Jindal Monitoring

Turns out that Mount Redoubt in Alaska has erupted, and the consequent ash plume is falling today. Studies by the National Weather Service led to the cancellation of flights in an out of Anchorage Airport as a precaution, as ash can cause jet engines to malfunction.

Leading one to ask Bobby Jindal if he still opposes "something called volcano monitoring," which may have saved many lives today up in Alaska. Or monitoring of any sort by the National Weather Service, you know, like on hurricanes...

It Might Be A Good Idea To Know When A Volcano Will Erupt

Bobby Jindal's dismissive reference to "volcano monitoring" was plain stupid. Disaster preparedness is obviously something we should fund, and someone who runs a state that was recently devastated by a natural disaster should know that. Proper volcano monitoring can save thousands of lives and millions of dollars. And this is made more urgent by the fact that there is an active volcano about to erupt in Alaska, and residents are being evacuated, thanks to the monitoring systems.

I happen to have a weird stock of knowledge about volcanoes thanks to a show I edited on Yellowstone and the giant caldera underneath the park. This is very serious and dangerous stuff, and the knowledge about when a volcano may erupt would be the difference between life and death for an untold number of people.

It's more of the anti-science talk that is driving Republicans into the furthest recesses of extremist irrelevance.

FAIL.

UPDATE: Krugman:

But both sides, I thought, agreed that the government should provide public goods — goods that are nonrival (they benefit everyone) and nonexcludable (there’s no way to restrict the benefits to people who pay.) The classic examples are things like lighthouses and national defense, but there are many others. For example, knowing when a volcano is likely to erupt can save many lives; but there’s no private incentive to spend money on monitoring, since even people who didn’t contribute to maintaining the monitoring system can still benefit from the warning. So that’s the sort of activity that should be undertaken by government.

So what did Bobby Jindal choose to ridicule in this response to Obama last night? Volcano monitoring, of course.

The intellectual incoherence is stunning. Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.

Er, Uh-Oh

Because of my work on several highly-distinguished digital-tier cable channels, I have certain pieces of knowledge that I probably shouldn't have. Because of the show I edited about the super-volcano under Yellowstone National Park, I know enough to get very freaked out by stories like this:

Yellowstone National Park was jostled by a host of small earthquakes for a third straight day Monday, and scientists watched closely to see whether the more than 250 tremors were a sign of something bigger to come. Swarms of small earthquakes happen frequently in Yellowstone, but it's very unusual for so many earthquakes to happen over several days, said Robert Smith, a professor of geophysics at the University of Utah.

"They're certainly not normal," Smith said. "We haven't had earthquakes in this energy or extent in many years."

What Smith is not saying is that the consequences of a big volcanic eruption, which goes hand in hand with the seismic activity. We haven't seen in our lifetime an eruption of the magnitude that Yellowstone would produce; the closest would be Krakatoa in Indonesia in the 19th century, which lowered global temperatures by a couple degrees (the good news) and destroyed crop cycles worldwide (the bad news). Not only would nearby cities like Cody, Wyoming and Bozeman, Montana be obliterated, but especially with an eruption so close to the Midwest, still the bread basket of the world in many respects, the amount of ash dumped on the region would be enough to make it infertile for years, and maybe uninhabitable as the particulate matter gets into the air. The last time Yellowstone erupted, fossil records in Nebraska show that multiple species not known to have lived in North America were wiped out.

Here's a little write-up of the show; you can find some video of it here. Stories like this get my Spidey Sense tingling.