Tuesday, September 11, 2007
The play came late in the game, when Rutgers expanded its lead over Navy to a comfortable level after a tight three quarters.
Navy's Reggie Campbell took the kickoff and ran full speed ahead up the middle with all the force his 168-pound body could generate. Campbell, almost always the smallest and fastest man on the field, hit a wall of XXXL-sized scarlet jerseys and was slammed to the ground at the bottom of the pile. He got up slowly, limping off. This gutsy kid, a slotback who already spent three quarters being chased and tackled by gangs of defensive linemen and linebackers, all weighing at least 100 pounds more than him, was then given a dose of Rutgers' student section class.
''You got f---ed up. You got f---ed up. You got f--ed-up," they chanted.
Reggie Campbell is a senior. After graduation in June he has a five-year commitment to the American military, which, like it or not, is at war.
"This is how you treat people who may die for this country?" said Bill Squires, an Annapolis graduate (Class of'75) who was on the sidelines for the Friday night game in Piscataway and was shocked by the obscene chants directed at the Navy players and fans throughout the game. "It was the most classless thing I've seen."
Navy was booed and peppered with "You suck!" chants when they stepped on the field for both halves. Toward the end of the second half, Rutgers students in the new bleacher section began to serenade the adjacent section of Navy fans and uniformed Midshipmen.
''F--- you, Navy. F---you, Navy. F--- you, Navy."
"There were wives and small children up there," said Squires, an academic recruiter for the academy who has been to dozens of away games and never seen such contempt directed at his team. "Our Midshipmen reacted the way they were taught. They didn't respond, but the band started playing 'Anchors Aweigh' to drown them out. Me, I felt like going up there and smacking somebody. I was mad, and it bothered me all weekend."
Booing, cursing, chanting obscenities, unfortunately, are now part of the game day experience. It's easily been three decades since fans across the country in all sports began spending more time and creative energy jeering the visitors and officials than cheering the home team. Rutgers is far from the worst. They're not even the worst in New Jersey, not with the Jets' fans still in town. Still, every penalty against the Scarlet Knights is greeted with a chant of "a--hole, a--hole, a--hole."
And now that Rutgers is winning, the long-suffering, self-effacing adult fans are being drowned out by a new generation of weight-room bully boys in scarlet T-shirts and red face-paint, who, from the safety of their seats, belittle the guys down on the field who take the hits.
Now that Rutgers is big-time, the old-time academic- and adult-minded fans are being elbowed aside by gangs of frat boys thrusting their fists and faces into the rolling ESPN cameras. What was it your old football coach used to say? Act like you've been there before. Not in the RU student section.
"At one point, I thought, we defend this country for people like this?" said Squires, who lives in West Orange. "I wasn't embarassed as a New Jerseyan. I was embarassed as a human being."
It was so noticeable that Rutgers athletic director Bob Mulcahy called down to Navy athletic director Chet Gladchuk yesterday to make sure there were no hard feelings, according to John Wooding, an assistant AD at Rutgers.
Some will excuse the behavior as kids just being kids, out to have a loutish, drunken good time. Spewing obscenities at the visiting team is just part of the fun.
But you'd hope our Jersey kids would be smart enough to make an exception for the service academies, especially the weekend before the anniversary of Sept. 11, their generation's own Day of Infamy. You'd hope they'd be sensitive enough to realize that some of those Midshipmen may soon be among the young American men and women fighting and bleeding and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. Young Americans, the same age as those safe in the stands watching a football game with their faces and bodies painted red.
At the very least, you'd think the Rutgers students would have some appreciation for the effort the undersize Navy players put out. They aren't like the players from Louisville or West Virginia or some of the other ranked powerhouses Rutgers now finds itself among. They are what Rutgers was not so many years ago. Students first, athletes second. Except better.
The new Rutgers is a big-time football school, with all the hype and manufactured drama. Coach Greg Schiano leads his team through pregame Scarlet Walk, chest out, stomach in, looking every bit the general except without gold braids, epaulets and a full rack of medals. The band plays. The cheerleaders and dance team girls wave pompoms. The conquering heroes go past, eyes front. At game time, the scoreboard TV shows the team coming down the tunnel to a soundtrack from Armageddon. An Army helicopter chop-chops overhead (your tax dollars at work).
Football has always marched to a militaristic or tribal drum beat, to whip up players to greater levels of violence. The game is always likened to war by coaches, players, announcers and writers who haven't been to war.
But to Reggie Campbell and his Navy teammates, Friday night's game wasn't war. It was a game. War is around the bend.
They deserved better.
And that red on the faces of some Rutgers' fans wasn't body paint.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Monday, August 27, 2007
Gray Shades of Green
Gray Shades of Green
Before you embrace new ways to save the environment, think about whether you're doing more harm than good.
By Tom Keane | August 26, 2007
Suddenly, everyone cares about the planet. Prodded by An Inconvenient Truth and worried that our Cape homes might one day be underwater, we're all enthusiastically looking for ways to save the world. That "we" includes the good folks at Massport, the state agency that runs Logan Airport. That's right. Logan says it wants to go green. Hearing this, I thought perhaps the airport was shutting down the New York shuttle and making people take Amtrak. But, no, Massport has something else in mind. A new policy gives drivers of hybrid cars preferential parking at the airport. Yes, use a Prius and you'll get a nice spot just by your terminal, saving oh-so-much time as you head off for your weekend jaunt to Paris.
Let's think this through. Now, instead of taking public transportation to the airport (because, after all, parking is such a pain in the neck), hybrid owners will take their cars. Rather than a smaller carbon footprint, Massport's plan could make it bigger. I call this environmental backfire: something intended to help ends up making the problem worse.
Massport is hardly alone in this. Remember "think globally, act locally"? People act locally, for example, by trying to preserve green space in their towns and keep population densities low. Yet, as Harvard economist Edward Glaeser points out, all this does is push development out farther from cities to areas where there are fewer people to object, which leads to more sprawl. Better to sacrifice a few trees in our backyards and let developers build.
Then there's Brookline's onetime proposal to double excise taxes on SUVs. Agreed, we all hate SUVs. (Well, actually, I hate yours. Mine, I like.) But SUVs are not necessarily more gas guzzling than other classes of automobiles: The 2007 Chevrolet Malibu sedan, for instance, gets a combined m.p.g. of 23, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, while the 2007 Jeep Compass, an SUV, bests it with 24. And then one has to look at how they're used. An SUV carrying two or three people is much more efficient than a hybrid carrying just one.
Car-pool lanes are another instance of environmental backfire. Lanes used for car pools carry far fewer automobiles than if they were used for regular traffic. (They have to; otherwise, no one would have an incentive to use them.) The result is more congestion in non-HOV lanes, which, of course, wastes fuel. In some cases, such as the I-93 zipper lane, the result is appalling. As commuters south of Boston doubtless know, huge jams occur at its entrance as a lane is cut off to make way for the car-pool lane. The problem reappears at the exit, as cars merge back into regular traffic. If we simply made it an open lane – with no barriers – all traffic would proceed more smoothly and less wastefully.
The list goes on. Cloth diapers may seem greener than disposables, but when one adds in the energy used to wash them, it turns out throwaways are the better choice in some cases. (The same analysis might well apply to Sheryl Crow's perhaps joking admonition that we use but one sheet of toilet paper. After the extra soap and hand washing such an approach entails, maybe using a few extra sheets might be better for the environment.) Our desire to prevent forest fires perversely ended up increasing their severity; fire, it turns out, is nature's way of pruning. Carbon trading – travel across country, plant a tree – sounds fine, but by relieving one's guilt, it encourages people to fly more while doing little to reduce the pollution created. True, the planted tree will consume the CO2 your trip creates – in 70 years. The problem of global warming, however, is today.
I don't mean to sound cynical about this. People really do care, but there is a lot of confused thinking out there. Perhaps that's because a degree of faddishness runs through much of our newfound environmentalism, as if going green were a style of dress. Looking the part – from drinking water from refillable bottles to watching LiveEarth – is apparently good enough. Whether something works or not seems regrettably irrelevant.
http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2007/08/26/gray_shades_of_green/
Before you embrace new ways to save the environment, think about whether you're doing more harm than good.
By Tom Keane | August 26, 2007
Suddenly, everyone cares about the planet. Prodded by An Inconvenient Truth and worried that our Cape homes might one day be underwater, we're all enthusiastically looking for ways to save the world. That "we" includes the good folks at Massport, the state agency that runs Logan Airport. That's right. Logan says it wants to go green. Hearing this, I thought perhaps the airport was shutting down the New York shuttle and making people take Amtrak. But, no, Massport has something else in mind. A new policy gives drivers of hybrid cars preferential parking at the airport. Yes, use a Prius and you'll get a nice spot just by your terminal, saving oh-so-much time as you head off for your weekend jaunt to Paris.
Let's think this through. Now, instead of taking public transportation to the airport (because, after all, parking is such a pain in the neck), hybrid owners will take their cars. Rather than a smaller carbon footprint, Massport's plan could make it bigger. I call this environmental backfire: something intended to help ends up making the problem worse.
Massport is hardly alone in this. Remember "think globally, act locally"? People act locally, for example, by trying to preserve green space in their towns and keep population densities low. Yet, as Harvard economist Edward Glaeser points out, all this does is push development out farther from cities to areas where there are fewer people to object, which leads to more sprawl. Better to sacrifice a few trees in our backyards and let developers build.
Then there's Brookline's onetime proposal to double excise taxes on SUVs. Agreed, we all hate SUVs. (Well, actually, I hate yours. Mine, I like.) But SUVs are not necessarily more gas guzzling than other classes of automobiles: The 2007 Chevrolet Malibu sedan, for instance, gets a combined m.p.g. of 23, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, while the 2007 Jeep Compass, an SUV, bests it with 24. And then one has to look at how they're used. An SUV carrying two or three people is much more efficient than a hybrid carrying just one.
Car-pool lanes are another instance of environmental backfire. Lanes used for car pools carry far fewer automobiles than if they were used for regular traffic. (They have to; otherwise, no one would have an incentive to use them.) The result is more congestion in non-HOV lanes, which, of course, wastes fuel. In some cases, such as the I-93 zipper lane, the result is appalling. As commuters south of Boston doubtless know, huge jams occur at its entrance as a lane is cut off to make way for the car-pool lane. The problem reappears at the exit, as cars merge back into regular traffic. If we simply made it an open lane – with no barriers – all traffic would proceed more smoothly and less wastefully.
The list goes on. Cloth diapers may seem greener than disposables, but when one adds in the energy used to wash them, it turns out throwaways are the better choice in some cases. (The same analysis might well apply to Sheryl Crow's perhaps joking admonition that we use but one sheet of toilet paper. After the extra soap and hand washing such an approach entails, maybe using a few extra sheets might be better for the environment.) Our desire to prevent forest fires perversely ended up increasing their severity; fire, it turns out, is nature's way of pruning. Carbon trading – travel across country, plant a tree – sounds fine, but by relieving one's guilt, it encourages people to fly more while doing little to reduce the pollution created. True, the planted tree will consume the CO2 your trip creates – in 70 years. The problem of global warming, however, is today.
I don't mean to sound cynical about this. People really do care, but there is a lot of confused thinking out there. Perhaps that's because a degree of faddishness runs through much of our newfound environmentalism, as if going green were a style of dress. Looking the part – from drinking water from refillable bottles to watching LiveEarth – is apparently good enough. Whether something works or not seems regrettably irrelevant.
http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2007/08/26/gray_shades_of_green/
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Bowling With Our Own
Bowling With Our Own
By John Leo
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.
Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”
In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.
Diversity does not produce “bad race relations,” Putnam says. Rather, people in diverse communities tend “to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” Putnam adds a crushing footnote: his findings “may underestimate the real effect of diversity on social withdrawal.”
Neither age nor disparities of wealth explain this result. “Americans raised in the 1970s,” he writes, “seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s.” And the “hunkering down” occurred no matter whether the communities were relatively egalitarian or showed great differences in personal income. Even when communities are equally poor or rich, equally safe or crime-ridden, diversity correlates with less trust of neighbors, lower confidence in local politicians and news media, less charitable giving and volunteering, fewer close friends, and less happiness.
Putnam has long been aware that his findings could have a big effect on the immigration debate. Last October, he told the Financial Times that “he had delayed publishing his research until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity.” He said it “would have been irresponsible to publish without that,” a quote that should raise eyebrows. Academics aren’t supposed to withhold negative data until they can suggest antidotes to their findings.
Nor has Putnam made details of his study available for examination by peers and the public. So far, he has published only an initial summary of his findings, from a speech he gave after winning an award in Sweden, in the June issue of Scandinavian Political Studies. His office said Putnam is in Britain, working on a religion project at the University of Manchester, and is currently too busy to grant an interview.
Putnam’s study does make two positive points: in the long run, increased immigration and diversity are inevitable and desirable, and successful immigrant societies “dampen the negative effects of diversity” by constructing new identities. Social psychologists have long favored the optimistic hypothesis that contact between different ethnic and racial groups increases tolerance and social solidarity.
For instance, white soldiers assigned to units with black soldiers after World War II were more relaxed about desegregation of the army than were soldiers in all-white units. But Putnam acknowledges that most empirical studies do not support the “contact hypothesis.” In general, they find that the more people are brought into contact with those of another race or ethnicity, the more they stick to their own, and the less they trust others. Putnam writes: “Across local areas in the United States, Australia, Sweden Canada and Britain, greater ethnic diversity is associated with lower social trust and, at least in some cases, lower investment in public goods.”
Though Putnam is wary of what right-wing politicians might do with his findings, the data might give pause to those on the left, and in the center as well. If he’s right, heavy immigration will inflict social deterioration for decades to come, harming immigrants as well as the native-born. Putnam is hopeful that eventually America will forge a new solidarity based on a “new, broader sense of we.” The problem is how to do that in an era of multiculturalism and disdain for assimilation.
By John Leo
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.
Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”
In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.
Diversity does not produce “bad race relations,” Putnam says. Rather, people in diverse communities tend “to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” Putnam adds a crushing footnote: his findings “may underestimate the real effect of diversity on social withdrawal.”
Neither age nor disparities of wealth explain this result. “Americans raised in the 1970s,” he writes, “seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s.” And the “hunkering down” occurred no matter whether the communities were relatively egalitarian or showed great differences in personal income. Even when communities are equally poor or rich, equally safe or crime-ridden, diversity correlates with less trust of neighbors, lower confidence in local politicians and news media, less charitable giving and volunteering, fewer close friends, and less happiness.
Putnam has long been aware that his findings could have a big effect on the immigration debate. Last October, he told the Financial Times that “he had delayed publishing his research until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity.” He said it “would have been irresponsible to publish without that,” a quote that should raise eyebrows. Academics aren’t supposed to withhold negative data until they can suggest antidotes to their findings.
Nor has Putnam made details of his study available for examination by peers and the public. So far, he has published only an initial summary of his findings, from a speech he gave after winning an award in Sweden, in the June issue of Scandinavian Political Studies. His office said Putnam is in Britain, working on a religion project at the University of Manchester, and is currently too busy to grant an interview.
Putnam’s study does make two positive points: in the long run, increased immigration and diversity are inevitable and desirable, and successful immigrant societies “dampen the negative effects of diversity” by constructing new identities. Social psychologists have long favored the optimistic hypothesis that contact between different ethnic and racial groups increases tolerance and social solidarity.
For instance, white soldiers assigned to units with black soldiers after World War II were more relaxed about desegregation of the army than were soldiers in all-white units. But Putnam acknowledges that most empirical studies do not support the “contact hypothesis.” In general, they find that the more people are brought into contact with those of another race or ethnicity, the more they stick to their own, and the less they trust others. Putnam writes: “Across local areas in the United States, Australia, Sweden Canada and Britain, greater ethnic diversity is associated with lower social trust and, at least in some cases, lower investment in public goods.”
Though Putnam is wary of what right-wing politicians might do with his findings, the data might give pause to those on the left, and in the center as well. If he’s right, heavy immigration will inflict social deterioration for decades to come, harming immigrants as well as the native-born. Putnam is hopeful that eventually America will forge a new solidarity based on a “new, broader sense of we.” The problem is how to do that in an era of multiculturalism and disdain for assimilation.
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Prius Outdoes Hummer in Environmental Damage
Staff Writer
The Toyota Prius has become the flagship car for those in our society so environmentally conscious that they are willing to spend a premium to show the world how much they care. Unfortunately for them, their ultimate ‘green car’ is the source of some of the worst pollution in North America; it takes more combined energy per Prius to produce than a Hummer.
Before we delve into the seedy underworld of hybrids, you must first understand how a hybrid works. For this, we will use the most popular hybrid on the market, the Toyota Prius.
The Prius is powered by not one, but two engines: a standard 76 horsepower, 1.5-liter gas engine found in most cars today and a battery- powered engine that deals out 67 horsepower and a whooping 295ft/lbs of torque, below 2000 revolutions per minute. Essentially, the Toyota Synergy Drive system, as it is so called, propels the car from a dead stop to up to 30mph. This is where the largest percent of gas is consumed. As any physics major can tell you, it takes more energy to get an object moving than to keep it moving. The battery is recharged through the braking system, as well as when the gasoline engine takes over anywhere north of 30mph. It seems like a great energy efficient and environmentally sound car, right?
You would be right if you went by the old government EPA estimates, which netted the Prius an incredible 60 miles per gallon in the city and 51 miles per gallon on the highway. Unfortunately for Toyota, the government realized how unrealistic their EPA tests were, which consisted of highway speeds limited to 55mph and acceleration of only 3.3 mph per second. The new tests which affect all 2008 models give a much more realistic rating with highway speeds of 80mph and acceleration of 8mph per second. This has dropped the Prius’s EPA down by 25 percent to an average of 45mpg. This now puts the Toyota within spitting distance of cars like the Chevy Aveo, which costs less then half what the Prius costs.
However, if that was the only issue with the Prius, I wouldn’t be writing this article. It gets much worse.
Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.
The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare.
“The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside,” said Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin during an interview with Mail, a British-based newspaper.
All of this would be bad enough in and of itself; however, the journey to make a hybrid doesn’t end there. The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce ‘nickel foam.’ From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery. Are these not sounding less and less like environmentally sound cars and more like a farce?
Wait, I haven’t even got to the best part yet.
When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer - the Prius’s arch nemesis.
Through a study by CNW Marketing called “Dust to Dust,” the total combined energy is taken from all the electrical, fuel, transportation, materials (metal, plastic, etc) and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime of a vehicle. The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles - the expected lifespan of the Hybrid.
The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more fiscal $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected lifetime of 300,000 miles. That means the Hummer will last three times longer than a Prius and use less combined energy doing it.
So, if you are really an environmentalist - ditch the Prius. Instead, buy one of the most economical cars available - a Toyota Scion xB. The Scion only costs a paltry $0.48 per mile to put on the road. If you are still obsessed over gas mileage - buy a Chevy Aveo and fix that lead foot.
One last fun fact for you: it takes five years to offset the premium price of a Prius. Meaning, you have to wait 60 months to save any money over a non-hybrid car because of lower gas expenses.
source: http://clubs.ccsu.edu/recorder/editorial/editorial_item.asp?NewsID=188
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Antarctic temperatures disagree with climate model predictions
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-02/osu-atd021207.php
This comes soon after the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that strongly supports the conclusion that the Earth's climate as a whole is warming, largely due to human activity.
It also follows a similar finding from last summer by the same research group that showed no increase in precipitation over Antarctica in the last 50 years. Most models predict that both precipitation and temperature will increase over Antarctica with a warming of the planet.
David Bromwich, professor of professor of atmospheric sciences in the Department of Geography, and researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, reported on this work at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at San Francisco.
"It's hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now," he said. "Part of the reason is that there is a lot of variability there. It's very hard in these polar latitudes to demonstrate a global warming signal. This is in marked contrast to the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula that is one of the most rapidly warming parts of the Earth."
Bromwich says that the problem rises from several complications. The continent is vast, as large as the United States and Mexico combined. Only a small amount of detailed data is available – there are perhaps only 100 weather stations on that continent compared to the thousands spread across the U.S. and Europe . And the records that we have only date back a half-century.
"The best we can say right now is that the climate models are somewhat inconsistent with the evidence that we have for the last 50 years from continental Antarctica .
"We're looking for a small signal that represents the impact of human activity and it is hard to find it at the moment," he said.
Last year, Bromwich's research group reported in the journal Science that Antarctic snowfall hadn't increased in the last 50 years. "What we see now is that the temperature regime is broadly similar to what we saw before with snowfall. In the last decade or so, both have gone down," he said.
In addition to the new temperature records and earlier precipitation records, Bromwich's team also looked at the behavior of the circumpolar westerlies, the broad system of winds that surround the Antarctic continent.
"The westerlies have intensified over the last four decades of so, increasing in strength by as much as perhaps 10 to 20 percent," he said. "This is a huge amount of ocean north of Antarctica and we're only now understanding just how important the winds are for things like mixing in the Southern Ocean." The ocean mixing both dissipates heat and absorbs carbon dioxide, one of the key greenhouse gases linked to global warming.
Some researchers are suggesting that the strengthening of the westerlies may be playing a role in the collapse of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula.
"The peninsula is the most northern point of Antarctica and it sticks out into the westerlies," Bromwich says. "If there is an increase in the westerly winds, it will have a warming impact on that part of the continent, thus helping to break up the ice shelves, he said.
"Farther south, the impact would be modest, or even non-existent."
Bromwich said that the increase in the ozone hole above the central Antarctic continent may also be affecting temperatures on the mainland. "If you have less ozone, there's less absorption of the ultraviolet light and the stratosphere doesn't warm as much."
That would mean that winter-like conditions would remain later in the spring than normal, lowering temperatures.
"In some sense, we might have competing effects going on in Antarctica where there is low-level CO2 warming but that may be swamped by the effects of ozone depletion," he said. "The year 2006 was the all-time maximum for ozone depletion over the Antarctic."
Bromwich said the disagreement between climate model predictions and the snowfall and temperature records doesn't necessarily mean that the models are wrong.
"It isn't surprising that these models are not doing as well in these remote parts of the world. These are global models and shouldn't be expected to be equally exact for all locations," he said.
###
Contact: David Bromwich (614) 292-6692; Bromwich.1@osu.edu
Monday, May 16, 2005
Obfuscation Doesn't Change the Facts: Rail Transit Is Unreasonably Expensive
May 16, 2005
by Wendell Cox
WebMemo #745
In a recent Wall Street Journal column, P.J. O’Rourke described the great expense and ineffectiveness of mass transit.[1] In the process, he referred to Heritage Foundation research on the exorbitant costs of urban rail (light rail, subways, and commuter rail).[2] Specifically, O’Rourke compared the cost of new rail systems to the cost of leasing riders luxury SUVs and found transit wanting. Transit advocates have challenged this point, but it still holds true.
For proof of the proposition, start by looking in almost any daily newspaper. The Newark Star-Ledger, for example, recentlycarried an advertisement for a new BMW X-5 luxury SUV, available for lease at an annual cost of less than $6,300.
Then compare that to the cost of rail. For example, the Federal Transit Administration reported in 2000 that each new trip on the Hiawatha light rail line in Minneapolis would cost a projected $18.57—and this was before the cost of the line escalated more than 50 percent. Using the pre-escalation number, the cost for each new annual commuter using the line two ways each work day (for 450 trips each year) would be approximately $8,400—or about $2,100 more than the cost to lease a BMW luxury SUV for the year. If that’s not clear enough, see Chart 1 for a graphical comparison.
Responding to the O’Rourke column, Mr. Janek Kozlowski of Alexandria, Virginia, wrote a letter, which the Journal published, disputing the transit/luxury car comparison. Mr. Kozlowski bases his argument on the new Hiawatha line. His detailed calculations include the cost of leasing cars for all riders of the Hiawatha system, most of whom were previously bus riders, not drivers. Kozlowski adds in the cost of operating the cars—that is, gasoline and maintenance—and building new highway capacity—on the specious assumption that, without light rail, more highway capacity would be necessary. But if one thing is clear from the U.S. experience in light rail, it is that new rail systems have a minimal impact on traffic congestion. For example, Portland’s expensive new light rail system has been accompanied by one of the largest increases in traffic congestion in a major urban area.
Mr. Kozlowski, like some other transit funding advocates before him, mistakes the transit/luxury car comparison as an actual policy alternative to building urban rail. But it is a rhetorical point, not a policy proposal. More often than not, the most prominent justification for building new rail systems is alleviation of traffic congestion, which requires getting drivers out of their cars. It is difficult to imagine a more absurd public policy approach than to spend more money to get a driver out of a car than to lease him or her a new one. Urban rail is an unreasonably expensive way to get cars off the road.
Mr. Kozlowski is not alone in attempting to refute the cost comparison. The same tactic has been used before in transit industry reports, perhaps to cloud the issue—and for good reason: transit’s extravagant expense should be an embarrassment.
If, for example, the people of Minneapolis and St. Paul were to invest the same amount of money per driver—$8,400, as described above—to attract all drivers in the area to transit, they would have to spend $13 billion per year, almost as much as Minnesota’s total tax revenue. Obviously, no urban area could afford such an expensive congestion reduction strategy.
And if the people of Minneapolis-St. Paul were to invest the same amount per daily trip to attract all trips from cars to transit, the cost would approach the gross personal income of the metropolitan area. If there were a Nobel Prize for irrational public policy, reducing traffic congestion with light rail would be the winner.
Of course, projections based on planning reports tend to be overly optimistic. In some cases, virtually no net transfer of ridership from cars to urban rail systems occurs at all. For example, the most recent expansions of the Dallas area DART light rail system have been accompanied by a reduction in transit ridership. Similarly, rail ridership is now lower after the doubling of the length of the St. Louis light rail line.
All of this demonstrates that it is extremely expensive to build urban rail systems. And more importantly, even the most grandiose systems have little or no impact on traffic congestion. That is because, whether in the United States or Western Europe, transit principally serves core urban areas and is not an affordable way to serve the non-core and suburban markets that represent the bulk of travel demand. This fact is well understood, if not readily admitted, by transit and urban planners, who blather on about transit and its ability to reduce traffic congestion. However, their actions speak louder than their words: no regional transportation plan anticipates transit improvements that would materially reduce automobile use. Case closed.
Wendell Cox is a Visiting Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris.
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