Tab-clearing, Nov 27

• Search engines are things we use to learn.
• Most global warming has been happening in the oceans. The warming happening in the atmosphere is kind of a sideshow.
• The Globe and Mail gave Jeff Rubin a blog. Weird.
• World's largest gold marketer says we've past Peak Gold. Of course, this titanic global corporation is run by hippies and communists who hate capitalism, I'm sure.
• We don't know how to build cities anymore.
• If Argentina can whip unemployment, why can't the US? (Answer: because America doesn't know how to run a country anymore.)

If true, we're boned

This is the kind of news that makes me want to accept Jesus as my personal lord and saviour:

The East Antarctic ice sheet has been losing mass for the last three years, according to an analysis of data from a gravity-measuring satellite mission.

The scientists involved say they are "surprised" by the finding, because the giant East Antarctic sheet, unlike the west, has been thought to be stable.

Other scientists say ice loss could not yet be pinned on climate change, and uncertainties in the data are large....

Melting the East Antarctic sheet would raise sea levels by much more - about 50-60m.

But scientists have generally discounted the possibility of it happening because the region is so cold.

The Grace measurements suggest there was no net ice loss between 2002 and 2006.

But since then, East Antarctica has been losing 57 billion tonnes (Gt) per year.

If East Antarctica is becoming unstable, then there's no end to the trouble in sight for the next 100 years. Even Jim Hansen -- who, while firmly grounded in the science, is yelling about this stuff as loudly as possible -- has mostly presumed that East Antarctica would remain stable.

These analyses are very preliminary, so here's hoping that, for the first time in a while, that the bad news on the climate front is actually alarmist, instead of prescient.

In private conversations, people are sometimes unguarded -- FILM AT 11

The latest revelations about the private discussions of climate scientists are so shocking, so disturbing, I can barely bring myself to type the words.

You see, my fair readers, accredited professionals in the field of climate science don't think much of the cranks and frauds out there polluting the discourse. I know! Shocking! Even worse, they use some impolite language to express their opinions. Clearly, the entire scientific edifice of climate change will come a-tumbling down.

The whole thing makes me laugh. I've had more than a few discussions with climate scientists as I finished up my degree this year, and the idea of getting excited because of the language in the emails is hilarious. I've had a climate scientist start a sentence, referring to a prominent Canadian climate skeptic, "he's so fucking stupid..." before he remembered the recorder was on. Calling the deniers "idiots" is relatively tame, compared to what some have said to me on the record. Of course, they aren't fond of reporters either, which led to further paint-peeling uses of their substantial vocabularies.

No, really, this won't work

Matthew Yglesias sadly reiterates his belief that my country shouldn't exist:

But the case for US-Canadian political union is pretty clear. As things stand, Canadian citizens are intensely impacted by decisions taken in Washington but have no real ability to influence them. Political union would give residents of Vancouver and Toronto an opportunity to have a say in decisions that are important to their lives. What’s more, the politics of AmeriCan would be more sensible than current US politics. There’d be a lot of microeconomic efficiency gains, and bringing America’s higher per capita income together with Canada’s vast natural resources could be beneficial for everyone.

Let's take these in turn:

• Canadians actually more or less get along fine without a direct voice in American policy-making -- as do residents of Washington, DC. We make our wishes known, and we are either listened to or ignored depending on domestic US concerns. When things are going well, we do alright. When not, not. You know what really protects us from the downside of US decision making? Being a sovereign country.
• The politics of the US would, if anything, become only marginally more sane if we all started voting in your elections. Marginally, as in "margin of error". Canada has only 10% of the US population. This means, if you can do the arithmetic, that even in 2008, as his Presidency was an increasingly bitter joke, that there were twice as many Americans who believed that George W. Bush was doing a good job as there were Canadians, period. An influx of Canadian voters would shift the bars only slightly.
• America is already going to have access to Canadian natural resources, by an obscure and complicated mechanism called "paying for them". This is particularly strange, because unlike the median American voter, Matt usually seems to understand that resources can be bought and paid for on the open market, and that we don't necessarily need to use political means (including massive firepower) to secure economic goods like oil. So WTF?

Let me propose an equally logical act on Yglesias' part: he should join the Republican party. For most of his life, Republicans have dominated either the Congress or Presidency, or both. The GOP, then, is an institution of incredible political importance and as a Democrat, he has no real input on their policy-making decisions. I think we can all agree that he's unlikely to join the Party of No anytime soon, though. If he thinks about the reasons for why that's so, he might stumble upon the reason why Canadians might view the idea of a political union with the US as a bad idea.

Writing the headline while it's still relevant

Liberals and NDP statistically tied!  (Just barely: the AR poll has a MoE of 3.1%, the IR poll has the same.

Won't last, but as it happens I'm reading The Strange Death of Liberal England. Kind of eerie.

The American impulse to misunderstand things continues unabated

Steve Benen, who actually is a smart yankee, writes:

Offered a very good deal, Iran nevertheless continues to be uncooperative.

Except that the deal Iran is being offered isn't very good at all. Following the link, we get a NY Times article which says:

CAIRO — Iran’s foreign minister said this week that his government would not ship its stockpile of low-enriched uranium out of the country, making him the highest ranking official so far to declare that Iran would renege on a deal aimed at defusing a confrontation with the West over its nuclear program.

“We will definitely not send our 3.5-percent-enriched uranium out of the country,” Manouchehr Mottaki, the foreign minister, told the semiofficial ISNA news agency in remarks reported Wednesday.

One of the things that is missing here is the fact that, under all relevant international laws, Iran has the unquestioned right to uranium enrichment. It is, quite literally, as firmly rooted in international treaties as the right to vote. (This is a political science joke, sort of.) As far as international law is concerned, asking Iran to give up the right to enrich uranium is like asking America to give up the right to vote. This was put in print decades ago as part of the 1950s "Atoms for Peace" plan put forward by the US government of the time. Say it with me one more time: Iran has the right to Uranium enrichment. This fact is well known in Iran, and the Iranian opposition -- remember, the "good guys" from the protests earlier this year -- are actually quite fond of their country's nuclear program:

But in Tehran, where officials insist their nuclear program is for civilian purposes only, the deal was attacked from across the political spectrum. When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seemed to suggest it was acceptable, he was criticized from all sides, even by the reformists he long called too soft on the West.

The point of "Atoms for Peace" was to take some of the scary edge off of nuclear technology, and spread "peaceful" nuclear technology throughout the developing world, because there was no possible way that could go wrong. But an inherent part of that was to allow countries that were recovering from World War II -- and those recovering from colonialism -- to enrich natural Uranium to the point where it would be useful for power production. In standard reactors, this is somewhere less than 20% U235, but the important point is that the technology that allows a nation to enrich Uranium to power-producing quality (protected by international treaty!) is the same technology that allows them to make weapons-grade material. This is why Japan is both entirely within the legal limits of nuclear technology and never more than 18 months away from having a bomb in hand. (The above is grossly simplified because it's late and this is a blog.)

Moreover, if we're going to have a global trade in nuclear power, Iran has to have a right to uranium enrichment. Otherwise, we're just proving countries like Iran and India correct when they say that non-proliferation is just a thin cover for keeping advanced technology as the exclusive preserve for white countries.

The other alternative would be for us to get rid of nuclear power altogether, because the enrichment needed for nuclear power is not fundamentally different from that needed for nuclear weapons. But that's probably too radical a step: we're so much fonder of treating symptoms than causes.

A brief story

So because of our recent move, Vicki and I have had to buy a new router and re-arrange the connections between our computers. Where her computer was once wired to the router directly, my computer used a USB wireless adapter to connect to our network. That's basically switched now, so I had to install the USB adapter's drivers on her computer -- because Windows or the adapter manufacturer, for some reason, have totally missed the whole "plug and play" thing that USB accessories are normally so good at.

This led me to three separate attempts to install the driver properly on Vicki's desktop, which had a three-or-four year old install of XP on it. None of these worked. I suggested that we finally reformat her HD and reinstall Windows XP, something that we'd been meaning to do for months now. Except that the registered, original XP install disks I have no longer work properly, so we end up with a partial install of XP that refuses to authorize. How do we authorize? By getting the desktop to talk to the Internet -- something it refuses to do wired or wirelessly.

So, because I didn't want Vicki to have to endure any more time with a Microsoft-induced boat anchor than necessary, I installed Ubuntu 9.10 (which I've been using on my laptop) as a stopgap measure. In contrast to XP's procedure of 1) Pray it works 2) Swear a lot when it doesn't, the procedure with Karmic Koala was, well, what it should be with an OS install in 2009:

1) Select "install". Answer a few questions, none more advanced than selecting one of three partition options.

2) OS installs.

3) Plug in wireless adapter.

4) Mirabile dictu, the wireless adapter works from the moment you plug it in, find the network correctly, and prompts for the password. [This strengthens my belief that the problem was on the MS end, not the USB manufacturer end.]

Now, this is unfair to Windows XP because I'm comparing a 2009 OS to a 2001 one. Fine, but Microsoft has always had the resources to make an OS that works well. I take the fact that most people who've used it tell me that Windows 7 is actually quite good an indication that Microsoft is actually taking the threat of users abandoning them seriously as Apple becomes more of a threat, not that MS has suddenly achieved what was impossible before.

Sadly, I can't convince Vicki to go without XP for too long -- too many MS-specific apps that she needs -- but it will be enough for now.

And generally, I can say that I've now used Ubuntu for the last two years almost continuously, including some pretty heavy use to finish my Masters, and found there was little that I couldn't do on it except of course play Windows games. And the one moment of total digital failure -- when my desktop ate all the data on my USB drive, including two months of interview tapes -- was the result of XP, not Ubuntu.

There are still kinks to it -- it doesn't talk well with my big-screen TV -- so that's really the only reason any of my computers have XP on them still. That and my desire to keep killing Nazis/Soviets/Insert bad guy here.

However did the Americans get to the North Pole without asking our permission?

You know, for a bunch of people who've spent the last few weeks talking about the former governor of Alaska, I'm really surprised that Canadian journalists keep jumping at these little stunts:

The recent surfacing of a U.S. submarine near the North Pole and an increase in military activity in the Arctic this year should send a warning to the Canadian government that other nations are serious about boosting their presence in the resource-rich region, says a specialist on Canada’s northern security....

It is unclear exactly what route the USS Texas took during its voyage, whether it transited through Canadian waters or whether Canada was told in advance about the visit.

I have absolutely no personal knowledge of this event, or any of the other surfacings of US nuclear subs in the recent past, but I'll guarantee you that none of them transited Canadian waters to get to the North Pole, if for no other reason than because submarine crews -- being incapable of seeing where they're going -- don't like to enter narrow passages choked with ice if they don't have to. The Texas stayed well clear of Canadian waters, because the US happens to own this little piece of land called "Alaska" and can make a direct run to the North Pole from there.

Which brings me to another point, which is that we should all really calm down about the whole Northwest Passage dealie. In short, it won't be nearly as exciting as some are hoping if and when it clears, and that's due in part to the fact that -- unlike the Russians -- Canada has never really invested heavily in its northern tier. Take it away, Gwynne Dyer:

The problem for Canada is that all the routes for a Northwest Passage involve shallow and/or narrow straits between various islands in the country’s Arctic archipelago, and the prevailing winds and currents in the Arctic Ocean tend to push whatever loose sea ice there is into those straits. It is unlikely that cargo ships that are not double-hulled and strengthened against ice will ever get insurance for the passage at an affordable price.

Whereas the Northeast Passage is mostly open water (once the ice retreats from the Russian coast), and there is already a major infrastructure of ports and nuclear-powered ice-breakers in the region. If the distances are roughly comparable, shippers will prefer the Northeast Passage every time – and the distances ARE comparable.

Just look at the Arctic Ocean on a globe, rather than in the familiar flat-earth Mercator projection. It is instantly obvious that the distance is the same whether shipping between Europe and East Asia crosses the Arctic Ocean by running along the Russia’s Arctic coast (the Northeast Passage) or weaving between Canada’s Arctic islands (the Northwest Passage).

The same is true for cargo travelling between Europe and the west coast of North America. The Northwest Passage will never be commercially viable.

Emphasis mine. If there's anything to be done in the Arctic because of the receding ice, it will be for purely domestic Canadian reasons, not because the Northwest Passage offers new commercial opportunities.

Which makes me a little sad, as a Canadian...