Month: December 2009

Why Climategate doesn’t matter (III)

_46196541_gracenasa226The series explained.

For some time now, global-warming skeptics have found Antarctica to be a source of comfort and joy.

“Report: Antarctic Ice Growing, Not Shrinking” was the headline on a FoxNews.com story back in April. And when syndicated columnist George Will was writing a series of whoppers about global warming last winter and spring, he grounded his faulty data in part on the notion that ice loss in the Arctic was being offset by gains in the Antarctic — something he did not explain, and which experts say is bad science.

Well, it was fun while it lasted. According to a study published late last month in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience, the East Antarctic ice sheet has been shrinking since 2006. The finding is based on new data gathered by a NASA satellite that measured changes in the Antarctic gravity.

Dr. Joe Romm of Climate Progress calls it a “satellite data stunner.”

According to news reports by the BBC and in Time magazine, scientists are treating the new data with caution, and are uncertain about what it means. For one thing, Antarctica is so cold that, under some models, warming could actually result in more snow and ice. For another, it’s not clear whether the shrinkage in East Antarctica can be attributed to global warming.

Nevertheless, if the data are borne out, the implications are clear enough: current projections that sea levels worldwide will rise three feet by 2100 are based on the belief that the East Antarctica ice sheet would not experience any melting. Looks like that number will have to be revised upwards.

And if the data are not necessarily evidence of global warming, they nevertheless show that Antarctica can no longer be cited as evidence of its lack, either.

First snow of the season

Click on photo for a Flickr slideshow
Click on photo for a Flickr slideshow

I’ve been banned from running — temporarily, I hope — and so this afternoon I headed over to Willowdale State Forest in Ipswich with my trusty Canon point-and-shoot to take some pictures of the season’s first snowfall.

As has been the case lately, the trails were incredibly muddy. A trail that leads in to the eastern end of the reservation now appears to be permanently flooded out. So I think I’ll plan my next visit for a deep freeze, which should make for better footing.

Other than the mud, it was a beautiful afternoon, and I ran into several mountain bikers, runners and fellow walkers. It was a great way to spend part of a Sunday.

Liberals and Afghanistan

Not quite sure what to make of this. But at our extremely liberal suburban Unitarian Universalist church this morning, I heard more support (albeit reluctant) for President Obama’s build-up in Afghanistan than I hear from congressional Democrats. Or, for that matter, from the four Democrats running for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.

One possible meaning: Mainstream liberals are not as reflexively antiwar as the interest groups that lobby Democrats on our supposed behalf think we are. Indeed, according to a CNN poll taken after Obama’s speech last week, the build-up of troops is supported by a margin of 62 percent to 36 percent.

Media Nation’s new mobile edition

This afternoon I added a WordPress plug-in that automatically displays a mobile edition of Media Nation when you visit the site with a smartphone. I’ve tried it on my BlackBerry and can report that it looks OK with the default browser (though the font is too big) and quite nice using Opera Mini.

I also figured out a way to tweak the comments template. You’ll now find a much wider and deeper comments box as well as some helpful introductory text.

Unattractive trade bait

Maybe Theo Epstein* is just blowing smoke. But how could he possibly be thinking about trading Jed Lowrie during the off-season? Lowrie’s trade value has got to be close to zero right now.

If Lowrie and new shortstop Marco Scutaro both have a good first half, maybe one of them could be traded to fill a hole somewhere else. But if Theo trades Lowrie now, then it will be obvious he’s given up on him. Is there evidence to suggest he should?

*@scruff notes, as I should have, that this could just be Nick Cafardo having fun — there’s nothing in his column to suggest the Red Sox are seriously thinking of trading Lowrie.

Sean Murphy responds to Totten

Boston Globe reporter Sean Murphy, who was the prosecutor in the Boston Newspaper Guild’s ouster of president — now former president — Dan Totten, spoke with me a little while ago. Murphy is highly critical of remarks Totten made in an e-mail reported yesterday by the Boston Herald’s Jessica Heslam. Says Murphy:

All I want to say is that this was a prosecution, not a persecution. Mr. Totten was not the victim of a political vendetta. He was a victim of his own bad conduct. I was asked to be the prosecutor and agreed to do so. It was done by the book. There was no personal animosity. Any suggestion otherwise is false. Any suggestion that I was biased is false. I was well known to be a “no” vote on both contract proposals, which was in line with the position of Mr. Totten. I did not participate in any recall efforts. I was known to eschew recall.

Murphy adds that, though he did attend a meeting to discuss Totten’s possible removal, Totten “knows full well I expressed great skepticism.”

I asked Murphy whether there has been any talk about whether the accusations made against Totten by the union could result in the involvement of law enforcement. Murphy’s response: “I have not broached that subject nor has anybody in my presence.”

Earlier coverage.

Why Climategate doesn’t matter (II)

House falling over in Shishmaref, Alaska
House falling over in Shishmaref

The series explained.

For hundreds of years, the small village of Shishmaref, an Alaskan village on the Arctic coast, has survived, if not exactly thrived, because it was frozen for much of the year. Now it is literally melting away, as the permafrost that had propped it up for generations turns to mud. Offshore, the nearly year-long ice has given way to water.

The fate of Shishmaref is told by Boston Globe reporter Charles Pierce (lately the scourge of Tiger Woods) in his book “Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.” Pierce writes:

The formation of the ice allowed the people of Shishmaref to go out on the sea and hunt. The permafrost guaranteed they would have a place to which they could return. Nowadays, though, the ice is late and soft. The permafrost is thawing. And Shishmaref is falling, bit by bit, in the Chukchi Sea….

There is no question about the cause of Shishmaref’s whittling away. Global climate change — specifically, what has come to be called global warming — is gradually devastating the Arctic. Alaska’s mean temperature has risen five degrees in thirty years and the permafrost is receding everywhere. The Arctic Ocean’s ice pack … is shrinking about 10 percent a year, and the pace of that shrinkage is accelerating.

In February 2008, Tom Kizzia of the Anchorage Daily News reported on what global warming was doing to Shishmaref and other northern villages, writing, “Alaska has lagged behind some other states in targeting emissions, even though the effects of rising temperatures have been pronounced here.”

And at that time, Kizzia wrote, then-governor Sarah Palin was looking into ways of reducing the emission of greenhouse gases in Alaska. Things change.

Update: For more on Palin’s rightward journey on global warming, see the addendum to this post.

You can learn more about the issue from the Shishmaref Erosion and Relocation Coalition, whose Web site is the source of the above photo.

Coakley gets it wrong on shield law

Martha Coakley
Martha Coakley

Bill Densmore has posted a crowdsourced Q&A with Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. (Disclosure: As you’ll see if you read it all the way through, I helped with one of the questions.)

I have not read the entire interview, but I did read her answer to a question about whether she would support a federal shield law to protect journalists who are ordered to reveal their confidential sources.

Coakley’s answer is troublesome, as she replies that she supports protection for “bona fide journalists.” I take that to mean card-carrying members of the mainstream media.

I am dubious of shield laws, and believe an absolute law would likely be ruled unconstitutional. At most, shield laws should require a judge to rule on whether a journalist’s testimony is necessary and if there might be some alternative way of getting the same information, as outlined by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in the 1972 Branzburg v. Hayes decision. (Alas, Stewart was on the losing side, and his proposed balancing test has led a tortured existence.)

But whatever is protected, it ought to be journalism, not journalists. If an amateur blogger is engaging in journalism, then she should have just as much protection as a press-pass-wielding reporter. The test shouldn’t be who you are — it should be what you do.

More on Dan Totten’s ouster

It turns out the Boston Newspaper Guild did indeed use the term “guilty” in an e-mail to its members about the removal of president Dan Totten; see the update at the end of my earlier item.

And Adam Reilly of the Phoenix speaks with Boston Globe staff reporter Maria Cramer, who says Totten was ousted strictly because of his misdeeds — and not out of any sense that he’d bungled the Guild’s dealings with the New York Times Co. Reilly writes:

“I find that suggestion” — i.e., that Totten’s trial represented a form of payback — “to be insulting in the least,” Cramer says. “We spent nearly four hours looking at the evidence, which was lengthy and very detailed…. It’s a duty that we took extremely seriously. We understood that the result would probably meet with this kind of criticism. But at the same time, I definitely feel we made the right decision — I have no doubt about that — and that it was free of politics.”

And there the matter rests. For now.

Still more: Boston Herald reporter Jessica Heslam has an e-mail exchange between Totten and his accusers. Looks to me like this is the key quote from Totten:

BNG / TNG / CWA has designated a member to act as “prosecutor” in this matter who attended a newsroom meeting this past September, 2009 with the purpose of assisting in the distribution and signing of a petition for my removal from office as BNG president. His actions were based on newsroom members opinion of the ratified contract of July, 2009, and their disagreement with its provisions. The jury selected for the trial contains several members as panelists who also attended the September, 2009 newsroom meeting and were signatories to a removal petition. None of these individuals is impartial; in fact, they are seeking to have me removed from office, and using this process as a vehicle to that end. This is in direct contradiction to the letter and spirit of the by-laws, and I will not be party to it.