Twitter Conversation Of The Day

Proof that I am spending too much time watching Twitter today:

Twitter Conversation by emptywheel, April 16, 2013

The crap is going to happen anyway, so you might as well laugh about it.

I took a screenshot, because blogger still doesn't have a tool to include Twitter messages inline. If you want to follow the links, go to the link in the byline.

Climate Change Update

Image credit: Cujo359

This is the cherry tree I photographed a week ago. As you can see, it's in full bloom, at least a week ahead of the earliest I can remember seeing these blossoms. Over at Two Ton Green Blog, Suzanne reports that the daffodils are up as early as she's ever seen them, and she used to live in California.

As anyone who has been watching the Winter Olympics is probably aware, this has been one of the warmest winters ever in this part of the world:

The Pacific Northwest Canadian city[,] which will host the games from today through February 28, 2010[,] just experienced its warmest January since record keeping began in 1937. Temperatures averaged 44.8 degrees Fahrenheit (7.1 degrees Celsius), considerably warmer than the average of 37.9 degrees Fahrenheit (3.3 degrees Celsius). Average February temperatures for Winter Olympic host cities are typically below freezing.

Vancouver 2010 to Be Warmest Winter Olympics Yet

It's just as unusually warm on this side of the border:

SEATTLE -- It's the worst-kept surprise party in Seattle -- the city officially set a record for the warmest January on record.

The average temperature was 46.97 degrees -- toppling the record of 46.56 degrees set in 2006, and a full six degrees above the normal average of 40.9 degrees. In fact, it's even warmer than a typical March! (which has an average temperature of 46.2 degrees.)

January Was Warmest On Record In Seattle

It's looking to be one of the warmer Februaries, too.

Last month, various Fox "News" personalities suggested that Al Gore and all those climate scientists don't know what they're talking about because it was snowing back East. That would certainly imply that those Fox "News" clowns don't know what they're talking about either.

The same "logic" certainly applies.

Afterword: Yes, I keep harping on this. Rank stupidity deserves to be called out, particularly when it endangers those of us who aren't too stupid to listen to the people who study these things, instead of ridiculing them for telling us things we don't want to hear.

The Nobel Prize: It's All About President Bush

You have to wonder what's going on in the minds of the American press when you read something like this:

President George W. Bush, whose approval ratings are at historic lows as the U.S. veers toward a recession or worse, got yet another thumb in the eye when one of his most vociferous critics was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics.

While Princeton University Professor Paul Krugman was honored ``for his analysis of trade patterns of and locations of economic activity,'' he's more widely known for twice-weekly columns in the New York Times and appearances on television, in which he regularly attacks the president on the war in Iraq, his tax cuts and other issues.

Nobel Prize to Arch-Critic Krugman Is Blow to Bush

As we've noted following Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize last year, if one were to take these headlines seriously, the Nobel committee, which is made up of people from all over the world, have nothing better to do than honk off the ignoramus who runs our country.

The Bloomberg article finally goes on to note that Prof. Krugman was awarded the prize for a ground breaking model of how nations trade with each other. As his colleague Arvind Panagariya explains:

Until the end of the 1970s, the Heckscher-Ohlin theory for which Bertil Ohlin won the prize--Eli Heckscher died before the Nobel Prize in economics was instituted--dominated the field. This theory explained well why labor-abundant countries such as South Korea and Taiwan would export labor-intensive products such apparel, toys and footwear and capital-abundant countries such as the United States would export machinery and aircraft.

But it could not satisfactorily explain the two-way trade that was widely known to exist: Many countries exported automobiles and televisions, but they also imported them. The Heckscher-Ohlin theory also did not adequately explain why rich entities such as Europe and the United States, which had very similar endowments of capital and labor, traded more intensively than those with very dissimilar endowments. While descriptive explanations of these phenomena existed, a tight theory explaining them was lacking.

Starting in 1979, Krugman published a series of papers that successfully tackled these and many other related questions. He postulated that consumers like variety in what they consume. For the same expenditure, their satisfaction is greater if they have a larger variety of products available. This creates the incentive for firms to produce a large variety of products. But the production of a new variety has setup costs. This leads to declining per-unit costs as a larger quantity of the variety is produced and places a limit on the number of varieties the market can profitably supply. A firm produces a new variety only if it can capture a large enough market to allow profitable sales.

This seemingly simple structure gives rise to a tight theory that leads to rich implications: Countries gain from trade not only because larger market allows them to better exploit scale economies, but also because consumers can access a larger variety of products. And even identical economies can gain from trade through scale economies and a larger variety of products. The theory also brought imperfect competition into a formal trade model.

Commentary: Paul Krugman, Nobel

The emphasis in this quote is mine. I don't know much about how national or international economies work. In fact, I may know even less about this subject than President Bush does. Nevertheless, I do recognize the obvious point here - Krugman's work clearly advances our understanding of how international economies work. That has important implications both for the financial industry, companies that depend on international markets, and government policy. That, despite the penultimate importance of embarrassing our lame assduck President, is probably why the scientists on the Nobel committee awarded the prize to him.

I've expressed admiration before for elegance, at least in the design of machines. It should come as no surprise, then, that the mention of elegance would catch my attention. Prof. Panagariya's description of Krugman's theory implies a similar elegance:

A hallmark of Krugman's work is parsimony. His models are among the most elegant: lean and thin and transparent. They have all the required parts but no unnecessary fat. It is quite remarkable that while other scholars in the field handsomely incorporated the Krugman model into their research, perhaps the most insightful and elegant applications still came from Krugman[.]

Commentary: Paul Krugman, Nobel

That kind of parsimony usually results from repeated re-evaluations and refinements, not from some chance inspiration. Another colleague of Krugman's explains what makes the theory better than the old ones:

“Krugman’s trade models became the standard in the economics profession both because they fit the world a bit better and because they were masterpieces of mathematical modeling,” said Edward L. Glaeser, a professor at Harvard University who also studies economic geography. “His models’ combination of realism, elegance and tractability meant that they could provide the underpinnings for thousands of subsequent papers on trade, economic growth, political economy and especially economic geography.”

Krugman Wins Economics Nobel

The part of that quote I emphasized explains far more about why Krugman won the Nobel than any political considerations. His theory added to the knowledge of economics, and has been the basis of much subsequent work on the topic. That's what really important theories do.

The implication that this award had more to do with politics is insulting both to the awardees and the committee. In fact, politics seems to have more importance to the critics of this award than it does to the awardee:

The committee that chose Krugman cited his "trade" theories that once made him famous for actually doing economics. (Krugman contends that nations can create comparative advantages by subsidizing certain industries, something the ancients once called Mercantilism.) However, Krugman has become a well-known public intellectual not because of his work on trade, but because of his twice-weekly op-ed column in The New York Times, where outright partisanship is substituted for economic analysis.

Paul Krugman is an unabashed liberal, and there is no crime in an economist having such persuasions. For that matter, many economists have a bit of that streak, too. Furthermore, many of us are in agreement that some of the economic policies of the Bush administration have been bad, if not downright disastrous.

However, the agreements end where Krugman begins to view U.S. economic history from a distorted lens, one in which all administrations run by Democrats are Good and Virtuous, and all Republican administrations are governed by Beelzebub himself.

Krugman In Wonderland

The remainder of the article, by Prof. William L. Anderson, is a rhetorical nightmare of labeling, strawmen, and ad hominem. Not to be outdone, long time Krugman nemesis Donald Luskin is quoted by Bloomberg:

"Paul Krugman the economist died a long time ago; the man named Paul Krugman is a public intellectual," Luskin, a contributing editor for National Review Online, said in an interview. "He is not in the same category as John Maynard Keynes, he is in the same category as Oprah Winfrey. To give it to him is to dishonor the Nobel Prize."

Princeton's Paul Krugman Wins Nobel Economics Prize

I don't recall Mr. Luskin predicting the current economic mess with the accuracy that Krugman has, but perhaps someone can point out such an article.

Prof. Peter J. Boettke writes a more thoughtful critique, but comes to this conclusion:

Unfortunately, and unlike both [Milton] Friedman and [John Kenneth] Galbraith, Krugman's work devolved from science to ideology and finally to political partisanship. Friedman and Galbraith had always kept (though from differing perspectives) on the scientific to ideological spectrum, but neither became overtly partisan in their writings. This cannot be said for Krugman and the way he has used his platform as an economist and as a columnist for the New York Times for his Democratic partisanship purposes.

This would be innocent enough if Krugman were just another political pundit, but now the prize has given him an enhanced platform from which to pronounce his partisan positions as if they are grounded in economic science.

Commentary: Political Economist

Friedman's almost religious devotion to the "free market" ideology makes this conclusion seem ironic, to say the least. Galbraith was a product of an earlier time, in which both politics and science were viewed differently, and more positively in many ways. Comparisons to either strike me as somewhere between hazardous and ludicrous. Certainly, Krugman isn't the only one who has difficulty determining the difference between his political views and his scientific ones.

So, congratulations to Paul Krugman. He earned the prize. If it pisses off the President, that's just a bonus.

Congatulations to Al Gore and the IPCC

Former Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body created to study the effects of climate change, won the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday. Congratulations to both. For anyone who hasn't been comatose or living in a cave the last few years, the reason for Gore's award is obvious:

The Nobel committee praised Gore as being "one of the world's leading environmentalist politicians."

"He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted," said Ole Danbolt Mjos, chairman of the Nobel committee.

Gore shares Nobel Peace Prize with U.N. panel

His film, An Inconvenient Truth, and its attendant publicity campaign, created an awareness of the situation among non-technical people. He's made carbon offsets a part of our vocabulary. His message is as much about what we can do as individuals as what our governments ought to do:

I'm under no illusions about how big an impact one person can make. But I do think that if all of us begin to make these changes, it adds up. And it begins to stimulate the emergence of a new marketplace, in which there is a business advantage in reaching out to consumers who want to be environmentally responsible.

Al Gore Interview: "It Is Not Too Late to Stop This Crisis"

The IPCC took a moment to remind us what this award is about, which is their efforts to raise our awareness:

In New Delhi, Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian scientist who leads the UN committee, said the award was "not something I would have thought of in my wildest dreams." In an interview in his office at the Energy and Resources Institute, Pachauri cast the award as a vindication of science over the skeptics on climate change.

"The message that it sends is that the Nobel Prize committee realized the value of knowledge in tackling the problem of climate change and the fact that the IPCC has an established record of producing knowledge and an impartial and objective assessment of climate change," he said.

Gore and UN panel are awarded Nobel Peace Prize

Of course, the International Herald Tribune felt the need to remind everyone that everything that other nations do is about making President Bush look bad:

Ole Danbolt Mjoes, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, addressed reporters after the award was announced and tried to dismiss repeated questions about whether the awards were a criticism - direct or indirect - of the Bush administration. He said the committee was making an appeal to the entire world to unite against the threat of global warming.
...
In this decade the Nobel Peace Prize has been given to prominent people and agencies whose views on a range of issues differ with those of the Bush administration. They include the former American president Jimmy Carter, who won in 2002, and the United Nations nuclear monitoring agency as well as its director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, in 2005.

Gore and UN panel are awarded Nobel Peace Prize

I'd like to remind the press in the U.S. and elsewhere that even in America we sometimes do things that are completely unrelated to making George W. Bush look like a fool. President Carter and Mohamed ElBaradei did some very worthwhile things to earn those prizes. How myopic do you have to be to think that everything is about W., because people just love to hate him dontcha know?

So, congratulations, Mr. Gore and the IPCC. You earned it, and if it ticks off our current President, thanks for that, too.

Delusions Of Adequacy: Limbaugh "Nominated" For Nobel

Taylor Marsh has an irritating article this morning on Rush Limbaugh being "nominated" by right-wing pundit/blowhard Mark Levin for the Nobel Peace Prize. Of course, Levin, and Limbaugh presumably, are just upset that Al Gore was nominated for the prize. Is it because they don't think that Gore's work qualifies for a peace prize? Possibly, but I think there's something to be said for the idea that these guys would object no matter what Al Gore did (see the comments).

My own feeling on the matter is that while Gore's work might not strictly be thought of as peace work, it is related. The climate changes and loss of land that would accompany serious global warming (I hate that term, but use it in the interest of simplicity) will inevitably result in conflict for the resources that are still available, and for any resources that become available. To quote the Environmental Protection Agency on this subject:

Many global issues are climate-related and thus may be affected by climate change. These include water resource availability and food security, especially for areas already afflicted by drought and extreme weather events. Sea-level rise is a particular concern for low-lying coasts and island nations.

EPA: Climate Change: International Impacts

Thus, preventing catastrophic warming of the planet is worthy of recognition as work in the name of peace.

There have also been worse nominees for the prize. As commenter Karin points out at Netscape:

However, the Nobel Foundation has published a database of nominations spanning the years 1901-1955. The fact that Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini appear in this database is only slightly less controversial than the fact that Yasser Arafat won a Peace Prize, and Mahatma Ghandi did not. On the database front page, the Foundation takes pains to imply that Ghandi would have received the prize in 1948 had he not been assassinated; Nobel Prizes cannot be awarded posthumously, and there was no award handed out that year.

Netscape Anchor Commentary: Al Gore Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

As several commenters to Taylor's article pointed out, you have to be invited to nominate someone for a Nobel Prize. Otherwise, it's just a joke or an exercise in futility. Here's the explanation at the official Nobel Prize site:

Each year the respective Nobel Committees send individual invitations to thousands of members of academies, university professors, scientists from numerous countries, previous Nobel Laureates, members of parliamentary assemblies and others, asking them to submit candidates for the Nobel Prizes for the coming year. These nominators are chosen in such a way that as many countries and universities as possible are represented over time.

Nobel Prize: Nomination

I doubt that Mark Levin was one of the invited, since he's not a government, a university rector, or a past awardee, and someone with his critical thinking skills could only dream of being a scientist. According to TPM Muckraker, two Norwegian political leaders nominated Al Gore:

Gore was selected jointly by Norwegian political leaders from both the Conservative and Socialist parties, who are both qualified nominators.

Gore Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize

From the AP report cited by TPM:

“A prerequisite for winning the Nobel Peace Prize is making a difference, and Al Gore has made a difference,” Conservative Member of Parliament Boerge Brende, a former minister of environment and then of trade, told The Associated Press.

Brende said he joined political opponent Heidi Soerensen of the Socialist Left Party to nominate Gore as well as Canadian Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier before the nomination deadline expired Thursday.
...
Norwegian lawmakers are among the thousands of people and groups with rights to nominate Nobel candidates.

And the Nobel Peace Prize goes to ... Al Gore?

So Al Gore was legitimately nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Argue with the merits of that nomination all you want, but Gore can legitimately be described as a nominee for the award. Rush Limbaugh was not nominated for the Nobel Prize. Some of his friends just think he should be, and were willing to make an effort to demonstrate how they felt.

Nevertheless, I think it's safe to predict that the right and much of the "news" in this country will treat this stunt as a legitimate nomination. Lying and being oblivious to reality are what the right do best, and uncritically reciting those lies is what the news organizations in America do best. I'd love to be proved wrong, because to quote a line, I hate it when I'm right.

UPDATE: Peterr at Firedoglake has an interesting roundup of articles and opinions about the recent U.N. report on climate change. The summary is out now (PDF), and apparently the full report will be available in May.