Lies, Damned Lies and Carbon Dioxide

The US government says 2014 was the hottest year on record, and the fourth such record since 1997. Skeptics say global warming stopped 18 years ago. Who is full of it? The graph shows temperatures since 1950 with El Niños in red. (It does not include 2014, which was the warmest year yet, and not an El Niño.)

Both the government and skeptics are trying to mislead us.

Rubio gets it. Stewart struggles to keep up.

On Tuesday, Jon Stewart interviewed conservative senator Marco Rubio. This sketch from before the interview provides context for some of the banter that follows:

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/dic6af/florida-haters

Here's the interview:

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/extended-interviews/d7iye4/marco-rubio-extended-interview

Rubio is working on bills that aren't just bipartisan alternatives to liberal proposals that Jon Stewart tries to inject into the conversation (like free community college and raising the minimum wage.) Rubio has actually done some homework and found smarter ideas. Two examples:

Before Obamacare: the only constant is change

How was American health insurance changing before Obamacare?

According to the US Census Bureau, between 2005 and 2010, 18 million Americans stopped getting health insurance from a job. About a third of this was people switching to government insurance (mostly retirees.) Some of it was part of a longer trend of fewer insured dependents, but mostly it was because of people being unemployed for more than 6 months or not getting insurance from their new job.

Bro Tech

Back when people still thought the future was flying cars and moon bases, the word "high tech" was coined to describe cutting edge, advanced technology, with the implication that technology was progressing upward with significant steps.

Then "high tech" became a source of anxiety. As automation replaced factory workers, industry and government told people to learn new skills that would be needed by future jobs that would be created by new technology.

See for example this extraordinarily disingenuous and manipulative advertisement by a private college founded by a manufacturing company. In February of this year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued ITT Tech for predatory lending.

Teleportation: Version Control not Bandwidth Problem

NBC News has posted a very good article about a recent study which concluded that teleporting a human would take a quadrillion years. The original paper assumes we want to "recreate the human brain on a quantum level" and then transmit it with 30 GHz microwaves - in other words pretty much the way the transporters teleport people in Star Trek.

This is a good way to show that the fictional transporter is poorly engineered, but it is not how you would actually make a machine to teleport people.

Star Venom

Why are the heavens silent? Are we alone in the universe? Where is ET? Here's one possibility:

At some point around 5-10 billion years ago our galaxy was full of civilizations that traveled between the stars.

Each civilization would eventually disappear, perhaps driven to extinction by competition or perhaps evolved into something different. But they were always replaced by another civilization.

This pattern ended gradually. Over a period of 1-10 billion years, the number of new interstellar civilizations fell to zero. Intelligent life would evolve over and over again, and then disappear before spreading beyond the planet where the intelligence evolved.

Complexity is Simple

According to the New England Complex Systems Institute, high food prices triggered rioting around the world in 2008 and 2011 and we are due for another wave of global social unrest this summer.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says global food prices are becoming more volatile because...

“Increased vulnerability is being triggered by an apparent increase in extreme weather events and a dependence on new exporting zones, where harvest outcomes are prone to weather vagaries; a greater reliance on international trade to meet food needs at the expense of stock holding; a growing demand for food commodities from other sectors, especially energy; and a faster transmission of macroeconomic factors onto commodity markets, including exchange rate volatility and monetary policy shifts, such as changing interest rate regimes. 

What is more, financial firms are progressively investing in commodity derivatives as a portfolio hedge since returns in the commodity sector seem uncorrelated with returns to other assets. While this ‘financialisation of commodities’ is generally not viewed as the source of price turbulence, evidence suggests that trading in futures markets may have amplified volatility in the short term.”

Plain English translation:

• global warming: climate change from using fossil fuels
• deregulation: special export zones
• globalization: loss of national self-reliance
• peak oil: growing cash crops and biofuel instead of food
• capitalism: using food production as a bank

In other words the hippies are right. Allowing wealthy people and corporations to accumulate and trade control of land, industry and infrastructure gave us a cycle of reinvestment in technology and resource extraction, leading ultimately to a world with many more, healthier, wealthier, better-educated people. But this is also an volatile and expensive world, and at the peak of our prosperity we have decided to stop controlling the volatility and ignore the hidden costs.