Depressing sights

The terrible flash flood videos from Nepal are naturally reminding people of the warnings that have been around for a couple of decades now that global warming was going to increase glacial retreat, landslides and associated floods in that part of the world.   I asked an AI to summarise the warnings, and this is what it came up with:

Here's a chronological summary of the key warnings from climate scientists and research bodies over roughly the past two decades:

Early 2000s – recognition of the hazard. Research from the early 2000s (e.g., glaciologist Richard Kattelmann's 2003 work) already flagged glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) in the Nepal Himalaya as a hazard requiring management, as glacier retreat left unstable moraine-dammed lakes behind.

2010 – ICIMOD's foundational risk assessment. The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) published a major assessment on the formation of glacial lakes in the Hindu Kush-Himalayas and associated GLOF risk, laying groundwork for regional hazard mapping.

2019 – the "landmark" HKH Assessment. A comprehensive ICIMOD report found the Hindu Kush Himalayas are warming faster than the global average, with severe regional consequences, and concluded that 1.5°C of global warming is "too hot" for the region. Former ICIMOD director David Molden warned that 1.5°C of global warming would translate to roughly 2°C of warming in the mountains, affecting half the region's glaciers and destabilising Asia's rivers for billions of people. This is also the year the IPCC's Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere flagged the HKH, projecting that flood events could more than double by the end of the century depending on warming severity.

2021 – a real-world warning made concrete. The Chamoli disaster in Uttarakhand (February 2021), where a rock-ice avalanche triggered a flash flood down the Rishi Ganga and Dhauliganga valleys, was widely cited by scientists as a demonstration of the risks the 2019 assessments had described.

2023 – IPCC's "final warning." The IPCC's AR6 Synthesis Report stated that floods, landslides and freshwater shortages from glacier retreat and snow loss pose a serious threat to mountain regions worldwide, with the potential for irrevocable damage that will worsen if temperatures exceed 1.5°C. Commentators described this as a "final warning," and it explicitly said changes to the cryosphere will have "severe consequences" in most mountain regions, including the Hindu Kush Himalayas. The same year, ICIMOD's HI-WISE report warned that floods and landslides are projected to increase over coming decades, that roughly 200 glacial lakes across the region are considered dangerous, and that GLOF risk could spike significantly by century's end. Months later, the catastrophic South Lhonak GLOF hit Sikkim (October 2023), killing dozens and destroying a major hydropower dam — later confirmed by a multinational scientific study as climate-linked, triggered by an unstable moraine that had been moving over 15 metres a year.

2025 – warnings about worsening trends. New research noted that GLOF damage has escalated markedly since 2005 as downstream populations and infrastructure have expanded into exposed areas, and called for better early-warning systems.

2026 (this week) – the pattern continues. Nepal's recent floods have again prompted scientists to note that as glaciers retreat, exposed mountain rock becomes destabilised by warming and repeated freeze-thaw cycles, feeding larger glacial lakes and raising flood risk. ICIMOD specialists again stressed the Himalayas are warming considerably faster than most of the rest of the world, increasing the odds of these disasters even where a single event can't be directly attributed to warming, and noted a 2023 ICIMOD report had already warned that glacier melt would be disastrous for the roughly 240 million people in the region and 1.65 billion further downstream.

The throughline: across two decades, the warnings have been remarkably consistent — retreating glaciers create and enlarge unstable glacial lakes; destabilised slopes and permafrost thaw add landslide/avalanche triggers; and expanding downstream population and infrastructure convert a growing physical hazard into growing human catastrophe. What's changed isn't the mechanism scientists described, but the frequency and severity of events matching the predictions, and increasingly direct attribution studies (like the 2023 Sikkim analysis) linking specific disasters to warming trends.

 But, of course, on the sewer pit known as X, anyone commenting about climate change and this week's disaster is howled down in threads by numbskulls who will never admit that the world in front of their eyes is proving them wrong.  Have a look at this denier, for example:

 As for "grifting":  that wanker is a Trump appointee to a well paid position, precisely because of his history of climate change denial:

The executive director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) makes an annual salary of approximately $285,592, reflecting high-level federal executive compensation guidelines. 

About Dolly

I'm not the sort of person who ever gave all that much thought to Dolly Parton.  She was pretty remarkable, though, how she defied your standard cultural ideas of how feminity and feminism is represented.   

In any event, it did become clearer and clearer over the years that she was smart and seemed to actually run closer to liberal ideas of what's important than redneck ones, contrary to the initial impression her deliberate, um, high class trashy? looks could easily give.

I don't think I ever read anyone having a bad thing to say about her, so I assume she was genuinely a good person.     

Not a magical solution

Here's an interesting, (though of course, inconclusive) study that gives some reason to be skeptical of those overstating the value of psilocybin as a future medicine: 

More than 2,300 psilocybin users report real-world outcomes in Oregon and Colorado 

Some extracts:

While many clinical trials have yielded promising results, they might not reliably reflect how different people could respond to psychedelics. This is because participants who take part in clinical trials typically undergo extensive prescreening, and many others who might wish to access regulated psilocybin services are excluded.

Under state law, Oregon and Colorado now allow eligible adults 21 or older to take psilocybin under the supervision of licensed facilitators at regulated centers. Both states require clients to undergo screening, although their eligibility criteria differ. In Oregon, clients may be ineligible if they are experiencing thoughts of harming themselves or others, have taken lithium within the previous 30 days or have ever been diagnosed with active psychosis. Colorado requires a general safety screening and allows facilitators to decline clients for health or safety reasons.

Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine and Althea PBC recently carried out a study examining the experiences of people who received psilocybin at licensed service centers in Oregon and Colorado.They summarized their main findings and observations in a paper posted on the medRxiv preprint server....

 

Over a period of 15 months, Althea compiled a database containing data provided by 2,363 individuals who had received psilocybin at licensed centers. This included their demographics, reasons for seeking psilocybin, prior medical histories, the dose they received, the quality and intensity of their subjective experience (i.e., the trip), any adverse events during and after dosing, and changes in their mental health after they received the drug.

"Fifty percent of participants were 'psychedelic tourists' traveling from out of state to receive psilocybin," said Thompson. "Thirty-six percent of participants were motivated to seek psilocybin because of mental health concerns. The mean dose of psilocybin received was 29 mg, comparable to a standard clinical trial dose of 25 mg. We found that people's depression (assessed with the PHQ-9 questionnaire) and anxiety (assessed with the GAD-7 questionnaire) scores decreased by about 50% at 2 weeks after dosing, also comparable to clinical trial results."

The team's analysis of the collected data also showed that the intensity of people's subjective mystical-type experiences was only weakly correlated with improvements in anxiety or depression. This means that more intense mystical experiences during dosing did not necessarily correspond to better mental health outcomes.

Receiving psilocybin was associated with improved mental health scores in more than half of the participants who completed the relevant follow-up questionnaires. Specifically, 50% to 60% exhibited reductions of at least 50% in their depression or anxiety scores two weeks after dosing.

"Depression and anxiety improvements were the same for those receiving more than 30 mg or less than 30 mg of psilocybin," said Thompson. "Although subjective effects were lower, benefits were comparable in people taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), suggesting weaning is not necessary. Adverse events were mild and transient (nausea, anxiety, headache), as in clinical trials, and there were no reports of novel psychosis, although suicidality results were somewhat ambiguous."

The actual paper notes:

There were 94 mild adverse events during and after dosing, five more serious events not clearly related to treatment, and evidence of possible risk of increased suicidality. Study limitations include open label administration, self-reporting, loss of participants for follow-up, and a short 2-week post-dosing end-point. We conclude that psilocybin services, delivered within these regulated frameworks, is associated with improvements in mental health in real world populations, however, more robust monitoring is needed to ensure safety. 

As to the suicide ideation effect, I find it hard to understand these numbers:

Suicide. Of 1476 respondents at baseline, 18 participants endorsed self-harm concerns, 44 had
thoughts of suicide, and 87 reported a prior suicide attempt. All received psilocybin. Adverse
events for these participants were four reports of nausea on the dosing day, one report of
crying on dosing day, and one report of nausea the day after dosing.

We also analyzed responses to the PHQ-9 regarding suicidal ideation and considered responses of nearly every day, more than half of days, or several days to be indicative of suicidal risk. Of 371 respondents, 95 expressed suicidal risk in the two weeks preceding their baseline assessment. 28 of these 95 participants responded before and after dosing, of which 22 reported a decreased frequency of suicidal ideation after dosing and 6 reported no change. Of 103 participants who reported no suicidal ideation at baseline, 11 did report suicidal risk two weeks after dosing. Total PHQ-9 scores were increased or unchanged in eight of these 11 after dosing.

 I don't know - but the line in bold sounds like in one group of no suicide ideation before dosing, suicide risk did happen in 10% of them in the two weeks following?

As I say, it's hard to understand.

And, of course, the positive effects overall have only been measured for 2 weeks, in a group of people who self selected to try this.  Also, no placebo group involved (although, as this article noted, it's pretty much impossible to do placebo control groups when testing the effects of psychedelics, for obvious reasons!)   

Anyway, I asked Claude AI about the issue of what percent of people being affected by a suicidal ideation side effect would it take to restrict the use of a drug for depression.  It said there is no set formula, and it all comes down to risk/benefit assessments, but it did include this (apparent) specific example:

The classic example here is the FDA's 2004 warning (later a boxed warning) on antidepressants (SSRIs and others) regarding increased suicidal thinking/behavior in children, adolescents, and young adults (up to age 24) during the initial months of treatment. This came from a meta-analysis showing roughly a doubling of risk (from about 2% on placebo to about 4% on drug) in that age group — not a "too high, pull it" number, but a "warn, monitor closely, especially early in treatment" response. The drugs stayed on the market. 

A few things for a Monday

*  The Netflix historical mockumentary comedy series 1670 (made in Poland of all places) only recently came to my attention.  I was not sure how good it might be from the first episode - but from the second episode onwards, it has become funnier and funnier.   It also looks great (although I am feeling sorry for the actors all of the time, as the mist from their breath makes it obvious they were often filming in very cold conditions.)    So, I am very much enjoying it, and it has 3 seasons, so great!

* I don't think I have previously opined here about how Taiwanese movies are routinely good.   There seem rightly proud of the industry, as was evidenced by one of the waiting areas in the airport at Taipei (when I was there in January) devoted to the it, including playing impressive short films.  One actually made me tear up a bit.   As I have probably made clear before, I have always had something like an allergy to the Australian film industry - the creative types in it just dwell on stories and themes that have next to no appeal to me.   Why is it then that Taiwanese films share the relatively small scale of Australian films, but I find them more interesting and appealing?   

* Onto bigger things - I can't quite work out how worried I should be about all of the US bond market news over the last week.  There are plenty of commentators on Youtube saying I should be very worried, and I do have zero confidence that Bessent knows what he is doing.   (His very manner annoys me plenty!)  But how exactly will it play out, no one seems to know.      

A science anecdote for Friday

A new (to me) "feel good" drug (until it kills you)

An article at the BBC talks about the rise of young people preferring illegally obtained prescription drugs to alcohol:

To enjoy a night out with friends, Matt once had to drink until he felt sick.

If he didn't, the 22-year-old from the north of England would spend the night silent, terrified of saying the wrong thing. The warehouse worker says it felt like there was "just no way into" the conversations everyone else seemed to be enjoying.

Then, two years ago, he swapped pints for prescription drugs he discovered through social media.

As he gets ready to go out on a Friday, Matt, whose name has been changed, now takes a medicine he purchases illegally online that usually treats epilepsy and nerve pain; alongside a beta blocker designed to slow a racing heart and relax trembling muscles (physical symptoms of anxiety).

He says it gives him the effects of alcohol without the hangover.

"The amount of alcohol you have to drink to replicate the effects of these is really unhealthy and it doesn't feel good," he says. Matt says the drugs he takes leave him feeling "euphoric," quietens his anxious thoughts and makes socialising easy, he says.....

 Around the world, evidence shows that young people are turning to medications and experimental substances as alternatives to alcohol. Some of them come in pill form - like pregabalin and propranolol, the ones Matt takes. And some are injected - like peptides, a type of protein that's becoming increasingly popular online.

It's part of an effort to quell social anxiety, which seems to affect Generation Z particularly sharply: more than a quarter (28%) of people in their early 20s in England report high levels of anxiety, according to a study published last year by University College London, which found that serious mental illnesses are far more common among members of Generation Z than they were among millennials at the same age.

The trend is alarming scientists - and prompting them to ask why some young adults feel they can only socialise with chemical help.

As much as I enjoy pondering the moral downfall of England over my lifetime, the article does say that the drug (which I wasn't aware of until now) is internationally popular:

 In Jordan, Ukraine and India, researchers have also noted an uptick in pregabalin abuse.

In China, the government tightened controls of the drug earlier this year by banning most online sales, and setting limits on how much of the drug can be manufactured in each province.

As to its dangers:

A study published in the journal Nature Communications estimated that global consumption of the drug more than quadrupled between 2008 and 2018.

Meanwhile, there has also been a sharp increase in deaths involving pregabalin. Office for National Statistics data show pregabalin was mentioned on 2,360 death certificates for drug-related poisonings in England and Wales between 2020 and 2024, compared with 768 between 2015 and 2019.

One of those deaths was Alex Cottam, a 27-year-old software engineer from Eccles described by his mother, Michelle, as "lovely, clever, and popular". He was prescribed pregabalin to treat his anxiety, but his mother says he "became addicted" and started boosting his supply by buying the drug from illicit websites. "I can't help thinking every day that pregabalin killed my son", she told the BBC in 2024.  

 And, of course, the "soft on drugs" school is hanging around saying "it's not so bad as it seems":

Prof David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London who has long campaigned for looser drug laws, argues that the drugs Matt takes may be less harmful than heavy drinking, even if they carry risks of their own.  

"Propranolol and pregabalin are undoubtedly safer than alcohol, but not perfectly safe," he says.

But he says the picture changes when pregabalin is used in large doses for intoxication (as Matt says he is doing). "If they're using it as a sort of intoxicant to get drunk, then they are at risk of dependence," he says. "It's not a free lunch in that sense."  

I will remain stubbornly old fashioned and argue that, at least with alcohol, it is well understood and (rarely) does the consumer have any good reason to be concerned over the purity of the product being consumed.   Buying tablets on the black market has always got this cloud of uncertainty over it.   

As for the rise of youthful anxiety - kind of ironic that as national comfort has increased, so has anxiety.

Bring back national service!  (Ha ha). 

  

Young women and therapy talk

Another interesting piece from today's NYT is this one:

I’m a Psychiatrist. I’m Hearing Something New From Young Women.

The writer has got a book on the topic to promote, but her basic point is this:

Several years ago, I started noticing something new when teenage girls or young women came to my office for their first psychiatric sessions. Patients used to dread being told that there was something, as they saw it, wrong with them. Now these young women were announcing their diagnoses — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, depression — almost before telling me their names.

They had researched their symptoms on Instagram; they’d taken TikTok quizzes about them; they had cross-indexed their conditions with those of their friends. It was everyone — gravel-voiced film majors and earnest high school athletes, class presidents and girls who skipped school, girls who spent weekends in the Hamptons and girls who had to work for their spending money. The patients of this new wave were talking in therapy-speak, and their therapy hadn’t even started. 

Further down:

In some cases, my patients’ self-diagnoses were spot on. In many others, however, the psychiatric label seemed more like a compromise between uncomfortable feelings and the desire for social acceptance. Are these labels a source of strength or a straitjacket? Are they helping young women find help and acceptance or standing in the way? The answer isn’t so simple.

Adolescent girls and young women aren’t the only ones reaching for therapy-speak, of course. According to some measures, 50 percent of Gen Z-ers have labeled themselves with mental health conditions, and illness identities have taken hold of young people, both online and off. But girls are by far the primary drivers of this trend. They are the main group looking up health information online, talking about their feelings and relationships and seeking labels for what’s wrong.

I guess it's still a thing, so to speak, that we worry about men (especially young men?) bottling up their feelings and emotions and sometimes not undergoing any adequate self analysis, and on the other hand we worry about young women wanting to talk too much (and overanalyse) about the same thing.

I get the feeling that any school education about such things (not that I am sure there is?) needs to try to teach some sort of happy medium here:   some self reflection and recognition is good, but too much can be unhelpful in its own way.   

 

Animal empathy

The New York Times has a charming article about research into animals (or at least, primates) that seem to enjoy treating certain other animals as "pets":

Humans Love Having Pets. Seems Like Some Other Primates Do, Too.

We aren’t the only animals that like to take care of other species. A new study finds that the roots of keeping a pet may stretch deep into our primate past. 

Some people in comments point out that other, non mammalian, animals also can strike up unusual bonds - geese that guard ducks is mentioned, for example.  

The article doesn't seem to address the question of empathy, which certainly seems to be behind a lot of human concern for the well being of their pets.  In other words, do primates showing concern for grooming and caring for other furry things show an evolutionary thing about empathy? 

(John:  I'm probably thinking of this because I think it was you who recommended The Age of Empathy, which I did download, but have not got around to reading yet.) 

Good news (the poll)

Hey, I didn't realise that a Reuters online subscription was so modestly priced (AUD $6 a month, cancel anytime), so I'll give it a go.

It's from there that I read this somewhat encouraging news:

WASHINGTON, Aug 17 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump's approval rating fell to the lowest level of his presidency, ‌with an overwhelming majority of Americans concerned the U.S. war with Iran will last a long time, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that concluded on Monday.

 

Just 33% of respondents in the four-day survey said they approved of Trump's performance in the White House, while 64% disapproved. Trump's approval rating, down from 35% in a poll that closed earlier this month and ​lower than at any point in his current term, has now tied the lowest level of his prior term reached in December 2017.

Further down:

Reuters/Ipsos polling this month has shown voters prefer Democrats over Republicans as better stewards of the economy for the first time in about a decade. The latest poll showed 38% of voters think ​Democrats will handle the economy better, compared to 35% who prefer the Republican approach. Democrats are also seen ​as better equipped to ⁠manage the cost of living. 

I mean, in a way, it's still depressing that he manages even a 33% approval.  But Murdoch and the other greedy Right wing media outlets have their profitable propaganda networks to run, don't they.  (Seriously, what would happen if Fox News was genuinely a news network that had even neutral hosts?)

 

Good News (a movie)

I finally got around to watching the recent Korean movie Good News, which is probably the only (mainly) comedic film ever made about an aircraft hijacking, on Netflix last weekend.   

The movie is "based on real events", but I think nearly all of the characters involved are invented or fictionalised.  Still, I am surprised to read now how most of the key events were fairly close to what happened in 1970.  (As a newspaper reading 10 year at that time I suspect I would have seen a headline about the real life hijacking, but I do not recall it.)     

The movie is very watchable, but it has flaws.  The characters were perhaps written with too much eccentricity (for the most part), and the main hero was a little hard to understand.   But, I didn't get bored, it is well crafted, and there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours...      

Things I'm sick of

*  Donald Trump;

* Donald Trump's cowardly, dishonest and greedy enablers both in politics and in media;

* the culture wars;

* the way the culture wars suck attention away from little things (sarcasm) like the US executing hundreds of people on the high seas;   

* the entire world feeling economically trapped by dumb, nonsensical decisions made by Trump and his cowardly, dishonest and greedy enablers;

* the rise of anti-science in climate change and medicine under Trump;

* the intense petty and fantastical narcissism of Trump which is completely undeniable;

* tech billionaires being weirdos who can blow away money on stupid ideas and face no consequences;

* earthquakes.   

Buttgate

Plastics to the rescue? A space radiation vest tested

This is new to me - they are evaluating wearable radiation protection for future astronauts:

With preparations underway for extended-duration crewed deep space missions, the health risks of solar particle events (SPEs) to astronauts are becoming increasingly pertinent. To address this hazard, the AstroRad vest, a personal radiation shielding garment providing targeted organ protection, was tested during Artemis I. Two anthropomorphic female phantoms, equipped with internal and external passive and active dosimeters, were flown aboard the Orion spacecraft: one unshielded and the other wearing AstroRad. Inner Van Allen belt transit active dosimeter measurements were extrapolated to simulate SPE scenarios, predicting effective dose reductions of ∼60% for an August 1972–like SPE and nearly 40% for an October 1989–like SPE, varying slightly with anatomical model. Such reductions could spare astronauts the equivalent of up to 193 and 131 days of deep space radiation exposure, respectively. These findings demonstrate that wearable shielding such as AstroRad could serve as a vital element for safe and sustainable human deep space exploration. 

Further down the article:

While coating an entire spacecraft hull with a meaningful thickness of radiation shielding remains impractical due to mass constraints (7), concentrating an equivalent thickness of shielding around astronauts’ most radiation-sensitive organs and tissues in the form of a vest incurs a significantly lower mass penalty. Therefore, while the use of shielding materials such as high-density polyethylene (HDPE) has been extensively explored as environmental radiation protection in space (8–11), StemRad and Lockheed Martin worked to create a low-mass emergency countermeasure solution in the form of a personal radiation shielding garment, termed the “AstroRad vest,” intended to be worn by astronauts during SPEs in deep space, reducing both the risk of radiation-induced cancer and the already low probability of acute radiation syndrome (ARS). The AstroRad vest further minimizes the mass of radiation shielding through a targeted shielding architecture of a spatially variable thickness that is inversely related to the degree of self-shielding provided by the underlying tissue at each point, a technique first developed for personal wearable gamma radiation shielding on Earth (12).  ......

 In accordance with the 2007 Recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), the vest optimizes protection for the red bone marrow (RBM), colon, lungs, stomach, breasts, and ovaries (Fig. 2A) (38). The shielding core of the MARE AstroRad vest is composed of HDPE, which has the largest percent composition by mass of hydrogen atoms of any nonvolatile and nontoxic material, maximizing the shielding efficacy against space radiation per unit mass as determined by the Bethe radiation stopping formula (39). Because HDPE is solid and inflexible, the shielding core consists of thousands of tessellated interconnected hexagonal rods, which behave in a scale-like manner to maximize flexibility, freedom of movement, and comfort (Fig. 2B). This design resulted in a vest with a mass of ∼26 kg. 

Wilful medical science lies as dangerous political propaganda

Yes, even on Twitter/X, whenever this claim has been posted, there have been scores of responses explaining clearly how and why it is untrue, such that to continue to propagate it is an outright lie.   That the likes of Cruz continue to lie, in a way that is going to continue making Fauci a target of extremist rhetoric and threats, is just appalling.

Catering for his escape

From the Washington Post:

The administration has claimed that Trump departed Turkey on July 8 on the former Air Force One. Trump announced on social media that he would use the “former Air Force One” rather than the plane that flew him there, a newer Boeing 747-8 gifted to the United States by Qatar. The security of the Qatar-provided aircraft has been called into question, and Trump said last month after the trip that it would undergo additional upgrades.

In Ankara, Trump boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras. He was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane — an Air Force C-32A — via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight, according to the U.S. official and corroborating material reviewed by The Post. That made Air Force One a “decoy” with media and some White House staff aboard, the official said.  

The Guardian had put it this way:

Prompted by an Iranian assassination threat, Donald Trump departed on a secret military flight from Turkey to Britain last month when the White House said he was flying aboard ⁠Air Force One, in an extraordinary ruse that involved hiding the president in an airport catering cart, according to reporting from the Washington Post and the New York Times. 

That gave me the pleasurable image of Trump trying to be squeezed into some super sized version of these things:

 

But, sadly, apparently not...