all the heat flow in the Earth's climate comes from the Sun across the vacuum between them. The Earth captures only a tiny amount of the Sun's radiance, but that's enough to make us warmer than the almost-absolute zero of interstellar space.

The Sun's energy is transported as (electromagnetic) radiation, or photons (from the Greek, phos, light). Most of it is emitted from the Sun's surface in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum, with a little in the ultraviolet. The radiation that doesn't get reflected back into space by the cloudtops is absorbed and re-emitted by the ground, but in a different part of the spectrum, the mid-infrared or heat radiation band. The electromagnetic energy flows in by radiative transport, flows back up by a mixture of convection and radiation, then leaves again by radiation. Radiation is dominant in the lower atmosphere but is supplemented significantly by convection and water evaporation-condensation, which make what we know as "weather." In the upper atmosphere, the transport is all radiative. The photons there travel almost unstopped into space. The other heat transport mechanism, conduction or heat diffusion in matter, is unimportant in the atmosphere, although it is important in the oceans and solid earth.

Visible and ultraviolet radiation travel mostly in straight lines in the atmosphere, which is largely transparent to them. Radiation can also travel by radiative diffusion, where photons are repeatedly absorbed and re-emitted by matter particles. Infrared radiation in the Earth's atmosphere suffers this process at the hands of water molecules. In stars, which are made of plasma, a hot gas of free nuclei and electrons, rather than neutral atoms or molecules, even visible and ultraviolet light can't make it by straight lines - they too have to diffuse, taking a drunken walk out of the star. In any sort of radiative diffusion, photons get absorbed and re-emitted from the electrons on a microscopic scale. In regular matter, the electrons are bound to atoms (but can still "vibrate"); in plasma, they're free. Radiative diffusion is a lot like conduction, where molecules transfer heat by bouncing off one another. The matter in and around stars is the common plasma in the Universe today. The early Universe - the "Big Bang" - was a hot, dense plasma too.

"Radiation" sounds dangerous, but the kind from the Sun is mostly visible and not dangerous to us. (The ultraviolet part is, and the atmosphere filters much of it.) Our eyes are adapted by evolution to that radiation band. Creatures living on a planet of another sun with a different dominant radiation emission band would have a different set of eyes - or some other functional equivalent.

Electromagnetic radiation (photons) is a physical entity in its own right, carrying energy and momentum. Its energy can be organized or disorganized; that is, the energy can be partially or entirely in the form of heat. That implies that photons also carry entropy. The second law of thermodynamics controls the basic mechanism of the Sun-to-Earth "heat pump": the Sun's surface is much hotter than the Earth's (5800 deg K vs 300 deg K), so the heat flows from the Sun to the Earth. The Earth absorbs the radiation, then re-emits it at 300 deg K into space, which has a temperature of essentially zero. Each step increases the total entropy of the system, if we are sure to include the radiation, as well as the matter of the Sun, the ground, the ocean, and the air, as part of the "system." In fact, essentially all of the increase in entropy in heating the Earth's climate is carried away into the vacuum of space by radiation, the Earth's "waste heat."

The whole process can be thought of as a "disorder waterfall:" as it flows from Sun to Earth to atmosphere to space, no energy is gained or lost; but each step "degrades" the energy by disorganizing into higher-entropy forms. It's like changing money into smaller and smaller denominations - except you can only change from bigger bills to smaller.

This has important implications for the Earth's history. It means that matter on the Earth can retain declining entropy (increasing order), even while the total entropy of the Universe is going up - with all that waste heat being dumped into space. That's why organic evolution, with living things of increasing complexity, is possible. So long as the total entropy is going up, the local entropy in the biosphere can be declining. In the nineteenth century, scientists and others worried that the Second Law meant that the Earth would "wind down" to a "heat death," and that organic evolution contradicted physics. They didn't know about radiation and its entropy. Now we do - there's no contradiction between thermodynamics and evolution.

Digression on thermodynamics

We use terms like temperature and pressure as if they're obvious. On one level, they are. But on another level they're far from simple concepts. They are two pieces of a large branch of physics called thermodynamics. As the name implies, it's about heat - or least, that's how it started in the nineteenth century.

Back then, molecules and atoms were only an educated guess about the ultimate structure of matter. The microsopic nature of thermodynamics was unsuspected. Instead, the entire subject was developed with macroscopic concepts that approximated matter - whether solid, liquid, or gas - as a continuum, with continuous flows of work, heat, mass, and so on. Extensive thermodynamic quantities, like volume or energy, added as you grew a system in size; intensive quantities, like temperature and pressure, did not. Instead, these are defined as local averages of heat energy and force at idealized points in space. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, a rather mysterious quantity called entropy was identified and defined. It was somehow a measure of disorder and apparently never decreased, but it took another half-century or so for entropy's true nature to be unraveled.

Today, the definition of thermodynamics starts with order and disorder. Work is organized energy; heat is disorganized energy, distributed among a very large number of molecules whizzing and banging their way through space. They're so small, and they take up so little space in ordinary matter, that we can conceive of material as continuous without making much of an error. A body's impact force is all of its molecules moving in the same direction at once, and the body does work on whatever its pushing. Its heat is all of its molecules in a state of random agitation (random in the sense that their "heat motions" prefer no one direction). The level of agitation is measured by the temperature, which is an indicator of how much kinetic energy (energy of motion) each molecule carries. The pressure exerted by the body (which can be a gas or liquid - physicists and engineers call gases and liquids, collectively, "fluids") is the average force per area exerted by the random motion of the molecules pushing in all directions equally around the body's boundary.

Entropy is the best starting point for describing a system of molecules for which we have only partial information about the molecules' state. Thermodynamic equilibrium is that state of the system where all we know is its total energy, volume, and/or number of molecules. A system in equilibrium is characterized by a single temperature (essentially, the total energy divided by the number of molecules, or the average energy per molecule) and a single pressure (essentially, the total force exerted on the system boundary divided by the number of molecules and the area of the boundary). That part of the system's energy associated with the temperature is its heat content; that part associated with macroscopic motion pushing other bodies, its work. (The attentive reader will ask, what about the energy associated with the number of molecules - good question: that's the system's chemical energy, but we won't pause for that - it's only important if there are chemical reactions going on too.)

The world around us is not in thermodynamic equilibrium. In our climate, our oceans, the solid parts of the Earth - except in the far upper atmosphere, where the air is extremely thin - it's possible to define and measure pressure and temperature, but these will vary by position and time. The theory of climate (The Theory I called it a while ago) treats temperature and pressure as fields, which are functions that vary with where you are and what time it is.

Heat flows and air moves because temperature and pressure vary in space. Unequal temperatures in matter mean that there's more average heat energy in one place than another. Nature moves to correct that, by getting some of the heat energy to flow from higher temperature to lower. Similarly, unequal pressures means unbalanced forces in the medium. The region with higher pressure will press against the region with lower and partly displace it. Both phenomena are examples of the second law of thermodynamics: a system not in thermodynamic equilibrium will evolve in such a way as to increase the total entropy and move itself towards thermodynamic equilibrium. The nineteenth century's macroscopic thermodynamics, this law had no obvious explanation. With the twentieth century's microscopic or statistical thermodynamics and entropy defined in a fundamental way as molecular disorder, the Second Law is just an expression of probability: the more disordered state is the more probable. The heat and air flows move the climate from a less probable state to a more probable one.

This is also the exact sense in which thermodynamic differences help to drive climate. As the climate changes, entropy increases. On the other hand, certain other physical quantitites are conserved or fixed in time - the energy, the volume, and the number of molecules. In real climate, these aren't exactly fixed, but they almost are.

Opportunities like this rarely knock

So when they do, someone should pounce: see Robert Satloff's recent article in the Baltimore Sun about his visit to Cairo and speech there on the Holocaust and Holocaust-denial. The Sunni fright of Iran is deeper than I realized.

There have been disastrous events for the Jewish people, like the outbreak of World War I and the Hitler-Stalin pact, which made World War II possible. But then there have been positive breakthroughs like Sadat's 1977 visit to Jerusalem and Gorbachev's arrival in the US in 1988. This is more like the latter.

I like JetBlue

JetBlue has taken a beating for last week's weather-induced screw-ups. It's too bad, because I've flown them frequently in the last three years and had nothing but very positive experiences. As a member of JetBlue's flying club, I got this letter of apology from CEO David Neeleman. You don't see that every day. He's even got the apology up on YouTube.

But there's always humor to be mined out of situations such as the JetBlue blues, and funny man Andy Borowitz has done it: "Bush: I’ll Bring Troops Home on JetBlue; No Exact Timetable, President Says."

What drives climate? Climate dynamics I

In a word, differences - differences drive climate. The most basic is the distinction among up, down, and sideways, determined by the direction of gravity.

Differences in pressure from point to point give rise to forces that push the atmosphere in the direction of lower pressure. They are one cause of atmospheric winds, as well as the vertical circulation that defines the "high" (higher) and "low" (lower) pressure systems on weather maps. Air is falling at the centers of "highs" and rising at the centers of "lows."

The differences between air and ground are manifold; one result is friction between air and ground (and between ocean and seabed) when the fluid slides over the solid.

A more abstract difference - between inertial and non-inertial (accelerated) frames - arises from the fact that the Earth is rotating. Because of air-ground friction, the air more or less rotates with the Earth. But the air then lives in an accelerated (rotating) frame. In a rotating frame, the Coriolis effect or pseudo-force accelerates anything moving in any direction other than parallel to the rotation axis itself. In the northern hemisphere, something moving northward is deflected eastward (or southward and westward). In the southern hemisphere, something moving southward is deflected eastward (or northward and westward).

The most important set of differences in climate are temperature differences, which drive the flow of heat in the air. Heat moves around by three mechanisms:

• Conduction
• Convection
• Radiation

The last two are at work in the Earth's atmosphere, while the first is not effective in air. (It is important in the water and ground.) The conduction of heat happens by diffusion; slightly hotter molecules bounce off of slightly cooler neighbors and transfer heat in the colder direction. In convection, big parcels of air (or water) hotter than their surroundings move to lower temperature surroundings, giving off their heat as they go. Radiation transports heat because electromagnetic waves have energy; that energy can have a temperature, and radiation can transfer that heat to (or remove it from) material by absorption or emission. A later posting will talk about radiation in more detail.

Further note on inequality

The relationship between divergent family structures, education, divorce, and growing inequality is documented with more precision in this paper from the University of Maryland. The result is a striking one-to-one-to-one correspondence among the three variables: education, divorce, socioeconomic success. More educated people marry later but divorce far less and have more stable and successful careers and lives. Less educated people marry earlier, divorce much more often (if they marry at all), and tend - irrespective of early success - to sink with respect to their age-peers as they get older.

A study like this illustrates the importance of asking the right questions when it comes to inequality. Too much attention is focused on distractions like CEO pay - the class of people in question is too small to make for a broad social trend. The CEO pay question is important in a different context, that of corporate governance: are they really worth it? Why are so many mediocre or bad CEOs paid so much? Is bad corporate governance actually being rewarded? As for the larger wealth explosion in American society, the right question is not, why are so many doing so well, but, why are so many doing so badly, or not as well as they could?

Some of the factors in rising inequality (illegal immigration, decline of American manufacturing) are halves of problems whose other halves are found in other countries; political cooperation has not kept pace with economic integration. Globalization is also distorted by the overvalued dollar and the world's need for America to act as a big importer and consumer (see here). The rest of the world - or at least Asia - imports and consumes too little. The dollar has been overvalued for more than three decades, while Japan and China still pursue outdated policies of oversaving and suppressing local consumption.

Europe still needs a democratic Right

A number of observers have noted a resurgence of right-wing populist parties in eastern Europe, following some degree of disillusionment there with their conversion to market/democratic liberalism and EU membership. The post-communist transition has been accompanied by a lot of sleaze, and those countries' voters are rightly tired of it. This reaction is a delayed version of what's happened in western Europe, and it illustrates one of things wrong with the EU: it's an attempt by Europe's elites to put the continent to sleep and take away its limited democratic achievements, ultimately a very bad thing. The EU rests on a weak foundation because it lacks democratic consent and legitimacy. The administration of Brussels anesthesia makes it that much harder for Europe to face its very real problems: the crisis of the welfare state, demographic decline, the rise - in parts - of Eurabia. See this article in the Economist, for example.

A European democratic Right would see the need for European free trade and political and security cooperation. Contrary to the populist demagogues, these are good things for European countries. But it would also see the need for that cooperation to rest on national sovereignty. A better model than the EU is NATO, about which you hear no such complaints. That's in part because NATO is a treaty organization. It's an expression of identity and sovereignty, not an erasure of them.

Why climate needs humidity

Climate is a set, at each point and every instant, of the four physical variables from the last posting: temperature, humidity, water state, and wind velocity. Actual measurements are samples of this set taken to be representative of some small box of space and short time interval. Forecasts are projected similarly over boxes of space and time.

A consequence is that humidity and the water state are independent variables that cannot be reduced to one of the others. When people talk about climate change, they often mean just temperature, which is wrong. Climate change means all of those variables changing. When we consider the precipitation of rain and snow and the growth and decay of living things dependent on that precipitation, it is especially important to keep this fact in mind.

Not doing so gets you into common climate fallacies. Even experts commit them. (More details can be found here.)

The "hockey stick" temperature graph. This graph was the result of a fatally flawed study of a few years back that purported to show that the Earth's temperature had not changed appreciably for the last thousand years - until 1980, when it supposedly started to rise dramatically. There were many faults in this study - ethical, methodological, technical, historical - each one of which was enough to invalidate it. I want to just mention one (technical) mistake, the misuse of temperature as the sole climate variable.

This study's temperature index was a weighted composite of a bunch of biogeological proxies for local climate at various points on the Earth's surface at various times over the last millenium. That's a standard way to gauge past climate, before their were accurate human records. One in particular was based on California pine cones, whose growth is somewhat sensitive to temperature and very sensitive to the water available from precipitation. The study wrongly attributed all of the changes over time of these pine cones to just temperature - which is not even the most important factor controlling the growth.

Obviously, a proper treatment would require at least two variables, temperature and "wetness." Through another flaw (in the statistical methodology), the misattributed variations in the pine cones were magnified into a large recent temperature increase. This study by now has been completely discredited.

The disappearing snows of Kilimanjaro. This is sometimes trotted out as a "smoking gun" of "global warming." Comparisons are made between snow cover at the mountain peak, say, fifty years ago and recently. The snow has receded. It's just not due to rising temperatures.

In fact, temperatures at Kilimanjaro have been falling, more or less, during those fifty years. But the climate around the mountain is also drying out. (The two things are related: as temperatures fall, less evaporates from nearby bodies of water, and thus less is available in the air to precipitate out.) The snow is disappearing, not because it's melting away (some of it melts every year), but because what melts isn't being replenished as it once was.

There's another lesson here: static "things" (like snow cover) are really snapshots of processes. The snow cover at any time is the cumulative result of snow falling and melting over many prior years. The exact amount is a balance of the competing forces that put snow down and cause it to melt, and that balance constantly shifts, every day and every season.

What is climate?

What does climate mean anyway?

We could use imprecise and impressionistic definitions, but it's best here to just use the physics of the atmosphere and isolate the variables. They're related in a straightforward way to more popular terminology, so there's nothing hard.

At any point in space and time, the state of the static dry atmosphere is given by this list:

• Temperature T (absolute zero: T = 0)
• Density rho (mass/volume)
• Pressure P (force/area)
• Chemical weight µ (80% N2 and 20% O2)

Not all these variables are independent. The mass density of air is nearly constant at a fixed altitude, so it doesn't need much discussion. The four variables are also related by a constraint, the ideal gas law: P = universal constant*rho*T/µ. So only two variables are independent. In technical meteorology, these are usually taken to be T and P.

Now add water to the mix. To specify the state of the atmosphere now requires knowing the water state (vapor, liquid-precipitation, or condensed-suspended = cloud/fog). Water vapor is roughly a percent of the real atmopshere (that can vary obviously), so it modifies the chemical weight µ slightly. This percentage is equivalent to knowing the humidity.*

Finally, put the atmosphere in motion. The dynamical laws of the atmosphere relate the accelerations (second time derivatives) to forces and heat dissipation (first time derivatives) to heat flows. The important independent motion for climate and weather is the wind velocity, which is a vector field. Imagine it as a bunch of arrows, with direction and magnitude; each point in the atmosphere has one of these arrows attached. The arrows (their length and direction) can vary in time.

In technical meteorology, all five are used: T, P, water state, humidity, and wind field. If you know the humidity and T, then you know P (by the ideal gas law), so only four are independent. Those are the four familiar from regular weather forecasts:

• Temperature (how hot is it?)
  
• Humidity (how muggy is it?)
  
• Water state (are there clouds? is it raining/snowing/sleeting?)
• Wind direction/speed (how fast is it blowing and in what direction?)
  

This set of four is defined for each point in space and each instant in time. Weather forecasts are fuzzy averages of these over a few hours and over several hundred square miles.
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* Actually, something called relative humidity, which is relative to the saturation point of air - the point at which the air can absorb no more water vapor. The technicalities are explained later but are unimportant here.

Climate change: A road map

I want to follow up a previous posting with a road map for understanding climate change, something that can guide future postings and discussions. The case and supposed remedy for human-caused global warming have three components:

1. The temperatures: they seem to be going up.
2. The models: no one really knows why, but inferences from climate models seem to indicate that human activity is the cause.
3. The economics and politics: it's worse than anyone realizes: a bizarre combination of hypocrisy, ignorance, fear - and fear-mongering by the omnipresent news media and increasingly hysterical environmentalist movement, reacting off of each another in a death-dance.

To fully understand climate change and climate prediction requires touching on a lot of issues and drilling into some climate science and deep scientific issues. As we drill in, we'll discover that the supposedly solid case falls apart, piece by piece. We'll also encounter some far more likely explanations for climate change. My discussion here partially follows one of the definitive books on the subject, Essex and McKitrick's Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming.

First, consider the temperatures. Ignore the bogus "hockey stick" graph that purported to show a steady surface temperature from 1000 until 1980 - a definitely wrong claim now discredited. The case for global warming really rests on the last 150 years of temperature data from thermometers, largely from the northern hemisphere. On the surface, the case seems solid - the Earth's atmosphere probably has warmed a bit since the 1850s. But even here, there are some difficult questions.

What's an average of temperature? This statistical artifact is rarely examined in its own right, and yet it is problematic. An average, even a weighted average, of temperature has no physical significance. There is no one temperature for the Earth - it's a non-equilibrium system with an infinite field of temperatures, in three dimensions of space and one of time.*

And that's not even broaching the issue of measurement artifacts. The most important is the urban heat island effect, which is known to raise the measured temperature of a downtown or an airport as compared to the surrounding countryside by up to about a degree C. No one knows how to correct for this effect, except in an approximate way, even though temperature measurement networks have become more concentrated in the last century in urban areas.

What could the physical meaning of the average temperature be? When people talk about "global warming," what they really mean is "rising heat content" - so many more Joules or calories stored as heat in the atmosphere. The temperature (in absolute Kelvins) is supposed to be a proxy for this heat content, and that supposedly justifies the averaging: heat content of dry air is proportional to the volume of air times its absolute temperature.

The fatal difficulty for this simple equation is that the air is not dry; it contains a significant and variable amount of water vapor that can retain heat on its own. (Everyone knows the difference between muggy and dry heat.) Wet air's heat content is not a simple linear function of absolute temperature. Not only is the function non-linear; it suffers discontinuities when water evaporates, condenses, and precipitates. (Such discontinuous changes of the state of matter are called phase changes or phase transitions.) Evaporation makes the air capable of holding a lot more heat; condensation and precipitation take it out. Water vapor is by far the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, much more important than the next-leading contenders.

When the average temperature indexes widely trumpeted to indicate "global warming" are broken down into their basic component measurement series, more questions arise. Not only is there the urban heat island effect. The variability of the composite temperature index is dominated by large variations in the least reliable and most spotty measurements, ones taken in Eurasia and the southern hemisphere. The most reliable and extensive measurements - from Western and Central Europe, North America, and parts of East Asia - show less variation and, in fact, only slight warming. Global warming should be indicated by temperatures rising in most places, yet there is no consistent pattern. The Arctic is warming, for example, while the Antarctic is cooling.

Even so, the claimed temperature changes of the last 150 years, about 0.4 to 0.6 ^oC, are very much non-unprecedented in the history of the Earth's climate over the last 12,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age, which have featured temperature changes of at least three to five times that amount. The Ice Age transition featured even larger changes, eight to 15 times as great.

Technically, we're still in an Ice Age, or one of its relatively ice-free periods called an interglacial. Until about three million years ago, the Earth was hotter, wetter, and ice-free. Since then, it's been cooling down and drying out. This development seems to have had an important impact on our primate ancestors in East Africa and probably was a controlling factor in the appearance of one of their offshoots, the genus Australopithecus - the immediate ancestor of genus Homo.

Second, consider the climate models. There are many - in pricinciple, there could be an infinite number of them. What's really going here is The One, Complete, But Unsolvable Theory of Earth's Climate - let's call it The Theory - that contains everything: the properties of the air, the oceans, the land, solar radiation, clouds, dust and other particles, etc. The climate models used by scientific groups to estimate the evolution of climate, like the models used to predict the weather, are impressive computer approximations to The Theory. (Climate models predict over months and years, while weather models predict over days and weeks.)

The critical fact about these models is that they are uncontrolled approximations and thus suffer from potentially fatal drawbacks, depending on how they're interpreted and used. In mathematical physics, controlled approximations are used all the time to estimate the behavior of systems too difficult to solve in their full complexity. What makes them controlled is that it's possible to determine upper bounds on the error made in the approximation. Moreover, many of these techniques offer iterative methods to make the approximations successively more accurate. You can then make the approximation as accurate as you want, limited only by your time, patience, and computer power.

In an uncontrolled approximation (which is what all climate models are), there is no way to tell if you're converging on the right answer. In general, if you attempt to make an uncontrolled approximation more accurate, you will converge to nothing - or anything. The methods are instead subject to modeler bias: modelers tend to iterate the uncontrolled method until they get the answer they want or expect. If the answer is already known from controlled laboratory experiments, this might be useful - although even here, it just reproduces what you already know, and by a questionable method. If the "answer" is laid down by non-scientific preconceptions, what you've got is a serious case of scientific corruption or self-deception. Overall, there has been not nearly enough systematic exploration of how modeling approximations affect the climate model results - learning what's robust and what are merely artifacts of the methods.

Lurking in the background is a deeper and more serious problem for long-term climate prediction: the Earth's climate is chaotic - in the "butterfly effect" sense of dynamical chaos. We'll learn in detail what that means in later postings. Suffice it to say that chaos makes long-term climate prediction impossible with present methods. New methods might be invented to circumvent this difficulty, but it's not a direction climate research has taken, because it has been subjected to such serious conceptual distortion by the "global warming" hysteria.

Chaos arises from a certain kind of non-linearity in the world, where effects are often not proportional to causes. The specific physics that makes climate hard to model comes in two basic types. One is that the atmosphere exhibits turbulence, the form of chaos familiar in fluid dynamics. (What we call "weather" is this turbulence in the lower atmosphere.) The other is the already-mentioned discontinuities in the phase of water and their effect on atmospheric heat content.

You only need to compare the situation with climate forecasting to that of weather forecasting. Back in the 1950s, forecasters naively thought all you needed was just more computing power to make accurate forecasts into the far future. From the 1960s on, thanks to Edward Lorenz and others, the phenomenon of chaos came to be understood as an essential property of weather. The best forecasts today use the available firehose of satellite and other data; even so, they're only good out to about two weeks. "Climate" is supposed to be a "long term" or "average steady state" of weather. What chaos is telling us is that there ain't no such thing. Most discussions of climate modeling are, rather amazingly, stuck in a pre-chaos naiveté.

Last, consider the economics and politics of climate change. Given the level of industrial civilization and the rise of the new economic powers of China, India, and Brazil in the next century, large reductions in CO2 emissions in the next century are impossible. Those countries didn't sign the 1997 Kyoto Treaty in any case. The accord is a case study in hypocrisy. All European countries agreed to it, yet have failed to implement the required CO2 emission reductions. The US initialed it, but the treaty was then rejected in the Congress in a nearly unanimous vote. European governments continue to talk about the treaty in grave tones, while their economies fall further and further behind their scheduled emission reduction targets. In the US, the growth of CO2 emission has slowed, but don't expect the US to get any credit. The Kyoto Treaty is a perfect object of media chatter: all talk, all pretense, no reality. The fact that there's no reality makes it especially gripping television.

The smash-up of the manufactured "global warming" "consensus" is coming. Expect everyone responsible - the professional hysterics, the news media, the self-deluded scientists - to duck responsibility for it. The smash-up will constitute another body blow to the toxic news media that have done so much damage to our society, our politics, and, now, our science. I hope that everyone - voters and politicians alike - will take a smart pill and view what's in their daily "news" with ever-greater skepticism. Even now, much of it is propaganda and lazily rewritten press releases. The opposition to the hysteria was, until recently, practically non-existent, hobbled by a largely hostile media and politicians devoted to "doing something" about an imaginary threat. There's more public opposition now, but it is all uphill.

The imaginary "global warming" crisis has also diverted attention from the reality of the environment in advanced societies: it's getting better every year, and most of the progress from modern regulation happened early on, in the 70s and 80s. There are still some areas for improvement (like the regulation of "light" trucks and SUVs), but the battle for a better environment here and in other wealthy countries is largely won. The arguments today, when not over marginal issues, are increasingly unreal hysteria having little to do with reality and everything to do with fundraising and a quasi-religious demonization of rational and scientific thought. The religious atmosphere of the environmentalist movement - its preaching of Original Sin, its search for authorities and scapegoats, and its ominous need for sacrifices to placate the supposedly angry gods - deserves its own discussion I'll leave to capable others.

The important thing about pollution and conservation is that the frontier now lies in the so-called Third World, both in countries on the ascent (China, India, Brazil) and in much poorer countries. They all need, not a shutdown of development, but a leapfrog that gets them into better, less polluting technology sooner, so they can avoid the mistakes that Europe and the United States made in their histories. (Visitors to Shanghai and São Pão will understand.) "Global warming" is a wasteful diversion from this, much more important task.
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* A recent pathbreaking paper explains why temperature averages are physically meaningless - the paper is summarized here.

The problem of Jewish self-hatred

- and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.

- Numbers 13

Jewish self-hatred is a frequently talked about in hushed tones (like a disease that seems serious yet, at the same time, unreal) and often misunderstood as a social and historical reality. It's a distinctively modern phenomenon sometimes falsely attributed to earlier eras. Although there are recognizable forerunners among Jewish converts to Christianity and Islam (the converso-Inquisition episode and all its consequences - including Spinoza - provide some striking cases), as a full-blown affliction in its own right, it dates from no earlier than the post-Emancipation period in Europe (second quarter of the 19th century). By the early 20th century, there was a growing literature about it, mostly in German (juedische selbsthasse). To become widespread and distinctive, Jewish self-hatred needed a large number of Jews subject to double uprooting and double alienation, both from their origins as Jews but also from the larger gentile society around them. This double alienation creates a personality divided against itself and prone to self-hatred. Humans naturally seek to rationalize such feelings; in this case, the internalization of anti-semitic hate is a convenient solution ready at hand. Most striking is the comparison with other, parallel types of "self-image" pathologies, like the Stockholm and "battered wife" syndromes, and so on, in which people are driven to do irrational things plainly not in their self-interest by a similar division-of-the-self-against-itself. In the 1930s, Freud and other psychoanalysts lumped these phenomena under the heading, "identification with the aggressor." That concept forms a starting point for modern thinking on the subject.*

Taken to its logical conclusion, self-hatred can be regurgitated as a cosmic hatred. In its modern, political form, it takes form in fantasies of revolutionary apocalypse. It constitutes an essential part of the psychology of the modern left, and some of the most famous leftists of the last century and a half are simultaneously striking cases of self-hatred. Start with Marx, whose notorious On the Jewish Question is a classic of regurgitated self-hatred. Step down through the early 20th century to Trotsky; then to our own time, with Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, and lesser lights. Nothing about these people and their thinking can be traced in a obvious way to the traditionally claimed source of trouble - poverty or economic class. The same holds for non-Jews exhibiting the same pattern; the details are different there, but the overall picture is similar. In an earlier posting, I mentioned George Soros, a leftist capitalist (an apparent oxymoron) who suffers from messianic delusions of grandeur - in parallel with, say, Jimmy Carter - but, who, unlike Carter, also suffers from clear and repeated signs of self-hatred. (Soros was born a Hungarian Jew and has developed a very peculiar relationship with his past.) The case of a wealthy leftist international currency trader looks odd, until you understand the self-hatred dynamic at work.

To penetrate the smokescreen of leftist rhetoric, listen to the music behind the text, not the text itself. You'll hear the passions at work, and they're not "nice": they include hate, anger, the desire for destruction and revenge. Much of the left is driven by these motives. Liberals pay too much attention to the text, get sucked in by the slogans ("peace," "justice"), and end up compromised with something they didn't expect. They pay insufficient attention to the music. Observe one striking fact: the alienated can be attracted to many things; seeking out and validating hatred directed at one's own society and self is only one possibility. But the self-hating latch on this hatred almost unerringly, of all possible things to latch on to.

After the Holocaust and the creation of Israel, Jewish self-hatred faded into the background - until recently. The revival of anti-semitism that started in Europe and the Middle East in the 1970s reached a new intensity in the late 90s and stimulated a new generation of self-hating Jews to step into politics. (Self-hating Jews rise and fall in prominence in parallel with the rise and fall of anti-semitism, another demonstration of the close connection between the two.) Certain crank figures (like Chomsky) were always there. This new, post-Marxist or "cultural" left gets more traction than it deserves because mainstream (liberal) Jewish organizations have made themselves vulnerable to its dynamic with their faulty self-definition, especially since the end of the Cold War. In many ways, they've painted themselves into a corner. There's a real problem here, one that I'll continue anlayzing in a later posting.
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* A lengthy exploration of Jewish self-hatred and self-delusion in this framework is Kenneth Levin's The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege. Scandanavian cities seem to be all over when we stare at this issue.

The new inequality

With John Edwards the dark horse candidate in the 2008 Democratic presidential contest, we'll be hearing a lot more in the next two years about "two Americas" and the "new" inequality/poverty. (Edwards himself isn't a po' tiller of the soil, of course, but a wealthy trial lawyer. His very large new house could probably fill at least one of those Americas.) This might be a good thing - but it might not, depending on the degree of honesty in what we hear. The Edwards rhetoric is, in part, about connecting the new inequality/poverty with globalization, but that relationship is loose and only a very recent development.

Conservatives (with some exceptions) are uncomfortable talking about poverty and inequality, while liberals love to talk about this pair of issues. They would be less happy talking about them if the issues were discussed honestly. Contrary to the impression you get from the media, inequality didn't magically appear under Reagan, disappear under Clinton, then magically reappear under Bush Jr. The new inequality started in the late 1960s, following four decades of growing equality after the 1929 crash and the Great Depression, and has been growing (at an uneven pace) ever since.

Inequality and poverty are not the same thing. Europe is often compared favorably with the US on these issues, but a better comparison is not country by country, but across the whole European continent. Then the picture is more like the US, at least in terms of poverty. Inequality is still significantly higher here and is largely due to the dynamism of the American economy - lots of new millionaires and billionaires have been minted in the last 20 years.

The best source on the "new" inequality and the related decline of urban life in the US is the great City Journal, published by New York's Manhattan Institute. The new inequality/poverty of the last forty years is driven by three trends. Two of them are rooted in changing family patterns, which reminds us - pace liberals and feminists - the family is still the single most important economic institution and, in some ways, more important than ever.

The first is the broken family/marriage caste revolution, a mixture of moral anarchy, the equalization of education and marriage between men and women, and bad welfare policies. It's the mix of these three, not any one, that set this trend is motion. This problem started in the late 60s, ran its course through the late 80s, and lately has been partly reversed by welfare reform. But it remains the single largest cause of child poverty. There are fewer teen mothers now, but single/working poor mothers now seem to be a permanent feature of our social landscape. Children of unmarried mothers are far more likely to repeat the behavior.

The Manhattan Institute's Myron Magnet and Kay Hymowitz have written on this development in their respective books, The Dream and the Nightmare and Marriage and Caste in America. Hymowitz is interviewed in this podcast.

The second trend is the decay of high school education and the large achievement gap that opened up between the college-educated and non-college-educated in the 70s and 80s. This phenomenon is no longer new and not as big a deal as it was 30 years ago. But it remains the largest factor in limited opportunities for working-age males and intact working-class families.

This second cause interacts strongly with the first to highten inequality. There's a strong correlation between being working or lower-middle class and having an education that stops at high school, on the one hand, and being middle or upper-middle class and having an education that extends to college and possibly beyond. This fact lays the ground for the strong assortative mating or homogamy trend of the last 30 years, whereby doctors don't marry nurses - they marry other doctors; and so on. Combined with the effects of single motherhood and feminism, this trend encapsulated most of the growing inequality of the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

This somewhat tongue-in-cheek but ultimately quite serious article from the Daily Telegraph documents the British case, but the dynamic is similar in the US. The trend started here about a generation earlier than in the UK.

The third cause is illegal immigration - to put it in political/legal terms - or - to put it in economic terms - unskilled immigration. This is the major new factor that has reversed the good poverty and inequality trends that started in the late 80s. This cause is fairly recent and became strong only in the late 90s. But it's the sole reason for the large increase in poor people in the last decade and the main reason for increasing inequality. Essentially, we're importing very poor people without the skills to do much better.

The simplest way to see its effect is to view its impact geographically, in those states with the largest illegal/unskilled immigrant population. The resulting burden on local and state governments puts those cities and states, even in good economic times, in a difficult situation. Unskilled immigrants also drive down the wages of unskilled and semi-skilled Americans.

The third cause overlaps with the first two, inasmuch as virtually all illegal immigrants have little education and experience dramatic family breakdown once they move here.

The net result of these trends is a troubling self-perpetuating caste system, a two-track society. It makes liberals uncomfortable, but the reality is that having two parents matters; having a father matters; they impact education and the life chances of children, by far more than any other factor. Education in turn is the next biggest determinant of life chances.

Discussing illegal immigration also makes many people uncomfortable. Almost everyone has a reason not to. Libertarians and economic conservatives believe in "pure economic man," at least much of the time. Neoconservatives believe in limitless American opportunity, even for the unskilled, and have a sentimentalized picture of past waves of immigration. Liberals share this sentimentalized mythology and also view illegal immigrants as potential new Democratic voters.

Much of the rhetoric on poverty and inequality, when not connected with globalization, is stuck in concepts 40+ years out of date. The "old" poverty was largely rural poverty, what FDR meant in his 1936 inaugural address ("one-third of a nation ill-clad," etc.). It has shrunk markedly since the 1940s. A major mistake of American politics in the 1960s was assuming that poverty was mainly urban. Cities aren't incubators of poverty; they're places where poor people go to escape poverty. The basic problem was rural poverty - there's no poverty like rural poverty, because of the isolation it enforces. Economic opportunities are far better in metropolitan areas. But there is less social solidarity, and an advantage to rural poverty, in spite of its severe economic limits, is this social solidarity.

The "new" poverty, by contrast, is not rural or rooted in ancient class systems. It's urban or even suburban and a result of bad life choices, subpar education, and lack of skills. Real progress will be forthcoming when politicians start talking about why people should stop making bad life choices, about reforming public education, and about stopping illegal immigration. The last item is especially explosive, since it touches on the failure of the societies-of-origin to develop on their own. This was even an issue in the recent Mexican presidential election, an all-too-rare moment of honesty.

When politicians talk about poverty and inequality, grade them on the degree of their honesty concerning these three trends. For that matter, grade the media the same way - and buyer beware.

Welcome to Tu b'Shevat

UPDATE: You know, here in North America, we have our own late-winter thing, known as Groundhog Day. It doesn't involve trees or the planting thereof, but instead a large rodent named Phil :D

Happy Groundhog Day!
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What is Tu b'Shevat? It's the 15th (Tet-Vav = Tu) of the Hebrew month of Shevat. It's the middle of winter here, but in Israel, the first almond blossoms are starting to show. Tu b'Shevat is one of the four new years in Hebrew calendar, the new year for trees - a kind of Jewish Arbor Day. It's common to plant trees on Tu b'Shevat, especially in Israel.

In ancient times, the new year for trees marked the first year of tree's life for the purposes of tithing. (Fruit from a tree couldn't be tithed until the tree's fourth "birthday" and couldn't be used for normal use until its fifth year: Leviticus 19.) Later, the Kabbalists of Tzfat (Safed) gave a mystical interpretation to the holiday and created for it a mini-seder, modeled on the seder of Passover, but with fruits and nuts instead. A modern interpretation links Tu b'Shevat to protection of the environment.

The tradition is to start with fruits and nuts with hard exteriors (pomegranates and nuts with hard shells), then move on to fruits with rinds, and eventually to completely soft fruits. Late winter will give way to spring in the same way, and the learning of Torah progresses from the difficult first encounter to the eventual enjoyment of the essence - when it all seems easy - but only after a lot of hard work first :)

Since Tu b'Shevat falls on shabbat this year, many observed the holiday this year a day early.

The anthropic principle: The final word

My final posting - I swear! - on this subject was inspired by this sentence from a book review I read recently: "science is the art of answering the answerable, not imagining the imaginable." Exactly. Anyone who absorbs and understands this dictum will also understand what's wrong with the anthropic principle.

Debating the clash of civilizations

I've posted before on the "clash of civilizations" (Islam vs. everyone else) theme - why it's happening and that it's happening (in the face of denial and wishful thinking). Check out this video from a recent debate in London on just that theme. Two of the participants (Douglas Murray and Daniel Pipes) are brilliant, while the other two (Ken Livingstone and Salma Yaqoob) are revealing in a very different way. Livingstone in particular shows how far the European left has gone in its Islamist sympathies.

Strange, you say - isn't the left supposed to be "progressive" and all that? No - that's so 1930s. The left today is driven by little more than hate. The growing left-Islamist alliance screams this fact loudly and clearly to anyone ready to listen and draw the obvious conclusion.
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An important related development is the self-abasement and self-abnegation of Jews on the left and the corrosive effect this has been having lately on mainstream American Jewish life. An important essay on this subject can be found here (PDF; requires registration), by Alvin Rosenfeld of the University of Indiana. For stating the obvious so simply, the article has provoked "controversy" - as reported by the Times - meaning, some people can't stand that much probing honesty. The Times article refers to leftists as "liberals" - another nice, evasive euphemism we're now so used to, we don't think about it. Leftists (motive: hate) become "progressives" (sounds: warm and fuzzy) become "liberals" (sounds: innocuous and mainstream). Such journalistic obfuscation is how leftists acquire the respectability and legitimacy they crave.

More to come on the blinders of mainstream Jewish institutions in a future posting. The phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred would take more than a posting - more like a book, or a whole library. It's already been written too, but the books are old and musty, and many are in German. It's a subject that needs a thorough reconsideration, translation, and updating. You could do worse than start with this article on George Soros, a delusional megalomaniac with his own billions, rather than some sheik's. Soros is on his way to becoming a 21st-century cross between Ross Perot and Henry Ford - except Soros is Jewish. His billions are now going towards buying out the Democratic party.
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Apropos of Jimmy Carter, check out this close examination of his post-presidential career. It seems not so much "I'm-still-president" delusions as a mixture of narcissism, bitterness, and a distinct messianic-martyr complex. He's a "good" peacemaker beset by "evil" Jews - sound familiar? It's Mel Gibson again.