WayWest

Visualize globalization

Ethan Zuckerman's blog My heart's in Accra uses the map below as the starting point for an insightful essay on making concrete the often abstract notion of globalization:

From Turkey to France, people are finding themselves sitting in the cold due to a dispute between Ukraine and Russia over natural gas.

Most of us don’t think about the global infrastructure that makes our connected world work so smoothly until something fails. When it does, we reach for maps…

Environmental journalists going way of polar bears?

From the always insightful Joel Makower:

For all the media reports about a surge in 'green jobs,' one place we won't likely be seeing them is in the media itself.

The past few weeks and months have been devastating for environmental journalism. Just after Thanksgiving, Fortune magazine gave layoff notices to Marc Gunther, one of the leading business writers on corporate environmental practices (whose blogs also appear on GreenBiz.com), along with Todd Woody, whose coverage of clean technology has led the pack. (Gunther has been asked to stick around as a 'contributing writer' and again chair next year's Brainstorm: Green event.)

Over at CNN — which has been pushing hard its new Planet in Peril series — the network's entire seven-person environmental team, including stalwarts like veteran anchor Miles O'Brien and pioneering producer Peter Dykstra, was let go. Even the Weather Channel, which has been hyping its climate change program, Forecast Earth, extinguished the Environmental Unit that produced it. (It did this, by the way, while turning its normally blue logo green as part of NBC's Green Is Universal promotion.)"

(More @ Joel Makower: Two Steps Forward)

Perfect once again enemy of the good: mpg confusion

What reduces emissions more?
A. Someone swapping their old SUV (which gets 12 miles per gallon) for a hybrid version (18 mpg) or
B. someone upgrading their 25 mpg compact to a new 46 mpg Prius?
(ignore for a minute manufacturing issues or driving habits and assume the miles driven are the same).

The surprising answer (for those who don't work it out) is A. It's easy enough to see why this is the case. If the driving distance is 100 miles, then for case A the saving in fuel used (and hence emissions) is 100/12-100/18 = 2.8 gallons, while for B, you have 100/25-100/46 = 1.8 gallons. The confusion arises because people like to think linearly about numbers, not inversely, and so tend to assume that a similar change in mpg has a similar impact on fuel usage. This is not however the case - improvements in efficiency at the low end of the scale are much more useful at reducing emissions. This is actually a very general point - when trying to raise efficiency it is always sensible to start with the least efficient processes.

This confusion got some attention a couple of months ago after a piece that was published in Science by Larrick and Soll. They tested peoples instinctive reactions to changes in mpg numbers and found that people very often got it wrong, leading to less than optimal decisions. They also tested a different way of giving fuel usage information (the number of gallons used per mile), and since this is linear in emissions, people made the correct judgment much more often (it's worth noting that the standard in most of Europe is already litres per 100 km). Rewritten in those terms, the choices above become:

A. Someone swapping their old SUV (which takes 8.3 gallons to go 100 miles) for a hybrid version (5.6 gallons/100 miles) or
B. someone upgrading their 4 gallons/100 miles compact to a new 2.2 gallons/100 mile Prius?

Much easier, right?

(Via RealClimate)

Thought bubble

This morning seeing the photo of Bush and Obama sitting together in the Oval Office, warily eyeing each other, I imagined a single cartoon bubble overhead for what both of them were thinking:

"Who let this guy in here and how do I get him out?"

Gunning for Earth

Every teen-age boy alive, it seems, loves to play first-person shooter video games. A couple of new games steer kids in a more hopeful direction: saving Earth in the battle against global warming.

The BBC's created Climate Challenge, where you as the president of the European Nations must decide the policies that do the most to reduce carbon emissions. The other, shown above, is CO2FX, a multi-player game built on a model created at MIT.

Bigfooting the oceans

It's hard to really grasp the global effects of the human race. This graphic, one of six remarkable images on the New York Times site, shows our collective impact on the world's oceans. The colors mark the routes of 3,374 commercial and research vessels in a single year—and this is only 11 percent of the total merchant ships at sea that year.

Other images depict the spread of invasive species, temperature changes, acidification and other changes driven by our presence. Such big footprints make the prospect of global warming a lot less abstract.

A blunt voice of great precision

David Roberts, who blogs for Grist, is a must read for tracking the ins and outs of global weirding. In dissecting the science and politics of climate change, David Roberts cuts to the chase with righteous calm. Few use such a blunt voice with such precision.

If you're new to his ways, his guest column over at The Nation is a great place to start. Consider your stereotypes dynamited:

"When Grist hired me five years ago, I did not consider myself an 'environmentalist.' To me the word conjured not so much a set of policy positions as a subculture, with the emphasis on cult. It was a set of clothing, music, and activity choices I had little affinity with and associated with a degree of self-righteousness. I'd never hung out with environmental activists. I didn't want to subordinate my other interests (horserace politics, social and economic justice, rule of law, the web). I'm an unreconstructed urbanite with no particular love for critters, trees, or hiking/climbing/kayaking. I enjoy irony, political wonkery, pop culture, and bacon. I hate jam bands.

He'll be posting throughout February, so give it a look.

Info Wants to be...Select?

The New York Times announces that 135,000 people so far have been willing to pay for access to its columnists and other material. Steve Johnson, the Chicago Tribune's official internet critic, examines the  web experiment being watched by every newspaper in the country: Times Draws Blood from Stone.

Hecho en China

The other day I bought a package of wood screws at Home Depot with this little label that seemed to capture the crosswinds of globalization.

It's old hat to see Hecho en Mexico (Spanish for Made in Mexico) on all kinds of items, especially here in California. The border with Mexico is near and trade under NAFTA now sends trucks loaded with goods rumbling north and south. Similarly, just about anything you buy at Target or Wal-Mart these days comes from China. (In fact, every known object now appears available in Chinese stainless steel, forged from the power harnessed by hundreds of new dams there.)

But Hecho en China? Is this some sort of salt on the wounds of Mexican businesses that have been forced to close as manufacturers send their orders to ever-lower-cost producers in China?

Dean Screams, We Scream

Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean seemed to lose it during his concession speech Monday night in Iowa. For those of us who have supported him to date, his wolf-bit-by-a-badger howl was enough to make the skin crawl. Maybe we'll all be laughing about it soon enough; especially with this QuickTime remix.
Thanks to the Kraus files for the link...