What's the Difference between a Skeptic and a Denier?

To someone with a scientific background, the difference is obvious. A skeptic has an open mind; a denier has a closed mind.

The denier has made up his mind that anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming isn't happening. He rejects any scientific evidence supporting AGW, and blindly accepts any evidence, pseudo-evidence, emotional appeal, or unsupported argument that opposes AGW. Scientifically disproving his argument won't sway him.

The skeptic doesn't believe something just because the establishment says it's so. He needs to personally examine the evidence, and won't believe it until he can prove it for himself.

The skeptic is pro-science, exactly the type of person who moves science forward. The denier is anti-science, but may hide behind the term "skeptic" the same way a creationist hides behind the term "intelligent design."

Dr. Richard Muller is a skeptic. The Berkeley physicist criticized errors he saw in Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth" He criticized the scientists involved in the so-called "climategate scandal." He vocally criticized the "hockey stick" graph that climate scientists have used to show the sharp increase in temperature in the past few decades.


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Patent Reform is Bust for Brainy Boulderites

Last year Boulder was judged the brainiest city by Portfolio.com, but lumped in with 20th place Denver in Forbes' list of innovative cities.

Now we're seventh on the Insomnia Log Patent Friendly Cities list. Boulder area residents were issued 834 patents per 100,000 residents from 2006 through 2010, and only six other metro regions did better.

President Obama just signed a patent reform law, the first major overhaul of our patent system in 60 years, and there was hardly a peep from local inventors.

The most debated part of the new law converts the U.S. from a first-to-invent to a first-to-file system. Previously, you could get a patent if you could prove that you invented something first, even if someone else beat you to the Patent and Trademark Office. No more.

Supporters, including many of the biggest technology companies, say this will simplify things, eliminating contests over who actually owns an invention. A class of procedures is eliminated from the PTO. This should reduce legal costs, and help reduce the multi-year backlog of patent applications.

Many small inventors are not so thrilled. They fear big companies with teams of lawyers will file applications faster, and earn patents even when they weren't the first to come up with an idea.


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Correction: In this essay, I said that, "Under the new law the PTO gets to keep all of its fees, rather than having them siphoned into the general fund." In fact, that provision was deleted during congressional negotiations.

Patent Friendly Cities

These are the top 20 metropolitan areas in the US, based on the number of patents granted to residents per capita. This is based on the first named inventor on patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office from 2006 through 2010.

Rank	City/Region	Patents/100,000
1	San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA	2,202
2	Corvallis, OR	1,586
3	Burlington-South Burlington, VT	992
4	Rochester, MN	962
5	Boise City-Nampa, ID	906
6	Bremerton-Silverdale, WA	841
7	Boulder, CO	834
8	Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA	758
9	Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX	597
10	Ann Arbor, MI	591
11	Fort Collins-Loveland, CO	591
12	San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA	564
13	Rochester, NY	496
14	Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown, NY	463
15	Ithaca, NY	458
16	Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA	427
17	Raleigh-Cary, NC	423
18	Trenton-Ewing, NJ	423
19	Durham-Chapel Hill, NC	390
20	Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH	374

First Lucky Island

One thing seems evident when looking at the nuclear crisis at Fukushima Dai-Ichi (literally, Fortunate Island Number One, not to be confused with Three Mile Island).

If you are a fan of nuclear energy, that one thing is that even after one of the biggest earthquakes ever followed by a huge tsunami, the worst case scenario didn't happen. Nuclear is even more good-to-go than before.

If you are a nuclear foe, then what happened in Japan proves how dangerous this technology is. It is only pure luck and seat-of-the-pants management that prevented a complete meltdown and huge nuclear disaster.

I look at things differently.


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Fixing Health Care isn`t the Answer

Politicians of all stripes have solutions to our heath care crisis, whether it's giving everyone access or letting the free market rule.

But you can't solve health care without solving health. Otherwise the current cycle just continues.

That cycle, discussed in my previous column, is based on health fads, each promising to fix our health with new supplements and enhanced foods, and each fad in turn proving to be insignificant or counterproductive. Look for example at the now discredited low-fat craze still driving many diets.

Will today's fads (super fruits, omega-3 fatty acids, and vitamin D) follow the same pattern?

It's taken us 10,000 years to adapt to dietary changes resulting from the invention of agriculture. Some of us still can't eat wheat and dairy. How can we thrive on foods invented in the past few decades or less?

Is an antioxidant really better than fruit? Refined flour better than whole grains? Factory-raised meat better than wild game? Pasteurized non-fat hormone-treated milk better than fresh whole milk? Vitamin water better than real water? "Natural flavor" better than any real food?


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Real Health Foods

Imagine that you are the owner of a health food store who is cryogenically frozen for 200 years. When you wake up, you are told that everything you sold at your store is actually bad for you, and all the stuff that was supposed to kill you is actually good for you.

That's what Woody Allen finds out in his science fiction movie, "Sleeper." But it may also be the key to America's health care crisis.

It turns out that the food industry in this country has been lying to us for decades. Every time they come out with a new product they say is supposed to be good for you, it most likely is just the opposite.

Industry has accomplished much positive. Food is now much cheaper, it transports more easily, it doesn't spoil as quickly and it is much more convenient. People that were starving before are much more likely to be able to afford food.

But this progress has come at a huge cost. Each bit of processing brings a food item one step further removed from the foods we evolved to eat.


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Gut Check

It's not easy being logical in forming opinions. We humans are wired to make decisions with our guts, and to manufacture a rational world around those decisions.

We are easily manipulated. A news story with lots of blood convinces us that a minor issue is the problem of the day. For example, the Camera front page has a story about an accident at a flashing crosswalk, and suddenly flashing crosswalks are death traps. We conveniently ignore the fact that most traffic accidents do not happen at these crosswalks.

Then you throw in peer manipulation. One person says that pedestrians don't look before crossing the street. Pretty soon it is common knowledge that pedestrians in Boulder have a death wish and always walk out directly in front of cars without even a glance, an opinion that, if examined logically, couldn't possibly be true.

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Six Degrees of Climate Separation

Until recently, the best scientific estimates of atmospheric carbon dioxide only went back about 800,000 years. This time has been a generally cold period in the Earth's history, characterized by ice ages punctuated with brief, relatively warm spells (one of which we`re in right now) every 100,000 years.

During this time there has been a strong correlation between CO2 in the atmosphere and global average temperatures. But also during this time CO2 hasn't approached today's human-influenced level, so we didn't have direct evidence of what happens when levels of the greenhouse gas are this high.

Late last year, a group of scientists at UCLA published a study demonstrating a new method of estimating prehistoric CO2 levels, extending the estimates back about 20 million years.

Not only do these measurements continue to show a strong correlation between CO2 and climate, they also illuminate the most recent time in the Earth's history when CO2 levels were similar to what they are today.

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Good News on Global Warming Front

I'm committed to telling both sides of the global warming story. So, here are a couple of items of good news that have been published lately.

First, New Moore Island has disappeared to rising sea levels. This uninhabited island in the Bay of Bengal, known by India as New Moore Island and by Bangladesh as South Talpatti of 81 square miles is now under water. The two countries have been arguing about control of this island since it first emerged from the sea over 35 years ago. Now, happily, the dispute is over.

Second, pollution from China is being carried around the globe by the Asian Monsoon. Why good news? Because pollution such as black carbon can reflect solar energy back into space, masking the increasing greenhouse effect that is causing global warming. Let's hope the Chinese don't address their pollution problem any time soon, or it could be getting lots warmer lots faster.

Safe, Clean Nuclear Power

To create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. - President Barack Obama, 2010 State of the Union Address

Many environmentalists gasped when the President made this comment. We all know that nuclear power is neither safe nor clean.

Nuclear reactors are dangerous. They are subject to meltdown. They are targets for terrorists. Nuclear fuel is a safety problem from mining though transportation, and there is not nearly enough uranium available for widespread use of nuclear power. Nuclear waste is dangerous in even small quantities: There is no safe storage option, and it remains unsafe for thousands of years.

Plus, huge amounts of greenhouse gases are produced in the mining, enriching, and transport of uranium; the building and decommissioning of the plants; and the transportation of nuclear waste.

But what if these dangers and problems didn`t exist?

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The Purity of Science

The level of smugness rising from the anti-global-warming blogosphere is reaching the level they accuse us environmentalists of exhibiting.

The bloggers who cry "hoax" have stumbled upon (some say stolen) a steaming pile of e-mails and files they claim proves there is a conspiracy by scientists to fudge the data and silence dissent.

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Climate Change causes Civilization

Here`s an intriguing coincidence.

Humans evolved about 200,000 years ago in Africa. For most of the time since, we have lived as hunter-gatherers. There were fits and starts at agriculture, but nothing really "took."

And then, starting about 10,000 years ago, we figured it out. We domesticated wheat, oats and barley, and other grains. We started herding cattle, sheep, and goats. We built villages and towns.

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Global warming whodunit

After my recent column about Dr. Jim Hansen's global warming research, I received e-mails with dozens of references designed to convince me that anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming (AGW) is a hoax.

I'd seen many of the references before. They ranged from irrelevant to bad science. Some I honestly don't have the expertise to evaluate. But I owe it to my scientific background to evaluate the case with a skeptical eye.

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How to Save the World

Dr. James Hansen spoke on "Climate threat to the planet: Implications for intergenerational and environmental justice" to a packed Macky Auditorium on April 9, as part of the Conference on World Affairs.

Way back in 1988 Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified about climate change to Colorado Senator Tim Wirth's Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, bringing the issue to the public eye.

At CWA, Hansen presented a target for what needs to be done, scientific rationale for that target, and a step-by-step plan for getting there. Not bad for a 50 minute talk.
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Why can't we all just evolve?

Today is Charles Darwin's 200th birthday. My wife and I celebrated early by spending a week in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, in December. ... [more]

It's Here, It's Severe, Get Used to It

Dr. Susan Solomon, a senior scientist at NOAA here in Boulder, led a study being published this week that says global warming is going to be around a long time, no matter what we do.

According to Dr. Solomon, even if we stop with all the CO2 the earth will still be seeing the effects of global warming for another 1,000 years at least. And that's the conservative estimate. Apparently our planet is good at slowing down the impacts of all the greenhouse gases we are emitting. Unfortunately, that slowing means that the ocean and atmosphere are saving the best for later.

The best means, at a minimum, rising sea levels of a foot or three that threaten coastal cities, and persistent droughts around the world comparable to the Dust Bowl.

Dr. Solomon, in Solomon-like wisdom, gave us the bad news followed by the good news: If we can slow down our emissions of CO2 it will give us time to look for new solutions.

So, the bottom line is that we are in for some big changes no matter what we do. But there is still value in reducing CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, and pursuing other approaches to attack global warming. We can still avoid the worst of it, or push things off further in the future. And the Pottery Barn rule means that we owe it to ourselves and the rest of the planet to try.

The Only Way to Stop Global Warming?

I write quite a few essays about global warming. These include several ideas on how individuals can help address the problem. But I'm not naive enough to think that even a significant minority of well-intentioned consumers doing what they think is right will have a measurable impact.

Some of my Libertarian-leaning friends say that the solution should be left to the free market. (At least they are mostly agreeing that the problem is real.) But here's the problem with that. Given enough time (say, 100,000 years), the free market will arrive at a solution. But in the meantime, lots of people and species will suffer, and most of them are not directly related to the companies and individuals causing the biggest impacts. You see, the flaw in this thinking is that spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is definitely impinging on others' rights, and the free market should not allow individuals or companies to infringe on the rights of others in the name of profit, even if those others are not yet even born.

One politically popular approach is cap and trade (carbon trading). Here, companies are issued the right to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gases. If they emit more, they have to purchase the right to do so from someone else. If they emit less (or if they remove carbon from the atmosphere), then they can sell the credits.

The problem with cap and trade is that it assumes people and companies have the inherent right to put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, impacting future generations around the globe. That would be like saying that, since there are 16,000 murders per year in this country, we are going to cap and trade permits to kill people. The permits will be issued proportionally to the number of murders you committed last year. If you kill more people next year, you will have to buy more permits from someone who came in under their cap. (Have no fear, each year we will cut the number of permits issued. By the year 2050 we will only be allowing 10,000 murders per year -- uh, subject to change based on input from organized crime's lobbyists.)

I've always thought that a carbon tax (actually a tax on any greenhouse gas emissions) is the ideologically best way to approach the problem. You charge a tax for any fossil fuel burned. It can be charged when the fossil fuels are mined, when they are burned, or any point along the supply line, but we would need to be consistent so they are charged exactly once.

You may ask, what about other countries? This will have no impact on China, India, or any other part of the world that may be contributing significantly to the problem.

I have two answers to that. First, we slap a tariff on all imported goods and services, proportional to the amount of greenhouse gases used to produce and ship to the U.S. If the producer can provide proof that they have an equivalent tax in their home country, this tariff will be waived. And second, if this program is successful, it can provide a model for other countries, and a useful tool in negotiating international agreements.

There's one more big problem with a carbon tax, and this is where I got stuck. Such a tax is highly regressive. The people who will suffer the most are those that already can't afford the gas to drive to work and the energy to heat their homes.

I pondered this last issue long and hard until I ran across this idea from Jim Hansen. Dr. James Hansen is none other than the scientist who first brought climate change to the attention of the U.S. Congress in the 1980s, and he continues to be active in the field.

Dr. Hansen suggests (actually demands) a carbon tax, but he adds a twist: 100% of the revenue of the tax is refunded immediately to the citizens. People would receive monthly direct deposits into their bank accounts. None of the received new tax money would be spent by the government. Instead the money would be divided equally among every man, woman and child.

How does that work? Say this new tax causes massive inflation (after all, the companies paying the tax will just pass it on to consumers). People might be paying $1,000 more per month for home heating, electricity, gasoline, and goods and services produced using these resources. But, the same people would be seeing the same $1,000 appear like magic, like clockwork every month.

If I'm a smart consumer, I'm going to figure out how to cut back on my energy usage and set aside some of that new money to make my home more energy efficient, or buy a plug-in hybrid, or any number of investments designed to allow me to live more efficiently and hence spend less money.

And, if I'm a smart business, I'm going to figure out how to get some of that new money. I'm going to start selling some of those energy-efficient products. And it won't be something goofy like carbon credits. Instead it will be something that will actually cause less greenhouse gas emission.

How much money are we talking about? Well, one estimate was that it would take an investment of about $100 per ton of carbon dioxide to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Each person in the U.S. emits about 22 tons of CO2 per year. So, we're talking about new taxes (and new dividend checks) of about $200 per month per person, or $800 for a family of four. Most of the cost for the typical family, I assume, would be in the form of higher prices for energy, and for good and services produced using fossil fuels. That cost would be offset by direct deposit of an approximately equal amount each month.

Of course, we'd need a scientific panel to determine the correct amount of the new tax for each product or service, as this should not be a political decision. And we would likely want to phase this tax in over a small number of years.

Is this the best solution? I don't know. But it seems to me that we need to be thinking about radical ideas such as this, instead of relying on do-gooders, relying on the free market, or relying on the ability of politicians to solve this in a timely manner. Because a timely manner is the thing that is most important.

Smarter than Mother Nature?

While traveling from mainland Ecuador to the Galapagos Islands, I wrote about how a species, whether bird or human, can actually drive itself into extinction through the actions of a few rogues. We're back now, and I have a few more thoughts on the topic.

I still haven't organized the hundreds of pictures and videos I took in the Galapagos, and I'll post more when I can make some sense of them. But here is a picture of Lonesome George, the very last member of his species, the Pinta Island Tortoise. He is kept at the Charles Darwin Station on Santa Cruz Island in the hopes that eventually another of his kind (hopefully female) will show up in some private collection sometime in the next century (his expected lifetime), to keep this species alive. For companionship, he shares his space with a couple of females of a different species of Galapagos tortoise, but the hybrid eggs produced, even if they hatched and were fertile, would not be the same species.

George is so lonesome because, prior to the protection currently enjoyed by the native and endemic species of the archipelago, the giant land tortoises and other animals were hunted extensively. Four species (out of fifteen) of the tortoise are extinct and the fifth is down to just George.

During the down times on the boat during our cruise, I read about Easter Island, among other things. Easter Island is about 3000 kilometers southwest of the Galapagos. When the Polynesians first moved to Easter Island, they built an amazing culture. It is symbolized by the Moai, huge stone statues like the one shown here, up to 33 feet high and 82 tons.

But the Polynesians destroyed the ecosystem on their paradise island. They destroyed all tree species, which meant they could no longer build, transport, and erect the statues, nor could they make seaworthy vessels for fishing. They destroyed most of the food sources on the island as well, and descended into cannibalism by the time the Europeans stumbled onto them.

These examples make it clear that people can have a huge impact on their environment, and that they have the capability to literally make their home unlivable. In the middle of the South Pacific, the Easter Island natives had nowhere to retreat (and no more ability to build any vessel capable of getting them anywhere else). Similarly, the human race is stuck on this planet. If we mess it up and are forced to eat each other, don't say I didn't warn you.

Survival of the Fittest

I hope that's me -- "the fittest", that is. Reporting from Ecuador this week, I've been enjoying swimming in the Pacific ocean. Actually, I probably swam further in the past week than any other previous week. The folks on the beach were looking at me funny when I climbed water-logged from the ocean after my marathon adventures.

It was near here, in the Galapagos Islands, where the Theory of Evolution got its first seeds. Also, that's where so much research has been done on that subject. Recently, scientists have been measuring the sizes of the beaks of every single finch every single year and proving that evolution really is happening.

We're heading to the Galapagos next week, and it got me thinking (what else to do while putting in the big swimming miles) about the whole idea of the survival of the fittest. Seems like lately folks are talking more than usual about the free market and business Darwinism. And the free market may indeed "work", but there are a couple of problems.

First, survival of the fittest is messy. You may end up with the most fit species/business at the particular time. But there is guaranteed to be lots of blood along the way. In nature, lots of individuals die so that the best among them can live. And in business it's the same way -- lots of economic turmoil so that the best businesses can survive.

When reading about the finches, I came upon a second "problem" with evolution. It seems that on one island a few cactus finches (about a dozen) came up with a bit of a shortcut to sipping their nectar. To make their lives easier, they were actually, with a simple snip of the beak, killing the cactus flower just to take a sip.

Now, these individual birds will never pay evolutionarily. They got their dinner. When things get tight later in the year, these may be the same birds who will be strong enough to get what little nectar remains. A tiny subset of the population is actually destroying the food source for all, and the only solution evolution may offer is extinction.

The logical comparison is the businesses that snip humanity's cactus flower. They may, for example, dump tons and tons of CO2 into our atmosphere. There is no incentive for them to stop or slow down, because it would just hurt their bottom lines. The only solution that the free market has to offer is to allow them to destroy the global economy, with the only consolation being that these rogue businesses will go down with the rest of us.

We are smarter than finches. We can see what we are doing, that the actions of a subset are harming the livelihoods of all. So, it seems like it is up to us to come up with a solution. Perhaps we just need to trim the beaks on these metaphorical finches a few millimeters and the problem will take care of itself.

Why'd He Do It?

On my run today, I came upon a dead skunk in the middle of the trail, so far decomposed it no longer smelled. On the way back, I stopped to watched a green snake slithering through the grass.

No particular reason, but I started thinking about Senator McCain's presidential campaign. Have you seen any of his ads? I generally TiVo through them, but occasionally I can't, and I get to see how he's positioning himself for the biggest job in the world. And that is: By insulting his opponent and telling tales that are so close to being lies that the camera has to focus high on his face to not show the smoke curling from his pants when he approves the ads.

You know I used to have quite a bit of respect for the Arizona Senator, back when he really seemed willing to stand up to people on both sides of the political fence. He used to think the fundamentalist right was an evil influence on politics. Then he actively sought out the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee, who actually is working towards nuclear war with Iran so that Israel will be destroyed and he (Hagee) can proceed directly to Heaven without having to pass Go. He promised to nominate Supreme Court justices that would vote for evangelical causes. And then he went and selected fundamentalist Gov. Palin as his running mate.

Why did he pick her? Well, my theory is that he had to do something drastic to stop Obama's convention momentum. Democratic excitement, and the biggest on-site and television audience in political convention history, and all that stopped cold by talk about Sarah. Perhaps a good short-term decision, but he's going to have to live with this longer term.

And speaking of Palin, what's up with her idea of teaching creationism in public schools? Suppose we did just that, put intelligent design on the high school science curriculum right next to evolution. To be intellectually honest, we would have to hold it up to the light and point out all the flaws in this so-called scientific theory. If you are a supporter of evolution (and who isn't), that might be intellectually satisfying. But, if actively supporting a specific religion in public school is unconstitutional (as it surely is), then actively pointing out the flaws in a specific religion is just as unconstitutional. Therefore, the science teacher would be prevented from saying anything negative about intelligent design, which would completely defeat the purpose of the "science" part of the science class.

Not to mention putting all those kids in the middle of the controversy, making them pawns in some religio-political battle. No, that should be done at home.