Examining the Short Term Regional Cooling Effects of Aerosols Derived from Fossil Fuel Emissions by Utilizing the Impact of the Covid Lockdown of 2020 upon the City of Tucson as a Natural Experiment

By: Marc Lombardo

2020 and the Question of Aerosol Cooling

While 2020 was not incontestably the warmest year on record globally—measurements have it as being marginally cooler than 2016, though this was within the margin of error—it was demonstrably the warmest year ever experienced in the Northern Hemisphere. And, unlike 2016, which was an intensely strong El Nino year, 2020 started off as ENSO-neutral and after September actually had a La Nina influence. I cannot help but wonder if the unexpectedly high temperatures of 2020 may be evidence of something other than simply the logical result of ever-increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. Of course, one factor that distinguished 2020 from all other years was the temporary reduction in anthropogenic fossil fuel emissions (particularly in the Northern Hemisphere) due to the Covid Lockdown.

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

Figure 1.3

Measuring the temporary cooling effect produced by the impact of aerosol particles from anthropogenic emissions upon albedo is among the most controversial and important questions for any attempt to mitigate the effects of anthropogenic climate change. Bellouin et al. (2020) tried to narrow the range of estimates for the total effective radiative forcing of aerosols and came up with a window of -1.6 to -0.6 W m⁻²  with a 68% confidence interval and -2.0 to -0.4 W m⁻² with 90% confidence; or, as they say in the plain language summary, the total cooling effect of aerosols “offsets between a fifth and a half of the radiative forcing by greenhouse gases.”  Using satellite observations, Jia, et al. (2021) found total observed aerosol radiative forcing to be −1.09 W m⁻²—more or less right in the middle of the range provided by Bellouin et al. (2020)—but with a 133% stronger observed cooling effect over land than was previously estimated. When we compare these recent figures for aerosol cooling with the estimated radiative forcing from anthropogenic emissions alone (~2.1 W m⁻² in 2020), the phenomenon appears to offset a bit more than half of human-derived warming. Lelieveld, et al. (2019) find that:

“fossil-fuel-related emissions account for… 70% of the climate cooling by anthropogenic aerosol… Since aerosols mask the anthropogenic rise in global temperature, removing fossil-fuel-generated particles liberates 0.51(±0.03) °C… The largest temperature impacts are found over North America and Northeast Asia, being up to 2 °C. By removing all anthropogenic emissions, a mean global temperature increase of 0.73(±0.03) °C could even warm some regions up to 3 °C.”

While these contemporary findings on aerosol cooling are by no means negligible in their effect size, they are actually somewhat lower than the aerosol-derived cooling effect that Hansen et al. (2011) estimated for 2010 of -1.6 ± 0.3 W/m⁻². Hansen believes that the decline in measured aerosol cooling over recent years compared with prior estimates reflects a true change in the phenomenon rather than simply a refining of measurements. Referencing the accelerated warming trend evident in the 2015-2020 period, Hansen, Sato, and Rueddy (2022) write: “that accelerated warming seems to be caused by a decrease of human-made aerosols; the moderately increased growth rate of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the past several years cannot account for the observed large increase of Earth’s energy imbalance.” Comparing the three charts above shows that the abrupt 2015-2020 global temperature increase cannot be explained by ENSO states or fossil fuel consumption.

Not only did the period from 2015-2020 see a dramatic acceleration of global warming. During this same period, the number of extreme weather events in the US also greatly increased. The National Centers for Environmental Information reports the following regarding the more frequent occurrence of extreme weather events in the US resulting in destruction totaling over a billion dollars: “The 1980–2021 annual average is 7.4 events (CPI-adjusted); the annual average for the most recent 5 years (2017–2021) is 17.2 events (CPI-adjusted).” Could this dramatic increase in highly destructive extreme weather events in the US over recent years possibly be related to the decreased cooling from aerosol radiative forcing that Hansen surmises to have taken place over the same period?

Mann et al. (2018) offered a global simulation showing that in the long run lower aerosol levels could lead to fewer extreme weather events, despite temperature increases, but even if this holds as a global trend, there may be contrary effects on particular regions. Looking at disasters globally, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction did find that the number of disasters during the 2010s actually declined from the 2000s; nevertheless, they also project global disasters to exceed 2000s levels in the near-term: “If current trends continue, the number of disasters per year globally may increase from around 400 in 2015 to 560 per year by 2030”. While recent global disaster trends remain somewhat murky, this is not the case for the US as a region. When aerosols were at their lowest levels in recent memory in the US during the year of 2020 thanks to the Covid Lockdown, there were “22 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters across the United States, shattering the previous annual record of 16 events, which occurred in 2017 and 2011.”

In recent interviews, Michael Mann acknowledges the cooling impact of aerosols but argues that the removal of this cooling can be regarded as a modest tax upon efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Even if Mann’s 2018 hypothesis that lower aerosol levels would drive fewer extreme weather events was correct globally and over a longer time scale than recent events such as the Covid Lockdown allow us to observe, it is still unclear that the calculus regarding the impact of human-derived aerosols upon global temperature is as straightforward as Mann presents. While it is indeed certain that the cooling effect of anthropogenic aerosols is significantly less than the total positive radiative forcing of present levels of greenhouse gases, changes to anthropogenic emissions cannot possibly reduce GG radiative forcing entirely. For one thing, there are and will continue to be significant non-anthropogenic sources of carbon emissions. For instance, Xu et al. (2020) find that “From 1997 to 2016, the global mean carbon dioxide emissions from wildfires equated to approximately 22% of the carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels.” More concerning still is the fact that any efforts taken to reduce emissions now will have little to no discernible cooling effect upon global temperature for decades.

Mann has widely proclaimed the IPCC’s model of decarbonization that posits a steady decline in global temperature 3-5 years following the introduction of a net-zero emissions regime. However, this model is at considerable variance with other estimates. For instance, Samset, Fuglestvedt, and Lund (2020) find that there would be no measurable reduction in the rate of global temperature increase for 21 years following the implementation of a net-zero emissions regime. Evidently, this variance in projections arises as a result of differing views on how the carbon cycle will respond to emissions reductions. According to Mann, if humans were to “stop emitting carbon right now … the oceans start to take up carbon more rapidly” (Mann quoted by Hertsgaard, 2020). Mann claims that this prediction is a result of “new science” that even he was unaware of until recently—and he only cites the IPCC’s 6^th report for this claim rather than any primary sources—however, it’s difficult to see how the record of air-sea carbon flux supports this prediction. While there is some interannual and decadal variability in air-sea carbon flux largely having to do with ENSO states and other varying circulation patterns, the overall trend for the last 60 years is beyond clear: ocean carbon uptake has increased largely in parallel with atmospheric carbon increases (Bennington, Gloege, McKinley, 2022; Friedlingstein et al., 2021). Why would we expect this long-standing trend to abruptly reverse?

Upon reviewing estimates for the total amount of carbon presently in the atmosphere and the maximum possible rate at which atmospheric carbon could conceivably drawdown into ocean and land sinks, the decarbonization claims of Mann and the IPCC are difficult to fathom without the introduction of some unknown deus ex machina of remarkable effect. Increases in GG emissions, atmospheric carbon levels, and ocean + land carbon uptake have tracked closely over the past six decades during which we have the best data.

Figure 1.4

What amount of carbon drawdown would it take to slow GG warming to 1990 levels (which is to say nothing of stopping GG warming entirely, as Mann and the IPCC posit is possible in as little as 3-5 years)? Ostensibly, we would need to draw atmospheric C02 back to ~350 ppm, as Bill McKibben has so vociferously insisted for so long, i.e., a total of roughly 750 GtC of atmospheric carbon. NB: this total is still at least 90 GtC above pre-industrial. Even if we assume the highest plausible rate of ocean and land uptake (the 2021 projected rate of 6.2 GtC/year plus the maximum possible error of +1.4 GtC/year) as a constant 7.6 GtC/year, given that total atmospheric carbon at present is ~900 GtC, it would take 20 years of net-zero emissions to return us to 350 ppm; and note that this most optimistically plausible estimate very closely agrees with the results of Samset, Fuglestvedt, and Lund (2020) who found that it would take 21 years of net-zero to result in any measurable slowing to the rate of global warming. Assuming a more likely scenario in which the drawdown of atmospheric carbon starts from 6.2 GtC/year (the mean 2021 projection) and decreases linearly to 1990s levels—after all, historically, oceans and lands store carbon at higher rates when it is present in the atmosphere at higher rates—it would instead take 29 years of net-zero emissions for atmospheric CO2 to return to ~350 ppm. The decarbonization timeline of Mann and the IPCC seems off by a factor of no less than 4 and up to an order of magnitude.

In any event, what is undoubtedly clear is that GG warming and aerosol cooling take place on radically different time scales. Some portion of carbon dioxide emitted now will continue to cycle through the climate system for thousands of years, whereas cooling aerosols fall down to the ground within days. The significance of this fact is that any efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that also reduce aerosols will by definition result in temperature increases in the short-term. Anyone who proposes cuts to carbon emissions but who does not acknowledge the short-term global temperature increase such a project would cause as a basic fact of atmospheric physics does the field of climate science a much greater disservice than the most oblivious or disingenuous of climate change deniers could ever dream.

Moreover, if the short-term temperature increases resulting from lowering anthropogenic emissions in turn drive positive feedback cycles—e.g., more numerous and larger wildfires, greater release of permafrost-sequestered methane, decreased albedo from loss of glacial ice, a collapse of the gulf stream system, etc.—this would further reduce (and may even trump) any possible long-term cooling from lowering carbon dioxide emissions. One well-understood feedback amplification mechanism that must be considered is the increased atmospheric water vapor that follows from temperature increases. Ramanathan and Inamdar (2009) find that for every 1 degree K increase in global temperature, water vapor contributes an additional positive radiative forcing of 1.42 W m⁻² and does so on a much more rapid time-scale than any possible cooling from emissions reductions. The authors conclude that the full force of water vapor feedback will be evident within the course of a single year at the latest.

The Covid Lockdown provided the largest reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the period for which we have highly resolved data and thus our first major opportunity to assess the immediate real-world climate impacts of anthropogenic GG emissions reductions. Gettelman et al. (2021) examined the effect of the 2020 Lockdown upon global temperature and found the peak ~20% reduction in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions to have at its maximum impact led to ~.15 degree C of warming averaged across the globe and a ~.35 degree C increase over the landmasses of the US and Russia. This finding comports surprisingly well with the estimate of Lelieveld, et al. (2019) that the total loss of short-term cooling from anthropogenic emissions would produce a total near-term warming of 0.73(±0.03) °C as a global mean. Using the findings of Ramanathan and Inamdar (2009) regarding the positive feedback cycle of water vapor and temperature increases, the .73°C global estimated temperature increase from the loss of anthropogenic emissions would in turn result in an additional 1.04 W/m⁻² of positive radiative forcing from the added water vapor in the atmosphere alone. Thus, it appears that the combination of the loss of aerosol cooling and the associated increase in water vapor would in and of itself be enough to obliterate the long-term cooling that is supposed to accompany reductions in anthropogenic emissions.

Let us consider the rate of temperature increase that we would expect to follow from this net-zero emissions scenario. Loeb et al. (2021) estimated the magnitude of Earth’s energy imbalance to be 1.12 ± 0.48 W m⁻² in mid-2019—a quite dramatic increase from the estimated value of 0.42 ± 0.48 W m⁻² in mid-2005. Getting rid of the temporary cooling from anthropogenic emissions would approximately double the present imbalance in the course of a week; the additional positive forcing from water vapor at the resulting higher temperature would in turn almost triple the energy imbalance in the course of a year. A conservative measure of the present decadal rate of global temperature increase is .22 C/decade (using the 1990-2020 average). The .22 C/decade rate observed from 1990-2020 is almost certainly an underestimate of the present rate of global warming as the observed increase from 2010-2020 was .394 C/decade. Nevertheless, we will keep .22 C/decade as our lower bound to account for any negative feedback due to the presumed drawdown of atmospheric carbon following net-zero discussed above. Adding the loss of aerosol masking (1.09 W/m⁻²) and the accompanying forcing from water vapor (1.04 W/m⁻²) to the present energy imbalance would in turn imply a minimum global temperature rate increase of .532 – 1.47 C in the decade following net-zero. This range of decadal temperature increase should be regarded as an absolute minimum to follow from the onset of net-zero in that this rate does not include any other of the numerous possible positive feedbacks that may well be triggered at the implied temperatures.

Even using the bottom end of this estimate for the rate of global temperature increase following the onset of net-zero emissions—almost certainly an underestimate, given the high agreement between the prediction of Lelieveld et al. (2019) of a .73 C increase to follow immediately from the loss of anthropogenic emissions and the observed increase of .15 C that followed the ~1/5^th reduction of emissions evident during the Covid Lockdown, to say nothing of the water vapor feedback—the planet would blow past the IPCC’s target of 1.5 C above the 1850-1900 average in only a handful of years. In a scenario near the mean of this potential rate increase (1C / decade), we would experience the perils of a +2C world that the IPCC warns of in the decade following net-zero implementation: 37% of the global population would be subjected to extreme heat once every five years, wildfires will burn 35% more area annually than at present, 12-29% of species would be at high risk of extinction, and as many as 3 billion people may experience water scarcity. A scenario near the high end of the estimated temperature rate increase (1.47 C/decade) following net-zero emissions, which certainly cannot be ruled out given that the observed temperature rate increases of each of the past 4 decades have exceeded the linear projections from the decade before even without the additional forcing from a total loss of aerosols, would lead us to a near-term future that in all likelihood would be beyond the scope of our species’ adaptive abilities.

Due to the carbon drawdown timeline discussed above, we should not expect the rate of global warming to slow for at least two decades following the onset of net-zero, but when we look closer at the relevant factors, it seems that this estimate seems unduly optimistic. Following upon this timeline, were we to implement net-zero tomorrow, we would already be committed to a world that is at least ~2.3 C above pre-industrial as the absolute best-case scenario 20 years after implementation. This figure was obtained by adding the lower bound increase to the Earth energy imbalance for 20 years after net-zero (.532 C /decade x 2 = 1.064 C) to the averaged 2016-2020 yearly global temperature anomaly relative to 1850-1900 (1.22 C).

However, over this longer time scale, we also need to add an additional positive feedback from water vapor not accounted for in the change to the Earth energy imbalance to follow in the short-term from net-zero. At +2.3 C, the positive radiative forcing from water vapor would be an additional .47 W m⁻² above that used in the EEI estimate for a total of 1.51 W m⁻² above present and 3.27 W m⁻² above 1850-1900 baseline. Even assuming that greenhouse gas radiative forcing miraculously declines to its 1990 level (~2.2 W m⁻² above pre-industrial, that is, a decline of ~1 W m⁻² from present levels) by the time period in question—i.e., 20 years after the onset of net-zero—the Earth energy imbalance would still be between 1.15 and 2.11 W m⁻² at that point (this wide range owing to the uncertainty in the present EEI estimate). In other words, assuming the fastest plausible drawdown of atmospheric carbon, far from global temperature starting to decline 20 years after the implementation of net-zero, we should expect the rate of temperature increase to be unchanged from what it is at present as an absolute best-case scenario.

Of course, the idea of anthropogenic emissions falling to zero overnight is a distant fantasy (and, some believe, a problem that we wish we had). Nevertheless, the clear decoupling of the trend of increasing temperature with anthropogenic emissions that is evident since 2015 suggests that even modest reductions in human usage of the most polluting fuels can have very significant near-term real-world consequences. In popular discussions about moving to a carbon neutral economy, the short-term warming associated with reduced pollution particulates in the air is rarely mentioned, but the findings discussed above suggest that the loss of short-term cooling from anthropogenic emissions would likely spur feedbacks capable of offsetting (and possibly trumping) any gains made from eliminating anthropogenic GG emissions. When we consider that the aerosol cooling effect is immediate, loss of any significant portion of that cooling at a given moment in time may well be sufficient to cause near-term increases in temperature capable of pushing the Earth beyond pivotal climate tipping points such as the elimination of Summer arctic sea ice. Even in the extremely unlikely event that the cumulative global impact of reduced air particulates upon temperature is relatively low, we may still see a more dramatic impact upon the populated areas that emit the bulk of pollutants. Might such an impact be enough to trigger extreme temperature events capable of stressing infrastructure, decimating crop yields, and/or compromising human health in particular regions at particular times?

Tucson’s Unbelievably Hot Summer 2020: A Case Study

I wonder if there is not a way of analyzing the record-breaking heat we experienced during Tucson’s Summer of 2020 so as to view the unique conditions that prevailed here over those months as a kind of natural experiment into the local impacts of losing a significant amount of the temporary cooling from anthropogenic emissions. In 2020, Tucson recorded its hottest May, July, August, and September ever in terms of average temperatures; May and August also both recorded their hottest average highs as well. Using data from 1991-2021, while the May 2020 average was not quite statistically significant (p = .0668), July 2020 (p = .0202), August 2020 (p = .0023), and September (p = .0401) all clearly were. I’m not sure of the best method for calculating the combined probability of these events given that there is some degree of correlation between them and so they are not truly independent, but I am quite sure that the result would stand out as highly significant, even in contrast to the clear overall warming trend from 1991-2020. Here’s the formula that I used:

(Month A – Month B Correlation) (Z-score Difference of Observed A 2020 from Projected A 2020) (STDEV of B) + Projected 2020 B from trend = Total Expected B 2020

For July, August, and September, I then averaged the totals from this formula for all of the relevant monthly pairs. That is, for August, the total temperature (in F) correlation adjustment added to the linearly projected August temperature averages the formula results for the May-August and July-August pairs. Utilizing this method, we get the following results:

May – Projected 2020 from Trend = 76.886 F, Observed 2020 = 80.7 F, Z-score of difference of observed from projected May 2020 = 1.428 , p = .0764

July – Projected 2020 = 88.545 F, correlation between May and July (.119) times May 2020 Observational Difference Z-score (1.428) times July STDEV (1.698) = Total Expected July 2020 = 88.834 F, Observed July 2020 = 91.5 F, July 2020 Z-score difference obs. Vs. total expected = 1.57 = p of hotter July 2020 than observed given May 2020 and trend = .0582

August – Projected 2020 August = 87.525 F, Correlation between May and August (-.14521) times May Z-score differential (1.428) times Aug STDEV (1.877) = -.389,  Correlation July and August (.394547) times July Z-score differential (1.57) times Aug STDEV = 1.163, Average correlation adjustment of Aug 2020 = .387 F, Total Expected August 2020 = 87.912 F, Observed 2020 = 92 F, 2020 August Z Differential = 2.178 = probability of hotter August 2020 than observed given May and July 2020 and trend = .0146

September – Projected 2020 September = 83.204, Correlation between May and September (.142347) times May 2020 Z-score differential (1.428) times September STDEV (1.727) = .351, Correlation between July and September (.187376) times July 2020 Z-score differential (1.57) times September STDEV (1.727) = .508, Correlation between August and September (.3557) times August 2020 Z-score Differential (1.971) times September STDEV (1.727) = 1.211, Combined Averaged Correlation adjustment for September 2020 = .69 F. Total Expected 2020 September = 83.894 F, Observed 2020 September = 85.7 = 2020 Z Differential = 1.046, probability of hotter September 2020 than observed given trend and observed May, July, and August 2020 = .1469

Combined probability of May, July, August, and September all hotter than observed 2020 given trend =  0.0000095365435152

The co-occurrence of these four record hot months over the same Summer is a signal worthy of notice unto itself but intuitively it also raises the question: what about June? As I’ve already mentioned, June was the only month during Tucson’s Summer 2020 that did not have the hottest average for the month on record, though it was still .225 degree above the 1991-2021 average, making it the 17^th warmest June on record. Still, this was actually quite a bit lower than the temperature for June 2020 that one would expect given the ongoing warming trend and the observed temperatures of May 2020:

Projected June 2020 from trend = 88.08 F + May-June Correlation (.159004) times May 2020 Differential Z-score (1.428) times June STDEV (2.33) = Total Expected June 2020 = 88.609 F, Observed June 2020 = 86.4 F, June 2020 Observed vs. total expected differential Z-score = -.948, probability of a June cooler than June 2020 given May 2020 and trend = .1711

In other words, the observed average temperature of June 2020 was a full 2.2 degrees cooler than what you would expect from the ongoing warming trend and after observing May 2020. For this result to be compatible with the hypothesis of 2020’s Summer temperatures being driven to new heights due to the emissions reductions of the Covid Lockdown, some other factor would need to have been at play that made June 2020 so different from the other months of Summer 2020. There was in fact something quite different about June from the perspective of the aerosol masking effect. The National Weather Service writes:

“The main story of the month was the Bighorn Fire on the Catalina mountains which was started by a lightning strike on Pusch Ridge on the 5th. Over 118,000 acres has burned at the close of the month with 54% containment and ranks as the 8th largest wildfire in Arizona so far on record. For reference the Aspen Fire in 2003 burned 84,750 acres and ranks as the 9th largest wildfire in Arizona on record.”

Just like anthropogenic fossil fuel emissions, wildfires contribute a significant amount of both greenhouse gases and aerosols to the atmosphere. The latter can produce a quite dramatic short-term cooling effect upon regional surface temperatures. For instance, looking at the 2019-2020 Australian wildfires, Chang et al. (2021) found that “wildfire-derived air pollution was associated with an aerosol optical thickness of >0.3 in Victoria and a strongly negative ARF [aerosol radiative forcing] of between −14.8 and −17.7 W m⁻², which decreased the surface air temperature by about 3.7 °C–4.4 °C.”

Here then is the story of Tucson’s Summer 2020 that only slowly came into focus for me but that I can no longer unsee: directly following the reduction of fossil fuel emissions from lockdown restrictions, Tucson experienced its hottest May ever recorded. Hot summer temperatures are known to bring together thunderstorms here, which in this case, coming earlier in the season and in a much drier overall weather pattern, resulted in the worst fire in the state of Arizona in a generation. The Bighorn Fire took place in the mountains directly above Tucson and its huge plumes of smoke blocked out much of the sun that would have doubtless otherwise blasted us here for the month of June. Whereas the Bighorn Fire burned 118,000 acres in June, the fire was significantly contained by the end of the month such that less than 2,000 additional acres burned in July.

Lower-than-expected June temperatures gave way to much higher than expected July temperatures, just as the aerosol masking effect hypothesis would predict. And this is despite the fact that there was still likely some residual cooling influence from the Bighorn Fire upon July 2020 temperatures. With the Bighorn Fire’s plumes of smoke largely dispersed to the East and without their yet being replaced by the typical amounts of aerosols from tailpipes and smokestacks thanks to the Covid Lockdown—Liu et al. (2020) show that unlike in China and many European countries, emissions reductions due to lockdown continued in the US through the Fall of 2020—this set the stage for the truly exceptional temperatures of August 2020.

Cumulatively, we see that following the introduction of the Covid Lockdown, temperatures rose well above expectations in May, only to decline below our expectations when a new source of emissions was introduced in June (the Bighorn Fire), only to climb again once the plumes of smoke dissipated in July and, most significantly, August. Rather than disputing the hypothesis, given that June 2020’s lower than expected temperatures were likely due to an abundance of fire-derived aerosols, the June temperature observations actually support the hypothesis that the absence of aerosol cooling is the likely cause of 2020’s unexpected warming in Tucson.

This hypothesis raises more questions than it answers: How can it be effectively demonstrated that no other factors exerted a substantial causal influence upon Tucson’s Summer 2020 temperatures? Is the aerosol masking effect a more dramatic phenomenon in Tucson than in other generally less dry and more cloudy regions and is that why many other regions did not experience similar temperature spikes during Summer 2020? Supposing the aerosol masking hypothesis is a correct explanation of 2020 for our dusty little town, to what extent can these results be generalized to other regions and other times? Moreover, can a fuller appreciation of the regional cooling effect of aerosols lead to more accurate predictions of the regional temperature effects of changes in anthropogenic GG emissions? The latter question may prove immediately relevant as the conflict in Ukraine pushes global fuel prices to points that will likely lead to reductions in usage.

Likelihood of Tucson Summer 2020 Events when Including June as Supporting Hypothesis

May – Projected 2020 = 76.886 F, Observed 2020 = 80.7 F, Z-score of difference of observed from projected May 2020 = 1.428 , p = .0764

June – Projected June 2020 = 88.08 F + May-June Correlation (.159004) times May 2020 Differential Z-score (1.428) times June STDEV (2.33) = Total Expected June 2020 = 88.609 F, Observed June 2020 = 86.4 F, June 2020 Observed vs. total expected differential Z-score = -.948, probability of a June cooler than 2020 given May 2020 and trend = .1711

July – Projected 2020 = 88.545 F, correlation between May and July (.119) times May 2020 Observational Difference Z-score (1.428) times July STDEV (1.698) = .289, Correlation between June and July (.06) times June 2020 Z Difference (-.948) times July STDEV (1.698) = -.097, Average Correlation Adjustment = .096 F = Total Expected July 2020 of 88.641, Observed = 91.5, Z Difference = 1.684, p = .0465

August – Projected 2020 August = 87.525 F, Correlation between May and August (-.14521) times May Z-score differential (1.428) times Aug STDEV (1.877) = -.389, Correlation between June and August (.092693) times June Z Differential (-.948) times  Aug STDEV (1.877) = -.165, Correlation between July and August (.394547) times July Z Differential (1.684) times Aug STDEV (1.877) = 1.247, Averaged Correlation Adjustment = .231 = Total Expected August 2020 = 87.756, Observed = 92, Z Difference = 2.261, p = .0119

September – Projected 2020 September = 83.204, Correlation between May and September (.142347) times May 2020 Z-score differential (1.428) times September STDEV (1.727) = .351, Correlation between June and September (-.08012) times June 2020 Z Difference (-.948) times September STDEV (1.727) = .131, Correlation between July and September (.187376) times July 2020 Z Differential (1.684) times September STDEV (1.727) = .545, Correlation between August and September (.3557) times Aug 2020 Z Differential (2.261) times September STDEV (1.727) = 1.389, Averaged Correlation Adjustment = .604 = Total Expected September 2020 = 83.808 F, Observed = 85.7 F , Z Difference = 1.096, p = .1357

Combined total probability = 0.0000009815741894238

History of Tucson Summer Heat Anomalies 1950-2021

As hot as Tucson’s Summer 2020 certainly was, in all likelihood, it would have been much hotter without the influence of the Bighorn Fire. Moreover, tracking the history of Tucson summer heat anomalies with significant deviations from the overall warming trend allows us to consider the likelihood of an even more anomalous heating event than Summer 2020. While 2020 was incontestably the hottest summer in Tucson’s history in terms of raw temperatures, due to the lower-than-expected temperatures of June 2020, it was actually only the second most anomalously hot summer as compared to the underlying warming trend.

Figure 2.1

As a useful point of comparison, let’s look at the third most anomalously hot summer in Tucson between 1950-2021, which occurred way back in the year 1952.

Figure 2.2

With the exception of 2020’s plummeting June temperatures, quite likely due to the aerosol influence of the Bighorn Fire, the Summers of 1994 and 2020 have similarly shaped bell curves with May and September being less anomalous than the middle months. This is the inverse of the U-shaped curve for 1952, which is a more extreme form of the typical weather pattern for the region, due to the flattening influence of the July-August monsoons. By contrast, the example of 1994 shows what can happen to the region’s summer temperatures when the monsoon rains don’t come.

Figure 2.3

Tucson’s Summer 1994 actually started with a half inch of rain, which may not sound like a lot to those from wetter climates, but that’s actually slightly above the region’s average May rainfall and, unsurprisingly, May ’94 temperatures were slightly below trend. However, the mid-summer months of 1994 (June, July, August) were together the driest on record, and correspondingly, the temperatures of those months for 1994 also showed the greatest combined positive deviation from trend ever observed for those months.

2020 had almost no rain whatsoever for May, June, or September and so when one counts the overall precipitation from May to September it was the driest summer in Tucson’s history. Nevertheless, the traditional monsoonal pattern of July-August was faintly perceptible in 2020, culminating in over an inch of rain for August and making it only the 15^th driest August from 1950-2021. However, despite Tucson receiving over .7” more rain during August 2020 than August 1994, and despite the -.45 correlation between precipitation and temperature for the month of August during 1950-2021, the temperature anomaly of August 2020 was even greater than that of 1994. Not only does this collection of facts provide evidence for the impact of the loss of aerosols upon August 2020 temperatures; to my mind, it also raises the question of what a summer as dry as 1994 and with even fewer aerosols than 2020 would look like. Fire may well be the climate’s endogenous negative feedback mechanism in response to escalating temperatures, but this negative feedback is not infinitely elastic in response to greater and greater stresses. This phenomenon is not dissimilar to the manner in which your home air conditioner will keep you at a balmy 72 F until all of a sudden, one day, it doesn’t work at all—having shown few if any prior signs of imminent collapse aside from a few unusual electrical groans and whimpers that can be easily ignored until it finally actually stops working. 

It’s Not Averages that Kill, it’s Extremes

Compiling and comparing average temperatures such as was done above can be a useful and hopefully illuminating statistical exercise, but the extremes are where the rubber meets the road with respect to the question of preserving habitat for living creatures (including homo sapiens). Regardless of whatever the average temperature may be for a given region for a given year or season, a single day that is hot enough can present a challenge to that region’s organisms that exceeds their adaptive capacities—i.e., kills. Moreover, species (including homo sapiens) are mutually interdependent and thus, even if a given organism is not itself immediately killed off by an extreme weather event, the extinction of any other species that provides crucial inputs or work can lead to a much wider circle of demise.

In the immediately preceding section, I made the case that as hot as Tucson’s August 2020 was, it certainly could have been much hotter (e.g., simply due to the overall trend of global warming and/or with less precipitation and/or with a larger loss of aerosol masking–either due to larger emissions reductions or less fire in the season). It’s hard to imagine an August hotter than 2020 was in Tucson that would not be deadly. An incredible 7 days of the month set record daily high temperatures, with three of those days shattering the old record by more than 2 degrees. Here is the data from the National Weather Service:

• Set daily high temperature on 13th: 111° (old record 109° set in 2012)
• Set daily high temperature on 14th: 111° (old record 107° set in 2015 & 2019)
• Set daily high temperature on 16th: 110° (old record 108° set in 1992 & 2013)
• Set daily high temperature on 17th: 109° (old record 108° set in 2013)
• Set daily high temperature on 18th: 108° (old record 107° set in 2013)
• Set daily high temperature on 19th: 111° (old record 110° set in 1915)
• Set daily high temperature on 25th: 107° (old record 106° set in 1901, 1985, 2001 & 2012)

Whereas August 2020 recorded 4 days over 110, no prior August had ever seen more than one 110+ day and there were only five years in the period from 1950-2021 that a 110+ day fell in August. Cumulatively, the 8 days over 110 recorded during 2020 do not sound so extraordinary given that there were two prior years (1990 and 1994) that had 10 such days. However, when we look at the distribution of when 2020’s 110+ days occurred, we see that 2020 recorded the only such day for the month of September in Tucson’s history, and none of the 8 days that topped 110 during the year of 2020 did so during the month of June, which is quite unusual given that 56% of all of the 110+ days ever to occur in Tucson did so during the month of June. It’s hard not to see the impact of aerosols upon Tucson’s 2020 temperature extremes, both in terms of the correlation between the lack of extremely hot days in June and the abundance of aerosols from the Bighorn fire as well as the latest 110+ day in the city’s history being recorded during a period when local fossil fuel emissions were at lows likely not seen in decades. The undeniable impact of aerosols upon short term temperatures poses a frightening near term question for all of us who reside in the West: What will an extreme heatwave look like for an already extreme climate when there is nothing left to burn?

References:

Bellouin, N., Quaas, J., Gryspeerdt, E., Kinne, S., Stier, P., Watson‐Parris, D., … & Stevens, B. (2020). Bounding global aerosol radiative forcing of climate change. Reviews of Geophysics, 58(1), e2019RG000660.

Bennington, V., Gloege, L., & McKinley, G. A. (2022). Observation-based variability in the global ocean carbon sink from 1959-2020. Preprint submitted to Geophysical Research Letters available at: https://www.essoar.org/pdfjs/10.1002/essoar.10510815.1

Friedlingstein, P., Jones, M. W., O’Sullivan, M., Andrew, R. M., Bakker, D. C. E., Hauck, J., … & Zeng, J. Global Carbon Budget 2021, Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss. [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2021-386, in review, 2021.

A. Gettelman, R. Lamboll, C. G. Bardeen, P. M. Forster, D. Watson‐Parris. Climate Impacts of COVID‐19 Induced Emission Changes. Geophysical Research Letters, 2021; 48 (3) DOI: 10.1029/2020GL091805

Hansen, James. Sophie’s Planet, expected 2023, pre-print available at http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200916_SophiePlanet23.pdf

Hansen, Sato, Rueddy. Global Temperature in 2021. Newsletter published January, 13, 2022. Available at: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2022/Temperature2021.13January2022.pdf

Jia, H., Ma, X., Yu, F. et al.  Significant underestimation of radiative forcing by aerosol–cloud interactions derived from satellite-based methods. Nat Commun 12, 4241 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24518-6

Lelieveld, J., Klingmüller, K., Pozzer, A., Burnett, R. T., Haines, A., & Ramanathan, V. (2019). Effects of fossil fuel and total anthropogenic emission removal on public health and climate. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(15), 7192-7197.

Mann ME, quoted in Hertsgaard, Mark. 60 Minutes, The Guardian, and game-changing new climate science. Columbia Journalism Review. Oct. 7, 2020. Available at: https://www.cjr.org/covering_climate_now/michael-mann-60-minutes-emissions-warming.php

Mann ME, Rahmstorf S, Kornhuber K, Steinman BA, Miller SK, Petri S, Coumou D. Projected changes in persistent extreme summer weather events: The role of quasi-resonant amplification. Sci Adv. 2018 Oct 31;4(10):eaat3272. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aat3272

Mann ME, Huq S, Hertsgaard M, “Press Briefing: The Best Climate Science You’ve Never Heard Of,” published on YouTube on Feb. 17, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vQxnt-bGOI&t=77s
 
Samset, B.H., Fuglestvedt, J.S. & Lund, M.T. Delayed emergence of a global temperature response after emission mitigation. Nat Commun 11, 3261 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-17001-1

Xu, R., Yu, P., Abramson, M. J., Johnston, F. H., Samet, J. M., Bell, M. L., … & Guo, Y. (2020). Wildfires, global climate change, and human health. New England Journal of Medicine, 383(22), 2173-2181.

And there goes that…

The last few days have been absolutely brutal for those of us who were stupid enough to buy GME near its last week high. Of course, we knew that such a precipitous decline was a possibility, if not a probability, all along. Robinhood’s freeze on buying may have been the most dramatic blow, but the bizarre last minute changes in the short numbers that came out on Sunday from S3 Analytics likely did the most damage, IMO. This was a bet and a bet against the house and that is how these things usually go. Did the house cheat to get us here? Of course! That’s why they call them the house! But by being complete idiots and diving into shark infested waters with our hard-earned money, we nevertheless did accomplish some things:

1. Even though we may have “lost” (in the sense of not having made the stock price a totally notional number and completely bankrupting the short HFs) I think that the battle may have been well worth it in the sense of tempering finance capital’s appetite for shorting in the future. Too often, this predatory practice has been able to benefit from its own self-fulfilling prophecy. Once a company is targeted for short sale, this cripples the company’s liquidity which then limits the company’s ability to innovate or increase production. This pressure from finance capital touches nearly every aspect of industry and ultimately results in a significant downward pressure on wages (for, after all, the easiest way to increase profits is to lower costs and labor is one of the largest expenses in most industries).

2. We might have saved GameStop from going under. Even though they are a corporation that pays their employees like shit, on balance, I see this as a social good. Retail around the country was already decimated pre-Covid and this fucking virus has taken out much of what was left over after decades of ever-increasing rents, insurance premiums, and interest payments. I want there to still be places to go when—or perhaps I should say if—we ever get out of this godforsaken viral timeline. Moreover, for many of us, some of our fondest memories are of going to the video game store as a kid. For me, and I think for a lot of us, the idea of today’s kids not having that option provokes a deeply visceral response.

Now how exactly is GME going to turn its peculiar new role as a parking space for protest dollars into long term profit generation? It’s unclear. Some have suggested that the company could benefit from taking a deeper position in e-sports but I can’t really comment on that because I’m too old to know much about that industry. Nevertheless, I think that they will be the recipients of an enormous amount of public good will after this episode and unless they are as stupid as us they will find ways to capitalize on that. Maybe they could even go into game development and partner with reddit to make a WallStreetBets game where you try to organize a herd of 8 million moronic apes to fight the interconnected web of hedge fund managers, brokers who let you buy stock only when they feel the prices are acceptably low, and boomer talking heads who will come up with the most outlandish nonsense and apologias for the latter two. I’d love to play that game in simulation! It’s been pretty darn fun IRL too!

3. We probably made Robinhood go under. I see this as a social good. Even before they orchestrated Thursday’s flash crash, RH’s business practices were questionable. For instance, Vice points out that just back in December—which does already feel like more than a year ago—”Robinhood was fined $65 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission for ‘misleading statements and omissions in customer communications’ about its revenue, but specifically around its payment of [sic] order flow process.” The lawsuits over what happened on Thursday (and there was plenty of fuckery on Friday and Monday as well—document all of this!) will most likely go on for years to come, so it’s quite possible that what we thought was a short-term bet will actually end up being more like the boomer investments that many of the WSB crowd mock so roundly.   

Why am I long GME when I’ve never put more than 2 digits of money into a stock before?

TL:DR 1. It’s not the money, it’s the spite. 2. Let’s bring the systemic risk! 3. What the fuck else is there to do?! (thanks covid!)

First of all, don’t put in any money you don’t want gone. But there still might be reason to put in money. It’s not about the money, it’s about the moral hazard and the lolz. In some GME scenarios, I could win a nice bonus and fucking bankrupt some hedge fund fucks in the process, while also making some other hedge fund fucks even richer than they are already. It would seem that there’s no strong argument on either side. But that would be, IMO, to undervalue the pleasure of spite and to undervalue the necessity of some level of suffering for growth.

Now let’s talk about spite. We were all taught that spite does the most harm to the person holding it. And if this thing somehow goes tits up, all us poors are once again going to have given our hard-earned money to some of the greatest assholes on the planet. That sounds terrible. And yet, upon reflection that’s what we do EVERY FUCKING DAY. Every time we pay to feed or clothe or transport or house ourselves or god forbid procure medical attention, we’re paying some rich capitalist fuck pig somewhere in the supply chain. There are almost no exceptions to this. If this lopsided ass system were actually capable of delivering people’s needs then perhaps it wouldn’t be an issue, but we have seen all too well over the past year (and a helluva lot longer than that if you were paying attn) that the billionaire class is perfectly fine with managing the world’s resources in such a way that it will almost inevitably lead to the murder of millions if not billions of us. Less of us poors around means fewer of us to ruin their land and water.

Spite means: I want to hurt someone even if it means hurting myself. Whether having spite for these fucks is right or wrong morally or spiritually, I can’t say since I’m not a fucking priest. I just know that I feel it. There’s now so much big capital tied up on both sides of this trade that, no matter what, someone I hate is going to get a nasty bruise. That’s what I’m paying for even more than the opportunity to make a little money. How many times in life do you get the chance to punch a billionaire in the face?

Even if I lose everything, I’ll have considered the money well spent. Why? Because aside from the sheer pleasure of helping to fuck some of these fucking fucks–a pleasure which I’m 100% guaranteed–I know the pain that losing this money will cause me is nothing compared to the pain that whichever of the billionaires holding the bag with this one are going to feel. Experiencing pain as a result of one’s own fucking idiocy and arrogance may or may not be a precursor to some modicum of moral reform or it could go the other way and make an asshat double down on asshatness. In either event, the lesson isn’t so much addressed to the one receiving the blow so much as it is a warning to all those who witness it. We will fucking burn you! We give no fucks! We don’t care if we lose as long as you lose! We know what losing feels like. If you don’t yet, get ready to learn fuckfaces. Normally I try to be a bit more subtle and rational but jesus fucking christ the world is on fire and we’ve got covid killing 80k of us a month so let’s fucking try something! This is the only thing I can think of.

I’d like to see this thing go so high that it poses some serious fucking systemic risk and it may well do so! Let’s make Biden bail out the hedges one more time, because IMAGINE the fucking furor that’s going to cause politically! Even the fucking MAGAT nazis are going to be asking where my UBI is at that point! And if we can do this with one single $600 check, imagine what the fuck we could do when we get $1200 a month! Okay, so maybe the stupid fucking boomers will say that’s too far but if they bail out the banks again, they’re going to damn sure have to give us something this time or that shit at the Capitol is going to look like a picnic! Class power, baby! There’s always gonna be more poors than riches. When the poors get together, they always win. Period.

This play is damn sure a dumpster fire. But it might well be exactly the fucking dumpster fire we need to make some real change in this country. Let’s set it off! Hopefully we don’t get singed in the process but fuck if we do YOLO. You got something more fun to do right now than this because I sure fucking don’t! This trade has fucking everything: community, camaraderie, spite, and some badassss fucking memes!

Oh, and I think it’s quite possible that we will end up making not insignificant money. Remember we got HELLA free advertising yesterday. It’s no longer redditors that are the only ones pumping this stock. Now it’s essentially every news outlet in the country and every asshole analyst and politician that goes on TV to say how bad it is. The squeeze hasn’t even started yet cause these fuckfaces just keep doubling down on their shorts! As if sheer arrogance and more of other’s people money could magically fix their position. Keep trying assholes! It only makes your losses grow!

So to recap I literally made an argument for throwing your money into the dumpster and lighting it on fire. Yeah, you’ve found the right guy to get stock advice from!  

Colin Kaepernick is an asshole (thank god!)

The recent sports protests illustrate a lesson for our time: don’t be afraid of being an asshole. It took a real asshole to ruin the Kumbaya of the Obama era by pointing out that no, having a black man in the White House did not magically put an end to centuries of white supremacist violence. Assholes don’t apologize. They speak the truth as they see it and they let the chips fall where they may. People will not like you. You might lose your job. Everyone with power over you will do anything they can think of to get you to shut up—everything besides simply saying it, because that would be impolite. But you never know, sooner or later, a bigger asshole might just come along and say what the majority had felt all along: that you ought to be shut up by any means necessary. Paradoxically, this sort of asshole only comes along to demand your injury long after you had already incurred it! And ,even more paradoxically, it is at that moment that all at once, the very people who had silently collaborated to incur this injury upon you suddenly start pretending that they were in fact on your side all along! Don’t forget: this turn of events never would have happened if you weren’t willing to be a little impolite and say the things that no one wanted said.

Debunking “Lost City” Debunking

“Mysterious underwater ‘lost city’ made by microbes, not ancient civilization”

This strikes me as a somewhat curious attempt to explain away quite startling images. If these “formations” supposedly took 5 million years underwater to form, given their shallow depth, one must ask what would be the effect of long periods of above ground exposure over that time period. Only 12,000 years ago, these “formations” would have been well above sea level–as everyone must agree given the geological record. In fact, except for the last 10,000 years, sea levels haven‘t been as high as they are now for 110,000 years!

Given the overall distribution of sea levels historically over the last 5 million years, it is certain that these “formations” would have spent a greater amount of time out of the water than they did in the water. For the virtual entirety of the last 3 million years they would have been above ground.

While the hypothesis is framed in such a way as to fit the possibility that these “formations” formed in the period of generally high sea levels from 5-3 million years ago, we should remain skeptical of such an account until it provides an explanation as to the morphological consequences of a greater period of above ground exposure. I do not have access to the original article so I do not know what, if any, explanation the researchers provide regarding this process of supposed above ground weathering that doubtlessly must have occurred for their hypothesis to have any validity whatsoever (and to a certain degree I hold the authors of this article responsible for my own ignorance in this regard given that they chose not to make their article open access even though the journal of publication allows for such a possibility). I do wonder however just exactly what sort of standards of comparison or reproducibility exist for establishing such a peculiar formation scenario as being definitively at work in this particular instance. Indeed, one wonders just what sort of evidence would be necessary so as to make the hypothesis in question a uniquely plausible explanation for the phenomenon in question.

Meditation to End the Drug War — 12/21/15

The beginning is near. The low hanging light of the winter solstice reaches the Northern Hemisphere at an ideal angle for transforming the power of the sun into a transdimensional rainbow hologram. The tree of life builds information deliberately, sequentially, in all directions, but always in a straight line. It is only when coherent light shines upon the crystallized data streams assembled by natural attraction that the parallel processes which are the precursors of life at once coalesce into the shape and time of an object which is itself an experience. The priority given to the element of water in biological systems lies in both the ease with which it transitions between physical states and the luminescent properties that it expresses within these states. To turn light back upon itself and upon itself again: this is the function of the medium. The wave interference pattern known as “the rainbow” is the result. But a result that is only the beginning. Median superposition is the point of assembly.

The folk wisdom has it right: the pot of gold lies at the end of the rainbow. Stare through the rainbow until it disappears, only for it to reappear behind your eyes. It is from this point that visions arrive, dreams are dreamt, and wishes are granted. The quality of our reality is the quality of our imagination. Play with the light behind your eyes until it grows familiar as an instrument. Sing a tapestry, weave a song. Design forms that cut to the heart of the coincidence between intention and execution. From such a place of patient levity, unseen worlds bubble into being.

Let us summon all of our power as spirit, as flesh, as mind, as bone, as dirt, as air, as light. Let us shine light upon the full range of crystallized forms bequeathed to us by the tree of life and let us marvel at the beauty of all that we behold when we do.

Never Forgive, Never Forget the War Crimes of George W. Bush

Yesterday, George W. Bush was paid $175,000 to speak about leadership to various Riverside County public officials at Casino Morongo in Cabazon. Occupy Riverside, Occupy Coachella Valley, Answer LA, Veterans for Peace, and various other community organizations and members came to mark Bush’s visit to Riverside County under the theme “Never Forgive, Never Forget.” Local media coverage of the event is available here and here.

I was asked to speak by my compatriots in Occupy Riverside and here’s an expanded version of the speech I gave:

I can’t say that I’m happy to be here today but I know that this is exactly where I need to be. Today is a sad day. Today a murderous criminal, an unelected dictator, walks around free while one of our democracy’s great heroes sits at trial accused of being an enemy of the state. I just heard today that the Army is filing an additional 22 charges against Bradley Manning. I ask you: What kind of state is it in which telling the truth makes you an enemy of the state but those who tell the most base lies to the American people and commit the gravest of crimes walk around free?

That is why I say today is a sad day and this is also why I know that this is exactly where I need to be. I know that someone needs to remind our fellow citizens that a murderous dictator is walking around free here today. Though I wish it were under better circumstances, it warms my heart to see so many of you here as well. I know that it must have taken a strong commitment to justice to bring you out here to the desert today. Look around. We are not alone.

My hope is that the next time all of us meet George W. Bush will be wearing handcuffs. Until the day comes when Bush is arrested and made to account for his crimes, every day will be a sad day. Seeing all of you here makes me hopeful that that day of justice will come sooner rather than later. I know that if we are to have a democracy that it has to happen. It may take 30 years but it will happen.

It took the people of Guatemala 30 years to bring the murderous dictator Rios Montt to trial. Yes, sadly it is true that although he remains in house arrest, Rios Montt’s conviction was overturned on a technicality. This is an injustice no doubt, but we must not lose sight of the fact that for the people of Guatemala the greater justice was the process of the trial itself. The crimes of a government regime of mass murder, sponsored at every step by the Washington power elite, were brought to the light of day. Victims were able to claim their stories and to make the atrocities that they witnessed a matter of public record. Telling the truth in public exposes crimes for what they are and in so doing prevents similar crimes from being repeated in the future.

That’s why we need a trial for George W. Bush. Not for the sake of punishing an individual, as deserving as he may be. We need a trial for the deeper purpose of exposing the culture of corporate and government criminality that pervades our society today. This culture of criminality is what allows Wall St. bankers to rob us with full confidence that they will never be made to account for their systematic thievery. This culture of criminality is what allows the Obama Administration to shred the Constitution as it sees fit, with its extrajudicial assassination program and the total surveillance of every form of private communication for every American that it has enacted. This culture of criminality is what allowed the head of the National Security Agency, to tell an outright lie to the US Senate when he was asked a direct question as to whether any type of data was being collected on millions of Americans. When our public officials feel unremorseful and unabashed about lying to the Senate, what else do they think they have license to do?

As long as Bush walks free, the power elite know that they are unaccountable, that there is no limit to the crimes that they can commit in our name. It is important to remember that the total surveillance program that Obama has brought to fruition was dreamt up by Bush’s employees. It took Obama’s competence to execute Bush’s fascist dream. The two go hand in hand. J. Edgar Hoover lies in his grave in awe.

If we were to list Bush’s crimes today we would be here a very long time. That being said, in my estimation, there is one set of crimes that stand above the rest. That is the deliberate fabrication of intelligence that made possible the Iraq War. The fact that intelligence was forged at the behest of the Bush Administration in order to make the case for war stands already as a matter of public record. I ask you: What else do we need to know? What could be a greater crime in a democracy than lying the public into a war of aggression? Kill a single person with a gun and you will be denounced as a murderer for the rest of your life. But evidently, if you orchestrate the killing of hundreds of thousands, not only are you able to walk around free. You’re even paid $175,000 to spend an afternoon sharing your thoughts about the meaning of leadership.

This state of affairs will not last. It cannot last. Bush himself knows this. I guarantee you that already today, before he thinks about travelling to a foreign country, Bush has to ask himself and his lawyers whether or not it would be safe for him. Already today, I do not believe that his lawyers would recommend that he visit Argentina or Spain. Every year the list of places that Bush is not welcome will grow, and every year he will find himself more and more a prisoner. The day will come, I am sure of it, when Bush will not even be safe in Texas. For the sake of our democracy, I hope that day comes sooner rather than later.

On the falling rate of profit…

It’s the falling rate of profit… my thoughts for the past few days exactly… but it gets complicated… at present, the govt is essentially bankrolling the maintenance of corporate america, esp. through the fed’s quantitative easing and perpetually low interest rate (thus making corporate stock much more comparatively appealing for investment than bonds, etc., and still much of the stock surge has been powered by companies buying back there own stock, i.e., providing an internalized solution for their own overliquidity)… in effect, corps are borrowing money for nothing from the govt and using that money to raise the value of their own stocks… thus the function of the “stock market” is that of leaking fiat-created public $$$ directly to shareholders… basically, it’s a circuitous mechanism for a handful of owners to extract money from the public treasury… there is even little pretense of investment (i.e., the falling rate of profit)… hence… the place we’re at might be thought of as a special kind of liquidity trap, one bankrolled oddly enough by the govt… a notion which is a perfect contradiction in Keynesian terms, and yet we see it in reality very clearly nevertheless… Keynes assumed that the govt would spend money into existence, but our govt lends more money into existence than it spends into existence and that money is not being invested so much as hoarded… accordingly we are no longer in Keynesian territory… the entire economic system bears a startlingly similar appearance to a single system of patronage.

On the logic of standardization: a response to Jeff Bliss

If you haven’t seen the viral video of Duncanville, TX high school student Jeff Bliss eloquently condemning the endless procession of worksheets that counts as education today, what’s keeping you? I can’t think of a better way to spend 87 seconds of time.

I’d like to respond to Bliss’ equally thoughtful and visceral remarks by taking a step back and asking simply, what is the logic behind standardization? Standardization defines nearly every aspect of the educational process at present but it’s obviously got to do with a lot more other than education alone. Accordingly, I think that if we want to understand why standardization is such an attractive framework for education, we should start by seeing the concept in as holistic a fashion as possible. I’ll get back to education eventually, but first I want to expand the canvas a bit.

The logic of standardization is a legacy of the factory. Who determines standards? Toward what end? Today, the core of capitalist production demands only the standardization of results rather than the standardization of processes. In fact, much of capital’s present ability to achieve efficiencies in the standardization of commodities often comes from removing standardization from the processes of production. For instance: How “standardized” was the application of building codes in Bangladesh? As David Harvey and others have pointed out, in recent years, the more exploitative forms of capitalist production have increasingly moved away from the factory model and back to the workshop (often organized on the basis of familial, clan, and caste hierarchies rather than the factory logic of labor differentiation by specialization alone). In many respects, this is nothing new. The suburbanization of production (and the production of new suburbs as part and parcel of capitalist production) was already a phenomenon well-known to Marx; the emergence of the post-War defense industry as a collection of more or less decentralized engineering, machining, communications, computing, optical, chemical, and theoretical “shops” is another long-standing example; the pre-established differentiation of their products allowed greater degrees of fluidity and collaboration regarding productive tasks within individual shops; granted this fluidity of job duties was made possible by the over-arching standardization of product specifications made possible by the fact that this plethora of decentralized shops often served a single customer–the Defense Department–who standardized its demands. This production model was itself one of the many gifts that the public sector gave to the private sector: just ask Wal-Mart.

Where is the factory logic of the standardization of production processes still applied most religiously today? In two places above all, it would seem: schools and prisons. Mandatory minimum sentencing is a form of legal standardization that regulates the flow of “inputs” (i.e., poor, black, and brown bodies) into the production process. Ensuring the standardization of security protocols, inmate conditions (food, space, medical care, etc.), building standards, etc. in turn defines the official logic of the production of the prison as a commodity. However, just as in other forms of production, there is always money to be made by subverting the official production standards (e.g., overcrowding, cheapening food and medical care, taking a laissez-faire attitude toward inmate safety, etc.). The compelled labor that many prisoners are made to perform while serving in prison functions according to the classically specialized factory model not because that model has a unique claim to productive efficiency but only thanks to the overarching presence of force as it defines every aspect of the conditions of production in such settings (which, in fact, is always the condition upon which the efficiency of factory production depends).

This brings us, at last, to the logic of standardization as it is encountered in the educational system today. Many of the conditions discussed above with respect to the production of prisons also apply to educational production. “Standards” determine not only the content and delivery of curriculum, the processes of teacher certification, the parade of background checks required of all school employees, but everything from school building codes to the nutritional content of school lunches. School districts purchase only computers, software, textbooks, desks, and chairs that meet pre-ordained state “standards.” The creation of such “standards” constitutes the job duties of many state bureaucrats and these “standards” in turn insure the profitability of well-connected corporate educational suppliers. On the other hand, just as in the case of prisons, money is also made by cutting corners when supplying standards, especially when the cheaper materials are thought to be more or less indistinguishable; and so, some of the worst quality meat in the country goes into school lunches.

The absurd over-standardization of what seems like nearly every detail of the educational process found at traditional public schools in turn makes possible a critique of these institutions as inefficient. As an institutional outgrowth of this critique, charter schools generally operate with much more lax standards concerning curriculum, textbooks, teacher training, and building regulations (collectively: the means of educational production, if you will). Interestingly, however, the comparative lack of standards dictating the process of educational production found at charter schools is in turn justified solely by their ability to obtain sufficient results on standardized tests. This mirrors the manner in which the decentralization of production in the defense industry is made possible by that industry’s having a single customer; in the case of schools, the state-as-customer buys the commodity of students with acceptable standardized test scores; there can be 10,000 different charter schools run under 10,000 different conditions precisely because the state-as-customer has itself dictated the standards of the commodity that it will purchase. In other words, contrary to the free market dogma regarding charter schools, in fact–rather than having anything to do with a robust market–charter schools much more closely resemble small manufacturers clamoring to fill a single, pre-determined job order made by a single firm that has a monopoly in its given industry; there is competition, but only with respect to the standards of competition that are set by a single buyer; competition takes place with respect to the different approaches of individual schools with respect to the standard goal of producing “outputs” (i.e., students with acceptable standardized test scores) as efficiently as possible by any means necessary; no matter the educational production process, the results are intended to be the same in all cases.

I don’t want to suggest that standards are in themselves the problem. In some sense, the dissemination of standards is what allows us to speak a common language (e.g., the various genres of music), to coordinate our movements through space (e.g., traffic rules), and to meet similar ends with similar tools (e.g., the standards of computer hardware, which in turn make possible certain standard operating systems which facilitate communication in certain pre-configured ways). But standards also help humans to organize themselves into armies for the sake of killing one another; moreover, the more widely adopted a given standard, the less susceptible it is to change (the technologies and norms based upon fossil fuel energy being the most obvious and pernicious example). Standards facilitate human expressions of creativity but at other times they smolder our passions for novelty, change, and chance; standards make us healthier but they also kill us; standards provide a set of social rules according to which we can set our designs and intentions but these rules invariably favor those actors well-situated to take greatest advantage of them.

The question concerning standards then, like most questions complex enough to think about for longer than a minute, is not whether they are simply good or bad. Better questions to ask are: What interests does the standard serve and what does the standard take an interest in leaving out? As I see it, it is with respect to such questions that we should reflect upon Jeff Bliss’ impassioned critique of the standardized educational process.

The root of Bliss’ complaint concerns the worksheet as a mode of pedagogy. The justification of worksheet pedagogy is not so much that it teaches reading, writing, or math skills effectively, nor that it is an efficient conduit of information. The virtues of worksheet pedagogy are 1) student assimilation of facts, concepts, and skills can be tracked efficiently and frequently and 2) the worksheets are themselves designed to provide students with practice with respect to both the content and the format of the standardized tests that constitute the consumable product of education for the state. The advance notice concerning student’s future testing performance that worksheet pedagogy provides is particularly important because teachers and administrators know that their jobs depend upon student test results, and accordingly, they don’t want to leave such results to chance. If worksheets show that students are “underperforming,” the cure is simple: even more worksheets until they improve. The worksheet is both the assessment and the lesson contained in the smallest, most temporally segmentable form possible.

Bliss’ demand–that his teacher abandon or simply provide a respite from worksheet pedagogy and instead engage in classroom discussion–as simple and reasonable as it may be, is nevertheless impossible. It is only the students who have already demonstrated that they can be trusted to perform well on NCLB tests (or whose level of social privilege in and of itself makes such demonstrations unnecessary) that get the luxury of learning by discussion. With respect to the students who need the social benefits of education the most, teaching by discussion is simply too risky a proposition. The most immediate risk from the point of view of teachers and administrators is that discussion is not the most direct way of leading students to the standard pre-ordained result that the powers that be demand that they reach (at exactly the same time, regardless of their differences in abilities or development, etc.). Even if it is adopted with the best of intentions, and even if it is indeed the most efficient method of preparing students to score well on standardized tests, there is a limit to how much worksheet pedagogy students can tolerate; while some can tolerate more of it than others, no one can tolerate it forever.

As I see it, the limits to how much worksheet pedagogy a person can tolerate have to do with the nature of assessment in general and the fact that worksheet pedagogy devotes such an obscene amount of time and resources to assessment. The thing about assessment is: sometimes you either know or you don’t. If you know already, assessment is more or less unnecessary. On the other hand, if you don’t know yet, assessment alone is almost certainly not going to help you figure it out. Accordingly, we can say that the greater the amount of time devoted to assessment, the less time there will be for actual learning. When you add to this the fact that students are very aware of the fact that assessment is not learning–for that is above all exactly what Jeff Bliss is telling his teacher–it seems that this system is actually well-designed in order to make students learn as little as possible while being as frustrated as possible in the process.

There is another reason that discussion is a dangerous mode of pedagogy, or at least why it would be dangerous if it were afforded to students who are not the most privileged. If given the opportunity to voice their opinions, the possibility exists that students may comment upon the absurdity of their circumstances in ways that their peers would sympathize with. Moreover, the reason and conviction of student resentment may at times be difficult to contradict, even by authority. The teacher cannot argue with Jeff Bliss. She can only exercise her limited threats of authority from the confines of her desk. She may know the absurdities of the system that employs her very well, but she knows better than to talk about those absurdities, for doing so would raise the question of what could be done to change them. As someone who institutes this system of absurdities, she knows that such a conversation could only undermine her authority and so she understands that such a conversation must not be had.

It is more or less safe to give opportunities for discussion to students of privilege because they learn very quickly that their future success depends upon attaining leadership roles within the present system of absurdities. Moreover, they are less aware of present absurdities simply because their privilege often insulates them from experiencing those absurdities directly in their most potent forms (e.g., worksheet pedagogy). Because they are privileged, they are trusted. Because they are trusted, they are taught instead of merely assessed. Finally, because privileged students are actually taught–instead of just given an endless supply of worksheets–whatever initial differences in test performance may have been used to justify class-based segregation, the process of educational production will itself soon exacerbate these differences. This is how the educational system reproduces inequality, not by accident but by the very standards of its design. Any questions?

If we fix the violence, the social networks will fix themselves

Some of my commenters have informed me that I haven’t been clear enough about just why I got so incensed over Nancy DiTomaso’s recent op-ed “How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment.” I apologize if in my disdain for white liberal obfuscation I have not been explicit enough about just why this particular instance of obfuscation is so deeply and regretfully pernicious. Let me try to be as precise as I can.

Clearly, DiTomaso was trying to be a good, well-meaning, white liberal and justify affirmative action. My concern is with how she goes about doing it. I don’t really care whether she intended to be misleading or not–her argument is deeply misleading and as I see it fundamentally counterproductive. I’m not a mindreader and I feel like judging the goodness of someone’s intentions is overrated as a moral category generally speaking. I cannot call her mendacious, for the facts that she reports are indeed true. As I say, I’m sure that social networks do indeed function in an often racially exclusive way. However, it seems clear to me that this observable phenomenon is better situated as an effect of racial injustice rather than as a cause. The problem I have with treating it as a cause is that doing so offers a set of solutions that are either mysterious or inadequate.

Here’s how the implied argument behind DiTomaso’s piece seems to go: People are people. They like to socialize with people who they see as like them. Unsurprisingly, they like to give jobs to people they socialize with. Therefore: white supremacy is no one’s fault! It’s just human nature! (And to say that this is only implied is even being generous: the subtitle of her book is “racial inequality without racism”).

First of all, that’s just bullshit. White supremacy takes violence and the segregation found in social networks is a result of violence. If we’re serious about redressing white supremacy let’s redress the racial violence that pervades our society before we start worrying about how to fix people’s social lives to make them more politically correct. DiTomaso would agree with that point I suspect, as the fact that people aren’t politically correct in their social lives is what leads her to argue that we need affirmative action to redress this fact. If the segregation of social networks wasn’t largely a result of more fundamental socioeconomic violence, I might agree. When I said DiTomaso’s work was a missed opportunity what I meant was: The point about how under the present conditions, white supremacy can not only function but flourish without the need for individuals to think of themselves as racially biased is indeed an important one, but only when we look at it in a larger context.

Apart from my belief that there are indeed deeper causes of black unemployment than the exclusivity of social networks alone, the practical problems with trying to redress the exclusivity of social networks through affirmative action are immense. 1, we would need much, much stronger affirmative action policies to move the unemployment disparity even at all; 2, this would be fighting against the grain of an economy that no longer feels that workers are terribly necessary; 3, the bulk of the benefits of affirmative action policies benefit the small percentage of black and brown folk who are already well-connected. As far as the last point, there is something to be said for AA, in that any diversity in white institutions does improve them (even if in better accomplishing their white supremacist aims). However, as a policy it does nothing for the people who need the state and the cops and the corporations off their back the most! It does nothing for the young black and brown men in prison. It does nothing for black and brown single mothers hustling to raise kids and working minimum wage jobs. It does more or less nothing for the black and brown kids who the educational system failed. 

In conclusion, if DiTomaso actually wanted to do something about black unemployment she NEEDS to talk about mass incarceration, the drug war, the injustices of our educational system, the fact that the economy is stacked against poor people in general, and the fact that we need a MUCH stronger social safety net. I am an advocate for a guaranteed wage paid to everyone; if capitalism can get by without workers, then why should not having a job preclude you from being able to survive? In short: If we fix the violence, the social networks will fix themselves.