Pacific Tsunami

There was an 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile this morning. That is one of the ten strongest quakes in history, and a hundred times stronger than the 7.0 that leveled Port-au-Prince last month. It struck a relatively unpopulated area, though, and also a far more developed country, so the damage and number of deaths won't be nearly as high as in Haiti. It was expected to produce a tsunami, however, and NOAA's West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center has a map showing the predicted energy of the tsunami as it crosses the Pacific:



They also have a map showing predicted arrival times of the tsunami. From the time of the earthquake it was expected to take 7-8 hours to reach Central America, 15 hours to reach Hawaii, and ~22 hours to reach Japan. They've issued a tsunami warning for the entire Pacific basin, though the tsunami isn't expected to be catastrophic.

The wave is expected to be about eight feet high when it reaches Hilo.

Olympic Medals Map

The NY Times has an interactive map of Olympic medals won by country:



This represents medals won in the Vancouver Olympics thus far. You'll notice that the United States has a larger circle than Canada. This is because the United States has won more medals than Canada. I draw attention to this fact because the Canadians were all bragging about how they were going to win the most medals. Clearly they are going to fail to do so. Their hubris rankles; hubris belongs to Americans and Russians. In Canadians it is just... unbecoming. Also, as a United Statesian, it's fun to root for my country on the rare occasions when we are the underdog, like in the winter Olympics and the World Cup.

The map has medal winners going back to the first Winter Olympics in 1924. You can see that it was basically a meeting of Europeans, with a few odd North Americans thrown in, until the last few cycles. Now the North Americans are a much bigger presence, as are the Asians and even the bleepin' Australians, who need to knock it off with the excelling at sports all the time. Are there even any ski resorts in Australia?

Meanwhile, The Vancouver [de]Tour Guide 2010 team sends along their effort to google map some stuff of interest around Vancouver. They describe it as "a mixture of google bombing, counter-cartography and psychogeography that uses Google Maps to contest the online/offline representations of Vancouver during the Olympics." I link to them here mainly because I enjoy the words "counter-cartography" and "psychogeography."

The United States of Facebook

PeteSearch finds some patterns in the ways Facebook users are connected to each other:



The colored clumps represent areas within which users' friends tend to be found. That is, someone within Greater Texas, for instance, will tend to have more friends within that region than outside of it. Lines connect cities which tend to have more friend connections.

Says Pete: "Some of these clusters are intuitive, like the old south, but there's some surprises too, like Missouri, Louisiana and Arkansas having closer ties to Texas than Georgia." On Stayathomia:

Stretching from New York to Minnesota, this belt's defining feature is how near most people are to their friends, implying they don't move far. In most cases outside the largest cities, the most common connections are with immediately neighboring cities, and even New York only has one really long-range link in its top 10. Apart from Los Angeles, all of its strong ties are comparatively local.

In contrast to further south, God tends to be low down the top 10 fan pages if she shows up at all, with a lot more sports and beer-related pages instead.

On Dixie:

Dixie towns tend to have links mostly to other nearby cities rather than spanning the country. Atlanta is definitely the hub of the network, showing up in the top 5 list of almost every town in the region. Southern Florida is an exception to the cluster, with a lot of connections to the East Coast, presumably sun-seeking refugees.

God is almost always in the top spot on the fan pages, and for some reason Ashley shows up as a popular name here, but almost nowhere else in the country.

On Mormonia: "It's worth separating from the rest of the West because of how interwoven the communities are, and how relatively unlikely they are to have friends outside the region." The Nomadic West has much longer lines of connection than other regions, which is not terribly surprising. Socalistan is not simply Californiastan (or California for that matter) because the center of gravity clearly bends LA-wards. And Pete observes that Pacifica is "the most boring of the clusters."

All this, Pete notes, is "qualitative, not quantitative," so data caveat emptor and all that. Still, an interesting representation.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Satisfaction

Gallup asked some people how satisfied they were with their standard of living, which yielded this result:



Says Gallup:

The 2009 satisfaction results are based on combined data for Gallup Daily tracking from Jan. 2 through Dec. 30, 2009, including more than 350,000 interviews for the entire year. The state sample sizes range from 632 in the District of Columbia and 878 in Wyoming to 37,203 in California. Forty-one states had more than 2,000 respondents...

Overall, 31 states showed an increase in satisfaction of at least one percentage point between 2008 and 2009, whereas 5 showed a decrease of at least one point (the greatest decrease, Hawaii's, was less than four points.) The remaining 14 states plus the District of Columbia changed by less than one point.

Now that just doesn't make any sense. Obviously things went downhill from 2008 to '09. Don't people know that? Don't they realize they must be less satisfied now than they were a year ago? Or is it that lean times make people feel more fortunate about their relative prosperity? After all, even now more than four-fifths of people who want jobs have them. That's 80% of the country that probably realizes they could be worse off than they are.

At any rate, it's interesting that the most satisfied states seem to be those that have been least affected by the recession, rather than the ones that have the highest standard of living. And for the least satisfied states it's the same deal: they don't have the lowest objective standards of living, but they have been hard hit by the current recession. I take this to mean that satisfaction, in this context, correlates with perceptions of change in economic conditions, rather than economic conditions as such. (Which makes some sense: if you have a net worth of $1,000, and you find a hundred dollar bill on the street, you'll probably feel a lot more satisfied than someone who's got $10,000 in the bank, but just lost $50,000 at the craps table in Vegas (Nevada, by the way, is the least satisfied state in the country).)

But overall there's not a real huge range from least to most satisfied. Nevada, like I say, is the least satisfied, but 69% there still express satisfaction with their standard of living. The most satisfied is North Dakota, at 82.3%, followed by South Dakots, at 80.8%. (The Dakotas, by the way, are the two ugliest states in the country as well. The reader may make of that what she will.)

BONUS FUN FACT: Did you know the Rolling Stones' (Can't Get No) Satisfation is only the third-best version of that song? It's true! Here's the best:

Russians Call it 'Sneg'

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: how much of the Northern Hemisphere is currently covered in snow, and can this information be represented in mustard yellow? Well, aren't you in luck:



That's from the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab. By way of commentary, Jeff Masters says:

We live in the United States of Snow. A rare Deep South heavy snowstorm whipped across the southern tier of states yesterday, dumping six-plus inches of snow over portions of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Even Florida got into the act, with up to two inches recorded in the extreme northwestern Panhandle. The snowstorm left 49 of the 50 states with snow cover, according to an article by Associated Press. Hawaii was the lone hold-out. David Robinson, head of the Rutgers Global Snow Lab, said that 67.1% of the U.S. had snow cover on Friday morning, with the average depth a respectable 8 inches. Normally, the U.S. has about 40 - 50% snow coverage during the 2nd week of February. January had the 6th greatest snow cover in the 44-year record over the contiguous U.S., and December 2009 had the most snow cover of any December on record. The current pattern of record heavy snows over the the Eastern U.S. is primarily due to a natural oscillation in the Earth's climate system called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).

If one single person comments that this proves global warming does not exist, as God is my witness I will reach through the Internet and pop you right in the nose. I will then proceed to make a substantive argument as to why all this snow is actually just what you'd expect (in the short term) in a warming world, but I'd really prefer to not have to do that.

The Reformed State Map of the US

A proposal for electoral reform from fakeisthenewreal:



It's neat and all that the US was the first modern country to adopt many democratic institutions - we did it way back in the 18th Century, before the French Revolution even. Bully for us! However, a side effect of our early adoption of 'democracy' is that we have a lot of weird anachronistic leftovers from the pre-1789 era. Slavery was one, but fortunately we finally managed to get rid of that. But other, less significant but still not insignificant pre-democratic inconveniences remain. This map is meant to address some of these issues. Says fitn:

The electoral college is a time-honored system that has only produced results in conflict with the popular vote three times in over 200 years. However, it's obvious that reforms are needed. The organization of the states should be altered. This Electoral Reform Map redivides the territory of the United States into 50 bodies of equal size.... [This plan] overrepresentation of small states and underrepresention of large states in presidental voting and in the US Senate. Preserves the historical structure of the electoral college and the United States unique federal system, balancing power between levels of government. States could be redistricted after each census - just like house seats are distributed now.

Fifty states, as you see here, each with just about the same population. Yes, this would help with the problem of the electoral college system for picking presidents, which is insane by any reasonable standard and without which we might have avoided a certain period of unpleasantness from 2001-2009.

But the real advantage is in the Senate. Right now, Wyoming has as many senators as California. Vermont has as many as Texas. That's just straight up retarded. It's certainly not democratic. And don't give me any of that crap about how it preserves the sovereignty of states as the Great and Omniscient Founding Fathers intended, because do you know why they ended up with this provision that every state have an equal number of senators? To protect regional interests from the will of the majority; i.e., to protect southern interests; i.e., to protect slavery from meddlesome northerners. (And like just about everything unseemly in American politics, it all somehow goes back to the legacy of slavery...) Nothing approaches this level of blatant anti-democratic institutional structure in the free world. What's more, we can't even amend the constitution to allow for proportional representation in the Senate: the Founders made sure of that by making it the one thing that couldn't be repealed by amendment. Brilliant! So we would have to hold a constitutional convention and start over from scratch if we wanted to reform the Senate in a way that would really live up to modern norms.

Or - we could follow this guy's plan: just take the scissors to the ol' state map and produce what you see above. There would still be two senators per state, but every state would have equal population, so representation would be proportional. A fantastic idea! This would be much fairer than the system we've got going on now. In particular, as it stands, rural areas are way, way overrepresented in the Senate; having two senators each for neo-states like SF Bay, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Dallas would remedy that.

As for the electoral college, it wouldn't solve the problem entirely. It would still be possible to lose the popular vote and win the electoral college, but at least it wouldn't be due to the fact that the smallest states get overrepresented in the electoral college (e.g., North Dakota gets 3 EVs, because of its 1 representative + 2 senators, though it only has the population to justify 1).

Of course, there would be some logistical problems in re-organizing state governments throughout the country. But bah, I say. Small potatoes: the senate is dysfunctional as it is and it is going to end up killing the country. My own personal choice would be for us all to just ignore the Senate until it went away, sort of like the House of Lords. But this plan strikes me as the next best thing.

Powers of Ten

The classic Eames film:



Because I'm feeling rather logarithmic this week.

The Earthquake in Haiti

Some countries have been historically lucky. Some have been unlucky. And then there is Haiti. I've always rooted for Haiti - how can you not want success for the only country that was founded from a successful slave rebellion? But it's long been the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, historically scarred by slavery and colonialist exploitation, physically scarred by environmental degradation, and beset by countless natural disasters, including devastating floods from frequent tropical storms; and yesterday they had an earthquake which looks like it may go down as one of the most terrible disasters in human history. Jeff Masters has this map:



Says Masters:

According to the USGS (Figure 1), 238,000 people near the quake's epicenter experienced violent to extreme shaking, capable of causing very heavy damage. A further 3.2 million people experienced very strong to severe shaking, capable of causing moderate to heavy damage. Another 1.3 million people experienced strong shaking, capable of causing moderate damage. Haiti's total population is just 9 million, so half the country's population lived in areas that received moderate to very heavy damage from the earthquake.

According to the BBC, the destruction is overwhelming in the area of Port-au-Prince. The Parliament building collapsed, along with some large percentage of structures in the capital. The Prime Minister believes more than 100,000 people have died, or are now dying, in the rubble.

This is the sort of disaster that can have really long-lasting effects. Of course, Haiti was already poor (though it had recently been showing signs of life), but this obviously increases the impact of poverty for millions of people, so many of whom must now be homeless and without jobs. And if the death totals are as high as the Prime Minister believes (or as high as one Haitian Senator estimated, at half a million), the number of disrupted families and communities, and the number of orphaned children, are on the scale that can have negative repercussions for a society for generations.

Oxfam would be a good place to donate to the recovery. The Map Room has more map links for the quake.

Netflixography

The New York Times raided Netflix's queue data and came up with this:



It shows Netflix rental patterns by zipcode in twelve great American cities, plus Dallas. Shown above is the popularity of Gus Van Sant's Milk in New York City. They've got maps for the current top 50 rentals for every zip code in all 13 cities, which is kind of nuts.

A few patterns tend to recur. In particular (based on my limited knowledge of the geography of these cities, especially NYC, which I know best) a lot of titles seem to fit into one of three categories:

Movies that are popular in wealthy urban areas: the yuppie and hipster neighborhoods. Includes Burn After Reading, The Wrestler, Milk (they're not big fans in surburban Atlanta), Revolutionary Road (but suburbs, too), Rachel Getting Married, Pineapple Express, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, W., Sunshine Cleaning, Religulous, Man on Wire, and Mad Men: Season 1.

Movies that are popular in poorer or working class urban areas . Includes Seven Pounds, Twilight, Body of Lies, Eagle Eye, The Soloist, Wanted, Pride and Glory, Push, Obsessed, Transporter 3 (never heard of this franchise), The Taking of Pelham 123 (only 31st most popular in Pelham), and RocknRolla.

Movies that are popular in suburbs. Includes Gran Torino, The Proposal, Mall Cop, Taken (never heard of it), Defiance, Nights in Rodanthe (city people hate it!), Yes Man, Marley and Me, Last Chance Harvey, Australia, and Bride Wars.

Lots of movies don't fit any of those patterns, of course, including I Love You, Man, The Dark Knight, and Watchmen. New in Town is just hugely popular in Minneapolis and nowhere else. And The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is inexplicably popular pretty much everywhere.

Urban Growth Regulation in the US

Paul Krugman points to another be-mapped Brookings report, this one on the growth typologies of the 50 largest US metro areas. Here's the map Krugman posts - it shows typology of land use regulation by metro area:



They found that cities followed a few different patterns of growth regulation regimes, which they classify into four orders:

Traditional. This covers 34 metros and 75 million people. In these areas, "planning and zoning remains mostly voluntary, few local governments engage in innovative land-use regulation, and state review of local plans is mostly absent. These are also highly 'fragmented' metropolitan areas with large numbers of local governments, each of which regulates land use based mainly on its own calculus." Densities are falling faster in these areas than elsewhere, and they tend to offer fewer housing opportunities for low-income residents.

Exclusion. These areas regulate against the construction of low-density apartment complexes, and "share a comparatively low use of tools to require that development 'pay its own way'.” Housing prices tend to be relatively high in these areas.

Wild Wild Texas. The Lone Star State is sui generis, its cities less restricted than any others in the country, partly because zoning and comprehensive growth plans are both disallowed for Texas counties. These cities have some of the lowest housing prices, but note that this report was from 2006, the height of the housing bubble.

Reform. These metros use a broad range of tools to regulate and manage development. Central cities in these areas tend to be more prosperous, with more college graduates and homeowners, than in the Exclusion and Traditional areas. (This goes for Texas as well.) The growth control group within this family has thte highest housing prioes in the country.

One thing worth noting is that, though the essentially deregulated environment in Texas is characterized by affordable housing and (in 2010) one of the least bad state economies (not saying much), this is largely due to the existence of uncharacteristically progressive regulations in the mortgage market which kept the housing bubble at bay in Texas' biggest cities. And, of course, the affordability of these cities has lots of external costs in the form of environmental impacts, particularly the worsening of global warming engendered by all that new sprawl. Meanwhile, the report says that reform cities generally offer the best opportunities for minorities (again, ca. 2006; but these areas are generally getting hammered economically right now); and that they succeed when they are oriented towards growth management rather than growth control, the latter of which suppresses development in already built areas.

Krugman makes a further point:

Oh, and someone will surely raise the claim that this shows that you mustn’t have “smart growth” policies because they cause housing bubbles. Can I say that this is deeply stupid? On one side, we’re supposed to believe that markets are efficient and wonderful; on the other, we’re supposed to believe that anything which constrains buildable land — which, you know, sometimes happens for entirely natural reasons — will send markets into wild irrational swings. Those poor, fragile, omnipotent markets, able to handle anything except mild government intervention …

I more or less agree with this sentiment, though I wouldn't necessarily call the opposing view "deeply stupid." I think that on the one hand, a truly deregulated growth environment is sort of like what Ghandi said about Western democracy: it would be a nice idea and we whould try it some time. Even cities like Houston have lots of regulations about how cities can be built, for instance, employing minimum parking space requirements that exacerbate sprawl. (I actually don't know if a truly unregulated city growth pattern would be a 'nice idea,' but it would be interesting to have one such American city as a test case.) But on the other hand, I think what you get from a radically free market in urban development is what you usually get from radically free markets: a tremendous ability to satisfy consumer demand in the short-term, plus horrendous externalized costs (environmental degradation, including global warming, and so forth) and other terrible consequences that tend to mount over the long term, and which private individuals have little incentive to account for.

Metro Monitor Maps

The Brookings Institution does this thing called a Metro Monitor. It monitors metros, economics-wise, and it comes with some maps. This one shows overall performance:



It's based on four factors: "employment change from peak; unemployment rate change from one year ago; gross metropolitan product change from peak; and housing price index change from one year ago."

This one shows employment change. It explains itself:



And this one just shows straight-up unemployment:



Says the accompanying report:

Nationwide, the recession is over—at least in the view of most economists in light of third quarter 2009 indicators. They revealed a real U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) increasing at a 2.8 percent annual rate, after four consecutive quarters of contraction. Most interpreted that rate of output growth, along with other signals such as increasing housing prices, as indication that the economic recovery is underway.

Yet the recovery seems fragile. The output increase may have resulted largely from the replenishment of manufacturing inventories and from temporary federal policies: the “cash-for-clunkers” program (already over), the first-time homebuyer tax credit (now extended through April 2010), and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s economic stimulus. As the effects of these policies recede, the recovery could slow or give way to yet another recession or a prolonged period of economic stagnation.

Real recovery in the labor market, moreover, remains elusive. Although output grew between July and September of 2009, the total number of U.S. jobs continued to decline. Payroll employment dropped by about 600,000 during the third quarter (about half the decline of the previous quarter), and the unemployment rate climbed to 9.8 percent by September. While the most recent national-level report showed a significant slowing of job losses in November, and a slight downtick in unemployment, the national economy still seems a long way from posting the sustained job gains that would meaningfully lower unemployment and boost incomes.

I'll be honest: this article seemed kind of boring so I didn't really read it. I assume it said what we all know - the economy blows and there aren't enough jobs. But it did helpfully put a few points in bold, so we can skip right to those:

• Metro areas continued to register highly disparate economic performance even as the nation showed early signs of recovery.
• Six metro areas—Albuquerque, Austin, McAllen, San Antonio, Virginia Beach, and Washington, DC—had regained their pre-recession peak level of output by the third quarter.
• Recovery seemed to be underway in most metro areas, but job growth remained spotty.
• The first-time homebuyer tax credit appeared to boost economic growth in nearly all metro areas.
• The “cash-for-clunkers” program boosted economic growth in most metro areas, and probably accounted for the improved rankings of auto production-specialized metro areas.[By the way, it is the official economic analysis of The Map Scroll that the government's efforts to continue to encourage home and car buying is propping up a failed economic model and merely delaying the inevitable transition to a non car-and-sprawl based economy while squandering tax dollars in the process. Our qualifications for making this analysis are various and broad.]
• The rate of metropolitan job losses in construction, manufacturing, and administrative services slowed considerably in the third quarter.
• Home prices stabilized or grew in an increasing number of metro areas, but inventories of real estate-owned properties (REOs) continued to mount overall.

This report is from December. The next update will come out in March, and it will probably show improvement, though according to Paul Krugman, there's a strong danger of the economy taking another brody later in 2010. We'll see. In the meantime, So long, Florida, and thanks for all the fish!

States of Happiness

Ladies and gentleman, your latest state-by-state quantification of human feeling:



This map is based on a new study that finds correlations between subjectively reported happiness and certain objective factors like air quality, cost of living, and climate:

The new research published in the elite journal Science on 17th December 2009 is by Professor Andrew Oswald of the UK’s University of Warwick and Stephen Wu of Hamilton College in the US. It provides the first external validation of people’s self-reported levels of happiness. “We would like to think this is a breakthrough. It provides an justification for the use of subjective well-being surveys in the design of government policies, and will be of value to future economic and clinical researchers across a variety of fields in science and social science” said Professor Oswald.

The researchers examined a 2005- 2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System random sample of 1.3 million United States citizens in which life-satisfaction in each U.S. state was measured. This provided a league table of happiness by US State reproduced below. The researchers decided to use the data to try to resolve one of the most significant issues facing economists and clinical scientists carrying out research into human well-being.

That issue: whether subjective reports of well-being (like those portrayed here) can be trusted. Seems that they can.

The study used subjective reports of well-being, but then checked those reports against a number of other variables for each state, including "precipitation; temperature; wind speed; sunshine; coastal land; inland water; public land; National Parks; hazardous waste sites; environmental ‘greenness’; commuting time; violent crime; air quality; student-teacher ratio; local taxes; local spending on education and highways; [and] cost of living." It turned out that the objective factors which would be expected to correlate with subjective happiness - nice climate, affordability, short commutes and all that - actually do correlate to the reported happiness of those 1.3 million surveyees. According to Professor Andrew Oswald, the lead author of the study:

“The state-by-state pattern is of interest in itself. But it also matters scientifically. We wanted to study whether people's feelings of satisfaction with their own lives are reliable, that is, whether they match up to reality -- of sunshine hours, congestion, air quality, etc -- in their own state. And they do match. When human beings give you an answer on a numerical scale about how satisfied they are with their lives, you should pay attention.

People’s happiness answers are true, you might say. This suggests that life-satisfaction survey data might be tremendously useful for governments to use in the design of economic and social policies,” said Oswald.

The happiest state is Louisiana (!), followed by Hawaii, Florida, Tennessee, and Arizona. The South does well in general, and the Northeast and Rust Belt not so much, which is interesting: happiness levels seem to be in strikingly inverse proportion to levels of economic and social development. The unhappiest state, it thrills me to report, is New York, followed by Connecticut and New Jersey - a trifecta for the tri-state!

The rest of the unhappiest quintile of states form a Bleak Belt from southern New England to the Great Lakes, with California thrown in for good measure. California can't blame it on the climate, of course, so their other factors must have been really brutal. On the other hand, Montana and Maine managed to sneak into the top tier despite their godforsaken climes.

Via the NY Times.

Interstate/Underground

The blog at Good has a map of the US interstate highway system on the model of the London tube map:



A detail:



Nice map, but I don't think Kent is the most important city between San Antonio and Las Cruces.

The author of this map cited a couple other interstate maps as inspiration, including this one by Chris Yates:



More inspiration here and here.

Deconstructing Metros

Neil Freeman's rather postmodern fake is the new real site has a graphic of the "fifty largest metro areas (in blue), disaggregated from their states (in orange). Each has been scaled and sorted according to population. The metro areas are US-Census defined CBSAs and MSAs":



This actually took me a while to figure out, but what seems to be going on is that metro areas and states minus their top-50 metro area populations are scaled to population and ranked in that order. Actually pretty interesting: it shows how much of the US population lives in those 50 cities vs. the rest of the country.

And by the way, I still don't believe Jacksonville actually exists, let alone that it's one of the 50 largest urban areas in the US. Have you ever met anyone from there? Have you ever, like, heard of someone taking a trip to Jacksonville? Didn't think so. And yet we're supposed to believe it's home to 1.3 million people? Please.

Via urban cartography.

Yet More on the Fate of the Planet

Via The Map Room and mapperz, here's another nice visualization of the calamity coming down the pike.



The image on the left anticipates increasing greenhouse gas emissions over the course of the century, which leads to a rise of just over 4C; the one on the right shows what'll happen if emissions gradually decrease - a rise of only 2C.

But obviously the warming, in either scenario, won't be uniform. The images really show how much more dramatic warming is forecast to be over land than over the ocean. Bear that in mind when you hear forecasts of like 4C warming by the end of this century: that's a global average, but it'll be considerably higher over land, which of course is where humans and cute baby elephants and things tend to live.

Meanwhile, talks in Copenhagen are hitting various sorts of predictable roadblocks:

China and the United States were at an impasse on Monday at the United Nations climate change conference here over how compliance with any treaty could be monitored and verified.

China, which last month for the first time publicly announced a target for reducing the rate of growth of its greenhouse gas emissions, is refusing to accept any kind of international monitoring of its emissions levels, according to negotiators and observers here. The United States is insisting that without stringent verification of China’s actions, it cannot support any deal.

If there's reason for optimism about the world's ability to do anything useful to slow our eminently foreseeable slide into global environmental devastation, it is this: if the US and China can just work out a framework for tackling the problem in a meaningful way, then Europe and Japan would surely follow; and just like that the countries producing a substantial majority of emissions will be on board. The rest of the world would not stand in the way (though OPEC would surely throw a fit).

If there's reason to be pessimistic about same, however, it's that the US and China would both have to agree to do something to meaningfully thwart global warming. For China, that would mean altering the model of industrialization that has brought them unprecedented and almost miraculous wealth in the last couple of decades, not to mention a growing role as a global power. For the US, it would mean overcoming the ossification of decline, including the extensive corruption of the political process and Versaillization of the political media, that appears to have compromised our ability to achieve any significant reforms on any front. In other words...

Sigh.

UPDATE: But here is some good news:

Negotiators have all but completed a sweeping deal that would compensate countries for preserving forests and in some cases other natural landscapes like peat soils, swamps and fields that play a crucial role in curbing climate change.

Environmental groups have long advocated such a compensation program because forests are efficient absorbers of carbon dioxide, the primary heat-trapping gas linked to global warming. Rain forest destruction, which releases the carbon dioxide stored in trees, is estimated to account for 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally.

The agreement for the program, once signed, may turn out to be the most significant achievement to come out of the Copenhagen climate talks, providing a system through which countries can be paid for conserving disappearing natural assets based on their contribution to reducing emissions.

So it's good to hear some concrete good will come out of this meeting. And of course preserving ecosystems carries all sorts of environmental benefits along with it, beyond the increased absorption of greenhouse gases. But on the other hand:

A final agreement on the program may not be announced until the end of the week, when President Obama and other world leaders arrive — in part because there has been so little progress on other issues at the climate summit, sponsored by the United Nations.

Baby steps... Who knows. we may yet manage to cobble together a decent approach to global warming by the end of the century or so.

Global Warming is Gonna Be Bad for the Midwest

While bureaucrats from around the world are in Copenhagen haggling over an arcane agreement that may have profound effects on the state of the entire planet a century from now, you can enjoy this interactive map, which projects temperature rise across the the lower 48 states by the 2080s:



It's based on a "medium" projection of greenhouse gas emissions. It shows at least a 4F temperature rise relative to a 1961-1990 baseline pretty much everywhere and 6-8F in much of the Interior West and Midwest (a.k.a. where our food comes from). In fact the seven states that are expected to heat up the most are all in the Midwest or thereabouts: Nebraska and Iowa (9.4F according to the moderate scenario), South Dakota (9.3), Missouri (9.2), Illinois (9.1), Kansas (9.1), and North Dakota (9.0).

The maps are based on a report (pdf) from The Nature Conservancy:

To help average Americans, policy makers and other local stakeholders better understand how climate change will directly impact their states, The Nature Conservancy has analyzed the latest and most comprehensive scientific data available to calculate specific temperature projections for each of the 50 US states over the next 100 years.

The Nature Conservancy also worked with the University of Washington and the University of Southern Mississippi to develop a new on-line tool that combines the latest scientific data and climate models with geographic information systems (GIS), statistical analysis and web-based mapping services. This tool, Climate Wizard (www.climatewizard.org), represents the first time ever that the full range of climate history and future projections for specific landscapes and time frames have been brought together in a user-friendly format that is available to a mass audience.

It also predicts rainfall:



Bad news for California and Texas. Oh well, at least they're not the two most populous states in the country or anything.

Via Huffington Post.

Nine Chinas

Patrick Chovanec, an associate professor of business-type stuff at Tsinghua University in Beijing, has a map of what he calls the Nine Nations of China up at The Atlantic:



Chovanec, inspired by Joel Garreau's Nine Nations of North America, sees China as "a mosaic of several distinct regions, each with its own resources, dynamics, and historical character," and notes that "taken individually, these 'nations' would account for eight of the 20 most populous countries in the world." The nine regions are:

The Frontier (colored salmonish on the map): Population a mere 86 million. It's China's outback, or more pertinently, its Empty Quarter. Lots of wild landscapes, ethnic minorities, and exploitable resources - a milieu Americans might find faintly familiar!

The Refuge (contemplative purple): Pop. 110 million. An agricultural breadbasket consisting of the provinces of Sichuan and Chongqing, it's remote but close to self-sufficient; sheltered by high mountains, the be-pandaed region sounds like a Chinese pastoral idyll, albeit one that's now lurching somewhat gawkily into industrialization and increasing integration with the rest of China and the world.

Shangri-La (ethereal light blue): Pop. 132 million. Purported home of the legendary paradise on earth, Shangri-La is, naturally, beset by environmental degradation, drug cultivation (an historic producer of opium and, more recently, the far deadlier tobacco), and poverty: it's the poorest of the nine regions. It's also comprised of about 30% non-Han minorities.

The Yellow Land (a very yellowy yellow): Pop. 359 million. A massively fertile land watered by the Yellow River, this region has more people than the United States. It has also served as the center of Chinese political power since roughly forever; it's the real belly of the whatnot.

The Crossroads (sullen dark blue): Pop. 226 million. So named because of its geographical centrality, and because it has historically stood between regions that compete for its resources; the region's never risen to a position of dominance within China, despite its placement on the Yangtze and main transportation corridors of the country.

The Back Door (debauched orange): Pop. 112 million. Once known as Yueh, this region in the south of China was a sort of Wild South for northern elites: a place of exile, full of jungles, gambling, smuggling, shadowy secret societies, and monkey-eating. Anchored by Hong Kong, it's boomed on the back of massive exports of late; presumably becoming less awesome.

The Straits (green like money): Pop. a paltry 59 million. Formed by Fujian on the mainland and the ever-ambiguous Taiwan, the region has been primarily a sea-faring one for centuries; its colonies throughout southeast Asia still remain tied together in many ways. The Asian tiger-dom of Taiwan has driven this to become the wealthiest of China's regions, though its political future is anyone's guess.

The Metropolis (tawdry pink): Pop. 147 million. The area around Shanghai and the mouth of the Yangtze has been the one region to seize preeminence from the Yellow Land at various points in Chinese history. After a period of neglect during the years of High Communism in China, Shanghai has led the country towards what seems to be its ever more urbane, cosmopolitan, and capitalistic future.

The Rust Belt (industrial alienation gray): Pop. 109 million. This is Manchuria, the locus of a certain prickliness between Russia and Japan a century ago. Japan held the region from 1931 until World War II; it went quickly to the Communists, and it became a stronghold of the socialist state. The reform era, though, hasn't been kind to the region; parts are almost as bad off as Michigan, if you can believe it. Pastimes include grain alcohol, decline.

Chovanec's got much more in his capsule descriptions, not to mention his blog.

The Decline and Fall of Assorted Empires

A visualization of four European empires over the course of the 19th and 20th Centuries:



The bubbles respresent "the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by [areal] extent"; hence Britain's loss of Canada looks like a more significant bursting of the imperial bubble than its loss of India, even though India is obviously a far more important place than Canada.

Via Andrew Sullivan and 3quarksdaily.