I’ve written before that I think massive investment in R&D is the single most important thing we can do to address climate change. And I’ll write about it again! There are various reasons that I believe this—which I will review at great length in the near future—but since “How are you going to pay for that?” is such a hot button among Democrats right now, it’s worth mentioning one big benefit of an R&D program: It all but pays for itself.

Climate R&D is a mix of basic science and applied research, and estimates of the return on this kind of thing hover in the range of 20-30 percent annually. Think tanks can provide detailed models of how this pencils out over the long term, but a back-of-the-envelope calculation¹ suggests that government spending of, say, $200 billion per year would cost about $5 trillion over 25 years but increase GDP by enough to produce more than $3 trillion in additional tax revenue. The remaining balance is pretty small: perhaps around 2-3 percent of the current federal budget annually. This is easily fundable. Hell, we increased the military budget by nearly that much a couple of years ago without even bothering to pretend that we were funding it.

This is something that Democratic candidates and think tanks should pick up on. A massive research program might cost a fair penny at first, but over time it would mostly pay itself back. The net cost would be surprisingly small—and that’s not even counting the benefit of not incinerating our planet.

¹That is, no accounting for inflation or NPV, and no sophisticated input/output model of the economy. Just some rough numbers.

Yesterday, testifying before Congress, Stanford University professor Pamela Karlan made this quip:

The Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility, so while the president can name his son Barron, he cannot make him a baron.

There is nothing wrong with saying this. Nonetheless, Republicans pretended to be outraged by it, and as near as I can tell there was no pushback. Not a single Republican stepped up to say “Give it a rest, guys.”

This kind of solidarity is a startlingly successful strategy. Reporters mostly bought into the Republican outrage, and even more tellingly, so did many Democrats, who suggested that Karlan really shouldn’t have “brought up the president’s son.” Eventually this forced Karlan to say sorry, which prompted yet another round of faux Republican outrage over her (of course) inadequate apology.

This was a minor affair, quickly forgotten. But it reminds me once again of the hack gap. Conservatives instinctively circled the wagons after the first person let loose on Karlan. Many joined in and none defended Karlan. Liberals, by contrast, were divided. Some were clear from the start that the whole thing was entirely fake, but others apparently felt like they had to demonstrate their reasonableness, which they did by saying that while it was no big deal, “still she really should have left Barron out of it.”

I shall have more to say about this later, but I’m not going to tell you when and it won’t be obvious that I’m doing it. It will just be a little test.

This is the Chicago skyline as seen from Navy Pier. Sadly, I took this picture before my experiments with panoramic shooting. Still, even when it’s cropped a little tight who doesn’t like a nice nighttime skyline?

The Washington Post published a story yesterday about the undocumented workers employed by Donald Trump’s Bedminster golf club. But the real scoop comes halfway through:

Trump loved Tic Tacs. But not an arbitrary amount. He wanted, in his bedroom bureau at all times, two full containers of white Tic Tacs and one container that was half full. The same rule applied to the Bronx Colors-brand face makeup from Switzerland that Trump slathered on — two full containers, one half full — even if it meant the housekeepers had to regularly bring new shirts from the pro shop because of the rust-colored stains on the collars. A special washing machine in the laundry room was reserved for his wife Melania Trump’s clothing.

How about that? The marketing boffins at Bronx Colors were quick to take advantage of this revelation. Their website features a prominent screenshot of the Post story along with a special offer to all customers that’s good through Saturday:

Hmmm. BHC06. Let’s take a look:

Yep, that’s our boy! I wonder what the backstory is here? When did Trump find out about this stuff? Why did he pick a shade called, simply, “Orange”? Our gossip media, which is far more aggressive than our national political media, needs to get on this. We want answers.

Via Tyler Cowen, here is Alon Levy’s estimate of the cost to build subway lines around the world. Levy has estimates for 101 recent projects, but in this chart I’ve included only rich countries with at least three projects:

According to Levy, it’s all about the stations:

Cheaper stations, people! No more excuses.

The latest OECD tax figures are out and the United States is continuing its march toward having the lowest taxes among advanced economies anywhere:

This includes all taxes—income, corporate, property, etc.—at all levels of government. It includes everything. Here’s the breakdown:

Look at those nice, low corporate taxes. It’s a good time to be a big corporation in America.

A few months ago Donald Trump decided to suddenly yank our troops from Syria. We’d already beaten ISIS, so why not? It was time to get out. But the Wall Street Journal reports today that apparently things have changed:

The Trump administration is considering a significant expansion of the U.S. military footprint in the Middle East, including dozens more ships, other military hardware and as many as 14,000 additional troops to counter Iran, U.S. officials said. The deployment could double the number of U.S. military personnel who have been sent to the region since the start of a troop buildup in May. President Trump is expected to make a decision on the new deployments as soon as this month, those officials said.

Ah yes. To counter Iran. Apparently our current military presence in the Gulf is just too thin to provide us with the ability to respond if Iran were to fire a missile or something:

Hell, this military escalation probably isn’t even Trump’s idea. It’s the blob at work. Still, it was his idea to piss off Iran just because Barack Obama had done the opposite, and now he—and we—are paying the price. We never learn, do we?

I don’t know what this particular peak is called—or even if it’s big enough to have a name—but I took this picture through the windshield of our car as Professor Marc and I were driving on I80 shortly after leaving Sacramento airport on our way to Chicago. This was the very last instant that the sun was still shining on it. Within a minute or so the entire ridge was in shadow.

UPDATE: In comments, a couple of folks suggest this looks like Blue Canyon. Another reader emails to say it looks like Signal Peak, just west of Cisco Grove. Those two sites are only a couple of miles apart, so this is probably pretty close to the right neck of the woods.

UPDATE 2: Wait. I have another picture taken two minutes later that shows the sign for the Eagle Lakes Road exit, which is right before Cisco Grove. So Signal Peak is probably the best guess.

The key metric in all models of the earth’s climate is sensitivity. That is, how much will the globe warm for every ton of greenhouse gases that we dump into the atmosphere? If sensitivity is low, we have little to worry about. If sensitivity is high, we’re well on our way to broiling ourselves to death.

Naturally, then, it’s important to get this right. Today, a new paper was released that reviews how accurate climate scientists have been at determining this, and the answer is that they’ve been remarkably good at it. Here’s the original chart from the paper, which covers 15 models that have been published since 1970:

This is a little hard to follow, so I’ve created an unauthorized version that shows how far off each model has been in percentage terms:

As you can see, once you get past the very earliest crude models, the climate community has done pretty well. With only a couple of exceptions, their models have predicted sensitivity within ±20 percent or so. The average of all the modern models is -11 percent, which means (a) the models have been very close to reality, and (b) if anything, the models have been a little low. The earth is actually warming faster than they’ve predicted.

Moral of the story: listen to the climate scientists. Their models are pretty good, and there’s little reason to think they’ve missed anything important. Keep this in mind when your skeptic friends start going on about urban heat islands or solar cycles or whatnot. Because guess what? Climate scientists know about all these things too! Some of them don’t matter, and the ones that do have already been incorporated into current models. Climate change is real.

The House is currently hearing from constitutional scholars about whether Ukrainegate constitutes an impeachable offense. I would like to offer up a hypothetical. Consider the following two demands from the Trump team:

Demand #1: The president won’t release military aid until Zelensky goes on TV and commits to opening a serious investigation of Burisma and the Bidens.

Demand #2: The president won’t release military aid until Zelensky commits to spending at least $1 million for an investigation of Burisma and the Bidens.

Practically speaking, these are identical. Both demand an investigation of the Bidens that would benefit Trump personally. Both demand a way of binding Ukraine to carry out the investigation: the first with a public announcement, the second with a budgetary outlay. And both say essentially the same thing since any serious investigation of the Bidens would certainly cost Ukraine at least $1 million.

The only difference is that demand #2 actually states the dollar amount out loud. In demand #1, it’s merely implicit.

And yet, in much of the public’s mind, this minuscule difference seems to be key. As long as you take care never to be caught actually mentioning money, it’s not corrupt. Discuss.