The mulga scheme.

I'm reading "In Australia’s Outback, a controversial cash crop is booming: Carbon" (WaPo).

Here in the “mulga belt,” which stretches into northern New South Wales, is the unassuming epicenter of Australia’s roaring carbon-farming industry. In this area alone, roughly 150 properties have collectively made at least $300 million from carbon credits in less than a decade, according to government records.... 

If you can get that wrong, what are the chances you're getting the actually difficult stuff right?

A correction on an article titled "A Surprise From the Supervolcano Under Yellowstone" in the NYT "Science" section:

An earlier version of a home page headline for this article misstated the location of a supervolcano that drives geological activity. It is beneath Yellowstone National Park, not Yosemite.

The article went up yesterday, and the correction is dated today.

Meanwhile, on the subject of the NYT and science, there's an editorial with the headline: "Mr. Trump Nails Shut the Coffin on Climate Relief." It's just such an offputtingly dramatic title. I understand that they mean that the government effort to provide relief from climate change is dead, but death is not enough. It had to be "nails shut the coffin." Yeah, coffin metaphors seem scary — and perhaps seasonally apt (near Halloween) — but there's nothing that's a metaphorical body inside the coffin. Relief is an abstraction. And "climate relief" doesn't even make sense. We will always have a climate. We just have preferences about what kind of climate we like best.

Sorry, I'm just complaining about a headline. The editorial itself says "climate change." And it doesn't mention a coffin. It says "dead." Here:

In March Mr. Trump ordered Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, to repeal the Clean Power Plan, which was aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. Mr. Pruitt, a climate denier closely tied to the fossil fuel industry, was only too happy to oblige — boasting to an audience of Kentucky coal miners on Monday that the plan was dead and that “the war on coal is over."

So what's dead — ironically — is a war.  "War" was a metaphor, the other side's metaphor.

Kill war. That sounds like a slogan on a 1960s placard. But I don't think I've seen that slogan. I've seen "Killing for peace is like screwing for virginity."

IN THE COMMENTS: There's some discussion about how that 60s slogan was exactly worded. I've searched around a bit and I'm guessing that it all started with this image, for which I don't have any background information (other than the guess that the bombing in question was Nixon's bombing of Cambodia, which we heard about in 1970):

"It would be unlike me to write about the promise of spring without mentioning that spring is suicide season."

"There are a lot of theories about why spring has the most suicides, but the majority of the theories take into account the relationship between spring and loneliness."

The 3rd-to-the-last paragraph of "There’s a high price to hiding from the need to transition," at Penelope Trunk's blog.

Here's some friend-making advice: "circle... sniff... okay... from now on we'll be old friends."

"On Tuesday, when Madison residents enjoyed temperatures that hit 78 degrees, a number of calls filtered into the state capital's 911 system with reports of dead people in the grass."

"Also known as, you know, sunbathers. It got so bad that the authorities had to take to Wisconsin Capital Newspapers's Madison.com to get the word out: 'Please tell cellphone users that people lying in the grass are not necessarily dead,' a dispatcher at the 911 center told Madison.com.'... Basically — and now tragically, if rather strangely — Madison residents were so unaccustomed to the good weather, and especially sunbathers, that they were very quick to assume the worst. They saw something, but maybe they said a little too much."

Says Alexander Abad-Santos at The Atlantic Wire, via Steve Elbow at the Cap Times, via Rob Thomas at the Cap Times.

Thomas's piece is extra amusing because it begins with something about — of all people — Meade.

Alexander Abad-Santos's was a little less amusing than it would be if it hadn't happened that, a year ago, a sunbather, lying on the grass in a Madison park, was run over by a city truck and killed.

ADDED: We were out on Picnic Point yesterday evening and saw this:



It turned out to be part of a medical school exercise. Groups of students would arrive and, led by an instructor, attempt to diagnose the medical problem, which was — I happen to know — a collapsed lung.

"The twigs and acorns crunching pleasurably beneath his boots, Mr. Autumn Man Dennis Clemons, 32, reportedly strolled..."

"... down Massachusetts Avenue on Wednesday wearing a gray sweater over a plaid collared shirt as he cradled a cup of pumpkin-spiced coffee and relished the crisp October morning."

“Nothing beats autumn in New England,” said His Excellency, the Duke of Fall, who began the day swaddled in a warm flannel blanket, gazing out the window at the golden-hued landscape, as is his custom this time of year. “Everywhere the leaves are changing and the temperature is starting to drop off. You can smell it in the air.”

2 websites were a-merging/The fans began to howl.

"Fans Howl After Weather Site Buys Out Rival."

In the eyes of Weather Underground’s ardent fans, the Weather Channel appears to represent the wrong kind of weather information: personality-driven sunniness and hype, they say, rather than the pure science of data. As Mike Tucker, a computer professional in New Hampshire, put it on Facebook, reacting to news of the deal: “Nooooooooooooooooo! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”

The controversy illustrates the deep national divide between those people who just want to know if it’s going to rain, and people who really, really, care about the data underlying the weather. Christopher Maxwell, a manager at a solar energy company in Richmond, Va., is in the really-really-cares-about-the-weather camp. He said he saw the Weather Channel deal as a sad sellout for Weather Underground.

“It seems to happen all the time,” he said. “Something great gets invented and sold in the United States, and it gets bought up and destroyed.”

Weather Underground was founded in 1995 in Ann Arbor, where it grew out of the University of Michigan’s online weather database. The name was a winking reference to the radical group that also had its roots in Ann Arbor....

And the radical group — is it really okay to wink at terrorists? — got its name from Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues": "You don’t need a weatherman/To know which way the wind blows." My post title refers to another Bob Dylan song "All Along The Watchtower": "Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl."

Now, from the first-linked article, I see:

[Wunderground and Weatherbug] are dwarfed by Weather.com and the other properties owned by the Weather Channel, which is owned by a consortium that includes Comcast, Bain Capital and the Blackstone Group. The Weather Channel sites draw almost 50 million visitors a month. But only half of Weather Underground’s users also use Weather.com in a given month, which might be considered a silent protest of sorts.

Bain Capital!

You know, it's 2012 and 2 riders are approaching. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Barack Obama... Bill Ayers... Weather Underground. Make your own connections. Mitt Romney... Bain... Weather Channel....

"'There must be some way out of here,' said the joker to the thief/'There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief'/Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth/None of them along the line know what any of it is worth..."

Do you think this is but a joke?

The windstorm coming tonight is being compared to "to the storm that sank the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior in 1975."

The midwest is warned.

***

"What objections could there possibly be to this large-scale atomic harbor-blasting project?"

That was a question asked in the 1950s, when nuclear scientists were hot to apply their expertise to peacetime projects. David Roberts reminds us of that insanity in the context of reviewing Jeff Goodell's new book "How to Cool the Planet" — which has some geo-engineering ideas to sell:

Geo-engineering ideas are all over the map, and quite a few are just wacky -- say, shooting a nuke at the moon to kick up a cloud of sun-blocking dust -- but two basic ideas are being taken seriously.
The first is what the British Royal Society has termed "solar radiation management," sometimes known as "solar shielding" ... [by] shooting sulfur particles into the upper atmosphere to imitate the shading effect of a volcanic explosion... [or] brightening the tops of clouds to make them more reflective, thus deflecting more sun, which can allegedly be done by injecting them with super-fine water droplets...

The other frequently discussed form of geoengineering... is pulling carbon dioxide directly out of the air...

Are these really like those crazy nuke things from the 50s? I'd worry about over-cooling by accident. How could one possibly set the right temperature? And if we could, maybe it would only get worse:

If humanity takes control of the climate, do its existing inequities become a collective moral responsibility? After all, even the pre-industrial climate was, in some sense, unfair -- some areas too hot, too arid, too wet, or too cold, life harder for some than for others. Do we try to restore an old climate or create a new one, and who decides which is better? If history is any guide, it will be the wealthy with their hands on the levers. Climate imperialism, anyone?

We could have all sorts of fights in the atmosphere, a dramatically huge version of the squabbles people who live in the same house when one after another adjusts the thermostat.

At the Early Spring Café...

... I'm enjoying this transitional phase. After a week in glaring sunlight and dry, thin air, I love the filtered light and moisture of Wisconsin. It's very mellow here. Hang out and talk to me.

It's the first day of spring.

Yesterday, the last day of winter, I was barefoot when I walked to the end of the driveway to kiss you goodbye. You slept on the bus, and I slept without you for the first time in our marriage and woke to a first day of spring that looked like this....



The table is set up for warm breakfasts for 2, but I'm cooking oatmeal for one, sitting elsewhere, and awaiting your missives from the Tea Party.

"Avoid the term 'global warming'," Thomas Friedman says. "I prefer the term global weirding.'”

Because, apparently, then anything that happens can be evidence of the thing you need to be true so you can have the policy changes you wanted anyway, but for reasons people wouldn't support because they weren't scary enough. And "weirding" sounds scary.

Friedman is quite absurd. He begins his column by mocking people who are saying "because Washington is having a particularly snowy winter it proves that climate change is a hoax and, therefore, we need not bother with all this girly-man stuff like renewable energy, solar panels and carbon taxes."

But then he turns around and says "The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever."

So weather is not climate — which, duh — but he still wants to use weather as climate. And he even gets to say that cold is evidence of heat, because we shouldn't be saying heat anymore, we should be talking about weirdness.

Come on, that's really weird.

***

I see the analogy between global warming and the weapons of mass destruction used to justify the Iraq war. Those who planned the war believed there were other good reasons to go to war with Iraq, but they made a decision to use weapons of mass destruction as the reason to go to war, because they thought people could understand this reason and unite behind the war effort. But then, when the WMD were not found, the war looked like a big mistake.

Now, think about the analogy. Think about how people support the policies that are supposed to deal with global warming — renewable energy, solar panels, carbon taxes, etc. — and what other reasons they have for wanting those policies. Think about why they would decide to rely on the global warming prediction rather than those other reasons, and how they will need to scramble if the global warming theory proves untrue or is no longer believed.

If global warming were the only reason for doing the things that are needed to deal with global warming, then no scrambling is required. We can simply be happy about it. But the scrambling... that's what shows that people wanted the policies anyway.  And maybe they are right! Maybe going to war in Iraq was right even without WMD.

So why not stress the other arguments for renewable energy, solar panels, carbon taxes, etc.? Because it's not scary enough! Running low on traditional fossil fuel — the old energy crisis — just isn't crazy-making enough to get the public to accept great sacrifice and pain.

"The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws..."

"... at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made."

Huh? Why would it just be skeptics who would be interested in evidence of serious flaws in the science? I'm amazed by paragraph 6 of an article that begins:

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

Everyone should perceive flaws! To talk about "sceptics" as the ones who will "seize" upon "evidence" of flaws is unwittingly to make global warming into a matter of religion and not science. It's not the skeptics who look bad. "Seize" sounds willful, but science should motivate us to grab at evidence. It's the nonskeptics who look bad. It's not science to be a true believer who wants to ignore new evidence. It's not science to support a man who has the job of being a scientist but doesn't adhere to the methods of science.

Blasphemonomics.

Those Freakonomics guys have shocked the high priests of science.

Suppose... that the best solution [to global warming] involves a helium balloon, several miles of garden hose and a harmless stream of sulfur dioxide being pumped into the upper atmosphere, all at a cost of a single F-22 fighter jet.

That freaks out Al Gore, et al.

[S]ubversively, ["SuperFreakonomics" authors Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner] suggest that climatologists, like everyone else, respond to incentives in a way that shapes their conclusions. "The economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the [climate] models to approximately match one another."

Even assuming the global warming alarm is justified, the Stev(ph)ens still freak out the alarmists by pointing to easier, cheaper solutions:

[I]t may well be that global warming is best tackled with a variety of cheap fixes, if not by pumping SO2 into the stratosphere then perhaps by seeding more clouds over the ocean. Alternatively, as "SuperFreakonomics" suggests, we might be better off doing nothing until the state of technology can catch up to the scope of the problem.

All these suggestions are, of course, horrifying to global warmists, who'd much prefer to spend in excess of a trillion dollars annually for the sake of reconceiving civilization as we know it, including not just what we drive or eat but how many children we have. And little wonder: As Newsweek's Stefan Theil points out, "climate change is the greatest new public-spending project in decades." Who, being a professional climatologist or EPA regulator, wouldn't want a piece of that action?

Part of the genius of Marxism, and a reason for its enduring appeal, is that it fed man's neurotic fear of social catastrophe while providing an avenue for moral transcendence.

For some people, it needs to be a religion, and to the extent that it is a religion, we need the blasphemers.

Why aren't more people going to the beach?

This NYT article attributes the phenomenon to the reverse-global warming we're having. Nah, just kidding. It's a cool summer, and that's the reason given for the low beach attendance, but, of course, there's the predictable denial of the denial of global warming:

William D. Solecki, a geography professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York and co-chairman of a mayoral panel on climate change, warned that this summer’s unusually mild temperatures should not buoy global warming skeptics.

“Ask them to visit Seattle,” he said, where a record temperature of 103 was recorded on Wednesday.

“On average, going back decades, we would only have a few days above 90 in any given summer,” he said, “and while we haven’t hit that mark yet, there’s still a lot of summer left.”

I love that we are "warned" not to feel optimistic. How twisted we've become! It's like people are rooting for disaster. I also love the way we're instructed not to take any cool weather as evidence of what the climate is becoming, but any hot weather will be used to "buoy" our belief that disaster looms ahead. (You're going to need a buoy when those oceans rise up.)

But I want to raise the question whether it's the low temperatures that are keeping so many people away from the beach. There are plenty of other reasons not to go to the beach: it's a hassle, we've got air conditioning, we love indoor activities like movies and computer games, we're concerned about skin cancer, we've gotten fat and don't want to be seen in a bathing suit, etc. etc. It's really quite silly to think that — in the modern world — going to the beach is the natural and automatic response to hot weather. Most of us can get some cool at home, and if we can't, it's much simpler to go to the movies or a restaurant.

As the generation that grew up without air conditioning ages and dies off, maybe beach-going will become an old-fashioned, occasional activity, not the main idea of summertime.

"My hollow shell gives you the finger."

That was Blake's response to Palladian's "The absence of real winter is deadening to the human spirit. I mean, look at southern California. Or Florida."

Just something in the comments to my "Unmade Noises" post that made me make a noise — laughter — in the dead of the night... in the dead of winter...

AND: "It was a brutal 78 degrees F today near the beach. I forced my hollow shell to take a hollow walk and record a bunch of hollow images to document the hollowness of a life lived bereft of seasons."

0° in Madison.

Right now, still pre-dawn.

I think of the law students who must endure another 8:30 a.m. exam. The exams are always at 8:30 a.m. -- a tough time for a young person. It's easy for us oldsters to be up and sharp at dawn. I could do an exam at 6 a.m. What's the problem?! But I remember the problem. How do you get yourself to sleep at all, knowing the exam is that early?

But the exam is early, and to make matters worse it's 0° here in Madison. Yesterday, it was in the 40s, and that was an exam day too. Yes, exams on Sundays. In fact, it was my Religion & the Constitution exam on Sunday. We love our ironies.

But better a Sunday exam in the 40s, than a Monday exam at 0. That's what I would think. Or does that zerosity jump-start your brain?

Hey, Florida readers, are you okay?

What a long tropical storm. Is your front lawn a pool swirling with alligators?

"The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault."

"Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance." Write Alan Fram and Eileen Putman. (Via Drudge.) They summarize the evidence:

Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

Polar bears are adrift. They just don't know what to do with themselves any more. Slaughtering baby seals with our bare paws, what kind of a life is that? It may nourish the body, but what about our souls? Oh, you mean they are drifting on that melting iceberg? Anyway, the point is that everything seems to be going to hell:

"It is pretty scary," said Charles Truxal, 64, a retired corporate manager in Rochester, Minn. "People are thinking things are going to get better, and they haven't been. And then you go hide in your basement because tornadoes are coming through. If you think about things, you have very little power to make it change."

Thanks for the tip. IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O. writes:

My great-great-great grandmother had six kids in Indiana when her husband and oldest son went off to fight in the Civil War. Both died, leaving her with five kids and a farm. She worked hard and they did okay. Her oldest kids grew up and moved to California in the 1870s. She followed not long after, and continued to work. “Soft,” she said in a newspaper article when she turned 100, talking about that present generation. “The world is full of weaklings.” People with heart and courage respond with heart and courage. Those that never really did like to complain about how bad things are, in order to justify their own anxiety and give fuel to their fretting.

AND: Also from the comments, read this from Steve.

"Water rose up way too close to us earlier."

"It went back down later but now the skies have just opened up again and it’s raining hard, hailing on us and a tornado warning. We are just not catching any breaks here in Cedar Rapids at all today."

Dave Howell has words and video on the flooding in Iowa — extremely well presented on his blog (which was linked at BBC.com).

I was deeply ensconced in Wisconsin architecture today.

I spent much of the day here:



At the Maurice Greenberg House — which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I put in 2 hours as a docent, posted in the living room, where I pointed out the view and identified the items of furniture that were designed by Wright.

I have more pictures, but I'm I little too tired to do a good job of getting them web-ready. Why should I be tired so early? It's not just from 2 hours of docent work. I also drove many miles around south central Wisconsin, including some grueling time through pouring rain, the kind of rain that renders the windshield wipers useless. And there was another part of the drive where there were thick streaks of lightning and wind so rough I had to grip the wheel to keep from being swerved around. Then I turned the radio on and heard about the tornadoes spotted in this storm. Find sturdy shelter, the warning said. Where? I'm in my car, driving through farmland. I just keep going, trusting in luck and airbags.