Here's the feel-good story of the day, at least until somebody put an eye out.
Nine-year-old Dane Best lives in Severance, Colorado, where a ban on snowball fights has been in place for 100 years. Even though the rule wasn't enforced, the kid was pissed about that, explains Newsweek.
"I think it's an outdated law," Best said. "I want to be able to throw a snowball without getting in trouble."
The young boy asked his mom's permission before taking his first steps in the political sphere. "She called the town hall and then she told me I had to make a speech," he explained to CBS Denver.
Best also gathered more than 20 signatures toward a petition on the issue, the outlet stated.
On Monday, the young politician gave his presentation to the Severance Town Board. "The children of Severance want the opportunity to have a snowball fight like the rest of the world," Best said during the speech, according to The Greeley Tribune. "The law was created many years ago. Today's kids need a reason to play outside."
Although he faced difficult questions from the board—including: "Can we amend this ordinance to say that if you're over 60, no one can throw a snowball at you?"—officials were impressed with the boy's performance and agreed to repeal the ban.
Mayor Don MCleod then presented ceremonial snowballs to Best and his little brother Dax. The pair went on to became the first legal snowball-throwers in Severance's history.
Chalk one up for the little guy and the forces of free-range parenting everywhere.
I'm sure I'm not the only who is a little disappointed that the Best brothers didn't immediately take those snowballs and whip them directly into the collective mushes of the Severance Town Board. Which might explain why some of us can't have nice things.
The post Feel-Good Story of the Day Until Someone Puts an Eye Out appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Viral videomaker Casey Neistat's clip of him and his friend Oscar Boyson snowboarding through the streets of Manhattan during last Saturday's blizzard has been viewed nearly 6,000,000 times on Youtube as of Monday afternoon. Set to a remix of Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York," Neistat and Boyson shred the streets of Gotham while holding onto jet ski ropes tethered to the back of a Jeep.
As noted at the start of the video, a city-wide travel ban on cars went into effect at 2:30pm on Saturday and although a behind-the-scenes video indicates that much of the urban extreme winter sporting was done before then, Neistat and his cohort were still on the road for a while after the ban went into effect.
Using GoPro cameras and a drone floating overhead, Neistat and company capture some spectacularly fun footage of weather-weary pedestrians cheering with delight (one even gets to take a brief ride) as these two goofballs risk life and limb to do something deliberately silly and almost certainly in violation of any number of laws. But perhaps the most life-affirming moment of the video comes at the very end, when the riders pass an NYPD vehicle which promptly pulls them over, lights-flashing and sirens-blaring.
Just when you're expecting the record to scratch and the party to come to a bruising halt, one of the officers (whose face is unseen) tells Neistat, "Someone complained about you, so we're just gonna act like we're talking to you, alright?" To which Neistat replies, "You guys are awesome."
This is a far cry from the NYPD officer who gave Neistat a ticket for riding his bike on the street but outside of a designated bike lane (which is not illegal), an incident which inspired the 2011 viral video of Neistat strictly adhering to bike lanes and thus violently crashing into several impediments (including a police cruiser).
The officers who did not arrest (or even so much as hassle) Neistat this past Saturday provide a living example that cops have discretion over which petty violations they choose to enforce, and that they also have the autonomy to choose how and when to escalate a potential confrontation. Sadly, the NYPD officers who detained Eric Garner on a Staten Island sidewalk over his alleged sale of loose cigarettes chose the opposite tack: to vigorously enforce a "low-level offense" and use violent force to neutralize Garner's non-violent non-compliance, which led to Garner's death.
The surprising tolerance of joie de vivre wasn't confined to New York's Finest, the blizzard brought out the fun in at least one of Washington DC's police officers, who played some pretty rough-and-tumble sidewalk football with the citizenry.
In Gainesville, FL a few weeks back, a police cruiser's dashcam captured an official response to a neighbor's noise complaint that some kids were playing basketball (loudly!) in the street. The officer who responded casually approached the kids and proceeded to play ten minutes of pickup hoops with them before going on his way. The Gainseville PD edited the video and posted it to Facebook (where it has been viewed more than 15,000,000 times) with the added message that "We're going to let kids be kids. We're going to focus on the ones that commit crimes."
The post "Snowboarding with the NYPD" Video Proves Cops Have Discretion, Can Be Cool appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After experiencing a fairly mild winter season so far, East Coasters have finally ushered in the cold weather with the arrival of Winter Storm Jonas. Washington D.C. was in the eye of the storm and received two feet of snow along with nasty winds, causing much of the nation's capital to shut down. However, not all D.C. residents are planning to hunker down indoors for the entire weekend; some are prepared to brave the elements to attend a massive snowball fight held in DuPont Circle on Sunday.
Hopefully this year won't see a repeat of the DC snowball fight in 2009, when a police officer—upset at being hit by a snowball—pulled his gun on the snow-pelting crowd. Reason TV's Dan Hayes was on the scene, capturing the tense confrontation between police and citizens who chanted "Don't bring a gun to a snowball fight!"
The post DC Prepares for Epic Snowball Fight appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 2005, I changed my mind about climate change: I concluded that the balance of the scientific evidence showed that man-made global warming could likely pose a significant problem for humanity by the end of this century. My new assessment did not please a number of my friends, some of whom made their disappointment clear.
At the 2007 annual gala dinner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a D.C.-based free-market think tank, the master of ceremonies was former National Review editor John O'Sullivan. To entertain the crowd, O'Sullivan put together a counterfeit tale in which I ostensibly had given a lecture on environmental trends pointing out that most were positive. After my talk, O'Sullivan told the audience, a young woman supposedly approached me to express her displeasure with regard to my change of mind on climate change.
Continuing his fable, O'Sullivan recounted to the hundreds of diners that I had tried to explain why my views had shifted. Eventually realizing that the young woman was having none of it, I then purportedly asked her if it wasn't enough that we two actually agreed on most environmental policy issues. The young woman paused for a moment, said O'Sullivan, and then retorted, "I suppose that Pontius Pilate made some good decisions, too." Being compared, even in jest, to the Roman governor who consented to the crucifixion of Jesus is, to say the least, somewhat disconcerting.
Welcome to the most politicized science of our time.
So what evidence would convince you that man-made climate change is possibly real? Keep in mind that despite what progressive dimwits like Naomi Klein might assert, the scientific evidence does not mandate any particular program.
What about higher temperatures? Obviously, in order for there to be any man-made global warming, temperatures must be going up. Are they? Yes.
Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have increased from 280 parts per million in the late 18th century to around 400 ppm today. And the trend in average global surface temperatures has been increasing since the late 19th century. As I've reported before, all of the global temperature datasets, both the instrumental and satellite, find that the atmosphere has warmed since the 1950s.
By how much? Summed over the past 35 years—that is, since the advent of satellite monitoring—temperatures have increased by at most 0.56 C° (1 F°) and at least by 0.455 C° (0.8 F°). In general, the instrumental records suggest that surface temperatures have warmed on average by about +0.9 C° (1.6 F°) since the 1950s.
Let's look at the near-term trends. The average rate of increase since 1979 varies among the temperature datasets from a high of +0.16 C° to a low of +0.13 C° per decade. The rate of surface temperature increase dramatically slowed after 1998 to rate of around +0.05 C° per decade. Of course, correlation does not imply causation, but how sure can you be that the rise in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases just happens to coincide with an entirely natural increase in average temperatures? Conversely, how sure can you be that a natural decline in average temperatures is not temporarily countering a trend toward to higher temperatures caused by accumulating greenhouse gases? Explanations based on natural variability work both ways. I will address the recent "hiatus" in temperature trends below.
What about converging daytime and nighttime temperatures?
Climatologists predicted that man-made warming would produce a decrease in the differences between low nighttime temperatures and high daytime temperatures. And indeed, a decrease between day and night temperatures has been occurring in the United States, China, Spain, and other regions. This phenomenon is global, although more recently daytime and nighttime temperatures have been increasing at about the same rate. Along with the observed increases in average temperature, heat waves have become more common since the 1950s.
What about earlier spring and later fall seasons?
Many studies find that the onset of spring is occurring earlier than it did decades ago. A 2015 study reports that the advent of spring in the Northern Hemisphere occurs about 4 days earlier than in 1980. A 2006 European study found that spring is arriving about 3 days earlier, and a 2014 study reported that the growing season in the Northern Hemisphere is expanding.
Part of the reason that spring is advancing is that the extent of snow cover in March and April in the Northern Hemisphere has been falling. As a 2011 study in the journal Cryosphere reports, "The rate of decrease in March and April Northern Hemisphere (NH) Snow Cover Extent (SCE) over the 1970–2010 period is ~0.8 million km2 per decade corresponding to a 7% and 11% decrease in NH March and April SCE respectively from pre-1970 values." The decline in snow cover is broadly in line with climate model predictions.
What about disappearing glaciers and Arctic sea ice?
The Arctic-wide melt season has lengthened at a rate of 5?days per decade from 1979 to 2013, according to a 2014 study in Geophysical Research Letters. A 2014 review article looks at what satellite data are telling us about recent climate trends in the Arctic. Temperatures are rising at 0.6°C per decade, about 4 times the global average. Sea ice extent has been falling at 3.8 percent per decade, and spring snow cover is dropping by 2.1 percent per decade. The Greenland ice sheet has been losing mass at a rate of 34 gigatons per year, though that has increased sevenfold since 2002 to an estimated 215 gigatons per year.
Ice is not melting only in the Arctic. Most of the world's 130,000 mountain glaciers are also disappearing.
The growing extent of sea ice in the Antarctic over the past decades is a climate change conundrum. On the face of it, more sea ice would indicate cooling rather than warming. Researchers are still trying to figure out what is going on. One idea is that warmer waters are melting the bases of freshwater Antarctic ice shelves. The fresh water then cools the sea surface thus promoting the freezing of more sea ice. When climate researchers don't understand what is going on they often attribute the empirical trends to "internal variability."
What about stronger rainstorms?
As temperatures increase by 1 degree Celsius, global average water vapor in the atmosphere is estimated to increase by around 7 percent. It is difficult to determine the average global humidity. But a 2005 study parsing satellite data finds that the atmosphere did moisten, as predicted, between 1982 and 2004. A 2014 study confirmed the finding and suggests that the increase is mostly the result of man-made warming.
Increased atmospheric humidity suggests that precipitation should also increase. The data show that this is happening. A 2013 study that analyzed data from nearly 9,000 weather stations from around the globe found increases in annual maximum daily precipitation at nearly two-thirds of the stations since 1900. (Climate change does not appear to be exacerbating hurricanes, tornadoes, or droughts.)
What about warming oceans?
Does the recent 17-year hiatus in rising global temperatures cut strongly against the notion of man-made global warming? The pause certainly was not predicted by the computer climate models. As the researchers at the private consultancy Remote Sensing Systems have noted, "The troposphere has not [their emphasis] warmed as fast as almost all climate models predict." University of Alabama in Huntsville climatologist John Christy compared 102 climate model predictions with actual temperature data and found that "their response to CO2 on average is 2 to 5 times greater than reality." Pretty damning.
Other researchers have reluctantly come to acknowledge that there has been a slowdown in surface temperatures. But while surface temperatures may be on pause, they are convinced that "global heating" is not. Lots of researchers have been reporting that for the past couple of decades, 90 percent of the extra heat from greenhouse warming has been sequestered in the oceans. In February, Nature Climate Change asserted that planetary warming continues "unabated," with most of the excess heat being absorbed by the top 2,000 meters of the oceans. Just how and where the heat gets buried in the oceans remains controversial.
Last year an intriguing study in Science suggested that natural variability in the North Atlantic can keep transporting heat downward into the deep ocean for periods lasting 20 to 35 years. Those researchers propose that "the latter part of the 20th century saw rapid global warming as more heat stayed near the surface. In the 21st century, surface warming slowed as more heat moved into deeper oceans."
How about some falsifiable predictions?
Another February 2015 article in Nature Climate Change makes the bold prediction that the current hiatus will likely last only until the end of this decade. Around 2020, the authors suggest, the oceans will start to release the stored heat and surface temperatures will begin to rise rapidly. An even more alarming (alarmist?) article in the April 2015 Nature Climate Change asserts that the rate global average temperature increases will rise to 0.25°C per decade by 2020, "an average greater than the peak rates of change during the previous one to two millennia."
The future course of man-made warming depends on climate sensitivity, conventionally measured as how high average temperature would eventually increase if atmospheric carbon dioxide were doubled. In recent years, there has have a lot of back and forth between researchers trying to refine their estimates of climate sensitivity. At the low end, some researchers think that temperatures would increase a comparatively trivial 1.5 degrees Celsius; on the high end, some worry it could go as high as high 6 degrees Celsius. The uncertainty over this variable is largely why I think that future warming could become a signficant problem. In a 2014 article in Geophysical Research Letters, a group of researchers calculated that it would take another 20 years of temperature observations for us to be confident that climate sensitivity is on the low end and more than 50 years of data to confirm the high end of the projections. How lucky do you feel?
In his magisterial 1960 essay "Why I Am Not A Conservative," economist Friedrich Hayek observed:
Personally, I find that the most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it—or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism. I will not deny that scientists as much as others are given to fads and fashions and that we have much reason to be cautious in accepting the conclusions that they draw from their latest theories. But the reasons for our reluctance must be rational and must be kept separate from our regret that the new theories upset our cherished beliefs.
What Evidence Would Persuade You That Man-Made Climate Change Is Real?
It might be that it is just so happens that natural climate variability has boosted global temperatures and the trends discussed above are occurring coincidentally at the same time the concentrations of carbon dioxide are 30 percent above their highest levels in the past 800,000 years. Correlation does not imply causation. The data cited (and uncited) do not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that man-made climate change is real. However, in my best judgment the preponderance of the evidence suggests that the greenhouse gases produced by humanity are warming the climate and that it could be a significant issue later in this century. In the foregoing I have aimed to cite data, not model outputs. I have long been a critic of computer climate models.
To restate: The existence of man-made warming does not mandate any particular policies. So back to the headline question: If generally rising temperatures, decreasing diurnal temperature differences, melting glacial and sea ice, smaller snow extent, stronger rainstorms, and warming oceans are not enough to persuade you that man-made climate is occurring, what evidence would be?
The post What Evidence Would Persuade You That Man-Made Climate Change Is Real? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As reported by Talk of the Sound, a New Rochelle (NY) police officer held two teens, kneeling with their hands raised over their heads, at gunpoint after responding to a report of a snowball fight. Though the date of the incident is not clear, Talk of the Sound's sources say it was last Wednesday, January 28.
As seen in a video posted to social media, the officer approaches the teens with his gun drawn shouting "don't fucking move." An off-screen witness, presumably holding the camera recording the incident can be heard saying, "this group of guys was having a snowball fight and now the cop has a gun on them."
Talk of the Sound writes:
The officer is holding his firearm with both hands, pointed directly at one of the youths. He then approaches the young man, briefly frisks him with one hand while holding onto his firearm.
The second video clip shows police telling the youths to get up and move along. If there was a gun on the scene it is not apparent from the video.
…
We know his name of the police officer but are withholding it at this time. We will say that he is a Superior Officer (i.e., Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain) and not an inexperienced officer as some have speculated.
Reason readers are likely familiar with the 2009 Reason TV video showing a Washington, DC police officer waving his gun at a snowball-fighting crowd.
Watch below:
The post Watch: Suburban NY Cop Points Gun at Kneeling Teens After Snowball Fight appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Schools have already endured a wave of weather-related cancellations this winter. Now, to make up for lost instructional time, a few states are considering tagging on makeup days to the end of the semester. Some districts want to cancel spring break altogether.
They may not need to bother. As Emily Richmond notes in The Atlantic, new research from Harvard Public Policy Professor Joshua Goodman finds that makeup days may be unnecessary; based on statewide tests, closing schools barely affects achievement rates.
Schools shouldn't worry too much about weather-related closures, the study suggests, because the negative consequences of staying open often outweigh the benefits of staying open. Even when schools don't close, many concerned parents keep their kids at home. (One mother told The Atlantic, "I don't want to worry about them on the bus sliding around the road.") These kids end up falling behind.
Then of course there are the whimsical benefits that lay beyond the scope of the study. The Atlantic reports:
A father who grew up in Connecticut said the snow day had been a rite of passage in his own childhood and he was enjoying sharing the experience with his own kids–at least on a very limited basis.
The bottom line is that snow days are okay. The negative consequences of keeping schools open often outweigh the benefits of a day of class. Oh and, forget "makeup days."
The post Snow Days Are Okay, Says Harvard Study appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>