Rhinocrisy

I haven’t talked about oil in a while, mostly because ever since the ol’ economy took a big shit and died it hasn’t been a big issue - oil consumption drops with other kinds of consumption (fewer trucks delivering goods, fewer people driving and flying around, fewer people heating their pools with a hundred curling irons, etc.), so things have been pretty slow for the past few years. Snazzy graph from EIA:

Nevertheless, though things have slowed, that doesn’t mean our wild-eyed blubberings about peak oil are now completely mitigated. Quite the contrary; the problem was quite real, and remains. I read the other day that when OPEC recently trimmed their output in order to encourage the oil price back up around $100/bbl after it collapsed down to the $40s, the level they ratcheted down to was still an incredible 97% of capacity, leaving a whopping 3% margin of spare capacity - at the low end of productivity.

So we should be expecting news like we got last week from the US military, which announced that it expects a major shortfall in oil production in the next two years, and a serious crisis by 2015. By then, they expect a shortfall of 10 million barrels a day - that is, something like 12% of global oil consumption. As an exercise, just try to imagine the effect this will have on the price of oil.^*

We’ll pause to note the irony in the US military - the largest single consumer of oil in the world, at about 400,000 bbl/day - making this announcement. They haven’t announced exactly what they’re going to do about it. Maybe if we fought a couple of more wars it would help. Fortunately, it seems like the economy is going to be lying in the shitter and weeping for a bit longer, which might buy us some time.

In the meanwhile, to make up the shortfall, I advocate going back to doing what we were doing before: sending teams of ferocious, hook-wielding men in boats to kill thousands of whales for their oil-rich blubber. I’ve already done my part by canceling my contributions to Greenpeace.

^* Put a few hill giants and evil wizards into your scenario for good measure, just to spice it up.

This New York Times article on the subject of the mash-up culture, and its origin in deconstruction’s implied nihilism, is a pretty close parallel to my previous post on the subject. Although the author it quotes, Jaron Lanier, seems to favor a technological rather than philosophical culprit as the main antagonist: “[S]ince the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”

Here’s one to add to the “list of insights other people have probably already had”:

This morning I was at Mission Comics staring at some comic books - graphic novels, in fact - which are a medium I find attractive for reasons too numerous to list here. If you’ve read Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” you’re probably familiar with his presentation of the comic as a truly modern art form, whose loud, brash strokes and larger-than-life characters are appropriate allegorical vehicles for the oversized problems of the world. And as our cynical self-critique has become more elaborate, as the demand for analysis has become more stringent, comics, and the characters in them, have become more complex and fraught - a post-modern art-form, a digest edition of the contemporary mind. By peering through its pages we may get a glimpse of the cross-section of our gyri.

As usual^* I am meandering towards my point - Anyway, I was looking at these comics; my companion commented on the revisionist nature of a lot of the work - hashing and rehashing old characters and storylines, reinventing them and updating them to reflect more modern sensibilities, or merely to explore the familiar tropes when pressed and extruded through the gears of a new apparatus.

This is nothing new, of course - art has always been collage-work, and maybe there is even a kind of prestige to be found in the artifice of reference. Shakespeare relentlessly plundered, from Plutarch and Ovid and many others. Did he even have a single original story? Is there such a thing? Perhaps not - the diet of words we’re fed on is itself formed from the regurgitations of thousands of generations preceding us; we are creatures built of contingencies. And of course, as Qohelet said, there is nothing new under the sun.

However, I don’t feel out of place in suggesting that contemporary art - contemporary media in general - elevates this kind of autophagy to a central principle. Practically all we produce is reconstructed from existing fragments - mashups, remixes, samples in music, “reboots” of film and television franchises, an endless parade of sequels, retellings of fairytales or children’s classics as seen through the bleary, fever-reddened eye of the present.

And simultaneously, as the lexicon of our culture expands, our memory (and therefore the body of reference we can draw on) narrows - we’re quickly going to proceed from chewing on our toes to swallowing up our own esophagus, Klein-bottle-like. Check out this Wired article suggesting reboots of scifi film and television stories, including the still-active television show Heroes, itself a shameless digest of superhero comics. The culmination of this trend will probably be publications composed only of chapter-heading quotes and a bibliography.^†

To visit and revisit the past - even the recent past - is either the product of trauma - we are so overwhelmed by the events of the past century that coprophagia is a nutritional and digestive requirement - or else it is the product of fear. We fear the future, and we fear the presentation of new ideas, now that we are all so well-trained in the art of deconstruction. The scope of our problems is ever-broadening, but we long ago eradicated our traditional frameworks for addressing them. There is no way to imagine our future. So we re-imagine our past, again, and again, until all our flesh is consumed.

Meanwhile, the dragon looms ahead.

^* I really ought to stop having these fanciful asides to my habitual readership, which surely does not exist. One can’t form habits around such an irregular basis.

^‡ A disgusting coinage if ever there was one, as if words and ideas were so much birdseed to be held in vessels to attract the maddened and voracious flocks (viz., you, my dear readers). We ought to find the invidious bureaucrats who created the term “content provider” and scourge them till their skins are a tartan of bruises.

When I fold my t-shirts, I hold them by the corners of the shoulders and make a snap-and-fold motion, folding them lengthwise in a single movement. I do this with the ease of long practice, even though I have never consciously noted this action before.

This is the sort of nonsense that would end up on my Twitter feed, if I had one. You guys should feel lucky I don’t.

A few weeks back I happened across a news story trumpeting a link between cell phones and brain tumors, containing the ominous warning that cell phones are “worse than cigarettes”. By coincidence my roommate had happened to ask me if I knew anything about the subject, and so I spent a portion of the previous day scouring PubMed to answer this very question, and had, of course, also compared against cigarettes as the outstanding example of a public-health disaster caused by personal foibles.

So my immediate reaction to the story (”Balls.”) was based on more than just a gut feeling.

But let’s start off by poisoning the well a little bit: the source for this story was an Australian neurosurgeon named Vini Khurana. Vini’s methodology in answering this question was exactly the same as mine: reading some papers on PubMed. We should be clear that reviews are an important part of scientific literature, and they are a great way to collect information and present a perspective on the field. They’re usually the product of specific solicitations by journal editors to respected members of a field - e.g., asking James Hansen to write a review on the global temperature record, or even asking someone like Carl Woese to write a review on the future directions for the entire field of biology. The idea is that someone with a demonstrated expertise in the field is surely best-positioned to report on its history and state-of-the-art.

But no one solicited Vini’s article. In fact, Vini has no history of publication in the field. In fact, Vini didn’t even publish this paper anywhere. It was published on the web and was completely unreviewed.^*

As I’ve suggested before, I think the manner of propagation of many news stories is purely viral: something happens to make it onto some wire service, and if it is interesting or sensational, it spreads. As its exposure increases, so do opportunities for further dissemination - another outlet picks it up, and the cycle continues. This process doesn’t seem to include anything like quality control or actual journalism (mayhap the journalists here can speak to why this might be the case), with the result that bad, bad science gets broadcast loudly around the globe.

At any rate, the question at hand remains to be answered: do cell phones cause brain tumors? After Vini’s own pathetic review, he recommends an actual review in the Journal of Radiation Biology, whose abstract tells us:

Biophysical considerations indicate that there is little theoretical basis for anticipating that RF energy would have significant biological effects at the power levels used by modern mobile phones and their base station antennas. The epidemiological evidence for a causal association between cancer and RF energy is weak and limited. Animal studies have provided no consistent evidence that exposure to RF energy at non-thermal intensities causes or promotes cancer. Extensive in vitro studies have found no consistent evidence of genotoxic potential, but in vitro studies assessing the epigenetic potential of RF energy are limited. Overall, a weight-of-evidence evaluation shows that the current evidence for a causal association between cancer and exposure to RF energy is weak and unconvincing.

That first sentence, by the way, is an important one: there’s little justification for the notion of non-ionizing radiation being a significant cause of DNA damage.

Meanwhile, a simple comparison of some epidemiological studies on the question is revealing. This study finds odds ratios of 1.22 and 0.70 for gliomas and menigiomas respectively. This one finds an odds ratio of 0.6 for gliomas, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.4-0.9. I.e., the study finds that regular cell phone use is slightly protective against gliomas! And finally, this study examines both long- and short-term users of cell phones and finds no increased odds of acquiring tumors through phone use in either group.

By now you are probably shivering in your boots^†, so let’s take you back down a little, with a sentence from this case-control study:

The odds ratio (OR) for lung cancer in current United States smokers relative to nonsmokers was 40.4.

The short version: As you were, lieutenant.

^* Yes, reviews are normally reviewed. The reviewers of reviews are called re-reviewers, and they are required to do their reviewing work between two facing mirrors to deepen their powers of meta-analysis.

^† You are wearing your boots, right?

WTF?

WASHINGTON, Jan. 28 (Xinhua) — In probably his final State of the Union address, President George W. Bush urged on Monday night Congress to quickly pass a 150 billion U.S. dollar economic rescue package to fend off a looming recession.

Three of the most-viewed videos on YouTub today are of Hillary Clinton allegedly crying, or “tearing up”. I, for one, don’t buy it. If you haven’t seen it, here it is:

Clinton is giving a relatively boiler-plate speech about how much she “cares about our country”, and how she “passionately believes” in what she is doing. That, I DO buy: her passion is lust, and we all know what she’s lusting for. But what is she “tearing up” over? Who can tell?

This morning I woke up to some lady on NPR marveling at Hillary’s display of genuine emotion. She interviewed the lady who asked the question, and several others who testified that Hillary’s tears^* had convinced them to vote Clinton! at the very last minute. After vomiting on my pillow, I thought to myself “How the hell am I going to clean this up?” “My God, are we really so starved for political theater that we’re willing to swallow whatever horseshit act some politician can throw at us?” The lady who asked the question, incidentally, did NOT vote Clinton - she voted Obama, because the previous night, Obama’s stirring speech had “moved her to tears”.

I’m truly astonished that people can maintain this level of vacuousness. And not, apparently, a small handful of people - the majority of American adults. Shouldn’t there be an epidemic of head-implosion going on?

^* Which, frankly, are not in evidence in the video to mine eyes. Can you see ‘em?

There’s nothing to shrink the concerns of the world like a near-death experience. Nature red in tooth and claw, facing down the angry beasts of the wood, prevailing over mortality and renewing, however briefly, one’s time in this world. I have returned from Yosemite. The quotidian concerns of homo sapien urbanis seem tiny. For I have done battle with the sooty grouse, and I have lived to tell.
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It may seem as if we’ve resigned ourselves to being “All global warming, all the time!” here at Rhinocrisy. However, this is only illusory. Any random process, like the workings of a human or a hedge-hog brain, will naturally produce confluences which have the appearance of the miraculous, but are in fact the product of mere coincidence.^* We will shortly return to talking about jello sculptures and cow flatulence.^† Meanwhile, here’s a few bits on just how screwed we really are.

If you believe the science, this couldn’t matter more. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is coming out this year, and I’m sure most of you noted the release of the Summary for Policymakers on February 7th, which, with much fanfare, announced that it was the opinion of the scientific community, with 90% certainty, that humans are responsible for the current warming trend.

The projections are quite dire; by 2090, even the low estimate puts the temperature rise at 1.8^oC; mid-range estimates yield a mean shift of 2.4-3.4^oC. But note that this is average warming - the warming on land will be much sharper than warming over the oceans, ~4-5 ^oC, and in the Arctic it will be an astonishing 6-8 ^oC. To put this in persepective, the last Ice Age was about 5 to 7 ^o C from the modern temperature. And as Hedgy points out below, carbon cycle feedback will continue to contribute to warming despite our best efforts on quite long timescales (for us).

Meanwhile, the Policymakers themselves are not speaking in terms of halting or reversing our emissions, but rather in merely slowing their rate of growth.^‡ Just to be clear, this means we will emit more than we did last year or the year before, and next year we’ll emit even more - but the amount of our increase will be smaller. This is presumably a sensible way to look at things if you’re used to thinking in terms of continuous rates of growth and the creep of inflation. In this case, perhaps not so much.

The most concrete steps the Administration likes to crow about is “clean coal”. I wrote about this previously. Surprisingly, the amount they’ve spent on it is rather sparse; only $2.2 billion to date. The favored child of the DOE’s efforts in this regard is something called “FutureGen”, initially touted as a zero-emissions coal-based plant supposed to come online in 2012. Sounds dreamy. What does FutureGen say about this?

During normal operations, emissions will be as low as, if not lower than virtually any other coal plant in the world. However it should be noted that there may be criteria emissions, such as NOx, SO2, and particulates, when the plant is starting up and shutting down.

Here’s some icing on that cake: FutureGen is working hard to find sites for carbon dioxide injection, as part of the much-touted carbon sequestration program. Their minimum target is 1 million tons, but they hope to get as high as 50 million tons. How much CO₂ does the U.S. produce in a year? 5.8 billion tons. Yeah.

At this point you should do your best impression of Curly. Slap your face a few times. Go “woop woop woop woop!” Run around the room, possibly up and down a few walls.

Now that you’ve relaxed a bit, let’s review: coal is the major source of electricity generation in the United States. 50% of our power comes from coal. This number is only going to go up; demand is probably going up thanks to our continuing profligacy. And coal is attractive, despite its considerable environmental failings. It is abundant and cheap. It seems likely that the dozens of new plants that are going to be built in the upcoming years will be coal-based plants. So it’s somewhat distressing that the best result we can hope for out of this is that in ten years’ time, we’ll have almost no improvement whatsoever.

^* For example, if you are watching some re-runs of the X-Files with some friends, and then later that same day you are beamed up by space aliens.

^‡ E.g., see this White House open letter on climate change.

Check out this bizarre segment on Fox News, where a reporter has himself waterboarded in order to, essentially, redeem the technique. His report concludes that, since he was “feeling fine” moments after his “torture”, waterboarding was really “an efficient mechanism to get someone to talk and still have them alive and healthy”.

This should go without saying, but judging from the comments on the linked thread, it needs to be said: this is deeply fucked up. Let’s first briefly mention the fact that there really is no way to properly simulate torture in this situation - the victim is a volunteer, his interrogators^* are merely demonstrating, and he is free to tap out if he feels uncomfortable. Needless to say, this bears little resemblance to actual torture. Other accounts of waterboarding I have read emphasize that the purpose is to convince the subject that they are going to die; that this is an execution.

Now, what is apparently being proposed is that torture (as the reporter candidly calls it) is fine so long as it doesn’t do physical damage to the subject, or cause excrutiating pain. I’m appalled that this is being discussed. We are not seeking the most efficient and least physically invasive mechanism of information-extraction, here. The reason torture is unacceptable is not because it merely leaves scars on the victims (although, obviously, mental scars do not fade as quickly as physical ones), but because it makes a beast of both the torturer and the tortured, both of whom must lose a part of their humanity in the process.^† Cruelty should not be held as a virtue by civilized people. And I think civilization (in the sense of civility) is something we should still be aspiring towards.

But it seems I am wrong. I simply don’t comprehend how we’ve lost our way so thoroughly. This flies in the face of the most basic principles of freedom,^‡ which we allegedly prize so highly that we fight and die in wars around the world to preserve. We’re off the slippery slope. We’re in freefall down a sheer rock face. And there’s broken glass at the bottom.

^* Who are apparently active duty soldiers, and quite gleeful that they know not only how to perform these torture techniques, but lots more. Presumably this story was reported with the eager cooperation of the Pentagon. I don’t know what to make of their desire to advertise their prowess in this odious field, especially since the “reporter” neglected to clarify where or whence this training came from.

^‡ E.g., due process, presumption of innocence, and the basic right not to be subjected to barbaric punishments.