Income and the 2008 US Election

Andrew Gelman takes a look at the 2008 election results in terms of class. You wouldn't know this if you followed the mainstream media depiction of politics as an essentially cultural battle rather than an economic one, but it turns out that people mostly vote their economic interest:







If you are rich, you probably voted Republican. If you are poor, you probably voted Democrat. Fancy that! Gelman notes, in response to a commenter: "Regarding Robert's comment that 'the map based on rich Americans only corresponds so closely to the image of the US presented by pundits TV talking heads': Exactly. That's a key point of Red State, Blue State."

Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do is Gelman's book, in which he argues what these maps bear out: that people who don't have a lot of money favor the party that tends to offer more support for people who don't have a lot of money, and that people who have a lot of money favor the party that tends to offer more support for people who have a lot of money. Go figure. So why does the media seem to portray politics as a battle between church-going gun-owning social conservatives and secular gay-marrying liberals? Well, another thesis of Gelman's book is that, to the extent there is a culture war that manifests itself in the voting booth, it's a phenomenon of the upper classes: people who have the luxury of voting on cultural issues will do so; others will vote for their economic interests, all else being equal. But of course most media pundits are wealthy - they are just the sorts of people who have the luxury of voting on cultural issues. No wonder they tend to ignore the significance of class in voting behavior.

Mass Transit Systems of North America

From the obscenely wonderful Radical Cartography, a map of mass transit systems throughout North America.



(Note: I've shifted a couple of the 'cities' around slightly for formatting purposes.) The map depicts fixed mass transit systems - subways, light rail, and the like - in cities across North America, all depicted at the same scale. Radical Cartography says:

At a glance, many metros seem to be comparable in scale, but what separates New York from Baltimore is density: station-to-station distance, line overlap, and linkages.

Most systems are organized as a hub with spokes; the two notable exceptions are New York and Mexico City, both of which are more like nets.

You can also really pick out the slackers in this sort of direct comparison - I'm looking at you, Detroit and Seattle. Detroit you can sort of understand: that city's been bleeding population for decades, perhaps leaving it without sufficient density and tax base to support a modern mass transit system; and of course they're the home of GM, which has not historically been very amenable to the whole notion of people not being chained to the yoke of car culture. But Seattle? A city that's been pretty much booming for the last few decades? Where there's supposedly a high level of environmental consciousness? That is actually rather densely built and walkable, and has massive problems with traffic congestion? Seattle, I think you have some explaining to do.

You can compare this map to a list of heavy rail mass transit systems in North America, mostly based on information from this list (which unlike the map doesn't include light rail, note):

1. New York City-Subway (7,825,500)
2. Mexico City-Metro (3,879,500)*
3. Toronto-TTC (1,256,700)*
4. Washington, DC-Metrorail (1,019,900)
5. Montreal-Metro (791,500)**
6. Chicago-L (680,400)
7. Boston-MBTA or T (502,500)
8. San Francisco-BART (392,900)
9. Atlanta-MARTA (294,400)
10. Philadelphia-SEPTA (eww...) (289,000)
11. Vancouver-SkyTrain (271,000)***
12. New York City-PATH (257,400)
13. Los Angeles-Metro Rail (153,000)
14. Miami-Metrorail (65,500)
15. Baltimore-Metro Subway (57,600)
16. Philadelphia-PATCO (36,900)
17. San Juan-Tren Urbano (36,500)

* estimate based on this
**based on this
***based on this

Well, making that list was certainly an exercise in procrastinating from work I should be doing. Hope you enjoyed it!

Google Flu

No, it's not a mad scheme to embed the blueprint of Google's corporate ambitions in the genome of every living human (though don't think they haven't thought of it). It is, rather, an effort to use Google's alarmingly Everestian stockpile of data to track the spread of the flu bug.




Says Google:

We've found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems.

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together.

During the 2007-2008 flu season, an early version of Google Flu Trends was used to share results each week with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC. Across each of the nine surveillance regions of the United States, we were able to accurately estimate current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports.

So by using the use of search terms as a proxy for people's deepest wishes and concerns, and by extension as a proxy for their physical state, Google is providing a public service - letting us know where and when the flu is spreading. Faster than the Centers for Disease Control itself. Nothing nefarious about that.

Right?

Unemployment in the US

The New York Times is out with a couple of maps today depicting the state of the labor market in the US. (Hint: it's not great!) This one shows unemployment rates in every county.



They also show the change in unemployment from a year ago:



There are some other maps there as well which allow you to see that the two main areas that have been hit the hardest are those where the economy is dominated by manufacturing (in the midwest and the southeast) and those where the housing bubble reached oscenely bloated proportions (the east and west coasts). The Great Plains region and West Virginia have actually done pretty well so far; surprising, since these areas weren't exactly booming before the recession. But maybe that's the point: people were already trying to leave these areas, so it's not as if there was a housing bubble to pop in like Minot, North Dakota. And in those areas the labor market has been adjusting for decades - since the Dust Bowl, maybe - to a certain lack of economic dynamism, and the excess workers had long since already left.

Mapping the Future of Gay Marriage

Yesterday, same-sex marriage was rendered legal by that state's Supreme Court (the same day it was made legal in Sweden). The movement in the United States seems inevitably headed towards marriage rights for gay couples - but how long will it take to get there across the board? Based entirely on Nate Silver's hard work at fivethirtyeight.com, here is the future of gay marriage in the US:



Wait, no. Go here.

Place of the Week: The Ryugyong Hotel

The Place of the Week heads out on yet another ill-advised voyage. This time we're traveling to the Hermit Kingdom: North Korea, where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are above average. Oh, wait - wait, no. I'm thinking of something else. North Korea is actually an internationally isolated, broken society suffering from decades of Communist oppression. And into it we journey, with the Place of the Week: the Ryugyong Hotel!



Status: hotel/metaphor
Area (floor): 360,000 sq m
Population: none unto eternity, in all likelihood
Stories: 105
Height: 330 m
Rank among world's tallest buildings: 24
Remarkably inapt meaning of name: "Capital of Willows"

Snuggly nestled into the bosom of North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, the Ryugyong Hotel was a classic example of Cold War oneupsmanship. After a company from South Korea built the Westin Stamford Hotel, then the world's largest hotel, in Singapore, their rival sibling to the north was inspired to do them one better. The government commissioned a project to build the new world's tallest hotel as a groundbreaking effort to attract foreign investment, and to establish a towering symbol of the nation's glory.

Construction on the pyramid-shaped scheme began in 1987, and continued apace for the next five years. Wikipedia describes the building thus:

The reinforced concrete structure consists of three wings, the face of each wing measuring 100 m (328 ft) long and 18 m (59 ft) wide, which converge at a common point to form a pinnacle. At the top is a 40 m (131 ft) wide circular structure which contains eight floors intended to rotate, topped by a further six static floors. A construction crane is perched at the top, and has assumed the role of a permanent fixture. The hotel is surrounded by a number of pavilions, gardens, and terraces. Its walls slope at a steep 75 degree angle.

By 1992, the government had spent three-quarters of a billion dollars on the thing, or about 2% of North Korea's GDP. Such was the regime's pride in the edifice that it was bedecking the nation's postage stamps before it was even halfway built.

And then the project began to fail. Unsurprisingly, given the enormous relative scale of the project, funding increasingly became an issue. There were electrical problems. The elevators never quite worked, and a famine in 1990 disrupted the government's plans. There are evidently serious structural problems with the building as well, as the low-quality concrete of which it is built has proved unable to support it's enormous scale. The official line is that the project ran out of money - itself a significant concession to reality for a government that is loathe to reveal any sort of weakness. In 1992, construction was finally brought to a halt. The shell of the building has loomed over Pyongyang ever since, without windows or lights, a preposterous icon of the state and a metaphor for the hollowness of the ambitions of the North Korean regime. In recent years, the government has been airbrushing the building out of official photos.

Work, of a sort, re-commenced on the building in 2008, as an Egyptian firm was seen to be touching up the top floors of the hotel. A North Korean official has said that the building will be renovated by 2012, in time for the 100th anniversary of Kim Il Sung's birth. A spokesman for the Egyptian firm, Orascom, has indicated a relatively modest goal of "redo[ing] the facade to make it more attractive." Retouching the facade: at this late date, that's about all that the government can do.

(For more Abandoned Wonders of Asia, check out this fantastic list from Web Urbanist.)

The Food Nations of North America

From Renewing America's Food Traditions, a coalition of organizations dedicated to promoting the diverse foods and food traditions of North America, comes this map of the "food nations" of the continent:



According to RAFT, this map identifies what it calls "totem foods" which are emblematic not only of a regional cuisine, but of an entire culture:

These totem foods are more than just important commodities--community feasts, household rituals, song, stories and the nutritional well-being of residents have revolved around these foods for centuries.

It's fair to say, in other words, that this map is not just a map of North American food commodities, but a full-blown cultural map of the continent.

It's not hard to intuit that there's something to this depiction of cultural geography. Indeed, this geographical partition is similar in many of its particulars to others made in the areas of cultural and political geography, including some I've discussed here. Chile Pepper Nation corresponds pretty closely to the areas of the US Southwest that used to be part of Mexico (and the part of northwestern Mexico that still is), and that is heavily influenced by Mexican and certain Native American cultures. Clambake Nation is the Yankee portion of the Bos-NY-Wash mega-region, plus the coastal areas of the Atlantic that correspond to the Eastern portion of Robert David's Upper Coasts region, while the western portion of Upper Coasts, the region anchored by the Cascasdia mega-region goes here by the name of Salmon Nation. Corn Bread and BBQ Nation is otherwise known as the Greater South, less Gator Nation, which is just another way of describing the Gulf Coast Mega-region. And Moose Nation - well, that's just Canada minus the parts that have people.

As the RAFT folks write in the introduction to their book on America's food traditions, more than 400 years after the first white people started mucking about on the continent:

two-thirds of the distinctive seeds and breeds which then fed America have vanished. One in fifteen wild, edible plant and animal species on this continent has diminished to the degree that it is now considered at risk. These declines in diversity bring losses in traditional ecological and culinary knowledge as well. Consequently, we have suffered declines in the food rituals which otherwise link communities to place and cultural heritage.

It's not gone unnoticed that there has been some degree of homogenization in ways we eat. One big reason for this has been industrialized agriculture and cheap transportation costs: just look at the stickers on your produce to see what kind of epic vegetable diaspora your daily diet represents. Normally I'd lament the cultural homogenization, but I've just been reading some Jim Kunstler, whose dystopian rants can't help but give one the sense that, while a return to localism in the food supply is likely just around the corner, it will only be because we are going to have far greater problems to worry about: namely, the end of cheap transportation and general economic collapse. (The pinch of salt with which one is inclined to take Kunstler would be a good bit larger if not for the fact that his predictions of doom have been spot on for the past year or so.)

But I digress. The RAFT map is interesting and their goals noble. They go into far greater detail in their book, which you can download as a pdf file free of charge at this site. In those pages they detail the ten most endangered traditional foods: Chapalote corn, Chiltepin pepper, Eulachon Smelt, Gulf Coast sheep, Java chicken (which is, yes, actually from Asia originally, but never mind), Marshall strawberry, Native American sunflowers, Pineywoods cattle, the Seminole pumpkin, and White Abalone. (They also list the top ten success stories - traditional foods that have made a comeback - including American alligator, Louisiana Creole cream cheese, and Iriquois white corn.)

The book also has a comprehensive index of endangered traditional foods; especially given the price tag, it's really an essential reference for anyone in North America who cares about food, culture, and the preservation of traditional knowledge.

Capital Punishment Around the World

While we're on the topic of law and order and international norms, here's a map from the Criminal Justice blog at change.org on capital punishment policies around the world.



According to the blog entry by Matt Kelley, the top five countries for executions in 2007 were China (470 executions), Iran (317), Saudi Arabia (143), Pakistan (135), and the United States (42). (Kelley notes that China likely underreported executions.)

There are some clear geographical patterns here. Basically, capital punishment has been completely delegitimized in Europe, and to a slightly lesser extent in Latin America. It is still fairly healthy, if that is the word for it, in most of the Muslim world and East Asia, however.

And then there is the United States. This is one of those issues where the US really stands out as culturally and socially distinct from other Western countries. No other European country (save for the dictatorial regime in Belarus), nor any other Anglophone country, practices capital punishment. In this case, the US has more in common with the traditionalist societies of the Middle East and Asia, which tend to have a more authoritarian character at the societal level.

Cannabis Laws Around the World

From Skunkblog, a map of cannabis laws around the world.




(Note that the state of Massachusetts recently decriminalized possession of up to 1 oz. of marijuana, so color that one in blue as well.)

Classification of countries on this map which I find somewhat surprising:
1. Norway, Sweden, Finland, and France
2. Iran
3. Bangladesh

Meanwhile, the United States seems to be marching inexorably towards broad-scale decriminalization. A recent CBS/NYT poll found that 41% of Americans think it ought to be legal, campered to 34% who thoughts so in 2002 and 18% in 1986. And 72% think that people should just pay a fine for having small amounts of weed, rather than being put in jail. A Rasmussen poll found similar numbers, and the highest support for legalization among young people. As with legalization of gay marriage, broad acceptance of marijuana decriminalization would seem to be only a matter of time.

Who's Buying What?

That's the question that Good Magazine asks. Their answer is this map graphic.



It measures 20 countries that seem to have been chosen more or less arbitrarily by per capita expenditure in 5 categories: clothing, household goods, alcohol and tobacco, recreation, and electronics.

It's unclear why these particular countries were chosen - maybe they just had the best data? Who knows. At any rate, Scandinavia is way overrepresented, as are the Anglophone countries. Africa - not for the first time in history - gets the short end of the stick.

The biggest consumers in each category are:
Clothing - Norway
Household Goods - Norway
Alcohol and Tobacco - Norway
Recreation - Norway
Electronics - Norway

A clean sweep! And the least consumptive, so to say?
Clothing - India
Household Goods - Pakistan
Alcohol and Tobacco - India
Recreation - Pakistan ($1!)
Electronics - Pakistan

A clean sweep for South Asia, at any rate. Though this seems like the sort of competition where you wouldn't want to come in either first or last.

The graphic also indicates the top item of these five categories in every surveyed country. In all ten industrialized countries, it's recreation. Of the ten developing countries, clothing is the top item in 7, household goods in 2, and alcohol and tobacco in 1. (Go, Brazil! At least one nation has its priorities in order.)

Global Piracy Map

Via the excellent BLDGBLOG, here is a map of pirate incidents from around the world.



The map is published by the International Chamber of Commerce's Commercial Crime Services Agency. It shows all the piracy and armed robbery incidents reported to the International Maritime Bureau during 2009. (Reports for the last four years are also available.) You can click on the thumbtacky marker thingies to get the incident details. Details like this:

12.02.2009: 0448 LT: Posn: 01:18.86N - 104:14.42E, Off Tanjung Bulat, Malaysia.

Five robbers in a wooden boat approached a bulk carrier at anchor. One of the robbers boarded the ship and attempted to steal ship's stores. Duty crew noticed the robber and informed bridge who raised the alarm, sounded ship's horn and informed ships in the vicinity via VHF Ch.16. The robber jumped overboard and escaped empty handed with his accomplices.

Or this:

22.02.2009: 0400 UTC: Posn: 12:33.98N - 047:01.32E, Gulf of Aden.

Armed pirates attacked a bulk carrier underway. They boarded the ship, took hostage crewmembers and hijacked it to an undisclosed location. Further details are awaited.

Or this:

21.02.2009: 1900 UTC: Posn: 14:31.1N - 053:43.1E, Gulf of Aden.

Pirates in an unlit high-speed boat chased a general cargo ship underway. The boat came close to the ship and attempted to board. Master raised alarm, increased speed, took evasive manoeuvres, crew switched on additional lighting and activated fire hoses. The pirates aborted the attempt due to the evasive manoeuvres taken by the ship.

The ICC's CCS's IMB reports do make for some entertaining reading. What you can sort of infer is that there are two classes of pirates: most of these scalliwags and buccaneers are sort of opportunistic or hapless - they're just engaging in glorified muggings-at-sea. And then there are the dudes working the Gulf of Aden. As you can see, this is where the lion's share of incidents have occurred. And it's the only area that's seen actual hijackings in 2009 (and it's had some really high-profile ones over the last few months, too). This situation seems to be quite different from a few years ago. In 2005, the waters off Somalia were a nettlesome area, but by far the most action was in Indonesian waters and the Strait of Malacca. Given the essentially governmentless condition of Somalia, it's not surprising that piracy has skyrocketed there. But I wonder why it has fallen so much in Southeast Asia.

For more, this report summarizes the state of piracy in the world today.

A Map of Global Warming

A team of MIT researchers has just come out with a new projection of climate change over the course of the 21st Century.



Is this a map? I guess it's both a map and a graph. Anyways, it's a little tricky to read it at first, but look at it this way: every point on the map/graph represents a particular latitude and a particular year; the color of that point represents how much warmer it's likely to be at that given place and time. So, for instance, a location at 40 degrees north latitude (e.g., New York, Madrid, Beijing) is forecast to be about 2C warmer in 2050 and about 6C warmer in 2100. No doubt lots of local effects will come into play, but these temperatures would represent the latitudinal average.

What's immediately striking is how much greater warming is forecast to be near the poles, and especially the north pole. Temperatures there could be more than 10C warmer by the end of the century, a mind-boggling number. And a special added bonus effect of a dramatically warmer acrtic is that the melting of tundra could cause even more greenhouse gases to escape into the atmosphere, instigating a vicious cycle.

The projections are warmer than those made using the same model in 2003. As the paper's abstract says:

the median surface warming in 2091 to 2100 is 5.1°C compared to 2.4°C in the earlier study. Many changes contribute to the stronger warming; among the more important ones are taking into account the cooling in the second half of the 20th century due to volcanic eruptions for input parameter estimation and a more sophisticated method for projecting GDP growth which eliminated many low emission scenarios. However, if recently published data, suggesting stronger 20th century ocean warming, are used to determine the input climate parameters, the median projected warning at the end of the 21st century is only 4.1°C. Nevertheless all our simulations have a very small probability of warming less than 2.4°C

And what would a 4-5C rise in temperature look like?

Globally, a 4C temperature rise would have a catastrophic impact.

According to the government's 2006 Stern review on the economics of climate change, between 7 million and 300 million more people would be affected by coastal flooding each year, there would be a 30-50% reduction in water availability in Southern Africa and the Mediterranean, agricultural yields would decline 15 to 35% in Africa and 20 to 50% of animal and plant species would face extinction.

That's one of the somewhat optimistic scenarios in the MIT report. And the image above depicts a middle-of-the-road model for both climate change and economic development. But there's been a tendency for observed changes in climate patterns and sea ice to push the upper bounds of what scientists have been predicting. If that continues to be the case, then a merely catastrophic outcome may be the best that we can hope for.

Endangered Languages

UNESCO has just come out with a fascinating new resource: an Interactive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.



The atlas lists some 2,500 languages worldwide, including 230 that have gone extinct since 1950. Languages are rated on a scale from unsafe to extinct, according to these criteria:

Safe: language is spoken by all generations; intergenerational transmission is uninterrupted
Unsafe: most children speak the language, but it may be restricted to certain domains (e.g., home)
Definitely Endangered: children no longer learn the language as mother tongue in the home
Severaly Endangered: language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves
Critically Endangered: the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently
Extinct: there are no speakers left

As you might expect, the coutries with the most endangered languages tend to be those with the greatest linguistic diversity. They also tend to be the areally largest countries, especially those with diverse indigenous populations that are under pressure from homogenizing cultural forces. India has the most endangered languages, with 196, followed closely by the United States with 191, and Brazil with 190. Indonesia, Mexico, China, Russia, and Australia all also have more than 100, and linguistic powerhouse Papua New Guinea has 98.

But what is striking to me is just how widespread the distribution of endangered languages is. There are endangered languages is places I would never have expected them - Western Europe, for instance, has dozens of endangered languages, from Griko to Walloon to Sorbian; Italy alone has 31.

Languages are always coming and going, of course, and probably will continue to do so as long as there are people. But due to the forces of urbanization and globalization, more have been going than coming lately. Since Columbus showed up in the New World, for instance, 115 languages have died out in what is now the United States out of an original 280 - most recently Eyak, a native Alaskan language which Marie Smith Jones took with her to the grave in 2008.

As with the disappearance of a species, there's something heartbreaking about the loss of a language. It represents an irreversible diminution of the diversity and fecundity of the human cultural legacy; languages are the conduits for the traditions and wisdom which are collectively held by a people, and when a language blinks out from the world, those things die along with it. The site captures something of this poignancy, and the challenge to the identities of endangered language speakers, with a poem by Alitet Nemtushkin, an Evenki poet:

If I forget my native speech,
And the songs that my people sing
What use are my eyes and ears?
What use is my mouth?

If I forget the smell of the earth
And do not serve it well
What use are my hands?
Why am I living in the world?

How can I believe the foolish idea
That my language is weak and poor
If my mother’s last words
Were in Evenki?

Renewable Energy and the Electrical Grid

Matt Yglesias posts a simple but interesting map of the United States' high-voltage electricity grid.



Yglesias quotes Bracken Hendricks, who says in an article for the Center for American Progress:

Although the United States has vast onshore wind resources—more than enough to supply 20 percent of the nation’s electricity demand by 2030, according to a recent Department of Energy study—the best of these wind resources are located primarily in remote regions of the country. These areas are generally located far from major centers of electricity demand and have little or no access to the “backbone” extra- high-voltage transmission lines that would be required in order to transmit power efficiently from these regions to major electricity markets.

Indeed, if you compare the power lines to the areas with wind and solar energy potential, it almost looks like they were trying to avoid those areas, especially the windy ones, as these maps from Hendricks' article show:




Of course, the people who built the grid weren't trying to avoid those areas - renewable energy production just wasn't a concern back then. This is a problem the United States has in a lot of areas - it was a world leader at building infrastructure back in the day, but all that once-state-of-the-art stuff is now getting old and obsolete. But instead of just throwing up a whole new infrastructure, like China can do in many cases, the US has to work with and around all the stuff that's already there. It's like learning to dance in middle age: the process is clumsy, slow, and generally awkward for everyone involved.

UPDATE: Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag just said this at a press conference:

In energy, reduce dependency on foreign oil and improve operational efficiency of gov't by 25% by 2013. $15 billion/year in energy efficiency investments, including creating an electricity superhighway that would allow transportation of wind energy from the Dakotas to the population centers that need the energy. This expenditure would be financed through cap-and-trade, in a "market-friendly" way.

You see the sort of influence this blog has?

Google Earth Map of CO2 Emissions in the US

This is a bummer:

A NASA satellite to track carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere failed to reach its orbit during launching Tuesday morning, scuttling the $278 million mission.

“It’s a huge disappointment to the entire team that’s worked very hard over years and years and really did their best to see it through,” said Charles P. Dovale, the launch manager. “The reason not everyone is able to do this is it’s hard. And even when you do the best you can, you can still fail. It’s a tough business.”

On the bright side, NASA and some Purdue scientists, working on something called the Vulcan Project, just launched a new Google Earth map that lets you see the amount of CO2 being emitted in the United States every hour. (The Purdue folks are the ones who put together this impressive map animation.) Here is a demonstration flyover:



It shows information about emissions at the state and county levels, and even gives information on specific source points, such as airports. It also breaks down emissions by sector, showing relative contributions from air traffic, electricity production, industry, commercial, transportation, and residential sources. It really does a good job of helping the viewer visualize carbon emissions - a sort of nebulous and abstract thing to try to think about - and that may prove to make it a very valuable tool in public efforts to decrease those emissions. You can download the Google Earth map at this site (though it ran a bit slow for me). And by the way, kudos to the Purdue folks for picking a badass name for their research project. You gotta know how to market this stuff, people!

Temperature Anomalies and Global Warming

Weather Underground updates this map every month.



It shows the temperature anomalies around the globe for January 2009 relative to the average between 1961 and 1990. As has usually been the case over the last ten or fifteen years, the global average temperature was above average for the month; it was the 7th warmest January on record, in fact. (And look at Siberia: it's been looking like that a lot lately - the climate seems to be changing there really dramatically.) However, among the few areas of the world that were below average were Western Europe and the Northeastern and Midwestern United States. For the US as a whole, it was only the 59th warmest January out of the last 114. (Note, too, the coolish temperatures over the central Pacific: a symptom of La Nina.)

One inevitable consequence of cold snaps during the winter is that global warming skeptics will say sarcastic things about the weather. And some people become more receptive to denialist claims - claims by people like George Will who recently wrote a denialist editorial that was pretty much entirely composed of falsehoods. But of course the fact that the temperature of the planet is gradually rising doesn't mean there will never again be any temperatures anywhere that are below average - and you can see clearly enough that a significant cold snap in some of the densely populated parts of the industrialized world is perfectly consistent with the world having temperatures somewhere in the neighborhood of the 5% warmest ever.

Ricky Rood makes a related point at his blog on Weather Underground, where he shows these maps of the continental US temperature anomalies from the Januaries of 2008 (top) and 2009. It so happened that in 2008, most of the big cities in the US were warmer than average, and this year they were colder (the major exception being the cities on the west coast). Overall, though, the months were similar for the country as a whole, and near average. But for two reasons, the denialists have had more fodder this year: 1) the colder weather disproportionately hit the places where lots of people live - if the map were a cartogram (which would make no sense) it would be overwhelmingly blue, including in big media centers where opinions tend to get amplified; and 2) the colder weather this year hit places that are naturally colder, which makes it seem more dramatic. Record lows in Oregon are gonna be chilly for the folks there, but not freezing; it's a lot more startling when it hits -40 degrees in Maine. As Rood says, "I don’t remember a lot of rhetoric that 'global warming is spurious' coming out in 2008, from say, Seattle."

Well, these points probably seem obvious to most people. And for that committed minority who don't believe in anthropogenic global warming, there is an entire industrial-media apparatus (of which George Will is obviously a card-carrying member) designed to confirm their views, and no amount of data is likely to win them over. But maps like these are still a good corrective to the impulse we all have to extrapolate global trends from the anecdotal events we read about in the news.

Mapping the News

Some dude named Chris found a cool screensaver that maps the news in real time. He discusses it here.



The screensaver is billed as "an indispensable tool for the global newsjunkie!" It's sort of a cross between the crawl at the bottom of BBC news broadcasts and the light-bright background of the Larry King show. You can get it here.

Place of the Week: Nauru

The possibly misguided continuation of the Place of the Week series takes us this time to an erstwhile paradise in the South Pacific: the Micronesian microstate of Nauru.



Status: Independent Republic
Area: 21 sq. km.
Population: 13,770
Unemployment rate: 90%
Rank, in GDP, among the world's nations in the early 1980s: 2
Rank today, according to the CIA World Factbook: 141

The tragic story of the island nation of Nauru begins in the digestive tracts of countless generations of sea birds. Those were the production facilities of what would become one of the world's most valuable commodities: bird shit. Or at least, it would become very valuable after being deposited in copious quantities over millions of years and reacting with the uplifted coral that formed the structure of the island to become phosphate, from whence comes phospohorus, which has many industrial and agricultural uses, including as a key component of fertilizer.

Turns out that the combination of Nauru's geology and its ecology allowed the island's phosphate deposits to become some of the largest and highest-quality deposits in the world. Mining began in the early 20th Century, when Nauru was a colony of Germany. The island would go through periods as a possession of Australia, Japan, and the UN before becoming the world's smallest independent nation in 1968 - and all the while, the mining continued.

It was an absolute bonanza. The small population of the island gained enormous wealth from its phosphate exports. By the early 1980s, the country had the second-highest per capita income in the world, after the United Arab Emirates. And, like the UAE today, the country was not ashamed to spend the wealth it derived from its natural resources. People chartered planes to go on international shopping trips around the Pacific Rim. The country imported fancy sports cars, even though the entire nation can be circumnavigated by bicycle in an hour and a half and the highest speed limit on the island is 25 mph. The nouveau riche Nauruans were living the good life and profiting from a natural bounty that seemed to be a limitless gift from God.

Unfortunately, the island's good fortune did not extend to its investments of that wealth, to the extent that investments were even made:

"We just didn't know how to handle it all," a barefoot islander told me as he played his guitar beneath a tree.

"Hardly anyone thought of investing the money. Dollar notes were even used as toilet paper," his friend told me. "It's true," he insisted seeing my look of disbelief. "It was like every day was party day."

The world's most dubious investors - from the nefarious to the clueless - saw in Nauru a likely target for their financial schemes. One advisor to the Republic of Nauru convinced the government to invest in Leonardo the Musical: A Portrait of Love, a West End production that would go down as one of the most spectacular flops in the history of the London stage. The country also made various real estate investments around the world that would be gradually vaporized by corruption and mismanagement. And when the nation finally took a break from its decades-long party to look around itself, it made a discovery: the phosphate - the source of all the good times - was nearly gone, and so was the money.


The country has tried other means to keep its financially foundering fortunes afloat. It went the route of other island nations by trying to make it as a tax haven and money laundering center, though pressure from the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering quickly scotched that plan. And in 2001, a Norwegian boat carrying a cargo of human refugees, including some from Afghanistan, was diverted from Australia to Nauru; in exchange for keeping the refugees in a detention center on the island, Australia threw Nauru a lifeline of financial aid. Australia decided to close the facility in 2008, and its unclear how the island will deal with the consequent shock to its now refugee detention-based economy.

Meanwhile, mining has left the once pristine nation comprehensively denuded. A thin limn of foliage clings to the edge of the island, but almost the entire interior - 90% of the island - has been rendered a wasteland. The country, having squan- dered its resources and its wealth, is now left without even a healthy natural environment from which to rebuild.

Nauru's tale is the story of a population whistling past the graveyard as it gradually depletes the finite resource on which its economy and its society depends, preferring to live extravagantly without considering what might happen when that resource inevitably disappears.

Feel free to draw your own lessons.

UPDATE: NPR's This American Life had a really good episode a little while back about Nauru. Here's the link.