Not Dead

LOL JK. Dead.

Max: Out Of Nowhere

I don't even want to look to see how long it has been since I have put anything more than a link or video up here.

I haven't had the urge to write much more than the occasional smart-ass quip for longer than I can remember and Twitter and Facebook are more convenient forums for such.

Right now my wife is working out with one of her friends. I have to keep telling myself not to stare at said friend's butt/cleavage.

My life has become so routine that it has become a little too easy to turn my brain off and ride alone the safe, predictable rut rather than exercise my imagination.

I may need to change that one of these days.

Max: Not Your Man

Max: Obama Make Republicans His Bitches

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Jericho: Global Warming, Common Sense & Canadian Alligators

A friend of mine and I have been in some Liberal vs. Conservative debates over the last few months. She's a smart friend. Very smart. But, she's bought into a lot of the Conservative talking points. I know I can't win her over to my way of thinking. Once someone has made up their mind about something like that, you can't talk them out of it. But, I know that she is smart so I hold out a vain hope. She and I have come to quite a few points of agreement. One of those points being: both sides are lying. Somewhere in the middle, there is truth. There should be action taken. What actions and at what cost are still in debate. I don't think she nor I are extremists on these issues, if anything I am more extreme than she.

Today she forwarded the following video to me. It was sent to her from a relative of hers. I think the relative is more extreme in his thinking than she - or at least I hope so. The video was attached to an email titled "Finally Some Common Sense." I'll let you decide if he is right or not. I attach this video merely to allow you, constant reader, access to arguments from the other side of the aisle ... and so I can rip this nonsense apart below. IWDC is by no means fair nor balanced!



My most violent reaction to this video was directly after I watched it, the last part made me feel like the ads and commercials from the 40s with doctors saying that smoking tobacco was good for you and the key to a healthy life ...

This guy, this meteorologist, John Coleman, stopped being a good scientist about three minutes into this video. I'm not a professional scientist, but I know something about the scientific method. I know the dangers of messing with sample sizes - and he had the gall to suggest that others are manipulating data!

Too small of a sample size is as equally dangerous as too large of a sample. And a sample with no context is no sample at all. What am I talking about? I often play a little game with some of my friends called "Small Sample World" - in this game you judge the entire population of the planet by the sample size in the room or around the table at a restaurant. So, if I were to play this game right now, judging the entire population of the planet based on the sample of everyone currently sitting in my apartment (that would be just me), the entire human population of planet Earth, all nearly seven billion of us, would be morbidly obese, balding, glasses wearing Caucasian males who are galloping toward 40. Same can be said for too large of a sample. Take everyone on the planet, count only the physical characteristics that are most common and assume that those apply to everyone. You could then say that everyone on the planet has dark skin, black hair and brown eyes ... and we live in Asia.

I'm afraid Mr. Coleman did a lot of the same things in his little video - a video he seems to feel puts the issue to rest. If only it were that easy. Right away, Mr. Coleman sets the tone for this video. He says that Global Warming theorists have said that the the icecaps will melt and that the oceans will rise and that several islands will be lost. He dismisses it as "a frenzy" - as if it's science-fiction that never happened. Well, Mr. Coleman, a good scientist should be a good researcher, and if you did your research you would see that the oceans have risen and entire island nations are no more.

But, let's get back to sample sizes, especially those with no context. Mr. Coleman produces a temperature graph of a goodly chunk of Earth's recent history, showing the high rises and low falls of the planet's mean temperature. This is an undisputed fact. There have been periods on Earth of high and low temps. The Earth has seen very warm ages and ice-ages. This is presented so that we the viewers feel that our current warming trend is just business as usual. However, no real context is given to this point - other than the fact that these changes in temperature were not caused by man burning fossil fuels.

Ah, yes, but fossils are the key to this piece of info. For example, some 55 million years ago, alligators lived in Canada, well above the Artic circle. Fossils of those and many other warm weather animals can be found there - indicating that in one of the warmer periods of recent Earth history, the climate around here was much different. Of course, when I went to the University of Missouri, we studied geology with a focus on what we knew: Missouri. The last ice age brought glaciers down to the Missouri river (look at a map - that's about the middle of the continental U.S.) In warmer periods, Missouri was covered by an inland sea. So, yes, if you want to go sun bathing in Canada and buy sea-front property in the Ozarks, by all means, go buy a Hummer! The economy needs your uninformed spending!

Fossils and fossil fuels are also a point here. Mr. Coleman asks very early on "Doesn't CO2 help plants grow?" - it does indeed. And in the warmer periods of Earth's history, plants grew a lot! Especially smaller plants like micro algae. There are lots of images in the media of dead dinosaurs being crushed into crude oil, but, truly, most of our oil comes from micro plants. They are born, take in the CO2, build bodies, then die. Layer on layer of them for millions of years. A little pressure and heat and time and now we exploit that left over carbon, we find it as crude oil that we refine into gasoline and jet fuel. We find it as coal. Those little life forms lived off that CO2 in the atmosphere. But - that's the point. All of that CO2 has been sequestered underground for millions of years. Man wasn't around then. In fact, Man rose up only in the last million or so years. All of recorded human history has been since the last ice-age - a mere 10,000 years. Man didn't get around to burning fossil fuels until the last couple of hundred years. And, in that time, especially the last 100 years, we have burned away what took Mother Nature hundreds of millions of years to sequester. We have released all of that CO2 back into the atmosphere. Man showed up on a planet cooler than the one we live on now, we are setting ourselves up to achieve massive temperature increases. Will man survive in a world where Toronto is like Miami? This freakin' meteorologist doesn't know the answer - that's for damned sure!

So, that's what you get when you use a huge sample size with no context. What about a too small sample size? All you have to do is look at the end of this video. Yes, indeed 2009 was a quiet year for hurricanes. So, that's it? Crisis is over? 2005 was the most active year for hurricanes on record. Katrina isn't even the most powerful hurricane on record. The largest hurricane on record was Ike in 2008. But we're only talking Atlantic hurricanes. More hurricanes are now developing in the Pacific. But, hey, 2009 was quiet, 30 years of studying this are moot - let's call it off!

But it gets better. Mr. Coleman cites no temperature rises from the 40s to the mid-70s - the Industrial Boom. (PSST! Mr. Coleman? Yeah, in the mid-70s, there was an oil shortage, maybe you remember it? The shortage was basically cured by OPEC opening the taps and driving oil prices to unheard of lows. In the 80s and 90s, most families in the US bought a second or third car, public transportation dried up and the US decided that a family with three SUVs was desirable! The world has changed! The world is changing!)

This guy's logic takes more twists and turns than I can handle. Look, I'm not saying we have to get rid of cars, I'm just saying we have been using the sky for a dump and now it's time to clean up the mess before it bites us - and it's already biting us. Micro organisms made all the oil by absorbing CO2. How did they get it? They didn't fly out of the water, take a big breath and dive back in. They got it by absorbing it from the water. CO2 moves from the atmosphere to the ocean. Now, scientists are telling us that the CO2 levels are so high that the oceans are becoming acidic. This isn't just about climate change, this is environmental change. Why do we care about the oceans becoming acidic? Because it's bleaching coral and it's killing plankton - the basis for the ocean food chain. Take out the base of the ocean's food chain and eventually it will effect the top of the chain: us. Mr. Coleman keeps using phrases like "They say this will destroy civilization!" - again he says it like it's a ridiculous concept. Well, civilization might be able to withstand this, but I think if you start hurting the primary source of food for a good portion of the planet, i.e. the oceans, you are definitely going to disrupt civilization.

I don't even see why we're still arguing about this. I mean, I know why. Big Oil and other industries are putting out lots of money to make sure we are blinded, to make sure we are in doubt. However, a little simple logic clears everything right up. Mr. Coleman early in his, oh, let's call it a presentation, posses the question "Isn't CO2 a trace gas?" Yes, yes it is. And, in a bottle of water, you can have a trace of cyanide. A small trace will never be noticed by your system. But, just a few more parts per billion, a slightly larger trace of cyanide, will kill you with one sip.

The friend that forwarded me this video used to have tropical fish. As we have debated, I've wanted bring this up. Why would this matter? Well, those tropical fish were, in a word, a pain. You provide a tank and salt solution and food and light and heat. Raise or lower any of those factors and you have a tank of dead, expensive fish. Too much salt, too little salt. The pH is too high, too low, whatever - dead fish. Well, if the atmosphere is the water we all swim in - and it certainly is - how are we any different from those expensive, easy to kill fish? Drop in too much oxygen, you can easily kill a person. Too much CO2? You'll kill someone easy. I won't get into the statistics about asthma. Too hot, too cold - okay, humans with their technology can survive a lot better than the stupid fish, but, I think you get the idea.

China has nearly 2 billion people. They also have one of the largest coal reserves on the planet. They will need heat and power for themselves - guess what energy source they are likely to use?

It would indeed be better if they, the Chinese, and if the rest of us didn't keep saying yes, we would like alternative fuels ... someday - but if we instead started using them now. We have the technology. Solar has never been cheaper or more effective. Wind is cheap, we just need the will and the infrastructure. The next time you buy a car - buy a hybrid, better - buy an electric vehicle if you can swing it. Are they expensive now? Sure. Convince the car companies that you want them and they will produce more of them and they will fall in price. They already are falling in price. Building a house or doing a major upgrade? Add solar - you will get a return on your investment. Maybe replacing your bulbs with florescent is good - I don't have the numbers. I like the ones around my place.

We could even lower the amount of CO2 currently floating around. Google the term "Bio-Diesel" and you will get a lot of information. But, what it boils down to is that we can make a diesel replacement out of any fat - corn oil, chicken grease, you name it. Now, we've talked a bit about micro algae in this post - those little guys are perfect for this. Vast swaths of American desert land could be converted to grow micro algae that could be turned into bio-diesel. That makes American jobs and uses the CO2 already in the air. Take the next step and sequester some of it. It would be a logical but politically difficult process to tell American oil producers that for every five barrels of oil products they sell, they have to produce one barrel of bio-diesel from micro algae. And for every 10 barrels of micro algae bio-diesel, they need to sequester one barrel. Down goes the CO2. It's the least Big Oil can do in the wake of record profits in a down economy! As we all switch to hybrids and hopefully electrics and add more solar and wind - we start lowering CO2 and we can do that right now!

In the end, I'm not going to base my opinions on any one person. I'm certainly not going to base my opinions on a "scientist" who has appeared on Fox News and who appears to be running a personal crusade to debunk this issue in the face of thousands of other scientists. It's Occam's Razor time - yet another scientific principal that I doubt is familiar to Mr. Coleman.

But, hey, what do I know? Let's forget it. Let's all light up a cig, have a couple of high balls and enjoy the good life. Mr. John Coleman said we can. We have no responsibility for this! It's not our problem if we bury our heads in the sand, right?

Jericho: Life in General

Max: Simmons SDX - The Geekiest Drums Ever

Max: What We're Not Supposed To Know About The New Copyright Treaty

Jericho: Ray & The Future

Ray Kurzweil predicts some of the future (Computers won't disappear in two months, sorry!)

I think it's worth a half hour of your time. If you need me, I'll be in the pool.

Max: My Kid Is Awesome