Jamestown

We’d always known that it was rough there early on, but they’ve actually found solid evidence of cannibalism:

The researchers used this reconstruction, along with the other data, to determine the specimen was a female, roughly 14 years old (based on the development of her molars) and of British ancestry. Owsley says the cut marks on the jaw, face and forehead of the skull, along with those on the shinbone, are telltale signs of cannibalism. “The clear intent was to remove the facial tissue and the brain for consumption. These people were in dire circumstances. So any flesh that was available would have been used,” says Owsley. “The person that was doing this was not experienced and did not know how to butcher an animal. Instead, we see hesitancy, trial, tentativeness and a total lack of experience.”

As I discuss in the book (though I don’t mention this, and it’s probably not worth adding it at this point), the settlers were not well chosen, in terms of skill sets for settling. The only really useful skills most of them had were in fighting, not farming or homesteading.

I have to say, the one time that I visited the island, maybe twenty years ago, there were deer on it in rodent-like abundance. I guess they weren’t as plentiful back then. And of course, by then, it was a national historical park, and they were protected.

The Green EU

It took an economic disaster for them to reduce their carbon output:

But the data shows that even though EU economic weakness and US natural gas are responsible for significant drops in emissions in the developed world, developing countries, led by China, continue to drive the global total higher.

This underscores the disconnect between green policies and green results. The US hasn’t checked off many items on the green wish list for domestic legislation; Europe has. But it turns out that the introduction of the euro and the subsequent economic disaster had more to do with European emissions drops than Kyoto or the shambolic carbon-trading program.

The usual suspects are headed to Bonn next week for another forlorn attempt to carve out a meaningful global climate treaty. Meanwhile in the real world, the challenge is to find a way for developing countries to continue rapid growth without driving greenhouse gasses and other pollutants to potentially dangerous levels.

That’s assuming that the high levels of the “other” “pollutants” is more dangerous than slow economic growth, of course. And meanwhile, it turns out that the US has twice as much oil, and three times as much gas as we thought. And “peak oil” continues to recede into the future, to the tears of the Malthusians. Which are delicious.

[Update a while later]

Gazprom (and the Russian economy) are in trouble, too:

The US has begun exporting gas to Europe, and has also ramped up coal exports by more than 250 percent since 2005. The net result has been to knock Gazprom back on its heels. The WSJ reports that the negotiations with Bulgaria were heated, with Gazprom’s negotiators shouting in frustration on several occasions.

In public statements, however, the Russian company remains defiant (and perhaps in a state of denial) about the implications of the shale gas boom…

Well, that’s one tactic, I guess. Not one I’d recommend, though.

The Paradox Of Consensus

This is the essay I’ve been meaning to write, but not taken the time. Fortunately, someone else did:

Consensus, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. The more easily testable and verifiable a theory, the less debate we would expect. There is little disagreement, for example, about the sum of one plus one or the average distance of the earth from the sun. But as a question becomes more complex and less testable, we would expect an increasing level of disagreement and a lessening of the consensus—think: the existence of god, the best band since the Beatles, or the grand unified theory of physics. On such topics, independent minds can—and should—differ.

We can use a simple formula to express how an idea’s popularity correlates with its verifiability. Let us introduce the K/C ratio—the ratio of “knowability,” a broad term loosely encapsulating how possible it is to reduce uncertainty about an idea’s correctness, to “consensus,” a measure of the idea’s popularity and general acceptance. Topics that are easily knowable (K ~ 1) should have a high degree of consensus (C ~ 1), whereas those that are impossible to verify (K ~ 0) should have a low degree of consensus (C ~ 0). When the ratio deviates too far from the perfect ratio of 1, either from too much consensus or too little, there is a mispricing of knowledge. Indeed, in cases of extreme deviations from the perfect ratio, additional support for a concept with such a lopsided K/C ratio increasingly subtracts from its potential veracity. This occurs because ideas exist not simply at a single temporal point, but rather evolve over the sweep of time. At the upper reaches of consensus, there is less updating of views to account for new information—so much so that supporters of the status quo tend to suppress new facts and hypothesis. Government agencies deny funding to ‘sham’ scientists, tenure boards dissuade young researchers from pursuing ‘the wrong’ track, and the establishment quashes heretical ideas.

…To see how this works in practice, we turn to the evergreen topic of climate change. Notwithstanding the underlying ecological threat of climate change itself, the debate about how to confront human-caused global warming has spawned unprecedented financial, political, and social risks of its own. Entire industries face extinction as the world’s governments seek to impose trillions of dollars of taxes on carbon emissions. The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman approvingly writes that Australian politicians—not to mention public figures through the world—now risk “political suicide” if they deny climate change. But if carbon dioxide turns out not to be the boogey-man that climate scientists have made it out to be, tens of trillions will be wasted in unneeded remediation. Much of the world—billions of humans—will endure a severely diminished quality of life with nothing to show for it. The growth trajectory of the world in the twenty-first century may well depend more on the “truth” of climate change ex ante than ex post.

With climate change, as in many areas of scientific complexity, we can (and do) use models to understand the world. But models have their problems. This is particularly true when dealing with complex, non-linear systems with a multitude of recursive feedback loops, in which small variations produce massive shifts in the long-term outcome. Pioneered by the mathematicians Edward Lorenz and Benoit Mandelbrot, chaos theory helped explain the intractability of certain problems. Readers of pop science will be familiar with the term the “butterfly effect,” in which “the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set[s] off a tornado in Texas.” The earth’s climate is one such dynamic, chaotic system and it is within the whirling, turbulent vortex of unpredictability that the modern climate scientists must tread.

And boldly have they stepped into the breach. The scope of agreement achieved by the world’s climate scientists is breathtaking. To first approximation, around 97% agree that human activity, particularly carbon dioxide emissions, causes global warming. So impressed was the Norwegian Nobel Committee by the work of the Inter-governmental Committee on Climate Change and Al Gore “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change” that it awarded them the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. So many great minds cannot possibly be wrong, right?

Wrong.

The Stupid Party

strikes again:

It is understandable that Tennessee senators Corker and Alexander would oppose the idea for the usual home team reasons, but why aren’t other Republicans jumping on board and upping the ante? (Probably for the usual deference/log-rolling reasons; they’ll want Corker and Alexander to support their home state pet projects down the line.) I recommend that Republicans suggest adding the Bonneville Power Administration in the Pacific Northwest, and watch the Democratic senators from Oregon and Washington object. That’s probably why Obama didn’t include Bonneville along with TVA. Memo to GOP: Go big with this idea.

But they won’t because…see post title.

Over A Barrel

I’m as shocked as the rest of you to learn that the Russians are jacking up the price for ISS support again:

That’s $70.6 million per seat — well above the previous price tag of about $65 million.

Just your standard inflation, I’m sure. Bolden is right:

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said if Congress had approved the space agency’s request for more funding for its commercial space effort, the latest contract would have been unnecessary. He is urging full funding of the Obama administration’s 2014 budget request of $821 million for the commercial crew program.

“Because the funding for the President’s plan has been significantly reduced, we now won’t be able to support American launches until 2017,” Bolden, a former shuttle commander, wrote in a NASA blog.

It could take longer if Congress does not fully support the 2014 request, he said.

“Further delays in our Commercial Crew Program and its impact on our human spaceflight program are unacceptable,” Bolden said.

But they’ll keep wasting money on SLS.

Here’s what I write in the book:

What is nuclear non-proliferation worth to us? This shouldn’t be an issue of civil space policy, but it is. There is a U.S. law called the Iran/North-Korea/Syria Non-Proliferation Act (INKSNA), which states that we will not trade with any nation that supports any of those countries in the development of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Russia has been doing both for years, and in order for us to continue to utilize their services for ISS access and lifeboats, Congress has to continually waive the law, essentially rendering it toothless with respect to one of the most significant violators of it (in early January of 2013, they did so out to 2020). If (as earlier discussed) we were to start using Falcon-9/Dragon sooner, even without its abort system, we could stop depending on the Russians, and stop shipping money to a nation that is indifferent to our security, if not outright hostile to it. Why don’t we? Because we don’t want to risk the lives of an astronaut crew, even though the Falcon-9/Dragon is probably as, or more, reliable at this point than anything we flew in the 1960s. Same thing applies for the Atlas and the Boeing CST capsule.

I think that it’s “safe enough” right now to end our dependence on the Russians. Despite their stated desire for three nines of safety, I’d bet that most people in the astronaut office would agree, and if there are some who don’t, no one held a gun to their heads to be an astronaut. In our unwillingness to do this, we are saying that the life of an astronaut crew is more valuable than preventing Iran from getting nukes, or to be more precise, we don’t think that non-proliferation is worth risking their lives. I don’t think that’s the case, and I’d guess that few astronauts do, either, but in its continuing hyperconcern about safety, that is exactly the message that we are getting from Congress. Now obviously, we see many men and women willing to risk their lives for national security every day, in Afghanistan (and now in other places in the Middle East). If I were an astronaut, I’d be insulted that Congresspeople don’t think that I’d be willing to. But if it’s true, then maybe we need some new astronauts, because the current ones, if they’re demanding three nines, don’t have the Right Stuff.

But space isn’t important.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!