Are the House Democrats committing suicide? Why?

If Nancy Pelosi has a high level of sanity, and if she saw the first Star Wars movie, the situation she is in now should remind her of the scene where the good guys got stuck in a garbage room, with the walls closing in, and no way out they could see except a door leading to the Imperial star troopers trying to kill them. It IS a box, and their survival depends on seeing that there IS a way out of the box. Metaphors are important to understanding the situation well enough to see the way out. (Equations are better, but life taught me long ago to translate the math into metaphors when speaking to 99% of the people of earth.) I did propose a way out a few days ago (https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2019/01/letter-sent-to-my-congressman-about-how.html), but maybe I need to explain a bit more why we need it, how it would work and why certain details are important.

I am very impressed by those CNN reporters who have asked House members on their show: when will the Democrats put something themselves on the table, a real compromise? I was deeply depressed by the confused feelings (ultimately suicidal) of some of the people who replied by saying "this is about border security" and "we can't get substantive because it would set a bad precedent." No, not quite. those are understandable thoughts, but survival depends on getting past understandable inhibitions to seeing a way out beyond them.

First, IS it about border security? Does it HAVE to be, or that a losing constraint?

Let me stry to explain with another metaphor, more useful and precise than the Star Wars metaphor here. Relations between Democrats and Republicans have become more and more like relations between Russians and Americans at the height of the Cold War. We can make lemonade out of those lemons: we can learn from the very serious and deep literature from that time on how to avoid total destruction and get better outcomes. (In those days, I took seminars from Hermann Kahn and Tom Schelling, and courses from many others aware of that literature, including advanced game theory. )

At the height of the Cold War, a guy named Henry Kissinger showed up and proposed "linkage politics." He proposed that negotiations with Russia should COMBINE several key ideas together in one negotiation. Pelosi CAN extend the agenda beyond just border security, if she so chooses. She has very good reason to do so here, since NO motion which the House could pass on border security alone would be anything but a disaster in the end.

Back at the time of Kissinger, there were lots of intense debates for and against linkage politics. In the end, there were good arguments for and good arguments against; the best choice depends on the situation. Linkage politics CAN cause breakdown due to complexity and confusion; that is why my proposal calls for just three very clear, very transparent demands ONLY to be attached to funding for the wall (and restarting the government). Even that complexity is justified ONLY when the issues in the narrow scope (here, border security) are simply not balanced enough in terms of importance to the parties. Pelosi knows full well that even a strengthened version of Trump's proposal, giving permanent relief on Dakka, would appear as caving in and embolden Trump in ways she would not like. That is why issues from OUTSIDE the realm of border security are the best hope of creating enough REAL balance.

One reason I like my little proposal for a House bill is that it puts a spotlight on Trump and the Senate, forcing them to make a very public choice. I love situations where people are asked to judge themselves, and not be judged by others. (It is a basic option in game theory, dating back in a way to the old Pari Pascal.) IF Trump hates the ideas of upholding the spirit of the Constitution (as embedded in the Muller report and public disclosure) or averting a bloodbath of the Kurds endangering our ability to limit the expansion of the worst sort of fundamentalist jihadism, then even if he vetoes the bill he will be sending a VERY strong signal to folks who previously supported him. Doing that at a time of shutdown would not embolden him at all. (Likewise the Senate of course. It is good that Pelosi is already on to THEIR bag of tricks.) But if he agrees, under the new public pressure, I doubt it would embolden Trump to create such opportunities for Pelosi again.

It's nice that so many people in DC rightly care about Daca folks. They should continue to talk about that in the future. But here and now, the threat of a new genocide of our allies in the Middle East is simply bigger and more urgent. Could it be that more people know about Muller and about ISIS than about Daca? People like the swing voters? If each side believes the advisors who say "just wait for the other guy to totally publicly cave"... well, they should know by now not to just believe whatever they wish were true.

Letter sent to my Congressman about how to end the shutdown

Urgent Need for Better Tactics in Standing Up to Trump

By now, you have have heard from hundreds of federal workers asking “Why do WE have to suffer to save us from Trump’s wall? Isn’t the cost of the shutdown more than the $5 billion for the wall?” CNN hates Trump, but they too have been repeating these concerns, especially important to your office.

Nancy Pelosi has good reasons to look ahead further, and stand up to Trump. But, like Cameron after the Brexit vote, she hasn’t been able to relax enough to look ahead more calmly and consider more creative options.

Above all, I urge you to work with Hoyer, and urge her to pass a bill immediately in the House which combines two key elements: (1) yes, $5 billion for the wall; (2) specific additional provisions which REALLY stand up to points which irritate people in the middle of the road and which mobilize new support from the people worried about Trump’s recent betrayal of US national security. Consider: if Trump or the Senate say no, you will at least be able to look at your constituents and say what this says about Trump.

(2) is very tricky. (Years ago, I got my PhD from a guy at Harvard who was the world’s expert on nations falling apart through internal conflict, and in 2009 worked for a year as a Senate staffer. How to explain a complex game in less than a page? I’d love to come in and discuss more if there is a value in that.)

What I would propose is:

(1)  Include the recent proposal that all Federal candidates and present officers MUST make their tax returns public;

(2)   Guarantee support for the Muller investigation and public release of its report;

(3)  Require concretely (with enforcement mechanism) that the Administration live up to Bolton’s recent promise not to leave Syria until ISIS is truly defeated and the Kurds are protected from genocide.

If Trump refuses these points, he signals that he does have a lot to hide, and that he has defected from the effort to defend us from the Third Caliphate movement. The genocide of the allies which have been most crucial to our struggle on the ground would be a disaster for national security. If he agrees, you save a lot of lives. If he doesn’t, he exposes himself as… someone a lot of his base might abandon, if you make the point clear.

The situation with the Third Caliphate movement is complex. I do not blame him for having made a deal, but the KIND of deal which he and Putin have made is a disaster for the future of all of humanity if it sticks. It is not the kind of win-win Pateto optimal deal which some of my old teachers (Schelling and Raiffa) studied, or which the US was founded on (Locke and Hobbes), but more like the novel 1984. PLEASE take action on this! Win or lose, we need someone (hopefully including Pelosi) to stand up NOW for these principles.

Sincerely,

Dr. Paul J. Werbos

Response to policy options for the new US Space Force and impact on saving Iceland and renewable electricity

This post tries to explain why Iceland might well turn into one big glacier in 5 to 20 years, with major freezing in other places like Britain, Ireland and Norway which depend on the Gulf Stream. But it starts with a quick evaluation of options for the new US Space Force which could be one part of how to prevent the disaster. At the end, I respond to questions from a few leading engineers about the Gulf stream problem and about access to space

COMMENTS ON SPACE FORCE OPTIONS

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The new US Space Force, done right, could substantially improve US military capabilities, but it could also turn the idea of space solar power (SSP) from political marketing hype to a real option for safe renewable electricity all over the world, and give us some hope for a new way to save Iceland (and many other parts of Western Europe like Noway, Britain and Ireland especially) into a glacier in 5-20 years.  BUT BASED ON HISTORIC EXPERIENCE, I WORRY WHETHER IT WILL BE DONE RIGHT.  

The level of spending from these choices is much less important than HOW the money is spent. The value of product of government spending varies by orders of magnitude as a function of how it is done.

In this case, I am aware of DARPA new starts, similar to what Mitchell Clapp and Jess Sponable tried to get going, which could be more important to the real hopes of human settlement of space than everything else on Earth combined, if they get more financial and policy support than before. Trump's policy logically calls for that support, but certain DC Lobby swamp types could easily get in the way, lowering technical standards for WHATEVER short term special interest. 

If the human settlement of space is what we really care about, we will give total priority to this core issue in our response. In jargon terms.. it is about precompetitive Rd&d, medium TRL, for reentry structure technology, drawing on advanced materials but not about materials in a narrow sense, making heavy use of WPAFB reality testing.

This was brief, but an earlier blog post gets into technical details, which I used when recommending the space guard idea a few short years ago:

https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2015/06/resurrecting-us-space-program-draft.html

RENEWABLE ELECTRICITY AND SAVING ICELAND

Renewable electricity

There are people out of touch with reality who imagine that a silver bullet technology exists for “sustainable” world electricity supply. Experts in electric power know that we need diverse sources, so that well-designed markets can choose where and how much the different sources and technologies are used. By “sustainable,” I do not mean politically correct, but simply what we can sustain -- what we could rely on  and survive not only now but in the long-term future. See www.werbos.com/E/GridIOT.pdf for an overview of the future needs, including citations to back up the claim that space solar power could realistically supply more than $200 billion per year of electricity if and when we solve the launch cost problem.

SAVING THE GULF STREAM

www.werbos.com/E/GridIOT.pdf also has a section on emerging problems with ocean currents and what could be done about them. Over the past few months, I have studied these problems in much more depth, with help from Al Trujillo (author of the best selling text on oceanography) and from my son Alex (who manages a software effort to process relevant satellite data). The biggest potential risk is still in the Antarctic, threatening Chile and Peru and California in a way which could affect all humans on earth (50-50 whether we all die after I am dead of old age), but our knowledge of exactly what to expect on what schedule demands new research. There is a piece by Purkey et al in Annual Reviews which gives an overview.

BUT THE GULF STREAM SIDE OF IT LOOKS MORE AND MORE DEFINITE. IT IS ON COURSE TO TERMINATE MUCH SOONER. ONLY THE DETAILS AND TIMEFRAME ARE HARD TO QUANTIFY.

I was in Iceland most of the past two weeks, and even people in the street told me without spontaneously “without the Gulf Stream, this whole island would be nothing but one big glacier”. No farms, almost no people.  And they would not be alone. When Trump talked about how to handle millions of refugees from Norway, I did not laugh.

Al recommended a paper giving a kind of technical overview of the problem:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0263-1?WT.ec_id=NCLIMATE-201810&spMailingID=57464814&spUserID=NjI0MDk3MTMzMQS2&spJobID=1500065165&spReportId=MTUwMDA2NTE2NQS2

The big climate models do give us a warning, but does anyone believe those models? It reminds me of my first tenured job, at DOE’s Office of Energy Information Validation (OEIV), assigned to evaluate how far we can believe any of the big energy models, and what they really tell us.  To make it real, we need to understand a few key physical variables which drive the system, which could be put on a spreadsheet.

As I look for authoritative sources for what everyone already knows in this field, I ran across: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_thermohaline_circulation

Not a bad start, but not the simple physics people need to understand.

See http://www.enviropedia.org.uk/Climate/Gulf_Stream.php for a clear statement of what the Gulf Stream really is, physically. For folks who do fluid flow modeling, it is the effect of the “mass balance” term in expanded Navier-Stokes equation, exactly balancing what they call “NADW”. In other words,  the amount of warming Gulf Stream current is mathematically the same as the amount of NADW. But what is NADW and why do I worry it will cut out in 5-20 years or so?

NADW is what is called a “thermohaline current” (THC) explained well at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation, and in Al’s textbook.

It is a massive current, driven by water in the Arctic and North Atlantic pushed deep down into the ocean by an increase in density. If there is no increase in density somewhere, no water is pushed down and the THC stops.

The Wikipedia article has a simple colorful diagram showing what drives the density of seawater: temperature and saltiness (salinity).

It turns out that there are TWO drivers of THC, physically. If either one of the drivers continues, we get some THC. The amount of THC is basically just the sum of these two drivers. In the Arctic and North Atlantic, BOTH drivers are clearly on a path to sudden termination in the near future.

Driver number one is temperature. To understand that, look at the pink line in the Wikipedia article. When water on the surface is below that line, colder than the temperature of maximum density, then warming it up makes it more dense, and then it sinks. So picture a stretch of open ocean in the North, mixing gasses with the air at night, becoming rich with oxygen. Then when the sun comes out, it warms up, becomes more dense, and sinks. That’s driver number one, which is all I really knew about a year ago.

Driver number two is local increase in saltiness, which the paper in Nature put me onto (and which Purkey discusses at length in his recent review paper).  The search term “polynya” is pretty specific. This one happens when the surface suddenly gets so cold that it starts freezing. As it freezes, freezing concentrates fresh water into the new ice, making the water next to it absorb a whole lot more salt, making it more dense. The literature on THC from Antarctica shows that this happens mainly in just two places, the Weddell and Ross seas, where two little beaches provide most of the oxygen that keeps the whole ocean alive (the main thing standing between us and mass extinctions like what happened before 5-10 times). I imagine smiling penguins looking down on us all…

But it can happen in the Arctic too, when new ice is formed.

SO HERE IS THE CUTOFF, THE NEAR-TERM RISK TO ICELAND AND WESTERN EUROPE IN GENERAL: what happens when the surface water reaches the pink line in the Wikipedia article AND when the formation of new ice discontinues?

For water as salty as the North Atlantic, I would guess that the pink line kicks in at 0 degrees C, and we are already very close to that. Because the Arctic has been warming faster than the rest of the earth, the end of new ice formation is also in sight. It is curious how oil companies fund lobbyists who try to tell us that none of this could happen, even as they invest many billions on how to exploit the coming ice-free Arctic. (And no, they are not investing so much money for something 30 years in the future). And it is ever so sad that Trump has been supporting all that -- a commitment he has maintained even as he  surrenders or sells out on the ongoing war with what he calls “radical Islam” (a bad term for a very strong and persistent reality). But then again, the world today is very complex and hard for most people to understand; I know of no government on earth which does not have a mix of positive and destructive policies.

Even well before the zero NADW cutoff is reduced, the Gulf Stream will be reduced a whole lot as we get closer to the pink line and as the amount of new ice formation is reduced. If it were all just the salinity effect, we could even say that cutting the amount of new ice formation in winter in half would send Iceland and Western Europe down to temperatures halfway between what they are used to and what you see in Siberia at the same latitude. Roughly. Roughly in more ways than one.

Space technology is one hope for sustainable geoengineering, if we move fast enough. There is a time to stop debating options and instead to explore the “technology decision tree” with higher technology readiness levels, moving as fast as we can on more than one line of options to try to become ready to save Iceland and Norway and the British Isles before it is too late.

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Looking this over, Al Trujillo also mentions a new paper in Science:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6419/1113

Kump's earlier work was cited by Peter Ward in his book, Under a Green Sky. That paper by Kump actually showed more awareness of what caused a massive release of H2S poison that Ward's own book (which calls for more research into THC by people who understand the physics more than he did). I once tried to get his group an NSF grant, but even the old NSF had its fetters.

In addition to the solutions proposed in www.werbos.com/E/GridIOT.pdf, see https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/2247441918619546

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One leading engineer (from the Republican/industry side) asked:

Paul—

This is interesting stuff.  It brings up more questions.

So, more melting of the Greenland ice sheet causes less salinity in the North Atlantic, which can shut down the Gulf Stream, which then makes Greenland colder again, stopping melting of more ice.  How much of the Greenland ice sheet would have to melt to make this happen?  If only 10%, then the multiple-meter sea level rise predicted to result from melting 100% of Greenland’s ice can’t happen.  Maybe that’s a self-regulating good thing?

My reply:

Yes, even though the core system here is just a few variables, a few variables forming a nonlinear dynamical system can show back and forth behavior which defies simple extrapolation.

IN THE PAST, the melting of ice from Greenland was the main cause of sputtering of the Gulf Stream. It was logical to assume that this would stop when all the ice on Greenland has melted. More precisely, if the RATE of fresh melt water coming off of Greenland stays constant, the DEGREE of reduction of the Gulf Stream would not grow. Things would not grow worse, if that were the only problem.

BUT IN THE FUTURE, there is a clear phase transition coming for the two core drivers of the thermohaline currents (THC) which drive the Gulf Stream even in the absence of problems from Greenland: the temperature effect and the effect on salinity of forming new ice in the ocean itself. The physics of the temperature effect is ever so clear and ever so certain (as in the diagram in the wikipedia article I cited), and so is the role of salinity in raising water density. Only the timing is in doubt. 

I suspect you would like those people in Iceland as much as my wife and I did.  Looking in their faces, and hearing them talk about the role of the Gulf Stream in their lives... I will do what I can to reduce my guilt about not really helping them in any way I can. 

Best regards,

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We had a lot more in-depth discussion of how to reduce launch costs, including engineers from NASA, AF, major aerospace companies and the space lobbies. Too much to post here. But in brief, the AF guys were so much further along in reality testing, without which nothing in space will be really real, whether for military or civilian or environmengal benefits. 

Shutdown must end, but how?

Am puzzled by Nancy Peloeu"s tactics. Why is she playing into Trump's hand by increasing the number of folks who will give her more of the blame?

But in truth, it is a small minority who believe that $5 billion for a wall would itsrlf be such a big difference in. Do why not immediately pass a billing in the House giving that to him but with just a few bipartisan additions of great importance:
Full protection for the Muller investigation including public release; mandatory release of tax forms; and preventing grocude of Kurds, making Bolton's recent promises mandatory . If Trump or Senate then veto or try to play games, they get the full blame.
Overemphasis on the basest among us is a huge drag on our future; without stronger leadership in the middle, folks in the middle will hate both sides, a very dangerous situation