When facts fail make them up

With the Dear Leader’s upcoming push for unilateral nuclear disarmament, the “reality based community” seems to be focusing on battlefield preparation to pave the way for our hobbling.

Case in point is self proclaimed “communitarian” and GWU professor Amitai Etzioni.

Writing in Time, Jonathan Tepperman lays out the case that Obama should embrace nuclear weapons because they have kept the work relatively peaceful the past 60 years citing the absence of direct armed conflict between nuclear powers. To which the distinguished professor Etzioni remarks:

Soon, it became clear that there is no research--let alone compelling research--to support this forehead-slapping claim, only Mr. Tepperman's simplistic conclusions ...... However, Mr. Tepperman fully reveals the depths of his "research" when he writes, "There's never been a nuclear, or even a nonnuclear, war between two states that posses them." I guess he has never heard about India and Pakistan.

I hope Etzioni isn’t a history professor because Pakistan and India haven’t had a shooting war since 1971, three years before India tested its first bomb in 1974 and a decade before Pakistan had its first bomb*.

But what are silly little things like facts for the “reality based community”.

Science Blogs

I have been spending a few months over at Scienceblogs and have been generally disappointed with the site and its content. After reading some truly first rate articles about … well, science and technology, I found that there exists a large portion of the website dedicated to political and philosophical discussions. It turns out that its not just “large” but appears to occupy a majority of the site’s content … at least based on my observations.

The philosophical topics tend to focus on the New Atheist’s attempt to argue a purely philosophical debate by interjecting “science”. That and by generally being pricks. No surprise there.

The political topics are the usual boilerplate statist/lefty arguments on nearly everything under the sun, but usually go something like this “OBAMA IS GOOD, OBAMA IS GREAT, WE SURRENDER OUR WILL TO HIM ON THIS DATE” and “FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BETTER”.

I think ever since Einstein (maybe Newton, who knows) used his celebrity to step from the scientific to the political realm (read Einstein’s asinine lectures on socialism for more on that), there has been a rush of mainly liberal and left wing scientists to follow suit. It is argued, by them at any rate, that since they are experts in X, Y and Z, that this expertise naturally lends itself to them being experts in policies impacted by X, Y and Z …. as well as every other letter in the alphabet. After all, they are flipping geniuses and who can argue with that?

It’s the notion that the celebrity scientist is an expert on anything the pontificate about and to question them is to reject the scientific method and rationality.

Take Carl Sagan for example.

Sagan was, by all accounts, an accomplished and intelligent man. He was a well respected authority on Astronomy but unfortunately he believed that his reputation on scientific issues should give him equal authority on scientific and moral matters and worse, he allowed his political biases to cloud his judgment of technical and scientific matters. Sagan’s work on “Nuclear Winter” is an example where he was willing to support a scientific theory because it supported his own political biases and not because it was good sound science.

Sagan didn’t actually develop the idea of Nuclear Winter”, it was initially hypothesized in the Soviet Union by Georgy Golitsyn in 1982 at a meeting of the Committee of Soviet Scientists in Defense of Peace, Against the Nuclear Threat. It should have been a flashing red light that a scientific conclusion like “a large nuclear exchange, even if completely one sided, would cause the earth’s climate to plummet 30 degrees C” would be coming out of the Soviet Union. Especially so given the committee’s Orwellian name. Couple this with recent relations that this was disinformation campaign run by the KGB and that one of Sagan’s team members, Soviet physicist Vladimir Alexandrov, disappeared in Madrid never to be seen again, and its painfully clear in retrospect that this was part of the larger Soviet influence campaign on the Nuclear Freeze movement.

Aside from the issue that there are indications that the KGB may have had a hand in shaping Sagan’s conclusions (unbeknownst to Sagan to be sure), “Nuclear Winter” was a sales job to further Sagan’s brand of politics and he hit the circuit to push it. Months before the release of any peer reviewed results Sagan lobbied the press and politicians very hard to sell this to the world.

As Michael Chriton said: “this is not the way science is done, it is the way products are sold”

After quite a bit of back and forth over Nuclear Winter in the 80’s Sagan saw his chance to demonstrate to the world the truthiness of his ideas. Near the end of the first Gulf War, Sagan along with toady Richard Turco predicted that the oil fires in Kuwait were spewing so much soot into the air that agriculture in SE Asia would be severely effected by it, so much that there would be frost in spring and summer in SE Asia and the effects globally would lead to a year without a summer*. Sagan debated Fred Singer (noted climate change skeptic) on Nightline during which he made several more dire predictions while Singer said that Sagan was acting like a hysterical Nancy and the soot would quickly settle out.

Needless to say Fred Singer was right and Sagan was wrong.

All of which leads me to conclude the following: Science and politics don’t mix well, regardless of who is doing the mixing. Let relevant scientific fields speak with authority within their relevant fields, and leave it to that.

*given Sagan’s notoriety, the specific nature of the predictions as well as how spectacularly bad they were, its amazing that there isnt a copy of this (for free) anywhere in the internet, so I have cut and pasted it here

Soot clouds over Islam

Note: I had to bury this, but wanted it on the blog, so I just replaced an older article I never published.

CARL SAGAN RICHARD TURCO 1991 New Perspectives Quarterly

ITHACA, N.Y. - Oil is not only a chief cause of the war, not only fuel for the machinery of war, but also now a weapon of war. Now a vast oil spill, the largest in human history, is spreading through the Persian Gulf, threatening the ecology and desalinization plants of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.

Before the war is over, pollution of this sort may attain a still more unprecedented scale. But there is a military use of oil that is still more ominous: massive injection of soot into the atmosphere. In the fall of 1990 Iraq announced that, under some unspecified circumstances, it was prepared to set fire to all 363 productive oil wells in Kuwait.

On Jan. 22, 1991, U.S. reconnaissance satellites detected plumes of dark, sooty smoke erupting from several refineries and wells in Iraqi-occupied Kuwait - perhaps a harbinger of the promised full conflagration. The smoke rose and was carried by the winds across the Persian Gulf to Iran, where some of it fell to the ground as "black rain. " The rest continued moving eastward.

What would happen if there were extensive petroleum fires in the war zone? Kuwaiti oil wells are, of course, not the only possible sources of soot. There are also wells, refineries and petroleum storage depots to burn in Iraq - some of which were reportedly on fire because of military action of the coalition allies - in Saudi Arabia, the other gulf Emirates and, if the war expands and old scores are settled, in Iran.

There is stored oil in ports, ships and pipelines. There are natural gas wells. And, of course, there are cities. We have calculated what might happen if only the active oil wells in Kuwait burned.

Smoke would be blown by the prevailing westerlies over Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Southeast Asia and South China. The higher the smoke rises, the further east it is blown before it falls out or is rained out of the atmosphere.

Soot is very close to the darkest material known in nature.

Fine particles of soot absorb sunlight, warm up, and heat the surrounding air, which then expands and rises, carrying the suspended soot with it. This ability of soot to pull itself up is called self-lofting. It is predicted by the physics of the problem and has been demonstrated in experimental fires. As a result, there are plausible circumstances in which the soot from Kuwaiti fires would rise many kilometers into the air and be carried great distances across South Asia.

Capping an oil-well fire is a risky and difficult business. It takes the best teams in the world (and there are very few of them) a week to several weeks to do it. Quickly capping 363 oil well fires in a war zone is impossible.

The fires would burn out of control until they put themselves out. This, it is thought, would take months, and perhaps as long as a year. So, if these fires were set in winter, say, they might continue to burn through spring and summer at least. This is the growing season for many crops.

Soot would pour into the air at a certain rate and fall or be rained out of the air at a certain rate. The resulting steady-state amount of soot might well stretch over all of South Asia. In some circumstances, it could be carried around the world. Perhaps as much as 20 to 40 percent of the Northern Hemisphere might be covered by the pall.

Even if it only covered South Asia, the consequences could be dire. Beneath such a pall sunlight would be dimmed, temperatures lowered and droughts more frequent. Spring and summer frosts may be expected.

Agriculture is vulnerable. One night of below-freezing temperatures is enough to destroy the Asian rice crop. A temperature decline of only 3 or 4 degrees Celsius can destroy the Canadian and U.S. Midwest grain crop.

A real-world example can be found in the aftermath of the explosion of Mt. Tambora, an Indonesian volcano, in 1815. The two cases are not the same: Tambora injected a very large quantity of fine transparent particles into the stratosphere; Kuwaiti fires at their worst would inject much smaller amounts of much darker particles, but not to as high an altitude. However, the amount of sunlight that got through the Tambora cloud (which covered much of the Northern Hemisphere) and what we calculate from a massive Kuwaiti oil-fire pall are about the same.

The year 1816 was known variously as "the year without a summer," "poverty winter," "the year of the beggars," and in New England, "eighteen hundred-and-froze-to-death. " Traditional military wisdom holds that even remote contingencies must be taken into account if their consequences are serious enough. Since many of the nations most in danger are Islamic, perhaps Iraqi war planners might wish to reconsider torching the Kuwaiti oil fields - even as a gesture of defiance.

And coalition forces may want to avoid targeting large numbers of petroleum and natural gas facilities in Iraq.

Not only is the Gulf War being fought at least in part over oil - with more than a million uniformed young men and women from some 30 nations at risk because of it. The use of oil as a weapon can put vast numbers of civilians at risk. Add to this the pervasive local and regional pollution from the routine peacetime use of fossil fuels, and the extremely serious long-term danger of global warming from the same cause, as well as the risky dependence on foreign imports of oil, and it is reasonable to ask whether there are any alternatives.

Wouldn't many of the problems before us be avoided or mitigated if there were other energy sources we could use?

Nuclear reactors have, especially after Chernobyl, a wide range of real and perceived problems. But a world energy economy run substantially off solar energy and hydrogen fuel, for example, would generate no soot, no greenhouse gases, no local pollution and could hardly serve as a cause of war: sunlight is a widely available commodity.

These and many other technologies, more than competitive with oil when all costs are added in, could be developed.

But the U.S. government spends less on developing such alternative technologies in a year than the Gulf War costs in an hour.

With a slight adjustment of priorities, opportunities for the development of new industries would be immense. One lesson of the Gulf War, evident even at this early stage, is the need for industrialized nations to begin phasing out the world petroleum economy and phasing in cheaper, cleaner, safer alternatives.

Carl Sagan of Cornell University is a Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist and creator of the "Cosmos" public television series.

Richard Turco of the University of California-Los Angeles is a recipient of the McArthur Prize Fellowship.

The Politicization of Intelligence

With ChimpHitler out of office the only context the phrase “Politicization of Intelligence” will be used in will be to describe what happened ion the past.

Like the 2007 NIE determination in Iran’s nuclear program rejecting the idea that Iran was working towards an offensive nuclear capability.

And the reaction to that determination.

From Think Progress

But even with Cheney’s meddling, this NIE makes it clear that there is no imminent danger from Iran’s nuclear program. Newsweek’s Howard Fineman recently reported that the intelligence community is trying to send a message to “slow down what the president, most particularly the vice president” in what they “want to do in Iran.”

The NY Times

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

NPR

A new U.S. intelligence report on Iran says that Tehran may be able to develop a nuclear weapon between 2010 and 2015. But the National Intelligence Estimate finds that Iran halted its nuclear weapons development program in the fall of 2003 due to international pressure — contradicting claims by the Bush administration.

ABC News

In a stunning reversal of Bush administration conventional wisdom, a new assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies concludes Iran shelved its nuclear weapons program over four years ago.

Salon.com

The latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program raises questions once again about the Bush administration's veracity in describing a nuclear threat.

Considering how certain the agencies contributing to the 2007 NIE were and just how despicable the above commenters (and a whole host more) thought that Bush/Cheney’s lies were with respect to the 2007 NIE, this certainly comes as a surprise.

Little more than a year after U.S. spy agencies concluded that Iran had halted work on a nuclear weapon, the Obama administration has made it clear that it believes there is no question that Tehran is seeking the bomb. In his news conference this week, President Obama went so far as to describe Iran's "development of a nuclear weapon" before correcting himself to refer to its "pursuit" of weapons capability.
Obama's nominee to serve as CIA director, Leon E. Panetta, left little doubt about his view last week when he testified on Capitol Hill. "From all the information I've seen," Panetta said, "I think there is no question that they are seeking that capability."

God help these people if Iran gets its hands on a nuclear weapon because they though it was better to score some poltical poitns against the former admisntration than confront a manical Islamic regime hell bent on becoming a nuclear power.

In thier quest to "slow down what the president, most particularly the vice president" they may have ensured a much wider and dealier conflict to come.