This last week, The Guardian published, Liquid Mercury Found Under Mexican Pyramid Could Lead to King’s Tomb. This has to do with Teotihuacan — a ruin site in modern Mexico that was a large city starting a few centuries BEC, which may have reached a peak population of a quarter million people around 450 CE. But here’s the thing: we really don’t know that much about the people who lived there. We don’t even know who they were, but it is now assumed they were people who emigrated from the south — at least some from the Mayan empire.

For the last six years, archaeologist Sergio Gómez Chávez has been excavating a tunnel under the ruins at the Pyramid of the Sun. At first, the tunnel was thought to be naturally occurring. But it indeed seems to be man made. The further they go in, the more interesting it becomes. They have now found three different chambers, one going down 20 meters below the temple. Along the way, they have found various artifacts: “jade statues, jaguar remains, a box filled with carved shells and rubber balls.” But most recently, they have found liquid mercury — as opposed to mercury ore. As a result, they believe they are on the verge of finding the first “royal tomb” ever found in Teotihuacan. And that’s important:

There are many other theories. As I said, we don’t know much about these people. But to my mind: of course it was a dynasty! This is just the way humans work. Consider: this is a major — multi-chamber — tunnel dug under the biggest structure in the city. Flair for self-glorification or not, that is the sign of at least one person with a very big ego and the power to feed it over a long period of time. A dynasty is almost required for that, because nothing other than some kind of god-king or God approved king would provide that kind of stability. Otherwise, there would always be someone trying to take over.

But look at our own society. Never has a country be so deluded about the idea of meritocracy as the United States. If many people don’t actually believe it, you would never know it by us constantly talking about it. Yet we could very easily see this country ruled by three members of the same family in the period of just 25 years. And it sure isn’t because they are so brilliant. George H W Bush was a reasonably competent bureaucrat. George W Bush was either incompetent or uninterested in the job. (Or both!) And Jeb Bush was anything but a stellar governor. Regardless, we would be happy if he was as good a president as his father. Humans just naturally fall for this kind of stuff. This is why we continue to allow unconscionable levels of inequality and don’t even pretend to provide “equality of opportunity” to our children.

So I am betting that within a year or two, we will find a “royal tomb” at Teotihuacan. But regardless, it ought to be fascinating what we do find.

Afterword

Want to get really angry? WalMart moved into Teotihuacan and acted more or less how the Islamic State would, Teotihuacan Gets Mickey-Moused.

[1] This date is inaccurate. The Pyramid of the Sun — the biggest structure in the city — was built by 100 CE. So the city was doing quite well for a while before that.

Back in the middle of December, my little town here in California had an amazing storm. In a couple of days, we got roughly twice as much rain as we normally do for the whole month. And then January came: no rain the entire month. Normal rainfall for that month is six inches. In February, we got about half the normal five inches. And in March, when we normally get about three and a half inches, we again got no rain at all. None of this is surprising. It’s been going on for years. The idea of “normal rainfall” is now just a sick joke.

So when Jerry Brown stood in the snowless Sierra Nevada to announce a 25% decrease in water use, I was pleased. For years, I’ve been hammering the point that global warming is primarily dangerous because of what it would do to rainfall. And what it does is increase it. The problem is that it changes the rainfall patterns so that we get a net decrease in rainfall over land where we need it. A fellow graduate student when I was in school did a century long correlation between rainfall and temperature and he found that everywhere in the United States other than the northeast the correlation was negative. That is: as it gets hotter, it gets drier. And that’s especially true in places like California and Texas.

I used to take a certain amount of solace from the fact that eventually those evil people who had been denying climate change would be forced to admit that, yes, in fact, they had been wrong. But I was wrong. If George Will and James Inhofe are denying it now, they will always deny it. Like most of the denial community, they are both old. By the time it gets really bad — when California is a ghost state — they will be dead. And I doubt it will matter to them that they left a far worse world for their kids. They left their kids in the hands of God, and God showed his usual level of care for human misery.

The great innovation of American business over the last forty years has been the three month time horizon. The question for the average CEO is not, “What is best for my business over the long term?” It is rather, “What is best for my next quarter bonus?” Given that we’ve allowed the United States to be taken over by the power elite of the business world, it is no surprise that the government now works the same way. What is the long term health of the people of the nation — much less the world — compared to next quarter’s bonus? We know the answer: not a damned thing.

The good news is that as the United States becomes a desiccated shell where nothing grows, Canada looks to become far more productive. If I were in charge of Canada, I would start a massive military buildup. Because you know, the United States isn’t going to sit idly by as its rich suffer, when it has spent all these years consuming 48% of the world’s military expenditures. The US will go to war with Canada under one pretext or another. But what does it matter to me? I’ll be dead. And why should I care about future generations when George Will, James Inhofe, and the whole of the Republican Party doesn’t care? Anyway: we can all drink “freedom.”

Michael Hiltzik reported on a funny story with deadly consequences, A Vaccine Denier Bet $100,000 the Measles Virus “Doesn’t Exist.” He Lost. It’s deadly because people listen to fools like that and don’t get their kids vaccinated and people die. It’s interesting to consider things like the recent French law that allows the government to take down (without due process) websites that supposedly advocate terrorism. Many people here in the US think such laws are valid for the sake of public safety. But we would never be okay shutting down junk science sites that push vaccine and global warming denial — even though they are far more dangerous.

The particular case that Hiltzik wrote about concerns a German virologist Stefan Lanka who has “a long history of pseudoscientific outbursts.” So he offered €100,000 to “anyone who could prove that the measles virus exists.” I know, I know: you didn’t even know there was a debate about this. It sounds kind of like the claim that the sun revolves around the earth. Indeed, the existence of the measles virus is equally settled science. But there will always be cranks around. Lanka is one of them. And if there were billions of dollars at stake in pushing this idea, Lanka would be a really popular guest on Fox News!

A German doctor by the name of David Bardens decided to take the challenge. He put together a bunch of research and submitted it. Lanka, of course, said, “No! No! No!” According to him, Bardens hadn’t proven that viruses exist. Of course, Bardens couldn’t have proved that, because no amount of evidence would ever convince Lanka under normal circumstance, much less when €100,000 was riding on it. So Bardens sued Lanka, and the court found in Bardens’ favor. Needless to say, this is a fantastic outcome. I am so tired of these disingenuous publicity stunts.

Steven Novella at NeuroLogica Blog explained what’s going on in some depth, Yes, Dr Lanka, Measles is Real. It turns out that Lanka’s current position is an outgrowth of his decades long belief that HIV doesn’t exist. Because viruses are so small, scientists have to infer a great deal. You can’t see them in a normal microscope. But so much in science (And life!) is inferred. It’s curious that there are scientists who think this way. This is the same thinking of Christian Scientists who think God cures cancer (which they can’t see) but can’t cure broken bones that they can.

Over time, Lanka seems to have figured out that his reasoning about HIV applies to all viruses. Thus, his more recent crusades on Ebola and measles. In the latter case, Lanka thinks it is psychosomatic. This is ridiculous, of course. Novella exampled:

You see, while testing the measles vaccines, they have done numerous double-blind studies where one group got a placebo. So if measles was just a psychosomatic disease, both the vaccine and the placebo would have worked as well. And they didn’t. Instead, the actual vaccine works remarkably well. But as Novella noted, Lanka is no dummy. He wrote, “Lanka is clearly, in my opinion, a crank, which is a specific flavor of pseudoscientist who makes sophisticated arguments to support a hilariously wrong conclusion.” That sounds about right. I’ve known many people like this. In fact, I may be, in a much more modest way, such a person.

But this business of making such “challenges” are really corrosive. In general the crank designs a challenge in such a way that it can never be met. And then they can go around for decades saying, “No one has ever met my challenge of proving that measles exist!” And in the US, I’m afraid this case would have gone very differently, as long as Lanka had enough money. As it is, it may still go differently, because he is appealing the decision. And as Novella wrote, “If they win the case on legal technicalities, they will generally claim they won on the merits, and will use the judgement as vindication of their pseudoscience. People who base their career on bending reality will bend reality.” We’ve seen this dynamic again and again in global warming in this country. It makes me despair.

Tuesday night, Ted Cruz was on Late Night With Seth Meyers. It didn’t go well. I’m not a fan of Seth Meyers. He’s always reminded me of another Weekend Update alumni: Dennis Miller. A lot of people have forgotten this, but Miller was once an outspoken liberal. But as with Meyers, you could always tell that he wasn’t serious about it — he clearly hadn’t thought through his political positions. So I wasn’t the least bit surprised when Miller turned conservative. In fact, it’s better now: he has a greater grasp on what conservatives think. I’m not saying that Meyers is going to turn conservative, but his liberalism is razor thin.

Even before Cruz got a chance to talk, Meyers said something that annoyed me. After they discussed Cruz’s “world’s on fire” rhetoric, Meyers said, “At first I got excited, because I thought you were coming around on global warming… Because I think the world’s on fire literally.” But clearly, the world is not on fire. It portrays the issue in a casual and hyperbolic way that makes for easy pickings by conservatives. And in fact, Cruz used just such an attack when he later mentioned that it had been snowing in New Hampshire. I know: that’s stupid. But it is a perfectly acceptable counter to the stupid claim that the world is literally on fire from global warming.

One thing that Cruz said that made me want to bang my head against the wall was a total distortion of linguistic history. He said, “It’s why, you remember how it used to be called global warming, and then magically the theory changed to climate change?” Actually, that was the result of a propaganda campaign. According to The Guardian in 2003, “The phrase ‘global warming’ should be abandoned in favor of ‘climate change,’ [conservative branding expert] Mr [Frank] Luntz says…” One of the things that the Republican Party is really good at is branding, and I hate that Ted Cruz can go on national television and claim words that his party got changed are actually due to a changing understanding of science.

Cruz continued, “The reason is it wasn’t warming. But the computer models still say it is, except the satellites show it’s not.” He claimed earlier that the last 17 years of satellite temperature data indicated “zero warming, none whatsoever.” Meyers’ response to this was nothing at all. He didn’t even know enough to say that Cruz was cherry picking data. The audience was left thinking, “Wow! I guess there really is a debate!”

There is no debate:

That’s from an excellent article by Tim McDonnell at Mother Jones, Scientists: Ted Cruz’s Climate Theories Are a “Load of Claptrap.” It represents an average increase in atmospheric temperatures of 0.22° F per decade for the last three and a half decades. Of course, it’s important to remember that these data are some of the worst that we have — and they still show a distinct rise in temperature. But importantly: we don’t especially care about total global atmospheric temperatures; we care about surface temperatures. One thing that falls out of the simplest of climate models is that while the lower atmosphere (troposphere) warms, the upper atmosphere (stratosphere) cools. So looking at the overall temperature will tend to understate the rise in surface temperature.

What Cruz said was not technically false. You might wonder: why did he pick 17 years and not, say, 20? It’s because 17 years ago, 1998, was one of the warmest years on record (the warmest of the 20th century). Thus, by starting there, the upward trend is small — I assume within the margin of error, because the errors on satellite temperature measurements are large. You can see this very clearly by looking at the yearly average surface temperatures provided in McDonnell’s article:

I don’t mind people like Seth Meyers getting into these debates. But given the power they have to amplify voices, they have a responsibility to know what they are talking about. In this case, Meyers had absolutely nothing to say other than that he believes in global warming. Did he really think Ted Cruz didn’t have talking points about this? If you watch the video, you can see where he pauses slightly after mentioning the snow in New Hampshire. He is used to the audience cheering after he says that. Meyers did liberalism generally, and science specifically, great harm Tuesday night. Maybe it would be best if he just turned into a conservative.

Afterword

This is a great one minute long video that explains the difference between climate and weather in a really clever way. Check it out: