A secular hymn

So, I'm slowly catching up with what the young'uns have long known about technology and music by paying for a family subscription to Spotify.   (It does seem ridiculously good value.)  I'd never used the app before until last weekend.

For someone of my vintage, it's remarkable to think how this digital world really makes previous decades of physically collecting recorded music largely redundant.   Not that I have ever collected much myself - listening to music probably plays a smaller role in my life than it does for the average person.   But still, I can retrospectively now deem my lack of interest in acquiring vinyl and cds as justified by technological changes that I never saw coming.

I say this by preamble of posting a song by Michael Nesmith which I hadn't listened to for years - Harmony Constant.   At the risk of sounding morbid, I've always felt that this would be a good one to play at a (my?) funeral service, as it definitely has a spiritual aspect and is rather uplifting.   I have found a good bit of commentary about the song here, calling it a secular hymn, which seems accurate.   



Update:  Hmmm.   While it's OK seeing Nesmith singing the song, his vocal in that version isn't that great.  I much prefer the album version which can be heard on the next clip, starting at 2min 55sec.   But you should listen to his cheering version of "Different Drum" at the start too.

Fantasy budget time again

David Leyonhjelm likes to do a fantasy libertarian budget every year, although it's hard to see why he bothers, since the details need never change when you're an ideologue who lives by simple rules (government is essentially bad; taxes must be absolutely minimal so that government must be tiny.)

One thing of interest, though, is how his libertarian policy is completely against government foreign aid (other than short term disaster aid), which presumably would mean leaving that field wide open to the big pockets of China - a country with internal policies which are pretty much the complete antithesis of what libertarians like that's actively seeking to spread its influence with foreign aid deals.  Way to step back and let China buy its way into favour with all of our near neighbours, Senator Blofeld.


    

A good idea, I think

It was only back in October last year that I wondered why it didn't make sense for governments (at least in sunny states, like Queensland) to make it compulsory for new house builds to have solar power and battery storage.

It seems I wasn't the only person thinking about it, as California is likely to go down that path (at least for the solar cells, if not the storage):

California may soon be the first state in the nation to require virtually every new home be fitted with solar panels.

The mandate, which would take effect in 2020, is expected to be approved by the California Energy Commission on Wednesday as part of the state’s ongoing push to move from fossil fuels to renewable power.

Under the proposal, all new homes and apartments three stories or less would be required to include solar installations. Exceptions would apply to houses built in shady areas or new structures that include other sources of renewable power.

The proposal is expected to raise the average home cost by nearly $500 annually over the term of a 30-year mortgage, according to state officials. However, homeowners are expected to save nearly $1,000 a year on their power bills, officials said.

I think that this idea would go over well in at least Queensland, New South Wales and the Northern Territory.   I'm not so sure about Victoria and South Australia, where cloudier, wetter winters than the northern  States enjoy probably make solar power seem of limited use for several months of the year. 

Time for more climate change whiplash

This article in Nature News:  Can the world kick its fossil fuel addiction fast enough is another in the long line of "climate change whiplash" reporting we've been seeing for a few years.  On the one hand, emissions are clearly still going up when the economy picks up; on the other, past estimates of the decreasing cost and increasing deployment of renewable energy were clearly underestimates, and a lot of renewable energy deployment is in the pipeline.

As to whether market based policy is going to work fast enough, there seems to be increasing doubt:

But politics can also help to bring about rapid change. While Trump is fighting on behalf of the fossil-fuel industry, leaders of other countries are moving in the opposite direction. The United Kingdom and France have both announced plans to ban the sale of petrol- and diesel-powered vehicles by 2040. And more than two dozen countries have committed to phasing out coal by as early as 2030.

These types of mandate are a sign that energy politics might be shifting towards more brute-force methods, says Michael Mehling, an energy and environmental-policy researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Economists tend to favour market-based programmes, such as the EU’s Emissions Trading System, but Mehling says there is little evidence that such arrangements will drive the kind of rapid transformational change needed to meet global climate goals. Old-school government mandates might be the last resort, Mehling says. “If the decisions are made at a sufficiently high level,” he says, “they can change the landscape pretty much overnight”.

In any case, as I've been posting for some time, it's not as if those who are supposed to be the Right wing proponents of small government and free market solutions (libertarians and so called "classical liberals") are actually interested in addressing climate change at all:  they are more interested in corporations making money now, and a gormless in principle belief that governments never doing anything is better than governments doing something, such that they will clasp any reason (ranging from entertaining outright denialists to a "it's too late now anyway" defeatism) so as to justify not endorsing any policy action.   They are worse than useless, and just need to be bypassed.  

And to be fair, the Left of politics needs to be criticised for a certain gullibility in the policies and advice they have promoted, too.   At least they are interested in solutions, which is the first step in the process.

But look at the revision now going on regarding the estimates of the social cost of climate change, just in the matter of agriculture.  From this paper's abstract:

Despite substantial advances in climate change impact research in recent years, the scientific basis for damage functions in economic models used to calculate the social cost of carbon (SCC) is either undocumented, difficult to trace, or based on a small number of dated studies. Here we present new damage functions based on the current scientific literature and introduce these into an integrated assessment model (IAM) in order to estimate a new SCC. We focus on the agricultural sector, use two methods for determining the yield impacts of warming, and the GTAP CGE model to calculate the economic consequences of yield shocks. These new damage functions reveal far more adverse agricultural impacts than currently represented in IAMs. Impacts in the agriculture increase from net benefits of $2.7 ton⁻¹ CO₂ to net costs of $8.5 ton⁻¹, leading the total SCC to more than double.

That's some massive change to an input into an IAM, isn't it?

And further to my skepticism that IAMs could have adequately worked out the cost of intense rainfall and sea level rise, I note from a review of a new book on the latter (my bold):

Projections diverge on how fast the inundation will proceed if nations stay on a “business as usual” path in their greenhouse gas emissions. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects a maximum of about three feet by the year 2100; James Hansen and colleagues project several times that much over the same time frame; a recent research paper that recalculates the dissolution of Antarctic ice warns of five feet as a median estimate. Sea level rise on such a scale would submerge an area inhabited, just now, by 153 million people. For an indefinite number of decades or centuries after that, the rise would continue.

As former presidential science advisor John Holdren once pointed out, human beings have three options: reduce the amount of climate disruption they are causing, adapt as intelligently as possible to the change they can’t avoid, and suffer. “The question – the issue that’s up for grabs – is what the mix going forward is going to be,” Holdren has said.

Under a “work and hope” scenario – one in which the world cuts emissions with extreme speed and hopes that the more optimistic climate change projections are the accurate ones – sea level rise might be limited to something like two feet. But even that more modest figure would imply worldwide consequences exceeding our ability to comprehend them. “Staggering,” “catastrophic,” and other alarm words have lost much of their voltage. In these busy times, “trillions” are the new “millions” – and thus rather negligible. But two feet of sea level rise is, beyond question, coming.

So, have IAMs been worked out on the "best case" scenario of 2 feet by 2100, when it may be 2 1/2 times  that, and causing the re-location of 153 million people? 

But, again, why should this be taken as a licence to do nothing in terms of CO2 reduction?   Even if it takes 200 to 300 years (instead of 100 years) of increase to reach a 3 metre sea level rise, slowing down the rate surely buys time for (some) cities to respond.  

It's about time I revisited the matter of ocean acidification too.  That is a key area that, I believe, is not realistically amenable to to geoengineering, regardless of what techno-optimists may think can be done temperature wise.  

Oh look, another libertarian do-nothing

For reasons unimportant to this post, I was searching through this blog for past entries about Helen Dale, and was reminded that she had written this in 2013:

5. Libertarians in particular need to drop their widespread refusal to accept the reality of climate change. It makes us look like wingnuts and diverts attention from the larger number of greenies who spew pseudoscience on a daily basis. 

A year after that, she started her (brief) career as a staffer for David Leyonhjelm, the accidental Senator whose party's policy is still a facade for denialism:

Scientific evidence suggests that the Earth’s climate has changed throughout its existence, sometimes dramatically, and that changes in climate have impacted human civilisation. Much of human history has been subject to the effects of global warming or cooling – the origins of the Sumerian, Babylonian and perhaps also biblical stories of a great flood, for example, are probably due to a massive rise in sea levels following global warming 7,600 years ago.

Global cooling from 1300 to 500 BC gave rise to the advance of glaciers, migration, invasion and famine. The Medieval Warm Period from 900 to 1300 AD led to the Vikings establishing colonies and trade routes.

Whether human activity is causing climate change or not, the important issue is whether governments are capable of implementing policies that mitigate it without reducing the prosperity of future generations.

Should the evidence become compelling that global warming is due to human activity, that such global warming is likely to have significantly negative consequences for human existence, and that changes in human activity could realistically reverse those consequences, the Liberal Democrats would favour market-based options.

And Leyonhjelm himself makes denialist quality tweets, such as:

 I also see (from her Facebook page, I think) that Dale is attending the Friedman Conference in Sydney later this month, which as I have already noted, is having climate change denialists Ian Plimer and "Jonova" as speakers.

What's the bet that Dale will not make a scene at the conference about it inviting as speakers only full blown climate change deniers?  

And that Chris Berg will appear on the ABC again and not be challenged about his similar status as fellow traveller with climate change denialism.  

Intense rain, climate change, again..

It's long been a theme here that new records for intensity of rainfall and resultant flooding, due to even the relatively modest increase in the atmosphere's water carrying capacity is likely the first big problem with climate change in many parts of the world.

And it's a hard one to deal with:   sure, in theory, you can argue that flood prone cities can prepare themselves by spending more on higher capacity drainage systems.  But replacing pipes and drains of one diameter that used to be adequate 100 years ago with significantly larger drains to cope with the increased frequency of intense, overwhelming rainfall, is  surely going to be very expensive; and for a regional government it is not going to be clear which particular location is going to face an unexpected downpour first.

Why on earth should I think that the economic modelling of climate change effects could be accurately making estimates of that when tallying up the figures for their estimates of when the benefits of climate change crosses the line of being clearly outweighed by the harm?    I would think they can put a rough estimate of of the cost of increased damage from flooding - they've got some historical guidelines for that - but as flooding increases, governments will be under pressure to pre-empt them by the expensive sorts of capital works that I would think is very, very hard to estimate.


Anyway, these thoughts were inspired by the news of (what sounds like) a new rainfall record in Hawaii, which has caused lots of damage:

A staggering rainstorm on the north shore of the Hawaiian island of Kauai is the latest clue that climate change-related impacts are already threatening the islands. On April 14 and 15, a gauge in Waipa recorded 49 inches of rain in 24 hours. For perspective, the rains from Hurricane Harvey, which inundated the Houston area with up to 60 inches last year, occured over a four-day span.  

The state is still assessing the full extent of damage, and Gov. David Ige recently announced a plan to help farmers who suffered losses during the storm. More than 220 people had to be airlifted to safety by the Army and National Guard as a major road was blocked by landslides. A herd of bison was carried off by the flood waters, with some animals having to be rescued from the ocean.

A group within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that investigates extreme weather and climate events is analyzing the storm to  determine whether the storm broke the national record for the most rainfall within a 24-hour period.

The current 24-hour record  is 43 inches, set in Alvin, Texas in 1979.

Setting a new record will be just the latest reminder that as the climate warms,  parts of Hawaii are already experiencing bigger torrential rains and will likely see more frequent tropical cyclones. Pao-Shin Chu, Hawaii’s state climatologist and a professor at the University of Hawaii, noted that his research showed that the Big Island has seen more frequent heavy rains in the past 50 years.

“If given a one degree C warming, the atmospheric moisture is expected to increase by 7 percent. With this additional moisture available in the air, it may help trigger heavy downpours if other conditions are right,” Chu said by email.

Of course, the damage caused in a rural area is not even necessarily preventable by better drainage.   It can be hard to retain a hillside if it collapses.

Here's a recent article, too, from DW about extreme weather being validly linked to climate change is increasingly proved by science.  Interesting that it deals with the Roger Pielke Jr claim that that increased costs from weather events is more related to increased building in risk prone areas (and therefore not proof there are more extreme events causing damage.)   The insurance industry doesn't believe it; scientists don't believe it.   And Pielke Jr's continuing contrarianism is fading from influence, anyway.  Good.

A cluster of a rare, unpleasant disease

Ocular melanoma?  Hadn't even heard of it, and for some unfortunate people from a town in the USA, there's a cluster of it for completely unknown reason.

Read about it at NPR.

Pascoe has a point

See his tweet here, about how way low company tax in the UK is not helping their economic growth much.  Read the thread too.   Perhaps I like his point further down more:

Everyone's an expert

Hey, I see via an extract at Catallaxy that Henry Ergas is critical of the Gonski 2 report on education, and this is what he thinks:

No one could sensibly blame the subsequent worsening on ­inadequate funding. Having grown by almost 30 per cent in real terms since 2000-01, public ­expenditure per student is at all-time highs. Nor are there too few teachers: while the number of ­students increased by 25 per cent during the past 40 years, teacher numbers rose 60 per cent, halving the student-teacher ratio compared with the 60s.

What has changed, however, is that how well students do in school no longer matters. University places used to be tightly ­rationed, and tertiary admission depended on the scores students received on completing secondary schooling; now, with 44 per cent of students proceeding to university and that proportion set to rise further, test scores scarcely have any enduring impact.

The contrast with the countries whose performance the report wants us to emulate could not be starker. Although the report seems entirely unaware of this fact, in Japan, South Korea and the Chinese-speaking jurisdictions — which invariably dominate the league tables — matriculation rankings are the primary factor determining students’ long-term prospects. Put in the language of sociology, these systems are sternly unforgiving, offering few or no second chances.

And even in Finland, whose ­approach is less harsh, Amanda Ripley’s widely acclaimed book, The Smartest Kids in the World, concludes that “school is hard, and tests affect students’ lives”, “creating a bright line” that shapes ­future career opportunities.

 He might have half a point here, but has he seen anything about the ridiculous extra curricular tuition system in Korea, in particular?   You can obviously go too far in that direction, making student's lives an absolute misery; but yeah, it'll make your education system's average performance look good internationally.  

And I'm not sure if it is true still, but I understood that the Japanese system used to be mainly about getting into a good university, but the degree of work involved in many of the arts/business university courses once a student got in was pretty easy.   

I also find it hard to be too critical of the "alternative paths" emphasis to get into university now.  I mean, I think it really is clear that some 17 year old students just haven't reached the level of maturity needed to devote themselves to higher education, but that may well change within a couple of years.

I also like the way that medical schools here do check the personality suitability of people to do medical degrees now.  

I don't think our education system is perfect, and it is really frustrating the degree to which teaching is pretty clearly prone to fads and ideas that flow in and out of popularity every decade.   I mean, I thought Naplan testing was a pretty obviously good idea, but didn't really realise that some teachers had opposed it from the start as setting up the system to be gamed by schools that would use the test in ways that were not intended.  The Naplan skeptics seem to have won the day, too.  Or at least, that is my impression.

Currently, when I look at the matter of how teachers are supposed to assess work submitted by my high school attending son and daughter, my overwhelming impression is that the academics are still very prone to overcomplicating the theory of teaching and assessment.   But even then, without my having studied teaching and education, I don't really know whether my gut reaction is right, or whether the assessment criteria they use now are much better than what used to exist.  

So the frustrating thing is that everyone thinks they are an expert, and it is very hard to judge the better way forward.   And it is always treated like a neverending crisis, yet we still end up feeling pretty comfortable that we're making new engineers, doctors and scientists who aren't endangering our lives with their incompetence.   So it can't be that bad, surely.  

The Russians prey on the paranoid streak in the US right

The Guardian reports:

Speculation about a US armed forces exercise that led some Texans to fear that the Obama administration was plotting martial law was stoked by a Russian disinformation campaign, according to a former director of the CIA.

Russian bots were so successful in planting wild ideas during a military exercise called Jade Helm in 2015 that Russian social media bandits launched another offensive the following year, attempting to influence the presidential election itself, Michael Hayden told MSNBC.

“There was an exercise in Texas called Jade Helm 15 that Russian bots and the American alt-right media convinced most – many – Texans that Obama planned to round up political dissidents, and it got so much traction that the governor of Texas had to call up the [state guard] to observe the federal exercise to keep the population calm,” said Hayden, who was CIA director from 2006 to 2009 after serving as director of the National Security Agency.

“At that point I’m figuring the Russians are saying: ‘We can go big time.’ And at that point I think they made the decision: we’re going to play in the electoral process,” Hayden said on Morning Joe on Wednesday.

So, the Trumpkin, wingnut Right don't realise how easily they are manipulated by a foreign nation's BS rumour mill, and when evidence to show that they were manipulated comes out, they have to reject it in order to deny their gullibility.

What a bad state for American politics.

Meet the future incels

A distinct lack of female faces amongst this group of American high school students having a counter protest to the March for our Lives gun restrictions rallies.   And what's the "Saturdays are for the the boys" meme?   Is that the day their divorced dads take them to the range?

Update:  This is the explanation of the relatively recent, US specific, "Saturdays are for the boys" meme.   It says that when it became popular:

Over the next few months, the hashtag took off, as men shared videos of their various acts of drunken debauchery with the hashtag on Instagram and Twitter. 

 So yeah, just what you want a bunch of young gun rights dudes to be hoping to get into - drunken debauchery with guns.

Hitler's bones

Slate talks at length about a new book published in France, in which the authors explain that a re-examination of a bit of jaw held by the Russians re-affirms earlier conclusions that it is from Hitler.   A piece of skull the Russians also hold - that's not so clear.  But the teeth in the jaw allow for some reasonable certainty:

Sognnaes and Ström did not have access to the actual jawbone and relied on testimonies of Hitler’s dentist and physicians, X-ray plates taken after a 1944 assassination attempt, and findings of the Russian autopsy to assert that “Hitler did in fact die, and that the Russians did indeed recover and autopsy the right body.” 

Charlier analyzed the teeth with a stereo microscope and was even able to dissect a few particles he involuntarily brought back with him in France, stuck to his laboratory gloves, and concluded that the jawbone presented to him is not a “historical forgery.” He asserts: “We are certain of the anatomical correspondence between the radiographies, the descriptions of the autopsies, the tales of the witnesses, especially those who made these dental prostheses, and what we had in hands.” Brisard and Parshina add, with similar confidence: “We can state that Hitler died in Berlin on April the 30th, 1945. Not in Brazil at 95, nor in Japan, nor in the Argentinian Andes. The proof is scientific, not ideological. Coldly scientific.”

One line struck me as a bit like something out of James Bond, or Mission Impossible:

The description of their investigations makes for a lively tale, full of appointments not honored, rude secretaries, and unexpected twists, like the purchase of a bottle of Armenian cognac to mollify an archivist or a visit to a storage room where all oxygen is expulsed at night to trap any illegal visitors.

Malthus, Thanos and workhouses

Given that the Avengers movie (not very wisely, in my opinion) gives the villain-in-chief Malthusian/environmental motives for laying waste to countless numbers of people across the universe, it's interesting that I just stumbled across a Philosophy Now article that looks at Malthus himself and his specious argument.

I see that Malthus actually changed his views in one key respect, but (so the article argues) his initial pessimism continued to be very influential:

In 1805 Malthus was appointed to the first professorship of Political Economy in England, at the new East India College in Haileybury, where he remained until his death. His Principles of Political Economy, published in 1820, was much more upbeat than the population Essay. Here, in fact, Malthus saw food production sufficient for centuries to come. Yet he did not alter later versions of the population essay accordingly. And those who controlled all the major journals in the field of economics ignored – indeed snubbed – his Principles. Thus when Thomas Carlyle dubbed economics the “dismal science” in 1849, it was due to Malthus’s population theory, not his economic theory....

....when Malthus says in the first Essay that the existing English poor relief laws “tend to increase population,” while doing nothing to increase the food supply, he thinks he is describing the actual world.....In the end Malthus is posing a hypothetical, not an actual problem. And hypothetical problems don’t require draconian solutions.

Besides, it’s not as if the existing Elizabethan Poor Laws, in force since 1601, were generous. Nonetheless the New Poor Laws of 1834 tightened the screws, mandating that workhouses be built in every parish as the sole source of poor relief, and that conditions there be worse than what the poorest free laborers could find on their own. Husbands and wives were separated from each other, lest they continue to multiply, and even from their children. Yet even so, workhouses could be better than life outside.

The situation provided plenty of material for Charles Dickens. In A Christmas Carol (1843) Ebenezer Scrooge is asked to donate to the poor. “Are there no prisons,” he snaps? “Are there no workhouses?” But “many cannot go there,” he is told, “and many would rather die.” Scrooge: “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” As one Dickens scholar remarks, “Malthus hung over England like a cloud.”

The article notes that workhouses did not officially end in England until 1929 - much later than I would have expected.

Which led me to have a quick look at the Wikipedia entry on the matter of English workhouses.

It's quite interesting, and includes this photo from 1911 - barely over 100 years ago - of women eating dinner at the St Pancras workhouse:

It's good to have been born in the second half of the 20th century.

An over-egged argument with an element of truth?

He does go on at unnecessary length, but I could see his point, at least in parts:

Peak superhero? Not even close: How one movie genre became the guiding myth of neoliberalism

Saudi Arabia - sort of joining the early 20th century 118 years late

A good article at NPR about the Saudis feeling some "culture shock" at the sudden attempt at modernizing social views by their new Crown Prince.

I didn't know baby photos had once been banned for religious reasons, for goodness sake:

Comedian Khaled Omar takes the mic and begins his act, lamenting how he has no baby pictures of himself. His parents ripped up the family photos in the early 1980s, when ultra-conservative religious authorities deemed photographs haram — forbidden, they said, by God...

Omar's punchline gets a good laugh: Now, he says, not only are photos suddenly not forbidden — but all the people who banned or tore pictures up are now happily posing for selfies. He still wants to know what happened to all his baby pictures.

Conservative towns are having a hard time accepting it:

While some rumblings of discontent are apparent in the kingdom's big cities, it's more obvious in smaller towns, such as Huraymila, about an hour's drive north of Riyadh, past plenty of camels and new construction in the desert. The town of wide boulevards and squat, sand-colored buildings has a conservative reputation. You can't buy cigarettes, and music in public remains unwelcome. When the government entertainment authority tried to stage a concert here a few months ago, the town refused to attend it.

They are also going to be encouraging tourism, for like, the first time ever?:

Consider the changes in April alone: The kingdom rolled out its plans for its first-ever tourist visas, held its first Arab fashion week and opened its first cinema in 35 years.

A 26-year-old man in Riyadh, wearing a thobe, a long white gown, says the changes are nothing short of shocking.

It's about the last country I would be comfortable visiting.  Well, maybe after North Korea. I can just imagine the ease with which one could be framed for doing black magic, or for looking lustfully at a woman, or something weirdly specific to their still antiquated beliefs.  I mean, seriously, this report is just from November 2017:

In the midst of Riyadh’s latest “anti-corruption purge” carried out by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a government body elsewhere was busy giving a course in defeating an alternative form of evil hiding between the walls… black magic.

The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice concluded a training programme on Wednesday called the "development of scientific skills in the fight against witchcraft."

The course took place in Ramada al-Hada in the city of Taif, located in the Mecca province, southwest of the country.

The 27 participants of the programme were taught how to “scientifically battle witchcraft,” and received certificates of attendance from the head of the Taif Governorate, Sheikh Yahya bin Ali al-Hazmi.

Distressing comedy news

I missed that the ABC has renewed the woeful "Tonightly" with Tom Ballard.

It has been distressing me that it has also leaked like a broken sewer pipe out of ABC Comedy channel (why did they think it was worth doing that - they have been struggling to find enough old and new shows to fill it) onto the main ABC channel.

I dropped in on it last night to see if Ballard was still as bad as I formerly found him.

Yes, he is.  Still swearing like a bogan in a pub (to no effect other than as a sort of repetitive  punctuation), and with a delivery that is pretty much always begging for laughs: half acknowledging that the humour that he just tried didn't really work.   I read someone at Catallaxy, CL I think, described the audience as always giving "pity laughs", and for once, I think he is reading something right.

It's an appallingly underwritten show with an appalling host, and a pretty tiny audience.   I hope it's cheap to make, as I can see no other potential justification for not giving it a mercy killing. 

Low islands and climate change, revisited

Early in the life of this blog, I used to criticise the reporting of politicians and environmentalists claims about sea level rise being about to cause the more-or-less immediate demise of low lying Pacific islands.   The situation, when you looked at the details, was more complex, and this was hardly ever reported.

Move forward, and there was a recent report which climate ignoramus Andrew Bolt seized upon with glee - 

The Pacific nation of Tuvalu—long seen as a prime candidate to disappear as climate change forces up sea levels—is actually growing in size, new research shows.

A University of Auckland study examined changes in the geography of Tuvalu's nine atolls and 101 reef islands between 1971 and 2014, using aerial photographs and satellite imagery.
It found eight of the atolls and almost three-quarters of the islands grew during the study period, lifting Tuvalu's total land area by 2.9 percent, even though sea levels in the country rose at twice the global average.

I meant to comment on it at the time, because, I thought, a mere small growth in the area of a low lying island (caused by currents pushing around sand and ground up coral, I believe) tells us nothing about the habitability of the island.   The immediate problem with sea levels that I had seen on some documentary shows was the ground water becoming replaced with salt water.  

An article at Carbon Brief explains this well, and supports my hunch from earlier this year.  A new paper suggests that many low lying atolls will be uninhabitable due to the groundwater issue earlier than expected - perhaps by mid 21st century.

Not everyone agrees - it would seem that New Zealand (which was the source of the "Tuvalu is growing" study) has some scientists who are busy downplaying the issue.   (Given New Zealand's reputation as a lifeboat island for South Pacific islanders, one wonders if there is a bit of a motivation for such studies.)

So, I still think my early criticisms of media gullibility on the issue were valid;  just as my criticism of climate change denialist's complete dismissal of the very same issue is valid now. 

Not just aged in oak, but made from oak

Not at all sure why anyone would bother even trying this, but the Japanese can be pretty innovative:

Discerning drinkers may soon be able to branch out after Japanese researchers said Tuesday they have invented a way of producing an alcoholic drink made from wood. The researchers at Japan's Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute say the bark-based beverages have woody qualities similar to which is aged in wood barrels. They hope to have their "wood alcohol" on shelves within three years.

The method involves pulverising wood into a creamy paste and then adding yeast and an enzyme to start the fermentation process.

By avoiding using heat, researchers say they are able to preserve the specific flavour of each tree's wood.

So far, they have produced tipples from cedar, birch and cherry.

I like this understatement further down:

The institute has a broad mandate for scientific study related to Japan's extensive woods and forests, but Magara acknowledged "wood alcohol" might not be the most obvious application for their research resources.

The blog for the over 50's incel crowd

My internal reaction to 99% of cartoon critic Tom's comments at Catallaxy:  "What a miserable sad sack." 

Made me laugh

What with the bizarre news from Trump's former "Dr Nick" looking doctor (not that people didn't suspect that Trump wrote his own medical endorsement), I was amused by this tweet:

More Avengers

I was reading the comments after a good review at The Guardian for Avengers:  Infinity War.    The great majority were very positive, and when Guardian readers endorse something so American, you know it probably is pretty good.

I also agree with David Roberts' tweet:

And there is amusement to be had in the sarcastic responses to the criticism made by Richard Brody at the New Yorker that you had to have seen the last 10 years of Marvel films to understand this one.  (Actually, as I explained in my previous post, I've missed plenty of Marvel movies, but seen enough that I knew nearly all of the main characters - and a couple of minor Avengers don't get to do much in this one anyway.)  It does seem silly to criticise a movie in a long line of sequels for being a sequel.   

Quite ridiculous

This case of the white Utah student wearing a Chinese dress to her prom, and getting attacked for "cultural appropriation" is quite ludicrous.   It's worrying that so many tweeted in support of the complainant Jeremy Lam.  His take on the matter makes no sense at all - why the heck isn't a white woman wearing the same dress that (allegedly) was a symbol of Chinese female empowerment not seen an endorsement of the (alleged) same positive meaning behind its creation?   And what of expensive European fashion labels having stores in Beijing and Shanghai?  Why isn't cashed up Chinese women buying, I don't know, a beret "culturally appropriating" from the French?  Actually, now that I Google it:

It’s a classic Shanghai sight: older Chinese men sporting rakish berets. The iconic headwear of the French never seems to have gone out of style among gentlemen of a certain age in Shanghai, a legacy formed during the period of the French Concession (1849-1945). Some hypothesize that since famous revolutionaries like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara also favored these practical chapeaux, Chinese men may have felt comfortable wearing them post-1949. Patrick Cranley’s been on the streets of Frenchtown and beyond, documenting the laokele (distinguished Shanghai gentlemen) and their berets.

So both the French and the Cubans should be complaining about cultural appropriation?   They don't?  Because complaining about cross border fashion is a nonsense!

He supports Trump

Evidence of the, um, surprising views held by some high profile Trump supporters.  A full quote from Kayne West:

In a montage of clips released on the site, West dropped in to chat with host Harvey Levin about being so appalled that people are still upset about slavery. An actual quote:

When you hear about slavery for 400 years—for 400 years? That sound like a choice! Like, you was there for 400 years, and it’s all of y’all? It’s like we’re mentally in prison. I like the word prison, because slavery goes too direct to the idea of blacks. It’s like slavery, Holocaust, Holocaust, Jews. Slavery is blacks. So prison is something that unites us as one race … the human race.

Update:  God knows why I should bother, but in an attempt to be "fair" to West, here's what Allahpundit  thinks he was trying to say, in a spectacularly so-unclear-it's-offensive fashion:

I think his slavery point is metaphorical, sort of. Quote: ““When you hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years?! That sounds like a choice. You was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all. It’s like we’re mentally in prison. I like the word ‘prison’ because ‘slavery’ goes too direct to the idea of blacks. Slavery is to blacks as the Holocaust is to Jews. Prison is something that unites as one race, blacks and whites, that we’re the human race.” Allowing yourself to be mentally enslaved is a choice. Unless you’re also physically enslaved, in which case, ah, you’re probably going to feel mentally enslaved whether you “choose” to or not.

Kanye West, interesting guy!

Historical pants

From Discover, earlier this year, a brief article all about pants in history:

From far above, the area around Yanghai cemetery looks like a collection of ground-dwelling wasp dens, drilled into a gravelly desert. It gets hot in this region of remote western China — up to nearly 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and dry. That’s a hard-knock climate, but it’s perfect for preserving ancient artifacts. And if you zoom in on the region, and dig in, as archaeologists have, you’ll find tombs with well-kept secrets. Inside two of them, scientists found not just human remains but the remains of what covered those humans.

I’m talking about clothes, and not just any clothes: pants. These are the oldest pants (discovered) on Earth — more distressed than any jeans Gap can offer — dating back some 3,000 years. They’re tailored wool, and constructed from sewn-together pieces of uncut fabric. If Project Runway had magically predated television by about 2,930 years, the designer of these leg covers would have had a shot at the win.

Yeah, they are pretty fancy duds for 3,000 years ago:

As to how the fashion caught on, the article goes to explain that horse riding has a lot to do with it:

 “The design of the trousers from Yanghai seems to be a predecessor of modern riding trousers, which, together with other grave goods in the tombs, allows the assumption that the invention of bifurcated lower body garments is related to the new epoch of horseback riding and greater mobility,” says Ulrike Beck, researcher studying the design and construction of early clothing....

While these pants, and their equine-riding wearers, date back to between the 13^th and 10^th century BCE, leg-separating fabric didn’t catch on in Euro-“civilized” (Greek or Roman) culture for a while after that. Only barbarians, those cultured people believed, wore trousers. Take the Scythians, a group of Iranian nomads, or the Hunnu of Central Asia. The Greeks called Middle Easterners’ and Persians’ lower-wear “sacks,” and not in a nice way.

The Greco-Roman fun-making stopped, though, around the time those civilized statue-builders realized that mounted soldiers—cavalry—had a huge advantage over average-heighted people running around on their own two feet. To maintain military dominance, they needed to get atop the equines, to avoid tangling their tunics, and to protect their nether regions. And so, enter pants, which were also warmer as these people expanded northward.

When the Romans wore loose pants, they gave them a nice name: braccae, a word that later became the English “breeches.” And after the Romanics lost their military dominance despite their attire, the people in charge of Europe were full-on horse-riding pants-lovers.

I feel much better educated now...

Update:   This makes a good companion piece to my lengthy 2011 post about the history of cotton (even though the old Chinese pants above are wool.)     I like these self education posts - and have no idea whether anyone else ever does. 

So easily led

Wow.  Steve Kates and the Trumpkin Right wing media show zero interest in the detail of Netanyahu's claims re Iran:  they literally only need to see him flash up "Iran Lied" and they think they know all they need to know.

Surely we have never seen a time of such wilful ignorance on the part of people who think they are smart.

Anyway, this article at The Atlantic fills in the details they are not interested in.  Update:  this Vox article is even better.

Odd addiction news

The BBC has a detailed story about how Nigeria has a serious issue with recreational codeine addiction - taken in the form of cough syrup.

A peculiar Chinese issue

To the extent that traditional Chinese medicine ideas encourage the rapacious use of animal parts for no good reason at all, I wish it would go away.   But I didn't realise the Chinese government has a protective attitude towards it:

A Chinese doctor who was arrested after he criticized a best-selling traditional Chinese remedy has been released, after more than three months in detention. Tan Qindong had been held at the Liangcheng county detention centre since January, when police said a post Tan had made on social media damaged the reputation of the traditional medicine and the company that makes it.

On 17 April, a provincial court found the police evidence for the case insufficient. Tan, a former anaesthesiologist who has founded several biomedical companies, was released on bail on that day. Tan, who lives in Guangzhou in southern China, is now awaiting trial. Lawyers familiar with Chinese criminal law told Nature that police have a year to collect more evidence or the case will be dismissed. They say the trial is unlikely to go ahead.

The episode highlights the sensitivities over traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) in China. Although most of these therapies have not been tested for efficacy in randomized clinical trials — and serious side effects have been reported in some¹ — TCM has support from the highest levels of government. Criticism of remedies is often blocked on the Internet in China. Some lawyers and physicians worry that Tan’s arrest will make people even more hesitant to criticize traditional therapies. 

 He was arrested under something like a defamation law (spreading false information) when he criticised a company's popular health liquor.  You can read about it at Nature.

Another pop culture post..

I find Beyonce very easy to ignore.  Maybe that's an age thing, although I suspect that her appeal is much more American based than with other pop stars.

For what it's worth, with my very tiny exposure to her music and videos*, one thing I've never liked is her fashion sense which has always seemed to emphasise legs with thighs that I personally find too thick to be too attractive.  Is she responsible for the several years we have had of teenage girls/young women wearing very short shorts when going out for fun, regardless of bodily attributes?  Did other  groups popular (I presume) with teenage girls, like Little Mix, get their inspiration for their somewhat trashy fashion from her?

How young women dress and its implications is a vexing issue.   In theory, we all know that being more-or-less undressed does not necessarily have to correlate with messaging of sexual availability:  tribes of topless women and near naked men tell us that.  We can also all agree that extreme conservatism in modesty - such as in Saudi Arabia - shows the ridiculousness of taking the connection between dress and sexual availability too seriously.  

But there's this fine line where the logic hits the biology, particularly when you're the father of a teenage daughter; and you really do wonder, as I was a few weeks ago when seeing a stream of high school teenagers going to an alcohol free concert/dance party thing, that it's kind of odd how the teen guys are all dressed with much more baggy-short-T-shirt modesty than the tight tops and maximum thigh baring shorts fashion that is so "in" with teen girls now.**   Or has a disparity between young male and young female fashion (in terms of apparent sexual signalling) always been a thing?   I guess you could say that a shirtless guy at an outdoor concert or sporting event might be signalling something (maybe, more often, just that they are drunk), but in any event my impression is that straight young men are now much less likely to do that in public than they were in the (say) the 70's or 80's.   And how much of that is that just because of greater sunburn awareness?  

Anyway, this is all prelude to linking to an article at the Catholic Herald, of all places, that takes a somewhat cynical view of the much lauded performance of Beyonce at the recent Coachella festival.   The article notes that, despite the female empowerment theme  coming off the stage from her performance, the festival was noteworthy for the number of groping and sexual harassment complaints from the female attendees.  The article doesn't reference the libertine fashion of many of the young women attending (just Google "Coachella 2018 fashion" for an idea), but it does reference  the conformist liberation vibe from B:

Still, it is illuminating to compare her performance to the music festivals of yore. Woodstock opened with Richie Havens’s improvised performance of Freedom and closed with Jimi Hendrix’s noodling national anthem. Both expressed a sense that liberation was found in individual challenges to authority. Now that the counterculture has gone mainstream, liberation is achieved by conforming to the commands of the new authorities. Cops march in the gay pride parade and suits issue HR directives on diversity.

Beyonce’s brand of lockstep sexiness is the artistic expression of conformist liberation. Rather than an individual improvising on stage, she is the leader of phalanxes in freakum dress uniform, backed by a marching band. It is amazing how many of her lyrics take the form of commands – “Bow down bitches, bow bow down bitches” or “OK ladies, now let’s get in formation.” Freedom is now enforced.

I think he has a point:  although the attendees at 60's and 70's music festivals were no doubt also being accused by conservative oldies of conformist fashion, the music performances were (I suppose) more loose and individualistic.   God knows some of the 5 minute electric guitar solos were self indulgent...

So how do I end this ramble?   I don't know - you never want to blame the young women (however dressed, or whichever female performer they like), for being groped, or to excuse the utter jerks who do it to them - and while it seems impossible to not mention concern about sexual signalling in fashion if you're a normal parent, it is next to impossible to do so without it being interpreted as placing an unfair onus on a daughter for their safety. 

I suppose parents have fretted about this forever - or at least over the last 70 years - and it seems no  closer to a really satisfactory resolution.


*  I've just watched bits of several of her songs - I remain completely underwhelmed by her style of music.

**  (My daughter wasn't going there; it just happened that I was having a beer in a bar next door to entry to the teen event that was starting mid afternoon.)

There's something odd about me and tomatoes...

Like all normal people, I like a nice tomato, be it in a sandwich, salad, on a cracker with cheese, or in the form of pizza sauce, paste or canned for cooking stews.  I'm a little bit lukewarm on them heated whole on the plate, as the English like to do with their protein heavy hot breakfasts, although if they are slow baked down further in an oven they are great again.  

But for some reason, I cannot enjoy tomato juice, or any juice combination that is too heavy with the tomato element.   I just bought a combination juice and yes, it has way too much tomato.  I can drink it, but find it unpleasant, like taking medicine. 

I do have another, related issue about them:  some people can eat a ripe one like an apple.   Something about the idea of doing that myself I find off putting.   Even in a salad, I don't like the pieces to be too large, and will often cut a wedge in half.  Maybe it's just that I feel tomato is a flavour that always needs to be with something else?

I think this is a bit odd, as I can't think of any other food that I cannot enjoy in its juiced form, or to have too much of in one bite.   I've never tried a Bloody Mary for this reason.   Maybe I should give that a go as a way of finishing this unfortunately large bottle that I just bought....

PS:  I did, a few decades ago now, once make an observation to someone eating with me how I preferred sliced tomato more than wedges, and he agreed.  Maybe it is more common than I know, although I am basing that on precisely one instance in my life of someone who shared this feeling.   

Were the prison authorities in Batman right?

At NPR there's a report about prison reform (at least for young offenders) in one US state:

In Massachusetts, over half of young adult men released from jails and prisons go back within three years. The state's largest county wants to disrupt that cycle by teaching responsibility.

In Billerica, a suburb northwest of Boston, a select group of inmates at the Middlesex House of Correction and Jail are at this effort's forefront. They're part of the People Achieving Change Together, or P.A.C.T. unit — a program designed specifically for 18- to 24-year-olds who want to make sure that this period of incarceration is their last, like 22-year-old Eric Darden.

"I just kinda want to break the cycle and try to be better instead of coming back," said Darden, who is finishing up a two-year sentence for armed robbery and assault and battery.

Inmates in the P.A.C.T. program reside in the prison's top floor, where the unspoken rules of jail politics fall by the wayside. Inmates and corrections officers have more relaxed, friendly relationships. The floor has a barber shop, a library and a meditation room, and its cell doors stay open all day until 9 p.m. or later.

Besides having a cell all to himself, Darden says the atmosphere in the P.A.C.T unit is distinctly different from the rest of the jail. In his last cell block, he'd always been on guard. Here, he says, "you don't have to worry about looking over your back. If you have a situation, you can talk about it instead of someone trying to hype it up."

You know what I thought of when I read that?   The ridiculing of rehabilitation in jail that used to turn up on the (Adam West) Batman TV series.   I didn't understand it as such when I first saw it as a 7 or 8 year old, but then I watched a bit again as a adult many years ago and recognised the satire of "bleeding heart liberals" in the way they portrayed some villain or other having a great time in jail.  A couple of decades later and it had all turned around with (mainly Republican inspired) tough on crime, three strikes you're out, attitudes, and now it seems the circle might be turning again?

I also find it a bit wryly amusing to see it's Germany that's apparently an example of soft touch rehabilitation as the best model for young prisoners. 

Reviewing Infinity

So you all want to know what I thought of Avengers: Infinity War?  No?  I don't care, I'm telling you anyway.

Just so you know:  I haven't even seen the previous Avengers movies, or Captain America: Civil War.  I tried watching some of Age of Ultron, which I think was the worst reviewed Avengers outing, on Friday night, but couldn't be bothered sticking with it.  (Even my more superhero tolerant son didn't care for it much.)

However, given that I am fine with Marvel as long as it is being funny, and I knew enough to know that the Guardians of the Galaxy crew were involved, as well as the recently humoured up Thor, I was curious enough to go see it and its "shocking" ending.

And yeah, I'm pretty glad that I did.

What I liked:  yes, it does make room for some pretty good humour - the Guardians of the Galaxy were funnier than they were in their second movie, which disappointed me.

Secondly, there's a key role for Dr Strange, who I find an oddly pleasing Marvel character.  I still love the slightly retro sparkly special effects they give him.   He badly needs to be given a second movie of his own.

Third:  there is a sort of gravitas about the ending which is something of an achievement for a silly superhero scenario.

What I didn't like so much:

Did we really have to spend so much time back on the fields of Wakanda?  Look, I'll say it:  I'm finding the overly serious African-English accents and delivery of anyone from that part of the Marvel universe pretentious and annoying.  And the Black Panther costume (or more specifically, the headpiece) still strikes me as silly.   If Thanos had to be offered some place to destroy to placate him, that would be the first I would offer.

Next:  did anyone else get the feeling that the motivation given to Thanos sounded like it could have been pandering to modern, dimwitted conservatives?   I could just imagine some Trump voting idiot thinking "yeah, he's like a pathetic Green Lefty, talking about 'limited resources' and being prepared to kill humans to 'protect the environment' - he's evil, just like all Lefties".   Now, I know that some Bond villains were given a similar "we have to kill to save the planet" motivation back in at least the Roger Moore era, but the difference is that at that time, the Right had not yet gone off the deep end like they have now and taken conspiracy belief so much to heart that they really do think all environmental concern is evil and anti-human.  (In fact, they virtually don't ever believe that the environment is any danger from anything anymore, such is the stupifying power of the culture wars.)   So I am a bit dubious that this motivation was a good idea in the current political climate.

Third:   honestly, the abilities of the Iron Man suits are getting so ridiculous that I find the mystical powers of Dr Strange more credible.

Fourth:  Thanos is a bit of flip flopper between invulnerable one minute and easily vulnerable the next.  He's kind of too, I don't know, flesh and blood in a way.  His sidekick had the psychokinetic powers that I thought he ought to, and overall, I don't find him that impressive as a villain.

But, despite those whinges, I did enjoy most of it and am somewhat curious as to how easy the resolution will be in Avengers 4.  This article at Slate - which you should definitely not read until after seeing the movie - points to the same resolution that is kinda obvious (one of the crystals controls time, so how hard can "resurrection" be?)  It also points towards something I think the movie is hinting at - a comic book storyline had Thanos changing sides.  Seems likely to me, too.

Update:   the movie has made an absurd amount of money - $630 million - in about 5 days of international release.  And it hasn't even opened in China yet.    Truly, Marvel is like a licence to print money for Disney. 

Update 2:   why haven't Marvel settled on doing a Dr Strange sequel?  It was a much better movie than the relatively modest international box office suggests.

Disastrous sea level rise past 2100 removes the "uncertainty monster"

Further to my complaint about climate change policy considerations misleadingly concentrating on effects up to 2100, I see that last year Andy Revkin responded (in his overly mild way) to Bret Stephen's "let's just wait to see what is happening with more certainty" column in the NYT with a piece in ProPublica. 

The problem for Revkin is that his thing for criticising environment advocates for not being careful enough with details enabled him to be cast as a supporter of the Judith Curry style "do nothing, it's all too uncertain" crowd.   But, in the article linked above, he talks about the really big picture, going beyond 2100, to show that he's not really aligned with the "do-nothings":

Kenneth Caldeira, a much-published Carnegie Institution climate scientist, now divides his time between studying unfolding impacts of climate change, including on coral reefs, and research on possible clean-energy solutions — and occasionally fact-checking the internet with others. On Saturday, he posted a critique stressing the dangers in the Stephens interpretation of uncertainty and lack of attention to what is clearly known:

“Bret Stephens writes of ‘sophisticated but fallible models’ as if ‘sophisticated but fallible’ gives one license to ignore their predictions. A wide array of models of different types and levels of complexity predict substantial warming to be a consequence of continued dependence on using the sky as a waste dump for our CO2 pollution. It doesn’t take much scientific knowledge to understand that the end consequence of this process involves approximately 200 feet of sea-level rise. We already see the coral reefs disappearing — a predicted consequence of our CO2 emissions. How much more do we need to lose before recognizing that our ‘sophisticated but fallible models’ are the best basis for policy that we have?”

Caldeira is hardly alone in this view. There are entire issues of scientific journals devoted to understanding and responding to deep climate change uncertainty.

So those calling for nothing but delay and debate, as Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt did on MSNBC in March, have some explaining to do. What is it they are waiting for?

In fact, if anything, the core challenge of global warming is both clearer and vastly bigger than most of those debating it either understand or care to talk about. What is perhaps the most important scientific analysis pointing this out went largely uncovered early last year — a paper describing, with essentially no uncertainty, the enormous “consequences of twenty-first-century policy for multi-millennial climate and sea-level change.”

I hope Stephens will stay on this issue, but perhaps looking beyond the uncertainty red herring toward common-sense ways to build a durable relationship with energy and climate that any conservative can embrace.

So, lets go the 2017 paper in Nature Climate Change which is at that last link.  (I don't think I have posted about it before.)

Unfortunately, apart from the abstract and supplementary material, it's behind a paywall, and I have not yet been able to find a full free copy at anyone else's site. But, the key results were summarised in some reporting, Chris Mooney at the Washington Post being a decent example:

From 1750 to the present, human activities put about 580 billion metric tons, or gigatons, of carbon into the atmosphere — which converts into more than 2,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide (which has a larger molecular weight).

We’re currently emitting about 10 gigatons of carbon per year — a number that is still expected to rise further in the future. The study therefore considers whether we will emit somewhere around another 700 gigatons in this century (which, with 70 years at 10 gigatons per year, could happen easily), reaching a total cumulative emissions of 1,280 gigatons — or whether we will go much further than that, reaching total cumulative levels as high as 5,120 gigatons. (It also considered scenarios in between.)

In 10,000 years, if we totally let it rip, the planet could ultimately be an astonishing 7 degrees Celsius warmer on average and feature seas 52 meters (170 feet) higher than they are now, the paper suggests. There would be almost no mountain glaciers left in temperate latitudes, Greenland would give up all of its ice and Antarctica would give up almost 45 meters worth of sea level rise, the study suggests.

Still, anyone observing the world’s recent mobilization to address climate change in Paris in late 2015 would reasonably question whether humanity will indeed emit this much carbon. With the efforts now afoot to constrain emissions and develop clean energy worldwide, it stands to reason that we won’t go so far.

“With Paris, it does get us off the exponential growth, and we might level off at 2,000, 3,000 gigatons,” said Pierrehumbert.

Still, what’s striking is that when the paper outlines a much more modest 1,280-gigaton scenario — one that does not seem unreasonable, and that would only push the globe a little bit of the way beyond a rise of 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial temperature levels — the impacts over 10,000 years are still projected to be fairly dramatic.

In this scenario, we only lose 70 percent of glaciers outside of Greenland and Antarctica. Greenland gives up as much as four meters of sea level rise (out of a potential seven), while Antarctica could give up up to 24. Combined with thermal expansion of the oceans, this scenario could mean seas rise an estimated 25 meters (or 82 feet) higher in 10,000 years. There is, to be sure, “a big uncertainty range on that prediction,” Pierrehumbert said by email.

Once again, a key factor that could mitigate this dire forecast is the potential development of technologies that could remove carbon dioxide from the air and thus cool down the planet much faster than the Earth on its own can through natural processes. “If we want to have some backstop technology to avoid this, we really ought to be putting a lot more money into carbon dioxide removal,” Pierrehumbert said.

Pierrehumbert said he believes that we will manage to develop such a technology in coming centuries, so long as human societies remain wealthy enough — but he added that we don’t know yet about how affordable it will be.

The new study fits into a growing body of scientific analysis suggesting that human alteration of the planet has truly brought on a new geological epoch, which has been dubbed the “anthropocene.” Taking a 10,000-year perspective certainly reinforces the geological scale of what’s currently happening.

Interestingly, I note from the supplementary material that the modelling work which forms the basis of the paper did include using runs with a Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity of 1.5 degrees to see what difference that made - and that figure is below the recently revised Nic Lewis/Judith Curry median estimate discussed in my last post.  (It also references modelling at an assumed ECS of 3.5 degrees.)

As I cannot read the whole Nature Climate Change paper (jeeez, I ask again of philanthropists - if you want material widely read, make it free) I don't know for sure what difference the lower ECS may have made for their 10,000 year sea rise estimates.  But clearly, they did take some account of the possibility of a low end ECS.  One suspects that in the long run, it doesn't make that big a difference.

OK, I hear some reader, presumably Jason Soon, saying "if even the low end total emissions still gives rise to 25 m sea level rise, doesn't this support my argument that it's too late to do anything effective and we will just have to deal with this technologically?"

But there are two important points to make in response:

1.   Look at the graphed rate of sea level rise using the different scenarios, which I get from the supplementary material to the paper:

Even at this low resolution, it's clear that the rate of sea level rise in the first 1,000 years is sharply faster in the next higher carbon emission scenario they considered than in the lower, achievable, scenario they worked on.  (And I'm just guessing here, but I suspect that even on the most optimistic guess, the process of removing CO2 back to 20th century levels will be a project requiring centuries of effort.)

2.  Surely that means that that the work involved in a technological fix can be undertaken at slower rate, which also surely means at less cost and less risk of failure (given that there is more time to adjust, change and improve the technological fix.)   And this would apply regardless of  whether the fix be by CO2 extraction or the (much, much more potentially environmentally risky*) use of something like spraying sulphates into the upper atmosphere. 

The point is - even these long term dramatic sea level change predictions do not mean that defeatism is an appropriate response.   That actually seems to be the motivation of the authors of the paper, too.

It makes sense that taking steps now to ensure that total carbon emissions are limited gives more chance to reverse the millennia scale disastrous sea level rises that are bound to happen if you keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere. 

I know that there is a libertarian idea that (when they are not busy disgustingly actually promoting climate change denial, as is the wont of a large section of the movement) the right way to deal with climate change is to race ahead with economic growth, because riches can deal with all climate change problems.  (Air condition the Third World, develop fusion power, spray sulphates into the air.)

That idea is fanciful for many reasons (it is at heart, a statement of faith not dissimilar to Evangelicals who can't believe that God would let humans destroy the Earth, and deserves a post of its own); but for now, the point here is to make it clear that if ripping ahead with economic growth means releasing high end CO2 emissions, they are advocating for a dramatic long term problem that, if not addressed, will literally re-write the shape of the inhabitable globe and inundate scores of those things we currently consider cultural and economic centres of civilisation - cities.

They will also be kicking the economic can for any possible solution to that down to future generations.   The least you would think they could do is to agree to give their descendants more time to deal with it.  (No one has any reason to think that removal of CO2 is going to be easy.)



 

*  Apart from very uncertain regional effects, the biggest worry is that if the program is stopped, the planet would undergo rapid heat increase that species - including humans - would not have time to deal with.  Read this article at Science.  

Back to the "maybe climate sensitivity is at the lower end" argument

It's been ages since I've posted much about climate change, but a climate change mega death post is probably due soon.  (I've started mucking around with fonts lately, because I have an urge to feel shoutier, given the current numbskullery on abundant display in the world.)

But before I get to that, it's time to re-visit the Nic Lewis/Judith Curry revised attempt at showing that their energy budget/observational take on Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity shows that it is at the lower end of the range given by all the other methods.   (They suggest possible medians of 1.5, 1.66 or 1.76 degrees.  The last is said to allow for "time varying climate feedbacks, which sounds to me like something which ought to be assumed, so I would take their highest median as the most likely.)

There's a good discussion of the paper (particularly in comments, where Nic Lewis condescending joins in) over at And Then There's Physics.   As someone notes, Judith Curry's involvement in this work seems just a tad inconsistent:

It is interesting that Judith has, in the past, argued that internal variability could explain a lot of the observed warming, but now authors a paper essentially suggesting it plays no/little role.

But it's all grist for the mill with climate inactionists, isn't it?   Any argument will do, damn the inconsistency, as long as it ends at "we should not be doing anything now."  

Which brings me to the point of this post.   Even if one takes the optimistic (but not particularly well justified) view that the Nic Lewis estimate of  ECS is (say) 1.7 degrees turns out to be the correct figure, what does that really mean if you hope for the planet to not go over the guesstimate that over 2 degrees would be dramatically dangerous?

This was addressed in a paper I seem not to have linked to before:  Implications of potentially lower climate sensitivity on climate projections and policy.  

The answer:   not as much as one might guess.   I would strongly suggest reading at least the end discussion section, from which I extract this (my bold):

Drawing upon the combined information of these multiple lines of evidence shows that there is no scientific support to diminish the urgency of emission reductions if warming is to be kept below 1.5 or 2 °C, the two temperature limits currently being discussed within the United Nations (UNFCCC 2010). Even the lowest ECS estimate assumed in this study only results in a delay of less than a decade in the timing of when the 2 °C threshold would be crossed when emission trends from the past 10 years are continued. Alternatively, if significantly lower ECS estimates were to be confirmed, following a low emissions trajectory (consistent with RCP3-PD) would become consistent with limiting warming below 1.5 °C by the end of the century with high probability (>80%) instead of only low probabilities (around 40%), and limiting warming to 1.5 °C would require about the same emission reductions as are now consistent with 2 °C when assuming the current IPCC ECS assessment.

Ah, why stop there, the rest of the discussion is so good I may as well cut and paste that too:

Relatively small shifts of ECS distributions towards lower values have a small influence on the temperature outcome and on compatible emissions, when compared to the overall uncertainty. As international climate policy is concerned about limiting warming below 2 °C with a 'likely' chance (UNFCCC 2011) ('likely' denoting and 'at least 66% probability' (Mastrandrea et al 2010)), shifts that robustly constrain the high end of the ECS or TCR distributions would be most important.

With this study we show that betting on the optimistic message of a few recent studies is risky at this point for two important reasons. First, as pointed out above, recent low ECS estimates are only part of the story. Alternative, and equally convincing methods point to higher values of ECS and only looking at the lower estimates would thus obfuscate an important part of the available scientific evidence. Second, not taking into account the combined evidence and delaying emission reductions in the coming decades would lead to lock-in into energy- and carbon-intensive infrastructure. This would thus not only result in a lower remaining carbon budget for the rest of the century, but the world would also be on a much more costly path by 2030 (Rogelj et al 2013b, 2013a, Luderer et al 2013, Riahi et al 2013). If current policies would bet on the optimistic end of the range, and more pessimistic estimates turn out to better capture the Earth system's behavior, limiting warming to low levels (like 2 °C) might well become unattainable (Rogelj et al 2013a, 2013b, Luderer et al 2013).

In conclusion, in light of the large uncertainties that still exist, the lack of consensus across different studies and lines of evidence, and the weak constraint that the observations provide, we argue that the possibility of lower values for ECS and TCR does not reduce the urgency for climate mitigation. On the contrary, a risk-averse strategy points to more ambitious reductions compared to what countries presented so far (Rogelj et al 2013a, UNEP 2013, Riahi et al 2013). Hedging against this uncertainty can be done by reducing global carbon emissions without delay, as to limit cumulative carbon emissions to within a budget in line with medium and higher climate response estimates that currently cannot be excluded. For our current generation, early and deep reductions of carbon emissions will undoubtedly be an important global societal challenge, despite the multiple opportunities and benefits that they bring along, such as reduced air pollution, energy security etc (McCollum et al 2013). However, those challenges are likely small compared to what future generations otherwise might possibly face: high climate impacts or emission reduction rates and associated costs that are substantially higher than the ones that would be necessary, if mitigation action commenced today.

I will also take the opportunity to link back to my 2013 post that discussed the first Nic Lewis paper, and pointed to papers arguing that some very slow feedbacks may well mean a long term  "earth system sensitivity" that could be double the fast feedback ECS.  

Too much oxygen?

Who would have guessed that too much oxygen for seriously ill patients is probably a bad thing?:

The McMaster-led team of researchers searched electronic academic databases from their inception through to October 2017 for randomized controlled trials done worldwide which compared liberal versus conservative oxygen therapy and death rates, as well as impacts on such aspects as disability, infections and hospital length of stay.

The 25 randomized controlled trials encompassed more than 16,000 adult patients with sepsis, stoke, trauma, emergency surgery, heart attack or cardiac arrest.

Data analysis demonstrated that, compared to the conservative strategy, liberal administration of oxygen resulted in increased in-hospital death by 21 per cent. Additional analyses suggested that the more supplemental oxygen patients were given, the higher their risk was for death. However, the incidence of other conditions, such as infections or length of hospital stay, were similar between the two groups.

The researchers estimated one additional death for every 71 patients treated with a liberal oxygen strategy.

"Our findings are distinct from the pervasive view that liberal oxygen therapy for acute illnesses is at worst, harmless," said Alhazzani.

Count me as surprised.