Climate notes from all over

Yes, it's cold in England and much of Europe, and climate change skeptics are poking fun at those who in the last decade predicted the virtual end of winter snow for those countries currently under a lot of it.

Yet, Real Climate has a post about the ways that it may indeed be all related to AGW, and in particular to do with sea ice over Canada way. But it's all very complicated and no one knows for sure.

Now, 2010 is bound to be high on global average temperatures, but it does seem a year most notable for sudden extremes in all aspects of weather - the Russian heatwave, the Pakistan floods, the one in a 1000 year flood of Tennessee. And now England and Europe being unusually cold.

Given the slow but (on the longer scale) steady progress of global temperatures (Tamino has an excellent post showing how all the temperature data sets collected and calculated in different ways are still all following the same path,) it will be interesting to see whether the public over the next year or two becomes convinced of global warming not so much due to high local temperatures, but more because of erratic weather swings.

Meanwhile, Judith Curry's blog continues to be a big puzzle. As someone commented somewhere, it's like she decided to rebuild climate science from the ground up. On the positive side, she doesn't dispute the very, very basics of CO2 as a greenhouse gas, but when she gets into anything else, it's actually very hard to tell where she is going. (In fact, some posts, talking about science generally, give the impression she is seeking to rebuild science itself from the ground up.) She seems to find many things "interesting" and worthy of her looking into further, but at this rate is seems she will come to some conclusion by about 2020.

None of her mainstream climate critics have said much about her lately, a bit to my surprise, but Judith went to the AGU meeting last week in San Francisco, and her post showing her slides ends with these two:

Slide 14

In conclusion: The drive to reduce scientific uncertainty in support of precautionary and optimal decision making strategies regarding CO2 mitigation has arguably resulted in:

• unwarranted high confidence in assessments of climate change attribution, sensitivity and projections
• relative neglect of defining and understanding the plausible and possible worst case scenarios
• relative neglect of decadal and longer scale modes of natural climate variability
• and conflicting “certainties” that result in policy inaction

Slide 15

A way forward is the decision analytic framework of robust decision making under deep uncertainty, which emphasizes scenario discovery and uncertainty analysis and identifying a broad range of robust decision strategies.

Implications of such a strategy for climate research are an increased emphasis on:

• exploring and understanding the full range of uncertainty
• scenario discovery using a broader range of approaches
• natural climate variability, abrupt climate change, and regional climate variability

Clear? No, it wasn't to me either.

But - I am happy to see that James Annan, who was strongly critical of Curry's "Italian flag" post several weeks ago (I don't think she has finished talking about them yet) saw her AGU talk, and has this to say about it:

He also emphasised the importance of only speaking in areas where you had earnt credibility based on your published record, which formed an interesting backdrop to Judith Curry's talk later that day. She devoted her time to accusing the IPCC of ignoring the tails of the pdfs of climate sensitivity that were clearly presented in the very figure that she repeatedly referred to and explicitly emphasised in the summary ("values substantially higher than 4.5C cannot be excluded"), then read out a few cartoons and finally, literally out of nowhere, concluded that therefore they had underestimated the magnitude of decadal variability and that their detection and attribution results were unsound! Really, I'm not making this up, it was actually how it happened. These latter topics were first introduced on her concluding slide and there was no hint of supporting argument. She also talked about the "modal falsification" of Betz 2009, (which I haven't read but just googled now, is there a free version somewhere?) so I asked if and how this "falsification" (and she used the scare quotes herself) was distinct from assigning a low posterior probability in a Bayesian sense. She replied that it could be considered the same, at which point some of the audience were shaking their heads and others were nodding in agreement. From which I conclude that nobody, including Judith, knows what Judith means. Unfortunately, she didn't seem to be anywhere to be found at the end of the session and I didn't see her at any of the other relevant sessions where people actually dealing with these sorts of issues were actually presenting concrete results.

So, I am not alone in not being able to make head nor tail of Curry, and my lack of science qualifications are not the reason why. Romm's description of her as a "confusionist" seems as apt as ever.

Sequelitis

Well, it's good to see my complete puzzlement as to why Disney would chose to make a sequel to Tron is shared by many critics. As Dana Stevens writes:

The idea to make a sequel to the 1982 movie Tron—which was a hit neither with most critics nor with the public and which has amassed, at best, a campy cult following among a niche of gamers and sci-fi fans—is an arrogant overestimation of the original's value. The grandiose hype for Tron: Legacy (Disney Pictures) reminds me of those Manhattan "vintage" stores that try to trick you into paying $120 for a stained raincoat because, hey, it's old! Well, no, I don't want an expensive old raincoat that was unremarkable the first time around, nor do I want an expensive ($170 million) remodel of a 28-year-old matinee flick that was forgotten for a reason.

I agree totally, although I would add that I didn't realise there was a market for old raincoats in Manhattan.

Mind you, Disney has history with making sequels to bad movies. Recently, my wife borrowed for the kids the 1975 movie Escape to Witch Mountain. I had the vague idea that it had been a moderate success for Disney, as they had made a sequel (Return from Witch Mountain), which I had never seen either.

Well, I can tell you, Escape is an extraordinarily bad kid's film, even by the standards of the normal poor regard Disney had developed for its live action product in the 1970's (before the studio underwent its animation led recovery in the 1980's.) It has simply excruciating acting, and special effects that make those in (TV) Lost in Space look sophisticated. Yet, the DVD still has the "extras" on it, with interviews with the director, the child actors, etc. It's not even so bad that its good: it's just bad with no redeeming features.

But: do not get confused with Race to Witch Mountain, the recent Dwayne Johnson Disney vehicle, which really is quite good.

Ahead of the media

Jack Shafer in Slate notes that there has been recent US media attention to the illicit use of nutmeg to get high. He goes into the history of the use of the spice for this reason.

I would just like to point out that, for anyone who hadn't heard of this before, if you were reading my blog in 2006, you would have known this unusual fact already.

Stay ahead of the media, and learn oddball facts. Read this blog.

Saving time

This will only be understood by a limited number of people. The rest of you shouldn’t look.

No holes, yet

Nature reports about the LHC:

Predictions of mini black holes forming at collision energies of a few teraelectronvolts (TeV) were based on theories that consider the gravitational effects of extra dimensions of space. Although the holes were expected to evaporate quickly, some suggested that they might linger long enough to consume the planet. But scientists at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector now say they found no signs of mini black holes at energies of 3.5–4.5 TeV. Physicist Guido Tonelli, the detector's spokesperson, says that by the end of the next run, the LHC should be able to exclude the creation of black holes almost entirely.

That's good; but let's hope that it doesn't unexpectedly create a naked singularity or two: I don't think anyone has any sound idea what that could lead to.

Tolkien in Narnia

So, Voyage of the Dawn Treader has attracted very mixed reviews, and, I thought, was certainly the end of the series after the first weekend box office in the States was only about $24 million: half that of the first two movies in the series. 

Yet, overseas box office has been surprisingly strong, bringing the total take to over $100 million already.  The studio says it’s happy; so who knows, maybe  there will be another.  I can’t remember a single thing about The Silver Chair, though, so I have no idea how readily it might be adapted.

Anyhow, that’s not the main point of the post.  Narnia movies always stir up debate about whether the religious themes are too obvious or heavy handed.   (It’s a handy criteria for judging reviews of the films:  if they complain about them being so Christian, they can safely be ignored.  It’s like complaining to the waiter that there’s tomato in your bolognaise sauce.) 

This time around, I have enjoyed some of the comments in a Guardian story on this aspect of the movie.   Having the readership that it does, there are many who complain about the Christian element and virtually consider it a corruption of children to have such ideas appear in their fiction.  But I liked this response:

Still think its a bit amusing (and strange) how people complain about Christian themes being 'corrupting' when woven into the subtext of one narrative or another - yet Lady Gaga gyrating and wagging her bacon clothed crotch about while singing 'lets have some fun this beat is sick, I wanna take a ride on your disco stick' (And yes seven year old kids do mimic the dance moves and sing the lyrics completely innocent of any ulterior connotations) doesn't conjur nearly the same level of pompous ire. I ain't got a problem with Lady Gaga necessarily (though as you will have guessed I'm not much of a fan of her music), just think the contrast in response is amusing.

And, of course, you can't have a discussion of Narnia without comparisons with Tolkien breaking out. Readers may recall that I belong to the (seemingly) very small club known as People Who Think Tolkien is Vastly Over-rated in Every Respect. The movies bored me;  before they came I had tried to read the first book of LOTR twice; and when that didn’t work tried the Hobbit. Bored and gave up for lack of interest every time. I haven't spent a lot of time trying to analyse why: I just think he's stylistically a dull writer, and I just don't understand what it is, thematically, that people respond to.

But now,  in this Narnia thread, someone made a comment that rang very true to me:

I like many posters on her, I grew up in an atheist family. I discovered the books through friends at school, and thoroughly enjoyed them, more than the Tolkein books as the main characters weren't exclusively male, and the adventures didn't drag on and on ad-nauseum, with battle followed by journey, followed by battle etc. Also, good and evil were things that could happen because of the choices a person made; not like the Tolkein books, where good and evil, are just depersonalised 'forces' which people either succumb to or not, which I think is a far more primitive, 'superntaural' take on morality, which avoids the truth, that people chose to act in a particular way, but can also change and chose not to.

I have to admit that, not having got more than about 100 pages into LOTR, I am not one to really judge, but that explanation of the treatment of good and evil in Tolkien sounds right to me, and may be why I don’t respond to him.

And now let’s end with a couple of Guardian readers who complain about the Anti-Lewis (Philip Pullman’s), books (which I haven’t read, but like to kick anyway):

Narnia might be a bit shit but The Golden Compass is the most preachy nonsense for years. My nieces/nephews all loved Harry Potter and Narnia, but really did think they were getting a lecture from PP

I couldn't agree more. I read his trilogy, which started off well enough, but not too far into book two I felt that at times I might as well just have had Pullman shouting "Religion is bad!" in my face. His message was as subtle as a kick in the balls and really put me off (even as an atheist).

Wednesday’s List

* Regarding Hugh:   So, Hugh Jackman nearly took out an eye in front of Oprah’s audience.   Which leads me to wonder:  why don’t I like Hugh Jackman as a screen presence?   He doesn’t seem to be the jerk in real life that I always half suspected Mel Gibson was.  Is it just that he has appeared in Australian films, to which I am famously allergic?  I don’t think so; Geoffrey Rush and Noah Taylor turning up in a foreign movie doesn’t bother me.   Is it because he has become the international poster boy for iced tea?   Maybe:  the only wussier product a some time action man could have chosen to endorse is Max Factor.   No, I’m not entirely sure, but there is something about him I don’t care for. 

*  Ross looks on the bright side:   Ross Gittins goes against the popular wisdom and tells Australia that selling minerals instead of making things is not that big a problem for our economy.  Must be an outbreak of Christmas optimism.

*  Image I’d rather not see:   for some reason, German doctors thought it would be a neat idea to watch a live human birth via MRI.  The resulting x-ray-ish image makes the world’s creepiest new born baby photo. 

An unusual explanation for the Holocaust

I have a vague recollection of reading before that Hitler might have had syphilis, but I’m not sure if I had heard of the theory that it was catching it this way which may have led to his anti-Jewish obsession: 

An encounter with a Jewish prostitute in Vienna in 1908 may have given Hitler neuro-syphilis and provided the 'deadly logic and blueprint for the Holocaust' as well as giving him a reason to attempt to eliminate the mentally retarded, according to evidence presented at the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

That theory supported by 'ample circumstantial evidence though no final proof', according to a team led by Dr Bassem Habeeb…

There has been speculation that Hitler had the infection since his personal doctor, Theo Morrell expressed his own suspicion in his private diary. But the theory has never been rigorously examined, say the researchers.

'But if Hitler's life is looked at through the lens of a syphilis diagnosis, one clue leads to another until a pattern of infection and progressive infection emerges, a disease that may have defined him from youth as an outsider and that progressively ravaged his body and mind.

Hitler put syphilis high on his political agenda, devoting 13 pages to the disease in Mein Kampf. The job of 'combating syphilis… the Jewish disease… should be the task of the entire German nation,' he wrote. 'The health of the nation will be regained only by eliminating the Jews'.

The theory might hold up better if it were not believed by the very nutty Dr Morell.  In fact, I see from his Wikepedia entry that at least two of his treatments in 1944 may have directly sent Adolf over the edge:

During his interrogation after the war, Morell claimed another doctor had prescribed cocaine to Hitler and at least one other doctor is known to have administered it through eyedrops after he requested it in the hours following an almost successful assassination attempt on July 20, 1944. Cocaine was routinely used for medical purposes in Germany during that time but Morell is said to have increased the dosage tenfold - despite this the concentration was still weak as the eyedrops were only 1% cocaine. Overuse of cocaine eyedrops has been associated with psychotic behavior, hypertension and other symptoms; given the weak dosage, it's more likely they were caused by Methamphetamine of which these are also common symptoms. However historians have generally tended to discount any effects of Morell's treatments on Hitler's decision-making.

Anyhow, I can see a new poster slogan for safe sex: "Avoid World War! Use a condom."

Tuesday’s collection

*  Geosequestration – Just Give Up

A geophysicist talks about how pumping large amounts of CO2 into the ground is often likely to cause sesmic activity, and although it may not be much on the surface, it may be enough to break the resevoir itself. But the most obvious problem is the sheer scale you would need to make a difference:

The other complication, Zoback said, is that for sequestration to make a significant contribution to reducing carbon dioxide emissions, the volume of gas injected into reservoirs annually would have to be almost the same as the amount of fluid now being produced by the oil and gas industry each year. This would likely require thousands of injection sites around the world.

"Think about how many wells and pipelines and how much infrastructure has been developed to exploit oil and gas resources over the last hundred years," he said. "You need something of comparable scale and volume for carbon dioxide sequestration."...

There are two sequestration projects already underway around the world, in Norway and Algeria, and so far they appear to be working as planned. But Zoback said 3400 such projects would be needed worldwide by midcentury to deal with the volume of carbon dioxide that we will be generating. "Finding that many ideal sites around the globe is not impossible, but it is going to be a tremendous challenge," he said.

*   Ron Paul – rants ahead

Slate notes that Ron Paul getting a position on a House financial committee is not universally welcomed by libertarians:

"Republicans stashed him in this job because they don't want him making more important decisions," said Megan McArdle, a prominent libertarian blogger and economics editor of the Atlantic. "He cares passionately about monetary policy, which most Republicans don't care about. But when you look at his speeches, he doesn't understand anything about monetary policy. He might actually understand it less than the average member of Congress. My personal opinion is that he wastes all of his time on the House Financial Services Committee ranting crazily."…

The anti-Paul case consists of one simple argument—he sounds crazy—and one complex argument, which is that he's distracted libertarians and Tea Partiers by focusing their ire on the easily demonized Fed.

 

* Colbert and the big kids

This was a pretty interesting, light hearted interview with Eisenhower’s grandson and Nixon’s daughter, who are married.  They’ve got a book out about Eisenhower coped with retirement:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
David Eisenhower & Julie Nixon Eisenhower
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog March to Keep Fear Alive

Monday madness, and other stories

*   There is something seriously wrong with Liz Hurley.  A psychiatric consultation is strongly recommended, and if she doesn’t go voluntarily, a kidnapping intervention by her friends would not result in any conviction in any court of law.

*  Neil Armstrong writes an email talking about his trip to the moon.  He wants NASA to go back there.  The only thing standing in our way are politicians.

* There was a charming story in Slate recently about a 100 year old guide called “How to Write Fiction”.   Slate says “…much of Cody's advice remains startlingly recognizable: It's Writer's Digest with a handlebar mustache.” 

The article notes that there was a lot of advice around at the time directed to women in particular.  I liked this section:

The London women's magazine Atalanta launched a regular "School of Fiction" column, and its advice from 1893 on pitching remains as useful and unheeded as ever: Keep your pitch short, nail down a tangible story first, and for god's sake read the magazine before you submit to it. Ladies were then invited to try such spry writing exercises as an imagined 500-word dialogue "on the Equality of the Sexes, between Miss Minerva Lexicon, M.A., an apostle of Progress, and Miss Lavinia Straightlace, of the Old-Fashioned School."

* From the Christian Science Monitor, a story of, um, dedication to art (or at least controversy:

Swedish cartoon artist Lars Vilks, who became the target of an alleged international murder plot for his 2007 cartoons of Mohammed as a dog, again angered Muslims Tuesday by showing an Iranian film that depicts the Prophet entering a gay bar.

When Mr. Vilks showed a scene from the film at Uppsala University in Sweden, a protester charged the dais and hit him, breaking his glasses. Police were forced to detain or pepper-spray some unruly members of the crowd as other protesters yelled "Allahu Akbar" – "God is great."

For Mr. Vilks, who has booby-trapped his own house and says he sleeps with an ax beside his bed, the right to unfettered speech – regardless of whether it offends Muslims – is a point of principle.

I am kind of curious as to what Mohammed does in the gay bar in an Iranian film. 

Science, gold and ducks

It’s kind of surprising that there is still a far amount of uncertainty about the formation of planet Earth.  I didn’t realise this, for example:

The planets formed when tiny rocks collided, forming ever larger lumps. Then, after Earth was born a second planet about the size of Mars crashed into it. This cataclysmic shock blasted a huge cloud of material into orbit, where it coalesced to form the moon.

This neatly explains the moon, but poses a problem. The collision re-melted the solidifying Earth, allowing heavy materials like iron to sink into the core. But some elements, called siderophiles, dissolve in molten iron, including gold, platinum and palladium.

"We shouldn't have any siderophiles in the crust or mantle," says William Bottke of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "But actually we see them in surprising abundance."

The obvious solution is that they arrived after Earth cooled. If so then the moon should have siderophiles too, and it doesn't. Rock samples show that it has 1200 times fewer than Earth.

The article notes that the idea is that the earth was hit by a few, really big, gold bearing planetoid things, but they missed the moon on the way in.

This is a pity.  Having an gold bearing region on the Moon might make have made space exploration take a different path.

And, come to think of it, this reminds me of the classic Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge comic “The 24 Carat Moon” which I read as a child.  No doubt this was why I wanted to post about this, before I even remembered the comic.  

An important paper

Real Climate has an important post up about a paper by Dessler out this week on clouds and climate sensitivity.   The actual paper can be read here.

Basically, it analyses satellite data and suggests that increased clouds will not protect the earth from increasing temperatures, as Spencer and Lindzen have argued.  Roy Spencer also had a paper analysing satellite data out recently; until now, response to it had been strangely quiet.

Dessler does acknowledge that it will be a long time before precise long term cloud feedback is pinned down with certainty.   But the post in Real Climate is  well worth reading because it seems to put Spencer’s opinion in its eccentric context:

After reading this, I initiated a cordial and useful exchange of e-mails with Dr. Spencer (you can read the full e-mail exchange here). We ultimately agreed that the fundamental disagreement between us is over what causes ENSO. Short paraphrase:

Spencer: ENSO is caused by clouds. You cannot infer the response of clouds to surface temperature in such a situation.

Dessler: ENSO is not caused by clouds, but is driven by internal dynamics of the ocean-atmosphere system. Clouds may amplify the warming, and that’s the cloud feedback I’m trying to measure.

My position is the mainstream one, backed up by decades of research. This mainstream theory is quite successful at simulating almost all of the aspects of ENSO.

Dr. Spencer, on the other hand, is as far out of the mainstream when it comes to ENSO as he is when it comes to climate change. He is advancing here a completely new and untested theory of ENSO — based on just one figure in one of his papers (and, as I told him in one of our e-mails, there are other interpretations of those data that do not agree with his interpretation).

Thus, the burden of proof is Dr. Spencer to show that his theory of causality during ENSO is correct. He is, at present, far from meeting that burden. And until Dr. Spencer satisfies this burden, I don’t think anyone can take his criticisms seriously.

It’s also worth noting that the picture I’m painting of our disagreement (and backed up by the e-mail exchange linked above) is quite different from the picture provided by Dr. Spencer on his blog. His blog is full of conspiracies and purposeful suppression of the truth. In particular, he accuses me of ignoring his work. But as you can see, I have not ignored it — I have dismissed it because I think it has no merit. That’s quite different.

Something comes from nothing (take that, Rogers and Hammerstein)

An article at PhysOrg describes a way of making a heap of particles out of nothing. Takes a fair bit of energy though, so I don’t think we’ll be building a second earth this way anytime soon.

In other “where did this all come from?” news, I meant to note last week that Roger Penrose and a collaborator had published a paper showing nice circles in the universe’s cosmic background radiation, with the following implication :

The discovery doesn't suggest that there wasn't a Big Bang - rather, it supports the idea that there could have been many of them. The scientists explain that the CMB circles support the possibility that we live in a cyclic universe, in which the end of one “aeon” or universe triggers another Big Bang that starts another aeon, and the process repeats indefinitely.

However, according to physicist (and irritating anti-religion polemicist in the culture wars) Sean Carroll, there are two papers out already saying that the circles mean no such thing. Most interestingly, he writes how he’s got his hands on Penrose’s (recent, I think) book, and just can’t see how Penrose’s idea of a cyclic universe is supposed to happen. (Unlike the old view that the universe would contract to a Big Crunch, and maybe bounce back from that, it would seem everyone is now accepting that the universe dies in an ever expanding wimper.):

The basic point is this. The very early universe is smooth. The universe right now is lumpy, with stars and galaxies and black holes all over the place. But the future universe will be smooth again — black holes will evaporate and the cosmological constant will disperse all the matter, leaving us nothing but empty space. (Just wait about 10¹⁰⁰ years.) So, Penrose says, we can map the late universe onto a future phase that looks just like our early universe, simply by a conformal transformation (a change of scale). Do this an infinite number of times, and you have a cyclic cosmology — the universe goes through a series of “aeons” that start with a smooth Big Bang, get lumpy as structure forms, smooth out again, and then gets matched onto another smooth Big-Bang-like phase, etc.

If you’re sketchy on that last bit, join the club. Sure, mathematically we can map the smooth late universe onto the smooth early universe. But what physical process would actually cause that to happen? Despite having the book in my hands, I’m still unclear on this. (I absolutely confess that the answer might be in there, but I simply haven’t read it carefully enough.) While the early and late universes are both smooth, they are very different in other obvious ways, such as the energy density. What causes the low-density late universe to come alive into something like the high-density early universe? Something like that happens in the Steinhardt-Turok cyclic universe, but in order to make it happen you need to specify some particular matter fields with very specific dynamics. This isn’t a trivial task; there are things you can try, but they generally are plagued by instabilities and singularities. I don’t see where Penrose has done that, so I’m not even sure what there is to be criticized.

Penrose is getting old, but he remains a well respected figure. But it would be good to know how he thinks his cycles may happen.

Very true

Hmmm.  Seeing that a couple of weeks ago, when we had people over for lunch, I brought down the iPad and demonstrated its abilities, Danny Katz’s column today rings very true.  

And later, when using it with the kids, I found somehow the site Cute Overload, a handy way to get all of the cute, usually baby, animal photos and videos you could ever need.  This creature is not a Japanese toy, it is real, as you will see from the videos on its Facebook page.   And I did not know that dogs would do this in snow (the best parts are in the second half): 

Brooker on privacy

This anecdote from Charlie Brooker in The Guardian, in a column about how privacy has disappeared with modern technology, was pretty amusing:

Not so long ago, a tourist couple stopped me in the street and asked me to take a snap of them grinning in front of something vaguely picturesque (this being London, probably an especially colourful pavement puke-puddle or a tramp with a funny neck tumour). But unfamiliar as I was with the workings of their phone, instead of taking their picture, I inadvertently brought up the gallery of previous photographs, and was treated to a view of one of them in the shower, followed by a series of close-up views of various biological and overwhelmingly intimate occurrences involving the pair of them.

As I fumbled with menus, trying not to betray my embarrassment, I glimpsed at the man and something in his eyes told me that he knew, somehow, what had happened, but couldn't snatch the phone off me for fear of embarrassing his girlfriend, who remained oblivious. Eventually I took the photo. His smile was fixed and unconvincing. I handed the device back. She thanked me. He stared at the ground. We went our separate ways in silence. Somehow, it was as if we'd all taken part in a terrible threesome....

... By the year 2022, there'll be a naked photo of everyone on the planet lurking somewhere in the interverse. You might as well take a really good one this afternoon, while you're young and pliable, and upload it yourself before some future peeping-tom equivalent of WikiLeaks does it for you.

It got 5 stars from Benedict

From a column in the Catholic Herald, noting that in the long interview most noted for its condom comments, Pope Benedict also mentioned that he felt priests should live in communities.  The column then notes:

There is no need to cite the obvious dangers arising from isolation; this and its consequent loneliness are quite bad enough in themselves. Even Pope Benedict – who might be described as a kind of ‘prisoner in the Vatican’ – fondly describes his own little “community” within its walls: he, his two secretaries and the four nuns who look after them, share meals, watch DVDs together and join in the celebration of Mass and each other’s birthdays. I am sure this small community helps to make the burdens of his office more endurable and less lonely.

Funny, but I never imagined the Pope's domestic life as being a bit like a (celibate) university student share house. I hope they share a beer while watching the latest overnight hire DVD from Vaticanbuster.

Because it will annoy Philip Pullman

There's a so-so review of Voyage of the Dawn Treader that has this comparison between three current fantasy series, which amused me quite a bit:

To describe the overall series comparatively, Narnia is the dorky Bible-basher at the back of the class whilst Harry Potter is the popular, apolitical kid who gets all the attention. His Dark Materials is, of course, the atheist drop-out brooding over a gun collection.

More miscellany

Spies:    the US secret orbiting shuttle-lite returns to earth.   I expect a villain holding a cat was inside.

Fooling the Nazis:  the BBC has an article about that famous deception involving floating a dead tramp in Spanish waters with fake invasion plans.   I see he had been kept on ice for three months before embarking on his mission.

Holiday destination I could happily avoid:  Another BBC story on a salt lake in Djibouti, which has summer temperatures of 55 degrees (and 34 degrees in winter.)    Yet some people like it that way:

Like Ali, Mohamed says he is pinning his hopes for the future of Lake Assal, on tourists coming to look at it.

The first plush hotel has sprung up in Djibouti. It has two swimming pools and hot and cold running water.

But the water still smells of desalination chemicals and tastes of salt.

Its guests are mostly foreign military on rest and recuperation, visiting diplomats, and NGO staff.

I ask Ali why he and the other families do not leave and look for work in Djibouti town.

He says: "We were born here. We love Lake Assal. We like the heat, we just want more water."

Bacteria in the news

The Science Show has an good story on the strangeness of the arsenic utilising bacteria that NASA announced last week.  Interestingly, the woman who found them had predicted they should exist.  Very clever.  Physicist author Paul Davies was involved too.   He summarised the discovery as follows:

This is the first time that any living organism has been found that can operate outside of the six basic elements on which all hitherto known life depends, which is carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur and lastly phosphorus. It's replacing phosphorus with arsenic. And it's doing this not just in a casual way, not just by stripping the energy out. We have known organisms that will do this. The way I best describe it is that they smoke the arsenic without inhaling it. These are organisms that take the arsenic into their innards, into their vital biological machinery, incorporating it into their biomass. So what we're dealing with here is a radically new type of organism. It's not just an outlier on the known spectrum of life.

And in other new bug news, it turns out that it is bacteria that are eating away the poor old Titanic:

Microorganisms collected from a "rusticle" – a structure that looks like an icicle but consists of rust – are slowly destroying the iron hull of the liner on the seabed 3.8km (2.36 miles) below the Atlantic waves where it plummeted, killing 1,517 people, in April 1912.

The newly identified species, while potentially dangerous to vital underwater installations such as offshore oil and gas pipelines, could also offer a new way to recycle iron from old ships and marine structures, according to the researchers from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and Seville University in Spain. The discovery of the bacterium, now named Halomonas titanicae, will be reported in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiologyon Wednesday. When the researchers tested its rusting ability in the lab, they found that it was able to adhere to steel surfaces, creating knob-like mounds of corrosion products.

I wonder if some new bug that would be helpful for terraforming Mars will be found soon. 

Catch up time

Three other things of interest to your humble blogger over the last week:

* Religion: Ross Douthat’s essay on contraception and the Catholic Church (inspired, of course, by a certain Papal comment on condoms) has been around a couple of weeks now, but it is the best commentary on it I have read. He is a very good writer, and I should remember to read him more regularly.

* Science: a too detailed by far article from arXiv on working out whether the entire universe, including space-time “is emergent from the quantum-information processing”. I see that Wikipedia has a fairly long article on the “ it from bit” idea, but I haven’t read it yet.

* Sex: Prostitution is, apparently, incredibly popular in Spain:

Prostitution is so popular (and socially accepted) in Spain that a United Nations study reports that 39 per cent of all Spanish men have used a prostitute's services at least once. A Spanish Health Ministry survey in 2009 put the percentage of one-time prostitute users at 32 per cent: lower than the UN figure, perhaps, but far higher than the 14 per cent in liberal-minded Holland, or in Britain, where the figure is reported to oscillate between 5 and 10 per cent. And that was just those men willing to admit it.

The article suggests that this has something to do with Franco, which I think is a bit of a stretch. Given its embrace of gay marriage, as well as commercial straight sex, I’m sure this country must be a big disappointment to the Pope.

Dawn Treader noted

The family had a pleasant day out seeing Voyage of the Dawn Treader yesterday.

To my surprise, my son said afterwards that it was the best of the trilogy, but he’s got a bit of a thing going about ships at the moment. I found it a very mixed bag. My main problem is that, whereas I felt the first two movies were very well directed by former animation director Adam Adamson, there is nothing noteworthy at all about the direction of Michael Apted in VDT. Maybe this should not have mattered, given that it is less of an action/battle story than the first two, but I think it does account for some of the attempts at humour really just falling flat with the audience, and the action scenes that are there are just not as well done as they have were in previous movies. (Honestly, the one-on-one, near climatic, fight between Peter and Miraz in Prince Caspian made a worthy comparison with anything Ridley Scott has done.)

My other major concern for the film is that, based on some internet comments, I saw it in 2D, as the 3D version was only decided to be made in the post production conversion process that many critics claimed was unbearable in Clash of the Titans. To do 3D well, you have to plan for it from the start, and be sure that scenes are not over-edited so as to allow time for the brain to “see” the 3D clearly.

Even though I was watching it in 2D, I felt sure I could see where the problems of the 3 D version would exist, and I think many more critics (once reviews from North America start appearing) are going to be dissing the 3D version. I would not be surprised if that hurts its box office.

On the good side: although it’s been decades since I read the book and I recall little about it, the changes made to the story appeared reasonable to me, and as with the previous movies, are within the spirit of the source material. It was always going to be a challenge to make an episodic storyline into a smooth flowing movie, but they succeeded in that pretty well. The movie does not drag at all. That’s not to say the script is perfect; I’m sure I would have suggested some changes if I were in charge.

And still, I remain a sucker for the emotional power of Aslan whenever he makes and appearance in the films. It’s not that the books were important to me as a child; I only read them as a young adult after I read most of Lewis’ serious books. But the realisation of Aslan in the films, being as it is entirely consistent with the robust view of Christianity that Lewis held, is their best achievement.

Interestingly, at the end of the film yesterday, the audience was surprised when, just as the credits started, an earnest young man down the front stood up and announced loudly that he was there to tell us all that “Aslan is Christ, and He wants each of you to know him…” etc. The volume of the title song then tended to drown him out, but it was the first piece of cinema preaching I had ever encountered. I would have preferred a more subtle form of evangelising (perhaps quietly hand out invitations to church), but I couldn’t condemn his effort anyway.

Drinking ages considered

Oh.  I had missed the fact that:

A wave of respected medical opinion has signalled its support for raising the legal drinking age since the proposal [to raise drinking age to 21] was brought up in the NSW Parliament more than a week ago.

The article notes the effect of raising the age in the States:

Professor Swartzwelder cites a decade's worth of research from the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study, which followed the drinking patterns of 18- to 20-year-old students. The research found that the raised legal age of 21 had created extremes in behaviour.

The law not only increased the proportion of students abstaining from alcohol but also the proportion of students engaging in illegal and dangerous binge-drinking episodes.

I find that a little odd:  why drink quicker and heavier just because you shouldn't be drinking?

Anyhow, it’s an interesting question, the effectiveness of drinking age prohibition in different cultures.  I’ve mentioned before how Japan enthusiastically runs on alcohol, to the extent that advertisements for imitation beer for the kiddies can  appear on television.  While it has a drinking age of 20,  it still seems to be the case that, even though underage drinking has been increasing in the last decade or so, it is still not in the same league of problem that it is in the US.  Certainly, it is not such a significant problem that beer can’t (famously) still be found in vending machines on the street.  (The number of machines has been wound back, though.)   

I wonder if part of this might be because they do make more of a fuss of "coming of age" generally.  It's a holiday every January:

Coming of age ceremonies (成人式, Seijin-shiki) are generally held in the morning at local city offices. All young adults who turned or will turn 20 between April 1 of the previous year and March 31 of the current one and who maintain residency in the area are invited to attend. Government officials give speeches, and small presents are handed out to the newly-recognized adults.

I guess it's hard to import one cultural celebration into another (although it works if it's something like Halloween,) but this sort of public endorsement of the importance of the transition to adulthood is something pretty much lost in the West  (if it ever really was there, I suppose.  I don’t think celebrating 21st birthdays was ever really as significant as the Japanese system.)  

I’ll mark this down as something to institute upon my much anticipated ascendancy to benevolent dictator of Australia, together with an increase in drinking age to 20.  That’s one way to put the dampener on Schoolies Week.

Christmas Dinner at the Assange house

I don’t really understand how people can think there is a justification for Wikileaks releasing thousands of diplomatic exchanges, and letting the fallout, um, fall where it will.  I mean, I know that there is an initial pleasure of hearing secrets, and having nation’s real assessments of their friends and neighbours made perfectly clear, but surely it doesn’t take much reflection to realise that international diplomacy is very similar to ordinary personal relationships writ large.   Just as it doesn’t pay to always be upfront about your feelings and assessments when you’re, say, having Christmas lunch with a relative whose company you don’t particularly relish, there are reasons why nations says things between themselves that are best kept secret.

I was happy to see that this was brought out in a recent Q&A in the Guardian when Julian Assange was asked:

I am a former British diplomat. In the course of my former duties I helped to coordinate multilateral action against a brutal regime in the Balkans, impose sanctions on a renegade state threatening ethnic cleansing, and negotiate a debt relief programme for an impoverished nation. None of this would have been possible without the security and secrecy of diplomatic correspondence, and the protection of that correspondence from publication under the laws of the UK and many other liberal and democratic states. An embassy which cannot securely offer advice or pass messages back to London is an embassy which cannot operate. Diplomacy cannot operate without discretion and the protection of sources.

In publishing this massive volume of correspondence, Wikileaks is not highlighting specific cases of wrongdoing but undermining the entire process of diplomacy. If you can publish US cables then you can publish UK telegrams and UN emails.
My question to you is: why should we not hold you personally responsible when next an international crisis goes unresolved because diplomats cannot function.

To which the boy of many hair styles  non-answers:

Julian Assange:
If you trim the vast editorial letter to the singular question actually asked, I would be happy to give it my attention.

Maybe Julian is all high-minded and a devotee of Kant at his most idealistic, who argued there was never any room for lies, ever.  If so, I hope Assange is consistent, and has Christmas days like this:

Mother:  Julian, so nice that you could make it.  Look, your brother George and his new partner Andrea are here.

Julian:  George!   Yet another woman who’s moved in with you?  Let’s see if it can last more than a year this time; they usually suss you out before then, don’t they?   I hope you’ve had the chlamydia you caught from the last one treated.  (Yes, guess which department the last leak came from.)  And don’t worry, the string of bastard children you’ve left behind you are on the public record already; it’s not like they’re a secret from anyone.

Curse you, advertising (a brief observation)

It was quite a few years ago now, I think, that there was an advertisement on TV in Australia for some new, small-ish car (perhaps a Nissan?) aimed at the Gen X set which actually showed as a feature a hook on the side door from which you could hang the plastic bad holding your takeaway food while you speed home to your inner city apartment. 

Ha, I laughed.  What a ridiculous idea that someone would buy a car for a gimmicky hook to help carry take away food.

But now, whenever I am bringing Chinese or Thai food home, and trying to turn corners gently so that the stack of plastic containers in the plastic bag doesn’t topple over, open and start spilling green curry (or some such) on the floor, I think to myself “gosh, it would useful to have one of those fast food hooks in this car.”

I feel certain this is going to haunt me for the rest of my life.

Yet more on small nuclear

I mentioned small nuclear power generators once already today, but I didn't realise that a good, fairly recent article had just appeared at Discover too.

There are several companies vying to get the lead in these new-ish breed of reactors. Toshiba's is small but has a long, long life:

Toshiba’s 10-megawatt reactor design promises to be a marvel of low maintenance. It is intended to be sealed and run for up to 30 years without refueling, relying on uranium enriched to nearly 20 percent uranium-235. (Typical reactors use a mix that is only about 5 percent energy-rich uranium-235; the rest is more common uranium-238.) Hyperion’s 25-megawatt prototype, which is based on technology developed at nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory and is similar to reactors long used on Russian submarines, gets by with more conventional levels of uranium enrichment but could still run 8 to 10 years without refueling.

There's another company working on a high pressure water cooled one, but the Toshiba and Hyperion designs use molten sodium and lead bismuth (respectively.) The article says:

Without the risk of water boiling, the reactors can run at higher temperatures, producing enough heat to extract hydrogen from water for use in fuel cells. And if one of these reactors melted open, there would be no venting, just a well-contained hot mess underground.

Well, I'm not sure residents nearby will feel so comfortable about such a leak.

This is the thing that does give me reservations: the articles about these usually say that mini nukes are intended to be buried. But surely that is an issue for an country or region that is earthquake prone. I'm not entirely sure why burying is seen as the attractive option (I think it is meant to provide terrorist resistance, but I am not sure if there are other operational reasons for it.) I suspect most people would prefer to keep the things above ground, even if it means paying for a well armed security force.

All very interesting anyway.

A whole bunch of links

I’m not sure how blogging will go this week. I’ve got a major change to software and the office network going on, as well as a Great Big Tax Catch Up to worry about.

But I’m still reading the net and saving links for later. Here’s a bunch of them for your reading pleasure:

* well, let’s start with one from last month that I forgot to talk about: pancreatic cancer is a nasty thing, and it appears it lurks around for decades before it finally reveals itself, and then it’s usually too late:

Genetic analysis of tumours by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Johns Hopkins University suggested the first mutations may happen 20 years before they become lethal….

The Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund welcomed the findings, but said that research was underfunded in the UK.

Chief executive Maggie Blanks said: "Survival rates have not improved in the past 40 years and whilst the disease is the UK's fifth biggest cause of cancer death, it receives less than 2% of overall research funding.

It does seem odd that such a big cancer gets so little funding. Some cancers lead a charmed life as far as funding is concerned. Others are the crazy axe wielding psychopath bridesmaid that never catches the bouquet.

* Speaking of cancer, there was a good article in The Independent about how radiation is our friend. Sort of. In low doses. I didn’t know many of things noted in the report:

One striking piece of evidence for this comes from radiologists themselves. They spend their professional lives exposed to radiation, in the form of X-rays and computed tomography (CT) scans, so you might expect them to have higher rates of cancer. But they don't. They have less cancer and they live longer than physicians in other specialities.

With modern safety measures, the actual dose received by radiologists is only slightly higher than for the general population. But that may be enough to give them an advantage. Sir Richard Doll, the leading Oxford epidemiologist who first linked smoking with lung cancer in the 1950s, published a study of British radiologists in 2003 which showed that those who entered the profession between 1955 and 1970 had a 29 per cent lower risk of cancer (though this was not statistically significant) and a 32 per cent lower death rate from all causes (which was statistically significant) than other physicians.

A similar study in the US compared workers servicing conventionally powered and nuclear-powered ships. Significantly lower death rates were found in the nuclear workers compared with the others.

* Did Harrison Ford have one too many drinks in the Green Room before this Conan O’Brien interview? Quite possibly, but it’s still a funny interview.

* I’ve been complaining for years that Sony would not release its e-reader in Australia. Now it finally has, and I’ve already got an iPad.

The only problem I’m finding with reading on the iPad is that I’m continually distracted to go back to the internet, or see if there is someone on line with whom to play a drawing game.

* AN Wislon gives a favourable review of a new biography of Tolstoy.

I know little of this subject, but it certainly seems an interesting one. I’ll probably get lazy and see that recent movie on DVD instead.

* A new European study indicates that more protein is a good idea for weight loss:

If you want to lose weight, you should maintain a diet that is high in proteins with more lean meat, low-fat dairy products and beans and fewer finely refined starch calories such as white bread and white rice. With this diet, you can also eat until you are full without counting calories and without gaining weight. Finally, the extensive study concludes that the official dietary recommendations are not sufficient for preventing obesity.

How much protein? It seems the successful diet was a "high-protein (25% of energy consumed), low-GI diet". I'm not sure how much protein you have to eat to get 25% of your energy.

* Barry Brook and others set out why nuclear power is the cheapest way to seriously reduce greenhouse gases in the long run.

I’m still speculating that mini nuclear reactors, if they ever get licensed, may be a faster way to scale it up than big reactors of current design; but that’s just my guess. And spreading that radiation around may well be good for us!

Sunday lunch

Spied in the yard today:

(My camera’s not working as well as it used to, but it wasn’t an expensive one in the first place.)

Oils are oils

A somewhat interesting article in the New York Times suggests that, once you heat them up in frying, even the experts can't taste the difference between very expensive olive oils, and things like canola oil:

The refined olive oil and two of three extra-virgin olive oils I tested began to smoke at a respectable 450 degrees. The inexpensive extra-virgin oil started to smell of rubber and plastic almost as soon as it became warm, and fumed at 350 degrees.

After I’d heated them, none of the olive oils had much olive flavor left. In fact, they didn’t taste much different from the seed oils.

To get a set of more expert second opinions, I took the olive oils to a meeting of the University of California’s olive oil research group. This panel of trained tasters evaluates oils from all over the world to provide guidance to California’s young olive-oil industry.

In a blind tasting of the four unheated olive oils, the six tasters easily distinguished the medal winners from the cheaper oils and found many interesting aroma notes in them, from tea and mint to green banana, stone fruit and cinnamon.

For the second blind tasting, I heated each oil to 350 degrees for five minutes. I also heated a sample of the Spanish oil more gently, to 300 degrees, to see whether it might retain more olive flavor.

The panelists said nothing as they swirled and sniffed the heated oils in their small tasting glasses, tinted blue to eliminate any consideration of color, then sipped, slurped and spat. The first spoken comment, immediately seconded by most of the panel members, was, “These oils all taste like popcorn.” In fact the panel ranked the heated light oil higher than the heated pricey California extra-virgin oil, whose pungency was no longer balanced by a spicy aroma and had become overbearing.

Well, I find that interesting, anyway.

I must admit, though, I do like the smell of olive oil as it is heated in the frying pan.

Pteropod risk

I've been mentioning pteropods here in the context of ocean acidification for many years.

Here's a good Scientific American blog post summarising the current state of play, and discussing the consequences of their loss or reduction. Worth reading.

Note the reaction of the first commenter: he won't subscribe to Scientific American again because it is being unscientific. (It is, in fact, a very balanced article.) There's nothing like putting your fingers in your ears and saying "I can't hear you". (I'm sure he'll take them out to listen to Judith Curry, though.)

Symplicity itself

Australian research has come up with a possible treatment for high blood pressure that resists other treatment. It’s called a “simple” procedure, but only if you don’t mind catheter’s being shoved around inside the major blood vessels of your body:

The new procedure, developed by Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, involves a catheter device that is inserted through the groin into the renal arteries.

It emits radio waves to destroy nerves in the kidneys that play a crucial role in the elevation of blood pressure.

The device, called the Symplicity Catheter System, has already been approved for use by government medicines regulator the Therapeutic Goods Administration and may be used routinely within a year.

I’m assuming some PR company has made a bit of money coming up with that name.

Anyway, I’d be giving the dark chocolate cure a good try before I underwent that procedure.

Caring readers may recall I recently found my blood pressure was a little higher than it should be. The other morning it was down a lot; and I did have a dark chocolate Kit Kat the night before. Today it’s back up to where it was, but I had no Kit Kat last night.

Clearly, more consistent self medication is called for.

Things that caught my attention

1. the phrase “mucous coccoon” (although your average marine biologist has heard it before)

2. China will soon be building its own generic jetliner (with a lot of help from foreign friends.) I was hoping for something a little more dragon like in appearance.

3. Wake up too soon before landing (sorry, I mean, wake up too close to landing time), and you’ll probably crash, seems to be the clear message from this investigation. Do pilots have rules about this? It’s probably been studied a lot in psychology departments, I imagine.

4. Judith Curry has had her day in Washington, and her statement is on her blog. My quick read of it indicates that this is a confused, contradictory, vague, inconclusive, pointless mess, just like her blog.

She certainly seems to be a (sudden?) convert to Pielke Snr’s similarly vague view of things.

Expect some severe criticism on the climate science blogosphere soon. (Except from skeptics and policy do-nothings, for whom confusion serves their position just fine. She’s their pin up girl now, there’s absolutely no doubt.)

Update: Joe Romm is first off the block, arguing convincingly (amongst other things) that Curry completely misrepresents economist Weitzman's position. While Romm is sometimes shrill, he was spot on when he started calling Curry a "confusionist". Doesn't the fact that the main praise she receives at her blog is from a cadre of AGW complete disbelievers alert her to the fact that she's traveled far from common sense?

Big Catholic statement of the day

A bishop at a conference:

Social media is proving itself to be a force with which to be reckoned. If not, the church may be facing as great a challenge as that of the Protestant Reformation.

Um, sure... I know Facebook has a lot to answer for (I am confident that its net effect on the happiness of humanity, or at least that part of it which is female and aged between about 10 and 30, is negative) but I wouldn't have picked a downfall of the Catholic faith as one of its outcomes.

Still, makes my recent musings about hearing confession over the internet sound sensible.

Pre-emptive pig removal

I don’t often highlight “stupid political correctness for Muslims” stories lately, but this one is a particularly egregious example:

A retailer withdrew a toy pig from a children's farm set to avoid the risk of causing offence on religious grounds, it emerged today.

A mother who bought the Early Learning Centre's (ELC) HappyLand Goosefeather Farm for her daughter's first birthday contacted the store after finding that the pig was missing, the Sun newspaper reported.

The £25 set contained a model of a cow, sheep, chicken, horse and dog but no pig, despite there being a sty and a button which generated an "oink".

But ELC chiefs have since decided to reintroduce the pig, with parents who have bought the set invited to get the toy from the company's website.

It’s interesting to hear the company’s explanation:

"ELC is a truly global brand, which means we need to be aware of the full range of customer expectations and cultural differences. The decision to remove the pig from our Goosefeather Farm set was taken in reaction to customer feedback in some parts of the world.

"We recognise that pigs are familiar farm animals, especially for our UK customers. Taking on board all the customer feedback, we have taken the decision to reinstate the pig and to no longer sell the set in those international markets where it might create an issue.”

So, in a sense, it wasn’t “pre-emptive” entirely:  they had received complaints about the toy pig from other countries, and decided to play it safe in soon to be Muslim England.  (Well, it may as well be, by the sounds.)

I'm sick of this carry on about pigs and dogs by you-know-which religion. Unless I'm mistaken, it's the only culture that goes to the extreme of finding it upsetting to have a mere model of an "unclean" animal in the hands of a child. Sure, religions can have their dietary taboos, whether they be founded in ancient practical experience of relative food safety or not. (After all, I'm not going to eat a snail again in a hurry.) But to carry on about animal's mere presence, particularly in a plastic version; this is just about the stupidest hangover of some  Arabian’s grudge against a harmless animal that still exists. 

Well, maybe not.  According to Ask an Imam, Muslims hate pigs , but they shouldn’t kill them.  Lizards and chameleons, on the other hand, get this treatment:

 4. Is there a reward for killing lizards or chameleons? if so then why ?

4.Yes there is. The Prophet Sallallah Alhi wa Sallam said that the chameleon blew on the fire which Sayyidina Ibrahim was hurled in to. This was its instinctive deed that it did on the promoting of the devil, but its efforts produced no results on the fire.

So we have been ordered to kill it to protect mankind from its mischief and from its harmful flesh.

Good grief.

The future is squid

The most interesting thing in last week's episode of Last Chance to See was the close up look at the Humboldt squid. I had read something about these appearing in larger numbers lately, but don't recall ever seeing them on TV before:



The guy in that video claimed he knew a fisherman who, while swimming between boats, had been seriously attacked by a swarm of them. According to Wikipedia (who knows with what accuracy), they aren't really that big danger to humans:

Although Humboldt squid have a reputation of being aggressive, the only reports of aggression towards humans have occurred when reflective diving gear or flashing lights have been present as a provocation. Roger Uzun, a veteran scuba diver and amateur underwater videographer who swam with a swarm of the animals for about 20 minutes, said they seemed to be more curious than aggressive.^[5] In reality, there is very likely little danger to humans.

Yet further down in the same article:

Recent footage of shoals of these animals demonstrates a tendency to meet unfamiliar objects aggressively. Having risen to depths of 130–200 metres (430–660 ft) below the surface to feed (up from their typical 700 metre (2,300 ft) diving depth, beyond the range of human diving), they have attacked deep-sea cameras and rendered them inoperable. Reports of recreational scuba divers being attacked by Humboldt Squid have been confirmed.

And more:

There are numerous accounts of the squid attacking fishermen and divers in the area.

Finally, the Wiki entry ends on this slightly worrying note for those who would like their children to be able to swim in the ocean without the risk of attack by swarms of aggressive squid:

A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that by the end of this century ocean acidification will lower the Humboldt squid's metabolic rate by 31% and activity levels by 45%. This will lead the squid to have to retreat to shallower waters where it can uptake oxygen at higher levels.^[24]

Catching malaria for good

Quite a surprise to read on the BBC about volunteers who are letting themselves catch malaria in the lab in order to test a new vaccine:

US army medic Joseph Civitello admits that becoming deliberately infected with malaria - one of the world's deadliest diseases - is "definitely nuts".

But without such volunteers, it would be almost impossible to test a new vaccine aimed at protecting the military overseas and preventing some of the estimated 300 million cases of malaria that occur every year.

First Sgt Civitello is part of the world's first clinical trial of a vaccine against Plasmodium vivax - the most widespread strain of malaria.

It's not as deadly as Plasmodium falciparum, which is endemic in Africa and kills millions of people, but it can resurface years after infection and still make its victims extremely ill.

"It was weird because I did this knowing I was going to get sick," says Sgt Civitello.

And the compensation for this: not much, by the sounds:

Volunteers in the world's first Plasmodium vivax malaria vaccine trial are given several thousand dollars in compensation. They say the money is an incentive, but most take part because they want to further medical science.

A well deserved thanks for service to humanity, Sgt Civitello.

"I have better things to do than make sense"

I can’t help but post again about the erratic Judith Curry.

As I noted before, she’s off to Washington soon to give evidence at a congressional hearing at the invitation of Republicans. So what does she do at her blog? Put up a post inviting her blog readership (who in a previous post, self identified as, I would guess, about 90% sceptics) to tell her what they think is known with confidence. [She doesn't say that this is related to her upcoming testimony, but it's kind of peculiar timing.]

One commenter asks the obvious:

Dr Curry, rather than setting an exam question for your pupils here, how would *you* answer the following? [Being the confidence question]

Curry makes no response.

When another, more sympathetic commenter asks her to respond to the criticisms other climate change blogs have made of her, she responds that “it’s coming” (as it has been for weeks), and adds this:

At this point I have no time to read stuff at RC or anywhere else for that matter. I frankly have better and more important things to do than deal with the little tempests created elsewhere in the climate blogosphere…

Yes, like asking skeptics to guide her in her testimony? And it's some freaking "little tempest". It's virtually the rest of the mainstream climate science scientific community telling her she is making major mistakes in many of her criticisms of the IPCC reports and process, and she does not respond in any detail.

CO2 up, temperature up

A study of what happened with increasing CO2 and higher temperatures 40 million years ago indicates that the CO2 came first, not vice versa:

“We found a close correspondence between carbon dioxide levels and sea surface temperature over the whole period, suggesting that increased amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere played a major role in global warming during the MECO,” said Bohaty.

The researchers consider it likely that elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels during the MECO resulted in increased global temperatures, rather than vice versa, arguing that the increase in carbon dioxide played the lead role.

“The change in carbon dioxide 40 million years ago was too large to have been the result of temperature change and associated feedbacks,” said co-lead author Peter Bijl of Utrecht University. “Such a large change in carbon dioxide certainly provides a plausible explanation for the changes in Earth’s temperature.”

And what conclusion do they reach about climate sensitivity:

The authors conclude that the climate sensitivity during the MECO led to a 2- to 5-degree C increase per doubling of atmospheric CO2.

Which is pretty much the range the IPCC expects.

Why electricity is going up

Michael Stutchbury gives an account of why electricity prices have been going up, and why a carbon tax would not add to that process as much as people think. Here’s a key section:

Sims's key point is a carbon price won't lift household electricity bills as much as typically figured. A modest carbon price has been estimated to push up wholesale prices by 60 per cent or so, translating into a 24 per cent or so rise in household retail bills.

But a carbon price world shouldn't be contrasted with the old status quo world. Instead, it should be compared with the actual alternative of carbon price uncertainty and the high-cost renewable schemes that are driving electricity bills higher anyway.

A carbon price could actually ease pressure on household electricity bills, assuming we're serious about hitting our target of cutting emissions by 30 per cent on business-as-usual levels by 2020. "A carbon price will see electricity prices increase by less than they would by pursuing a given greenhouse gas reduction target by the current greenhouse schemes," Sims told the committee.

This of course requires the Greens to accept that expensive renewables should no longer be mandated because they cost more than a carbon price to do the same emissions-reduction job. This extends to Gillard's own expensive $400 million "cash for clunkers" scheme which, like the Coalition's greenhouse direct action, shifts the problem on to the budget.

I was also interested to note this earlier part:

The recent surge is mostly driven by "network costs", which will account for two-thirds of the rise in regulated NSW power prices in the five years to 2012-13.

These distribution costs are rising in line with increasing peak demand, such as on hot days, and reflect our vigorous population growth and modern prosperity. Three out of every four Brisbane homes have air conditioners, compared with one in four only a dozen years ago.

More, bad, ocean news

I've made the observation before that, even if CO2 do-nothings are correct in saying that increased CO2 will lead to more ocean algae (which is basically fish food so what are ya worrying about?), not all algal blooms are good. Toxic algal blooms happen near populated coastlines where lots of nutrients from run off and sewerage fertilized the water, but what of the deeper ocean water?

This article says that the dangerous type of algae are indeed away from the coast, and it appears it is encouraged by the limited iron fertilization experiments that have taken place to date:

They joined Ken Bruland, professor of ocean Sciences at UCSC, on a research cruise to study iron chemistry in oceanic waters of the Gulf of Alaska. During this expedition, they collected water samples and found the algae and its toxin in nearly all of the natural oceanic environments throughout the region. This prompted them to examine older, stored samples from other sites around the Pacific, and again they found the toxin in most samples.

Then, with the help of Kenneth Coale, director of Moss Landing Marine laboratories and principal investigator on several cruises that conducted classic iron enrichment experiments in the Pacific, they retrieved samples and found both Pseudo-nitzschia and substantial amounts of toxin. Their findings show that iron enrichment indeed promotes high levels of toxins in the open sea, sometimes as high as those in coastal regions, where deaths of seabirds and mammals occur. The authors of this PNAS paper also noted that iron enrichments can occur naturally, suggesting that the high levels of toxins may also have occurred when iron was added by wind-blown dust and other climate and geological processes.

OK, so it probably happens naturally too. That's not to say it's such a good idea to cause more widespread toxic waters than what we see already.

And in other worrying news, another study suggests that elkhorn coral has its reproductive success greatly limited by ocean acidification. It's not that coral reefs will ever start fizzing due to an acid ocean, but as they are worn down by mechanical action, warm water bleaching and other damaging factors, they may not grow back.

Thugee investigation

I ended up watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom again last night on TV (I can’t help it – has there ever been a better directed and edited action/comedy movie ?  That’s a rhetorical question, the answer is “no”.  There’s something clever or witty that I like about every 8 seconds of its running time.)

Anyhow, it got me thinking: amongst the many topics in history I don’t know all that much about,  thugee in Indian is high amongst them.  Of course, I doubt that they were into magical heart removal or voodoo dolls, but how exactly they did kill, and whether or not they were that closely connected with Kali worship; well that’s all a bit of an unknown to this blogger. 

The Wikipedia article gives a bit of a general overview, but I felt it wasn’t the best example of that site’s work.  (Although it does get marks for mentioning Temple of Doom, which it probably does on the wise presumption that people like me would have their interest piqued by the movie.)  It does seem there has been a bit of historical revisionism going on about what exactly thugee was really all about.

A bit further down on the Google list showed a link to a book about it.  This link was to one of those download sites that seem to be all about hoping people will pay for the “fast” download for a (likely?) pirate copy of a movie or book.  I don’t think I have ever successfully used one of those sites before; the slow free download usually takes forever and I have given up when seeing the hopeless speed. 

But last night I did try it, and got a pretty fast free download.  I then tried to do it direct to the iPad, using Goodreader (one of the limitations of an iPad is that you can’t directly save .pdf or other web files directly from the browser.  You have to use an App such as Goodreader.)   That didn’t work, but I eventually got the book into my iPad via my computer and iTunes.

So, now I have a free .pdf of a book on my iPad which I actually want to read, or at least skim.  I will report further on any thugee discoveries as they come.

Dawn Treader is coming

The Narnia films have been very, very good. The third one, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is being released on 9 December, and yet I fear it is receiving inadequate publicity.

People in Brisbane who were able to visit one of the film locations (as my family did) have a particular reason to look forward to seeing it.

Really, Walden Media do very high quality films generally, and as it appears that the success of this film will determine whether or not the series comes to an end, all readers are hereby commanded to go see it.

Here's my bit to help promote it:

Putting the last election in perspective

The Economist has a chart that shows how, compared to Europe, Australians were complete wusses when it came to worrying about how long it took to form a government after the last federal election.

Curry in Washington

So, I see that Judith Curry has been invited (by the Republicans - so guess what purpose they hope her to fulfill) to a congressional hearing in Washington to talk about uncertainty in climate change. Seems to me they may do better to question uncertainty in Curry.

There hasn't been talk of this at James Annan's or Michael Tobis's blogs yet; they have been left waiting for Judith to explain how she didn't get her "Italian flag" comments on uncertainty very wrong. (I'm not sure how many times she has promised a direct answer is coming, but it's been quite a few.)

But Bart Verheggen has a useful suggestion to her on what she should concentrate on:

Facts and framing: Both are important

When it comes to science communication, the facts are the baseline from which one absolutely cannot stray; but at the same time, we have to be aware that people respond most strongly to the frame.

Uncertainty and risk

Remember that the political attack is also largely scientific in nature, at least in terms of its framing. It exaggerates uncertainty about particular scientific studies (…) in order to distract from the big picture.

So any scientist walking into this context had better be ready for one obvious trap: Being lured into talking about uncertainty to the detriment of what we actually know.

This is in sharp contrast to what Judith Curry is pushing for: Framing the issues in terms of uncertainty and stressing what we don’t know. I am in firm agreement with Chris Mooney here. Judith’s strategy is a dead end in terms of increasing the public’s knowledge about climate change.

Conversations about uncertainty invoke a frame which in the public mind is easily confused with doubt. Non-scientists have a very different perception of uncertainty than scientists. Framing what we know and don’t know in terms of risk is much more useful in getting the message across, because it leaves less room for misinterpretation (there is less of a gap in how this term is understood, whereas “uncertain” to a layperson means “I don’t know”).

You should read all of his post: it's very good.

Who knows, Curry could surprise us all and not leave everyone totally confused as to what her position is. But if her blog is anything to go by, she'll prefer to inconclusively waffle and be happy that she's muddied the waters further.

Update: A lengthy, detailed critique of Curry has turned up on Climate Progress. It's pretty devastating, and confirms even further how it is completely impossible to tell what she believes. It's not as if her apparent conversion to an "uncertainty is everything" view of climate change is actually backed up in her blog or elsewhere with detailed analysis and a critical reappraisal of her previous statements. It just seems to be "the vibe" which she wants to promote.

As Romm says towards the end of the post:

Curry is not the one who brings “uncertainty” into the discussion of climate science. Well, let me rephrase that. Curry is a confusionist who brings uncertainty into any discussion, but it is a canard of Curry-esque proportions to assert that scientists have not clearly explained the nature and extent of these uncertainties. They have bent over backwards to do so.