His great favourite is the second century Roman Emperor and Stoic Marcus Aurelius. I think you’d agree that stoicism is a great attribute for a premier, especially one in New South Wales.
Bob has said that the meditations of Marcus Aurelius are as good a guide to practical politics as he’s come across.
and yet get a response of "haw, haw, you're convincing no one; give it up, you've lost"? I mean, it sure sounds like dumb.There is no such thing as an honest climate sceptic. Those who reject mainstream science are either conscious frauds or gullible believers.....While many low-information “sceptics” have simply been misled by reading the wrong material on the Internet, or trusting the wrong sources, the great majority of active opponents of climate science are complicit in their own deception, preferring to believe obvious lies because it suits their cultural and political prejudices.Is he overstating the case there when he uses "conscious frauds", particularly when you look at what passes for commentary on climate change by economists at Catallaxy?
Me: Which leads me to a fundamental Catallaxy and Coalition bit of nonsense: you are (mostly) dead keen on nuclear, but totally against a carbon price that would actually make implementing it competitive.
Rafe:
5. Blair's Law on the Right. I'm still on Tim Blair's blog roll, and I see the occasional visitor still drops in here via that. Not sure how much longer that will last, though, when I note here how Andrew Bolt's blog, Blair's blog and Catallaxy are increasingly inter-related and referring each other to stories, and it all makes a pretty convincing case of Blair's Law ("the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force") applying just as much to the Right as to the Left.Not enough attention is paid to the ‘why’ of Obama’s Hitlerian attack on Christianity, specificially in relation to contraception.It's all because Obama and the Democrats and "homosexualists" have a "passionate hatred and fear of human sexuality and fecundity," according to the 1950's style Catholic conservative CL, which seems a bit odd to me because most conservatives feel the Left's fondness for non-interference in sex lives indicates they are generally pretty keen on sex.
Fruit flies infected with a blood-borne parasite consume alcohol to self-medicate, a behavior that greatly increases their survival rate, an Emory University study finds.
By the mid-18th century sexual mores in England (and in much of Europe, too) had undergone a revolution, writes Faramerz Dabhoiwala, an Oxford historian who has spent much of the last 20 years researching the subject. This rupture was far more dramatic than anything that happened in 1963 when, according to the poet Philip Larkin, “sexual intercourse began”. Less than 100 years after the execution for adultery of Mary Latham, a young woman in Puritan New England, many people were thinking about sex in ways that would make some contemporary readers blush. The wealthy and powerful proudly and openly displayed their mistresses. A public agog for salacious gossip followed the lives of courtesans and high-society prostitutes (such as the oft-painted Kitty Fisher), and pornography was widely available.
...as Mr Dabhoiwala persuasively argues, the reasons for the first sexual revolution were complex and varied. The migration of people to big cities had made the bonds of traditional morality much harder to enforce, while the explosion of mass-printed media both spread ideas and exploited prurient interest in sexual shenanigans. Exploration also had an influence, as travellers returned with tales of very different sexual cultures. But the key driver, Mr Dabhoiwala believes, was the spread of religious tolerance and nonconformity, which eroded the church’s authority and let people define morality more personally.But for salacious, somewhat unpleasant detail, you can't go past this:
The upper-middle-class members of the Beggar’s Benison club in Scotland, founded in 1732, apparently thought nothing of arranging meetings where they could drink, sing and fondle naked women. Such evenings were brought to a fitting climax, as it were, when they would communally ejaculate into a ceremonial pewter platter.I hope they didn't use it for the haggis the next day.
It gets worse (the hypocrisy, that is):Professor Carter added: “The details of any of these payments are private to me. I can’t imagine that Heartland has released this document – so the question is, how this document was released.”
“Scientists are paid not to have agendas or opinions, but to summarise the scientific evidence.”
Now I have to say I found this last statement pretty rich, coming from someone who is continually writing opinion pieces for newspapers and websites.
For example, during the carbon tax debate of last year, Professor Carter collectively described Chief Scientist Ian Chubb, Climate Change Minister Greg Combet, now Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery and former Australian Government climate adviser Professor Ross Garnaut as the “four horsemen of the climate apocalypse”.
Was this his opinion, I wonder? The kind of opinion he says scientists aren’t allowed to have?
“I’m a senior scientist and I speak in public on climate change. My scientific authority has nothing to do with who is paying me. I’m not implying a threat here, but I would advise you to be very cautious about what you impute. “
He said he “emphatically denies” any suggestion that his opinion on climate change was swayed by funders, but then stated this would not matter in any case.
Of course, Carter has been noteworthy in the Institute of Public Affairs, which refuses to disclose funding too.
“Professional scientists cannot have their opinion bought,” he said, adding it was not important who funded research, but whether or not it was correct.
This is an odd assertion for Professor Carter to make, given that he has regularly over the years attempted to suggest that mainstream climate scientists are motivated by research dollars.
As far back as 2006, in the UK’s The Daily Telegraph, Professor Carter wrote: “scientists are under intense pressure to conform with the prevailing paradigm of climate alarmism if they wish to receive funding for their research.”
Oddly, on Professor Carter’s webpage he chooses to state that he receives no research funding from “special interest organisations such as environmental groups, energy companies or government departments”.
Yet, if this funding doesn’t matter, then why make this statement? If he takes no interest in who funds his projects, then how would he know if he is receiving funding from “special interest groups” like those he describes.
I pointed out to Professor Carter that it was standard practice for scientists to disclose the funders of research when they publish in peer-reviewed journals. This, said Professor Carter, was “a very quaint and old fashioned practice”.
As always, Stephen Colbert captures the heart of the issue: “A woman’s health decisions are a private matter between her priest and her husband!!!”There is the matter of how "self insured" institutions can work with this compromise deal. But if that can be sorted, I don't see either the Bishops or the Republicans benefiting from trying to keep this a live issue.
It's always worth asking whether this type of research is only finding something novel, or just something no one had previously looked for. But a 50 year survey of plankton seems a pretty good basis for saying significant changes have happened.The study, published in Nature Climate Change found there has been a dramatic switch between the prevalence of dinoflagellates to diatoms – two groups which include many of the microscopic planktonic plants forming the base of the ocean’s food chain.
The patterns show shifts in the distribution of species known to cause harmful effect through toxin poisoning.
The researchers, from Swansea University’s Institute of Life Science and the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science in Plymouth said the effects of the shift could already be impacting UK waters, with shellfish harvesting sites off the Scottish west coast closing.
“Imagine looking at your garden one morning and finding that the grass had suddenly been replaced by bushes,” said Professor Graeme Hays, one of the paper’s authors from Swansea University.
“This may sound far-fetched but we have found changes of this magnitude in the biology of the North Atlantic, with a dramatic switch in the prevalence of dinoflagellates to diatoms.”
Using over 92,000 samples spanning 50 years from the Continuous Plankton Recorder survey, the team found that increases in temperature – a key element of climate change – had helped to drive this shift.
A 53-year-old woman, Janet Appiagyei, went berserk and stripped an 18-year-old sales boy, Godfred Darko, and beat him to pulp by pulling and squeezing his genitals until they turned livid.I like the bit about "sole importer of Mama Honey mackerel" thrown in the middle.
Janet Appiagyei, who is the wife of Apostle Daniel Boateng of Joyful Life Ministry International, a charismatic church at Kwashieman, and the sole importer of Mama Honey mackerel at Okaishie, accused Godfred of stealing GH¢1,600 from the sales they made on Friday, January 27 and Saturday January 28, 2012.
According to a source close to the Striking Force Unit of the Ghana Police Service, the woman stripped the boy after subjecting him to severe beatings and began to pull his manhood until it was bruised.
“I take [an] exception to what he said that I don’t even attend meetings. As a chairman as he is, even [when we were discussing the budget] how many times did he come with a clean face. You go and smoke your wee. .. He is a wee smoker, he goes out there, he doesn’t even do anything, please, please, I am not scared of that id***.”Oh wait a minute. The lurid nature of the reporting includes a graphic photo of a dead alleged thief with a bullet hole in the chest. I won't link to that, but of the comments following the story (many doubting the police version of how they shot the guy), no one seems concerned about the photo.
The former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania argued that science has been hijacked by politicians on the left, and that climate change is “an absolute travesty of scientific research that was motivated by those who, in my opinion, saw this as an opportunity to create a panic and a crisis for government to be able to step in and even more greatly control your life,” Santorum said.Funnily enough, the relatively cautious and moderate climatologist John Neilsen-Gammon had a post out this past week entitled "Three Simple Facts About Carbon Dioxide" which begins:
“I for one never bought the hoax. I for one understand just from science that there are one hundred factors that influence the climate. To suggest that one minor factor of which man’s contribution is a minor factor in the minor factor is the determining ingredient in the sauce that affects the entire global warming and cooling is just absurd on its face. And yet we have politicians running to the ramparts — unfortunately politicians who happen to be running for the Republican nomination for president — who bought into man-made global warming and bought into cap and trade,” he said, before criticizing presidential rivals Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney by name for their previous positions on cap and trade and climate change.
Some things about carbon dioxide in the climate system are so firmly established and fundamentally important, you can use them as litmus tests to determine whether the person you are listening to is honest and knowledgeable. Note that somebody contradicting these facts may be dishonest or ignorant or both, but it’s usually not possible to tell which.Rick should read.
Fact #1: A small concentration of CO2 is a big deal.
In his report released last night, the hydrologist found that "although hindsight indicates a better flood mitigation result could have been obtained ... it would have been unjustifiably risky using the information available at the time".
"The primary factor when forming this view is that there would generally be no grounds to release large flows from Wivenhoe Dam during a flood event that are greater than the inflows so far received," the report says.
The strategies would have relied on operators releasing large flows from Wivenhoe in anticipation of drastic inflows.
"Between 11am on January 8 and 1pm on January 9, both of these strategies would have involved dam outflows significantly in excess [almost double] the peak dam inflow observed until that point," the report says.
"During this period, the above scenarios would have required Wivenhoe Dam to operate as a flood amplification dam rather than a flood mitigation dam.
"The only reason to increase flows so dramatically at such an early stage would have been if there was a sure indication that future inflows [would] exceed the remaining flood mitigation space in the dam, and that storage capacity should be 'created' for later."
Earlier, the Australian owner of Big Pictures photo agency, Darryn Lyons, told the inquiry that photographers "didn’t know where they stand" when taking images of celebrities.
"We do not know from one day to the next whether they are going to want it or not," he said, speaking via video link from Australia.
"It is so ambiguous - we do not know what is right and what is wrong.
"Fifty per cent of celebrities want to be photographed and they love it but others will pick and choose their terms."
Patna: The Bihar police have arrested a black magician who ruthlessly stabbed a man claiming that it would cure him of his mental illness and help him lead a normal life.The 55-year-old accused was apprehended on Friday evening while he was stabbing the victim Taleshwar Murmu (45) at the latter's residence in the Mehboob Khan locality in eastern Bihar's Purnia district.
"The more you endure the pain of the stab, the faster the cure," the black magician kept on telling the victim who, police said, kept on screaming loudly due to the severe pain from the stabbing.
In the study, the rats’ testes were exposed to high frequency ultrasound at 3 MHz for 15 minutes each, two days apart. The sessions were enough to kill the existing sperm in the testes and stop the development of additional sperm. The first study to look at the effect of ultrasound on sperm production, in the 1970s, showed that the depletion was temporary, and Tsuruta hopes his studies will show the same result...Some men are keen to get in on the technique:
Tsuruta stresses that the procedure isn’t something you should try at home, despite the fact that commercial ultrasound machines are available online and men are apparently purchasing them for this purpose. “I get emails asking me what conditions men should use,” Tsuruta says. “This is really not something you should do at home because we don’t know nearly enough about its safety and reversibility and what other effects there might be long term.”
Seqwater said all south-east dams were receiving heavy inflows from surrounding catchments after heavy rainfalls across the region.
The water body’s decision to open the flood gates at the officially 100 per cent full Wivenhoe came under fire from the state opposition.
Opposition spokesman Jeff Seeney told parliament the dam was not completely full.
“Is not this release of water from Wivenhoe Dam, when it is holding only 40 per cent its available storage capacity, a clear indication that the government has learnt nothing from the water crisis,” Mr Seeney said.
But Natural Resources Minister Stephen Robertson said the extra capacity was needed to prevent a repeat of the 1974 floods.
“What Mr Seeney on behalf of the LNP suggests is that Wivenhoe Dam should not be used for flood mitigation purposes,” Mr Robertson said.
“As a result, that puts into jeopardy the very safety of people in Brisbane and surrounding areas.”
And on 20 December, only a few weeks before the flood, Deputy Opposition Leader Springborg repeated in detail the same view (that the dams should store more water, not less) on Brisbane radio.
The decision was made (post flood) to reduce dam levels seeing there is still a La Nina weather pattern hanging around, but I can't say that I have noticed evidence that anyone influential was being outspoken about reducing dam levels in anticipation for summer 2010/11.
In any event, the flood enquiry has taken a curious turn, after having finished its report and sent it to the printers, by virtue of journalist Hedley Thomas (who was running around promoting an "independent" expert or two who were pointing the finger at dam management almost before the flood subsided.)
It turns out that the inquiry seems to have missed that in emails and notes circulating at the time of the flood, the dam engineers were not talking about the same response levels as their later formal report to the Commission indicated.
The dam engineers have therefore been recalled and grilled over how they wrote their report: the accusations of fraud and cover up have flown fast and thick from the Counsel Assisting the inquiry: I have had the feeling that their new found aggression is partly due to the fact that a journalist has shown up the well paid lawyers, as much of this evidence was already before the inquiry, just its importance seems to have been missed.
So, the basic problem is that although the manual gives escalating classifications of response, each involving discretionary faster releases of water, on the weekend before the flood, the engineers were being rather careless to record what level their actual response was at. It even seems a bit unclear whether they recognised the level they were at. So (if I understand it correctly) when writing the report, after an incredibly tiring and stressful period, they looked at how much water they had started releasing, combined with other inflows coming into the river, and petty much retrospectively nominated that they had moved to level W3 by the Saturday morning.
This isn't an ideal way to demonstrate that you were working in accordance with a manual. In fact, in evidence on the last day, one engineer seems to have acknowledged (unwisely, if you ask me) that not knowing what level your response was at would constitute a "breach of the manual". This raises a good philosophical question: if you do the same things a manual would have required just based on your own judgement, you may not have been "following the manual," but have you actually "breached" it?
As far as I could tell from some of the figures, the move out of the lower W1 response did, for much of the weekend, involve not a whole lot more water than the maximum W1 release. (I could be wrong on that, though, as the chief engineer said it was clear that they skipped level W2 and went straight to W3.)
But - given that other independent engineers have already said they think the dam operators mitigated the flood as best they could - getting too hooked up on demonstrating compliance with the manual should surely not triumph over the practical outcome of how they operated it.
As I understand it, each response classification is triggered by the dam reaching certain levels, and it seems the dam engineers certainly recognised the significance of the threshold levels being reached. In other words, they did increase water flow as levels grew, and they did make decisions as to how fast to release water based on how fast the dam level was responding. The manual even at level W3 allows them to consider problems caused downstream by flooding the highest bridges near Fernvale, and they also took that into account in deciding rates of release.
The thing is, as far as I can tell, the manual does not say (at least at the first 3 levels - W4 is doing whatever must be done to save the dam) "once level X is reached, reduce dam levels by Y metres as soon as conceivably possible." And you wouldn't want it to. If there was blue sky forecast for the next week, you wouldn't want to be flooding Brisbane for no real reason.
So: surely you are always going to have to rely on judgements of the dam engineers as to rate of release based on a variety of factors that it is probably difficult to define precisely for all circumstances.
The importance is the outcome, and those who say they should have released a lot more water starting on the Saturday are, of course, doing this with the advantage of hindsight about what was soon to become record inflows into the dam. There must be hundreds of ways to model how releases could have been done differently - but high early releases would have caused earlier flooding of the lowest areas, and how do you recognize at the time the release rates which will turn out to strike the "ideal" balance?
I therefore await the inquiry's findings in this regard with some interest. Non compliance with the manual is said to have significant legal implications, as it would allow class actions. I wonder, however, whether a finding of non compliance might allow legal cases which nonetheless fail due to inability to prove negligence, or flood levels that would have been significantly lower. Surely insurance companies won't get paid much, or at all, if some modelled difference amounts to less than (say) 30 cm? And hydrology seems a rather imprecise science anyway. Lots of Brisbane flooded on land the Council did not expect would flood in a repeat of the 1974 flood - and this one peaked lower.
So the engineers have my sympathy, as do the politicians; the lawyers and the journalists - not much at all. In fact, I suspect Mr Thomas may only be giving false hope to a bunch of witch hunters.
UPDATE: as Hedley Thomas and the Courier Mail are hell bent on criticising the engineers (and just about everyone else associated with the enquiry,) you have to read another media outlet to get the same point I was making. From the ABC:
If the commission finds the engineers breached the operating manual, then it opens the Government to a class action, which law firm Maurice Blackburn estimates could exceed $1 billion.
Insiders question that figure, but regardless of the record keeping both Mr McDonald and an independent hydrologist have found the four engineers released the appropriate amounts of water and that has not yet been challenged.
If it stays that way, it means the only damage from these allegations are to the reputations of the four men.
Norman Swan ran an extraordinarily scary interview on the Health Report last week that put a lot of detail on that recent avian flu research story.
To be honest, I hadn't paid all that close attention to the controversy until now, but the details in the interview really surprised me. For example, the influenza pandemic of 1918 managed to kill about 90 million people with a mortality rate of 2%.
The bird flu in nature appears to transmit rarely between humans or mammals. The man made variety, however, spread airborne to infect about 80% of ferrets used in the experiments, with a 60% mortality rate.
And some of this is sitting in a freezer somewhere, and the details of how to make are pretty obvious to many scientists from information put out already.
Mind you, as a terror weapon, it is surely the equivalent of all out nuclear war - no one would want the world it leaves. I think the bigger worry is its accidental release, as well as the news that there appears no reason why natural mutations of bird flu won't turn as deadly, eventually.
You should read the whole thing...
New generation of nuclear reactors could consume radioactive waste as fuel | Environment | The Guardian: A new generation of "fast" nuclear reactors could consume Britain's radioactive waste stockpile as fuel, providing enough low-carbon electricity to power the country for more than 500 years, according to figures confirmed by the chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc)....
The engineering firm GE Hitachi has submitted an alternative proposal based on their Prism fast reactor, which could consume the plutonium as fuel while generating electricity.However, the Prism design is a sodium cooled reactor, said to have passive safety. I've always felt that liquid sodium doesn't sound all that safe. But what do I know? (Then again, what do engineers know? They build reactors besides the sea in earthquake zones.)
First plants caused ice ages: research: New research reveals how the arrival of the first plants 470 million years ago triggered a series of ice ages.Land plants came along that late? I need to memorise evolution time lines better. Anyhow, back to the report:
Among the first plants to grow on land were the ancestors of mosses that grow today. This study shows that they extracted minerals such as calcium, magnesium, phosphorus and iron from rocks in order to grow. In so doing, they caused chemical weathering of the Earth's surface. This had a dramatic impact on the global carbon cycle and subsequently on the climate. It could also have led to a mass extinction of marine life.
The research suggests that the first plants caused the weathering of calcium and magnesium ions from silicate rocks, such as granite, in a process that removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, forming new carbonate rocks in the ocean. This cooled global temperatures by around five degrees Celsius.
In addition, by weathering the nutrients phosphorus and iron from rocks, the first plants increased the quantities of both these nutrients going into the oceans, fuelling productivity there and causing organic carbon burial. This removed yet more carbon from the atmosphere, further cooling the climate by another two to three degrees Celsius. It could also have had a devastating impact on marine life, leading to a mass extinction that has puzzled scientists.
Nordhaus:The piece completely misrepresented my work. My work has long taken the view that policies to slow global warming would have net economic benefits, in the trillion of dollars of present value. This is true going back to work in the early 1990s (MIT Press, Yale Press, Science, PNAS, among others). I have advocated a carbon tax for many years as the best way to attack the issue. I can only assume they either completely ignorant of the economics on the issue or are willfully misstating my findings.
Either way, it certainly wouldn't have been a direction. That's not Murdoch's style. It would more likely have been an observation expressed by him or a lieutenant during or after dinner or at a coffee break between sessions. His editors, better than most at reading the wind, would have noted the boss's latest leanings and applied this knowledge at the first opportunity - many of them would have arrived back in Australia the morning of the budget lock-up. Of course, it would be open to an editor to ignore the boss's preferences, but as I discovered, that can sometimes come at a cost.
IN 1988, while attending a conference of News Corporation editors in Aspen, Colorado, I made the mistake of raising the thorny issue of journalistic ethics. The proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, was not amused.In short order, Murdoch, who was hosting the session, turned red, then purple, as I repeatedly asked a senior executive from his London paper The Sun whether the publication had any ethical framework. It didn't, the paper's news editor finally admitted. In most media companies that admission might have earned the executive a rebuke. But instead, I copped it, with Murdoch later dismissing me as a ''Fairfax wanker''. (For the record, I wasn't at that point; I became one 12 months later.)...
I left that conference in Colorado more than 20 years ago concerned that Murdoch saw ethics or, at least, the discussion of them, as an inconvenience that got in the way of the newspaper business.
To Murdoch's (waaaaay too late) credit, it is being reported that these arrests have arisen from information News Ltd itself has provided to police. Huh: a boss who telegraphs that ethics is for sooks, then later facilitates arrests for breaching them.
I think it's relevant that it is _already_ required in New York (and several other states) that health insurance coverage include contraceptives (with the same limited church exception provided by the Obama administration), and of course Catholic institutions comply. In particular, the hyperbolic objections of Archbishop Dolan of New York to the Obama administration ruling seem particularly inappropriate, since it appears that institutions under his oversight are already in compliance.I'm not sure that this is right, given the explanation given in a Washington Post column explaining the sort of compromises the States have come up with:
Under Hawaii law, religious employers that decline to cover contraceptives must provide written notification to enrollees disclosing that fact and describing alternate ways for enrollees to access coverage for contraceptive services. Hawaii law also requires health insurers to allow enrollees in a health plan of an objecting religious employer to purchase coverage of contraceptive services directly and to do so at a cost that does not exceed “the enrollee’s pro rata share of the price the group purchaser would have paid for such coverage had the group plan not invoked a religious exemption.” A New York law has similar provisions.Talk about your fine lines. The Church doesn't have to directly provide the contraceptive cover, but has an obligation to tell the employee how to get it at the same cost that the Church could have provided under their policy (if I am reading that right.)
So, all of the new year polls show Labor and the coalition pretty much where they were at the end of last year, with a two party preferred vote of 46 to 54 respectively. Given that you normally expect incumbent governments to pick up a bit during an election campaign, and that you only need to shave 4 percent off the Coalition lead to get back to where we were at the last election, Labor is a difficult but not absolutely impossible position, but of course you wouldn't know that from some of the media coverage.
But the strangest thing about politics at the moment is the standing of both leaders. There is no doubt that Julia Gillard seems incredibly unpopular, particularly amongst anyone over the age of 50. There is also no doubt that there has been widespread acclaim in media commentary since the last election for Tony Abbott as having been successful beyond expectation for the Coalition.
So why is it that in polling, they are both equally disliked, with large net dissatisfaction ratings? This has been the case since November on the Newspolls. Since then, Gillard has also been running as preferred PM by a narrow margin.
I don't think I have heard anyone in the media explaining this. Gillard had her high profile visits late last year, but I would have thought any benefit from those would not last long. Tony Abbott has been "Mr No" on the boat arrival issue very firmly since then, and I suspect that people think he is playing politics on what is too sensitive an issue for games, but I could be wrong.
It's all very curious.
Eating infected fish and fish-based products can lead to so-called anisakiasis. This illness often occurs in regions in which raw or semi-cooked fish is traditionally consumed. Symptoms include severe stomach pains, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting and fever, or even severe allergic reactions. Around 20,000 people are affected throughout the world each year, with a growing tendency. Hotspots include the coastal regions of Europe, the USA, as well as Japan and developing countries, in which fish and seafood are an important source of protein.Interestingly, the nematode can pass through several species, but ends up breeding via those big, loveable whales:
The marine parasites have a complex lifecycle, in which they frequently change host. The final hosts for each species are Baleen and toothed whales (so-called cetacea), which absorb the parasite with their food and act as its host until sexual maturity...Until we live in a world where whales are given giant worming tablets, like our pet dogs and cats, I'll stick to cooked fish, thanksg
On the way to the whale, fish, cephalopods and crabs act as intermediate hosts for the parasites.
Senior hydrologist Jim Stewart says records going back to 1884 for the Paroo River have been broken, with extraordinary rainfall totals over the weekend....
THE Gold Coast is smashing January weather records after the big downpour in the Hinterland and the border.And I see that over in New Zealand, it's been a particularly wet summer, in parts:
Coolangatta yesterday set a record for January rainfall of 479.6mm, up from 392.8 in 2006.
Springbrook on the wet and wild Wednesday received 291mm, easily breaking the 2008 daily record for January of 265mm.
Hardest-hit were Nelson and Takaka, where flooding plagued the region for most of the month causing slips, road closures and evacuations.
Nelson was soaked with six times its normal rainfall, while Takaka had eight times its usual.
Both recorded their highest December totals since records began in 1941 and 1976 respectively, with 446mm of water hitting Nelson and 1103mm pouring down on Takaka.
Takaka also recorded its highest ever one-day rainfall, on December 14, with 392mm flooding the town - beating its previous record of 259 mm recorded in November 1990.
Conversely, the winds caused the southwest to be warm, dry and sunny. Rainfall there was well below normal, Niwa said.A bit reminiscent of the unusual situation in the US last with Texas in severe drought, but the Mississippi having record floods.
Flooding is the greatest threat to the UK posed by climate change, with up to 3.6 million people at risk by the middle of the century, according to a report published on Thursday by the environment department.Note again that the forecast is for more problem flooding, but also water shortages. It's all to do with intensification of the hydrological cycle, a concept the climate change skeptics have trouble acknowledging as having been predicted years ago as part of AGW. Funny how the newspapers seem to provide evidence for it, though.*
The first comprehensive climate change risk assessment for the UK identifies hundreds of ways rising global temperatures will have an impact if no action is taken. They include the financial damage caused by flooding, which would increase to £2bn-£10bn a year by 2080, more deaths in heatwaves, and large-scale water shortages by mid-century.
It is important to recall that the end-stage of the BH evaporation remains an open issue (see,e.g., Refs. [14, 15, 16]), because we do not yet have a con rmed theory of quantum gravity. In fact, the semiclassical Hawking temperature grows without bound, as the BH mass decreases, which can be viewed as a sign of the lack of predictability of perturbative approaches. This is an important issue also on a purely experimental side, since deviations from the Hawking law for small BH mass(near the fundamental scale MG ) could actually lead to detectable signatures.
...now the CDC’s report is out, and Morgellons activists are horrified: The study, carried out in Northern California, found no environmental or infectious cause, nor evidence of real parasites. The fibers, which many Morgellons patients have insisted were of composed of a substance that was unidentifiable by any lab, were mostly just pieces of fabric and skin fragments from repeated scratching. (You can read the full study on the Public Library of Science.) In conclusion, the CDC writes on its “Unexplained Dermopathy” page,I still have this itchy left shoulder blade, though...This comprehensive study of an unexplained apparent dermopathy demonstrated no infectious cause and no evidence of an environmental link. There was no indication that it would be helpful to perform additional testing for infectious diseases as a potential cause. Future efforts should focus on helping patients reduce their symptoms through careful attention to treatment of co-existing medical, including psychiatric conditions, that might be contributing to their symptoms.
Male house mice sing like birds to serenade their mates, a study has found.
But don't expect to catch a performance in your kitchen - their high-pitched soprano voices are beyond the range of human hearing.
Austrian scientists made the discovery after slowing down the ultrasonic courtship calls of mice to study them. They found that mouse music bore a "striking" similarity to birdsong.
The vocalisations were complex and personalised, containing "signatures" that differed from one tiny crooner to another. Until recently, it was assumed the sounds made by male mice were no more than high-pitched squeaks.
Previous studies by the same group confirmed that male house mice sing when they pick up a female's scent, and that females are attracted to their songs. Females were able to distinguish between their own brothers' songs and those of unrelated males, even when hearing their siblings sing for the first time.
An asteroid will pass by the Earth on Friday in something of a cosmic near-miss, making its closest approach at about 1600 GMT.The asteroid, estimated to be about 11m (36ft) in diameter, was first detected on Wednesday.
At its closest, the space rock - named 2012 BX34 - will pass within about 60,000km of Earth - less than a fifth of the distance to the Moon.....
Earlier estimates put the asteroid's closest distance at as little as 20,000km, near the distance at which geostationary satellites reside, but observations by observatories overnight showed it will pass at a more comfortable distance.Just goes to show what I noted in 2010 - small, city killing asteroids may turn up suddenly and there isn't much we can do about it.
Improved telescopes would identify an estimated one million near-Earth objects over the next decade to 15 years, and 8,000 to 10,000 of them will have some probability of hitting the planet, Schweickart says. A hit by even one of the smaller rocks, say the size of a convenience store, would have the impact of 400,000 Hiroshima nuclear bombs exploding at once, he says.Isn't it odd how little publicity such a close passing potential disaster attracts in the media?
Eating fried food may not be bad for the heart, as long as you use olive or sunflower oil to make it, experts say.
They found no heightened risk of heart disease or premature death linked to food that had been cooked in this way....
In an accompanying editorial, Professor Michael Leitzmann from the University of Regensburg in Germany said: "Taken together, the myth that frying food is generally bad for the heart is not supported by available evidence.
"However, this does not mean that frequent meals of fish and chips will have no health consequences.
"The study suggests that specific aspects of frying food are relevant, such as the oil used, together with other aspects of the diet."
Great idea Steve, intervene to make an existing service more expensive to help an alternative to get up.
R&D will take care of the greater cost of nuclear power, if it is allowed to proceed instead of being brought to a halt as occurred in the US (under Carter?).