Goose

I'm typing this while watching my very own local MP Michael Johnson being interviewed on Lateline. He is a complete goose. I will enjoy not voting for him next election.

You may go back to what you were doing.

Appleyard on AGW

Global warming is real - Times Online

Bryan Appleyard explains how he came around to believing in AGW. That's a relief. He's not exactly conservative, but he is philosophically leery of much of science. If he had come out as a skeptic, I would have been disappointed.

Annabel Crabb on Malcolm's "crash or crash through" tactics

The mad splendour of King Malcolm - ABC News

What's this Annabel Crabb piece doing on the ABC site? Anyway, it's a pretty amusing, even though I still can't bring myself to criticise Turnbull for his tactics. For example:

Watching Laurie Oakes' interview with Mr Turnbull yesterday was to watch a man carefully, deliberately and coolly securing bomb belts around every inch of his person....

All year, he has seemed dull and muffled, as he struggled to placate the warring sides of his party and arrive, through a grim series of manoeuvrings and tactical dodges, to avoid the chasm that lies at the centre of this policy debate for the Liberal Party.

Now, out on his own, increasingly friendless and bristling with self-timed explosive devices, he's never seemed more alive.

Many people have said that his getting stuck into Minchin was a problem because Minchin is held in high regard by many in the party. Why?? Any goodwill people may have borne towards him should be overcome by his forcing a coup because his side lost in the party room.

When is telling the truth acceptable in politics?

I've been thinking. I am strongly of the view that the Liberal Party's current crisis was instituted by Senator Nick Minchin and his skeptic buddies, for no clear reason, telling the truth to Four Corners about their disbelief of the science of AGW. (Yes, I know, they would claim they are the ones interpreting the science correctly, but I would be willing to bet money that their main source of information is Andrew Bolt and his completely one sided, and completely irresponsible, assessment.)

But since Malcolm Turnbull went on TV yesterday and set out in exact detail what he thought of Minchin and his ilk and the disastrous course for the future of the party if they had their way, commentators are suggesting that he went too far in his truthful assessment. For example, Milne writes:

Support for Mr Turnbull was haemorrhaging even before he embarked on a damaging series of media interviews over the weekend, including with the Nine Network's Laurie Oakes, in which he lashed Nick Minchin, Tony Abbott and "cuddly" Joe Hockey.

I have to agree that the use of "cuddly" was not wise.

But every commentator and pollster in the land agrees with Turnbull's assessment of the coming disaster if Hockey takes over and does not get an ETS passed before the next election.

Everyone accepts that politicians lie in the course of leadership fights. Crises are denied, loyalties are pledged, and positions switched in extremely short order.

That's why the sudden outbreak of truth from Turnbull is something I find hard to criticise, even though I suppose it guarantees that even if did win, he'd only be able to pick a cabinet from about half of the party room.

But here is a really important point that has been poorly reported: I only understood yesterday (from watching Lenore Taylor on Insiders) that the party room numbers, when you include Cabinet members (and why shouldn't you?) did vote by a clear majority to pass the ETS (49 to 46, even including the Nationals. Exclude the Nationals and it was an even clearer win within the Liberals) That Minchin and Tuckey came out arguing that Turnbull did not have the numbers is based on a creative interpretation that you only count backbenchers when deciding party policy. How much sense does that make?

In other words, this entire leadership spill is, as Turnbull has been saying, simply about the losing side on a hard-fought policy issue refusing to accept the party room decision. As I have been saying over at Catallaxy, it seems that it's all about how they did not like the way Turnbull announced his win.

Well, if that is the calibre of the Minchin rebels, they actually deserve to be purged from the party, I reckon. If the party can't bring itself to split, I certainly hope that the electorate achieves the same result.

UPDATE: another point I forgot to make, and virtually no media commentator seems to have mentioned it either: Peter Dutton as deputy doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense when it's very unclear that he can hold onto his own seat, does it? If people thought it was a bad look for the party that Howard lost his seat last election, we now have the prospect of both a new leader and his deputy going down. It would be good for a gloat, but as even most Labor supporters would say, not having a reasonably strong opposition is usually bad for the country in the long run.

And another point: with all of this hoo-har about the (in truth, fake, right wing radio jocks led) Liberal grass roots uprising against the Party supporting the ETS, who exactly are those people going to rush to vote for in the next election anyway? The Climate Skeptics Party? (I am dying to see the quality of their candidates, and the loopy ideas they'll drag along behind them. It'll be One Nation all over again.)

UPDATE 2: Lenore Taylor in The Australian looks at the policy options the Liberals have, assuming the CPRS does not get passed after a Senate enquiry.

At some point, if they want any credibility at all, the party would have to come up with some policy that puts a price on carbon. And in whatever form you do it, you can call it a "tax on everything", as the Minchin followers are doing for the CPRS.

Given their rhetorical, the Minchin rebels have undercut the credibility of any alternative the Liberals can come up with, even if in fact it may be a better proposal than the Labor policy.

What will happen to the power stations of Victoria

Power giants crying foul? What a joke!

Kenneth Davidson reckons the panic being promoted over problems in the Victorian power industry is just a beat up. I suspect he is right.

His alternative to an ETS also has a pleasing simplicity about it:

The flawed CPRS should be replaced with a broad-based carbon tax. If it was set initially at $10 a tonne it would be hardly noticed, it would raise $5 billion a year and all the money could be spent on green infrastructure instead of the financial bubble if the CPRS goes ahead.

Let's not forget... ocean acidification

It's been a couple of weeks since I mentioned ocean acidification. You'd think that someone, even George Monbiot, might mention it in the context of "Climategate" (which I still reckon will amount to nothing in the long run) as the other big reason why rapid CO2 increase is Not a Good Idea.

So, what's new from the Ocean Acidification blog?:

a. a couple of types of plankton (two species of coccolithophore) show reduced growth under increased dissolved CO2, even when the increase is more gradual than in some of other experiments;

b. another study on 4 different strains of coccolithophore indicates that they respond differently to increased CO2, presumably on a genetic basis. This is possibly a good thing, if you assume the ones that take increased CO2 in their stride replace those that suffer decreased calcification. But it's going to be very difficult to experimentally tell if that is what will happen in the oceans, I would have thought.

c. a report from an unlikely source (iStockAnalyst!) says that the waters off Japan are showing lower pH:

A group of scientists, led by Takashi Midorikawa of the Meteorological Research Institute in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, has checked the pH readings of surface seawater off the Kii Peninsula at 30 degrees north latitude that have been made since 1986. They have found that the pH has dropped by 0.04 during this period, a considerable change. Such ocean acidification has been observed elsewhere as well, such as off Hawaii.

It seems that this is the 3rd report of long term (20 plus years) measurements which are indeed showing that ocean acidification is happening as predicted:

a. the Hawaiian study from earlier this year;
b. the Icelandic ocean study, which has just been updated, and
c. now Japan.

While there seems to be a considerable divergence in the actual rate of acidification, water temperatures and other factors presumably have a role.

Still, it seems that the skeptic response that ocean acidification can't happen (or isn't happening,) which seemed to be the position of Ian Plimer and Bob Carter, for example, just isn't sustainable.

4. Here's an interesting report on current work underway with coring coral in the Caribbean to see if growth rates can be correlated to decreasing pH. It will very interesting if they replicate the findings of a study on Australian coral.

5. Cuttlefish (and other cephalopod?) eggs are affected by decreased pH, but it seems unclear whether in a good way or a bad way. (They absorb less cadmium, but more silver.) All kind of complicated, isn't it?

Bad for my health

I am officially too depressed about the state of Liberal politics in Australia today to post. Combined with a lack of sleep from a series of early wake ups from the local bird life this last week, I suspect that political idiocy has raised my blood pressure.

I've been commenting at other places, but it's taking up all my time. Must...stop...doing...that.

Tell me, Tony

Malcolm Turnbull is 100% right. It is electoral disaster looming for the Coalition not just for the nest election, but probably for the next few electoral cycles.

I've been arguing all day at Catallaxy about the hopeless, politically inept, rabble of climate skeptics in the Liberals who think that a rush to the phones by the Liberal party members (what, average age probably 55, and avid readers of such sound sources of climate science like Andrew Bolt?) means that they should renege on an approach (good faith negotiations with Labor) they only agreed to a few week ago.

And my question: Tony Abbott, how are you going to deal with an ETS when you are leader? See what happens at Copenhagen? You think you are ever going to get Minchin et al to agree to any action at all on CO2? You are going to lead the Party to the next election as the Party dominated by do nothing skeptics, regardless of whether that election be a double dissolution or later. You think that's a winning strategy?

Absolutely hopeless (if, like me, you are normally inclined towards Coalition policies.) It's the 1980's all over again - Labor with no end in sight.

What's realistic and what's not

Climate experts debate strategies for reducing atmospheric carbon and future warming

There's some discussion by some Cornell guys as to whether CO2 at 350, 450 or 500 ppm is "realistic."

Given that we're already well above 350ppm, that figure isn't coming back anytime soon:

Even if all CO2 emissions were to stop today, the gas already in the atmosphere would stay there for another century or two, maintaining warmth. But activists need to set firm goals.

"It's the best political strategy," Wolfe said of the 350 ppm goal. "If we allow slack, it will never happen."

Seems a silly suggestion, really. But is the planet already committed to a 2 degree rise?:

Part of the problem are delayed effects that have already committed the planet to warming on the order of 2.4 degrees Celsius (4.3 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, regardless of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from today's levels. For example, as the ocean warms, it stores the heat and very slowly releases it to the atmosphere, creating a lag time in temperature equilibrium between the atmosphere and the ocean. Furthermore, due the ocean's great mass and heat capacity, it will take 1,000 years to reverse this century's warming and gradually reduce the heat already building up in the ocean, said Greene. Also, as pollution abatement strategies kick in this century, aerosols that now cool the atmosphere will decline, adding to warmth.

But, Greene added, the goal of 350 ppm can be reached and a calamitous warming halted if governments finance geo-engineering strategies that pull CO2 from the air and store it in the Earth.

For example, Greene and others advocate research to try to scale up simple machines already devised that draw CO2 from the atmosphere and then find ways to pump the gas into underground geological formations.

This (mechanically extracting enough CO2 from the atmosphere) sounds an extremely improbable solution to me.

Quick - someone slap George in the face

Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis won't make it go away | George Monbiot | Environment | guardian.co.uk

I can't believe George Monbiot cannot see the harm he is doing in his columns about "climategate". Someone slap him in the face and tell him to pull himself together.

Again today he has a column in which he complains that it is a major crisis damaging not the truth of climate science, but the appearance of climate science.

Yet by doing that, he provides for fodder for selectively quoting skeptics (like Andrew Bolt) to support their claim that it is a crisis of the truth of the science.

George, yes it may be a bit of a PR problem, but you're not helping by continuing to write in ways that let skeptics feed off you. Stop running around shouting "Panic!...Don't panic!...Panic!...Don't panic"

Some light relief

“2012” review : The New Yorker

Anthony Lane reviewed 2012, and while not as funny as some of his reviews, it's somewhat amusing:

“2012” is so long, and its special effects are at once so outrageous and so thunderously predictable, that by the time I lurched from the theatre I felt that three years had actually passed and that the apocalypse was due any second. Emmerich’s main achievement is to take a bunch of excellent actors, including Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Woody Harrelson, and to prevent all of them—with the exception of Oliver Platt and a pair of giraffes—from giving a decent performance. As for the statement issued by the governor of California, in response to the catastrophe, just block your ears. Obviously, the producers couldn’t hire the genuine article, so instead they looked around and found the world’s worst Schwarzenegger impersonator, thus adding to the general sense of gruesome make-believe.

Fair comment

Observations: Climate change cover-up? You better believe it

This take on the CRU email controversy seems about right. I note this in particular:

You can judge the emails for yourself at this wonderful searchable database. While the revelations about pressuring the peer review process and apparent slowness in responding to an avalanche of requests for information unveil something below impressive scientific and personal behavior, they can also be seen as the frustrated responses of people working on complex data under deadline while being harassed by political opponents.

Note the adjective there. Political, not scientific, opponents. Because the opposition here is not grounded in any robust scientific theory or alternative hypotheses (all of those, in their time, have been shot down and nothing new has been offered in years) but a hysterical reaction to the possibly of what? One-world government? The return of communism? If that's the fear, perhaps someone can explain why the preferred solution to climate change offered by former proponents of inaction is nuclear power. Has there ever been a nuclear reactor built anywhere in the world that didn't rely on government to get it done? Sounds like socialism, doesn't it? Hello France? USSR? USA?....

There is, in fact, a climate conspiracy. It just happens to be one launched by the fossil fuel industry to obscure the truth about climate change and delay any action. And this release of emails right before the Copenhagen conference is just another salvo—and a highly effective one—in that public relations battle, redolent with the scent of the same flaks and hacks who brought you "smoking isn't dangerous."

Someone have a private word with them

Why on earth would Kevin Andrews think he has any chance at all of being a convincing leader of the Liberals? He has never seemed to be the sort of person who ever want more than a Ministerial role.

And Tony Abbott: has always been too blunt, and too Catholic (although I think he has been working on watering that down) to be appealing to the broader Australian electorate.

If the party room replaces Turnbull for either of these, it will show their appalling judgement. Wilson Tuckey, don't you have a pub to retire to?

Using the world's fish more sensibly

Alternative animal feed part of global fisheries crisis fix

"Thirty million tons -- or 36 per cent -- of the world's total fisheries catch each year is currently ground up into fishmeal and oil to feed farmed fish, chickens and pigs," says UBC fisheries researcher Daniel Pauly...

"Globally, pigs and chickens alone consume six times the amount of seafood as US consumers and twice that of Japan," says lead author Jennifer Jacquet, a post-doctoral fellow at UBC's Fisheries Centre. "Ultimately these farm animals have a greater impact on our seafood supplies than the most successful seafood certification program."

Kind of surprising.

More on cat germs and schizophrenia

Scientists Find Unusual Immune System Activity in Brains of Schizophrenics

....researchers in Sweden and Germany found that recent-onset schizophrenics-- those first showing symptoms, usually young adults-- had elevated amounts of interleukin-1beta in their spinal fluid. In normal controls, IL-1beta levels were nearly undetectable.

The researchers looked at around 10 common cytokines, proteins used by the body's defenses to communicate with immune cells, but only IL-1beta was unusually expressed in the mentally ill patients. ...

As early as the 1970s, some scientists have suggested that schizophrenia, which afflicts about 1 percent of the U.S. population, could be triggered by an infection.

A popular candidate has been the protozoan Toxoplasma gondii, transmitted from cat feces or uncooked meats. Engberg says infection from the toxoplasma parasite more than doubles one's risk for schizophrenia. "Toxoplasma gondii appears to be one of several micro-organisms that can trigger [the] brain immune system," he says.

Andrew Bolt: smear merchant

I like the way Andrew Bolt posts about a Watts Up With That item which quotes some programmer's comments found amongst code that skeptics thinks sounds like more "tricks".

Andrew quotes with approval Watts saying that they (the climate scientists) can't "spin" this, yet at the end of this long post, Bolt says:

This is not proof of malpractice or anything untoward. But it does require explanation.

Oh I see then.

And in fact, quite a large number of software people in comments at WUWT are saying that it means precisely nothing. Gavin Schmidt says it is completely uncontroversial. But conspiracy skeptics will seize on anything, whether they understand it or not, and crap on about "conspiracy proved".

It's Watts and Bolt who are engaging in spin, in fact the only word for their posts is smear.

The more I read the way skeptics are crowing that they have proved a global conspiracy as a result of these emails, the more I understand why climate scientists on the AGW side simply can't stand the time wasting, muddy-the-water, fingers-in-the-ear tactics of the great bulk of skeptics.

And Bolt has no common sense when it comes to seeing how his own promotion of skepticism has virtually made it politically impossible for Turnbull to credibly delay the Coalition dealing with the government's ETS legislation. (If Turnbull wants to position the Liberals as not being dominated by do-nothing conspiracy mongers, he has to force a decision now.)

UPDATE: Andrew Bolt and his minions are now all very excited about a George Monbiott column which, I have to admit, is pretty strange.

Monbiott, who showed some smarts in setting rules before he would debate Ian Plimer, seems to have throw all PR knowledge to the wind by writing a column that both involves wringing of hands about how "bad" the CRU emails are, and insisting that this goes absolutely no where near disproving global warming.

Surely he realised that conspiracy-skeptics would dance around the first two paragraphs, claim victory and ignore the bulk of his column?

"Miracles," "anti-miracles," the LHC and underpants

Holger Nielsen of the Neils Bohr Institute, whose idea that the future may prevent the LHC from ever working properly was noted on this blog last year (way ahead of the world's media noticing, by the way) has been busy writing more articles about his surprising theories. Now he uses the terms "miracle", "anti-miracle" and even "miraculocity", so naturally I am interested.

This article from October seemingly argues that letting the decision to start up the LHC (or restrict its power) according to a card drawing/random number process is still a good idea, as if it works, it will prove backwards causation. If the random draw says everything is OK to proceed, then nothing has been lost. (Look, I think that is what he is saying, but this is not so easy to follow.)

As CERN is not about to let its multi billion dollar investment be held up by bad luck in a card draw, I guess we aren't going to see this experiment happen.

However, Nielsen is not giving up. In another article out last week, he talks about the black hole information loss problem, and how one particular solution for this can be fitted in with their "imaginary action model" and provide further reason why the LHC may never operate properly because the universe just might never let it happen. (Yes, it has just got a beam going again, but I think it is many months away from building up to high energy collisions beyond those other accelerators have already achieved.)

Nielsen's article is also, incidentally, almost certainly the only physics paper to ever refer to both high energy physics and champignon growing.

Here's what the abstract says:

This model naturally begins effectively to set up boundaries - whether it be in future or past! - especially strongly whenever we reach to high energy physics regimes, such as near the black hole singularity, or in Higgs producing machines as LHC or SSC. In such cases one can say our model predicts miracles. The point is that you may say that the information loss problem, unless you solve it in other ways, call for such a violation of time causality as in our imaginary action model!

And from the paper's conclusion, tortured English and all:

For phenomenological reasons it is of course needed that under “normal” conditions the amount of backward causation - or as we also refered to cases of backward causation, miracles or anti miracles - should be seldom. This is indeed the case both by thinking of Hartle Hawking no-boundary (mainly showing up in black holes, which are phenomenologically badly known) and in our “imaginary part of action model”, in which it is though needed a somewhat speculative argumentation to argue that the cases of backward causation get so seldom as needed for agreement with dayly life experience. We think, however, that there is a good chanse that the restriction from the history of the universe having to obey the (classical) equations of motion (at least approximately) could impose so strong restrictions on the amount of backward causation or miracles or anti miracles that it would not disagree with present knowledge. In this way we want to claim that our model is viable so far.

He does not address the issue of whether or not the baguette that nearly caused a problem recently was a "miracle". I suppose it was a pretty ineffective one, which perhaps makes it self disqualifying as a miracle anyway. A bit like Jesus curing an ingrown toenail for a day.

Ever since the baguette episode, I have been thinking about what it would take (in terms of unusual objects turning up within the LHC) to count as a miracle, and not just an unusual event. I think Tim Train's missing underpants being found as a blockage in the coolant system would count. In fact, nearly any Australian non-physicist's pair of underpants appearing up in a sensitive spot in the LHC tunnel might count. But we have to be able to identify where they came from.

For this reason, I propose that all Australians who have never been to Europe should immediately start writing their name and the date of purchase in large indelible marker pen on their underpants, in the interests of science. Men, your wives and girlfriends will understand: just refer them to this blog. Women: well, I somehow doubt you will follow my underwear writing directions anyway. Speculative physics is probably more of a male interest, after all.

A pair of Bonds briefs that appear within the LHC bearing a future date would be particularly convincing.

I joke, but I shouldn't. I would quite like backwards causation to be proved. It would give me hope of receiving Lotto numbers from the future one day.

Dubious prescriptions

Medical Marijuana - No Longer Just for Adults - NYTimes.com

The New York Times reports that:

Several Bay Area doctors who recommend medical marijuana for their patients said in recent interviews that their client base had expanded to include teenagers with psychiatric conditions including attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

I like this response:

“How many ways can one say ‘one of the worst ideas of all time?’ ” asked Stephen Hinshaw, the chairman of the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley. He cited studies showing that tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the active ingredient in cannabis, disrupts attention, memory and concentration — functions already compromised in people with the attention-deficit disorder.

The problem is that only California allows medical marijuana not only for cancer and AIDS, but “for any other illness for which marijuana provides relief.”

In the weird world of marijuana promoting doctors, we get comments like this:

Marijuana is “a godsend” for some people with A.D.H.D., said Dr. Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatrist who has written several books on the disorder. However, Dr. Hallowell said he discourages his patients from using it, both because it is — mostly — illegal, and because his observations show that “it can lead to a syndrome in which all the person wants to do all day is get stoned, and they do nothing else.”

What I don't understand is why, if a government is convinced that THC might work for some illnesses, can't they insist that the it be delivered in a more reliably measured way other than by smoking it. Can't it be taken in carefully measured dose via a medicine to be swallowed, for example?

Anti-CPRS from the left side

This ETS-lite deserves to be rejected

Kenneth Davidson has been reading the Friends of the Earth anti ETS report I mentioned here recently.

This part I hadn't heard before:

Offsets are an imaginary commodity created by deducing what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened.

It should be self-evident: a ton of carbon in wood is not going to be ''sequestered'' from the atmosphere as safely, or as long, as a ton of carbon in an unmined underground coal deposit.

But Australia tried to introduce a refinement to make rorting of the scheme even easier. According to Spash, during negotiations in Bonn before the 2009 Copenhagen summit on new Kyoto targets, Australia argued for excluding natural disasters, which basically means if, say, forests planted as offsets burnt down they would be treated as still existing.

So, that was it

I finally caught up with the much acclaimed (by everyone other than Tim Train) film Samson & Delilah on TV tonight.

Tim, I'm pretty much with you on this one. It reminded me of European films I have watched on SBS from the (perhaps less popular now than it used to be) "social-realism-at-the-expense-of-a- story-arc-or-dramatic-interest" school of film making. This involves competently filmed and acted movies about people leading hopeless and depressing lives at both the start and end of the film, regardless of what has happened in a more or less plausible way in the middle, thereby raising the question "what exactly was the point of that?"

But I have some specific, slightly narky, comments too:

1. While I don't have first hand experience to draw on, my impression was that "Samson" did not seem zonked out enough after sniffing petrol. Also, his whole body looked unrealistically healthy for someone who seemed to not have eaten properly for years.

2. "Delilah's" hair looked unusually good in the township after cutting it herself with a knife. Who knew hairdressing was so easy?

3. Andrew Bolt liked it because it showed a remote aboriginal community as a terrible, hopeless place to live full of social problems. (It even showed the old style "someone must be blamed for a death" thinking.) And indeed, I thought while watching the first 45 minutes that it was a wonder that the left wing world of movie critics didn't feel a bit insulted on behalf of aborigines for their being painted in such a hopeless light.

But, when the kids hit town, all of this is righted when the story threads go on to include white people engaging in aboriginal economic exploitation, rape and battery, and callous disregard even by the church. (Although by the end there seemed to some partial acknowledgement that the church helps some aborigines, occasionally.)

Ah, I thought, this is why it was OK for white movie critics to like it after all.

That and the fact that by the end of the film the suggested answer to the social isolation, boredom and poverty of our heroes was to move to a place where they were even more isolated, poor, and (at least for Samson) bored. But giving Samson a bath and putting a clean shirt on him was meant to make us feel they had a future. Presumably, the idea was that the girl would make a living by her painting.

Of course, David Strattan saw this as an wildly optimistic finish. Probably because of the dubious idea that they were now connecting more with their land and everything would naturally then be much better. Not very likely, in my books. It also seems odd that a film which seemingly carries the message (with apologies to Sartre) "Hell is other aborigines" is cast as optimistic.

4. Big, big spoiler warning: I have a confession to make. Things were going so badly for this pair when they were in town that I was expecting some disaster: perhaps spontaneous human combustion by Samson after sniffing so much petrol, or the bridge collapsing on them. So when Delilah suddenly got hit by a car, in a pretty convincing looking fashion too, I might add, I laughed. (A laugh at both my foresight and surprise, I suppose.) Good thing I didn't do that in a cinema.