Global warming and desert flowers

Via the University of Arizona, news of a study that shows that anthropogenic climate change (local effects of global warming) is both diminishing and changing the showy Sonoran Desert spring blooms.

Counterintuitively, the change favors more cold-hardy species; as rains get shifted later into the season, germination happens in colder weather. The whole news article is an example of responsible science journalism and is worth reading.

For more information about how AGW will affect Arizona, see the Southwest Climate Change Network website, a project of the University of Arizona.

Robert Shelton weighs in on UA "Climategate" involvement.

This is why it is good to have a scientist as a University president: he knows how to evaluate popular controversies about science.

In full:

M E M O R A N D U M

TO: UA Employees
FROM: Robert N. Shelton, President
SUBJECT: Email Messages on Climate Change
DATE:Dec. 9, 2009

The University of Arizona takes very serious any allegation of impropriety, academic or otherwise. As soon as news accounts surfaced about selected emails that were illegally obtained from a British university computer server and posted publicly, the UA reviewed the material with the full cooperation of UA faculty whose names appeared on some of those messages.

We firmly believe there is no substance to the negative allegations regarding the content of the emails. To the contrary, the work of our professors is contributing substantially to humanity's growing understanding of the origins and nature of global climate change.

As a matter of course, our faculty adhere to the highest standards of research ethics. Their data, once published, are available to other scholars as required by the journals publishing the work, and in most cases are posted online and hence are freely available for download. Their research conclusions are cross-examined through vigorous rounds of peer review. In the case of collaborative research by the UA's Malcolm Hughes, independent studies by other research groups and critical reviews, including by the National Academy of Sciences, have confirmed both the integrity of their research methods and their basic findings.

The research area in question - global climate change - is the subject of vigorous, worldwide debate. The implications of the findings being produced by the world's scientific community are profound. Naturally, there will be those who will not fully understand or be prepared to accept scientific conclusions that may be upsetting. This is an expected part of our faculty's work. Their response is to inform and explain their research methods as transparently and dispassionately as possible.

The UA faculty mentioned in these stolen emails have done so admirably. For that reason, the leadership of the UA has full confidence and pride in both the scientific methods they have employed, and the conclusions they have reached.

Unlike the Arizona Daily Star's false balance--Ross McKitrick is neither a "skeptic" nor a credible person nor one making reasonable accusations--and the Wildcat's parlay of this into an actual accusation by the paper itself of scientific wrongdoing, Shelton nicely gives weight where weight is due. Shelton is not a journalist and not acting as one, but nevertheless, his use of good sense is exemplary and the note is a show of fair-mindedness. Word to the Washington Post and the Star: Impartiality doesn't require you to give equal time (or, in the Post's case, well more than equal time) to the ridiculous. Most of the time, you do not do so!

What we should see from Hughes and Overpeck is a public lecture. They don't owe it to anyone, but it would go a long way to restore confidence, unfairly lost or not.

No word yet on whether or not either scientist plans to hit back. Maybe the Wildcat crossed the line and maybe it didn't--what's "potentially" supposed to mean?--but there have been things written in the blogosphere, especially about Hughes, that are outright libel. Being upset with a scientist's finding does not justify allegations of "fraud", even if one can cite private e-mails out of context to justify this post hoc. "Fraud" is an allegation of fact, not of opinion.

"Climategate" comes to Arizona

Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe has sent intimidating-sounding but somewhat vacuous letters to University of Arizona dendrochronologist Malcolm Hughes and paleoclimatologist Jon "Peck" Overpeck. Something a bit more substantial was directed to U of A General Counsel Lynne Wood.

To Wood:

Recently a large number of alleged CRU documents and e-mails were released to the public. These documents and e-mails outline disturbing trend of actions, which, at the least, imply activity to create a false impression of the certainty of climate change science. I will be conducting an investigation into these matters.

I am requesting that you secure, as soon as possible, all documents and records related to the communications or other interactions with CRU. This would include materials directly and reasonably related to CRU documents, e-mails, and its subject matter. Should you discover that other employees in your agency/organization have interacted with CRU or have furnished information which may be used in communications with CRU, please secure those documents as well.

Very interesting doublespeak there: "Released to the public." Meaning "somebody committed a computer crime, downloaded information from a mailserver, and then released the stolen information to the public."

And the e-mails don't really "imply activity to create a false impression of anything", at least not to a reasonable person familiar with academic science, when put in their proper context. The stolen e-mails may contain evidence that U.K. scientists ran afoul of that country's Freedom of Information laws, at least enough to merit investigation. There's nothing in the e-mails pointing to wrongdoing by any U.S. researcher. Claims to the contrary have all fallen apart upon critical inspection.

But to the point: Inhofe is requesting communications between U of A scientists and those at the CRU--and the "and its subject matter" bit can only mean that he is requesting all documents and records pertaining to climatology done at the U of A, from all labs!

The letters sent to Overpeck and Hughes were clearly both showboating and a smear. The stolen e-mails not imply a single act of wrongdoing by either man, but Inhofe's letters serve a way to imply that their activities are suspect without making an accusation.

The request for all information, however, is clearly nothing but an harassment tactic, designed to prevent scientists from spending their time doing science. Can the "legal eagles" clarify to what extent this request must actually be met?

Overpeck and Hughes are both holding their own in the Daily Star. Those who bother to read can confirm: no wrongdoing here.

If you stop at "We need to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period", yes, it looks bad, but stopping there is simply lazy. When reputations are at stake due diligence is a moral obligation. That's something Inhofe doesn't understand. (And I'd love to see him cross the line to libel, so Overpeck can sue him off the planet!) Overpeck makes due diligence easy:

Overpeck said last week that he had searched through his e-mails dating back a decade, and could find none like Deming referred to. Overpeck pointed out that he has written papers dating to the late 1990s saying that various records, including tree rings, stretching back 1,200 years, confirm earlier assertions that the Medieval period was warmer than today in the North Atlantic and northern Europe — but not globally.
"My papers are the record of fact, and in this case, I obviously did not try to get rid of the MWP," Overpeck said. "Instead, I have tried hard to be clear what it likely was and was not."

As I said: no scandal here, just a mal fide twisting of a scientist's words, a treatment of informal private communications as though they trump what Overpeck actually contributed to the scientific record.

If any Arizona scientist ought to be investigated regarding climate it's probably ASU's Robert Balling. Funding sources do not necessarily or even usually control scientific outcomes, but there are clear tail-wags-dog cases, like Fred Singer and the late Fred Seitz, who went from tobacco denialism to ozone hole denialism to global warming denialism. Balling doesn't publish his arguments against the scientific consensus (meaning, consensus of those with current scientific arguments) in the meaningful sense of "publish" but spends an awful lot of time directing them at a noncritical public. Just what is it that the Western Fuels Association pays him to do?

Balling, of course, will never be investigated by Inhofe, because he's a "skeptic". "Skeptic" in Oklahoman must mean "one who disagrees", without the implications of reason, caution, and modesty that the word usually carries. A skeptic, and most scientists are skeptics, who agrees with the only position compatible with what we know now--as Overpeck does--doesn't count. Being a real skeptic, that gets your research interrupted by a showboating Senator who has an ideological or psychopathological beef with the implications of your work.

No word yet on whether Inhofe's request for anything and everything pertaining to climatology has yet hampered research at the U of A. But Arizona taxpayers and donors to the U should be mad as hell. Being a U.S. Senator shouldn't mean that your peculiar form of crazy be nursed, in the form of a frivolous investigation, at the expense of a university.

Have questions? Readers should follow the instructions in Inhofe's letters and direct them to (202) 224-6176.

Schlomach lies about climate--and includes Plimer in bibliography!

Right-wingers and libertarians of the "nutjob" variety have said a lot of stupid things about the "Cliamategate" black-hat hack of CRU's backup mailserver, most of it simply untrue. The Goldwater Institute's Byron Schlomach--there's no affiliation between the Institute and this 'blog--joined in today, a little "late to the party" following the death of most of the right-wing/right-wing-libertarian talking points.

In full:

Does "ClimateGate" expose weird science or political propaganda?
By Byron Schlomach, Ph.D.

Twenty years ago a biologist showed me a graph from a peer-reviewed scientific journal that showed an alarming increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Then I noticed the graph's scale was logarithmic and made even small increases look exaggerated. I've been skeptical of the science behind global warming ever since.

Weird ScienceNow there's ClimateGate. Somebody hacked the University of East Anglia's e-mail server in England and downloaded e-mails to and from scientists in the Climate Research Unit, perhaps the world's premier climate research center. The messages show scientists engaged in politics over science. One damaging e-mail includes this remark:

"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

"Mike" is Michael Mann, made famous by the "hockey stick" temperature diagram Al Gore helped popularize. It first appeared in a UN report on global warming and purports to show that earth's recent temperature is the highest in a thousand years, using tree ring data to reconstruct past temperatures. Mann apparently grafted in data from unrelated modern sources to get the desired result when ring data didn't cooperate.

Add to this the recent confession that raw temperature data have long been destroyed. These data are the basis of the two main datasets used by the UN for its policy reports. Now nobody can actually check the methodology of the data that's being used to dictate international policy.

Given the lack of reliable, replicable, scientific evidence of global warming, it calls into question the wisdom behind the Arizona Corporation Commission renewable energy standards that will cost Arizona utility customers billions in the coming years. The Commission should rely on more than questionable science before they strike a multi-billion dollar blow to Arizona's already fragile economy. I've got plenty of raw data to back that up, by the way.

Byron Schlomach, Ph.D., is the director of the Goldwater Institute's Center for Economic Prosperity.

Learn More:

Goldwater Institute: Miller v. Arizona Corporation Commission

Power Line: Global Warming Bombshell

TimesOnline: Climate change data dumped

Ian Plimer: Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science

The more important remarks are in bold-face type; I give them from top to bottom:

1. Signing one's name "Given Surname, PhD" is a practice generally frowned upon as pretentious, and often as an attempt to establish a spurious credibility outside one's field of expertise. Schlomach's training is in economics; mine is in physics. Neither of us are climatologists but I gather from (unpleasant) personal communications with Schlomach that he doesn't read climatology papers and isn't familiar with even the basic science. It's perhaps too much to say that those who do not read the primary literature should not comment on recent science--even though I hold myself to that standard when it comes to both natural science and economics--but we should at least expect someone with the cojones to offer a strong opinion to not make mistakes that would earn college freshmen an "F" in their survey course exam. That should be the end of the story, and the comma PhD thing is thus in this case like putting icing on a turd.
   
2. The standard logarithmic scale doesn't exaggerate small changes--it does quite the opposite. But either way, Schlomach is acting as though there was a deceit involved. In physical and natural sciences we use logarithmic scales all the time--and it's nearly always obvious when one is being used from the axis labels, tick marks, and grid lines if present. And since he is trained in a technical field, Schlomach should be able to read a graph.
   
   This is really just another instance of something common from denialists (more on that term below): a tendency to make standard scientific practices out to be deceitful when they are not.
   
   
3. Schlomach calls himself a "skeptic". I don't see that manifested here; it appears he's caught up in a pitchfork-wielding mob. And no real skeptic would refer anyone to Plimer, nor would a real skeptic argue (as Schlomach did in previous public messages) that (carbon-neutral over relevant timescales) human breath is at issue.
   
   It's worse than what is in this e-mail alone. In what appeared to be seriousness, Schlomach once asked me to debunk a very bizarre graph without referring him to scientific literature. Don't think it takes much: there's no scale on the Y axis, no indication of what is plotted on the Y axis, no explanation of methodology on the source website, and the whole thing appears to be made up of clerverly arranged cubic splines. But it isn't clear what they're trying to argue in the first place. "Hey Kalafut, tell me what's wrong with this squiggle" is a Rorshach test.
   
   This is why I call Schlomach a "denialist". He doesn't consider--doesn't even bother to read--the solid evidence in favor of the mainstream scientific position, but he will hold up the weakest of evidence--including an unlabeled squiggle--in favor of his seemingly predetermined conclusion. "Skeptical", my ass. The scientists are, by and large, the skeptics. As libertarian commentators go, Bryan Caplan, Megan McArdle, and Tyler Cowen (for example) are acting like skeptics in the wake of "Climategate". Schlomach and co are credulous--that's the opposite of skeptical.
   
4. When proxy data and instrumental data disagree, which would you trust more? Michael Mann and co-authors plotted the instrumental record along with their proxy reconstruction, were honest and up-front about it in their paper, and it becomes an issue now for what reason? Objection to "shop talk" diction in private e-mails?
   
   If nothing else, the divergence problem--the mismatch with the instrumental record beginning in about 1960--means proxy reconstructions should be taken cum grano salis The case for anthropogenic global warming never depended on paleoclimatology, anyway, despite the emphasis put on it by right-winger, so if plotting two data sets on the same graph and being honest about it is an issue, it's really a sideshow. Schlomach isn't so much making a point about the scientific case here as he is trying to create an "aura" of doubt on science.
   
   
5. Schlomach's claim that raw temperature data were destroyed is an outright lie. A lie that has become "social truth", like the Emperor's clothes, on the Right, but a lie nonetheless. Representatives of CRU recently remarked that they deleted their copies of raw data and kept only their derived data sets. Each of these derived data sets was accompanied by a paper explaining methodologies and listing data sources. The only exception is CRU TS 3.0, the latest gridded time-series, for which the paper is "in preparation". As far as one can tell, the raw data are still available if one contact the original sources, who provided it to CRU. There have been no reports in the press or in the scientific community of these groups also deleting their data, consequently, we cannot even say here that Schlomach is understandably mistaken.
   
   
6. "Given the untimely death of Byron Schlomach, Kalafut's allegations cannot possibly be answered." See what I did there? Even supposing that Schlomach were right about CRU, there is plenty of other evidence for global warming. This begins with the spectral properties of gases and the application of modern physics to them, culminating in general circulation models (GCMs), although there are plenty of simpler treatments which give less precise results. In principle the case for global warming need not be founded on an historical record at all. If a cartridge is in the chamber and the gun is put to the temple, we can predict brain damage if the trigger is pulled; we do not need position and velocity measurements of the bullet in the barrel. Having temperature data helps us to refine models and do historical attribution studies, and there are other temperature measurements independent of CRU data sets, from GISS, from the raw data, from satellites, etc., and other evidence such as long-term decline of sea ice extent, moving of tree lines, and changes in seasonal behavior of animals and plants.
   
   So even if Schlomach were right about CRU, what he says is "given" is not so: lie number two. But he's not right about CRU: whatever evidence has emerged about misconduct pertaining to FOI requests, there has been no evidence that could lead to the retraction of a single scientific paper or that otherwise calls CRU science into question. That a few thousand bad-faith Internet ideologues are playing "let's pretend it does" and maybe tenfold more nincompoops and illiterates believe them doesn't change that. Science runs on reason, not on memes.
   
   
7. Schlomach's bibliograhy exposes him as someone who either can't tell the difference between good argument and bad, or doesn't care. Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth is the most discredited academic monograph since Bellesiles's Arming America, and its recommendation by Schlomach should be taken as nothing short of evidence that Schlomach's intent is to deceive. In the age of Internet search engines, it takes a downright creative selection of keywords to find information on Bellesiles or especially his book without finding an account of the deception contained therein. A naïve search will not do it. It is likewise for Plimer. Ian Enting's list is a good place to get started, but just search yourself if you want to know what I mean.
   

What Schlomach has yet to come to appreciate is just how much this matters. "Haha...I lied to boost popular support for our Corporation Commission lawsuit, so what?" The "so what" is that not only will being caught in a lie hurt support, but also that if I know I cannot trust him to be honest and competent (separate issues, but both are at work here) when it comes to topics I know about, how can I trust him to be honest and competent on topics where he is presumably the expert? There is no compartmentalizing of trust.

A few words about Warren Meyer's bona fides.

It's been brought to my attention that Warren Meyer of the Coyote Blog and its side project "Climate Skeptic" will deliver a talk in Phoenix tomorrow about anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Arizona has real experts on the topic--Chris Castro and Jon Overpeck both immediately come to mind--but Meyer, an "amateur" working through the literature (in that respect, not unlike myself, but read further) almost certainly draws a different audience, one I suspect overlaps a bit with this 'blog.

Meyer may call his climatology 'blog "Climate Skeptic", but I wouldn't call him a "skeptic" at all. "Skeptic" involves a measured, rational, cautious take; Meyer is if nothing else very excitable. Many of the would-be "skeptics" don't even bother to read up on the scientific case for AGW before claiming that the scientific mainstream--98% of people actually working on the problem--is wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong for reasons that would have the scientists involved being outright slobs or worse. Meyer, on the other hand, clearly reads and could almost be said to be trying to learn the science.

The trouble is the spirit in which Meyer is reading. Meyer is not trying to gain an understanding of the state of the science, but instead, he's looking for tidbits to help him argue a preconceived position, like a lawyer does. He's looking for a "gotcha!", and when he thinks he's found one, he stops without going further, without checking to see if his criticism is well-founded or if it is merely a personal hangup, and he tries to convince the public that the people who do this for a living have made a (usually gross) mistake or worse.

When you make a statement about science or the state of science, it comes with an unwritten message: "I have exercised intellectual due diligence and can not only make this argument but can be confident that it is truthful and valid." Meyer completely neglects this. His mistakes are often things that someone working in that field would spot right away but take a bit of effort for someone like me working on different problems. I can't usually fault him for getting it wrong--but in maybe every tenth post there is a glaring exception where he doesn't bother to get the basics right before slandering scientists as being slobs--but I can fault him for not being skeptical, for not examining his position before he tries to convince others that he is correct. And I can fault him for never correcting himself. Being Warren Meyer means never having to explain one's self or apologize.

One of the clearest examples is a a recent post on ocean acification. Ocean acidification isn't a consequence of AGW but it shares a cause, so is often brought up in the same conversation. Meyer plays some word games He thinks it's insightful to note that the pH of seawater is not predicted to drop below 7 and therefore finds use of the word "acidification" objectionable, as though his being an ignoramus implies moral failings for others. But that's not the worst of it.

Meyer tries to pick through the chemistry ab initio--and without the use of tables--and fails in a ridiculous fashion. The claim is that carbon dioxide not only doesn't acidify seawater, but that it cannot, because it "soaks up" H+ ions. (He also gets the mechanism of shell thinning wrong, but that isn't common knowledge.) In short, he is claiming that the
CO2+water <--> carbonic acid <--> H+ + bicarbonate
reaction causes water to become more basic! This is not an advanced topic: this is freshman-high-school level stuff that he could learn from a textbook at a used bookstore. Aquarists (fishkeepers) and others have firsthand practical knowledge of the affect of dissolved CO2 has on pH; if Meyer wanted for some reason to experimentally confirm it, he can purchase a pH meter, Instant Ocean seawater mix, and either generate his own CO2 in a yeast reactor or capture it from a 2 liter bottle of pop, and test what happens to the pH. That sodium carbonate (washing soda) and sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) are alkaline should also give him pause. Or perhaps he is also a baking-soda-as-antacid "skeptic".

The basic chemistry, empirical work, physiology, and more are spelled out with constant reference to the literature in the Royal Society's review of ocean acidification, which was written to summarize the topic for nonspecialists (and nonscientists). If nothing else, Warren Meyer should have read this before trying to convince the world that the position that increased partial pressure of CO2 acidifies the ocean and that such acidification has negative impact on marine life is "silly". But the normal rules of intellectual honesty do not apply to Warren Meyer and other faux-"skeptics". Take what he has to say tomorrow cum grano salis, or perhaps chase it with antacid.

Robb, in the Tucson Citizen, gets global warming right.

There are three or four reasonable policy responses to global warming and ocean acidification:

1. A straight Pigouvian tax: a fixed tax rate on carbon dioxide emissions. This establishes price certainty and allows the government to mitigate global warming in a revenue-neutral fashion, a sort of "Green Tax Shift" from taxing "goods" such as income to taxing "bads" such as CO2 emission.
   
2. Cap and auction. This is the "Cap and Trade" proposal favored by Barack Obama. It is essentially a tax scheme, wherein the quantity of emissions is fixed and the price is set by demand when a year's permits are sold at auction. It allows permits to be bought and traded, but doesn't incorporate many of the advantages, of an emissions market as it doesn't establish a persistent property right.
   
3. Cap and auction with allocation. This is the system used successfully to mitigate acid rain; permits for emission in or after a year are sold at auction, but some permits are allocated each year to emitters in business when the permit system was created. This thus doesn't so drastically shift taxes to a single activity as do the Pigouvian tax and cap-and-auction--it's less of a one-time shock. When emitters are largely fixed, large-scale operations, it makes sense, but in a situation we want to be dynamic, it establishes a permanently favored class of permit-receivers. Those who can make early cheap reductions in carbon emissions--probably cement makers and transoceanic shippers, and possibly the fertilizer industry--receive what amounts to a permanent subsidy. In practice this has resulted in some Coase-like bargaining, but since the best one can do is stop one-time emissions, buying and retiring permits is a Sisyphean means to reduction.
   
4. Cap and trade by establishment of a persistent "property right" to emit. Here the permits that are allocated are not the right to emit once but rather a right to emit a certain quantity per fiscal year. This has been implemented in some of the fisheries management tradeable permits schemes, but has been the subject of far less "straight economics" research than the other three. Its advantages are that it is less vulnerable to year-to-year government tampering, it allows for Coaseian bargaining, and that it makes almost obvious an "Epsteinesque" or "Kaldor-Hicks" framework for reduction of emissions by government: the government buys and retires permits. Unlike the first three, persistent emissions rights do not establish a revenue source for the government, but a small property tax on the permits could be established, to pay for program administration and emissions reductions through permit.
   

A savvy reader will note that the the first two are limiting cases of an infinite family of policies trading price and quantity certainty. Physicists and mathematicians, familiar with perturbation theory, will probably see this more readily than economists.

None of these could be effective if implemented by Arizona alone. All are intellectually respectable, and all are certainly better than the current state of affairs (unlimited dumping). I prefer the fourth option, which has not been given sufficient attention, but I understand and appreciate why others may prefer one of the other three.

Today in the Tucson Citizen, Robert Robb joins the many savvy libertarians--Greg Mankiw, Megan McArdle, Gary Becker, Brink Lindsey, Brian Holtz, and Richard Posner, to name a few--supporting a carbon tax. He appreciates the tradeoffs involved and is spot-on about the problem with Obama's proposal to use cap-and-auction revenues to offset price changes.

Many free-marketeers are (what should be embarrassingly) unfamiliar with the solutions to global warming that are actually on the table. Not all are as bad as the Goldwater Institute's Byron Scholmach, who, if he's still worried about his ability to breathe should try pulling his head out of his ass, but most nevertheless would rather put made-up tyrannical nonsense in the mouths of the constructive than put forth constructive solutions themselves. If you find yourself among the belatedly clueless, Robb's column is a good place to learn how market liberals (the sort with their heads in the right places) are thinking about global warming.

"Win-win" environmentally friendly home improvements for Arizonans (Earth Day post)

I don't know whether or not one can wish another "Happy Earth Day." It really isn't that sort of holiday. It's more like Patriots' Day (19 April), a time to reflect on ideas, facts, and responsibilities.

The Industrial Revolution yielded rapid and immense gains in human standard of living. In the rush to attain these gains, our legal institutions did not keep pace, did not adapt to take into account the spillover harms (negative externalities) associated with these novel activities. Man was surely more prosperous but was at the same time fouling his nest, to his immediate and long-term detriment.

Things have gotten quite a bit better since the first Earth Day. The U.S. and several other countries with acid rain problems have brought matters under control with cap-and-trade systems. Once-moribund waterways have come back to life. The U.S. passed a Clean Air Act and established an EPA--there is room for improvement of both, but they're a start. Common-law "Environmental Justice" continues to yield results in the courts. Ozone layer thinning and a southern-hemisphere "ozone hole" was found and we are well on our way to mitigation thanks to surprisingly effective international cooperation through the Montreal Protocol. I could go on.

But there is room for improvement. We have made no significant progress towards mitigation of two very serious global anthropogenic harms: warming and ocean acidification. (Readers who have genuine questions about either of these concerns, either due to denialist noise machine induced confusion or their own curiosity, who have sought out answers in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report should feel free to e-mail me their courteous queries. Your name, your city of residence, your query, and my response will be posted on a different 'blog.)

There's no sensible change Arizona, alone, could make to its policy to mitigate this harm. As was the case for ozone layer damage, Federal and international cooperation is necessary. There are small win-win improvements Arizonans can make, however, that can both lower home and business carbon footprints and save consumers money.

Arizona is rarely cloudy, and relatively close to the equator; solar irradiance is high. Solar water heating and solar electric generation can be cost-effective in many far cloudier places, but they make even more sense here. A properly installed system can pay for itself and more over its lifetime. Making the payoff even quicker are tax credits and incentives. An Arizona tax credit will pay for 25% of a residential solar hot water, heating, or photovoltaic system, up to $1000 per residence; the Federal tax credit, on which the cap was lifted, will pay for 30%.

Several of the state's electric companies also provide incentives. Tucson Electric Power provides up to $1,750 up front for residential solar hot water or space heating installations and $3 per watt up front for photovoltaics. The Salt River Project offers incentives for both, and a nifty web-based calculator of incentive levels and time to simple payback. Metro Phoenix's APS offers incentives at similar levels for solar hot water, solar space heating, and photovoltaics.

Other electric utilities elsewhere in the state might also provide incentives; check their websites. TEP and APS offer further incentives for geothermal and all are giving commercial incentives, as well. APS is now offering incentives for nonresidential installation of solar absorption cooling

Further governmental incentives are available for efficiency upgrades. See the Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency for more information.

Desert? What desert?

If we thought about local climate and ecology the way some commentators approach global warming, today's unseasonal wind and rain in Tucson would cast categorical doubt on the area being a desert!

It's a fairly well-documented if not quantitatively studied phenomenon: the common person does not understand that claims such as "drought", "global warming", or "desert" have associated time scales. "I can water my rocks, because it rained last week. Those people saying we're in a drought are a bunch of commie alarmists who have something against property rights and a good old fashined green lawn!"

Surely the louts, at least at the margin, will be extra wasteful this week. Hopes to get them to understand or even believe that water is a finite resource are perhaps misplaced. We have a "technology", if you will, which can bring about water conservation without getting the IQ-95 set to understand complicated arguments or waiting for the curmudgeons with mal fide objections to science in line. It's called "the free market". Aquifier-by-aquifier cap-and-trade would cause water's scarcity to be reflected in its price, and provide a means to gently wean the region off of diminishing stocks of Colorado River water.

What's keeping this ready-made "technology" from being applied? The last time Tucson Water raised its rates, there was political upheaval; understaning the meaning of "drought" and "scarcity" is not a necessary voter qualification. Thus we elect politicians who confound technocratic mitigation schemes and long-term solutions. This despite the current "going green" fad! Where's our homegrown Al Gore?

Goldwater Institute falls for old hoax!

To claim that there is a libertarian, liberal, or free-marketeer answer to a scientific question would be ludicrous. Why, then, are the staff at free-market think-tanks more likely than most to fall for the lies circulated by the sociopathic global-warming denialists? If it's because the liars know how to flatter the libertarian's prejudices, that's truly shameful.

Byron Schlomach of Arizona's own Goldwater Institute revealed in a recent newsletter article that he's an easy mark for such con men. So easy, in fact, that he fell for the global warming denialists' equivalent of the Canal Street, New Orleans "betcha I can tell you where you got your shoes": the Oregon Petition.

The connection between Schlomach's article and said hoax was glaringly obvious. Schoolboys know that human life per se is carbon-neutral; the CO2 we exhale was recently taken out of the atmosphere by plants. (The beef industry is not carbon neutral because the net effect on atmospheric composition is to replace a considerable amount of CO2 with CH4, or methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas.) Schlomach, on the other hand, is either genuinely afraid that Arizona will regulate his "very breath", or thinks his readers as so many fools who can be made afraid. Of the denialist hoaxes, the Oregon Petition emphasized most strongly that CO2 is exhaled as a normal part of human respiration.

The bare minimum we ought to be able to expect from think-tank staff anywhere on the political spectrum is that they be neither suckers nor swindlers, that they never willfully lie or dispense with critical thought. Robinson and Soon dressed up their old Oregon Petition propaganda to look like something out of the pages of PNAS and published it in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, which despite the name, is a right-wing newsletter, not a peer-reviewed technical journal.

If Schlomach had bothered to do any digging, he'd have found that this "paper"'s nearly identical predecessor was so widely and solidly debunked as to have no credibility, and that this one, too, has some obvious faults, the most prominent being its dishonest and deliberately misleading selection of data. If one wants to discuss global temperature, one must actually reference global temperature, not studies of the Sargasso Sea! Moreover, even schoolboys know that the anthropogenic global warming thesis does not imply that temperature will correlate 1:1 with hydrocarbon use (as in Fig. 3), nor that year-to-year fluctuations will not correlate to solar activity! Matters are much more complicated, that's why the models involved are of the sort that require computer evaluation and consequently give economists fits for reasons nobody but economists understand. (Were they traumatized by Fortran 77?)

The least we can expect from a think-tank is that it will have enough internal editorial checks so as to not allow someone so willfully lazy as to not check if a source from a dubious "journal" has been discredited to send his arguments to one of the larger contact lists in the state. The mistake was made: to preserve its reputation for honesty and high intellectual standards, the Goldwater Institute must kick Schlomach to the curb.