One of the possible solutions to climate change is geoengineering. Various types of geoengineering have been proposed over the years, but the best studied of them is to simply release vast amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere. The aerosols reflect light and thereby reduce the amount of solar heat that reaches the surface of the earth, much the same as a large volcanic eruption does. Even in massive quantities, an aerosol spraying program turns out to be surprisingly cheap and practical.

So why not do it? The biggest reason is that we don’t know what kinds of unexpected effects an aerosol spraying program might have. The second biggest reason is that we do know what some of the expected effects of aerosol spraying are. In particular, it does nothing about the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and CO2 does more than just produce warmer temperatures. It also gets absorbed into the oceans, where it increases ocean acidification.

This problem is worse in some places than in others. A new study, for example, shows that ocean acidification off the coast of California is twice as bad as the global average. Researchers measured shell thickness in tiny planktons, which produces an estimate of the concentration of calcium carbonate suspended in ocean water. Here it is:

What we see is a long-term downward trend modified by El Niño oscillations. Calcium carbonate is a base, so a decline in its concentration means that ocean water is becoming more acidic—that is, it has a lower pH. Specifically, the authors estimate that this data represents a 0.21 reduction in pH. Keeping in mind that pH is an exponential scale, like the Richter scale for earthquakes, this means that over the course of a single century the concentration of acid in California’s coastal waters has increased by more than 50 percent, compared to about 25 percent for the rest of the world.

So what does this mean? This is the problem: nobody really knows. It has obvious effects on coral reefs, and it also makes the shells around microscopic sea creatures thinner and more fragile. If acidification increased by another 50 percent over the next few decades, it would . . . probably have a very bad effect. But we don’t know for sure.

This is one of the reasons why geoengineering is a bad solution to climate change. Not only do we know that aerosols would have no effect on ocean acidification, but we’re in the dark about what else they might do. Aerosols in the air for a year or two from volcanic eruptions don’t seem to cause serious problems. But what about aerosols in the air for decades at a time?

It’s possible that eventually we’ll decide to risk it. But we’d sure be a lot better off attacking the disease—too much carbon—instead of the symptom—too much heat. We know exactly what the former would do. The latter is a roll of the dice.

The Democratic report on impeachment accuses President Trump of, among other things, criminal bribery. What’s up with that? Wasn’t it really extortion? Allow me to Boolesplain:

Extortion: If you don’t announce an investigation of Joe Biden then I won’t approve your military aid package.

Bribery: If I do approve your military aid package then you will announce an investigation of Joe Biden. Capiche?

They’re the same thing. Legally, though, the nice thing about the bribery construction is that bribery is specifically mentioned in the Constitution as an impeachable offense.

UPDATE: After a Twitter exchange about this, I realize maybe I need to explain further. The first statement is of the form “If A then B.” The second statement is of the form “If not B then not A.” The second version is called the contrapositive of the first, and it is logically identical. For example:

• If you are human then you are a mammal.
• Contrapositive: If you are not a mammal then you are not human.

These are logically equivalent.

A few weeks ago I put up a picture of the Sacramento delta taken from an airplane window. As usual, I got queries from a couple of people asking how I get such good pictures when all they get is smudgy crap when they try taking photos from an airplane. Part of the answer is luck: a seat up front ahead of the wing; a window that’s not too scratched up; the sun in the right place; etc. But the bulk of the answer is Photoshop. Here’s a demonstration using a picture I took shortly after takeoff from John Wayne airport in Orange County. This is the original:

Not so good! First, let’s straighten the horizon line:

Then crop:

Now let’s fill in the blank spot on the left. Luckily, there’s nothing there but plain sky, so this is easy:

The next step is to dehaze the picture. This is one of the most frequently misused Photoshop filters, but that’s mainly because people—quite understandably—try to use it to reduce the haze in pictures. I find dehaze useful in modest amounts for many things, but not for removing real-life haze. In this case, however, the dirty airplane window basically acts like a uniform haze over the entire picture, and the dehaze filter does a pretty good job of removing it:

Thanks to the airplane window, the white balance of the picture is off, so let’s correct that:

Finally, we need to clean up the sky. There’s a window smudge on the right we need to get rid of, and some artifacts that are best dealt with by simply blurring the entire area. I’m also going to modify the color a bit to get rid of the yellowish haze on the horizon:

That was a little sloppy. Sorry. But it gives you a sense of what you can do with the sky if it’s not to your liking. The last step is to reduce the picture to fit on the blog and then sharpen it since the reduction process introduces some blur. Some pictures take sharpening well and some don’t, so this is a matter of taste. I’m showing it here so you can see the difference. And here it is:

David Leonhardt says we shouldn’t believe the GDP numbers that are released every quarter. It’s not that they’re inaccurate, it’s just that they show only a national aggregate. What we should be interested in is how various income groups are doing. It’s all very well to say that GDP has gone up 2 percent, but does this mean that everyone has gone up 2 percent, or that the poor have seen no gain while the affluent gained 4 percent?

For that, we need to see GDP by income level, and apparently that’s something the BEA is working on. In the meantime, however, we can get a pretty good estimate. National income is pretty close to GDP, and we already have income shares by income level. All we have to do is convert shares to dollars, and then adjust for inflation and population growth. Here it is:

Since 2000, the richest fifth of Americans have seen their aggregate income increase by 23 percent. The poorest fifth of Americans have seen it increase by 0 percent. The folks in the middle and working classes have seen an increase of about 10 percent, or 0.5 percent per year.

Leonhardt says this is why so many people are dissatisfied: GDP may have gone up 40 percent since 2000, but when you adjust for population growth and then break things out by income level, working-class voters aren’t doing so great. When the BEA produces these figures, we’ll probably find out that the total GDP flowing to the working classes has increased by about 10 percent, just like national income.

So what does this mean? Well, Gallup reports that a third of Americans are “very satisfied” with their household income. But when you break the results down by income level, things look a little different:

Here’s another Gallup chart:

Wouldn’t you like to see that one broken out by income level? I would.

This is an artist's conception. It will be a very long time before California has anything more than that.California High-Speed Rail Authority

The California bullet train, which is so far behind schedule that it can hardly be said to have a schedule anymore, is nonetheless going forward with a contract they don’t have the money to pay for:

The agency took a key step last week toward issuing a 30-year-long contract to install track, set up high-voltage electrical lines, create a digital signaling system, build a heavy maintenance train garage and obligate future maintenance of the equipment and track.

….“If they approve that contract, it will put the Legislature in a position where it will have very little to say about what happens next, which is exactly why they are trying to do it,” said one key staffer. “But we have until September to make a difference in how they are doing things.”

This whole project has gone from ridiculous to phantasmagorical. Still, the legislature has nothing to complain about. If they don’t like what the rail authority is doing, they can pass legislation to stop it. If they don’t, they have no one to blame but themselves.

Ukraine is the big pink country on this map. This is what the articles of impeachment are about.

Just to make sure everyone knows this: The Trump impeachment is about Ukrainegate. It’s about the fact that Donald Trump tried to extort the president of Ukraine into announcing an investigation of a political opponent, which is an obvious and flagrant abuse of power.

It has nothing to do with Carter Page. Even if you believe that the FBI horribly mishandled its FISA request to surveil Page, that was an issue only in the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. Ditto for the “Nunes memo,” which was all about Page. Neither of these things matters right now.

Everyone knows this, right? The investigator general’s report about the FISA warrants for Page ought to spur some changes in how FISA warrants are handled, but it has no bearing on impeachment. Which is all about Ukraine.

Right? We all get this, don’t we?

Back in the early days of the Trump presidency, I figured his best strategy was to just pass some ordinary compromise legislation and then hail it as the greatest accomplishment in all of human history. His fans would believe him and that would be enough.

But then he held out and I started wondering if I had been wrong. Maybe he really did have actual goals in mind?

Just kidding. All I had to do was wait until it was election year for Trump to start acting like a used-car salesman desperately trying to close out the month. Suddenly he just wants to pass NAFTA 2.0 and he doesn’t really care what’s in it. He’s made a trade deal with China that’s almost laughably trivial. He’s bragging about NATO partners spending more even though they aren’t, really. He’s going to build four miles of border wall and pretend it’s four hundred. He traded off parental leave for his Space Force and he understands what his opponents don’t: it doesn’t matter if it’s an empty shell. Bragging about the Space Force makes good TV, and that’s all that matters.

Plus Trump has several legitimate wins: lots of conservative judges; moving the US embassy to Jerusalem; cutting the number of refugees we accept nearly to zero; killing the Iran treaty; getting us out of the Paris agreement; keeping trans people out of the military; withdrawal from TPP; and several other wins that are small but focused specifically on Trump constituencies. He may seem like a buffoon to us liberal types, but to conservatives he’s sure looking like a winner.

UPDATE: Why does the chart below show real per capita disposable income? It’s because I was oh-so-subtly making the point that Trump also has a good economy in his favor, and the best metric for measuring how people view the economy is real per capita disposable income. At least, I think so. I might be remembering that wrong, though. And I suppose I could have just said so instead of trying to be so cute about it. Oh well.

Kevin Drum

If you use Twitter to get a sense of “what people are saying,” it’s a mug’s game. It all depends on who you follow, after all. Still, I follow a smallish but—I think—pretty good cross-section of the progressive chatterati, and in just the past 24 hours the response to the British election results has changed a lot. At first there were a fair number of folks who thought the results might hold a lesson or two for American progressives, but over the course of a few hours most of them seem to have been bullied into adopting the view that, hey, Britain is a different country with its own distinct issues. It’s stupid to think it’s similar in any way to what’s happening in America.

And sure, there’s no question that you should be cautious about blithely drawing parallels. At the same time, come on, folks. Britain and the US are both part of the Anglosphere and have related political cultures. What’s more, if you dive even slightly below the surface there are enough specific similarities in our current situations that you really have to put your head in the sand not to notice them. The recent victories of Brexit and Donald Trump were both largely driven by white working-class panic over immigration. Trump and Boris Johnson are both buffoonish, ideologically flexible populists who are allegedly unpopular but who somehow get lots of votes anyway. In both countries, the progressive opposition won nice victories recently and were feeling good. Also in both cases, the progressive opposition has been moving to the left for several years: Jeremy Corbyn may have been a uniquely unlikeable party leader, but it’s hard to deny that at least part of the reason for his big loss is that he ran on a manifesto far to the left of the typical Labour leader. This is exactly the same thing that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are trying to do in the US, and both of them share Corbyn’s rigid distaste for any kind of politically useful weaseling.

So . . . yes, centrist types should be careful not to overstate the lessons we might take from Labour’s loss. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, although America in 2020 might not end up as a repeat of Britain in 2019, it will probably rhyme. It doesn’t do much good to close our eyes and pretend there’s just nothing there.

It’s been raining around here lately and Hopper is thrilled. She likes a little flavor in her water, and after a nice rain shower she drinks out of buckets, puddles, gutter spouts, and anything else she can get her paws on. In this picture, she’s lapping up the water in our birdbath. There’s plenty for everyone, after all.

In the wake of the big Conservative victory in yesterday’s British elections, Andrew Sullivan is getting a lot of attention for his piece about Boris Johnson in the latest issue of New York. Sullivan argues that although Johnson may seem disheveled and lacking any kind of consistent ideology, he deserves more credit than he’s usually given for executing a brilliant electoral strategy:

He has done what no other conservative leader in the West has done: He has co-opted and thereby neutered the far right. The reactionary Brexit Party has all but collapsed since Boris took over. Anti-immigration fervor has calmed. The Tories have also moved back to the economic and social center under Johnson’s leadership. And there is a strategy to this. What Cummings and Johnson believe is that the E.U., far from being an engine for liberal progress, has, through its overreach and hubris, actually become a major cause of the rise of the far right across the Continent. By forcing many very different countries into one increasingly powerful Eurocratic rubric, the E.U. has spawned a nationalist reaction. From Germany and France to Hungary and Poland, the hardest right is gaining. Getting out of the E.U. is, Johnson and Cummings argue, a way to counter and disarm this nationalism and to transform it into a more benign patriotism. Only the Johnson Tories have grasped this, and the Johnson strategy is one every other major democracy should examine.

Maybe so. But Johnson did this by giving the hard right exactly what it wanted: Brexit, and no shilly-shallying about it. As for anti-immigration fever calming, few people ever seem to take a good look at the timing of all this. The Brexit referendum, unfortunately, was held very shortly after the peak of the European refugee crisis, when panic about it was still fresh:

It’s pretty easy to calm anti-immigrant fever if you simply wait a few years for the fever to break naturally. And it’s pretty easy to defang a political movement if you basically surrender to all their demands, no? If you want to argue that this was the only way to get things done, and Johnson was the only one to see it, fine. But there’s not a lot of political brilliance here.