Cautionary tales of instant expertise

I've noted before how Barry Brook and then Andrew Bolt were quick to link to an explanation of the Fukushima reactors by MIT Research Scientist Josef Oehman, which contained the prematurely reassuring words:

"there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors"

As it turned out, Oehman had not worked in the field of nuclear science at all, and New Scientist has an interesting report explaining how Oehman came to write the article, and how it was picked up as having more authority behind it than it deserved.

It was all sort of a mistake, not written for wide publication at all. Oh well. Everyone can be an instant expert on the internet, even by accident it seems.

A second cautionary tale tonight regarding Andrew Bolt. He quotes a story from his own paper today which claims an ANU study shows a temperature rise of .5 degree over 160 years. The IPCC figure was .76 degree C over the same period. What gives? say Andrew.

Answer: the accuracy of journalists, Andrew.

The full quote from the body of the report on the study is (with my emphasis):

"There is sufficient evidence in the long run of temperature records to support the existence of a warming trend," Prof Breusch said today. "From the 1850s to today it's somewhere over half a degree (celsius) a century.

That is, no inconsistency exists. Several people in comments have already pointed this out to Andrew, who has found time to make a couple of other posts but not to come back and acknowledge the error.

Poor Andrew. He's really become quite upset ever since Julia Gillard belled the cat (about time, I say) with this last week:

''I ask, who would I rather have on my side?'' she said. ''Alan Jones, Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt?

''Or the CSIRO, the Australian Academy of Science, the Bureau of Meteorology, NASA, the US National Atmospheric Administration, and every reputable climate scientist in the world?''

Exactly. Andrew's agitated response ever since that speech keeps reminding me of Jones' famous words from Dad's Army "they don't like it up 'em".

UPDATE: Andrew Bolt has corrected his post, but in a rather unusual way:

Readers point out that the report of the ANU survey is wrong. The survey found that rise to be about .5 degrees per century, thus about the same as the IPCC. Except, of course, that the IPCC has all that 0.7 degrees of warming since 1850 occuring in just the past century…

Wouldn't that be all the more consistent with AGW then? Or does he mean the IPCC is inconsistent with the ANU survey in a corrupt way? What's the point of his point?

Send in the robots

I had been wondering why there wasn't much talk about why robot loving Japan did not seem to have any robots suitable for helping fight a nuclear reactor disaster.

The always interesting William Saletan at Slate comes to the rescue. It turns out that different countries have been looking at such developing such robots, but the country which has actually got a bunch of them ready for nuclear disasters is (to my surprise) France:

Two years after Chernobyl, French nuclear operators created Group Intra, a consortium charged with maintaining a fleet of robots for use in major nuclear accidents. The group is on call around the clock and pledges to deliver equipment and operators anywhere in France within 24 hours. Its robots have hydraulic manipulator arms and can go 10 hours without external power. Some can be remotely controlled from a distance of 10 kilometers.

You can see some photos of the indoor French robots here (very Wall-E I reckon). The outdoor ones remind a little of equipment from Thunderbirds.

So they do cheese, wine and disaster robots very well. What more do you need?

Answer: no

An article on Huffington Post entitled "Sexism in the Marijuana Trade" asks: "Been to a cannabis trade show lately?"

(The sentence following that rhetorical question is: "The floors are crawling with barely-clothed women pitching products. People shrug and say that's what happens at trade shows, but why does that have to be the case at our shows?")

HP covers all the big issues.

A trifecta of wrong

As far as I can tell, this is a very rare alignment of wrong (or misleading) opinion from across the political spectrum.

As we know, Andrew Bolt has been busy downplaying any danger to both workers and the public from the Fukushima accident, to the extent of wondering whether nuclear physicist Ann Coulter may be on to something with her suggestion that it may be good for people.

He referred to a radiation chart made by the person who writes the comic xkcd. I'm sure many people have seen it.

Tim Lambert criticised Bolt for the "maybe its good for them" post, but then also linked to the xkcd chart.

Now I see that George Monbiot has posted that the accident has not hurt his belief that we must use nuclear to combat greenhouse gases. (You can never quite tell which way George will jump. He badly over-reacted at first to the "climategate" emails as if they were stunningly damaging to the science of climate change. He later calmed down and changed his mind.) But anyway, my point is that he has also linked to the chart.

So, all three think it's a cool chart.

I think they are all wrong, and the issue of contamination of food, water and the seas around Fukushima shows why. As a commenter David COG noted at Lambert's blog:

I'd say it's dangerously misleading. It says nothing about the different types of radiation and how they are delivered.

• A speck of plutonium on your skin which is quickly washed off: not so bad.
• A speck of plutonium inhaled and stuck in your lungs: not so good.

It also says nothing about the very real psychological impacts of radiation.

• give someone an x-ray: no drama
• tell someone the local nuke is spewing radiation out: stress, depression, sickness

• 
  

And later he expands:

dhogaza:

The chart's specifically about the effect of environmental radiation, not of the breathing in of a radioactive particle of plutonium which then becomes lodged in the lung or the like.

The "effect of environmental radiation" is that it is sometimes breathed in or eaten. The chart therefore gives a misleading impression because it's simply a representation of holding a Geiger counter next to each item.

Also, it starts off with the 'banana dose'. This nonsense is all over the tubes right now - people claiming that because bananas are radioactive that the radiation appearing in Japanese food and water is no big deal. This is bullshit. If you don't know why, read this.

In the context of what is happening at the moment in Japan, that chart is going to do nothing but mislead people in to thinking it's no big deal. It is dangerously misleading.

Now, this guy is clearly an anti-nuclear advocate, and I see that prominent climate change advocates such as Eli Rabbett are arguing with him:

David, Eli suggests you go think about the difference between washing off a speck of plutonium and ingesting it. Hint, one is with you longer than the other and so the dose is larger.

The Bunny also suggests that silly boys like you are one of the reasons people in the US are stocking iodine pills to protect against the problems in Japan.

How much sense does Eli's comment make? David COG pointed out that the chart does nothing to deal with the issue of ingested radioactive particles: Eli says (to paraphrase) "of course they are dangerous because you are exposed longer to them." Well, yeah.

Nope, I have to go with the anti-nuclear activist here: people running around with the xkcd chart without understanding its very major limitations are not really being honest about what a nuclear reactor failure with leaks to the environment is about.

And although people may think I'm spending a lot of time dissing nuclear if I promote it: I maintain my position from the start - to have credibility, you have to be honest about how wildly disruptive and potentially dangerous reactor failures of the Fukushima type can be.

Then you can talk about future reactors with passive safety as their key priority and have some vague hope about people believing you.

And again - yes, there have been some wildly exaggerated claims of danger from Fukushima which are without basis (for example, that there is any danger at all to the US West Coast.) But it's no use pretending that it's not a serious environmental issue in the area around Fukushima.

UPDATE: speaking of bad reporting, I note that the Australian (and the ABC) is saying:

Abnormally high levels of radioactive substances were later detected in seawater 100m from the troubled plant.

Yet the AFP report says:

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) said the level of iodine-131 was 126.7 times higher and caesium-134 was 24.8 times higher than government-set standards.

The substances were detected in seawater which was sampled Monday about 100 kilometres (60 miles) south of the Fukushima No.1 plant, a TEPCO official said.

Come on, who's right? (I hope, and would guess, it's the 100 m version.)

That was quick

Typically enough, the always hyperbolic “centre right” blog Catallaxy was, after the last couple of Newspolls, full of people claiming that this was the end of Julia Gillard, even the Labor Party.

I think I noted there that it was ridiculous to be paying much attention to a dire poll this far from an election, based as it almost certainly was on the carbon price turnaround. And as far as polling for carbon pricing goes, it is no worse than what it was for a GST for a decade.

Now that there appears to be a strong bounce back to Ms Gillard, they seem to have all turned on Tony Abbott. Why, I say? He’s been inconsistent on climate change, and unable to do a good interview, since day 1. Talk about your fair weather friends.

Duelling tabloids

So I see the duelling tabloid TV current affairs programs are continuing to approach the bullying video story from opposite sides. Today Tonight last night ran an interview with bully Ritchard (yes, even the spelling of his name annoys people) and his father.

It was complete with cliché sad/saccharine music, contemplative shots of kid in a park, and all, as was A Current Affair’s longer Sunday night story. It’s not going to help Ritchard win the popularity stakes, but it was a much better story than the Current Affair one for this reason: it talked about the bigger picture of whether it is good to encourage victims to get violent in response.

Short story: it’s not.

Well, just tie the knot, then

Julia Gillard was apparently talking up her socially conservative opinions yesterday.

People seem to have trouble believing these are genuinely held. Perhaps that has something to do with her being in a de facto relationship?

I think once before when questioned about this, she noted in response something like "there's more than one party involved in the question of marriage;" I suppose that was ambiguous as to whether it was her or her partner who was cool on the idea, but it seemed to suggest that one might be keener on the idea than the other.

If it's Julia who doesn't want to marry him (and I think she has said before she never really aspired to marriage and kids,) I don't know you can really claim to be all that socially conservative.

If it's her partner, then I think she should take the view I have stated before: women should not let men hang around indefinitely in a relationship. It suits them too much*. Women: if you're going to live with a bloke at all (not that that I recommend that either) - give him 6 months; 12 tops. If he has cold feet about marriage still: ship him out.

No need to thank me Julia. Relationship advice from Opinion Dominion is free.

* (Particularly when it comes with live in cooks and servants!)

Japanese fallout

How's the atomically at ease Andrew Bolt going? Over the weekend, he reproduced much of Ann Coulter’s column pointing out that some increased radiation might actually be good for you. See, what are you complaining about, Japanese people near Fukushima?

Let's be clear - the idea that low level of radiation may actually not be bad for you has been around for some time. (I've mentioned it myself here before.) But it's also a fact that some types of radioactive fallout from broken reactors do cause cancers, particularly in children.

It is, to put it mildly, insensitive for anyone to be talking of the possible positive results of Fukushima at the moment. An unusually large number of Bolt's commenters seem to have chided him for this post; I'm not on my own.

Some corrections to what Coulter, and Bolt, said can be found at (the very annoying) PZ Myers and a Scientific American blog.

Back at the New York Times, there is a short follow up from Nicholas Kristoff about his column on Japan I mentioned last week. I didn't know this:

It’s the fact that the easiest people to steal from are the police. You see, you just walk up to any police box (koban) at a train station and say you need money to get home, and you’ll get $20 or whatever in train fair. You have to give your name and promise to pay it back, but you don’t have to show any I.D. When I once asked a policeman why they didn’t require I.D., he looked at me as if I was very slow and said something to the effect: People need train money because they’ve lost their wallets. But if they’ve lost their wallets, they don’t have I.D. He added, though, that a day or two later, the borrower invariably comes by to repay the money.

All the comments that follow are worth reading too.

Update: for Andrew Bolt -

The Japanese government on Monday told people not to drink the tap water in a village near the quake-hit nuclear power plant after high levels of radioactive iodine were detected.

Abnormal but much lower levels of radioactive iodine had already been found in the water supply in Tokyo and surrounding prefectures including Fukushima, where the troubled plant and the village of Iitatemura is located.

The health ministry said 965 becquerels per kilogramme of radioactive iodine was found in water which was sampled on Sunday in Iitatemura, which is 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the Fukushima No.1 plant.

It is more than three times the level the government considers advising people to limit the intake of water.

"There is no immediate effect on health if it is taken temporarily," ministry official Shogo Misawa said of tap water in Iitatemura.

"But as a precaution, we are advising people in the village through the prefectural office to refrain from drinking it."

The prefecture of Fukushima is preparing to provide about 4,000 people in the village with bottled water, media reports said.

Tabloid TV deals with bullying, with the queasy results you would expect

This will annoy people, I know, and it's not as if I haven't talked about it already, but I have to say it: the ACA Sunday story on the bullying video was irresponsible, tabloid TV at its cringe inducing worst.

I remain amazed at the uncritical attitude to the video that not only downplays the danger that Casey - a kid who deserves some sympathy - faced as a result of his reaction to bullying, but claims it as a "feel good" story. The interview barely mentioned that he (Casey) acknowledges that there could have been some more serious injury out of it, then quickly cuts to the obsequious interviewer asking him if he feels he went too far. An adamant "no" is the answer.

I am not surprised, given the international hero worship that has been bestowed upon him. His father's attitude to it was quite cautious: he did show quite a degree of disturbance at the violence coming from both the bully and his son, and it seemed to me that he may have felt that the attention it is getting is over-the-top. But he did pull his punches a little and emphasised more his pride in his son standing up for himself, and his sympathy that the bullying had been going on for so long.

Stupid and dishonest commentators in the blogosphere are seemingly incapable of understanding that my complaint against celebrating the video is not an attack on the boy. It is a complaint about adults celebrating school yard fighting in any circumstances, as the real message of the video is this: fights get out of control and can easily lead to permanent injury or death. This in turn leads to legal issues. For these reasons, in the interests of the bullied themselves (who -like Casey - are unlikely to be fully in control if they do respond with violence), responsible adults don't encourage violence as a resolution to bullying.

For those who doubt the danger of the throw: do they watch rugby league? Do they ever doubt that a spear tackle, on grass, is a stupidly dangerous thing to do? If so, they have no credibility in doubting the seriousness of a wrestling style throw onto concrete. It's as plain as day that it was very lucky that the bully did not hit his head with substantial force on the concrete. (And not merely as a secondary consequence of a hit, but rather as a very direct result of the way Casey handled himself.)

For those who say "yes it was dangerous, but he was acting in self defence and provocation and he's excused": don't people have enough common sense to know that these legal defences do have elements of reasonableness and questions of proportionate response built into them? Of course you're not entitled to do anything in response to violence against you, even if you have been subject to bullying for some time. I think it's because it's a bullying incident that people are downplaying the issue of proportionate response, and are overconfident that the police or lawyers would assess the situation in the same way as them. They should not have such confidence.

There has been a particularly ugly line of commentary on the internet along the lines: "I don't care if he did break the kids neck; he deserved it. In fact, I would have happy to see Casey do more to hurt him." This really does annoy me intensely - young bullies do not always maintain that attitude into adulthood, and getting hurt in a fight is not the only way people learn maturity. Those idiots wishing for more physical injury in this fight are showing the same kind of intense immaturity towards physical violence that we don't want young bullies to copy.

They may be a small, not very outspoken, part of the population (who are not very likely to
be rushing to the Casey hero worship sites to make their views known,) but there are voices out there agreeing with me - if Casey had caused death or permanent disability to the bully, it would be a very "live" issue for the police to decide if he should face criminal charges. You can guarantee that the bully's mother would have had a much harder time accepting the justice of the injury he received if he had been killed, or left as a paraplegic or a brain damaged kid who could nothing for himself for the rest of the his life.

Others seemingly take the attitude "well, that didn't happen so let's just say congratulations anyway." I can't understand this and consider it a sign of immaturity. (Granted, there are a lot more immature adults out there than I would have credited.) It is, I suppose, a bit like the attitude people have to a rugby league brawl where no one gets seriously hurt. But then again, such brawls usually are punches thrown by both sides, which doesn't raise the very issue that this video does about the proportionate nature of the response.

I think most people agree that it's a bad thing that young men in bars get into brawls, and need to learn self restraint and to avoid violence if at all possible. At what age do they think this becomes the right thing to do?

Clearly, people hate bullying: that is perfectly understandable. If they think that an incident like this shows the best way to deal with it: that is not understandable at all. The one thing that the interview did show (and I don't mean this a criticism, since we know nothing of their relationship) is that not all avenues of help had been exhausted: the father might have been involved in resolving the bullying if he had known it's extent.

We also know from the bully's mother previous interview that she was upset with her son's bullying. The parents involvement via the school, or otherwise, may therefore have helped. But instead, people are just acting as if this was a desperate act of a victim who had tried to get adults to help. It is by no means clear that this was in fact the case, although this was an aspect the tabloid style interview did not pursue. It might interfere too much with the "feel good" nature of the story, I guess.

No, all I can see is danger and an incident of escalating violence that came close to tragedy. And the praise of strangers towards Casey is unlikely to have any long term positive outcome to other victims of bullying, particularly if some other take it as an example and do accidentally seriously injure someone.

Finally: the ACA story made me very uncomfortable because it raises questions about the long term outcome for Casey himself. I can't help but feel that this praise and encouragement via the media and internet may turn out to be a false dawn of a brighter emotional future for him. No matter how good he feels at the moment, he may not yet appreciate that media fame is a temporary and fickle thing; he's certainly not going to be hearing from any of his internet fan club again over any other life crisis. Given his talk about his troubled time ever since he started at high school, including thinking about suicide, I do feel that he has issues which the "good" outcome of this incident are not going to resolve.

It may be that his father recognises this now in a way he didn't before, and that some greater involvement or attention in his son's life does really make a difference. But I suspect that all this media attention might end up being counterproductive for Casey's emotional development in the long run. Let's hope not, but it seems to me to be a real risk.

Update: I wrote that before Michael Carr-Gregg said pretty much the same things this morning. For another journalistic reaction which at least dwelt on the danger as a real issue in the story, see John Birmingham's column from last week.

Update 2: More detail in another report of an interview with Carr-Gregg:

Basically, this boy should not have responded the way that he did. Dr Carr-Gregg said there was a real danger that the bully may have been permanently injured in the revenge attack.

“My fear is that by going on TV this will normalise, sanitise and glamorise hitting back.

Dr Carr-Gregg said the lack of supervision and the fact other children were standing around filming the incident rather than trying to stop it was an indictment on anti-bullying policies in schools.

He said studies had demonstrated that children who retaliated were victimized more.

There are better ways of dealing with this such as holding the boy in a bear hug “or just walking away”.

What he did doesn’t work long term.

We have to look at bullying and harassment properly in this country.

Dr Carr-Gregg has previously warned retaliation could prove fatal.

"In some contexts it is brave when someone is invading our country or threatening our freedom, but in a school situation it's fraught with difficulty," Dr Carr-Gregg said.

"If we condone these actions we end up saying that violence is a problem-solving device.

"Spending a significant part of your formative years in prison as a result of a serious error of judgment is a heavy price to pay."

After the report, there is a stream of comments still supporting Casey, and hurling abuse at the 12 year old bully.

There do seem to be an extraordinary number of people weighing in on this who say they have been bullying victims themselves. I wonder during what decade most of these people were at school, as I don't know that bullying was a specific subject that really had such widespread attention when I was at high school back in the 1970's. Yet now that schools do talk about it clearly, it seems that all these commenters feel that the schools are failing to deal with it.

But in any event, I re-iterate: this is not a story that the media should be playing up at all. The attention on the bully, his family and the victim is not doing any of them any good in the long run, is my bet.

Update 3: Andrew Bolt on radio this morning (you can listen at his blog) noted that he was entirely sympathetic to Casey's plight, but it was a dangerous throw and if it had resulted in death, people would not be talking about heroics. He had also declined to put the video on his blog because he did not want to encourage others to react this way, given the danger involved. Steve Price agreed with him.

So what'ya know. Two pretty right wing guys seem to have an issue with the danger the video represents.

They have more common sense than the Catallaxy crowd, then. That's not hard, though.

A kind of milestone

And before anyone disses the numbers, just remember this:

Average book sales are shockingly small, and falling fast. Combine the explosion of new books with the declining total sales and you get shrinking sales of each new title. Here’s the reality of the book industry: in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells about 500 copies. (Publishers Weekly, July 17, 2006). And average sales have since fallen much more. According to BookScan, which tracks most bookstore, online, and other retail sales of books, only 299 million books were sold in 2008 in the U.S. in all adult nonfiction categories combined. The average U.S. book is now selling less than 250 copies per year and less than 3,000 copies over its lifetime.

The Fearless Bolt

OK, we all know people are easily spooked by nuclear radiation scares, and anti-nuclear activists are no doubt making exaggerated claims and worrying some people unnecessarily.

But....

I think it's high time we did a quick pass the hat around to collect the air fare to get Andrew Bolt over the Fukushima area and reassure everyone that they are being very, very silly.

I mean, we have it on good authority from Andrew, even today, after his earlier reassurances were proved to be, um, groundless, that:

The problem remains serious, but still no one has been killed or is likely to be, although two workers are said to be missing.....

The panic this emergency has induced is astonishing.

As there actually seems to be a high degree of uncertainty as to whether the workers who remained at Fukushima have already exposed themselves to levels of radiation that will lead to a premature death, it is foolhardy in the extreme to be talking about no one "likely to be killed."

Americans advising an 80 km exclusion for their citizens is not advice coming from nutty Greenie types. It's called "taking sensible precautions based on scientific advice". (A phrase with which, as I will note again in a second, Andrew shows a complete lack of familiarity.) Does Andrew think it's no big deal to evacuate even a 30 km zone in a country like Japan, which is not exactly renown for its big empty spaces?

There are two effects that I can see from his over-the-top "bah humbug" attitude to this; one I welcome, and one I don't:

a. he makes pro-nuclear types look like right wing macho nutters with a surplus of testosterone that over-rides sensible caution. This I don't welcome, because I haven't given up on nuclear myself: although I have to say, some of the things that they seem to have not thought of in enough detail - like "is it really a good idea to store this many old fuel rods here for so many years, when , if we ever lose the water in the cooling pool, they'll start to burn" - are pretty surprising.

b. he makes himself, as a very influential anti AGW writer in Australia, especially for the followers of the Coalition, look like an untrustworthy twit when it comes to his judgement about science, technology, risk and sensible precaution. This is a very, very good thing. (And don't anyone in comments give me any grief that I want to see the Fukushima problems get worse so as to further discredit him. I figure his performance to date, with the silly and borderline offensive downplaying of the consequences of Chernobyl and atomic bombs, and his rush to promote the "it's already under control" line, when it clearly wasn't, he's already discredited himself mightily.)

If Andrew Bolt looks foolhardy on nuclear accidents - and he does - it should make him look foolhardy on climate change - as he is.

He also has quite a following at Catallaxy, a blog with which careful readers may note I am currently having something of a feud. While it's not as if they haven't been ridiculous for years, their gung-ho "people are wimps" jeering on this topic is making them look like the clowns they really are (with some honourable exceptions) on virtually any topic to do with the environment. That is also a good thing.

UPDATE: I see Andrew is hard at it again, posting this evening:

The accounting begins. Here’s a wall of shame of just some of the journalists who have fed the hysterical fear of a nuclear incident that has killed no one and probably never will.

Funny, as he writing that, the news was that Japan had upgraded the seriousness of the emergency from its previous level 4 to level 5. OK, apparently that's still only the same as Three Mile Island which didn't kill anyone; but the point is that it's still not exactly a good look to be upgrading a week after it started. And besides, the IAEA already had it at a six. Even Barry Brook said a couple of days ago "In sum, this accident is now significantly more severe than Three Mile Island in 1979."

Maybe the people of Japan worry a bit because: - not even regulatory bodies and experts can agree on exactly how serious it is.

But People of Japan: do not be alarmed: Andrew Bolt says there is no danger to life.

Look, it's one thing to complain about poor journalism (of which there has been much, as there is every day of the year) that exaggerates danger, and it is true to observe that some people will make bad decisions due to irrational fear of very low levels.

But it's also ridiculous to pretend that this is not very serious, particularly for the plant workers.

Have a look at these radiation figures from Barry Brook's blog for yesterday. They give a pretty good indication why the helicopters were not inclined to get too close to the reactor buildings they were trying to dump water onto:

Radiation Levels

o At 9:20AM (JST) on March 17, radiation level at elevation of 1,000ft above Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station: 4,130 micro sievert.

o At 9:20AM on March 17, radiation level at elevation of 300ft above Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station: 87,700 micro sievert.

o At 11:10AM on March 17, radiation level at main gate (approximately 3,281 feet from Unit 2 reactor building) of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station: 646.2 micro sievert.

o At 7:50PM on March 17, radiation level outside main office building (approximately 1,640 feet from Unit 2 reactor building) of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station: 3,599 micro sievert.

o For comparison, a human receives 2,400 micro sievert per year from natural radiation in the form of sunlight, radon, and other sources. One chest CT scan generates 6,900 micro sievert per scan.

I don't want to encourage people in China or California to swallow a mouthful of iodine either; but downplaying the danger to the extent that Bolt is doing is embarrassing in the other direction.

A question

Given the haphazard way water has been attempted to be delivered to the cooling pools and reactors at Fukushima, I assume there is a good chance some radioactive water is getting into the adjacent ocean.

Has anyone been talking about what this will mean for the safety of the fishing and seafood industry around the Japanese coast line?

I would assume this may be a very serious consequence for the Japanese in particular, given that they harvest and eat virtually every type of living thing to be found in their seas.

Update: on a related note, the New York Times again proves to have been a pretty good source of reporting on the nuclear crisis, and this report explains in detail that storage of used fuel rods at reactors is a widespread problem not only in Japan, but America too:

Some countries have tried to limit the number of spent fuel rods that accumulate at nuclear power plants: Germany stores them in costly casks, for example, while China sends them to a desert storage compound in the western province of Gansu. But Japan, like the United States, has kept ever-larger numbers of spent fuel rods in temporary storage pools at the power plants, where they can be guarded with the same security provided for the plants.

Figures provided by Tokyo Electric Power on Thursday show that most of the dangerous uranium at the power plant is actually in the spent fuel rods, not the reactor cores themselves.

The electric utility said that a total of 11,195 spent fuel rod assemblies were stored at the site. That is about four times as much radioactive material as in the reactor cores combined.

There will be a lot of re-consideration about the America practices to come out of this, and none too soon, by the sounds.

No counselling required

Mind Hacks has a timely post noting the decline of "post disaster counselling" as a practice.

Pure idiocy

What does the media think it is doing, promoting this schoolyard bullying incident that has "gone viral"?

Everyone knows that the videoing of fights amongst school kids and posting them up on Facebook has become a large part of a bullying/cyberbullying vicious cycle. Apparently, this particular one was pulled from Facebook/Youtube pretty quickly, only to appear in the Fairfax media yesterday. What was Fairfax thinking? It was giving more publicity to a video that did not deserve it, and has only led to further appalling consequences.

The reason for it being pulled from Facebook (or Youtube?)was not clear to me, but from the Sky News report noted on this page of the Daily Telegraph, it might have had something to do with the fact that the idiots who posted it put a telephone number at the end as being the one for the young bully's home, and encouraged people to ring and abuse him and his family.

Turns out the number was for the home of a couple of old folk who have nothing to do with this at all, and received many highly abusive calls; some from overseas.

So, you might say: good on the Daily Telegraph for including this corrective.

Um, no, wait a minute. The body of the Daily Telegraph article says that the mother of the bully was interviewed on Channel 7 Today Tonight and "demanded an apology from the victim":

"We don't need this posted everywhere," she said. "I would like him to apologise."

This Daily Telegraph report was picked up in the (second) post on the story by right wing Anerican site Hot Air. Given that their first story was full of comments with gushing praise for the victim having had his revenge on the bully (with barely a handful of comments noting that it was pure good luck that he didn't accidentally kill the bully and end up at real risk of a trial for manslaughter) this revelation of the mother wanting an apology was too much:

Listen up, you worthless brood mare: if you raised your kids not to be bullies, they wouldn’t get bodyslammed. Now f**k off, because there’s a good chance you’re going to be demanding another apology in the future from the judge that puts your stupid brat behind bars.

That was a comment by "Madisonconservative". Yes, there is so much to admire on the Right of American politics at the moment.

One small problem: go look at the video of the story from Today Tonight (I am not sure how long it will be available) and it appears clear that the Daily Telegraph has misquoted the mother. She is referring to her own boy apologising.

The mother in fact comes across very well in the Today Tonight story. She is very embarrassed by her son's actions, and becomes emotional when she complains about it being splattered all over the internet. Who can blame her? She considers her son has made a big mistake and paid for it; it doesn't need to follow him indefinitely on line.

Now, hopefully the mother has more sense than to be reading the internet to see what people are saying about this. But The Daily Telegraph has had the uncorrected story up all day - and unless they have seen some part of the Channel 7 video that we haven't - it is a clear mistake which should be corrected immediately. If she is receiving abusive phone calls, and given what happened earlier in this story, that would seem very likely, I hope she sues the Daily Telegraph.

The Daily Telegraph Facebook page has had a comment up for 7 hours pointing out they are mis-quoting the mother: why is the webpage uncorrected?

As for the continued simple minded praise and cheering that is coming from websites about this video: they continue to disgust me.

UPDATE:

The Daily Telegraph is featuring an apology this morning, but it's hardly profuse:

IN an article published in The Daily Telegraph yesterday headlined "Bully's angry mum wants victim to apologise", it was written that bully Ritchard Gale's mother Tina wanted her son's victim to apologise for slamming her son to the ground.

But she had, in fact, said she wanted her son to apologise to his victim.

The Daily Telegraph apologises for the error.

What's more, on line, it appears above the original story of the incident from (at least) a couple of days ago, not the story in which the paper defames the mother! In fact, as you can see from the screenshot, the apology is the most popular story; but the second most popular story is still the (uncorrected when you click on it) report from yesterday:


Clearly, as at the time I write this, there may still be hundreds (thousands?) of people following Tweeted, emailed or Facebooked links to the incorrect story, and they will not see the correction.

When I posted last evening, I noted there had been a message on the Daily Tele's Facebook page for at least 7 hours telling them they had got it wrong. It also looks like some of the commenters took to emailing the Tele to point out the mistake, as this poor woman was copping abuse from all over the world for something she never did.

The apology seems to have gone on line at midnight local time, and yet, as I say, the link to the original wrong story still does not carry the apology.

Hey, Daily Telegraph: look at the title of this post. It's for you.

UPDATE 2: I see that Hot Air has a large "correction" now - although it is not as clear as it could be:

Update: Corrected — bully’s mom wants son to apologize

Whose son? Why not try this - Corrected - bully's mom wants her son to apologize.

Idiots.

UPDATE 3: what did it take? A phone call from a lawyer? I see that sometime in the last hour or two, the Daily Telegraph finally made their incorrect story page disappear. Congratulations, and where's your cheque book?

UPDATE 4: the Daily Telegraph has dropped the apology from its front page already. (It is still on the site, if you know where to find it.) Barely 12 hours is considered enough to give the apology prominence, is it?

UPDATE 5: Pssst: Daily Tele. Your Facebook entry for this story is still headed:

The mother of a school bully whose video has gone viral wants the victim to apologise. See her side of the story.

And the only link is to the now removed story. Try putting a link to the apology and correction, you incompetents.

For urgent delivery to Catallaxy

Female hormone could be key to male contraceptive

A question of timing, part 2

A couple of physicists have been speculating on whether the LHC could send a particle to the past, with the suggestion being that messages could be sent that way.

Apart from “don’t buy Betamax” (a joke I have borrowed from “Good Omens”,)  messages from the future could be even more useful, as Japanese events are showing.

But here’s another interesting point:  is anyone connected with CERN looking at particle sprays with the intent of deciphering any encrypted messages therein?  Something of a long shot, I would have to admit.

Here’s an idea for a short story (possibly been already done?):  physicist interprets CERN message as “turn LHC off now!”, then has to convince his fellow scientists he’s not mad.

A question of timing - Part 1

I don't have any doubt that anti-nuclear campaigners take political advantage of nuclear crises while they are underway.

However, it seems to me to be actually counter-productive for the pro-nuclear lobby to have been continually talking down the seriousness of the problem at Fukushima, particularly in the early days when no one knew how it would pan out.

But this what the well meaning Barry Brook has been doing, not to mention those who are simply anti-Green for political reasons, such as Andrew Bolt.

Here, for example, is Barry Brook's opening comment on 11 March:

1. There is no credible risk of a serious accident.

A reactor building exploding and/or catching fire on TV every day since then does not, shall we say, seem entirely consistent with that.

Andrew Bolt had been running with "Chenobyl only killed 65", including on Insiders last week, but finally did a column explaining (pretty pathetically) why he was not acknowledging that the WHO expects the total toll to be 4000 "extra deaths". I see that the New York Times noted today:

The great tragedy of Chernobyl was an epidemic of thyroid cancer among people exposed to the radiation as children — more than 6,000 cases so far, with more expected for many years to come. There is no reason for it to be repeated in Japan.

If you're going to talk about Chernobyl honestly, this might be something worth acknowledging. (In fact, I see now, that he finally has in a post that has just appeared this evening.)

A few days ago, Andrew was also happy to quote from a Brook's column the words of MIT expert Oehman:

The plant is safe now and will stay safe.

Even William Saletan at Slate was complaining two days ago:

Early reports said four Japanese plants were in trouble. Now it appears only two were disabled. Early reports said three employees had radiation sickness. Now we're hearing only one is sick, and even in that case, the radiation dose appears relatively low. Two reactor buildings exploded, but these were explosions of excess hydrogen, not nuclear fuel, and neither of them ruptured the inner containers that encase the reactor cores. Some radiation has leaked, but according to measurements outside the plants, the amount so far is modest. Any leak is bad, and the area of contamination, even at low rates, will probably spread. Japan needs our sympathy and our help. But let's not exaggerate the crisis.

Doesn't that seem, after another couple of days of nothing under control, to sound like a pretty feeble attempt at putting lipstick on a pig?

Here's the lesson: with nuclear power, it doesn't pay to spend a lot of time downplaying a crisis until the crisis is actually resolved.

In all honesty, when you're evacuating tens of thousands of people within tens of kilometres from a nuclear accident, you just have to 'fess up and acknowledge that when nuclear goes wrong, it can really go wrong. At the very least, if you have nuclear anywhere near a populated area, it stuffs up the lives of a large number of people in a very major way. It may not end up killing any (or many) of them, but even so, they have a high degree of anxiety and uncertainty in all manner of things (safety for the kids to go back there, is the soil safe for food crops, are their houses now effectively worthless, can you eat the fish, etc.)

So, does this mean I have joined the nuclear nay-sayers club? No, not at all.

The pro-nuclear lobby is still right, in the big picture, and in the long run.

I still believe that nuclear power will be important to reduce CO2 emissions in the future, and the best moral argument to not abandon it is to say that, if you think the problems for people within a 30 km radius of a malfunctioning nuclear reactor are bad, it is likely to be small change compared to the suffering that the worst predictions of global warming and climate change may entail for a huge portion of the world's future population.

And people do need to be reminded of the huge, annually recurring, number of people directly killed globally in the coal mining and oil industries (not to mention the environmental damage of oil spills.)

But even so, don't start saying that yet. Once the current emergency is over, hopefully with much less radiation leaked than the worst case scenarios paint, that may be the time to start talking up nuclear again, emphasising the low number of casualties compared to other industries, and that there are ways that passive safety can be built into future reactors. (Not putting them right beside the ocean might help too.)

But talking up nuclear right now - it just won't wash.

Another danger

It’s a little surprising to read in the New York Times that it’s not only the Japanese reactors which are the source of danger, but the cooling pools around them too:

The pools, which sit on the top level of the reactor buildings and keep spent fuel submerged in water, have lost their cooling systems and the Japanese have been unable to take emergency steps because of the multiplying crises.

By late Tuesday, the water meant to cool spent fuel rods in the No. 4 reactor was boiling, Japan’s nuclear watchdog said. If the water evaporates and the rods run dry, they could overheat and catch fire, potentially spreading radioactive materials in dangerous clouds. …

The pools are a worry at the stricken reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant because at least two of the reactors have lost their roofs in explosions, exposing the spent fuel pools to the atmosphere. By contrast, reactors have strong containment vessels that stand a better chance of bottling up radiation from a meltdown of the fuel in the reactor core.

If any of the spent fuel rods in the pools do indeed catch fire, nuclear experts say, the high heat would loft the radiation in clouds that would spread the radioactivity.

“It’s worse than a meltdown,” said David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists who worked as an instructor on the kinds of General Electric reactors used in Japan. “The reactor is inside thick walls, and the spent fuel of Reactors 1 and 3 is out in the open.”

More on passive safety in nuclear reactors

I just found this at Technology Review (talking initially about the Japanese reactors):

The reactors at the nuclear plant, built in the early 1970s, rely on active cooling systems that require electricity. Newer plant designs would lessen or eliminate the need for active cooling, making use of natural convection or a "gravity feed" system to cool reactors in the event of an emergency.

In one design, for example, the relatively new Westinghouse AP1000, water is suspended over the reactor housing. If pressure within the system drops, this allows the water to fall into the reactor area, submerging it in enough water to keep it cool.

While passive systems could be better in the event of electrical failures, they might not always be the safest systems. Kadak says that in an active system, it's easier to ensure that coolant gets exactly where it needs to be—it's simply pumped to the right location. Designing passive systems, on the other hand, requires complex models of how fluids will behave in a system that could be rendered incorrect if the system is damaged.

Kadak says that even more advanced reactor designs could overcome these issues. Some advanced reactors use molten metals to cool the reactor—the mass of these systems is enough to provide cooling in an emergency, he says, although if the molten metal were displaced by an earthquake, that could be a problem of its own. He's devoted much of his career to another advanced alternative, the "pebble bed reactor," which is designed to make it impossible for the fuel to get hot enough for a meltdown. The tradeoff is that the reactor has to be much larger--for a given amount of power--than a conventional reactor.

Life's too short...

....to spend too much time abusing other internet identities.

But it has to be said - I've been wanting to say it here for so long - Catallaxy has the largest collection of obnoxious, immature, misogynistic, unreasonable, dishonest, disingenuous, lazy, dumb, gullible, un-insightful, self absorbed, uncharitable, childish, abusive, detached from reality, unpleasant, unscientific, selfish, tribal, repetitive, hypocritical, pedantic, tedious, psychologically unbalanced, and flat out wrong collection of commenters in all of the Australian blogosphere.

They are free to choose which adjective goes with which of them. Most there deserve more than one epithet. This is no shock to them - most have been told at their own blog many times.

Now, to resume normal blogging....

Update: some mis-spellings corrected, although epitaph for epithet might be explained as a Freudian slip.

Huh. Scientists can really can sound like Sheldon

I normally really like James Empty Blog, run by climate scientist James Annan and his wife Jules, both of whom are living in Japan (near Tokyo.)

But I can't quite get around the tone of their posts regarding the Japanese earthquake. The first was by Jules who noted she had a "pleasant earthquake" in a new building that suffered no damage.

The next was headed "Earthquake fun" by James, talking about having to walk along the train track after the train he was on stopped short of the station.

Then came "Mildly Inconvenienced" by James, confirming that they were not suffering at all really.

Next, a series of pretty sunset photos.

And then, a post "Don't Panic", complaining that there is too much media hype (I think about the nuclear problems and the effects of the earthquake in Tokyo) and ending with:

Come on people, get a grip. It's an inconvenience. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a catastrophe down here, and the best thing most people can do is to get back to normality as quickly as possible. Turn off the wall-to-wall disaster porn on TV and have a look out of the window. It's a beautiful spring day and the cherries are starting to blossom.

I actually then sent a comment saying, in effect, that I like their blog and doubt that they really meaning to sound this way, but they were doing a very good job of sounding like they were completely insensitive to major human suffering happening just down the road, so to speak.

It must have sounded harsher than that, because it has not come out of moderation.

But they have let a couple of other comments through of similar effect.

I'm sorry, but this is weird. More than 10,000 of your neighbors have suddenly died and nearly all of your neighbors will suffer economic consequences well into the future. While the nuclear threat ight be overstated, it is certainly plausible. yet you wax indignant about "hype".

I agree. And as far as disaster porn is concerned, you can hardly expect a still evolving, unprecedented type of disaster in Japan with that amount of loss of life and property damage to not have blanket coverage.

My message to the Annans: you're probably not Sheldon-like scientists incapable of normal human empathy for suffering that is happening not all that far from where you live.

But if you keep making cheery posts making light of how a nearby disaster has not affected you, you're sure doing a damn fine job of sounding like insensitive arses.

Word games

After admitting on Insiders that Tony Abbott uses weasel words on climate change, so that his position of spending billions of dollars to attempt to match Labor’s target for CO2 reduction is somehow “sellable” to climate change skeptics/deniers, Andrew Bolt today tries to make out a case  that when other journalists/commentators say effectively the same thing, they are “verballing” him.  (OK, maybe Combet is to a degree by use of “denier”, but Lenore Taylor – I’m not accepting that she is at all.)

Passive safety in nuclear design

Long term readers of this blog would know that I used to follow with much interest the development of pebble bed reactors - in particular in the development program South Africa had going until they ran out of money. (Use the "search this blog" bar at the side for "pebble bed reactors" and you'll find lots of past posts.)

The big attraction of the pebble bed was its (claimed) passive safety features. As the Wikipedia article on pebble bed reactors notes (although it does sound like it has been written by a strong proponent of pebble beds):

When the nuclear fuel increases in temperature, the rapid motion of the atoms in the fuel causes an effect known as Doppler broadening. The fuel then sees a wider range of relative neutron speeds. U²³⁸, which forms the bulk of the uranium in the reactor, is much more likely to absorb fast or epithermal neutrons at higher temperatures. [2] This reduces the number of neutrons available to cause fission, and reduces the power of the reactor. Doppler broadening therefore creates a negative feedback because as fuel temperature increases, reactor power decreases. All reactors have reactivity feedback mechanisms, but the pebble bed reactor is designed so that this effect is very strong and does not depend on any kind of machinery or moving parts. Because of this, its passive cooling, and because the pebble bed reactor is designed for higher temperatures, the pebble bed reactor can passively reduce to a safe power level in an accident scenario. This is the main passive safety feature of the pebble bed reactor, and it makes the pebble bed design (as well as other very high temperature reactors) unique from conventional light water reactors which require active safety controls.

The reactor is cooled by an inert, fireproof gas, so it cannot have a steam explosion as a light-water reactor can. The coolant has no phase transitions—it starts as a gas and remains a gas. Similarly, the moderator is solid carbon, it does not act as a coolant, move, or have phase transitions (i.e., between liquid and gas) as the light water in conventional reactors does.

A pebble-bed reactor thus can have all of its supporting machinery fail, and the reactor will not crack, melt, explode or spew hazardous wastes. It simply goes up to a designed "idle" temperature, and stays there. In that state, the reactor vessel radiates heat, but the vessel and fuel spheres remain intact and undamaged. The machinery can be repaired or the fuel can be removed. These safety features were tested (and filmed) with the German AVR reactor.^[6]. All the control rods were removed, and the coolant flow was halted. Afterward, the fuel balls were sampled and examined for damage and there was none.

Wikipedia has a short article on passive safety design in nuclear reactors generally, noting that there are some designs using liquid metals as a heat sink for passive safety. Somehow, I can't help but think that using liquid metal just doesn't sound as passively safe as a gas cooled pebble bed.

In any event, surely recent events show that the goal of passive safety deserves to be a major component of future nuclear design.

Back to Australian politics

It feels a little early to go back to speaking about anything other than the death and destruction in Japan, but I’ll briefly note some recent political commentary about Australia that seems about right:

* Annabel Crabb wrote on Friday:

Let's look at the basics here.

Labor's problem is one of trust and consistency.

Political advocacy is about believing something, and setting out to bring a majority around to your point of view. In the best political advocates, principle and determination work together to the extent that even voters who fundamentally disagree with their position on a particular policy stance will grudgingly support them anyway.

Federal Labor is a long way from that right now, thanks to the messages it has sent out to the electorate on a number of issues.

Sounds about right to me. As I was arguing elsewhere on the weekend, with climate change policy in particular, it doesn't seem to be a case (unlike in the Coalition) where actual scepticism of the science has any real sway in Labor (if there were any strong private sceptics in the party room, I am betting we would have heard about it from Rudd aligned leakers during the last election campaign), but rather it just seemed to be lack of will to take on a populist campaign.

While I think there is some under-appreciated value in the way Gillard has announced the intention to have the carbon price in place before the details are worked out (it gives the “Ju-Liar” factor a longer time to burn out before an election,) what was the sense in announcing Tim Flannery was going to be paid to convince Australians of the need for a carbon price only a week or two before announcing we were getting one in a year's time anyway? And whoever thought that it was a good look to have two podiums at the announcement, making Bob Brown look like a co-Prime Minister, won’t be making that mistake again, I bet.

There has been something a bit screwy going on about how policy is made and announced in Labor ever since Kevin Rudd got elected, and it still seems kind of hard for the media to pin down exactly whose fault it has been.

Still, on climate change policy I remain as appalled as ever that Tony Abbott got the leadership on the back of a substantial number of climate change sceptics in the party room who (I am betting) get their science from reading Andrew Bolt.

Speaking of Andrew Bolt, I was a bit surprised to see that even he acknowledged on Insiders yesterday that Abbott uses weasel words on the science which the climate change deniers in the Party can interpret so as to give “plausible deniality” to the idea that Tony might really take climate scientists seriously. Look at his words on Friday after Minchin said warming wasn’t happening:

Climate change does happen, mankind does make a contribution…

As Bolt said, you can easily interpret this to mean that the contribution is absolutely minimal compared to natural forces.

And look at the answers he gave to a series of on-line questions from climate change denying skeptics on Thursday. One of them brings up the “but a carbon tax by Australia it won’t affect the world’s temperature at all” line, as well as giving a spray about how all of climate science is completely corrupt, and Abbott comments:

Good point. People shouldn’t act out of mere environmental vanity

Well what exactly is the point of your plan to match Labor CO2 reduction targets by spending billions of taxpayer dollars, young Tony?

Journalists do know how inconsistent and willing to court climate change denial Abbott has been; I think they just tire of pointing it out all the time because they have bad poll numbers of Labor to talk about instead.

* But going back to Labor’s problems, David Penberthy wrote recently:

The best thing Gillard could do right now is to start a policy fight with the Greens – go and visit Olympic Dam perhaps and come out behind BHP’s push to expand its uranium exports – just to remind them and the voters that she’s the Prime Minister and is running the show. It’s not like Bob Brown is going to pack his bags and go and sit with Tony Abbott. On the current polling the alliance between Gillard and Brown is paving the way for an Abbott Government anyway.

I think that's probably right, although nuclear power is going to have a public image problem until we see how the Japanese post earthquake crisis evolves.

Japan on our minds

There is some anxiety in our house at the moment about the inability to contact some relatives in the earthquake affected areas of northern Honshu. One in particular works in one of the tsunami affected towns, quite close to the waterfront.

In the meantime, the best commentary on the Japanese character and its response to natural disasters I have read is by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times. It is well worth a read.

Update: an email came through this afternoon that the people we were most worried about are OK, but there’s still a couple of others about whom we have not yet heard. They would not have been close to the water, however, so we trust they are OK.

Update 2: of course there are heaps of videos being put up on Youtube, but I haven't yet spotted the remarkable seaside town destruction footage that I was watching on TV earlier tonight. But Boing Boing had this video up, showing some very unnatural looking behaviour by some Tokyo buildings:

Actually, I see that a couple of million people have watched this version of the video on Youtube (because it has the link from Boing Boing), but only 5,000 or so have watched the original, uncropped version which the guy also has up on his Youtube account. I actually find the original more interesting, as you get to see other people on the street watching the sway:

Update 3:

I don't want to turn this into disaster porn, but the video below is similar to th longer one I mentioned above that I saw on TV earlier tonight. It does get a bit upsetting when it turns briefly to the scared child and shocked adults watching from their safe point:



Update 4: Let's hope he's wrong, but a UK geophysicist is quoted at the Nature web site saying this:

"Although certainly very big, today's quake was not totally unexpected," says John McCloskey, a geophysicist at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, UK. "Technically, it was in fact an aftershock of the weaker quake earlier in the week — even though it may sound odd that an aftershock can be stronger than the main shock." ...

"The previous quake, although much smaller, significantly increased stress in the fraction of the fault zone that ruptured today," says McCloskey.

The sequence of quakes has probably also affected the stress field further south along the fault zone, critically increasing the earthquake risk in the Tokyo region, he says.

"There is a strong interaction of quakes along a subduction zone, and we can certainly expect a number of major aftershocks in the next weeks," he says. "Some may be as large as, or even stronger than, the quake that last month devastated Christchurch in New Zealand. And chances are that another very large shock could occur to the south near Tokyo."

My apologies for worrying reader Geoff, who's due to fly into Tokyo soon.

Count me as a skeptic...

...when it comes to the Zero Carbon Australia plan that says Australia could be powered by renewable energy by 2020:

Our research was undertaken with two explicit parameters: energy technologies selected had to be both commercially available and from carbon-free renewable energy sources. This explains why the ZCA Plan identifies a 60/40 mix of concentrated solar thermal (CST) power and large-scale wind developments as the backbone of a decarbonised energy system. Together with existing hydropower, investment in CST with molten salt storage, backup from a small percentage of biomass power, an upgraded electricity grid, and comprehensive energy efficiency measures, Australia can reliably meet its energy needs from renewable electricity generation. The technologies selected were not preordained; rather they were chosen on the basis that they worked within ZCA’s parameters.

The ZCA scenario also includes natural gas. Under the plan, Australia would use existing gas infrastructure in a staged scale-back, until the last gas power plants are mothballed in 2020. The most carbon-intensive coal power plants must be first to be decommissioned as large-scale renewables come online, made possible by the deployment of CST power towers with molten salt storage for 24-h operation.

Brave New Climate has been critical of this plan before. Here's one post about it, but there are others.

Too big for my backyard

Time Magazine has a story on the newly retired space shuttle Discovery: it spent a total of a year in space; was the shuttle that delivered the Hubble Space Telescope; and first flew in 1983: a long time in aviation terms, let alone a space plane. (In fact, it's kind of surprising that it handles the vibration of repeated launches so well, isn't it?)

Here's something I didn't know from the story; there are twin astronauts:

The [next] mission will be commanded by the husband of wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Mark Kelly. His identical twin brother Scott is currently the skipper of the space station; he returns to Earth next week on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

The New York Times wrote about where the retired shuttles will end up. There is hot competition amongst various museums, but it seems the Smithsonian is sure to get one.

The Kennedy Space Centre wants one too. I reckon they'll need it, as the tourist value of that place while there's a big gap in developing a new manned rocket will likely diminish.

Higher water

Real Climate talks about the recent finding that some Antarctic ice freezes from the bottom, but also notes the big picture with ice melt:

....there is a new assessment of the net mass balance of Antarctica and Greenland. Rignot et al have updated results, including those from the GRACE gravity measurement satellite, to the end of 2010 and show that the downward trend in ice mass is continuing (stronger in Greenland than in Antarctica). The net rise in sea level associated with this decline is about 1.3 mm/yr, which will likely accelerate with further warming. Complementary analyses of the surface mass balance of Greenland (Tedesco et al, 2011) also show that 2010 was a record year for melt area extent.

This rate of melting is more than was figured into the tabulated IPCC AR4 estimates of sea level rise, and any further acceleration will obviously make the discrepancy worse. Indeed, even in the highest forcing A1F1 scenario, the IPCC calculated only a 0.3 mm/year contribution from the ice sheets averaged over the whole 21st Century! This was clearly a gross underestimate.

Extrapolating these melt rates forward to 2050, “the cumulative loss could raise sea level by 15 cm by 2050″ for a total of 32 cm (adding in 8 cm from glacial ice caps and 9 cm from thermal expansion) – a number very close to the best estimate of Vermeer & Rahmstorf (2009), derived by linking the observed rate of sea level rise to the observed warming.

The Song of the Mice

Physorg notes that there is research going on about how mice sing (ultrasonically):

Whether or not mouse song involves learning either through auditory imitation or behavioral feedback (e.g., from the mother)... is a subject of hot debate, and the answer is proving elusive. To highlight the difficulties facing researchers, two studies published on March 9, 2011 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE have come to differing conclusions about whether mouse vocalization patterns are innate or learned.

Rodents sing and they laugh. Sound like good company, really.

The problems with politics

On the Labor side, this announcement yesterday of a new regime of requiring businesses to report on gender equality issues feels like a real blast from the past, as I seem to recall that 1980's Labor used to like grand gender based social engineering ideas too:

Under the changes announced on Wednesday, companies with more than 100 staff will be required to report on how many workers are female and how their conditions compare to male employees.

Spot checks will also be carried out, with non-compliant businesses to be shut out of government-funded grants and industry assistance programs.

Wasn't there a time when the Howard government actually seemed to be achieving more (or just as much) in terms of women members of Parliament than Labor with all their Emily's List activism?

At least it has the benefit of putting Labor back in the grand tradition of being the time wasting bureaucracy party. It had been slipping in that regard in the last few years.

On the other hand, there's a brief history of the Liberal Party and its attitude to greenhouse gases in The Age today, which also shows the Coalition has taken a strong turn to the past since the Abbott ascendancy.

I remain unhappy with both sides of politics.

Hot places

There’s a short meteorology article out talking about the hottest places on Earth. Turns out that desert temperatures can be higher than I ever realised:

The Lut Desert, located in southeast Iran has long been regarded as one of the hottest places on Earth. Numerous studies have examined the relationship between the expression of severe thermal temperature across this hyper-arid landscape and the unique natural physical characteristics of the Lut, such as the wind-sculpted mega-yardangs, and the vast areas of closely packed rock fragments known as desert pavement (Alavipanah 2007; Azizi et al. 2007). The Lut Desert was determined to be the hottest spot on Earth in two of three years previously evaluated with the Aqua/MODIS satellite LST data (Mildrexler et al. 2006). Here we found that the Lut Desert had the highest surface temperature on Earth in 2004 (68.0°C; 154.4°F), 2005 (70.7°C;159.3°F), 2006 (68.5°C; 155.3°F), 2007 (69.0°C; 156.2°F) and 2009 (68.6°C; 155.5°F), five of the seven years analyzed in this study. The Lut is the only place on Earth to have a surface temperature above 70°C (158°F) and regularly has the largest, contiguous area of surface temperatures above 65°C of anywhere on Earth (Fig. 2).

But then the paper has a local surprise:

In 2003 a scorching temperature of 69.3°C (156.7°F), the second highest temperature of the seven-year dataset, was detected in the province of Queensland, Australia. Australia is the driest inhabited continent on Earth with vast arid lands where annual maximum LSTs routinely exceed 60°C.

So, Queensland has recently had a temperature just a fraction under 70 degrees. Amazing.

UPDATE: my bad. As noted in the comment, the article is not talking about air temperature, the hottest measured record of which still seems to be 58 degrees in Libya. I thought that the article was talking about desert air temperatures measured by satellite, but it is talking about "skin temperature", which can be way higher than the air temperature.

Well, that explains why the temperatures seemed extraordinarily high to me. Must not post so quickly.

A brief observation about Charlie Sheen..

Given that he appears to need to smoke continuously during his web appearances, he's quite the gift for the anti-smoking campaigners of the world.

* his last broadcast - hopefully the last broadcast ever - can be viewed here, if you really need to watch a man going insane.

Viewing recommendation

On ABC last night was the first part of the documentary series "How Earth Made Us", which, as the BBC explains, is "the epic story of how geology, geography and climate have influenced mankind".*

It was excellent viewing, making connections between geology and the dawn of civilisation which I certainly hadn't realised before. It also starts with one of the most weirdly spectacular places on earth - that giant gypsum crystal cave in Mexico, photos of which were circulating on the internet in the last year or two.

Get over to iView and watch it while you can, if you missed it.


* I've been noticing lately that "mankind" seems to be making some kind of a comeback, as against "humankind". That's odd, since as far as gender neutral talk goes, I had actually gotten used to "humankind". Now if BBC Two isn't using it, I feel I've been prematurely gender sensitive.

Unexpected downer

Spotted at Physorg:

Daily use of aspirin and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, commonly known as NSAIDs, is associated with a 22 percent increase in the risk of erectile dysfunction, Kaiser researchers found in a study of more than 80,000 men in Southern California. The results were a surprise because erectile dysfunction, commonly abbreviated ED, is thought to be caused by inflammation, and the researchers expected that use of the drugs would alleviate the problem.

The monogamous Douthat

Well, that sex survey indicating a (surprising) increase in sexual restraint amongst American youth is attracting some interesting commentary.

Ross Douthat had a column "Why Monogamy Matters" which noted as follows:

...there are different kinds of premarital sex. There’s sex that’s actually pre-marital, in the sense that it involves monogamous couples on a path that might lead to matrimony one day. Then there’s sex that’s casual and promiscuous, or just premature and ill considered.

This distinction is crucial to understanding what’s changed in American life since the sexual revolution. Yes, in 1950 as in 2011, most people didn’t go virgins to their marriage beds. But earlier generations of Americans waited longer to have sex, took fewer sexual partners across their lifetimes, and were more likely to see sleeping together as a way station on the road to wedlock.

And they may have been happier for it. That’s the conclusion suggested by two sociologists, Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, in their recent book, “Premarital Sex in America.” Their research, which looks at sexual behavior among contemporary young adults, finds a significant correlation between sexual restraint and emotional well-being, between monogamy and happiness — and between promiscuity and depression.

This correlation is much stronger for women than for men. Female emotional well-being seems to be tightly bound to sexual stability — which may help explain why overall female happiness has actually drifted downward since the sexual revolution.

One can imagine that such talk would annoy some people as sounding just far, far too much like what your well meaning parents may want to say to their daughter. And indeed, there's a (somewhat childishly) sarcastic article on Huffington Post:

Douthat teaches us that sexual restraint leads to "emotional well-being." Restraint is another word for: happiness! Not knowing too much is the biggest happiness of all. Little girls crave security, that's what you have to understand. Bunnies. Baa-Baa. Binkies! Mommmmy!

I see Andrew Sullivan has also weighed in, but without any venom. Someone at a Slate blog wrote:

I have yet to read a Douthat column without feeling deep embarrassment for the author. He has a completely disorganized mind and seems unable of self-reflection. I read that ... "thing" he wrote yesterday and chanted facepalm, facepalm, facepalm as a calming mantra.

Yes, talking about restraint in sex really upsets some people.

Update: it's been a long time since I linked to Mark Steyn, but his column on this has some more examples of amusingly appalled liberal readers of the Douthat column, and is worth a look.

Evolving dimensions - the start of something big?

Well, this is interesting. Bee at her Backreaction blog has post explaining (not exactly in layman terms, but you can get the general drift) a big, pretty new, idea in physics that may actually go somewhere:

The idea that space-time might not be higher-dimensional on short distances but instead be lower-dimensional has been around for some while, inspired by results from causal dynamical triangulation. In a paper last year, Anchordoqui et al proposed to examine the possibility of lower dimensionality at small distances for its phenomenology in their paper

Vanishing Dimensions and Planar Events at the LHC
Luis Anchordoqui, De Chang Dai, Malcolm Fairbairn, Greg Landsberg, Dejan Stojkovic
arXiv:1003.5914v2 [hep-ph]

Greg Landsberg gave a talk about this work on our last year's workshop on Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity (recording of the talk here). The basic idea is that the dimensionality of space changes with distance in such a way that it is 3-dimensional on scales we have tested it, lower dimensional on distances shorter than we have probed yet (about 1/1000 of a femtometer) and possibly higher-dimensional on distances larger than we can observe. The picture suggested is that of a (one-dimensional) string being knitted, and the knitted sheet (2-dimensional) being crumpled to a ball (3-dimensional). The authors dubbed this "evolving dimensionality." The merit of having a smaller number of space-like dimensions at small distances or high energies is that it improves the renormalizability of quantum field theories and esp. that of quantum gravity. (In contrast to additional dimensions which actually make the problem worse.)

Sounds interesting. As Bee goes on to note, the idea has a big problem ("lacks a mathematical model for the new fundamental structure and the dynamics of quantum fields in it") but even so makes some (I think) testable predictions.

Now I'll annoy science types by admitting something: my reason for liking the sound of it is that it seems to get us back to a possible "higher dimension". I always thought it a pity that physics lost the 4th big dimension as a place in which locate God and places like heaven and hell. You can always get around that by living in a type of cyber-heaven in the mind of God, like Tipler uses for his Omega Point, but a hyper-dimensional realm has its own nice feel about it too.

Is it April yet?

There's a 1 April feel about the following story:

Japanese researchers have been immersing iron-based compounds in hot alcoholic beverages such as red wine, sake and shochu to induce superconductivity.

Scientists from the National Institute for Materials Science, Japan, found that immersing pellets of an iron-based compound in heated alcoholic beverages for 24 hours greatly increase their superconducting ability.

But as it appears in the journal Superconductor Science and Technology, published on 7 March, it appears not to be a joke.

Red wine worked best, by the way...