Washington Monthly has not only picked up Kevin Drum to run the show for their new weblog, Political Animal, but also Phil Carter of Intel Dump. It’s great news for those guys, for sure. I, of course, already read both of their sites.

Don’t even think about reading this without reading this.

Global warming has been a thorny issue for me for quite some time. The problem has been that while I believed that the earth is warming and that humans played a part in it, I never understood the mechanism by which it operates, and my conviction has been limited by the resistance to acknowledging it by many people. Because I didn’t understand it myself, it was hard for me to talk about global warming with a lot of confidence.

That was before I read the article, The Case of the Missing Carbon in the February National Geographic. I really wish the whole article were posted online because it provides the most concise and sensible explanation of how global warming actually works that I’ve read anywhere. In fact, I think that after reading it I could explain global warming to anybody in one paragraph in a way that they could understand, and I’m going to give it a shot, just for practice.

The first thing to understand is that the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere dictates how much heat the atmosphere can store. The more carbon, methane, and other greenhouse gases are in the air, the hotter it is. Various natural processes release carbon into the atmosphere and leech carbon out of the atmosphere. For example, when the leaves that fall from the trees decay, they release the carbon stored in them into the atmosphere. In fact, the vast majority of carbon that’s released into the atmosphere gets there due to basic natural processes that are beyond our control. The main methods by which carbon is removed from the atmosphere are photosynthesis and absorption by the ocean. If more carbon is released into the atmosphere than these natural processes can soak up, then the overall level of greenhouse gases rises and thus the atmosphere is able to store more heat, leading to global warming. Throughout history, natural processes have led to a lot of carbon being stored rather than being released into the atmosphere, specifically in the form of fossil fuels. Rather than decaying, much organic matter has been trapped within the earth, and converted into oil, gas, and coal. Human beings have been taking this stuff out of storage and burning it, and the natural processes that absorb carbon have not been able to keep up with this increase carbon release due to the burning of fossil fuels and so the overall level of atmospheric carbon has risen, thus giving way to global warming.

When combined with the empirical evidence we do have, the anecdotal evidence I’ve read about (mainly coming from northern latitudes), a basic understanding of how the process actually works leads me to believe that there’s not much room for doubt of global warming and our part in the process. As of breakfast this morning, global warming has suddenly become a much bigger political issue for me.

One thing that’s obvious is that no Bush administration is going to do anything about it. They’re exploiting the fact that scientists are basically humble to repeatedly send it back for “further study.” It seems to me that one of the most obvious steps we can take is burning less carbon. Coal is the worst offender in this regard, and I kind of wonder whether nuclear power looks better in light of global warming. Nuclear waste is a huge problem, but it seems to me that global warming is a larger long term problem. Another simple step we can take that Republicans have resisted is raising fuel economy requirements for cars. The only reason not to do so is love of large cars and love of oil companies. The reasons for doing so are myriad. Lowering carbon emissions is a huge reason to do so, but there’s also the advantage of lowering our dependence on oil imports, and the fact that Americans will save money on fuel and die less frequently in car accidents.

One interesting part of the article that’s less easy to summarize is the experiments that scientists have done to figure out which natural processes are doing the most to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and how we can boost the environment’s ability to absorb more carbon. One interesting factoid was that old growth forests are not great consumers of carbon. The best habitats for absorbing carbon are forests that are growing, like those in the eastern United States that are only a few decades old. It seems to me that these findings should cause us to think differently about forest management.

Needless to say, global warming is much on my mind right now. Expect to see more about it in this space.

I find it hard to believe that so many otherwise intelligent people thought it wise to pin our hopes in Iraq on a convicted white collar criminal. I’m certainly not surprised at this point that Ahmad Chalabi has proven to be driven by nothing other than his own self interest.

Kevin Drum (of CalPundit fame) is going to be the official (read “paid”) weblogger for Washington Monthly. I guess we can put him in the “living the dream” category now.

The Daily Kos has a list of some Bush flip flops. Changing your position because you’ve reconsidered your postition, or because you have to follow the party line, or because you have to be responsive to the people who vote for you is a big part of the job of being a politician. It’s more shameful to hypocritically accuse your opponent of flip flopping than to flip flop as far as I’m concerned. The Kos list isn’t very tidy, as far as it goes. I think you could make a fine list of times when Bush advocated one policy and then went with another.

It’s early, but we may have the winning entry in the “dumbest election year controversy” category already. There’s a mini-eruption over the fact that dirty words can be found on the official John Kerry campaign Web site. Some of them are even in direct quotations from the candidate himself. All I can say about this is that if Kerry can successfully pitch himself as the candidate for people who use profanity, we’ll have a new President come November.

NBC reports that before we invaded Iraq, the White House declined to attack the Ansar al-Islam base in the confines of the nortern no-fly zone because destroying that organization would hurt the case for invasion. I have no way of knowing whether this story is true, but the circumstantial evidence is compelling. We knew Ansar al-Islam was working on biological weapons and that they were interested in attacking targets in Western countries. Under the guise of patrolling the no-fly zone we were already bombing targets in preparation of an invasion. Why didn’t we take out these known terrorists at that point? It’s a question that ought to be answered by somebody.

Ed Felten has a summary of the technical and legal issues in the report on the file pilfering by a Republican Senate staffer. If you’re not familiar with this story, a clerk working for Republicans on the Senate Judiciary committee figured out that he could access files that belonged to Democrats stored on a server used by all members of the committee. The Republicans went on to use the files to plot their strategy and selectively leaked them to the press. It’s kind of a shame for the Democrats that they didn’t have anyone on the scene who knew the first thing about computer security.

Congress, in its infinite wisdom, is going to try to tell Middle East studies departments what they should teach. Juan Cole has a post telling us not only that this is a major censorship threat but that the people in Congress pushing this don’t even know much about the departments they’re trying to change. Go figure.