For your viewing pleasure

Love him or hate him, most people think they know all about Clarence Thomas. The CBS News magazine Sixty Minutes interviewed him last night (video here) - see for yourself.

And to expand on my earlier point about girls packing heat: Classical Values gives you, Girls of the IDF.

(Hat tip to Instapundit for both.)

O shine on, harvest moon

Just in time for Sukkot :) There's even a holiday celebrated in many Asian countries that involves the harvest moon, and tasty mooncakes as well.

Time for a holiday break: chag Sukkot sameach v'kasher!

A cooling pause

A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane.

- Gibbs

Before taking a climate holiday, let's pause to summarize the months of blog discussion on climate and climate change.

A snapshot of the theory. The major thrust of theoretical discussion here has been to spell out how rising infrared (IR) opacity from IR-active gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and water vapor (H2O) might change Earth's atmosphere with regards to temperature and water distribution. The focus has been on pinning down qualitative trends, rather than worry about specific numbers that are very difficult to predict.

The theory of Earth's climate (from the point of view of just the atmosphere) requires three physical processes: radiation and radiative transport; air turbulence and heat convection; and water phase transformations. The first is well understood conceptually and quantitatively and can be subjected to controlled approximations of different types, including - but not limited to - numerical (computer) models.

The second and third are poorly understood and are approximated by uncontrolled methods. Converting these into numerical methods calculated on computers in no way mitigates these deficiencies. It just means calculating wrong answers more reliably and quickly.

Two extra-atmospheric effects will have significant impact on the CO2 concentration, absorption by the oceans (understood somewhat) and by plants (poorly understood).

The "global warming theorem" and why it fails. If we confine an atmospheric model to radiative transport alone, we can prove a theorem: increasing IR opacity must lead to a steeper temperature lapse rate. Holding cloud cover constant, we can also conclude that the temperature overall must increase at every altitude, with the increase being largest at the surface and declining until it reaches zero at the top of the atmosphere. The "global warming" craze has no other scientific basis than this. Computer climate models get this part - and only this part - right.

Better than the misleading metaphor of the greenhouse is that of a closed attic. It gets hot in an attic (hotter than the air outside) because the attic has no way of exporting heat other than to radiate in the IR. But suppose we open the attic windows, loosen or take off the roof, and hose it down with water?

Then the theorem fails: increased temperature is no longer a "must." The atmosphere, like the attic, has two other ways of sending heat flow on its way upward, turbulence and convection, and water phase transformations. It's not difficult to prove that convection must be enhanced in such a situation. The hard part is pinning down by how much.

The case of water is even more difficult. But the amount of water below the upper atmosphere is fixed. The rate of evaporation from the surface will increase. The water has nowhere else to go, so precipitation and therefore cloudiness must increase. Again, the hard question is, by how much.

Both of these atmospheric responses (convection/turbulence and water phase changes) will blunt the original tendency of the temperature and its lapse rate to increase.

Empirical snapshot. The observational situation is less clearcut, but not favorable to the hypothesis of significant human-induced warming.

The spatio-temporal patterns of the last few decades do not match what we should expect in the IR-opacity-dominant case. There's no systematic narrowing of daily or seasonal temperature differences. And while the Arctic might have warmed somewhat in the last three decades, the Antarctic has cooled, and there's no narrowing of equatorial-polar temperature differences. There's been no long-term fall-off of tropical cyclones. The most striking spatio-temporal fact is the lack of any systematic steepening of the temperature vertical lapse rate, the most fundamental signature of enhanced IR opacity.

When considering global temperature trends, use extreme caution: spatial averages of a temperature field are not legitimate, and climate needs at least a humidity variable as well for a complete description. Nonetheless, thermometers, satellites, and biogeo-proxies are valuable for indicating temperature trends, if spread out enough in space and time and provided we take care to compare proxies, not crunch them all together into a fictitious average. Also reject the misuse of composite time-series extrapolation methods like the "hockey stick" and similar mistakes; use the year-by-year measured temperatures, especially for the last 15 years, after the most recent warming period ended. This issue is thoroughly explored by ClimateAudit. The striking result is a fatal double blow to the anthropogenic "global warming" hypothesis.

In the short term, over the last century, there is no simple trend of upward temperatures. Instead, there is a pattern of up and down, with the strongest warming occurring before major CO2 emissions started after World War Two. The most recent trend, of the last 15 years, is neutral-to-cooling. There's no obvious human "thumbprint."

In the long term, over the last 400 years, there is a clear warming trend (with smaller short-term wiggles), with glacial retreat and rising sea levels. But this trend has been going on too long to be attributed to human activity. Again: no obvious human thumbprint.

The false politics of "consensus." To cut to the heart of the controversy requires facing the reality that the IPCC is a small minority of scientists. The active group issuing the hysterical summary reports under the aegis of the UN is about 50, with a staff of a couple hundred. They are apparently driven by faulty preconceived dogma and have mainly succeeded in manipulating the name of much a larger group of scientists - the couple thousand associated in some way with the IPCC's scientific working groups or perhaps all climate scientists - to make it sound as if the latter back the "global warming" craze. As the IPCC has gotten more aggressive in its claims, so more and more climate scientists have publicly rebelled: the Revolt of the Captive Ventriloquists' Dummies, to use an earlier metaphor. But by getting the ear of funding agencies and the editorial boards of scientific journals, the IPCC has done disastrous damage to the geosciences, climate science, and meteorology. Twenty years have now been wasted on wrong questions and dead-ends. Distorted funding and sociological incentives have enticed younger scientists to ride the bandwagon for careerist reasons.

Add to this the persistent gap between the caution and skepticism of the science reports, both from the IPCC and the US federal government, and the hysterical conclusions of the summaries for non-scientists and policymakers. A recent, striking example occurred in connection with the non-increase of the vertical lapse rate.

The IPCC is also responsible for foisting on scientists a false ideal of "consensus." Science doesn't work by consensus. When something is really solid, scientists virtually all assent to it because of its evident truth. When something is murky, controversial, or faulty, consensus is missing for a good reason: no one really knows. Good scientists swarm all over such challenging questions. If preconceived dogma is not enforced, and everybody works hard and honestly, progress results.

Hiking map for the final stages of the climate journey. After climate vacation, the journey will take us over two final high ridges of scientific thought with essential vistas on how much we don't understand about climate.

The first ridge to cross is the double approximation embodied in climate computer models: the controlled approximation of their discretized spacetime grid, and the uncontrolled approximations inherent in their treatment of convection, turbulence, and water phase transformations. We've looked at the latter somewhat already, but they are used in climate models in a peculiar way worth a brief look.

The second ridge is the thrilling intellectual achievement often labeled "chaos." We'll look hard at what it tells us about climate and, indeed, whether "climate" means anything. In the context of computer models, chaos is usually filtered out by design, by missing very-long-term behavior. But no attempt to predict climate that ignores chaos is credible.

As we descend, we'll make a final scientific basecamp at the question of climate cycles, which overlaps with chaos in connection to very-long-term climate change. Climate cycles are real but not sufficiently studied or understood. They range as blocks of time over the tens-to-hundreds of thousands of years (ice ages) to decades-centuries-millennia (solar luminosity cycles) to years (atmosphere-ocean oscillations), with the latter two essential to understanding climate change in recent history.

The journey ends back in the everyday with three final questions. The science comes first, starting with the climate cycle question: where should climate science be, and what went wrong in the last generation? How should society outside the science be supporting it, and what should society be looking for? And, given the apparently mild risk of human-induced climate change in the next couple centuries, what countermeasures can and should we take - and what should we avoid?

POSTSCRIPT: Here's a roundup of good climate blogs and books. McIntyre's ClimateAudit should win some kind of prize. Besides needing no sleep and his sly sense of humor, its author went more or less single-handedly mano-a-mano with the "hockey stick" nonsense and won. And he's not even American. The IPCC should have known better: Canadians know all about hockey. As Mark Steyn quipped, he's another immigrant doing a dirty job Americans won't do. And keep WorldClimateReport, GlobalWarming and CO2Science in mind too.

Of recent books, those of Lomborg, Leroux & Comby, Soon, and Essex & McKitrick are the most worth your time.*

A fine thumbnail sketch of the "global warming" craze is this talk by S. Fred Singer of the University of Virginia and George Mason University. He has a new book out too, but I have not yet read it.
---
* Mark this fact: not one of these gentlemen is American-born.

Thermodynamic confusion: A critique

An important point concerning the nature of thermodynamics - how it developed historically and how it's taught - was mentioned earlier. I want to expand on it, because it turns out to be the key to much confusion around the subject.

Equilibrium. At the center of the confusion is the concept of thermodynamic equilibrium. It's the keystone of how thermodynamics is taught, even though in real life, equilibria are limited in extent and duration. The natural state of things is much more often disequilibrium, with "stuff" - mass, heat - flowing from one place to another. Real equilibrium is only achieved with serious control in laboratory conditions. Conceptually, it's a powerfully simplifying concept that makes it a good place to start teaching students about thermodynamics. Everyone knows what temperature and pressure are - or they think they do.

For often-forgotten historical reasons, thermodynamic equilibrium is often defined for a system "in isolation," even though "equilibrium in isolation" is an oxymoron. When you're in equilibrium, you're in equilibrium with something else. And that is true in thermodynamics. More perceptive and modern treatments start by dividing the world up into "system" and "environment" and stipulate that the system can exchange something (mass, energy, volume) with the environment.* While the totals of each of these extensive variables is exactly conserved, the value retained by the system alone fluctuates according to some statistical law. In fact, a thermodynamic system is really an ensemble of many possible systems, each with a slightly different value of volume, energy, and mass. In a thermodynamic description, one or more of these system extensive variables is replaced by an conjugate or corresponding intensive variable:

• Volume -> pressure
• Energy -> temperature
• Numbers of various chemical species -> chemical potential

To be an equilibrium with its environment means that a system shares the same intensive variable with its surroundings:

• Mechanical equilibrium: pressure
• Thermal equilibrium: temperature
• Chemical equilibrium: chemical potential

The statistical definition of equilibrium defines it has the "most likely state"; this requirement connects statistical mechanics with thermodynamics. For large systems (largeness is not a requirement for thermodynamics, BTW, a point often botched in textbooks), the system's extensive variables (energy, mass/number, volume), while not precisely fixed, deviate only by small fluctuations from well-defined mean values.

Nonequilibrium. If the system fails to satisfy one or more of these criteria, it is out of equilibrium with its surroundings in one or more respects. If the pressures differ, system volume moves in the direction of lower pressure. If the temperatures differ, heat flows toward the lower temperature, moving energy. If the chemical potentials differ, molecules flow toward lower chemical potential, or chemicals react so as to equalize them, changing the chemical distribution. In each case, a difference in intensive variable is associated with a flow of the corresponding extensive variable.

Historical reasons for the confusion. The invocation of "isolated" systems (which actually are incapable of having any thermodynamics) was rooted historically in the development of equilibrium thermodynamics by Gibbs, Einstein, and others. Their point was to free thermodynamics from concern with microscopic details and statistical mechanics. The real requirement is that, while the system is in exchange-contact with its environment, the details of that exchange-contact are irrelevant to defining and using the system's equilibrium state. In fact, you couldn't have a system state (pressure, temperature, chemical potential) at all if the system cannot be sharply distinguished from its surroundings.

While it was necessary to make thermodynamics its own branch of physics, chemistry, and engineering, this requirement has been a source of serious confusion to students and even experts. Along with it goes another confusion, the false belief that thermodynamic systems require a large number of degrees of freedom (like a large number of moving particles or a large volume). In fact, thermodynamics can be defined for the simplest non-trivial case, a single degree of freedom with two possible states; for example, a quantum magnetized spin with "up" and "down" states. The real requirement is that the system evolve for a "long" time in contact with an environment that exchanges energy, etc., in so many different ways that it's only practical to use a statistical and not a deterministic description. (This "long time" requirement is called ergodicity, and checking its validity in real systems is far from obvious.) A large number of possible system states is also not necessary. All that is needed is a large number of transitions among states, transitions happening so often and in so many ways that, again, a statistical treatment is all that's possible. In (ergodic) time, all system transitions - stimulated by contact with the environment - become more or less equally probable, the condition of detailed balance and a big step towards thermodynamic equilibrium.

---

Exact definition of equilibrium. In a modern treatment, the total entropy (related to the probability of a state of the whole system+environment) is most simply assumed to be the sum of the entropies for system and environment separately; and ditto for the energy, volume, etc. For any conserved extensive variable X, the total entropy S is

S = S_sys(X_sys) + S_env(X_env) , X = X_sys + X_env = fixed

The most likely state (maximum of S) is found by requiring that

dS = (δS_sys/δX_sys)·dX_sys + (δS_env/δS_env)·dX_env = 0 , dX = dX_sys+ dX_env = 0

leading to the equality of two partial derivatives for the system and environment, respectively:

δS_sys/δX_sys = δS_env/δX_env

The intensive variable conjugate to X is then defined in terms of the partial derivatives of S with respect to X.

---

Thermodynamic equilibrium globally and locally. The need for the system to be coupled to its environment becomes clearer in the nonequilibrium case. Here the system doesn't have a "long time" to wait. The details of its boundaries matter, because they control how exactly the system and environment are in exchange-contact. But as long as the changes over space and time of the intensive variables (pressure, etc.) of the system are "smooth enough," it's still possible to redefine those intensive variables as fields that vary in space and time. (In equilibrium, they would all be the constant over the entire extent of the system). This forms the basis for the local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) approximation used everywhere in fluid dynamics (thermohydrodynamics), including weather and climate. It allows us to talk about, say, temperature here and temperature there - they don't have to be the same, but they are defined.

The difference between equilibrium and nonequilibrium becomes clear in a different way when viewed through the prism of extensive variable fluctuations. In equilibrium, fluctuations happen all the time, but they never fail to dissipate. (The Fluctuation-Dissipation Theorem connects the two.) In nonequilibrium, some of the fluctuations do not dissipate. Flows in and out from the system boundaries keep "dissipation from dissipating," so to speak, and, precisely by that means, prevent the system from reaching equilibrium.

If both equilibrium and nonequilibrium require that a system be coupled to an environment and thus not isolated, what's the difference in the two cases? The essential difference is this: In equilibrium, the exchange of energy, etc., between system and environment is unconstrained. Nonequilibrium means the exchange-contact is constrained. In fact, different types of nonequilibria can be defined by the way in which this exchange-contact is constrained.

Real life is always nonequilibrium. Equilibrium is one of those all-important but misleading idealizations that applies only in certain laboratory situations and cannot be applied in real life without these caveats.

---

What's the point of all this for climate? Let's break thermodynamic equilibrium down into the three criteria and examine them one by one from the atmospheric point of view.

Mechanical equilibrium is the only one of the three that is nonproblematic. Even in a tornado, where the variation of pressure is violent and the pressure much lower than normal, the air is nowhere close to a vacuum. A tornado might carry off everything else, but it will leave local pressure equilibrium intact as a reliable assumption, and every other weather phenomenon is less violent.

Thermal equilibrium looks okay on the surface, but it really isn't. "Heat" means just that part of the atmosphere's internal energy subdivided into randomized bits at the molecular level, with temperature indicating the average subdivided bit. But the atmosphere also has kinetic energy in the form of wind and turbulence, spatially "large" modes of motion not in thermal equilibrium. Somehow the two scales (molecular and "large") are separated, although there's a continuum of turbulence and wind scales. Energy can be moved between "large" and "small" scales, but only the latter has a temperature.

In the atmosphere, the place of chemical equilibrium is taken by phase equilibrium, which is supposed to apply to the various forms of water. In fact, it applies only in a crude sense. As normally applied, phase equilibrium requires contrasting phases to be neatly separated in space into "bulk" (macroscopic) regions. Water phases are sometimes neatly separated in space (like ocean-air or ice-air), and for these, local phase equilibrium is a good approximation. But the perpetual evaporation/condensation/precipitation cycle requires the contrasting water phases to spatially interpenetrate. Phase equilibrium is generally not a good approximation here.

• Evaporation proceeds by pulling and mixing up filaments of water vapor the way you see toffee stretched and folded on the boardwalk in summertime. It's a not a "bulk" process representable by large neighboring spatial blocks.
• Condensation of clouds requires catalysts (dust and aerosols) and forms "blobs" of varying sizes suspended in air (nucleation). Only when the "blobs" are large enough does phase equilibrium apply to good approximation.
• Precipitation means liquid or solid water "blobs" heavy enough to fall against upward air currents.

Each transformation of water phase also triggers a discontinuity in density (molar volume) and energy (heat of melting/freezing or of condensation/evaporation). These discontinuities are easy to approximate if the phases are neatly separated in "bulk," but not if they interpenetrate (filamentation or nucleation).

Various and uncontrolled approximations are used to "patch up" the modeling of such situations. These two failures of modeling (one connected with large-scale motion of air, the other with water phase transitions) are in turn reflected in precisely the main weaknesses of current climate modeling.
---
* The same system-environment distinction is needed for quantum measurement theory. A lot of mystery surrounding quantum mechanics can be dispelled if a measurement is viewed as just another interaction of environment and system. It obviates the need for mystifications like the "Copenhagen interpretation." And no mythical beasts - like hidden variables or many histories - need be invoked. The "hidden" variable is you: the observer is part of the environment.

The strange case of Al Gore

There was a time when I liked Al Gore, although I never voted for him. (I did vote for Clinton-Gore in '92.) His strange career, with its unexpected twists, reminds me of Michael Jackson. Like the pop singer, Gore was once a normal kid, before Something Bad happened. In 1988, he was a moderate Southern Democrat, a once-familiar political type. By 1992, he had already become the humorless RoboGore of later years. A French magazine that year referred to him as le Bon Élève (the Good Student) - sort of like Lisa Simpson, only with less charm and musical talent. He grew to resemble the denizens of postmodern academia and characteristic of all that is worst in his generation: censorious, obsessed with proving his higher virtue through pet causes, impatient with reason and evidence, burning with the need to impose righteousness on others. After all, this is the generation that gave us "advocacy journalism" and political correctness, taking over and abusing - for illiberal purposes - the liberal institutions their parents and grandparents had built to serve the larger public good.

That he underwent some obscure personal transformation in those four years is not in doubt. It's dangerous to psychoanalyze someone from a distance, but Gore himself has left an open trail of biographical crumbs in his Earth in the Balance, published in 1992. His son nearly died in an automobile accident, and his sister died of lung cancer. (The Gore family fortune was largely built on tobacco.) Gore would hardly be unique if crusading became for him an expression of complex and all-too-human feelings in the double aftermath.*

When we look at what's become of Gore since then, the only sensible response is to shake one's head in irritated befuddlement. The insistent demonization of rational critics and criticism of a mass hysteria is a hallmark of crusading fanatics, as noted by Ted Koppel on his Nightline program several times during Gore's tenure as Vice President:

The measure of good science is neither the politics of the scientist nor the people with whom the scientist associates. It is the immersion of hypotheses into the acid of truth. That's the hard way to do it, but it's the only way that works. (ABC News Nightline, February 24, 1994)

Koppel is one of the very few journalists in the conventional media to call Gore and others on their "global warming" fanaticism and militant desire to crush anyone who disagrees with them. In a saner and better educated age than ours, these very tendencies would be widely and correctly viewed as clear warning signs that such people are not to be trusted and perhaps even need to have their heads examined. Instead, people swoon over their "idealism," not remembering that idealism is not the same as saintliness or virtue.

So what are we to make of Gore's recent movie and books? All of them are full of little irritating gestures of "seriousness" (read: fanaticism) that seem both pathetic and highly revealing. On an intellectual level, these pale in comparison to the giant, looming scientific fallacies. The science is wrong on multiple counts, in some cases so wrong it seems like deliberate misrepresentation. I won't rehash what has been hashed out elsewhere. Apparently Gore (like many others) thinks he's doing G-d's work here, promoting a "higher cause," no matter how questionable the means. Like other crusading fanatics, he doesn't seem to realize that this technique of agitating the masses through hysteria and deception just makes everyone disillusioned and cynical in the end. If the "higher cause" itself turns out to be a bust, then the damage done is major and has no compensating upside.

Gore has further arguments, however, that invoke something other than the faulty science behind the "global warming" craze. He insists that the decline of education, bookreading, analytical thinking, rational public culture, and the news media have prevented ordinary folk from seeing the deep truth of his pet cause. These are real and worrisome developments. But Gore wildly and breathtakingly inverts the truth here: the "global warming" hysteria could not have gotten anywhere near as far as it has without just those helping trends.

At the center of the issue, the decline of science literacy enables the hysteria in a direct way. Science education in the US hasn't just declined, of course. It's been actively corrupted by an illiberal vision that replaces education based on skills, knowledge, and learning to think for oneself with the indoctrination and propaganda of crusades and causes. (For an example, see here.) This development parallels the decline of fact-based and investigative journalism, increasingly replaced in the last couple decades by "advocacy journalism," by which "activist" journalists push their usually ill-founded viewpoint in dishonest ways by manipulating their public with the older conventions of objective journalism. Only most sentient people have now seen through this maze of tricks and have lost patience with the conventional news media: fewer and fewer are fooled any longer.

Along with this half-baked argument comes bizarre claims that the news media have become increasingly "right-wing" (!) in their slant. Come on: a "right-wing" news media - really? With a few major exceptions (Wall Street Journal, Fox), the US news media (and even more so, the global news media) is overwhelmingly liberal to left-liberal in its reporting slant and the proclivities of its personnel. That's a massively overdocumented fact; there's no quibbling about it.

And really: doesn't the "global warming" hysteria, which the news media have played a decisive role in promoting, fit the news media's needs perfectly? Both in the commercial sense of getting people chronically anxious and constantly tuning in (to see if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has finally melted - spectacular, exclusive, thoroughly misleading footage from National Geographic Channel! CNN! MSNBC! Fox, even! with ominous music playing in the background!) and in the deeper sense of feeding the news media's delusions of being a profession and a fourth branch of government?

Al Gore is a sorry case. It's fine and all to denounce the partisan fanaticism of our present politics and the semiliteracy of the televisual global village. But he, his books, and his movie are very much part of the problem, not the solution.
---
* This phenomenon is explored and explained at length in that great modern classic, Eric Hoffer's The True Believer.

Classical music podcasts

The Web continues to revolutionize the way information and culture are delivered. What used to be prohibitively expensive can now be done quickly and easily. If the lawyers and established recording and broadcasting industries would get out the way, even more amazing things would happen.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston has a wonderful live classical concert series, which they're starting to make available by podcast. Find out more here.

The emperor's skimpy new bikini thong

Truth does less good in the world than the appearance of it does harm.

- La Rochefoucauld

While scientific criticism of the "global warming" craze has slowed down the bandwagon only with great difficulty, the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have superficially responded to at least some of the theoretical and empirical failures of the earlier stages of the hysteria. But in the end, there's less to their response than meets the eye.

The first decade of "global warming" from the late 80s to the mid-90s and covering the first two IPCC reports, was dominated by theoretical dogmatism: carbon dioxide (CO2) and other infrared (IR)-active gases increase IR opacity in the lower atmosphere and therefore must lead to higher surface temperatures - as if the lower atmosphere were purely radiative and didn't also have convection, turbulence, and water phase transformations. From the late 90s until recently, the third IPCC report was dominated by another form of dogmatism, attempts to "prove" that in fact the Earth is experiencing warming from increases in IR-active gases, the most famous such attempt being the "hockey stick." Over all of its history, the craze has been about dogmatic preconceptions: that opacity-driven global warming will happen or must be happening or must have already happened. Bullying, arm-twisting, and media demonization of critics then follow.

Silently abandoning the "hockey stick." The fourth and most recent IPCC report (2007) is interesting insofar as it exhibits for the first time a limited but noticeable acceptance of criticisms that have "leaked" from the larger scientific report (which has always had a reasonable level of skepticism) into the "executive summary" for policymakers (which is all anyone outside of science ever looks at).

The most important is the partial retraction of the "hockey stick" as a basis for understanding the recent history of Earth's climate. The "hockey stick" was an egregious scientific blunder that the IPCC had to at least partially acknowledge. Failure to do so was fatal to the credibility of the previous report.

The "hockey stick" was a collection of scientific papers that attempted to reconstruct the Earth's climate history over the last 1000 years. It remains one of the most striking cases of "junk" or "pathological" science ever perpetrated. The resulting temperature history purported to show that Earth's temperature was roughly steady from 1000 to 1980 CE, at which point it supposedly suddenly started to increase at a dramatic rate. This "junk" result was the centerpiece of the third IPCC report and their claims that "global warming" wasn't just a conceptual possibility, but already happening in a big way.

Bludgeoned by the "hockey stick." Nothing about this result is consistent with what is known about the Earth's recent climate history. Like much else in the "global warming" craze, the "hockey stick" required a suspension of disbelief, a setting aside of normal scientific methods and everything that is well-established about the Earth's climate history. Usual scientific skepticism and standards were replaced by panic-driven authoritarianism. In a reasonable atmosphere, the "hockey stick" would have been taken apart and dismissed by normal scientific criticism as laughable. But not under the spell of a generation-long hysteria and backed by the apparent authority of the IPCC. The "hockey stick" contradicts the well-established fact that the Earth experienced a long period of exceptional warmth from about 800 to about 1300 CE, the Medieval Warm Period, followed by the Little Ice Age from about 1300 to about 1650 CE.* The Earth has been warming, in fits and starts, since then and probably experienced its most recent period of peak warmth in the 1920s and 1930s.

The "hockey stick" created massive confusion inside and outside the scientific world. It made everyone think they were living inside of those (very inadequate) climate computer models. That, I suppose, was the point: an apparent, if ultimately illusory, empirical validation of these models.

Taking apart the "hockey stick." To follow the full sordid tale, take a look at ClimateAudit. A detailed technical examination of what's wrong with the "hockey stick" can be found here (PDF).

1. The "hockey stick" is physically wrong: Temperature is not enough to characterize static climate. You need humidity and the water phase state to independently account for the role of water. At least two local variables are needed and really more.

Plus there's the mistake of a "global average temperature" standing in for the Earth's temperature distribution (a field in space).

2. The "hockey stick" was methodologically wrong. Using biological and geological proxies - such as coral reefs, tree rings, and relic seed - to infer past temperature trends is fine in and of itself. But these proxies were then combined in a thoroughly botched way that led one proxy (California pine cones) to far outweigh the rest, producing bizarre results.

The pine cones themselves are far more sensitive to water than to temperature in any case.

3. The "hockey stick" was ethically wrong: The groups responsible for it refused for considerable time to release their data sets and methodology. When others attempted to reproduce it by "reverse engineering," they got wrong answers, but quickly uncovered the methodological and conceptual errors, which the "hockey stick" people refused to acknowledge.

4. The "hockey stick" is empirically wrong. The final result doesn't match what is otherwise known about climate history. It doesn't jibe with actual surface thermometer or satellite radiative temperatures. It implies no Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age following, although these are well-established.

I'm left with the same question I had nearly a decade ago: how did anyone with scientific training get taken in by this?

The final blow. Recently, NASA, one of the main American contributors to the junk science of "global warming," released a revision to their 20th century temperature reconstructions that silently retracted the "hockey stick" for the whole of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st, implicitly acknowledging that the warming period from roughly 1910 to 1940 was very probably the hottest period of the last 150 years. Certainly anyone alive then will remember the Dust Bowl and those exceptionally warm years of the two World Wars - followed by the harsh winters and surge of hurricanes of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Mark Steyn wittily summed up the "1998 - The Non-Warmest Year of the 20th Century" situation here (this is a cached version, since the original has apparently been taken down).

But that's not the end of the story. Built into the post-1980 part of the "hockey stick" was the bizarre habit of using extrapolated temperatures for the last 25 years, instead of the actual annual temperatures. That's how the "hockey stick" managed to miss one of the most important developments of the last decade.

Real century-and-a-half climate trends. ClimateAudit and other sites discuss sounder and more honest reconstructions of recent climate history. By their nature, such reconstructions are necessarily fragmentary and approximate. But clear trends emerge from many spots on the globe and from diverse proxies. Modern surface temperature trends from the 1850s on exhibit five distinct periods.

I. 1860-1910: No strong trend.

II. 1910-1940: Strong warming. Probably the warmest and driest period in the last 150 years. Familiar to students of military history (the World Wars) and the Dust Bowl. Fewer hurricanes.

III. 1940-1976: Strong cooling. Period of more blizzards and ice storms. Historically familiar: post-World War II cold winters; more hurricanes.

IV. 1977-1994: Moderate warming. Fewer blizzards, hotter and drier summers. Fewer hurricanes.

V. 1995-present: Apparent neutral-to-moderate cooling trend. Colder and snowier winters, wetter years over all. More hurricanes. See here.

Of course, the measured surface temperature records are biased, with northern hemisphere land observations overrepresented, and include a significant and difficult-to-isolate "urban heat island" effect. But interestingly, the satellite measurements (inferring temperatures from measured radiative fluxes) show no strong trend in the last 30 years.

Still wrong on the post-1980 climate. The good word from NASA apparently didn't get out in time: the IPCC still accepts the "hockey stick" results for the post-1980 climate, claiming an accelerating warming trend, based on temperature and sea level trends that are actually centuries-old and have little or nothing to do with human activity.

This impression was reinforced by the misuse of time-series extrapolation techniques that continue to pollute people's notions of recent Earth temperatures. Instead of using actual measured, year-to-year surface and satellite temperatures, extrapolations from the most recent warming period (late 70s to mid 90s) to subsequent years are trumpeted as "evidence" that the Earth is dramatically warming. Contraindicating surface and satellite temperatures have now been "officially corrected" in the 2007 IPCC report using the same misguided methods.

All of this underscores how bad theory continues to trump fact in the "global warming" craze. They constitute striking cases of what statisticians call "confirmation bias" - believing what you want to believe, accepting only confirming evidence and ignoring or twisting counterevidence - instead of cross-checking to see if you're wrong. Much of climate and geoscience is now polluted with circular reasoning of this type when it comes to recent climate history.

As with any craze, fact and preconception continue to be confused in striking ways, abetted by thermodynamic claptrap. The most striking example is the attempt to enlist the recent upsurge in north Atlantic hurricane activity as another support for "global warming." The computer climate models cannot resolve structures smaller than a few 100 km in size - not even something as big as a hurricane. We'll learn why in a short while.
---
* Centennial-to-millennial climate "waves" of this type are driven, in part or wholly, by variations in the solar magnetic cycle, a topic we'll learn about later.

The Archimedes palimpsest

Every thing old is eventually new again.

In the late 1990s, a lost Archimedes manuscript was recovered from a medieval Christian prayer book. It's now being deciphered at Stanford by Israeli scholar Reviel Netz. He has coauthored a book on the discovery.

G'mar chatimah tovah and tzom qal l'Yom ha-Kippurim!

Not what you thought

I'll let the Wall Street Journal do the talking:

Every Monday night at 10 o'clock, Iranians by the millions tune into Channel One to watch the most expensive show ever aired on the Islamic republic's state-owned television. Its elaborate 1940s costumes and European locations are a far cry from the typical Iranian TV fare of scarf-clad women and gray-suited men.

But the most surprising thing about the wildly popular show is that it is a heart-wrenching tale of European Jews during World War II.

The program has an undercurrent of very mixed messages regarding Jews, Judaism, and Israel. (They're still struggling with the fact that Zionism is not imperialism, just a nationalism.) It also has a funny allusion to Descartes and his skeptical "I think, therefore I am - but I'm not sure about anything else" line. In the context of Iran's theocracy, that has a clear implication.*

You can watch part of the first episode here. It's in Farsi, but has English subtitles.

POSTSCRIPT: For more about Iran, read the irrepressible Michael Totten again. His work is getting more exposure in the conventional media, which is a Good Thing.

A somewhat different point of view is provided by Abbas Milani, professor at Stanford and Hoover Institution fellow. A counterforce strike against Iran might yet prove necessary. But no one should be under any illusions that it has any other purpose than just that. It can't lead by itself to political change. Counterviolence can stop or prevent violence. It cannot produce constructive change by itself. Other forces have to be at work.
---
* Not that there are no sources of religious doubt and philosophical skepticism in Iranian history. Just read Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, written about nine hundred years ago, but banned in Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution. The West has a long history of such things, but surely no monopoly.

As the glacier turns

A supposedly decisive indicator of the reality of "global warming" is the supposedly melting Arctic and Antarctic icecaps. Certainly a rigorous thermodynamic deduction implies that polar temperatures should increase more than equatorial ones, leading to less ice up there and down there. The ice caps should shrink in both latitudinal coverage and in thickness. But the "global warming" case here, as elsewhere, falls apart upon closer examination.

The strongest and most worrisome trend is the apparently 30-year-long shrinkage of latitudinal ice coverage in the Arctic. But this trend is ambiguous. The shrinkage is all on the Asiatic side of the Arctic Ocean. The Canadian-Atlantic-European side shows no such shrinkage. There's no significant trend of shrinkage in Greenland. While there is some evidence of rising temperatures in the Arctic, the most characteristic expected trend - stronger warming in the winter, weaker warming in the summer, with a narrowing of summer-winter temperature differences - is absent. Nor is there any consistent trend of narrowing temperature differences between the equator and the Arctic, again something definitely expected from an infrared (IR) opacity-driven "global warming" scenario.

But it is when we turn to trends in the Antarctic that the "global warming" case fizzles. Temperatures there have been unambiguously falling for the last 30 years, not rising. There has been some thinning of the ice cap in the western Antarctic, but that seems to be due to lessened snowfall in the winter, itself apparently a result of cooling temperatures and a weakened evaporation-precipitation cycle. It's exactly like the case of the retreating ice cover on Kilimanjaro.*

For a small warming, we should not necessarily expect lessened ice volume. The ice coverage by latitudinal area would definitely decrease, because the summer isotherms (curves of equal temperature) would move poleward. But slightly warmer summers and somewhat warmer winters mean more humidity and probably more snow. Ice thickness would probably increase in that case. What that means for ice volume (thickness integrated over area) is ambiguous.

For a larger warming, we should definitely expect net ice loss, averaged over a year, year by year. But in that case the main cause would not be rising air temperatures, but rising polar water temperatures. Water takes longer to heat up than does air. But once heated, water is a huge heat reservoir and much more effective at melting ice than warmer air.

The amount of IR-active gases in the Earth's atmosphere is in any case too small to be the dominant driver of the ice cap coverage. The caps are reminders that we're technically living in an Ice Age. Before a few tens of million years ago, the Earth's poles were ice-free and the Earth's general climate was quite a bit warmer. The basic mechanics of permanent ice caps has to do with the position of the continents and the partial or complete blocking of the poleward ocean currents that move excess heat from the tropics.** The timing of ice advance and retreat is driven by the Earth's orbital and orientational variations (Milankovic cycles). IR-active gases, as far as anyone can tell, are at most a footnote to this story.
---
* Again, another reminder: climate = temperature and humidity/evaporation-precipitation as two (at least) independent variables, not just temperature!

** Quick sanity check: The most cooling possibility is a landmass over top of a pole. The second most cooling possibility is a landlocked polar ocean. For the present Earth, the Antarctic fits the former, the Arctic the latter. And indeed, the Antarctic is colder than the Arctic.

When "realists" attack

Do not answer fools according to their folly, lest you be a fool yourself. Answer fools according to their folly, lest they be wise in their own eyes.

- Proverbs 26

---
PRE-POSTSCRIPT: An interesting sidelight on this issue from Jeff Robbins (a former Clinton administration UN rep) at the Wall Street Journal. Pay particular attention to his encounters with the anti-Israel lobby, the extensive and lucrative business it does here, and its claims about the "pro-Israel media" - claims both laughable and disturbing.
---
No better motto could be imagined to introduce the continuing scandal of Walt and Mearsheimer's attack on the "Israel lobby" and their new book on same. They, their book, their publishers, and their schools (Harvard and Chicago) are a disgrace. Answering them is a necessity, yet fraught with danger - it gives them the attention they crave, but don't deserve.

For a start, former Secretary of State George Schultz has responded with this short piece, which is in turn a selection from a longer preface to a new book on the ongoing saga of conspiracy theories about Jews and politics that always mutate but never seem to die. (Apparently, they're too useful.)

Schultz is one of the most important living American diplomats and one of the most important Secretaries of State ever. (And there's more to Schultz than you think.) He brings that weight and his direct experience on the side of reason in helping dispel a pernicious myth. Groups that advocate on behalf of Israel could only have the impact they have because of the strong pre-existing support for Israel in Congress and the general public. Otherwise, they would be like what Walt and Mearsheimer portray: a semi-secret cabal having a questionable influence on America's foreign policy counter to its best interests. But their influence on that policy would also be all the weaker.

Dissecting the argument and the book. The real beef that Walt and Mearsheimer and people like them have is with American voters and political culture in general. They're aggrieved that not all of American foreign policy is up for sale to oil-producing countries, and this striking fact is what stimulates the irrational obsession that otherwise lives in the darker corners of modern politics. The book itself has been examined and critiqued, following earlier criticism of the authors' original notorious "working paper" and article in the London Review of Books. See here, here, here, and here. And here's a handy summary suitable for talking points.

Careful examination of the book reveals a situation similar to that found with Jimmy Carter's recent book: selective misuse of documents, frequent inversions of reality, careful omission of crucial facts and developments that undercut their argument, and a general failure to talk with the very people they're writing about, who would have also undercut their argument. They make full use of discredited mythology concerning the Iraq war and the Palestinians. Moving from the obvious (Jewish and non-Jewish Americans advocate for Israel) to the libelously malicious in spinning a fantasy of an evil conspiracy, Walt and Mearsheimer emerge with arguments that bear disturbing similarities to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the rantings of Henry Ford.

The real danger. Typical of conspiracists like Walt and Mearsheimer is the phenomenon of psychological projection.

The fascinating thing is that this sinister characterization does fit someone: not the so-called "Israel lobby," which operates in the full light of publicity and mainly through Congress, but what might be called the "oil lobby" or the "Middle East petro-dictatorship lobby." Unlike Israel's supporters, it is semi-secret, interacts almost exclusively with the Executive branch, generally stays out of the spotlight, and usually avoids public or Congressional examination. Behind it lie six decades of "Arabism," "oil realism," and so on, including influential and moneyed investment groups.* This is the other half of the problem, one that Schultz is too polite to mention and is rarely discussed at all, and it's what should be the focus of scrutiny.

Apart from funding the politically-correct academic pseudo-discipline of "Middle East studies," the most sinister part of this lobby is its Saudi component and its spin-off front groups like CAIR. The consequence has been a gradual takeover of world and American Islam by Saudi-funded and Saudi-inspired religious extremists. When a catastrophe like the 9/11 attacks happen, media attention temporarily turns to these groups. But it doesn't take long for this lurid light to get turned away on to something else, like another one of those Britney crises, or maybe a Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction.

The Arabists: The rise and fall of a bad idea. The origins of these groups and their influence (in the US) go back the 1940s. Ever since the Lebanese civil war and the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in the 1970s, they and their ideas have suffered one blow after another: first the the Iran-Iraq war, then the almost-fatal blow of Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, followed by the relentless post-1990 rise of radical Islamist groups in precisely the Sunni countries (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan) that are supposedly our "allies" and "friends."

The oil-driven "Arabist" idea and the policies based on it now lie in ruins. This is the real background to "when 'realists' attack." The perversion of classical foreign policy realism by the need for oil (on our part) and the need for oil revenue (on the part of oil-producing countries) has led American policy into a dead end. It's probably been the biggest foreign policy scam of the last century. Walt and Mearsheimer and people like them can't take this truth. So they idle away their hours in Cambridge and elsewhere with poisonous fantasies.

The curse of Midas. There's a final irony to this worth mentioning. Oil revenue was supposed to make the backwards petro-nations rich, able to leap into modernization at a single bound with enormous pools of capital that countries not blessed with abundant oil did not have. Except that it failed to work out as planned: as economists have learned, when a country becomes dependent on nothing more than a natural resource monopoly for its revenue, and all that revenue is controlled by the government, it has a strong tendency to become a corrupt, stagnant backwater. Far from becoming modern, a petro-government turns into a dictatorship and tries to buy off its population with oil wealth. This is the well-documented predicament of the Arab oil countries and the Arab-Iranian world in general. While the larger Muslim world does not suffer as much from this condition, the ability of governments like Saudi Arabia to promote radical Islamic doctrine is enabled by that flow of oil dollars.

OTOH, a country like Israel, with limited natural resources, has had, like Hong Kong and Singapore, to make the most of its human resources. For a society to be modern doesn't require wealth to showered on it, unearned, from an oil well. It requires a modern society and modern social and political practices. A modern society's wealth is its people, not what's in the ground.** Having just returned from Israel, I can testify from first-hand experiences that the same miracle that happened in those Far Eastern city-states has happened in Israel. Not having oil or other significant natural resources has been a blessing for all those places.†

Dependency on oil revenue, from the Persian Gulf to Venezuela, has produced little more than wasted decades, squandered wealth, political stagnation and oppression, and radical religious and political reaction. These countries now have little to show for it.

Allies, friends, and ... ? As for who's an ally of America, and who's not, consider the result of this recent Harris poll. Americans were asked to rank countries in terms of closeness as allies, and they responded with this revealing list, in rank order: Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Israel, followed by Japan, Italy, South Korea, and Germany. These are all democracies with whom we share values, history, and extensive commercial, cultural, and human ties. For a great democratic power like the United States, that says it all: allies like this arise from what you are, not just something you buy or sell.

So-called "experts" like Walt and Mearsheimer don't understand this, but ordinary voters do.
---
* These actually have far more political influence than the oil companies, which have more limited impact in Washington than many people think. The goal of these consulting and investment groups, which operate in all wealthy, oil-consuming countries, is to recapture the oil money flowing into the oil-producing countries by selling those countries large public works projects, military systems, etc. They also sell political influence in a fairly crass, if discreet, way.

** An interesting implication is that the main division in the globalizing world is not between those have and those who don't have, but between those who know and those who don't know.

† There's a lot of business now between Israel and Asia, especially China. Tel Aviv has a significant flow of Chinese and Indians doing just that. Even stranger, some of them speak Hebrew.

People often think that such benefits should be immediate, instant-gratification things, like finding oil in your backyard. Real blessings are not easy-come, easy-go: they're are difficult things that take longer to come to fruition, but are unassailable.

The trouble with neoconservatism

While traveling back to the US recently, I ran across a recent issue of the American Interest, one of those "little" policy journals that populate the less-read shelves at Barnes & Noble. It was founded by ex-neoconservative Francis Fukuyama and seems to be a slightly right-of-center mag for and by other recovering neocons and the Otherwise Confused.

One of their main writers is the excellent Walter Russell Mead, whose review of Andrew Roberts' History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900 appears in that issue (requires subscription). The review takes an interesting turn towards the end as Mead reconsiders the strange nature and career of neoconservatism and why it has proven attractive while turning nonetheless into a comprehensive failure. Reading it provoked me into putting together some long-churning thoughts on the subject. I'll use a narrow definition, restricting "neoconservative" to the students and followers of, and those influenced by, Leo Strauss and his peculiar brand of "Platonic liberalism." It encompasses various sorts of "right-wing liberalism" that accept liberal ends while embracing unilateral, authoritarian means and exhibit strong moralizing, crusading tendencies. The key places of congregation are the Weekly Standard and Commentary. Others use definitions so broad as to lose any distinctive meaning, or tendentious definitions ("Jewish conspiracy," "Bushitler," "Dick Cheney is a fascist") that are worse than useless.

Neoconservatives, Straussians, and rationalism. Neoconservatives have acquired the influence they have because of the rise of the academy as a center of American intellectual life. While superficially sounding the usual Anglo-American political themes, they are engulfed by a weird mix of academic theorizing and tough-guy-know-it-all cynicism, hold a virtually theological belief in unique American virtue and unlimited might, while remaining in reality naive about the nature and limits of power. Their style lands wide of the mark here: it routinely exhibits the vice of what philosophers call rationalism or apriorism (philosophical idealism). Here's an irony for everyone to contemplate: neoconservatives worship the standard pantheon of Anglo-American liberal ideas and personalities, but their intellectual style is anything but that. Sharply set off from the methodological pragmatism and anti-theoretical bent so characteristic of Anglo-American political culture, their style is distinctly Continental, with a strong whiff of Franco-German philosophical idealism and dogmatism. In both its liberal and conservative forms, modern Anglo-American political culture, in its 350+ year history, has been committed to an individualism that is more than social or political; it's a metaphysical individualism that starts with individual instances and moves towards generalities. The failures of Continental philosophy are due precisely to its pattern of starting with grand theories and work down toward individual cases, with a strong tendency to override real individual cases and manifest facts with heavy deductive logic and ideology. Neoconservatism is distinctly more "European" than "American" - sounds strange, doesn't it? But there you are.

This is why neoconservatism, in spite of its proclaimed ideals, sits so uneasily in the American political landscape. While it won't do to blame Leo Strauss (who died in 1973) for the Iraq war, it is his style, not any particular idea, that has reproduced itself over time, as it so often does with philosophers. Whatever the master says, it what he does and how he thinks that have the real long-term influence.* Strauss worshipped Plato as the greatest of philosophers and had an ill-concealed contempt for empiricism and its progeny: science and the modern Enlightenment movement, of which America is the most important exemplar. He wished America well, but was deeply skeptical of the potential of Enlightenment liberalism to transform the world and improve the lot of the great masses of people. How that was transmuted into crusading neoconservative democratism is still a mystery, but it clearly has little to do with Strauss' specific beliefs and more to do with his style. Were he present at this time, he surely would be stunned.

Neoconservatives and existential panic. Furthermore, the spiritual grandfathers of neoconservatism, shaped by their refugee experiences, brought with them from their European exile a feeling of existential panic, made chronic by the continuing threats to Israel as the successor state to the now-defunct Jewish exile of the Old World. While this panic in its original context is perfectly understandable, it is not rational in an American context.** Israel is a small country in a permanent semi-war situation, facing political and existential threats the US does not now face: ruling over discontented Palestinian Arabs, and a nuclear-armed, fanatic Iran. It also faces lesser but still difficult threats of terrorism, or as we have learned to call it more accurately, jihadism. (In principle, the US did face such threats during the Cold War, although as a practical matter, only in one instance - the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 - did that threat almost become real.) Europe now faces political threats beyond anything the US faces, and it might face existential threats in another generation.

Precisely because the US does not - repeat, does not - face such threats - it faces the threat of physical attacks alone - it enjoys a position of greater detachment and a greater freedom of action that allows it to help other countries that do not enjoy these. More than any other single fact, this is the key to understanding the relative success of American foreign policy since 1945.

The neoconservatives have helped to inject into American political culture a panicked desperation about omnipresent threats and extreme measures, while tying a moralistic unilateralism to an idealized utopia of "Americanism." Some neoconservative writers have even absurdly proclaimed "Americanism" as a new and apparently crusading religion. Americans have it good (many don't realize how good), but "Americanism" cannot be exported to other countries in its original form, certainly not by force. If and when they decide to become "modern" and join the now-crystallizing global civilization, they have done so and will continue to do so in their own time, having made a collective decision that that's a better way to live. If they are threat to us or to friends and allies, they can be stopped by counterforce. But they cannot be "forced to be good" in a positive sense. They have to decide and walk that path themselves - no one else can be them for them.†

Neoconservative misunderstandings of American foreign policy and the present vacuum. Neither these criticisms nor Mead's are wholly original. Ever since the rise of neoconservatism in the 1970s, critics of all stripes have expressed exasperation with its tendency toward obsessive moralizing, preconceiving before perceiving, and rewriting American history and making all their heroes (who are an unobjectionable lot) into neocons avant la parole. They fail to appreciate that, after a fling with European-style imperialism in the early 20th century (the Spanish-American war), post-isolationist American foreign policy has been guided by a blend of liberal internationalism (where appropriate in dealing with other liberal-democratic societies or countries struggling to become such) and conservative realism (where a cruder balance-of-power calculus is all that's feasible). It's avoided imperial constructions, even of the liberal Anglo-French type ("white man's burden" or mission civilatrice) because they're wholly inappropriate in an American context and have become obsolete and illegitimate. The American-led world order is a system of alliances, institutions, and shared goals. It is not and cannot be a traditional empire. Attempts to build an empire today merely threaten the world order we actually have.

Of course, neoconservatism became dominant in these latter days because our standard foreign policy paradigms are in trouble. The current crisis of American foreign policy is not some arbitrary thing that popped out of nowhere or from the perverse pleasure of Paul Wolfowitz or George W. Bush.†† Our essential problem is twofold:

• In a unipolar world, America's traditional allies have been transformed into whiny dependencies. We "do" foreign policy and military action for them, because they won't do it for themselves - and then they resent it. (This has started to change in the last couple years.)
  
• The globalization paradigm, which is just liberal internationalism in action, has been pushed into regions of the world that are absolutely not ready for it.

Look at some specific instances:

• In dealing with countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the US and Britain have moved beyond limited intergovernmental contact towards a situation where private citizens (including jihadis) can freely move to and from those countries with almost the same ease that people move around Europe or the US.
• Outside of Europe, North America, and northeast Asia, places like the Middle East have no regional mechanisms for achieving and maintaining peace or for dealing for bad situations like Iraq or Lebanon. (Iraq means not just after the 2003 invasion, but 1991-2003 as well. Lebanon means anything after the start of the civil war in 1975.)
  
• In dealing with struggling countries with difficult economic and social problems trying to become modern (such as Mexico and Turkey), the globalization paradigm has been extended in a far too casual and careless way. Ordinary voters have woken up and taken notice (earlier and better than their leaders); they have reacted strongly against the trends initiated so heedlessly by politicians - with Turkey in the case of European voters, and with Mexico in the case of American.

The imperial alternative (pushing outwards into the uncivilized and half-civilized areas of the world to export and impose political order) is no longer a realistic option. The age of empire is over and, in fact, has been ending for several centuries.‡ For an international system based on nation-states (most of them successors to pre-existing empire-states), empire is culturally incongruous and prohibitively expensive. For nation-states, the logical path is to pull back from pell-mell globalization, impose quarantine where appropriate or reimpose barriers that should never have been dismantled, and develop better and deeper forms of cooperation against common threats and to exploit common opportunities. For America especially, the opportunity beckons to move away from unipolarity back toward a world where it has allies, not resentful dependencies.

POSTSCRIPT: The same issue of the American Interest has an interesting article by German writer Josef Joffe (requires subscription) considering these same issues from a similar point of view.
---
* As evidenced by the very different cases of Plato and Marx.

It's also wrong to make a close identification of "Straussian" with "neoconservative." Strauss taught and influenced many students and others with a wide range of political and philosophical views. As far as the Iraq war goes, it's best to drop the obsession with Strauss and look hard instead at the personalities of the current administration who played a critical role in the earlier Persian Gulf war (Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney), as well as the thinking of someone like Bernard Lewis. But the Iraq war is a subject only tangentially related to the argument at hand.

** Fukuyama has stressed this point effectively and repeatedly. See his fine recent book, America at the Crossroads, the fruit of his recovery from neoconservatism.

† This neoconservative tendency has a long history going back to the 1930s, when extremist ideologies had their peak influence in Europe and the Western world. The motivation was and is to create out of American politics and culture an equal but opposite political religion or ideology ("Americanism") having the same militant fervor that the great 20th century radical ideologies had in their heyday. They drew, consciously or not, on previous American crusades, such the Union against the Confederacy and US intervention in World War I. Whereas I think the real point of Anglo-American foreign policy - beyond self-defense, balance of power, peacemaking, and expansion of trade - was and is precisely to get people disenthralled from all such crackpot ideologies. Only then can they start paying attention to facts and use reasoning from those facts as a guide to a better life.

All this is by way of shooting down a favorite idea of the neoconservatives, that the United States is a "universal nation." It's an attractive and flattering idea, but it's wrong.

†† No matter what Michael Moore thinks :)

‡ That is not to say that empires were simply evil things in their day. Over a long period of human history, coincident with the era of monarchies and aristocracies, they were the only way to create large-scale civilizational units, and their constructive role in this respect is undeniable. (Of course, that's small consolation if you happened to be the roadkill of an imperial juggernaut bent on imposing its own sort of order.) My point here is simply that empires inhabited a now-antiquated historical epoch - it's like going to the museum to see reconstructed dinosaurs. The last such constructive empires (the British and the French) ended in a tangle of contradictions between liberal democratic culture at home and imperial practice abroad, with sharply escalating costs. The British acquitted themselves more honorably and sensibly in this transition than did the French, but neither case was particularly appealing, and Americans, of all people, should recognize this. (Mead's review takes Roberts to task on just this point, in connection with Britain's relation to Ireland and its imperial rule over India.)

On other traditional empires, brilliant achievements such as the Ottoman, Russian, or Austro-Hungarian, historical judgments must come down all the more harshly. And then their collapse phase, unencumbered by Enlightenment-liberal culture, ended all the more catastrophically in such phenomena as Nazism, communism, and the "pan" movements (pan-Arabism, pan-Turkism, pan-Islam, etc.) that spawned genocide, ethnic cleansing, and chronic terror as alternatives to peaceful decolonization.

Jammin' in Jerusalem

One sign of how safe Israel is now (unless you're crazy enough to drive on Israeli highways) is the steady stream of popular music performers visiting. The latest are the Black Eyed Peas. They rocked Jerusalem. And they're right about Israeli girls. When you add small arms to the picture ... hmm ... when I was 24, an Israeli female solider + M-16 just did something to my brain I sort of remember, but no longer completely understand. Probably I didn't understand it then :)

Rockers have been returning to Israel since late 2003, when Madonna - sorry, Esther, now that she's frum - came for her Kabbalah-Palooza. She's returning soon and will be staying Safed (Tzfat). Whatever you think of Madonna's music, her once-trashy personal life (she's settled down now and virtually respectable), or the strange mystical group (is it just a money-making scheme?) she's now into, she has done good things for Israeli tourism.

The last big-name act to perform in Israel was Nine Inch Nails. Read about them here in the Jerusalem Post.

Überbaby!

For that favorite nihilist in your life, Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote.

The site will repeat eventually, but not until a very long time has passed.

Express your Will to Power today!

Hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones: Variations

What impact would an infrared (IR) opacity-dominated climate ("global warming") have on cyclones, tropical cyclones in particular?

The tropical heat/moisture engine is modified. The basic features of an IR-opacity dominated climate are:

• A rise in temperature overall, across space and time
• A reduction of temperature differences by latitude, by hour, and by season
• Reduced poleward flow of excess tropical heat

Putting back in turbulent convection and the hydrologic cycle gets us a few key compensating effects as consequences:

• Enhanced vertical convection, moving heat upward more quickly and speeding up the air circulation "merry-go-round"
  
• Enhanced evaporation, precipitation, and cloudiness

The air circulation "merry-go-round," on the largest scale, is just our friends, the Hadley cells. These will be enhanced in both speed and effectiveness of heat transfer. The earlier discussion of convection perhaps made it sound as if it is just a vertical, upward affair. It is for the heat. But the air, unlike the heat, does not escape the lower atmosphere. So there has to be some horizontal motion as an intermediate step between up motion and down motion. And there has to be compensating downward motion of cooler air, after it's given up its heat to the upper atmosphere, to preserve the overall mass of tropospheric air.

Consequences for tropical cyclones. If you think of the Second Law at work in the Earth's atmosphere by latitude, you realize that tropical cyclones serve the atmosphere's "need" to even out heat flow, overcoming the large difference between equator and poles and between high summer and autumn. If the temperature difference between poles and equator and between summer and winter narrows, even as the overall temperature goes up, the Earth's atmosphere has less "need" for tropical cyclones.

The specific mechanism that drives topical cyclones with excess heat and moisture is the nighttime temperature difference between the still-warm water and the cooler air.* "Global warming" will raise air temperatures more than it does water temperatures. Hence, the air-water temperature gap narrows, and the cyclone-driving "heat/moisture pump" is weakened. Some consequences of this change are difficult to trace out in full. But the essentials are unequivocal:

• Poleward transfer of heat and moisture: reduced
• Duration of tropical cyclones: reduced
• Intensity of tropical cyclones: reduced
• Frequency of cyclonic storms: hard to say, but an educated guess is: reduced
• Poleward movement of tropical cyclones: enhanced by stronger Hadley cell and other convective motions

Overall, in a "globally warming" world, expect a (probably) reduced frequency of tropical storms, with each storm being less intense and shorter-lived, and moving more quickly poleward away from the equator.

Further thoughts on tropical cyclones. People living in tropical and subtropical areas obviously have a big stake in this question, and it's been manipulated and misrepresented by "global warming" fanatics eager to chase ambulances. In particular, whenever a major hurricane like Katrina or Rita hits a populated and developed area like the Gulf coast, we can expect more "global warming" hysterics. Little attention is paid to the big fact about hurricane-prone areas, that they're far more populated and developed now than they were 30 or 50 years ago. As a result, they will necessarily suffer more human damage when a large storm lands than they would have back then.

The irony of it all is this: more frequent, more intense, and longer-lasting Atlantic hurricanes are almost certainly an indicator of a summertime atmosphere that is cooling year on year. It's one piece of a growing body of evidence that the Earth's atmosphere, or at least the north Atlantic, has been cooling - in fact, since the late 90s.

Put simply, periods of warming (1920s and 30s; late 70s to mid 90s) are periods of reduced hurricane activity. Periods of cooling (late 1940s to mid 70s; since late 90s) are periods of increased hurricane activity. The reasons are just those spelled out above. An upcoming summary of the present climate situation will return to this point.
---
* As summer passes on into fall, the tropical air cools day by day faster than does the water. Recall that water has a much larger heat capacity than does air.

Hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones: Basics

Cyclones, anticyclones, and fronts. Near the Earth's surface, vertical convection often creates localized low-pressure areas where surface air is pulled in towards a center of exceptionally low pressure, rises strongly toward the tropopause, then flows aloft outward from the low-pressure center. Compensating such low(er)-pressure areas are areas of high(er)-pressure where air aloft flows toward an center of exceptionally high pressure, flows down toward the surface, then outward along the surface from the high-pressure center.

In the Earth's rotating frame, any vertical or north-south air motion is deflected by the Coriolis pseudoforce.

• In the northern hemisphere, low-pressure systems are set spinning counterclockwise. In the southern hemisphere, they are set spinning clockwise.
• In the northern hemisphere, high-pressure systems are set spinning clockwise. In the southern hemisphere, they are set spinning counterclockwise.

Low-pressure systems (marked by "L" on a weather map) are also called cyclones and often bring with them rain and strong winds. If they form, as they often do, over water or humid land, the strongly heated, rising air at their centers takes with it a lot of moisture, which condenses into large cloud banks that eventually dump their moisture as precipitation (rain or snow). High-pressure systems (marked by "H" on a weather map) are also called anticyclones. Their air is typically much drier than the air in a low-pressure system, being pulled from aloft. They compensate for the presence of cyclones not only with respect to horizontal air flows, but also with respect to angular motion. They ensure that the atmosphere has no net angular momentum.*

Cyclones can be broadly divided between those associated with weather fronts (see here for more about fronts) and independent storms. A weather front is a sharp boundary between two air masses, one typically colder and drier, the other typically warmer and more humid. A cold front is a front where the colder air mass is pushing the warmer air mass; a warm front, a front where the warmer air mass is doing the pushing. Where a cold and a warm front meet, a "hinge" forms that gets spinning (by the Coriolis force) and forms a "low." A weather front can bring its own precipitation and strong winds, driven by the temperature, humidity, and pressure differences across the front boundary.

Front-associated cyclones and anticyclones are dragged along by their fronts in a direction determined by the basic Hadley wind pattern associated with the climate zone in question. Fronts in the temperates are pushed eastward. In the tropics and polars, they are pushed westward.

Tropical cyclones. Independent cyclones form away from any front boundary and live out a typical lifecycle that strongly depends on latitude and season. Some form near the equator (0^o lat) and, while still in the tropics, drift westward and (steered by the upper air tropical Hadley cell flow) away from the equator. Once they cross into the temperate zone, the prevailing eastward Hadley cell air flow takes over, and they reverse course to eastward, while continuing to move poleward.** Tropical cyclones are universally called "tropical storms." If they feature winds above a certain threshold, they are called hurricanes in the Atlantic (after the Carib storm god, Hurikán), and typhoons in the Pacific.

Tropical cyclones derive their power from upward convection of warm, moist air. They pick up this power at night, when the warmer nighttime ocean water dumps heat by upward convection into the cooler nighttime atmosphere. (Recall that during the day, the heat flow right over the water is downward, supplying the latent heat needed for evaporation - the daytime air temperature is higher than the daytime water temperature.) The longer they move over warm tropical water, they more powerful they get. They lose that power rapidly when they cross over land. The strong upward convection of warm, moist air at the cyclonic center, combined with the Coriolis force, gets the cyclone to spinning faster and faster, with a well-defined and relatively cloud-free vertical column of upward convection (the "eye" of the storm) whose walls have high circulating winds. If these winds exceed a certain limit, the storm is classified as a hurricane/typhoon. While Atlantic hurricanes can be spectacular and destructive, Pacific typhoons are typically stronger and more frequent, because the Pacific features a much larger region of unobstructed warm tropical water.

Northern hemisphere tropical cyclones form during the period June-November (from right after summer solistice to almost winter solistice), but mainly in August and September. It is during these months that the nighttime contrast between warmer water and cooler air temperatures is largest. The upward convection of warm, moist air is most enhanced in these months, leading to the highest frequency of storms and the strongest storms. In the rest of the year, conditions are not right for tropical cyclone formation. For southern hemisphere storms, shift by six months.

Extratropical cyclones. Independent cyclonic storms also form near the ±60^o lat lines. They drift westward in the polar zone, but switch to eastward if they cross into the temperate zone. Depending on geography, they can become trapped and sit for weeks or even months before dissipating. They typically pull warmer moist air from the south, convert it to rain or snow, then dump it at higher latitudes. They play an important role in transferring moisture to subarctic regions and replenishing polar ice caps. At somewhat lower latitudes, they form the nucleus of long-lived springtime storm systems that can afflict the northeast American and Asian coasts.†

The basic driving force of these systems is the contrast between the warmer, moister air of the high temperate zones and the colder, drier air of the polar regions. This contrast reaches its maximum (in the northern hemisphere) in the middle to late spring (April to early June), exactly the period when these storms are most frequent and strongest. For the southern hemisphere, again shift by six months.

Poleward mass, moisture, and heat transfer. The overall effect of these moist and warm low-pressure cyclones is to help in the transfer of excess heat and humidity from the tropical zone towards the poles. There is no net mass transfer, but rather a conveyor belt where mass transfer evens out to zero because of the balancing of low- and high-pressure systems.

While poleward heat transfer in the atmosphere is not as powerful as it is in the oceans, the effect is still significant. The net heat transfer is a result of the fact that the net air flow is, rising at the equator and falling at the poles. The presence of three Hadley cells per hemisphere, rather than one, merely complicates the details. Poleward atmospheric moisture transfer is also crucial in maintaining polar ice and snow covers. Water is evaporated at lower, hotter latitudes and dumped as rain and snow at higher, cooler latitudes.
---

* That is, as seen by an observer rotating around the Earth's axis with the surface. As seen by an outside inertial observer, the Earth's atmosphere does have a net angular momentum associated with its overall rotating motion.

** If the temperate eastward air flow ("westerlies") is weakened, a hurricane can keep drifting westward, even as it continues to move northward. From the Atlantic, such storms get into the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, where they can wreak exceptional havoc in a small confined area. Such storms also get new strength from the warm, shallow waters of the Gulf.

If the temperate "westerlies" are strong, OTOH, Atlantic hurricanes get strongly deflected back eastward once they get into the temperate zone. They can then miss landfall altogether. As they move over the colder north Atlantic waters, they rapidly lose strength.

† These include the famous New England-Maritime-Greenland "nor'easters."