Good morning.
- Mr Lieberman … payback?
- Hmmm, cars still weigh upward of 1.5 to 2 tons and travel at 20-40 mph faster …
- Stopping power.
- Of science and belief.
- Legal and moral are not connected.
- Theology and Mr Tebow.
- Dreidel … Texas style.
- A book recommendation. I bit.
- Two more books.
- Google and Russia’s net.
- Mr Obama and voting blocs.
- Super-volcano? That could be, uhm, exciting.
- Somebody should point out to the unfortunate Mr Gore that plants like warmer weather and higher levels of CO2.
- Heh.
Somebody should point out to the unfortunate Mr Gore that plants like warmer weather and higher levels of CO2.
Fair point, although I wonder if limiting logging both due to environmentalism and the poor economy might have a role to play in the improved status of plantlife observed.
More problematic, there’s a very crude way to measure this. We can figure out how many tons of carbon we are burning. Likewise, we can estimate how many more tons of additional plant life we are seeing. Since plants need carbon to aquire mass we can estimate how much carbon they are pulling from the air in terms of tons (I’m going to guess plants pull carbon from the soil in forms other than CO2 as well). Almost certainly the tons of carbon being burned will be a lot more than the tons of carbon being pulled from the air by added plant life. This means we, at best, have a weak counter cyclical feedback loop. Helpful but not a solution in itself.
Mr Lieberman … payback?
So why has he jerked around the Democrats so hard? Payback for the primary challenge, protecting his home state’s powerful insurance interests, or just a principled aversion to health care?
I’m not sure there’s any way to tell. But it’s going to be an interesting few weeks.
Let’s take them in reverse order:
1. Principled aversion? Scratch that. He’s on tape telling a Town Hall audience less than a year ago that he supports letting 55-65 year olds buy into Medicare. This would be akin to, say, Sarah Palin becoming a Senator and killing an energy bill because it has provisions to expand oil drilling in Alaska.
2. Protecting insurance interests? Possibly but the biggest issue with opening up Medicare has been the fear of adverse selection. Namely people too sick to afford health insurance would opt for Medicare. Insurance companies would love this since it removes sick people from their rolls freeing up funds to help them compete for the valuable healthy insurance customer (say by adding goodies to the policy like accupuncture coverage or subsidized gym memberships that young healthy people would like but a middle aged person worried about that lump in their breast couldn’t care less about in their insurance policy).
3. Payback for a primary challenge?! The next time Mark complains about group think or the lack of diversity of viewpoints on the left this post should be saved on a memory card, attached to the blunt end of a hammer, and pounded into his skull (speaking figuratively of course). Here you have a Democrat who gives a national address at the Republican convention endorsing their nominee for President and then campaigns for him accusing his party candidate of being a threat to national security. If this doesn’t merit a primary challenge then how do Republicans explain what they did to their candidate in NY’s 23rd district (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York‘s_23rd_congressional_district_special_election,_2009)….stabbing her in the back at the behest of Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh….who Mark will have us believe are just simple entertainers with no special connection to the Republican Party or conservative politics?
So let me suggest another option to explain Lieberman’s behavior:
4. Prima donna scumbag – He is one of those demented types that likes to, what I call, ‘oooze principle’. He wants you to pay a lot of attention to him because he is special. He is motivated with a special sense of righteousness to always ‘do the right thing’. For this he is horribly put upon by his critics who can’t get him because he is just so above playing poltics, they simply don’t understand his hoping from one side of the fence to the other has nothing to do with making himself a spectacle in order to get attention but has to do with his mighty noble principles.
Of course you’d think someone motivated by principle would be quite consistent. Yet oddly Lieberman is perhaps the most inconsistent Senator we have. He runs as Kerry’s running mate. Four years later he feels the safety of the country requires him to endorse McCain over Obama even though most people would consider Obama’s foreign policy stances closer to Kerry and McCain’s closer to Bush….but hey those people aren’t ooozing noble principle all over the place! Likewise buying into Medicare is good a year ago but now its a deal killer. There he goes again.
My #4 fits nicely when you look at who Lieberman’s chief political friends are. Bill Bennett, McCain, what do these people have in common? They too are big time ‘principle ooozers’ who’ve turned prima donnahood into a political philosophy.
11. Obama’s Crumbling Coalition December 16, 2009
With yet another poll showing Obama’s approval rating plummeting (with the Democrat enjoying even worse numbers on health care), it’s…
Backtracking to the original source (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/15/AR2009121503717_pf.html), we find:
Under the weight of these more negative reviews, the president’s overall approval rating has dipped to 50 percent, down from 56 percent a month ago. Other national surveys have recorded his ratings at or below 50 percent in recent weeks, but this is his lowest level yet in a Post-ABC News survey.
A graph of Obama’s approval rating can be seen at http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/jobapproval-obama.php.
Here’s whats interesting:
1. The steep drop comes from Obama’s peak of 65% or so in Dec-Jan of 2008/9. This, though, is right after the election when Obama was the President-elect.
2. At the time of the actual election, Obama’s approval rating appears to have been around 55%. His actual vote share was 52.9%.
So the ‘collapse’ seems to consist of Obama going from 53-55% to 50%. Considering that this is during a period of intense economic recession, painfully stalled leadership on his legislative priorities and pretty outrageous rhetorical attacks by the right the real question should be why has Obama’s approval collapsed but how has the Republican party failed so much that Obama’s approval is barely dented when everything incl. the kitchen sink is thrown at him.
Boonton,
I’m not going to remark on Mr Lieberman, as I don’t follow politics in a fashion which would allow me offer anything useful. Except to point out your #3 point that if you want Mr Lieberman as a “diversity” data point on the left, you’re going to have to quash the zillions of people who for years have been complaining bitterly about him from the left.
However, on Mr Gore … if you notice the linked piece quotes Mr Gore as noting a “tree die off.” If CO2 is on the rise and it’s warmer … the trees will be booming … not dying off. Why does Mr Gore offer that as a data point … and oddly enough plant growth is in fact on the rise … a point in Mr Gore’s favor if he would bother to get the facts right. Although noting that the ability of the planet to support and sustain more plant life (and thereby more life) is enhanced by global warming leads to the question that AGW/GW might be a good thing overall, which is not part of his thesis.
Boonton,
Vote share and approval are not equivalent. I guess I should have reminded you that such polls are just cricket races anyhow … when I pointed it out. But if you don’t think Mr Obama is losing support of those who did in fact support him originally, go right ahead. It’s your dreamworld not mine.
Mr Lieberman as a “diversity” data point on the left, you’re going to have to quash the zillions of people who for years have been complaining bitterly about him from the left
1. And why shouldn’t people on the left complain about him? In terms of actions, though, it would seem the ‘left wing’ party has been very tolerant of his ‘diverse’ viewpoints. Again if mounting a primay challenge is the test for a party being intolerant of diverse views the Dems come out pretty good with Lieberman’s record. The GOP it seems is much more willing to pull the trigger on their own who stray too far from the party line. (Of course, it seems from the right if Lieberman were to stab Obama in the neck with a butter knife at a state dinner and was hence stripped of his senority that would be an outrageous squashing of opinion).
If CO2 is on the rise and it’s warmer … the trees will be booming … not dying off. Why does Mr Gore offer that as a data point … and oddly enough plant growth is in fact on the rise … a point in Mr Gore’s favor if he would bother to get the facts right.
Wait why are you assuming CO2 increases mean more trees? I skimmed your citation but unless I’m mistaken it was citing measurements of vegitation. Are you assuming a relationship of CO2+ therefore trees+ simply because ‘trees eat CO2′? That seems to jump to too many conclusions IMO. Yes trees eat CO2 and that would therefore be good in one sense for them, but trees are much more influenced by the climate and local resources (soil, water etc.). Since CO2 is throughly mixed in the air I don’t think there’s any trees that aren’t growing because they lack access to CO2. The question is what would trees do if more CO2 were in the air. Would they grow even more or would they, like someone whose had his fill at the dinner table, leave the leftovers uneaten?
Vote share and approval are not equivalent. I guess I should have reminded you that such polls are just cricket races anyhow … when I pointed it out. But if you don’t think Mr Obama is losing support of those who did in fact support him originally, go right ahead. It’s your dreamworld not mine.
I’m not sure what it means to say someone is ‘supported’ by 65% of the people but only 52.9% will vote for him. An approval rating is simply that, a person can approve of someone and still vote against him. But the peak of 65% identified by GayPatriot was during the time period immediately after the election and up to and a bit after the inaugeration. At that point the election was over and the next one was as far away as it ever gets in the US election cycle therefore in terms of psychic cost, the price for Republicans to assert ‘approval’ of Obama was the lowest it would ever be.
The point was that Obama’s normal peak approval is in the range of between 50-55%. The ‘collapse’ therefore is him moving from a peak of 55% to 50% or just under 50%. I know Republicans like to pretend the Big Bang caused the world to pop into existence the day after Bush left office, but its still a pretty recent precedent of Bush riding approval polls from 80% to something like 17%.
BTW, Pollster.com seems to only have Bush’s 2nd term but http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-presapp0605-31.html has Bush’s full two terms. If we discount the 9/11 boost to near 80%, we can approximate a ‘normal’ approval rating in the high 50′s for Bush thereby making his ‘collapse’ into the high-20′s/low-30′s area. Perhaps more interesting is Reagan who started in the 60′s (like Obama) but fell to right below 40. That’s an interesting camparison to Obama because like Obama, Reagan began his first term with a deep recession & relatively strong partisan opposition. If that ‘normally’ generates a 20 point drop then Obama seems to be above par.
The real story here is not whether Obama’s approval rating has slipped. It has. The real story here is how much above par Obama appears to be when compared with the full picture. The ’08/09 recession is worse than the 82 one & partisan opposition is a lot stronger. The interesting question here is what happens if Republicans cease having a ‘perfect storm’ to drive down Obama’s approval? Non-stop “Obama’s evil” cries are going to get trite and boring very soon. If the economy and/or foreign affairs are not going exceptionally bad, what will happen then?
Again, I’m not saying there’s no slipping….I’m saying that slipping is normal and Obama is actually not slipping as much as one would normally expect.
Note on http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-presapp0605-31.html every single President seems to slip deeply from a high on their inauguration. The only exceptions seem to be Bush Sr. (perhaps because he began his term with a rap that he was too mean to Dukasis in the election and general tiredness with Republican Presidents????) who grew more popular after taking office (I suppose the Gulf War is a factor there as well) and Bill Clinton who despite having a minislip seemed stagnant in approval at the beginning of his first term only to ‘collapse’ halfway through his first term and then regain popularity (perhaps an object lesson for the effectiveness of intense partisanship as a tool for driving down the approval ratings of those you don’t like)
Correction, it seems Kennedy deviated from the pattern of going down in approval upon taking office….Nixon too seems to have resisted the post-inauguration decline….although I think looking at post 1980-data is more relevant to work out what should be considered normal.
Boonton,
I’ve seen numerous scientific journal citations over the decades of increase CO2 linked to better plant growth. I didn’t think that was controversial. I’ve also seen notes that higher CO2 levels in the dinosaur eras allowed for faster plant growth and recovery one of the reasons that allowed the huge animals to exist in the densities in which they are thought to have lived.
http://news.stanford.edu/pr/02/jasperplots124.html
But an unprecedented three-year experiment conducted at Stanford University is raising questions about that long-held assumption. Writing in the journal Science, researchers concluded that elevated atmospheric CO2 actually reduces plant growth when combined with other likely consequences of climate change — namely, higher temperatures, increased precipitation or increased nitrogen deposits in the soil.
And wikipedia’s article on carbon dioxide:
Plants can grow up to 50 percent faster in concentrations of 1,000 ppm CO2 when compared with ambient conditions, though this assumes no change in climate and no limitation on other nutrients.[32] Some people (for example David Bellamy) believe that as the concentration of CO2 rises in the atmosphere that it will lead to faster plant growth and therefore increase food production.[33] Such views are too simplistic; studies have shown that increased CO2 leads to fewer stomata developing on plants[34] which leads to reduced water usage.[35] Studies using FACE have shown that increases in CO2 lead to decreased concentration of micronutrients in crop plants.[36] This may have knock-on effects on other parts of ecosystems as herbivores will need to eat more food to gain the same amount of protein.[37]
Boonton,
I would guess that the Stanford researchers did not allowed for their plants to adapt over several generations to the changed conditions? That experiment would be quickly done using single or small colony plant types to allow them to first adapt a higher concentration.
1,000 ppm? Isn’t that a lower concentration of CO2 than normally found?
I believe we are still around 350 ppm right now. then again multiple generations? Of trees? How much time do we have?
Boonton,
Ah, you are right. I hadn’t looked it up but was going on a HS/college memory which had it at 3.5% not .035%. My bad.
How much time? Doesn’t much of the world’s plant life live as single celled algae in the oceans?
Additionally ‘plants’ seems too broad a category. Trees are excellent at long term carbon storage. A living tree will store carbon for decades, even centuries. Even after it dies, it takes years to decades for that carbon to get released back into the air. Smaller plants only store carbon for a few years or even a single season.
If climate change favors plants overall but shifts the balance of favor towards non-tree plants, you can end up with a negative rather than positive feedback loop.
Boonton,
That’s not true. Small plants die … but their carbon does not return to the atmosphere unless it is burned. If something eats it or it goes into soil or sediment the carbon does not return to the atmosphere but remains bound other forms.
It seems to me that carbon is more tightly bound in trees than dead plants. Don’t dead plants get eaten by mold & fungus that releases CO2?
Boonton,
Leaves? Most of tree carbon sequestering is temporary too.
Unless the biomass is increasing or decreasing the biological CO2 deposition is that stuff that is going into geological “storage”, i.e., such as peat-moss or ocean floor accretion. Increased plant activity may would likely increase that rate … but I could see arguments for how part of that increase does not get reflected in increased sequestering but in higher animal and other populations.
Leaves? Most of tree carbon sequestering is temporary too.
Errr yea but leaves make up a fraction of the mass of most trees I’m aware of.
I think this argument indicates how the big picture is more complicated than simplistic reasoning would indicate. As a whole plant activity would seem to be a net draw against CO2 by putting it into geological storage. Therefore shifting planet activity upwards would be a negative feedback loop in the climate warming system…good.
But what if the ratio of tree to non-tree plant activity was shifted towards non-tree? I suspect tree plant activity is better at ‘geo-storing’ carbon than non-tree activity. If nothing else tree activity is clearly better at storing carbon for 50-100 years which is a resonable time frame for us to look at (I would hope by 2109 we would have ample non-carbon based energy sources). I would suspect trees are more successful at putting carbon into long term ‘geo-storage’ for the simple fact that wood fibers are stronger than plant fibers.
So the question is which effect would be bigger, the counter-feedback effect of increase plant activity or the pro-feedback effect of shifting away from trees? No sure but the question isn’t going to be answered by simply noting total northern plant activity which can be impacted more by such things as limits on deforestation by industrial nations (thank you spotted owl!).
Boonton,
Uhm, I’m guessing that’s not true over the lifespan of a tree. Look at the floor of a forest, what makes the greater contribution to the loam, wood from trees or leaves?
By what mechanism. Look at it this way. Of plant growth a certain percentage (most?) gets transferred “up” in the food chain an consumed. A certain loss percentage slips through from long term geological storage. If you have more plants … that percentage is likely not to shift so much and more will be stored.
I’m not seeing any obvious way in which the ratio of plant/non-plant would be shifted. Plants are still the chlorophyll/solar base of the food chain. That can’t be altered.
Mass of trees vs. leaves: Good question but I’m not really sure of the answer. I suspect leave CO2 is somewhat cyclical with rotting leaves going mostly into the air (some going into deep storage). Fir trees, you know, do not shed their leaves every fall…..
Mechanism for shifting the ratio of tree to non-tree plant activity: That’s pretty obvious IMO. Trees take a long time to grow very slowly. Plants can sprout up quickly. In a changing environment, new trees have a hard time quickly adapting. Plants, though, are opportunistic and can quickly move into a distrubed environment.
Another possible mechanism is the very increase in CO2 that we are talking about. If weeds and other plants are able to exploit that increase faster than trees they would have an edge in the ‘war’ between different plant species. If they are displacing trees and they are less efficient as trees at geostoring CO2 you got a pro-warming rather than anti-warming feedback loop.