After

The hills will look lifeless when you return, the char infinitely deep, like death on a cracker but the cracker has burned and so has the plate. But before the ravens, getting soot on their jet, remove the last body of evidence of life that was, the hills' funerary garb will be sullied, pimpled, with brown. The refugees are returning from the underworld. Gophers, their digging fanatical, already are turning the ash down into the soil that insulated them, churning the living earth to the surface, and making withdrawals from the seed bank. All the dungeon dwellers of their domain, moles and voles, snakes and salamanders, beetles and bugs, are filing out of Hades' unguarded gates, hunting water, and each other. Plants whose ancestors have persisted through every fire for ages are doing it again, resurrecting themselves according to each family's tradition. Deer who fled to the valley are hoofing it back to the unburned patches, nibbling everything that isn't too crispy, and trying to catch the scent of mountain lion through the dissipating olfactory roar of fire. Seeds will ride up the hill on pelts, and wind, and in cheek-pouches and colons, joining the feast of uncontested soil and light. Ashen mountain mourning garb will give way to a new morning's green and the united kingdom of death to rebellious, fractious life. As surely as the gophers make the soil boil in slow motion, the forest will return, and forget, and repeat its mistakes.

A persistent problem

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I have a particular fondness for condors, so when I see an article about California Condors published in The Condor (a major ornithology journal), I usually take a quick look.  The look in this case was very short, because I am on my way to other things, but I found it interesting enough to mention to you.

Captive bred condors have over the last couple of decades been reintroduced to both southern (Ventura county) and central (Bug Sur) California, and young birds in both places have begun nesting. Their success has been limited, especially around Big Sur, where many of the egg shells have been extremely thin, leading to dehydration of the egg, fragility, etc. Why, you may well ask, should the eggshells be so thin around Big Sur? The suggested answer is that these condors do a lot of feeding on dead sea lions that wash up on the nearby beaches, and those sea lions do a lot of their feeding off southern California, in an area where an old DDT factory used to discharge its wastes into the ocean. DDT, and its breakdown product, DDE, are extremely persistent toxins, and biomagnify. So even though DDT was banned in the US in 1972, the marine ecosystems in that area are still quite contaminated. Algae pick up the DDE, small fish eat many times their weight in algae, bigger fish eat many times their weight in small fish, etc., up the food chain through sea-lions and eventually condors, who get a highly concentrated dose from their picnic on the beach. The Ventura condors don't often eat sea lion, and so don't get so much DDE. The Big Sur condors can see sea lion beaches from their majestically placed release area, and get enough DDE to seriously impair their reproduction. This of course is not the first time they have had this problem, but it is a reminder that DDT, while banned, is far from gone.

A month of snow

A cubic meter of fluffy freshly fallen snow weighs about 80kg, while a cubic meter of water weighs a metric ton, 1000kg. This implies that a meter of fresh snow will melt into a paltry 8cm deep layer of water. Enough to make the ground very soggy, but not nearly as impressive as a meter of snow. As ice is slightly less dense than water (about 92% as dense) a meter of snow will squish down into a slightly thicker layer of ice, almost 9cm. A third possibility is to catch a plane to someplace warmer, where the snow never fell at all.

Return on Investment in Higher Education

One of the major debates in US politics is usually framed like this: Should we spend more on things that are worth doing, or should we maintain balanced budgets by spending less. The underlying assumption of this type of argument is that spending more necessarily worsens the budget outcome. If the budget outcome income minus spending, doesn't it make sense that spending more worsens the outcome? Only if we can assume that the spending does not spur more income. In other words, only if we assume that investment is impossible. Investment is spending intended to increase income.

After reading Mike Hout's recent article on the importance of public higher education, I was left wondering how public expenditure on higher education compared to other investments in purely budgetary terms. Mike points out that education leads to higher personal incomes, higher rates of entrepreneurship and other good things that increase tax revenues. At the same time education leads to lower rates of things that cost the state money, like imprisonment and needing public assistance through social security/unemployment/health expenditure. So I wondered, how does the expenditure function as a investment. If the state of California could either spend an extra Billion on education, or invest that money in the stock market, how fast would the market have to rise to give better returns than the education (ignoring the non-fiscal benefits of education)?

I wrote to Mike to ask him, and it turns out he is scheduled to give a talk on that very subject here in Rostock some time soon. He sent me a copy of a 129 page report he and colleagues wrote on the subject in 2005. A pdf of that report (or a draft of it) is here.


The concluding summary of the report says:

The state devotes a substantial portion of its budget to supporting education in
California. That support is not wasted: the costs of neglecting education are
high, and the return this investment brings to the state is equally high. Laudable
though it may be, California’s investment in higher education is insufficient. If
things stay as they are now, that is, if future students progress through their
educational careers at the same rates as their ethnic counterparts did in 2000, the
state will suffer a net loss, and that loss will increase as years pass. With no other
changes, the state will forgo revenues from the increased earnings that education
encourages, and pay more to support a population in a situation of increased
poverty and incarceration. If, rather than maintaining the per-person level of
educational support and access, the state were to limit capacity, the situation
would become even more dire.
However, based on existing trends in educational demand, we expect that high
school graduation rates and college going rates will increase, and demands on
state support for education will climb commensurately. California will have to
invest in community colleges and universities in the short run, but both the state
and its residents will benefit handsomely from this additional support in the long
run. Our calculations suggest net savings to the state will exceed the additional cost by three-fold or four-fold, while its population will enjoy lower levels of poverty, crime, and dependency, and higher levels of average income and political participation.

(Emphasis mine)

The report also specifies in great detail the time scale on which these returns occur, and the majority of returns are "realized in the first ten years after investment because the benefits it buys -- lower welfare, less crime, and healthier children -- are problems/ benefits that disproportionately affect 18-34 year olds."

Now this suggests that we are getting 300% return within the first ten years. So let's just say our $1Billion turns into $3Billion by the end of ten years. That is about 11.5% annual return on investment (1.115^10= 2.97), better than the 11% average rise in the Dow Jones from 1926 through to its pre-dot com bust peak in 1999.

I am a strong believer in the value of education, and would gladly quadruple expenditure on education, but I find this purely monetary claim incredible. This is such an extraordinary claim that we are forced to consider the background of the person making it. The only one of the authors I know is Mike, and what I know about him is that he is the Chair of the best Demography graduate program in the Western Hemisphere, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a careful scholar. Mike does not go around spouting grand pronouncements. If he makes a claim like this it is because his analysis tells him it is true. There really is a strong argument to be made that in purely fiscal terms, investment in higher education pays off better and more consistently than investment in stock.

In that light, two things surprise me. First, that I haven't heard that argument made before. I hang around with a lot of people distraught about the direction American (and particularly Californian) higher education is going, and no one has ever mentioned this. Second, I'm amazed that Wall Street hasn't tried to securitize this yet.

I'm eager to hear what new work on the subject Mike will be presenting at his talk.

Finally, and sadly, I've just heard that Berkeley's demography department won't be able to accept any new graduate students this year. The lack of funding makes it impossible for them to hire faculty to replace those who have retired or left for better funded institutions. If this does not improve in the next few years, I would guess the department will have to close its doors.

Demographic Decline

There are no national rankings for departments of Demography in the US. If there were, UC Berkeley would certainly be near the top, and would likely rank first. Four of the five core faculty members have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and the last is relatively young. (The entire Academy has about 2100 members, out of perhaps a million PhDs who could potentially have qualified). I had the good luck to stumble into association with this department, benefited greatly, and was tremendously impressed.

This department contributes tremendously not only to Berkeley, and the field of Demography, but to our civilization's progress in understanding how populations function, how populations are likely to change in the future, and what effects these changes have on our economy, society and environment. Methods developed at Berkeley are at the core of the United Nations' understanding of population trends and their importance. Alumnae of Berkeley's rather small program in Demography can be found in almost every important institution making use of demographics, from the US Census Bureau to every major branch of the UN, to departments of Economics, Sociology, Anthropology and Epidemiology at most major universities, to think tanks, research organizations, and major corporations. The people that come out of this program are predictably smart, creative, quantitatively talented and know how to ask important questions and answer them convincingly. It is everything that graduate education should be. There are not many rooms full of people in which I feel slow, but discussing research with a bunch of Berkeley demographers required me to manufacture a fair bit of bravado. Among Berkeley's graduate programs, so many of which are at the top of their field, Demography stood out to me as a bastions of professionalism and brilliance.

Unfortunately, like so many of Berkeley's programs, Demography is in clear and present danger from the current fiscal crisis, and several of its students have hinted to me that it could easily cease to exist in a relatively few years. This happened once before. The following is an excerpt from a 1991 interview with Albert H. Bowker, Berkeley's sixth chancellor (1971-1980):

Q: I don't want to skip over some of your other activities with various departments, if you'd care to pick up on that again. Let's see, we had Department of Demography.

Bowker: Demography was a small group, and it had a lot of trouble recruiting faculty, largely because it was dominated by Judith Blake. I just decided to abolish it, largely because it was just one person, really, on permanent position. It's just something you can have or have not, not an important subject. There are some subjects that every university must have-- mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, history, English, philosophy, some of the languages, and others. Demography is not one of them, and criminology is not one of them. If you have it, it ought to be good and large. They kept bringing it back, and apparently that was not so much on intellectual grounds. It's a silly subject and the group there couldn't be very effective. Then Judith left, and somebody revived it, not in my day.

Q: Do you remember the Department of Design?

Bowker: Vaguely. Yes, we abolished that for the same reason, I guess. I've forgotten now what design was.

Demography was brought back by a group of faculty who are themselves now of an age where even many dedicated academics retire. The Demography department is, as a professor in another department put it "highly age structured." Beyond this older group, they brought in a few younger faculty, shared with the Department of Sociology. One of these recently left for a better offer in Texas. The department is unable to replace her because of the budget crisis. Another scheduled faculty search was cancelled. If recruitment remains frozen for longer than the faculty's more senior members care to continue teaching, (which is quite possible) the department could easily be back to one or two professors. One of these has already said that if this were to happen he could simply join another department. The current administration, may or may not remember what Demography is, or care whether it is important, and is unlikely to make any particular effort to save the department from attrition.

This department is of course just one casualty of the budget cuts to the University, which is in turn only one portion of the destitution of California's public education system, which is in turn only one piece of the general collapse of governance in California. To me, of course it means more than that. I wasn't actually a student in the department, but I spent enough time there to know I was surrounded by the best humanity can produce finding out things that humanity desperately needs to understand. This department is one of the best pieces of the best school in what was once the most ambitious public education system in the world, and it hurts to see it left to atrophy. This abandonment of greatness symbolizes for me what ails California, and America.

The University that Was

The University of California at Berkeley has long claimed, with reasonable justification, to be the world's top public University. The University of Massachusetts has some very good campuses, but they have never been any challenge to Harvard. The University of Connecticut is no Yale. But Berkeley and Stanford have often been considered on equal footing (or rather people at Berkeley thought Berkeley was clearly better and people at Stanford held the opposite opinion). In terms of prestige of faculty, Nobel Prizes won, National Academy members, number of important scientific publications, number of top-ranked programs and so on, Berkeley has long been among the US's top universities and far and away the best among the public institutions. California, historically a big wealthy state with a high standard of living and strong emphasis on education, made Berkeley the jewel of its enormous system of public education.

Berkeley now has this wonderful global reputation, amazing arsenal of high-powered faculty, several former faculty in high positions in the Obama administration and world-class facilities. It also has a crushing budget shortfall coming on top of several years of budget cuts, pay for grad students and many staff that is well below what the university considers a living wage, the expectation of massive staff layoffs in the near future, vanishing budgets for maintenance, supplies and support and deep sense that things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better.

The voters of California, in their wisdom, have used the state's mechanisms for direct democracy to require spending increases, but forbid tax increases. They have amended the state constitution to dictate budget items and make it enormously difficult to pass a budget. They have elected politicians based on looks and swagger and reacted with petulance when those politicians had more looks than brains. The state government has deteriorated to the point that most state spending not mandated by ballot initiatives will need to be completely cut. The budget for higher education is expected to be cut by about $1 Billion for the next school year. Similar shortfalls are expected until the global economy has rebounded, or the state constitution has been scraped and more workable one written.

Berkeley, I think it is safe to say, will not retain its reputation for excellence if this goes on for long. For some years now, as the budget has worsened, Berkeley has had a tougher time attracting the most competitive faculty. Many faculty searches have been canceled, and those which weren't often ended up offering positions to researchers who went for much better deals at private institutions. Berkeley has also been having trouble recruiting grad students. My department this year had six first year grad students enter and 17 PhDs graduate. Administrative departments are being eliminated or combined. Journal subscribtions are being scalled back. Phone lines are being turned off. Scholarships are being eliminated. It's ugly, and likely to get uglier fast.

I suspect that given a few years the economy will improve, and the budgetting process in California will be reformed, and Berkeley's budget will start to improve. I fear that by the time that happens Berkeley will have lost its global reputation, many of its most famous faculty, and its culture of intellectual greatness. UC Berkeley may from now on be just a very good public university.

On a related note:

University of California's endowment loses $1Billion in value.

"UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof said that if the financial markets continue their downward slide in coming years, there could be future reduction in endowment support for scholarships, research and funding to recruit and retain faculty, among other things."

All global warming is local

I got home from the lab late last night and turned on NPR. There was a voice I instantly recognized, my major professor, and the director of the MVZ, Craig Moritz. What, I wondered, was Craig doing in my radio at this late hour? Being interviewed by All Things Considered for this piece on the effects of climate change on the wildlife of Yosemite National Park.
Mean monthly minimum temperatures in Yosemite have risen by 6 degrees Fahrenheit in the hundred years since the MVZ's first director, Joseph Grinnell, surveyed the wildlife there. Apparently in response, many of the wildlife species in the park have moved their upper and lower limits thousands of feet higher than they were.

The project is described in great detail here, and a subset of the Yosemite data were just published in Science. I wasn't involved in this work, in case you were wondering.

Snake self defence

Iris and I were on our way up Blake St from the BART station to our house.
At the corner of Walnut St, I exclaimed, "Oh!"
"What! What!? What?" Iris responded.
"A garter snake!"
The sleek black ribbon, two feet long and no more than half an inch wide, with a bright yellow strip up its back, was frantically trying to wriggle out of the street and onto the curb. That corner has no curb-cut, and its movements were too disorganized to allow it to climb the 6-inch curb.
Three facts jumped to mind:
1. It was clearly overheated by being on the black pavement in the sun, and would cook to death or get run-over unless we rescued it.
2. Garter snakes are not poisonous, but can bite.
3. It probably came from El Cerrito Hillside Natural Area, 200m up the street.

So I handed my cane and groceries to Iris and grabbed the snake with both hands. But I had forgotten that the hotter a snake is, the faster it can move. Before I could get a finger on it, my thumb was bleeding from multiple tiny punctures. I grabbed the little snot anyway and held firmly, but without squeezing, on the back of its skull. Then it hit me with a garter-snake's last line of defense: musk. A garter snake's musk glands are in its vent (a.k.a. cloaca, a.k.a. butt) and can rapidly discharge a surprising quantity of a fluid that smells somewhere between a port-a-potty and old gym-socks.

With one hand bleeding and the other clamped on a snake and stinking, I looked up at Iris. She handed me my cane and retreated up the street.

Thamnophis elegans - Western Terrestrial Gartersnake

All quiet on the Hayward Fault

For the five years I have lived in the Bay Area, I have occasionally checked this map to see what recent earthquakes have happened round these parts. This is the least activity in a week I have seen. And there has been almost this little for some weeks now. The cluster of small quakes in the upper left corner is "The Geysers," an area of hydrothermal activity that always has many small quakes. On the San Andreas Fault and the Hayward Fault, the two main faults running through the Bay Area, there is not a single anything. No movement. This makes me very nervous. It makes me think that things have jammed. As long as there are many small earthquakes, my fabulously limited knowledge of seismography suggests that tension is being released. For the last several weeks there has been almost no release of tension on the faults around here. I consider it fairly likely we will have a significant earthquake pretty soon here. That said, I really don't know squat about earthquake prediction.

Global Amphibian Declines call for frog costumes.

There are few, if any, taxa losing species diversity as quickly and thoroughly as the amphibians.

From amphibiaweb.org:

"Amphibians, a unique group of vertebrates containing over 6,200 known species, are threatened worldwide. A recent assessment of the entire group (globalamphibians.org) found that nearly one-third (32%) of the world’s amphibian species are threatened, representing 1,856 species. Amphibians have existed on earth for over 300 million years, yet in just the last two decades there have been an alarming number of extinctions, nearly 168 species are believed to have gone extinct and at least 2,469 (43%) more have populations that are declining. This indicates that the number of extinct and threatened species will probably continue to rise (Stuart et al. 2004)."

And this is almost surely an overly optimistic view. The thousands of species for which we have no data are not considered threatened, and an unknown number of others, likely in the hundreds, has gone extinct without ever being discovered.

Amphibian lineages that have existed for tens of millions of years are ending shockingly quickly. The factors that are killing off these ancient groups are all the works of humanity: pesticides, industrial pollutants, introduced species and diseases, habitat destruction and alteration and rapid climate change. There is no reasonable doubt but that we have driven the rate of amphibian extinction to several thousand times its natural rate. We could barely kill them off more quickly if we tried. Genocide is not too strong a term.

Amphibians are widely seen as indicator species. Healthy ecosystems have healthy amphibians. Indications are poor.

So to help raise (the currently abysmally low) awareness of the scope of amphibian declines, Iris and I have decided to walk Bay to Breakers wearing homemade from costumes. And we hope to organize a group of friends and colleagues to walk with us, similarly garbed. A costume recognizable as an amphibian, or even a shirt with amphibian pictures on it. Perhaps we will hand out informational pamphlets to people who ask what we are about. If you are interested in joining us, please email me.

"Science" "Journalism"

Even taking into account how poor the state of science journalism is in this country, and what a sorry rag the San Fransisco Chronicle is, this piece on the danger posed to San Francisco by invasive pythons is well below the curve.
To summarize, there is an introduced population of Burmese pythons in the Everglades, 3100 miles away. A USGS lab used an off the shelf climate model to predict where in the US Burmese Pythons could deal with the climate, and San Francisco (along with pretty much the southern half of the US) showed up as one potential habitat.

The idiot who wrote the article then follows this train of thought to show that pythons will be eating pedestrians on Market Street by 2020:
•One python showed up at Lake Okeechobee, 100 miles north of the Everglades, and in the same direction it would travel if its single-minded goal was to reach Fisherman's Wharf.
•Pythons can travel up to 20 miles a month, and the road to SF is 3000 miles, so it will be here in 150 months, or about 12 years.
•Pythons eat mammals.
•"Human beings - like rodents, beavers and deer - are mammals, government scientists confirmed."
•Giant snakes falling from office buildings and eating you.
•QED

The sad thing is, reading the article, I am not sure if he is joking, but I am sure there are some people who will think this is a real threat.

Journal of the American Forehead Slapping Assosciation

In another big no-shock-shocker that needed to be demonstrated anyway, It has been found that when poor women are given vouchers to local farmers' markets, their families eat more fruits and vegetables. While anyone with two axons to rub together could have predicted this, I am still glad they took the time to prove it.

METHODS: Women who enrolled for postpartum services (n=602) at 3 WIC sites in Los Angeles were assigned to an intervention (farmers' market or supermarket, both with redeemable food vouchers) or control condition (a minimal nonfood incentive). Interventions were carried out for 6 months, and participants' diets were followed for an additional 6 months. RESULTS: Intervention participants increased their consumption of fruits and vegetables and sustained the increase 6 months after the intervention was terminated (model adjusted R(2)=.13, P<.001). Farmers' market participants showed an increase of 1.4 servings per 4186 kJ (1000 kcal) of consumed food (P<.001) from baseline to the end of intervention compared with controls, and supermarket participants showed an increase of 0.8 servings per 4186 kJ (P=.02). CONCLUSIONS: Participants valued fresh fruits and vegetables, and adding them to the WIC food packages will result in increased fruit and vegetable consumption.

Ecological causes and effects of SoCal fires: Initial thoughts

There are numerous wildfires currently blackening southern California. The short term response has to be to the fire itself. Save the people, save the pets, save the homes and the businesses. But what should be the response when the fires are out? Ruibiuld everything exactly as is was? That is the most likely outcome. After a disaster, people want to rebuild, regardless of how likely it is that disaster will happen again. But how likely is it these fires will return? What ecological factors played into this disaster, what ecological effects can be expected and what lessons should we draw from all of this?

I feel it is important to raise these issues before everyones attention moves on and we fail to learn from previous mistakes. I'll appreciate your input and comments.

With no further ado:

Ecological Causes:

1. Obviously the big'un is the Santa Ana Wind, the hot dry wind that blow-dries out of the Great Basin and over southern California every year. The topography and climate of coastal southern California, combined with the Santa Anas make for fires pretty much every year. It is being reported that the Santa Ana's are stronger and more persistent than usual this year. It is not yet known, so far as I know, if the Santa Ana's are expected to be stronger every year now that the Great Basin's climate is turning much hotter and drier.

2. California has had an unusually dry year this year. Unusual meaning "in comparison to the last 150 years." This year may turn out to be unusually wet as compared to the next 150 years, because, as mentioned, the climate of the southwest is drying.

3. A lot of these areas have many times the natural fuel-load. The last 150 years are important, because that is how long we have been suppressing fires in southern California. This unusually wet period allowed for a lot of biomass to build up, and not burn off, because we would not let it burn.

The natural time between fires in most of these areas is a few decades. Fires would pass through, burn off much of the fuels without destroying the local ecology because in most cases, the previous fire was recent enough to keep this fire from getting too hot. By putting out every fire we could for so long, we allowed the fuel load to build up to the point that the fires now get incredibly hot and spread incredibly fast. Some of the areas currently burning have burned recently, but the mean time since the last fire is much higher than what is natural.

4. We tend to build our settlements and structures without regard to the fact that we are building in a fire maintained ecology, and another fire will come. By failing to take that into account, we make things that much harder for firefighters and those who need to evacuate. It is like building in a floodplain and expecting your house to not get washed away every once in a while.

5. The climate is changing and the southwest is becoming more of a desert. When wet areas dry out, the vegetation eventually burns off.

Ecological Effects:

1. California is a world center of biodiversity, and quite a few of our species are found nowhere else. Many of the native plants and animals are already endangered by habitat loss, invasive species, pollution and climate change. Most of our natural areas are fragmented by human edifices. The native populations could deal with the comparatively mild natural wildfires of the past. Smaller, more fragmented and already declining native species with small ranges may well have trouble keeping a foothold in areas burning as hot and wide as the current fires.

I have a colleague who studies a species of native mouse found primarily in San Diego County. This year he could find almost none of his mice because their habitat is turning to desert. He did find them in a few places. In the last two days some of those places have gone up in smoke.

2. Fuel loads in the areas currently burning will be reduced, which is both good and bad. Good in that future fires will have less fuel. Bad in that all that fuel load was sequestered carbon, which is now in the atmosphere, and because the drier southwest won't have as much vegetation, that carbon is not going to be taken back out by the same land. My guess is, without having seen any numbers, that total carbon output from these fires will actually be quite minuscule on a global scale, and we are better off without all that tinder lying around.

3. If the rains in SoCal do get started in a month or two, we can expect some serious erosion from all the areas that have been stripped of their vegetation.

Lessons, not just for SoCal, but for the country:

1. Don't just let fuel build up until it explodes. Areas like this need to have some plan for how to get rid of fuel. My personal preference is controlled burns at times of year when the fire is easier to keep in hand. We can't keep pretending we can keep fire based ecologies from burning forever.

2. Notice that climate change is a serious problem now. Stop making the problem worse.

3. Take fire risk into consideration when deciding where and when to build. Developers should be legally responsible for planning their developments such that they are not putting residents and firefighters at risk. Planners should disallow building in areas that cannot be defended from fires.

.01% of California burned in past two days

Area of California is= 160,000 mi²

Acres per square mile= 640

Area of California in acres= 102,400,000

Acres burned in California in past two days= 100,665 (according to Bloomberg)

Portion of CA burned in past two days= 100,665/102,400,000= .0001= 0.01%