A Change in the Wind

Unemployed reporter turns brewer, keeps sense of humor

You have to love a reporter who makes a joke -- and beer -- out of his unemployment. 

Best of all is his label, which reads in part: 

"Porter style beers were first popularized in the nineteenth century by merchant sailors and manual dock laborers. Unemployed Reporter is crafted in the same tradition, honoring a profession likewise doomed to decline and irrelevance."

For this new class of "expendables," the label goes on:

"We've included chocolate and roasted barley malts that are as dark and bitter as the future of American journalism, and a high alcohol content designed to numb the pain of a slow, inexorable march toward obsolescence. While Unemployed Reporter is especially delicious as a breakfast beer, it's still smooth enough to be enjoyed all day, every day. And let's be honest: what else do you have going on?"

A wildly popular social media item, originally from the Hartford Courant. 

ADD: Credited the media source, but not the source: the reporter/wit Jon Campbell. My apologies, Mr. Campbell. No blog found as of yet, unfortunately. 

Researcher clicks w/reporter: true stories become movies

For decades the Los Angeles Times has had a Column One feature on the front page, at the top left of the front page, usually, in the A1 position. It's a story-telling opportunity for good reporters. Yesterday Chris Lee hit the ball out of the park with his profile of the unusual reader/Hollywood producer Stuart Klawans.  

It's good to see, because with the newspaper's struggles as of late in two separate bankruptcy court, the big hits have been few and far between. But no matter!

Here is the subject of the profile, Stuart Klawans, the reader/producer: 

Nearly every day, for upward of 10-hour stretches, the independent film producer speed-reads police blogs, articles from RSS feeds and niche-interest journals in dogged pursuit of an elusive prize: a story on which to base his next movie.

His biggest hit to date is "Argo." Before the film landed seven Oscar nominations (including one for best picture) and twoGolden Globes (including best drama picture), before it generated more than $180 million in worldwide grosses, "Argo" existed as a declassified story in the quarterly CIAjournal Studies in Intelligence, which Klawans happens to have been perusing one day in 1998.

"It's like going on the beach with a metal detector," the self-described news junkie says of his process. "Like Kanye West looks through records to sample on his songs, I'm looking for stories to turn into films."

Klawans, 44, has established himself as Hollywood's least likely movie macher by heeding the advice of his mentor, the old-school producer David Brown ("Jaws," "A Few Good Men"): "Read everything you can get your hands on."

A truly inspiring story about,an incredibly hard worker at work in the world of fact and story.  

Even more impressively, Klawans worked with a local reporter, Joshuah Bearman, who shared his taste for unusual stories. Bearman got good assignments, based on Klawans' tips, and went on to research, interview, and very successfully narrativize the stories Klawans found. He made the movie Klawans imagined vivid in prose, enticing the involvement of big Hollywood players such as George Clooney and Ben Affleck. 

Astonishing, and brilliantly timed, as Argo with its latest SAG wins contends for Best Picture. 

Related articles

'Argo' Wins Big at SAG - Are We Looking at a Best Picture Winner?

Why 'ZERO DARK THIRTY' Crashed Just Outside the Oscar Compound...

Three Reasons Why "Argo" Became the One To Beat

Oscar Talk: It's Argo's To Lose

Wall Street Journal vs. James Hansen on 2012 temps

In an editorial this weekend in the Wall Street Journal, columnist Holman Jenkins scoffed at the reporting of the NOAA statement that 2012 was the hottest year ever in the instrumental record in these United States.

Jenkins wrote: 

When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says 2012 was the hottest year on record in the "contiguous United States," trust the media to transcribe the statement accurately. A disaster for public understanding begins only when the media stop transcribing and start using their own brains.

Said the New York Times climate blog, in an assertion that was echoed throughout the media: "The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree, but 2012 blew away the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit."

Really? If that were true, then hair-on-fire news should have been the fact that 2012 was 2.13 degrees hotter than 2011. That's a far more dramatic change, and in a single year.

Nor was it mentioned that 2008, in the contiguous U.S., was two degrees cooler than 2006. Or that 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 were all cooler than 1998 by a larger margin than 2012 was hotter than 1998.

Are you getting the picture? None of this was mentioned because it makes a mockery of using trends in the Lower 48 as a proxy for global warming, the misguided intent that permeated media coverage of the NOAA revelation.

The contiguous United States isn't the globe. It isn't even the United States, omitting Alaska and Hawaii. The Lower 48 represent just 1.58% of the total surface area of the Earth. The law of large numbers is at work here: The smaller the sample, the more volatile its patterns compared to a larger sample. And the fact remains, in all the authoritative studies, the warmest year on record globally is still 1998 and no trend has been apparent globally since then.

In response to this, and to another misleading editorial in the paper, Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, calls on the WSJ to get a fact-checker for its editorialists.

Actually, our leading climatologist, James Hansen, today did fact check the claim that "global warming has stopped," with the respect for facts of a true scientist. Please note that he seconds Jenkins' remarks re: the temperature record in the last ten years:

Global Warming Standstill. The 5-year running mean of global temperature has been flat for the past decade. It should be noted that the "standstill" temperature is at a much higher level than existed at any year in the prior decade except for the single year 1998, which had the strongest El Nino of the century. However, the standstill has led to a widespread assertion that "global warming has stopped". Examination of this matter requires consideration of the principal climate forcing mechanisms that can drive climate change and the effects of stochastic (unforced) climate variability.

The climate forcing most often cited as a likely natural cause of global temperature change is solar variability. The sun's irradiance began to be measured precisely from satellites in the late 1970s, thus quantifying well the variation of solar energy reaching Earth (Fig. 4). The irradiance change associated with the 10-13 year sunspot cycle is about 0.1%. Given the ~240 W/m2 of solar energy absorbed by Earth, this solar cycle variation is about 1/4 W/m2 averaged over the planet. Although it is too early to know whether the maximum of the present solar cycle has been reached, the recent prolonged solar minimum assures that there is a recent downward trend in decadal solar irradiance, which may be a decrease of the order of 0.1 W/m2. Although several hypotheses have been made for how the solar irradiance variations could be magnified by indirect effects, no convincing confirmation of indirect forcings has been found except for a very small amplifying effect via changes of stratospheric ozone.

A slower growth rate of the net climate forcing may have contributed to the standstill of global temperature in the past decade, but it cannot explain the standstill, because it is known that the planet has been out of energy balance, more energy coming in from the sun than energy being radiated to space.10 The planetary energy imbalance is due largely to the increase of climate forcings in prior decades and the great thermal inertia of the ocean. The more important factor in the standstill is probably unforced dynamical variability, essentially climatic "noise"...

Indeed, the current stand-still of the 5-year running mean global temperature may be largely a consequence of the fact that the first half of the past 10 years had predominately El Nino conditions, while the second half had predominately La Nina conditions (Nino index in Fig. 1). Comparing the global temperature at the time of the most recent three La Ninas (1999-2000, 2008, and 2011-2012), it is apparent that global temperature has continued to rise between recent years of comparable tropical temperature, indeed, at a rate of warming similar to that of the previous three decades. We conclude that background global warming is continuing, consistent with the known planetary energy imbalance, even though it is likely that the slowdown in climate forcing growth rate contributed to the recent apparent standstill in global temperature.

Hansen posts a graph that shows the baseline shift in temperature anomalies in the U.S.: 

He adds:

The New Climate Dice. The high current global temperature is sufficient to have a noticeable effect on the frequency of occurrence of extreme warm anomalies. The left-most "bell curve" in Fig. 3 is the frequency distribution of summer-average temperature anomalies during the base period 1951-1980, in units of the local standard deviation1 of seasonal-average temperature.

The observational data show that the frequency of unusually warm anomalies has been increasing decade by decade over the past three decades. Perhaps the most important change is the emergence of extremely hot outliers, defined as anomalies exceeding 3 standard deviations. Such extreme summer heat anomalies occurred in 2010 over a large region in Eastern Europe including Moscow, in 2011 in Oklahoma, Texas and Northern Mexico, and in 2012 in the United States in part of the central Rockies and Great Plains.

The location of these extreme anomalies is dependent upon variable meteorological patterns, but the decade-by-decade movement of the bell curve to the right, and the emergence of an increased number of extreme warm anomalies, is an expression of increasing global warming. Some seasons continue to be unusually cool even by the standard of average 1951-1980 climate, but the "climate dice" are now sufficiently loaded that an observant person should notice that unusually warm seasons are occurring much more frequently than they did a few decades earlier.

I can't help but contrast the focus on fact from Hansen vs. the wild charges of Holman, who drags tax reform, the media, politicians, and other irrelevancies into his attempt to discredit the facts of global warming.  

How to politely correct a climate denier: Justin Gillis

Justin Gillis, who has taken over the lead reporting duties on climate change from Andrew Revkin at the New York Times, might want to consider tightrope walking in his next life.

Consider his exquisitely nuanced recapitulation of an on-line controversy involving a climate change denier named Alec Rawls, who dismisses the entire upcoming fifth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the basis of a single ambiguous sentence. 

Mr. Rawls found this to be a “game-changing” acknowledgement that, yes, earthly climate must be influenced by cosmic rays. Indeed, in his manifesto leaking the document, he called this sentence “an astounding bit of honesty, a killing admission that completely undercuts the main premise and the main conclusion of the full report, revealing the fundamental dishonesty of the whole.”

Well.

Looking at the full report, I have to wonder if Mr. Rawls just stopped reading when he got to that sentence. Because what follows is a lengthy discussion of the science to date regarding cosmic rays and climate, one that points out the intriguing results suggesting a possible connection, but also points out that many of those studies cannot be reproduced by other scientists, that many of the supposed correlations are weak, and so forth.

The Flying Wallendas couldn't walk that line any better. 

Is Earth d**med? AGU scientist Jason Box wants to know

Credit where credit is due: Brilliant story on this year's AGU by Jonathan Mingle in Slate. 

Many of us have wondered at some point in almost precisely these terms: “Is Earth F**ked?” But it’s not the sort of frank query you expect an expert in geomorphology to pose to his colleagues as the title of a formal presentation at one of the world’s largest scientific gatherings.

Dare you not to read the rest. 

Spoiler: The blunt-spoken scientist wants to save his beloved Greenland

At the conference the idea that the heat wave that melted 97% of Greenland's ice sheet in five days this July came up, and its similiarity to other heat waves, in this country in the Midwest especially.  

Why would anyone want to write for a newspaper?

A couple of weeks ago a smartie named Cary Odes was teasing me, pointing out that I had found a new career as a newspaper reporter, and what could go wrong with that?

It's a real question.

Coffee is good for you: The Institute for Coffee Studies

It's okay! Even "a lot" of it, for those who like that sort of thing. That's according to a story in the Atlantic Wire, which has made quite a splash on the Web this year for its well-chosen topics and bright, chatty style.

The first expert quoted. Dr. Peter Martin, encourages the drinking of coffee all through the day. Turns out he works at the Institute for Coffee Studies.

At Vanderbilt University, but still -- sounds like the Onion.

Can't be helped, apparently. 

No matter: This reporter will take any excuse to swill more coffee this upcoming week at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting, the largest earth sciences conference on the planet. With hundreds of presentations and thousands of posters, it's the biggest information overload I know. What mentor Andy Lipkis at TreePeople used to call simply "overwhelm." 

Happy to be attending again this year, starting Monday. Will try to post as much as possible. Any questions you might have, I might be able to ask. Here's the scientific program. 

Will Ventura County's Prez-picking streak continue?

Ventura County is one of just eight counties around the country that has picked every winner of the Presidential contest since Warren Harding successfully (with one exception -- l976). Timm Herdt, the reigning political writer in this parts, hints that the streak may continue: 

In early 2008, Democrats overtook Republicans to gain a plurality among registered voters in Ventura County. That fall, Obama carried the county by 12 percentage points.

"A lot of younger people started becoming more politically active, and that certainly started swinging things toward the Democratic Party," said former Supervisor Susan Lacey of Ventura.

The local races look close, but a substantial lead among party registration (about 44% Democratic to about 30 Republican, with about 20% Independent) gives the Prez a leg up.

Here's the history: 

Because county voters are substantially more Democratic than in past decades, due in large part to an influx of Latinos, the county will likely vote for Obama, probably at a higher rate than the nation.

Campaigns avoid climate change: McClatchey

One (slightly) encouraging sign: The most emailed story on the McClatchey newspapers site recently was a story about how the campaigns are talking (or not talking) about climate change. 

Although climate change typically ranks below such issues as the economy, polling done in March 2012 by Yale University and George Mason University found that 72 percent of Americans think that global warming should be a priority for the president and Congress. Among registered voters, 84 percent of Democrats, 68 percent of independents and 52 percent of Republicans think global warming should be a priority.

Regardless of the candidates’ relative silence about global warming on the campaign trail, the next president will face tough choices on controversial energy and environmental issues such as whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline and how to handle natural gas development and the environmentally fraught “fracking” that goes with it.

The silence on the campaign trail belies the reality – and the gravity – for many coastal communities. Planners in south Florida and New York City already are looking at the multibillion-dollar expense of upgrading infrastructure to address rising sea levels. 

Until recently, though, climate change has been so low a priority in the year’s political discourse that some major political contributors with a strong interest in environmental issues have been reserved in their giving.

That's interesting: To get liberal money, talk climate change.Have legislation to point to. Have seen that in politicians down here in SoCal.

On the other hand, the melting of the Arctic hasn't softened the hearts of Congress, as Toles points out on Monday in the Washington Post:

 

The undecided voter: Hating the hating of politics

Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post is one of the best of this nation's roughly 40,000 reporters, a man who likes complicated science stories, but also a shoeleather reporter ready and willing to go on a hunt to hardscrabble Ohio in search of that mythical beast, the undecided voter.

How does he find him (or her?) He interviews and interviews and interviews. And comes back with a simple truth that a zillion pollsters this election year have yet to clearly articulate, in my reading: 

A lot of voters are lukewarm about the guy they support, but they are white hot about the guy they loathe.

Dig into the quotes and you begin to suspect a deeper truth: The undecided voter is a person who hates the partianship. A person who hates the bitterness and hating of politics.

Look at it this way, and it's easy to understand why the undecided voter is difficult to persuade. And easy to see why pollsters increasingly doubt anything dramatic will change in six weeks. Today long analyses from both the L.A. Times and The New Republic landed on the same basic conclusion: 

As for the relatively few undecideds in the middle, research indicates that they are less likely to vote early than partisans on either side, preferring to wait until the last minute to make up their minds — if they vote at all.

Never thought I understood the undecided voter before -- or respected him as much.