If you’ve been following my delicious links (which you probably haven’t, at least until I started posting them here, too) you might remember The Dog Ate Global Warming, a story about how key climate data seems to have been “misplaced” by scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, maintainers of several key data series supporting the global warming hypothesis.

Now emails and other internal documents from the CRU have been leaked (and there are various theories about how they got out). CRU supporters (such as RealClimate.org) try to deflect criticism by predicting that

…the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. [...] Instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context.

(Try this listing of excerpts at Examiner.com for a taste of those cherry-picked phrases. Sounds pretty bad to me.)

Others (such as (Lord) Nigel Lawson) read the documents as revealing that

(a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.

I’ve been trying to find some place that actually summarizes the situation but I guess it’s too early for that. In the meantime, Watts Up With That? and Climate Audit Mirror seem like good threads to follow.

The latest thing to engage the hearts and minds of bloggers is the plight of Jon Engle, who says that a stock art site is accusing him of pirating his own work. The stock art site says he’s copied their images, and Jon says it’s the other way round.

What’s interesting about this story (which has made first page news on most blog aggregators out there) is not who’s right and who’s wrong. The interesting part is that 99% of the readers automatically assume that Jon is telling the truth, even though he doesn’t offer any proof or examples of the pirated work. I counted; out of the 400 comments on his blog post I could find 3 or 4 that were not offering Jon their immediate support, swearing at the evil of corporate lawyers etc., without doing any research whatsoever. And among all the people digging, redditing, re-tweeting, re-blogging and otherwise spreading the story, I found one sceptical blog post, and one commenter actually doing some investigative work.

Where did this mob mentality come from? Is it because Jon is one of them (bloggers)? Or because it feels better to side with the small guy against big business? Whatever happened to critical thinking?

Edited to add, on Wednesday: Now there are responses based on actual facts.

Have you seen the Earth Hour campaign? Seems incredibly stupid to me. Not only is the message the usual “ask the government to do more” (Isn’t it easy to fix the world’s big problems? Limit your own effort to an hour and ask someone else to solve the rest) but it also seems like a hugely wasteful and, actually, climate-damaging idea. Power plants are not made for coping with huge step changes in demand, and that this gimmick is likely to cause a lot of headache for power plant operators. Millions of people all turning off their lights and appliances at the same time, and then on again within minutes of each other, will put a lot of strain on the power system. Do something meaningful instead: hang your laundry to dry instead of using a tumble dryer, or use public transport instead of a car.

Four or five years ago, global warming was a fringe topic. The kind of thing that occasionally came up in conversations or published news, but it wasn’t on everybody’s minds. Then something changed, and global warming got everyman’s attention. Now hardly a day goes by without a GW-related news headline. I guess this means that the issue is perceived as important, for real, and isn’t going to go “out of fashion” the way ideas sometimes do.

Not that this attention has led to much actual action (as far as I can perceive). I remember a cinema ad campaign about GW that I saw in London. Solemn children quietly looking towards the sky, and a voiceover of children’s voices asking questions like “What will happen to polar bears?” and “Will we all turn into puddles if it gets really hot?”. The punch line was, “Write to your MP and ask the government to do more.” You yourself don’t need to do anything, the government should somehow fix this.

I wonder what it will take for people to actually start changing their behaviour.

PS: If you have any articles or other resources with more information or data on the emergence and growth of global warming as an idea, let me know!

I knew things were bad but not that they were this bad. Now even Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last two surviving major investment banks, are becoming commercial banks. The whole industry is gone. What a plunge, from the top of the world to giving up their business model, in just a year.

I’m not there any more to take part in this but somehow I still feel sad about this.

A bit more detail in NY Times

I’ve been following the news about the financial crisis more than the average person, because I used to work in that industry. Even so it was a shock to hear that two more investment banks are gone: one selling itself and the other bankrupt. I knew things were going badly, but not that they were this bad. I find some pleasure in the fact that the bank I used to work for hasn’t collapsed yet, but I wonder what the mood is like, and how much the firm will have to change due to the crisis.

I’m glad we didn’t have the means to buy a home when we moved to London 7 years ago – otherwise we would have had to either postpone our move back to Sweden, or to try and sell a home in this year’s stagnant market. And it was really lucky that we found a house this spring – if we had been looking now, we wouldn’t be able to buy anything, because the market is all but standing still.

When all this is over I will have to try to find a good book about this crisis. I’m losing track of all the collapsing dominoes.

Via Bruce Schneier I found this essay by a mom who let her 9-year-old son take the NY subway home on his own.

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.

Even more interesting is this graphic that Bruce links to, showing (anecdotally) how children’s freedom of movement has decreased over the past 4 generations. While I think some of this decrease is sensible (the 8-year-old in 1919 did not have to cope with cars doing 70mph on busy roads), much of it is due to excessive anxiety.

I am also reminded of this TED talk about 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do.

Those of you living in Estonia are probably all too aware of the situation around the Bronze Soldier. Those outside Estonia may well have missed it.

The Bronze Soldier is a monument, located in central Tallinn, to honour the Soviet soldiers who died in WW2. While the Russians think of the Soviet Army as liberating Estonia from the Nazis, Estonians cannot ignore the 50 years of occupation that followed. The statue had therefore become a magnet for both Estonian and Russian nationalist youth, so the government decided that the statue as well as the dozen-or-so soldiers buried underneath it should be moved to a less central location (a war cemetery).

The decision did not go down well with the Russians in Estonia or with Russian officials. The former have now spent two nights rioting – 1 killed, 150 injured, 800 arrested, numerous shops looted. The latter are threatening to sever diplomatic relations.

You can read more in most international news sources (Google News search). Eesti Päevaleht offers a concise summary in English.

I can understand the upset feelings, to some extent. But I cannot understand how the rioters or the Russian government can hope to achieve anything positive through their actions. Looting a Hugo Boss shop and liquor shops? Powerful political statement, that.

By the way, Itching for Eestimaa is a good place for commentary on Estonia and Estonian events.

In an interesting essay, The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan argues that the average voter holds erroneous beliefs about issues they vote on. (Found via Arts & Letters Daily, an excellent daily roundup of thoughtful and interesting writings from all sorts of places.)

…if you know what a voter thinks is best for society, you can count on him to support it.

Before we can infer that the policies that are best for society will actually prevail, however, we have to add the very assumption I am challenging: that the beliefs of the average voter are true. If his beliefs are false, his good intentions lead him to support policies that are less than optimal, and possibly just plain bad.

How can the public keep making costly policy mistakes, year after year, century after century?

Public choice economists are used to blaming what they call “rational ignorance.” In elections with millions of voters, the personal benefits of learning more about policy are negligible, because one vote is so unlikely to change the outcome. So why bother learning?

In my book, however, I argue that rational ignorance has been oversold. Rational ignorance cannot explain why people gravitate toward false beliefs, rather than simply being agnostic. Neither can it explain why people who have barely scratched the surface of a subject are so confident in their judgments – and even get angry when you contradict them.

My view is that these are symptoms not of ignorance, but of irrationality. In politics as in religion, some beliefs are more emotionally appealing than others. For example, it feels a lot better to blame sneaky foreigners for our economic problems than it does to blame ourselves. This creates a temptation to relax normal intellectual standards and insulate cherished beliefs from criticism – in short, to be irrational.

I have to admit that I agree with his proposed remedy of limiting voter power regarding some areas of society. On some topics, opinions are not enough – knowledge is also required to make sensible decisions.

Speaking of pointless security measures (again), Eric made an interesting observation yesterday. Now that airplane cockpit doors are locked, what is the purpose of forbidding sharp items on flights? Sure, someone could take the entire airplane hostage and start threatening to cut people. But that would gain them nothing, as no pilot would give in to their demands.

This looks like a good example of how security measures stay in place even after they’ve outlived their usefulness. Things get onto the forbidden list far more easily than they get off the list.