Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    <scribbled by jonl Mon 10 Jan 22 18:54>
  

    
(Sorry about the scribbles - formatting on the 2nd paragraph was a
problem. I think I have it fixed now.)

Via email from George Mokray:

Anybody interested in an online/all the time World Game for all
those who are for the benefit of all who are for the benefit of all?
I mean, just as a thought experiment.

<https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2021-386/>
Global Carbon Budget 2021

Received: 28 Oct 2021 – Accepted for review: 29 Oct 2021 –
Discussion started: 04 Nov 2021

Abstract. Accurate assessment of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2)
emissions and their redistribution among the atmosphere, ocean, and
terrestrial biosphere in a changing climate is critical to better
understand the global carbon cycle, support the development of
climate policies, and project future climate change. Here we
describe and synthesize data sets and methodology to quantify the
five major components of the global carbon budget and their
uncertainties. Fossil CO2 emissions (EFOS) are based on energy
statistics and cement production data, while emissions from land-use
change (ELUC), mainly deforestation, are based on land-use and
land-use change data and bookkeeping models. Atmospheric CO2
concentration is measured directly, and its growth rate (GATM) is
computed from the annual changes in concentration. The ocean CO2
sink (SOCEAN) is estimated with global ocean biogeochemistry models
and observation-based data-products. The terrestrial CO2 sink
(SLAND) is estimated with dynamic global vegetation models. The
resulting carbon budget imbalance (BIM), the difference between the
estimated total emissions and the estimated changes in the
atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere, is a measure of
imperfect data and understanding of the contemporary carbon cycle.
All uncertainties are reported as ±1&#963;. For the first time, an
approach is shown to reconcile the difference in our ELUC estimate
with the one from national greenhouse gases inventories, supporting
the assessment of collective countries’ climate progress.

For the year 2020, EFOS declined by 5.4% relative to 2019, with
fossil emissions at 9.5+/- 0.5 GtC yr-1 (9.3 +/- 0.5 GtC yr-1 when
the cement carbonation sink is included), ELUC was 0.9 +/- 0.7 GtC
yr-1, for a total anthropogenic CO2 emission of 10.2 +/- 0.8 GtC
yr-1 (37.4 +/- 2.9 GtCO2). Also, for 2020, GATM was 5.0 +/- 0.2 GtC
yr-1 (2.4 +/- 0.1 ppm yr-1), SOCEAN was 3.0 +/- 0.4 GtC yr-1 and
SLAND was 2.9 +/- 1 GtC yr-1, with a BIM of -0.8 GtC yr-1. The
global atmospheric CO2 concentration averaged over 2020 reached
412.45 +/- 0.1 ppm. Preliminary data for 2021, suggest a rebound in
EFOS relative to 2020 of +4.9% (4.1% to 5.7%) globally. 

Overall, the mean and trend in the components of the global carbon
budget are consistently estimated over the period 1959–2020, but
discrepancies of up to 1&#8201;GtC&#8201;yr&#8722;1 persist for the
representation of annual to semi-decadal variability in CO2 fluxes.
Comparison of estimates from multiple approaches and observations
shows: (1) a persistent large uncertainty in the estimate of
land-use changes emissions, (2) a low agreement between the
different methods on the magnitude of the land CO2 flux in the
northern extra- tropics, and (3) a discrepancy between the different
methods on the strength of the ocean sink over the last decade. This
living data update documents changes in the methods and data sets
used in this new global carbon budget and the progress in
understanding of the global carbon cycle compared with previous
publications of this data set (Friedlingstein et al., 2020;
Friedlingstein et al., 2019; Le Quéré et al., 2018b, 2018a, 2016,
2015b, 2015a, 2014, 2013). The data presented in this work are
available at <https://doi.org/10.18160/gcp-2021> (Friedlingstein et
al., 2021).
  

    
No, no, and no again to states' authority over women's bodies. NO.
We've already watched that show. My autonomy as a fully functioning
adult is not available for either compromise nor surrender.

I have every right as a woman and LGBTQ person to live in Galveston
for the creative spirit, or New Orleans for the jazz, or Oklahoma
for - for whatever the hell people live in Oklahoma for, and my
rights go with me. I'm not about to chase them cross-country.
Period.

If that's a chip I have to give up to keep the country in one piece,
it's not worth saving.
  

    
Angie: The State already claims authority over women's bodies -
that's why some birth control pills are legal, and others were
blocked by the FDA as too dangerous. It's why you can smoke weed in
some places, but not others.

State interference in personal bodily choice is everywhere: abortion
being moved from "easy to get legitimate elective medical procedure"
to "felony murder in most instances" is egregious, but so was the
War On Drugs - government does evil and outrageous things all the
time, and they affect some people (inner city youth, women) more
than others. The State is a beast. The alternatives to the State
appear worse. Life sucks, then you die.

If it comes to civil war, millions to tens of millions of people
might die. Certainly global power will shift to Russia, China, and
other less-than-democratic regimes.

It's all very well to talk about your rights, but the question is
this: *how many people are you and your faction willing to kill to
enforce those rights*.

Enforcing the rights of black people to be treated more-or-less like
human beings instead of livestock cost 600,000 dead. Under the
circumstances most would consider that to have been a noble and
utterly necessary sacrifice. The ones on the other side of that war,
the defeated, have a different opinion - as you might expect.

A war between left and right in America would probably have
minimally a million deaths, mostly from infrastructure and supply
chain failures: it's insulin supply problems not death squads that
would do most of the killing in most of those scenarios. About 3% of
Americans (as I recall) need regular medication to not die pretty
rapidly, and it doesn't take that much of a war to mess up those
pharmaceutical supply chains. And it could be far, far worse if
energy grids go down at an inconvenient time, or if National Guard
etc. armories get emptied out and the bad guys get hold of heavy
weapons.

So, yeah, I understand you think you have a right to live in Texas
with Federal protection against Texas's choice of law. But if Texas
decides - with their democratic mandate - that they've voted against
your idea of your rights being their idea of your rights...

How many Texas have to be killed to enforce your model of your
rights?

I think - while it is inconvenient and aggravating - the fact that
enormous numbers of geographically concentrated Americans want
different law and are voting for different law year after year
cannot be ignored. It's a democracy, and a huge voting bloc wants
something else.

We can either give it to them, and move everybody who chooses not to
live under that law. Or we can have a war, shed blood at vast scale,
rip open cultural wounds that won't heal for centuries, and force
our values on them at gunpoint as happened in the first Civil War.
And that's if the liberal side *wins* which is, frankly, ***not very
likely***. If it's open conflict, the 10 million American deer
hunters will swing mostly Republican, and you'll wind up with the
Coastal States of America barely holding their ground, or losing
outright in at least some scenarios. 

I should note that I was (at one point in my career) a failed states
specialist in military think tanks. These scenarios have haunted me
for 15 years. I've really thought this stuff through.

So the idea of simply letting the Texan make their own law on issues
which are currently a set of Federal issues seems like a pretty good
alternative. It *inconveniences* a lot of people, but it kills
(almost) nobody. It can be easily reversed as future generations of
Texans discover that banning abortion etc. really screws up your
society. It can be done in a way which permits California to have
hyper-progressive policies on pretty much everything, using the same
States Rights powers granted to Texas etc.

I know this is an ugly solution, I know a lot of people will be
harmed, but I think it could save the day.

Drugs, guns, abortion, LGBT issues - with a guaranteed right to
relocate to another state - could be pushed down to the State level
**and American life would go on, almost unchanged, for almost
everybody**.

It's the best offer on the table in most future scenarios. America
should take it.
  

    
Samizdat from Almaty, provided by my friend Fatima Omir.

Despite the information lockdown, some Almaty civil activists were
able to set up an informal coordination headquarters in this crisis
situation. In particular, a list of problems for the residents of
the city was compiled, which was then handed over to authorities. By
the way, one of the first points was the problem that many people
ran out of balance on their phones, there was a problem with paying
and buying essential goods due to lack of availability, there was a
risk of food shortage Etc. etc. d. Surprisingly, on the first clause
the decision was made quickly and cellular operators were asked to
replenish the balances of their subscribers. But after the crisis
situation, there is still a lot of work to do. And, most
importantly, develop a clear anti-crisis action program for civil
society, so that in case of any force majeure situations, people
know what to do, where to turn, how to behave, how to help, etc. d.
According to recent events, the power vacuum has paralyzed the city
for days, but if the city's law and order system fails for various
reasons, then citizens must be connected to it so that, on the one
hand, tomorrow they did not feel like hostages to looters, bandits
and terrorists, or victims of intra-elite showdowns, ah, on the
other hand, did not create additional problems due to panic or lack
of information on what to do and how to behave. For example, the
process of creating voluntary friendships, which began to arise in
different parts of the city by the residents themselves, should
obtain legal status and become part of the city anti-crisis program.
By the way, in 2019, in my book "Vertical Deformation", I devoted
two chapters to anti-crisis management, including the need to create
a Center for Situation Modeling and Anti-crisis Management involving
civilian assets in Almaty. Stand. The book was then handed over to
the akim of Almaty B. To Sagintayev and other government officials.
But apparently they didn't even open it.
  

    
So what's the state of the world?

The concept of democracy is fading. Governance throughout the world
is increasingly autocratic. The United States leads the trend. The
Biden presidency was a last gasp of the US Democratic party, which
will fade. Trumpist Republicans will rule by brute force, and the
United States will be dominated by far right white nationalist
leaders, including evangelical Christians who will insist that the
US be characterized as a Christian country, with other religions
marginalized and/or suppressed. Meanwhile increasingly heavy weather
events, driven my climate change and instability, will be the rule.
Insurance companies will be bankrupt by increasingly intense weather
events, seas will rise, people will be driven from their homes.
Infrastructure will be challenged and in some places collapse.
Public health organizations will lose support and be effectively
powerless, vaccinations will no longer be required by schools etc.,
diseases like smallpox, polio, measles etc. will spread unchecked,
Covid and flu will will continue to mutate and spread seasonally,
other pandemics will appear. Many will die, the human race will
start fading toward extinction.

Happy New Year!
  

    
JonL: Barbarism, not extinction.
  

    <scribbled by hexayurt>
  

    
Trend isn't destiny; the future is unwritten.
  

    
I just got a third Covid vaccination.  I wonder how many more
needle-jabs this year will hold -- and this decade.

There was an interesting tipping point with this third shot because,
although it's important to have a vaccination, it's become even more
pressingly important to be registered in this European national
health system as *having legally received* this vaccination. 

 I could probably rustle up a Covid vaccination somewhere outside
the European Union, but it wouldn't help me much in my bureaucratic
daily life in Europe; if a European health system didn't give it to
me, they wouldn't be able to count it.  Although coronavirus drifts
aross borders with great speed and ease, health data doesn't, and
won't.  Global medical cooperation is vastly *worse* than it was
when the global pandemic started.
  

    

The front-facing aspect of this situation is not my vaccination, or
the data registry of my vaccination, but rather the "Green Pass" QR
code, which is the visible emblem of my status.   If I have little
square of  black and white speckles on a phone, then I can move
around, get on planes, attend events, eat outside my home and so
forth.  If I lack this QR code validation -- my phone got wet, for
instance -- then I'm in trouble; I become unvaccinated underclass
and a visible health risk.

I haven't yet figured out if my old Green Pass QR code, which I
already possess, will continue to work (because it refers to my
upgraded vaccination database) or if they will issue an entirely
*new* QR code, which I have to download and install.  My wife's had
a clerical error once.  We had to jump through a lot of hoops, and
although she did get the QR code, she never successfully got the
phone software that surrounds it.

My Italian QR code application also has built-in Covid proximity
tracking, so if I fail to turn Bluetooth on in my phone, it
complains.  Once it told me that a guy five seats behind me on a
plane was sick.  Of course that bad news was useless to anybody, but
it showed that the application is functional (sort of).
  

    

Soon after our State of the World closes here on the WELL,  I'll be
travelling to Texas, which is seething with unheard-of amounts of
coronavirus.  And yet, the USA requires me to board a plane with a
certification that I myself don't have coronavirus.  This is a
near-comical allegation that they are in danger from me, instead of
me bravely plunging into an American maelstrom of disease, which is
what's actually going on.  

But, speaking in terms of diplomatic realpolitik, what can the USA
do?  Should they *apologize* to people arriving in the USA, and
explain that their health-care system is especially dangerous and
dysfunctional?  Everyone in Europe already knows that; it's the
state of the world, but not something that a nation-state can easily
admit.  "We're a superpower leper colony."  The cognitive dissonance
is too much to handle.
  

    

These new biomedical border systems were built at great expense,
although (except in China, which excels at Great Firewalls) they
have signally failed at their purpose.  The Covid-tracking efforts
turned out to be about as effective as the Trump Border Wall, but,
much like the Trump Border Wall, it's too embarrassing to boldly
admit that they're Potemkin projects.   

My guess is that they pass into political legendry, as a new form of
biomedical security-theater.  Like the airport security that never
captures a terrorist, they will occasionally trap some unfortunate
person, in much the way that half-forgotten scissors and
pocketknives get vacuumed up at airports, for decades on end.

There's a lot of Green Pass protest in Europe, but that probably
won't affect the situation much, as nobody wants to be seen as
bowing the knee to Facebook antivax mobs.  There are rational
cost-benefit arguments to be made here, but nobody who could make
them would get a hearing over the wail of the ambulances.

So -- like a lot of important developments here in the 2020s -- it's
gonna change things a lot, worldwide, but not in a way that anybody
wants.
  

    
I like Vinay's notion of Texas seceding; maybe they could join a
secessionist Scotland and start a Texo-Scottish oil-backed
cryptocurrency.

If haggis breakfast-tacos would work, it would all work.
  

    
More likely Texas and the 24 other red states separating from the 25
blue states, breaking the USA in two. Or some other, more granular
balkanization creating chaos, confusion, and opportunity. 
  

    
Comparing individual states (e.g., Texas v. California) seems to
miss some key geographic differences within the US: urban, suburban,
rural, dense, sprawling, sparse. I'm reminded that Texas went 47%
Democratic in the 2020 election. So what happens to Houston, San
Antonio, Dallas, Austin, El Paso, etc. in these
secessionist/federalist scenarios? Will all the cities of Texalberta
be empty?
  

    
I think some of us are assuming that a Republican minority will
assert and sustain control by whatever means. Gerrymandering fixes
the local elections, and taking control of the infrastructure for
voting could fix the statewide elections. It's a good question how
an increasingly democratic populace will react to those shenanigans,
state my state and also at a national level. 
  

    
Eh, Bruce, half of America's problems are Scottish settlers
continuing to act like... well... Scottish people :) 

> "If haggis breakfast-tacos would work"...

I've had curried haggis more than once. It's pretty tasty. Why not?

So maybe an independent Texas, Scotland, Catalonia and a few of the
other really young countries could form some kind of a league.

https://kathrynanywhere.com/youngest-countries-world/
South Sudan.
Kosovo.
Montenegro and Serbia.
East Timor.
Palau.

Presumably they have a lot of shared problems working their way
through the massive bureaucratic apparatus? 
  

    
((for context: I'm half-Scottish half-Indian and mostly grew up in
Scotland.))

https://dissidentvoice.org/Jan06/Bageant10.htm best thing ever
written on the Scottish national character and how it expresses in
America. 
  

    
Kevin,

My preferred scenario for fixing America is threefold.

1) Turn the big cities into States: Chicago, San Francisco, LA,
Chicago, Seattle and so on.

This helps sort out the Electoral College problems, without
annihilating it.

2) Push huge amounts of power over moral wedge issues down to the
States: drugs, guns, abortion, LGBT legal status.

This only works with Federal assistance to move people to a place
they want to live: we can't have people economically trapped in a
jurisdiction which just rolled back their civil rights.

3) Campaign finance reform, which Lawrence Lessig has worked on
extensively. 

I'm with him on all of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig#Money_in_politics_activism

Two bonus points.

4) Maybe retool the American military to run nuclear reactors on US
Concessions (like embassies, but large and industrial) in countries
that want to go green fast and don't want to use solar/wind for
whatever reason.

5) US-EU-CN climate pact - carbon accounting between these trade
blocs, so the Chinese CO2 footprint for making stuff for Americans
shows up in America, not China.

Not easy to do, but accurate carbon accounting is a prelude to
international treaties with real teeth.

Anyway, that's my manifesto.
  

    
>the fact that
enormous numbers of geographically concentrated Americans want
different law and are voting for different law year after year
cannot be ignored

They can be denied. Because this is atrocity. Majority rule does not
justify immoral law. That's why we have a Supreme Court. That's why
we must expand it to thirteen seats.

But the notion of Texas seceding is all rubbish anyway. Texas is
turning blue, and there's nothing the white plurality can do to stop
it. That's why they're thrashing around the deck like a gutshot
nurse shark; they know demographic mobility is coming for them on a
black horse. They're trying to get the genie (the permanent,
color-coded, underclass workforce) back in the bottle, and it ain't
going there.
  

    
Texas turning blue may rely on the Hispanic vote, and that, in turn,
is far from reliably for the Democrats - trending away, even.
  

    
Axon: the tension between democracy and civil rights is a very real
thing. The Founding Fathers wasted no shortage of ink on it.

But... that's also heading into Civil War 2.0. That might be the
choice being made here. Vs. just agreeing to disagree, and waiting
20 years for the Republicans to catch up.
  

    
love the bageant piece in #269. 'hillbilly elegy' touched on some of
this.
  

    
While the competition to control the US federal government
continues, I don’t see it becoming civil war. Instead I expect to
see laws increasingly ignored, though selectively.

We’ve already seen this with drugs being legalized by the states.
They were never legalized at the federal level. It’s just that
everyone ignores that, except the banks, resulting in financial
inconvenience for marijuana growers and dispensaries. Presidents
have other things to do and they’re not going to spend any political
capital on fixing this.

During the pandemic, health authorities have lost prestige with
people of all political persuasions. At the start of this pandemic
it was mostly libertarians who had it in for the FDA but frustration
seems pretty general at this point? Even a middle-of-the-road guy
like Dave Barry is making fun of CDC guidelines now.

It’s fractal. The state authorities make their own rules when they
don’t like the CDC guidelines, and local governments do their own
thing, and often the citizens can’t even be bothered to find out
what the rules are.

Businesses have somewhat less leeway but if they can find a creative
interpretation then they might do their own thing too. Tesla was the
most high-profile scofflaw keeping its factory open at the start of
the pandemic but there were lots of businesses that quietly decided
that they’re “essential” and local governments decided they’re not
going to fight it.

If the Supreme Court lets the Texas anti-abortion law stand, maybe
the main consequence will be widespread drug trade in abortion
pills? Getting them by mail is legal now and even if it weren’t, it
would be hard to stop.

Americans are still somewhat law-abiding if you compare with other
countries. They still get upset when other people break traffic
laws, some of them anyway. But maybe we should be looking at less
lawful places to see how that can change?