Coyote Blog

1.  The Brave browser is terrific and an essentially seamless transition from Chrome.  I depend too much on Lastpass and needed a browser it would work with, and it works just fine in Brave.  I am sure Brave is more vulnerable than they let on but it is an almost no-brainer upgrade from Chrome.
2. DuckDuckGo is okay but well short of Google for search.  I don't find the search results are as good and related Google functionality like Google Finance (e.g. when you search a stock price) and I quickly missed Google places and maps.  I am continuing to try to make it work but I keep a Google tab open and find myself going back to it frequently.
3. I have been using Express VPN.  I am not knowledgeable enough about how these things work to say if it is better than other VPN services but it seems to work fine for me.  Really almost invisible except that websites that depend on your browser or computer being recognized (e.g. some banks) will put you through verification hoops every single time you log in.
4. Stuck with Gmail.  Our company uses Google Apps to host email and some other services for our company and switching costs are high.  Particularly since I have a grandfathered free account for up to 100 users, which saves a ton of money.

The very first tariff President Trump imposed in 2008 was a 10% tariff on aluminum imports.  Because those desperate aluminum makers in the US needed protection from foreign competition.  Or someone did.

It turns out that earlier in the decade Goldman Sachs is accused of leading a price fixing ring that attempted to corner the market for domestic aluminum and aluminum warehousing

Purchasers accused banks and commodity trading, mining and metals warehousing companies of conspiring to hoard aluminum inventory earlier this decade, after prices had declined because industrial activity fell during the global financial crisis.

The purchasers said the alleged conspiracy led to delays in processing orders and higher storage costs, ultimately inflating the cost to produce cabinets, flashlights, soft drink cans, strollers and other goods containing aluminum.

One way to avoid this sort of thing is to allow robust import markets where consumers can seek alternatives when those of domestic suppliers are unreasonable, for whatever reason.  I would trust a free trade regime to far more than the FTC or the US courts to sort this sort of thing out in a timely manner.

I know I have told the story of the "Summer of the Shark" before, but I need to repeat it again because it is so relevant to the Amazon fire story

let's take a step back to 2001 and the "Summer of the Shark." The media hysteria began in early July, when a young boy was bitten by a shark on a beach in Florida. Subsequent attacks received breathless media coverage, up to and including near-nightly footage from TV helicopters of swimming sharks. Until the 9/11 attacks, sharks were the third biggest story of the year as measured by the time dedicated to it on the three major broadcast networks' news shows.

Through this coverage, Americans were left with a strong impression that something unusual was happening -- that an unprecedented number of shark attacks were occurring in that year, and the media dedicated endless coverage to speculation by various "experts" as to the cause of this sharp increase in attacks.

Except there was one problem -- there was no sharp increase in attacks.  In the year 2001, five people died in 76 shark attacks.  However, just a year earlier, 12 people had died in 85 attacks.  The data showed that 2001 actually was  a down year for shark attacks.

The Amazon fire story is like the Summer of the Shark stories back in 2001, except on steroids due to the influence of social media.  Just like with Summer of the Shark, everyone is convinced that this is the worst summer ever for Amazon fires.  And just like back in 2001, the media is bending over backwards to claim a trend without actually giving any trend data.

The Washington Post deftly avoided actually showing any trend data by having a couple of "experts" claim that this summer is the worst ever in their memory

“I cannot remember any other big fire episode like this one,” said Vitor Gomes, an environmental scientist at the Federal University of Para.

…

Ricardo Mello, head of the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Amazon program, struggled to find the words to describe his pessimism on Thursday.

“It’s historically — this is highest number [of fires] I’ve ever seen,” he said.

It turns out that trend data is actually pretty easy to come by.   NASA for example captioned a recent satellite photo of the Amazon fires by writing

 “As of August 16, 2019, satellite observations indicated that total fire activity in the Amazon basin was slightly below average in comparison to the past 15 years. Though activity has been above average in Amazonas and to a lesser extent in Rondônia, it has been below average in Mato Grosso and Pará, according to the Global Fire Emissions Database”

Wait, there is actually a global fire emissions database?  Wow, that seems like something that could be more useful to an article about trends than the anecdotal memory of two people.  It turns out the picture is complicated.  It is close to a 20-year high in the Amazonas region but much closer to average in the 9 other measured Amazon regions.   And with the exception of the Amazonas region, the basic picture is of the last 10 years having generally fewer fires than in the first decade of the century.  The level of fire is worrisome but far short of an unprecedented catastrophe.   As the Times wrote:

The number of fires identified by the agency in the Amazon region so far this year, 40,341, is about 35 percent higher than the average for the first eight months of each year since 2010.

The decade before that included several years in which the number of fires identified during the first eight months was far higher.

But the most interesting part is to consider the effect of short-sighted US climate policy.  It would be hard to imagine any climate policy stupider than ethanol mandates and subsidies.

One of the interesting things about the Amazon fires is that most folks agree the fires are largely limited to cleared farmland within the Amazon basin.  For example, here is the NY Times:

Natural fires in the Amazon are rare, and the majority of these fires were set by farmers preparing Amazon-adjacent farmland for next year’s crops and pasture.

Much of the land that is burning was not old-growth rain forest, but land that had already been cleared of trees and set for agricultural use....

Brazil was actually doing pretty well slowing the clearing of the Amazon

The new Brazilian President rightly deserves blame for increasing rainforest clearning

While campaigning for president last year, Mr. Bolsonaro declared that Brazil’s vast protected lands were an obstacle to economic growth and promised to open them up to commercial exploitation.

Less than a year into his term, that is already happening.

Brazil’s part of the Amazon lost more than 1,330 square miles of forest cover in the first half of 2019, a 39 percent increase over the same period last year, according to the government agency that tracks deforestation.

But one of the forces that has been at work for years has been US ethanol policy, essentially the government mandates and subsidies to divert a large amount of food and cropland to fuel production.  An article in Grist and Foreign Policy in 2010 discusses this issue in depth

In the FP piece, author Nikolas Kozloff jumps right to the point in his lead:

While sugar cane ethanol is certainly less ecologically destructive than some other biofuels, the industry’s boosters have overlooked one key fact: You’ve got to plant sugar cane somewhere. One couldn’t pick a worse place to harvest cane than Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest. There, sugar cane crops have led to deforestation and, paradoxically, more carbon emissions.

Both articles go on to discuss the shift in sugarcane from the Atlantic to the Amazon rain forests.  I would argue that by raising world food prices, corn ethanol in the US also has an effect, by creating the economic incentive to clear more farmland in the Amazon to plant crops essentially subsidized by US ethanol mandates.

Back in June, 2016 Tesla (a car maker) made an offer to buy SolarCity (an installer of rooftop solar). One does not need 3 years of distance to figure out the acquisition made no sense, I (along with many others) thought it was crazy at the time:

I am sure there are probably some hippy-dippy green types that nod their head and say that this is an amazing idea, but any business person is going to say this is madness.  It makes no more sense than to say GM should buy an oil production company.  These companies reach customers through different channels, they have completely different sales models, and people buy their products at completely different times and have no need to integrate these two purchases.  It is possible there may be some overlap in customers (virtue-signalling rich people) but you could get at this by having some joint marketing agreements, you don't need an acquisition.  Besides, probably the last thing that people's solar panels will ever be used for is charging cars, since cars tend to charge in the garage at night when solar isn't producing.

SolarCity was burning cash like crazy -- not only was it selling below cost to grow market share, but it was paying all the costs of the solar installations up front and only getting repaid over time by homeowners through power purchases.  Further, it was losing its access to the capital markets as investors became more skeptical about its management and business model.  Frankly, it was facing chapter 11.

But wait! SolarCity's Chairman and largest investor, Elon Musk, was also the Chairman and majority investor in Tesla (Musk's cousin was SolarCity's CEO and founder and the two companies shared several other board members, including Musk's brother Fredo Kimbal).  Tesla was hot in the way that SolarCity had been several years prior and still had access to the capital market and a stock with a sky-high valuation.  So a combination was proposed.  Tesla investors were skeptical, despite their being largely in the bag for Musk, so Musk then did a much ballyhooed solar shingle reveal.  This seemed to be the technology of the future and helped close the deal.

Readers know I write a lot about Tesla and Musk but this deal was the beginning of my interest.  At the time, in that original article, I knew little about Musk and his reputation and was reluctant to call this deal a self-dealing fraud (as I would today).  Years of Musk's lies and outrageous promises have convinced me he is untrustworthy -- for just one example, the solar shingle reveal turned out to be a total fraud and to this day, three years later, there is still not a sell-able product.

In the community of Tesla critics, frustration #1 seems to be how bulletproof Musk's reputation is in the media.  For many folks he is still a genius**, Tony Stark made real, the man of vision who is changing the world.  Adding to his protective bubble is his ability to wrap himself in saving-mankind virtue.  Critics of Tesla or Musk are immediately labelled as paid oil company operatives or uncaring enemies of the planet.  Maintaining this image is important, because his companies all milk billions of subsidies from the government, from the state subsidies to build his various manufacturing plants to the subsidies for electric car sales to the subsidies for solar roof installations.  A failure of his image might cause taxpayers to question all their money he is taking.

Well, you know this might be coming to an end when Vanity Fair, which is more likely to prop up a flawed virtue-signalling Left-leaning celebrity than dig up dirt on them, comes down hard on Musk and the SolarCity acquisition.  This is a fabulous article that mainly focuses on the SolarCity acquisition and the Buffalo Gigafactory 2's $750 million in state subsidies generating about zero jobs there.  But it also ventures briefly into many other niches of the Musk/Tesla fraud story.  I recommend the whole thing.   Most all of this has been discussed in the Tesla skeptic community for years but kudos to Vanity Fair for starting what I hope will be a general trend of increased skepticism in major media about Musk and Tesla.

**Postscript:  I am absolutely convinced Musk is not an engineering or scientific genius (he may be a promotional genius, though).  He is a master at saying things that sound smart to the average person, but sound ridiculous to an expert in that field.  Tesla skeptics even have a word for it, the "revelation," and stories abound of people saying, "I thought Elon Musk was a genius until he started talking about something I knew a lot about...."

While PT Barnum is sometimes suggested as an analogy for Musk, the best analogy I can come up with is Ferdinand de Lesseps, leader of the effort to build the Suez canal and author of the French disaster trying to build a canal in Panama.  De Lesseps, after Suez, was the greatest hero in France -- he was considered a genius and called the "great engineer."  But in fact he was not an engineer at all, but a dogged promoter and money raiser with big visions.  If you want to understand Elon Musk, read the first third of the David McCullough book "The Path Between the Seas" which covers the French efforts at Panama (then read the whole book because it is all wonderful).

Postscript #2:  My moment of revelation was Musk's hyperloop, which seems to entrance politicians and Popular Science types but which has never made a bit of sense to me.

So here is the story so far:  We know that the main barrier to high speed rail projects is that they are astonishingly expensive to build and maintain given the high cost of the right-of-way acquisition and building track to the very high standards necessary to support safe high speeds.   See for example California high speed rail, which is following some sort of crazed Moore's law where the cost estimate doubles every 18 months.

So we are going to fix the cost problem by ... requiring that the "track" be a perfectly smooth sealed pressure vessel under vacuum that is hundreds of miles long?  What about this approach isn't likely an order of magnitude more expensive than rail?  The prototype above which allows only one way travel cost about a billion dollars per mile to build.  And with a lot less functionality, as current prototypes envision 10-20 person sleds, one step beyond even the worst airline middle seat in terms of likely claustrophobia, and less than half the capacity of a bus.  It would take 15-20 of these sleds just to move the passengers from a typical aircraft.   Not to mention the fact that there is no easy way to do switching and a return trip requires a second parallel track.  All to reach speeds perhaps 20% higher than air travel.

Postscript #3:  I hope this (from the Vanity Fair article) is true, but I doubt it:

Everyone in Albany, says the longtime lobbyist, has accepted that the Buffalo plant is a “disaster”—a poster child for why government giveaways to big companies don’t work.

Postscript #4:  To be fair, Lynette Lopez is a reporter that has had her eyes open to Tesla for quite a while and has done some good reporting.

Postscript #5:  I should have mentioned that Bethany McLean, author of the Vanity Fair article, cut her teeth on helping to bring down Enron.

Recently the journal Nature published a "study" arguing that climate contrarians got too much media attention and that, essentially, the media needs to stop quoting them.  A part of the study included a list of climate skeptics and their media influence scores.

It was a little off-putting to be left off this black list, though I feel certain that 10 years ago in my active period I could have easily made the cut.  Nevertheless, it is clear that I have fallen by the wayside.

And that is by choice.  I simply do not have the ability in this blogging hobby to play decades-long games of wack-a-mole with the same arguments over and over.  In a different sphere, I see folks like Mark Perry and Don Boudreaux take on the same anti-trade arguments for years.  I respect them for it and appreciate the effort, but I don't know how they do it.

From my observation, the world of climate remains the same old sh*t.  No one has come up with a better approach for estimating the all-important value of the temperature sensitivity to CO2 concentration.  Alarmists are still assuming massive amounts of positive feedback in the climate system but have done nothing new to prove this is really true.  Trends are still extrapolated from individual weather events, and trends are often claimed in the media without actually showing any trend data.

And the whole thing has become tribal as hell.  The other day I tried to engage Kevin Drum on twitter about a chart he used that I thought was bad.  I was trying to make the point that there is no scientific reason to believe that worldwide increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration would have 3x their average effect in a 25 mile radius around Phoenix (as the chart seems to show) and that the more logical explanation is that the chart is based on at least somewhat corrupted data.  I said nothing like "and thus global warming is all a scam."  In fact, the only conclusion I drew was a very modest one everyone interested in global warming should be able to agree with, that it has been a mistake not to have invested in a better surface temperature network given how important the issue is to us.

But even that was too much -- you could tell Drum was automatically treating me as a denier and anti-science.  Take this exchange for example

There is plenty of reason for the former and little reason for the latter.

— Kevin Drum (@kdrum) August 16, 2019

Kevin Drum is one of my favorite people to read because he is one of the few folks in Left or Right who will occasionally question his own tribe.  This is not Kevin Drum thinking, this is Kevin Drum giving the tribal answer because anyone poking even modestly at the edges of climate orthodoxy has put his fur up.

So I move on to other things.  To be honest, this may just be a personality trait of mine related to ADD/limited focus.  I find myself bored with the whole Tesla critic community as well, seeing the SOS ever day.

Postscript:  For those who do not follow me much, here is my current position on global warming

• Man-made global warming is real but likely exaggerated, in particular from unrealistic assumptions about massive amounts of positive feedback in the otherwise long-term-stable climate system.  The chance of large (>2C) warming is remote but non-zero
• Most of the claimed relationship of extreme weather events to manmade CO2 are a crock.  Time and again the media and activists claim trends (e.g. in hurricanes, droughts, and tornadoes) that simply are not there when you actually look at trend data.  Where we do see trends, such in sea level rise, those trends have often been going on since the mid 1800's, making it difficult to attribute them entirely to man-made CO2 produced mostly after 1950.
• It is possible to create a low cost climate insurance plan that might actually be a net economic improvement over the current regulatory environment, even before considering environmental benefits.  That plan is here.  Speaking of tribalism, it does not run one way.  This plan essentially got me shunned in much of the skeptic community.

Postscript #2:  The skeptic list from Nature has some odd names.  Don Boudreaux and Ron Bailey stuck out to me.   Boudreaux to my knowledge is not engaged in the climate debate at all and I know Bailey is an AGW believer.  Both, however, are anti-authoritarian and pro-market, and in the era of the Green Great Leap Forward, or whatever it is called, I suppose that is enough to put one athwart the climate change alarmists.

Apparently the American embargo and blockade of Cuba have worked so well that Trump wants to try the same thing with Venezuela

Axios is calling it President Trump's Venezuela naval blockade "obsession" based on accounts of unnamed administration officials: "President Trump has suggested to national security officials that the U.S. should station Navy ships along the Venezuelan coastline to prevent goods from coming in and out of the country, according to 5 current and former officials who have either directly heard the president discuss the idea or have been briefed on Trump's private comments," according to a new report.

He's said to have repeatedly raised the idea in private as a way to finally deliver regime change in Caracas, after prior attempts - including a short-lived push for military coup - failed earlier this year. Supposedly, the plan would be to station US Navy ships along the coast such that all vessels would be blocked from entering or exiting the South American country.

I am trying to think of an example of an authoritarian regime brought down by a blockade or embargo, and I am struggling to do so.  We have embargoed the Cubans for 60 years and the communists still sit there merrily running that county.  We have embargoed Iran off and on for 40 years and yet essentially the same regime is in power.  And don't even get me started on the 1940 embargo of Japan**.  The closest I can come is the fall of apartheid South Africa, though that was never a full embargo -- it was more of an international public shaming that worked in part for the reason that the people of South African remained engaged with the world in trade and other matters.  Also I think giving too much credit to international players for the changes in South Africa is to reduce the agency, persistence, and bravery of the internal opposition.

I will say that an attempted blockade of Venezuela will definitely have three entirely predictable outcomes

1. It will hurt the citizens who we are trying to help
2. It will give Marxist apologists an excuse for Venezuela's economic disaster (ie "it wasn't socialism, it was the evil American blockade)
3. It will lead to unnecessary confrontations with other countries.  What happens the first time the US Navy puts a shot across the bow of a French or Russian or Chinese merchant ship?

I have a strong bias towards engagement as a palliative for authoritarian regimes.  Let their folks interact with the quasi-free West long enough and pressure will come for change.  You know who agrees with me?  The leaders of North Korea, which is why they would rather live in the Middle Ages than allow their folks any interaction with the West.

** Postscript:  Readers might respond that the wartime embargo of Japan was extremely effective.  Eventually the US Navy was able to strangle the Japanese economy.  This indeed was effective at reducing the Japanese warmaking ability, at the cost of abject misery for much of the Japanese people.  But note that it never even came close to forcing a regime change.  Only the American atomic bombs combined with the Russian declaration of war eventually (barely) led to Japanese surrender.

I seem to have established a couple of tiny blogging niches for myself, as there are two things with an absolute certainty that readers will email me -- solar road stories and pictures of steam plumes used to illustrate pollution articles.

So as not to disappoint my loyal readership in these two niches, Popular Mechanics as the story of a 5 million euro solar road in France.  And, surprise, it turns out that putting solar panels flat on the ground in a cloudy region and then driving over them does not work very well.

The noise and poor upkeep aren't the only problems facing the Wattway. Through shoddy engineering, the Wattway isn't even generating the electricity it promised to deliver. In 2016, the builders promised it would power 5,000 households.

There proved to be several problems with this goal. The first was that Normandy is not historically known as a sunny area. At the time, the region's capital city of Caen only got 44 days of strong sunshine a year, and not much has changed since. Storms have wrecked havoc with the systems, blowing circuits. But even if the weather was in order, it appears the panels weren't built to capture them efficiently.

“If they really want this to work, they should first stop cars driving on it,” Marc Jedliczka, vice president of the Network for Energetic Transition (CLER), which promotes renewable energy, told the Eurasia Times.

By the way, I called this particular project out as madness when it opened, so all of this was certainly foreseeable.  Just so we don't let those responsible slink away from their bad judgement, this was from an article when the road was first opened

A 1km (0.6-mile) route in the small village of Tourouvre-au-Perche covered with 2,800 sq m of electricity-generating panels, was inaugurated on Thursday by the ecology minister, Ségolène Royal.

Royal has said she would like to see solar panels installed on one in every 1,000km of French highway

More of my solar road articles are here.

Republicans, not completely without justification, frequently argue that papers like the New York Times and Washington Post often frame mis-steps by Democrats in terms of the Republican response.  So instead of "Biden makes racist gaffe" the headline might read "Republicans pounce on Biden over his latest statements."  I will confess that I don't really notice this so much but Conservatives in my feed are often posting examples.

For balance, I thought it would be useful to demonstrate that Conservatives are perfectly willing to do the exact same thing.  Take this story by Rick Moran.  The headline is "Trump Has Democrats Acting Like Pavlov's Dogs."  After a couple of grafs describing Pavlov's famous work, he writes:

Donald Trump gets Democrats hysterical with just about anything he tweets. It's a classic Pavlovian response and Trump plays his opponents like a well-tuned fiddle. He doesn't even have to say anything necessarily controversial. Whatever he tweets, his opponents see 1) racism, 2) fascism, 3) white supremacy, or 4) his enabling one or more of the previous. Trump tweets, Dems salivate. It's classic.  He knows exactly which buttons to push, which subjects are liable to turn liberals into sputtering, spitting, stammering piles of gelatinous goo.

It's not until like the 13th paragraph that we find out what the article is actually about, which is this:

Trump shared a tweet and video from  conservative comedian Terrence Williams that claimed without evidence that former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- Trump's 2016 presidential election rival -- were responsible for Epstein's death. The Federal Bureau of Prisons and Attorney General Bill Barr said Epstein died in an "apparent suicide" while in federal custody.

I consider myself to be one of the last people in America who can evaluate Trump's actions on a case-by-case basis without resorting to a default tribal position.  And I will say that this is ...  pretty f*cking egregious.  On a number of dimensions.  First and and foremost, the DOJ has already announced an investigation into this matter, so Trump is effectively commenting on an active Federal investigation in its very early stage.  I encourage you to check Mr. Google and search for times where Conservatives criticized Obama for commenting on an active investigation.  I remember a number of such occasions, e.g. here.

Second, not only is he commenting on an active investigation, he is suggesting a suspect.  Yes, I know the comic is having fun with the Clintons-knocking-off-their-opponents meme.  That is fine for a comic, but it is unacceptable for the person at the top of the federal law enforcement establishment.  This is how people like Richard Jewell had their lives ruined.  The fact that the suspected targets here are a former US President and Mr. Trump's opponent in the last election just make this all the worse.

This behavior of Trump is indefensible, which I suppose is why Mr. Moran chose to play the "Democrats pounce" card.

I find this depressing:

We seem to NEED an enemy.  We hop from one enemy to another -- Soviet Union to Iraq to Al Qaeda to Russia to Iran and now to China (with a certain minority always having Israel as their enemy).   I find this depressing.  As I told a reader in a private email the other day, for whatever cynicism I project here, I am actually a sloppy optimist, a pacifist, and a conflict avoider.  Maybe that is part of the appeal of Canada or New Zealand in surveys -- I mean, its hard to imagine them having enemies.

We had a Chinese exchange student back when my kids were in high school who frequently visits us here in the US.  The first day we saw here in America she looked exactly like Honey in the Doonesbury comics -- Mao jacket and hair and glasses and all.  After four years of college at Michigan, she is as American as my kids.  She and her friends want so much to be like us in so many ways, without rejecting her Chinese cultural heritage.

This country has so much positive soft power -- everyone around the world wants to be here and partake of our culture.  I don't think either Republicans or Democrats really understand the real reasons behind this pull.  Republicans seem to believe folks are lining up at the border for welfare checks while I don't know what Democrats believe any more, as their Presidential candidates all reject many of the great things about this country I would have thought attracted people.  Maybe that is why politicians of both parties so consistently piss away this potential goodwill.

I am not naive about China -- they are an authoritarian state desperately in need of reform.  I just don't think going into cold war tension mode with them is going to help.  I tend to believe in the power of engagement by ordinary people with the rest of the world to drive change, which we should have been trying years ago in Cuba.  Isolating authoritarian regimes is really just doing their work for them.

Kevin Drum published this map on his blog, which he says was originally from the Washington Post.  He does not include a link so I can't give any more background on the chart.  For example, I have no idea which surface temperature data set it is based on.

The fact that smart guy like Kevin Drum can publish this uncritically just demonstrates how little even vociferous global warming advocates actually understand about the issue.  Because all this chart does is reinforce a skeptic argument that the global surface temperature data set is corrupted and can exaggerate warming trend data.

Let's start with this:  I have read much of the IPCC reports and have skimmed the rest, and I can say with certainty that these reports contain no theory about how increasing the concentration of atmospheric CO2 from 0.03% to 0.04% causes warming of 2C or more focused in hotspots as small as a 50 mile radius.  There is absolutely no theory, and I would argue no way, that a general global warming trend of 1-1.5C per century is causing warming 2-3 times that rate narrowly over San Jose, California or Phoenix, AZ.

The fact that many of these hotspots are focused over urban areas is a good indicator that this temperature data set is corrupted with urban heat island biases.  This is a different kind of man-made effect but one which is local and is not the result of a global warming trend, and thus should not be in a database aimed at measuring this global warming trend.

Something like 10 years ago I saw a similar chart online based on USHCN measurement stations.  At that time, the chart showed a hotspot over Tucson

At the time, Anthony Watt was running his Surface Stations project to document the conditions of all the USHCN temperature stations (the crosses on the map) that formed the basis of the US global warming / temperature trend numbers.  So I drove down to Tucson to see the temperature station in the middle of that hotspot.  What I found was that the temperature station that 100 years ago was in a rural open field was now measuring the temperature of an asphalt parking lot in the middle of a large city:

As an aside, this was a fun project as I still see this picture reproduced in random places from time to time.  After this picture got some publicity, the government shut this station down and moved it to a better location.

But the point is that the hotspot on the temperature change map was both real and fake.  Real in the sense that Tucson was definitely hotter due to the change in land use, as are most all cities (just watch the weather in a city and they will often say that it will be a low of 45 in the city, and 40 in the outlying areas).  My son and I measured the urban heat island in Phoenix for a high school science project.  We found it to be as high as a 6-8F difference between city and the surrounding countryside at certain times of day.

But the hotspot was fake because this had nothing to do with global warming from CO2, and thus including this hotspot in the temperature data was exaggerating the global warming trend.  This is especially true since there are only a few data points, so this reading for Phoenix was averaged into the reading all over the Southwest and tended to raise the official temperatures for much of Arizona, not just in Tucson.  Where temperature stations are sparse, such as in northeast Montana, a single bad surface temperature station can corrupt the data for a large area.  This effect is even further exaggerated in places like Africa, where temperature stations can be hundreds of kilometers apart.

This is one reason satellite temperature measurement makes so much sense, as it is not subject to these sorts of biases (though it has other issues, including sensor drift and the fact that satellites can shift orbits and eventually die).  Whenever you see high temperature records today, they are usually set in the city at the airport, a big paved facility in the center of an urban area that 50 years ago was probably an open field.  There is a good chance the record has more to do with urbanization around the temperature measurement station than with global warming.

I believe the scientific community at NOAA and GISS have been almost criminally negligent with the surface temperature network over the last 30 years.  In the late 80's, when we became concerned with global warming, experts knew all too well about vast problems in how we measure surface temperatures.  We have invested tens of billions of dollars to fight global warming, but practically zero to measure it better.  We should have invested in a better, more reliable, less biased (in the scientific not political sense of that word) measurement system.  The amount of money we wasted in Solyndra would have paid for the upgrades, but we still have done nothing.  As a result, much of the warming signal is actually manual corrections to the raw data, undermining the signal to noise ratio of this critical metric and calling into question the bias (in the political not scientific sense) of these manual corrections (eg here and here).  For example, it turns out the past continues to cool.

Postscript Bonus:

The Danish Meteorological Institute, which has a key role in monitoring Greenland’s climate, last week reported a shocking August temperature of between 2.7C and 4.7C at the Summit weather station, which is located 3,202m above sea level at the the centre of the Greenland ice sheet, generating a spate of global headlines.

But on Wednesday it posted a tweet saying that a closer look had shown that monitoring equipment had been giving erroneous results.

“Was there record-level warmth on the inland ice on Friday?” it said. “No! A quality check has confirmed out suspicion that the measurement was too high.”

I am perfectly willing to believe that some school districts somewhere have spending too low to ever provide the education we expect in 2019.  But after sending my kids to a private school that did a fabulous job with kids and whose tuition was lower per student than the spending in most public schools, I have become suspicious of pleas for more and more money.  It seems that lack of money is ALWAYS the claimed problem at public schools.

In fact, I am increasingly convinced the problem is not lack of money but how the money is spent.  As the percentage of staff in most public schools who are administrators rather than teachers climbs over 50%, many public schools are doing exactly what every other government bureaucracy does -- starve spending for actual public services in favor of feeding a growing, increasingly well-paid administrative staff.

Here is this week's example.  Via Zero Hedge:

The Baltimore Teachers Union (BTU) has set up a donation page on their website to raise money and supply classrooms with fans this school year because of 60 Baltimore City School (BCS) buildings don't have air conditioning.

"It's no secret that Baltimore's students have had to weather the spectrum of extreme temperatures in their classrooms. We've all seen the photos of kindergarteners sitting in their coats and mittens at their morning circle. The reverse is true when school is back in session at the end of summer, when schools' internal temperatures have been measured at over 100 degrees. The Baltimore Teachers Union knows that educators' working conditions are students' learning conditions," BTU said on the donation page under the title "Donate to the BTU Fan Drive."

You see this all the time -- teachers begging the public for donations to help them through shortages of basic school supplies.  The blame is always put on public funding -- obviously Baltimore public schools are starved for cash and forced to beg for simple infrastructure items like fans.  But wait:

Of the 100 largest school systems based on enrollment in the United States, the five school systems with the highest spending per pupil in 2017 were New York City School District in New York ($25,199), Boston City Schools in Massachusetts ($22,292), Baltimore City Schools in Maryland ($16,184), Montgomery County School District in Maryland ($16,109), and Howard County School District in Maryland ($15,921). Maryland had one additional school system in the top 10, making it four of the top 10 school systems in the United States.

In the public recreation field, I call this borrowing from the infrastructure.  Infrastructure maintenance and spending is starved in favor of richer deals for growing administrative staffs.  That is why most major parks agencies have billions of dollars in deferred maintenance.  Transit agencies apparently do the same thing.

In no particular order, and sure to grow as I ponder it more:

1. Tribal rather than thinking responses to any argument
2. Using the wackiest person that can be found as representative of an entire group
3. Judging the individual by the group to which they belong ("racism" and "sexism" used to be examples of this but apparently these words are defined very differently in practice today)
4. Bad headlining (can include social media summaries) that obscures complicated situations with definitive black and white judgments.  When was the last time you clicked through from a social media headline to the underlying article and ever found it to actually say what the headline claimed?
5. Using tortured logic (or even no logic at all) to claim the worst possible interpretation of a person's arguments
6. Attacking a speaker's hypothesized motives, rather than their actual arguments
7. Using ad hominem attacks rather than rational responses to arguments  (the prior #6 is really a subset of this, but the claimed ability magically be able to read opponent's minds is so prevalent that I wanted to break them apart).
8. Post-modern "fake but accurate" facts. "It does not matter if fact X is wrong because it fits in so well with narrative Y we have created."  e.g. "this story about AOC turns out not to be true but it pretty accurately illustrates how uninformed she is."
9. Stretching definitions of words to try to tar lesser crimes with the opprobrium meant for greater crimes (modern examples include "sexual assault" and "racism."
10. Only learning about the arguments of person X from people opposed to person X (a sure path to failing the ideological Turing test).  Examples:  Relying on Rush Limbaugh as one's only source for knowing what Hillary Clinton's political positions are.  Never reading climate skeptics directly but only learning about what they supposedly say from those opposed to climate skeptics.
11. Failure to be skeptical about any story or argument that support's one's own position or "side."  (I know I struggle with this in my personal reading."

Folks know I completely disagree with the whole premise of Trump's trade actions with China.  Tariffs on foreign goods hurt this country and its consumers even if the other country does not reciprocate with lower tariffs.

But let's put this all aside and think strategy.  A trade war is about creating enough pain for the other side's leadership that they agree to give in to your demands.  So the game is about American leadership outlasting Chinese leadership in dealing with unhappiness of its citizens due to the trade restrictions.  Put in this light, doesn't it seem like the strategy is doomed?  When would you ever expect the leadership of a democracy to be able to outlast an authoritarian government in terms of living with unhappiness from its citizens?

ACC Business is apparently a subsidiary of AT&T that provides high speed dedicated data lines (think T1 lines if they still call it that).

Long rambling customer service nightmares are hard to describe in a coherent or engaging manner, so I will mostly avoid it.  The episode began innocently, 6 months ago, with an ACC Business salesman calling us asking if we would like to take advantage of lower pricing.  We said yes, signed off, and that should have been that.  Unfortunately the sales person filed the papers incorrectly internally as a new service, setting us off on a kafka-esque adventure were two accounts were created for the same service and it seemed to be impossible, given ACC's internal systems, to merge the accounts without terminating the physical service in the field.  Every month ACC Business merrily billed us twice for the same service, and threatened immediate extinction if we refused to pay one or the other bill.

After spending over a dozen hours of my personal time on the phone with this company I discovered the ACC Business unwritten customer service rules:

1. No matter how many people told you that the person you are contacting is (finally) the right person, the person you are talking to is NEVER responsible for whatever it will take in their internal systems to fix the mess
2. Any past mistakes made by ACC (e.g. their creating a second account by accident) are actually the customer's mistakes, somehow
3. No matter how much time you spend on the phone with them, all past conversations are forgotten and inaccessible to the person you are talking to and thus require you to start from scratch trying to describe the issue and history to yet another new person.

I turns out there is a whole cottage industry of paid consultants whose entire job is to try to act as an intermediary between customers and ACC Business to fix these kinds of (apparently) frequent SNAFU's.  The very existence of such people should tell you all you need to know.  Such a consultant fixed my problem 2 months ago, I thought.

Until I got a note this morning from their disconnect department, saying in part:

If the information is not received within 2 business days, your request will be cancelled. At that time, you will be required to start the process over by contacting our Customer Care Department.

If you need assistance completing the required information or have any questions, please contact our Customer Care Department at 888-286-2686

Of course, per standard ACC Business procedure, the people at that phone number provided me in the email knew nothing about the email, and disavowed any involvement whatsoever with the disconnect department.  This is roughly equivalent to American Airlines telling you that you need to contact them about your upcoming reservation and then giving you a contact number in the catering department.   ACC Business customer "service" could not give me a direct number for the disconnect team or any way to contact them about this email.  So I called my consultant again and prepared to write them another check.

If there is any other way, any way imaginable, to achieve your goals without involving ACC Business I would highly recommend that alternative.

Postscript:  ACC Business has to be bad to displace my previous awful customer service award winners, which were several dying Yellow Page companies that went to quasi-fraudulent ends to try to avoid stopping my ad and ceasing to bill me.  Seriously, your customer service really has to be bad when your otherwise legal business model has worse customer service than a company resorting to fraud.