Oh, the resolute stupidity

So the mayor of massively burnt out Kangaroo Island is a climate change denying Liberal from way back, who is upset that Obama made a tweet connecting the first to climate change.  I presume he didn't lose his own house, which is a bit of a pity.*  (It wouldn't have changed his mind, but there would have been poetic justice.)

As has been noted by many, old white men are killing the planet, and too stupid to learn anything new.  


*  Other property loss I would put down as evidence of a Righteous God - a gas explosion taking out the IPA's offices;  a meteor writing off this:

(That's Lachlan Murdoch's new home in Los Angeles, according to a weird, tabloid style article in the SMH today, that features more creepy photos of old man Murdoch in the water with Jerry Hall.) 

A space based quantum internet - and why it will be needed

It hadn't sunk into my consciousness 'til now, the matter of why a quantum internet was being keenly pursued as a research topic; but this article explains it's because of quantum computing's potential to break all present, mathematically based, encryption.  It then goes onto explain the technical issues with creating a quantum internet, and paints a pretty convincing picture that it is going to be best based in space, in orbiting satelittes:

First some background. At the heart of any quantum network is the strange property of entanglement. This is the phenomenon in which two quantum particles share the same existence, even if they are separated by vast distances. It ensures that a measurement on one of these particles immediately influences the other, a marvel that Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”

Physicists usually distribute entanglement using pairs of photons created at the same point and instant in time. When the photons are sent to different locations, the entanglement linking them can be exploited to send secure messages.

The problem is that entanglement is fragile and hard to preserve.  Any small interaction between one of the photons and its environment breaks the link. Indeed, this is exactly what happens when physicists transmit entangled photons directly through the atmosphere or through optical fibers. The photons interact with other atoms in the atmosphere or the glass, and the entanglement is destroyed. It turns out the maximum distance over which entanglement can be shared in this way is just a few hundred kilometers.

How then to build a quantum internet that shares entanglement across the globe? One option is to use “quantum repeaters”—devices that measure the quantum properties of photons as they arrive and then transfer these properties to new photons that are sent on their way. This preserves entanglement, allowing it to hop from one repeater to the next. However, this technology is highly experimental and several years from commercial exploitation.

So another option is to create the entangled pairs of photons in space and broadcast them to two different base stations on the ground. These base stations then become entangled, allowing them to swap messages with perfect secrecy.

In 2017, a Chinese satellite called Micius showed for the first time that entanglement can indeed be shared in this way. It turns out that photons can travel much further in this scenario because only the last 20 kilometers or so of the journey is through the atmosphere, provided the satellite is high in the sky and not too close to the horizon.

Khatri and co say that a constellation of similar satellites is a much better way to create a global quantum internet. The key is that to communicate securely, two ground stations must be able to see the same satellite at the same time so that both can receive entangled photons from it....

I won't extract the next few paragraphs, detailed the new paper's calculations as to how many satellites at what orbit would be needed, and cut to the conclusions:

Khatri and co suggest that the best compromise is a constellation of at least 400 satellites flying at an altitude of around 3,000 kilometers. By contrast, GPS operates with 24 satellites.

Even then, the maximum distance between base stations will be limited to about 7,500 kilometers. This means that such a system could support secure messaging between London and Mumbai, which are 7,200 km apart, but not between London and Houston, 7,800 km apart—or indeed between any cities that are farther apart. That’s a significant drawback.

Nevertheless, a space-based quantum internet significantly outperforms ground-based systems of quantum repeaters, say Khatri and co. Repeaters would have to be spaced at intervals of less than 200 kilometers, so covering long distances would require large numbers of them. This introduces its own set of limitations for a quantum internet. “We thus find that satellites offer a significant advantage over ground-based entanglement distribution,” say Khatri and co.

That's pretty fascinating, and it sounds like China is really interested in it.  Maybe Huawei will build it! 

He doesn't look or sound well

I didn't watch much of his (Thursday morning?) post-airbase attack speech from the White House, but did notice the (now quite common) slight slur of words that comes when he is trying to stick to script, like he has false teeth that don't quite fit, or something.   Many Lefties talk about his sniffing a lot during these speeches, but I tend to think that may well be a nervous tic that comes from, well, just sticking to script.

The attempt at Messiah image, by his coming out of the room with the light behind him, was just too, too obvious; and somewhat offset by the awkward appearance of the "disciples" behind him:

...especially that top brass to the right of him in the photo - he always looks like he hasn't slept for 2 weeks and is on the verge of panic, if you ask me.

But this subsequent photo from another event also makes Trump look pretty unwell:

 And it's not just one photo:

At the very least, he looks very, very tired.  But given the somewhat mysterious recent visit to a hospital, I think there is reason to suspect he is not well with an ongoing condition.

Yes, there is a small corner of Lefties who go on about how any sniff means he's doing cocaine, or he obviously has dementia, or whatever.   I don't think it has any real widespread traction though.

Unlike, of course, the utter conviction that existed amongst Right wingnuts that Hilary Clinton was on her death bed, virtually, during the campaign.  

We can be 100% certain that if Hilary Clinton were President, showing the same speech tics and with blue bags under her eyes like Trump, the Wingnut Right would be speaking about it all day, every day.

Searching for the real Buddha

This lengthy essay at AEON talks about the little that is known, or guessed, about the historical Buddha.   (Very, very little is known with any certainty.)

The author paints this picture (and make sure to read to the end):

Bringing the reliable historical fragments together, and discarding mythic elaborations, a humbler picture of the Buddha emerges. Gotama was born into a small tribe, in a remote and unimportant town on the periphery of pre-imperial India. He lived in a world on the cusp of urbanisation, albeit one that still lacked money, writing and long-distance trade. More importantly, we might ask what happened to Gotama after he had been drawn into a counterculture of ascetics and philosophers, and especially after he had attained his ‘awakening’. The texts say that the Buddha achieved remarkable success as a teacher straight away, but this seems unlikely.

The Pali account of the Buddha’s ‘First Sermon’ claims that its five recipients immediately attained enlightenment. But other texts give reason to doubt this. Indeed, these disciples are hardly mentioned again in the textual record, and in fact the occasional appearance of some of them is not entirely flattering. One text tells the story of an encounter between the Buddha and Koṇḍañña, the most prominent of the first disciples. After a lengthy absence from the Buddha, Koṇḍañña acts like a supplicating devotee, not an enlightened Buddhist saint (arahant): he is said to prostrate himself on the ground, stroking and kissing the Buddha’s feet, all the while announcing: ‘I am Koṇḍañña, I am Koṇḍañña!’

Another prominent member of the group of five, called ‘Assaji’, is mentioned in a few more places. But one text records the occasion when he was ill and became upset because he could no longer attain meditative absorption. Just like the text on Koṇḍañña’s emotional reunion with the Buddha, Assaji is not depicted as an enlightened saint. This suggests that, within the old Buddhist literature from ancient India, pre-mythic stories about the Buddha’s life have survived. Further historical fragments can be retrieved from myth, for example the primary Pali account of the Buddha’s ‘awakening’, where we are told that Gotama considered not bothering with teaching, since nobody would understand him. After Gotama did decide to teach, the first person to encounter him, an ascetic called Upaka, was not impressed. Upaka asks who Gotama’s teacher is. When Gotama replies that he is fully awakened, and so has no teacher, Upaka simply shakes his head and walks off, saying ‘maybe’.

That's sort of amusing.

The next section of the article is really interesting too - emphasising that Buddha's reputation may have been built by his "quietism".  And if one wants to be cynical, it almost comes across as describing an ancient version of Being There (a movie I don't care for, incidentally.)   That is, a case of people reading too much into simple, enigmatic statements, or insistent silence.

I doubt that it was the writers intention to give me that impression, but that's what came to my mind.

Science fiction and comedy has toyed with various ideas about Christ;  maybe it's time for a "Life of Gotama" too.

Once again, the pain behind the comedian

I didn't know much about Mel Brooks' personal life, except that I recall something about an unflattering biography.  Not sure if the book was the one reviewed in Jewish Review of Books (a publication I had not heard of before!), but here are some extracts which I thought noteworthy:

Funny Man tells the improbable story of how Melvin Kaminsky, the short, unbookish, unhandsome son of Kitty Kaminsky, became a comedy icon, an Emmy, Grammy, Tony, and Oscar winner. He was Kitty’s fourth son, supremely coddled and cared for. “I’d had such a happy childhood,” Brooks claimed, and maybe so, though its outlines were Dickensian. The Brooklyn Kaminskys were poor (“so poor, we do not even have a language—just a stupid accent!” wails a woman in History of the World: Part I). The family was grieving a tragedy—the death of Brooks’s father when Brooks was two. The main absence-presence in Brooks’s life, his father haunts this biography, as he apparently haunted Brooks long into adulthood....

Brooks was an incorrigible goofball, but he was fundamentally serious about comedy in a way that mirrored the seriousness of the times. In early 1944, just before D-Day, Brooks enlisted in the army and shipped out to France. Like so many soldiers, he returned scarred, damaged, prone to mood swings and depressions. He’d seen devastated French villages, streets strewn with fresh corpses. The experience “added a layer of outer shell to his personality,” McGilligan writes, insulating him from his own emotions and from other people’s....

The delightful Brooks, such grand company, gets short shrift in Funny Man, elbowed aside by the angry, belligerent Brooks. Beneath anger, there’s usually pain, and in Brooks’s case, there were reservoirs of it. In the 1950s, while writing Your Show of Shows, Brooks suffered frequent nervous breakdowns. There were bursts of hypomania; sudden, acute bouts of mourning; and at least one episode of paranoid psychosis. Finally, Brooks submitted to therapy. “All I did was cry,” he recalled of his psychoanalytic sessions. “For two years. I did nothing but sob.” Brooks’s dark night of the soul lasted six years.

By all accounts, Brooks learned much about himself, trading misery for ordinary unhappiness. What all that therapy didn’t do was change Brooks. He seems to have suffered from a looming sense of emptiness, an affliction not to be therapized away. In the showbiz mindset he carried with him, attention is oxygen; wealth is validation; prizes and praise are sustaining. The problem, McGilligan makes clear, is that no amount of applause could satisfy Brooks; his needs were bottomless. Even after he won an Academy Award for his short film The Critic, Brooks often felt neglected and unappreciated.

George joins the microbial food future

I mentioned last year that I had not been able to track down the (I think) RN Science Show in which it was claimed that the future of cheap, bulk food to feed the masses was going to come from vats of microbially sourced protein.   Not the (way over-hyped) meat grown from meat cells, but from the right kind of bacteria, which is then processed into food.

Well, it seems George Monbiot has got excited about this idea too, as he explains in this article in (where else?) The Guardian.      It starts:

It sounds like a miracle, but no great technological leaps were required. In a commercial lab on the outskirts of Helsinki, I watched scientists turn water into food. Through a porthole in a metal tank, I could see a yellow froth churning. It’s a primordial soup of bacteria, taken from the soil and multiplied in the laboratory, using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. When the froth was siphoned through a tangle of pipes and squirted on to heated rollers, it turned into a rich yellow flour.

This flour is not yet licensed for sale. But the scientists, working for a company called Solar Foods, were allowed to give me some while filming our documentary Apocalypse Cow. I asked them to make me a pancake: I would be the first person on Earth, beyond the lab staff, to eat such a thing. They set up a frying pan in the lab, mixed the flour with oat milk, and I took my small step for man. It tasted … just like a pancake.

But pancakes are not the intended product. Such flours are likely soon to become the feedstock for almost everything. In their raw state, they can replace the fillers now used in thousands of food products. When the bacteria are modified they will create the specific proteins needed for lab-grown meat, milk and eggs. Other tweaks will produce lauric acid – goodbye palm oil – and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids – hello lab-grown fish. The carbohydrates that remain when proteins and fats have been extracted could replace everything from pasta flour to potato crisps. The first commercial factory built by Solar Foods should be running next year.

Here's a BCC article on the same company.   The only thing that sounds a bit unnecessarily complicated - they say they will use hydrogen make from electrolysis of water as part of the feed to the bacteria.   Hence they need cheap (renewable) electricity for this to make environmental sense. 

Can't they do more with - I don't know, I'm just guessing here - GM algae, or something that doesn't need the hydrogen? 

Still Lost in Space

I've watched the first two episodes of the second series of Netflix's revamped Lost in Space, and I have to say, I still find the show very likeable.   I don't say it's monumentally great, but this part of an on-line review sums it up well:  Lost in Space remains aggressively fine in Season 2.

To sum up the things which keep impressing me:

*  the production design - is it weird that I spend much of every episode wondering why I love the interior of the Jupiter 2 so, so much?   Apart from that, the spacesuits they wear look solidly authentic compared to most science fiction.  And even the other gear they wear around inside sometimes - it all looks exactly how I think it should look.   The production staff deserve some kind of award;

*  the special effects - they seem particularly good this season, and certainly cinema movie quality;

*  the incredible ability of Posey Parker to make her (intentionally) horrible, manipulative Dr Smith so intensely dislikeable.   She really takes it up another level, but I am sort of enjoying the intensity of the cringing whenever she is doing one of her manipulation attempts on any of the crew.

*  the general level of acting is pretty fine all around, really.  As with the TV series, a lot hangs on young Will Smith, but this actor is handling it really well.

I hope it is rating well...

Update:  I meant to throw in that, while I appreciate that it is not exactly realistic,  I find it almost amusingly endearing now how the screenwriters take the attitude that there is never not enough time for the family to be having some interpersonal bickering - they might have 60 seconds left to avoid certain death by doing something or other, but at least one of the kids and at least one of the parents will still have time to have some back and forth about how they don't feel appreciated, or aren't being given enough responsibility, or some such.   The words "Shut up, we don't have enough time for that right now" seem to have been banned.

Joe Hildebrand: fact arsonist

So, "I'm just trying to be reasonable" professional opinion sprouter Joe Hildebrand put out a tweet saying this:

The problems start with item 1.

Arson definition:  Arson is the act of intentionally and maliciously destroying or damaging property through the use of fire.  Definition from the Australian Institute of Criminology, which is where Joe cites support for his claim.

The AIC report he is presumably relying on is this one, from 2008, which analysed figures from all Australian States, and came up with this conclusion:

Hence, I would have thought that anyone sensible would not claim anything more than "up to half of all bushfires might be deliberately lit", but even that would be misleading.

The correct summary would be "one study indicates that at least 13% of bushfires are deliberately lit, but if all suspicious fires are assumed to also be arson, then it might be as high as 50%".

And even then, it would be fudging somewhat on the qualifications the AIC gave:

Some caution should be taken when considering these figures. Just over 40 percent of vegetation fires across Australia do not have a cause assigned by the responding fire agency. Furthermore, inconsistencies exist between and within agencies in recording data. For example, different agencies may have different thresholds as to when they consider a fire to be deliberate, suspicious or unknown.

Well, that indicates that the exact figure for "arson" is extremely uncertain - and if you want to say that maybe some of the 40% of fires that don't have a cause assigned might be arson, then I would ask "do those fires matter much?  Is a cause not assigned because they were too small to worry about?"   And even if a fire is deliberately lit, it's not always by people who could be held responsible for their action.  Just this week, there was the report of an elderly man believed to suffer from dementia facing 4 charges of lighting fires.   His example might technically be arson, but it's irrelevant to the question of why this fire season is so bad. 

What Hildebrand, if he were honest, or smart, cannot claim is that the study he cites proves that "bushfires are started more by arson than any other cause". [I see in his Twitter defence against lots of people who are pointing this out to him that he now says "I didn't say it caused most fires", as a way of denying that he grouped "suspicious" with "deliberate".   But he must have to some extent to make his claim - "accidental" accounts for 35%, so for "arson" to get above that he has to have arbitrarily added at least 23% to "deliberate" from the "suspicious" column.] 

Why is he surprised that his so-called attempt at common sense consensus fails at step one?

It is, in fact, one of those exercises of "both side-ism" that carries a bias towards one side by giving it a credibility it does not warrant, assisted by his own dodgy number fiddling. 

Truth be told, most of us would feel he could do less harm if this were true...

Sunrise does something useful?

It's been obvious for sometime that Sunrise shows what might be called a "soft Right" bias in its politics now, so it is a little surprising to see that they had a guest to give clear pushback against the "it's all about the fuel load" claims of climate change denialists:

Well, that (almost) helps make up for Channel 7 helping pushing the other big denialist diversionary line that the arson issue is really behind the current crisis.   

The Victorian country fire authority chief yesterday hosing down (ha, a pun) the fuel load reduction issue was also useful. 

Here's the thing - scientists (and economists who believed them) gave clear warnings of a substantial increase in bushfire danger by 2020, and the events of this summer show that they were pretty much spot on.   Right wing climate change denialists (or lukewarmers who think economies growing as fast as possible are more important than environmental catastrophes that will get much worse after they are dead) are highly motivated to distract from the correct predictions.

Why is swords and sorcery fantasy more popular than ever?

Watched the first episode of The Witcher on Netflix last, and was completely underwhelmed.

I am not alone in this - I see that it only got 53% on Metacritic - but isn't Netflix saying it has huge ratings?  (Yes, it is.)

I guess people just can't get enough of their bloodthirsty, gratuitous boob, fantasies since Game of Thrones finished.  But what is the appeal of this genre?   It's always eluded me - even if it's family friendly fantasy such as Tolkien's.   If anything, the adult version offends me more for what has always struck me (since the first Conan the Barbarian and its imitators started appearing in the early 80's) as a too obvious attempt to broaden the market for an outdated genre by ramping up the soft porn and violence to appeal to young men.  But now, with the internet, the "let's give young guys access to soft porn" aspect is completely redundant, making it more gratuitous than ever.   So what are we left with - magic, the occasional monster and (let's face it) stuff that would have formerly been considered gratuitous ultra violence, but is now watched by women as well as men.   (And by the way, I don't think the fighting scenes were even well directed in that first episode.)

I don't understand the appeal at all...

Yes, she is appalling

El Nino predicted

Some news at the end of last year -

A group of researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Beijing Normal University and Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen has found a way to predict El Niño events up to a year before they occur. In their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their complexity-based approach to better predicting the seemingly random weather events. ...

Once they found that pattern, the researchers went analyzed yearly surface temperature data from 1984 to 2018 to make predictions about El Niño events in the past. They report that their method correctly predicted nine out of 10 El Niño events (and had three false positives.) Additionally, they found that the higher the disorder the previous year, the stronger the following El Niño event. The researchers conclude that it is now possible to predict El Niño events up to a year in advance with reasonable accuracy. 

Some of the work has come from an Israeli university, it seems, so the research got a lot of reporting in the Jewish press.  For example:

“This novel climate network approach is very promising for improving El Niño prediction,” said Prof. Shlomo Havlin, an Israel Prize-winning physicist from Bar-Ilan University who was involved in developing the algorithm.

“Conventional methods are unable to make a reliable El Niño forecast more than six months in advance. With our method, we have roughly doubled the previous warning time,” stressed JLU physicist Armin Bunde, who initiated the development of the algorithm together with his former PhD student Josef Ludescher.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director Emeritus of Climate Impact Research, explained: “This clever combination of measured data and mathematics gives us unique insights – and we make these available to the people affected.”

He pointed out that the prediction method does not offer one hundred percent certainty: “The probability of El Niño in 2020 is around 80%. But that’s pretty significant.”

As El Nino is usually associated with less rainfall and higher temperatures in Australia, the 2020 prediction is really not good news.

Quantum overview

I quite liked this simplified list of quantum interpretations that appeared in a recent book review in TLS.  John Gribbins came up with this:

As it stands today, depending on how you want to interpret the results from a litany of physical and mathematical experiments all validating each other, you are left, basically speaking, with only so many possibilities of how you might understand the world. Gribbin chooses six of the more scientifically realized and commonly endorsed. As he summarizes them:

One. The world does not exist unless you look at it.

Two. Particles are pushed around by an invisible wave. But the particles have no influence on the wave.

Three. Everything that could possibly happen does, in an array of parallel realities.

Four. Everything that could possibly happen has already happened and we only noticed part of it.

Five. Everything influences everything else instantly, as if space does not exist.

Six. The future influences the past.

As explained further down, this list equates with the Copenhagen Interpretation (number one, roughly) and the rest are:

the Pilot Wave, Many Worlds, Decoherence, Ensemble and Transactional interpretations

I like this bit of quirky information, too (in my bold):

Bohr said that the world revealed by measurements is the only reality worthy of the name, that the act of measurement actively constructs the reality that is being measured. Put an electron in a box. According to the Copenhagen interpretation – as Jim Holt describes in When Einstein Walked with Gödel – it “does not have a definitive location until we look inside to see just where it is. Prior to that act of observation, the electron is in a mixture of potential locations spread throughout the box”. This mixture is “mathematically represented by a ‘wave function,’ which expresses the different probabilities of detecting the electron at the various locations inside the box”. In French the wave function is poetically called the densité de présence, which is a helpful way of thinking about it.

Successful solar thermal?

I noticed an article at Bloomberg on a (pretty much) completely failed solar thermal plant in Nevada called Crescent Dunes.   I've reached my limit of free articles for Bloomberg, but if you haven't, here's the link.   Also, it has a wikipedia entry.

This made me think:  is there a company that is a clear leader in solar thermal that is making it work?

This seems a difficult topic on which to find solid information.

This site lists 8 companies, which work in CSP (concentrated solar power), but it doesn't really explain if they are making money. 

The Bloomsberg article said that that big problem with it is how cheap PV solar has become;  solar thermal's advantage is that it is not limited to making electricity during the day. But at what cost, is the issue, I suppose...

Standard Republican gaslighting

Update: and now -

The smoke hazard

One of the most surprising things about the terrible bushfires has been the seriousness of the smoke issue in Canberra (and to a lesser degree, Sydney).

I mean, I think this story was under-reported, if anything:

An elderly woman has died in Canberra tonight after she went into respiratory distress when exiting the plane to the tarmac which was filled with dense smoke from the bushfires.

The New Daily has confirmed the Canberra woman was on a Qantas plane arriving from Brisbane.

She was alive when she left the plane but relatives believe she went into respiratory distress after disembarking. ACT police and ambulance were called to the airport to assist.

Maybe there will be subsequent reports detailing properly the number of hospital admissions and increased mortality (one disturbing thing is that they say poor air quality and SIDS has a clear connection, making parents of newly born babies freak out with worry.)

But apart from that, it's the galleries and public buildings that are staying closed; the flights cancelled; the terrible images of smoke obscuring all views being spread across the globe.   You can imagine it having a terrible effect on summer tourism for some years to come.

It's part of what makes Right wing excuse making about how we've always had bushfires seem especially pathetic.   

Some criminal underworld stuff going on in Brisbane?

This is a surprising story:

Mr Percival's bar on Brisbane River hit by gun shots weeks after being firebombed

Shots have been fired at a bar on the Brisbane River that was firebombed on December 21.

The shots came from a boat on the river and were aimed at Mr Percival's bar at Howard Street Wharves, under the Story Bridge, according to police.

Police confirmed the shots were fired from a boat carrying three to four people.

 We're not used to bars being firebombed in Brisbane.  The most notorious one was in 1973, and the investigations into it just went on forever. 

Movie viewed

I finally got around to watching The Death of Stalin last night (on SBS On Demand).

It was very good.  It was also good to read this article at Slate as to which parts were true, or at least, half true.  

As I didn't go into it expecting great historical accuracy (as I don't expect there was really all that much humour to be found in the inner circle machinations after his death), the blender approach to the history behind it didn't bother me in this case.  (Mind you, I still wonder about the choices made.  Why make out that his daughter was sent immediately to Vienna?)

Jewish success considered

I'm still catching up on posting about things I read while I was away on a short break.   This is one of them.

As a result of Bret Stephen's recent controversial article in the New York Times, Noah Smith reminded us of a blog post he had written in 2013 which looked at explanations other than high IQ, culture (or conspiracy) which may well show that the apparent success of Jewish folk is somewhat illusory, or explained in more mundane ways.

I thought it raised many good points which I had not heard of before.

GRAEME:  DON'T COMMENT IT WILL BE DELETED

Northern sea surface temperatures: is this unusual?

I am doing a bit of "man in his shed" speculating here, but I had noticed somewhere that, even though there is a delayed start to the monsoon season in North Australia this summer, the sea surface temperature anomalies are pretty high up that way (in the Indian Ocean, and the Timor and Arafura Seas, at least):

Which made me wonder - very high sea surface temperatures were a feature of the summer before the 2011 floods.  How does today compare to then?

Unfortunately, this map does not use the same colour scale, so you have to convert it in your brain:

Now, I know one is a year long analysis, and the other is a one day snapshot:  but still, it seems to me that both show a large accumulation of anomalies in the 1.5 to 2 degrees range, with the difference that this year it is bunched up further north.

Still, is the large blob of hot water unusual for this time of year, and does it indicate that when the wet comes, it will be very wet indeed?

I guess we will soon find out...

Global debt considered

I always worry when someone writes something about economics that seems very reasonable to me, but extremely few commentators are discussing the issue at all.   Is it my lack of understanding of economics, or is it a case of the obvious being ignored by most economics commentators for political or other reasons? 

That's the feeling I have with this short piece in The Guardian by Phillip Inman:  Debt will kill the global economy.  But it seems no one cares.

An aviation thing I didn't really understand before

I had always wondered whether unlucky sailors might be covered with an obvious fine spray of aviation fuel if a passenger jet was doing an emergency fuel dump over them.  Apparently not, although they may still smell it:



Read the article that the video is from at Business Insider.

Events that were made for comedy writers

For future reference

A couple of things I noticed via Twitter or the web over the Christmas break:

This tweet and the thread following contains some useful warnings about how not to improperly access academic stuff:

 Good to know how not to do anything wrong!

And this site is one I had never visited before, but yeah, looks really good:

Update:  now there is Anna's Archive.   Extremely useful.

Hazard reduction

This ABC Factcheck article on the matter of hazard reduction burns for bushfires is pretty detailed, and (as I would have expected) strongly indicative that there is not a fundamental problem of Greenies gone berserk and ruining all attempts at hazard reduction under the current system.

Why would I say "as I would have expected"?   Because, in case you hadn't noticed, it is primarily politicians on the Right, and their culture war warrior commentator supporters, who immediately start complaining about it whenever bushfires start.   It's remarkable, in fact, how conservative commentators who rarely get out of the city are suddenly armchair experts on how much fuel has been left in the forests and how bad those damn Greenies have let it get.   (They appear to have found one case of small scale environmental protest that interfered with one hazard control burn in the last couple of years, as far as I can tell.  From that, they just know that it's all about Greenies interference.)

Seems to me, using my common sense, that if it were a serious issue, the experts in the field (metaphorically, not literally) and the people who manage forests and hazard reduction would be the ones complaining about it.   By and large, they aren't.

Update:   a useful Twitter thread to read by someone with clear knowledge of the system.

Also - Jack the Insider also disputes the "Greenies caused all of this" fake excuse.

While there are environmental groups who campaign to restrict hazard reduction burns, in terms of political representation, there are 1273 councillors in New South Wales. Only 58 of them are Greens. There are no Greens on my local council and not one in the state government. In the Shire of Wingecaribbee, it’s a raft of independents, many National Party aligned, pock-marked with the odd property developer. It is hardly Leichhardt at 600 metres above sea level.

While I can’t speak for the rest of the country, I decided to go to the source, the local RFS, who tell me the real difficulty in hazard reduction burns is the country is so dry. Two consecutive winters with rainfall well below average make hazard reductions well, hazardous.

There was a furore in April 2018 when NSW Fire & Rescue performed a controlled burn in Hornsby which threatened homes as far south as Curl Curl and blanketed Sydney in smoke haze. Do people not remember this?

And let's not forget Graham Readfearn's earlier Factcheck article in The Guardian which I had previously linked to, containing quotes such as:

A former NSW fire and rescue commissioner, Greg Mullins, has written this week that the hotter and drier conditions, and the higher fire danger ratings, were preventing agencies from carrying out prescribed burning.

He said: “Blaming ‘greenies’ for stopping these important measures is a familiar, populist, but basically untrue claim.”

The coal issue

I thought a Twitter thread by David Fickling on the issue of Australia, its coal exports, and climate change, was good and nuanced.   

I think John Quiggin will soon be posting an article about the same topic, and that will be worth reading too.

Update:  and if you want complete lack of nuance from someone who used to take climate change seriously, but then decided to culture war instead, have a look at angry man Mark Latham -

Update 2:   Gee, just how much of the new year am I going to have to spend asking "whatever happened to Jason Soon?".    Clearly, it would seem he doesn't think Australia's enthusiasm to sell coal overseas is an issue, because he's stuck on saying "1.5% of global emissions, nothing we do makes any difference".   But take these comments from the Fickling thread about how our involvement in emissions is much bigger than the 1.3% often quoted by Scotty From Marketing:

A lengthy "factcheck"article last November showed that, if you include emissions from our exports, you can get our national contributions to around 4.4 tp 4.8% of global emissions from burning fossils, depending on how you count:

If Australia's fossil fuel imports, containing an estimated 135.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, are netted off, Australia's share of the global emissions from fossil fuel combustion falls from roughly 4.8 per cent to roughly 4.4 per cent, while Australia's share of total emissions falls approximately from 3.6 per cent to 3.3 per cent.
  

Update 3:  Warwick McKibbin tweets today:

Sounds fair, and he is the climate economist the Liberals have leaned on before. His 2018 article about his favoured approach towards pricing carbon is here.

Update 4:  something good to come out of this?  Young Liberals with the "radical" idea of believing scientists unreservedly, and more aggressively tackling emissions?:

In early December, delegates representing Young Liberal branches across the state voted overwhelmingly in approval of a motion recognising the reality of climate change and the need for action.

The NSW Liberal party’s youth wing recognises this a particularly important issue facing our generation, as our generation will have to face the risks brought about by climate change.

They're going to have to wait to outlive some of the fogeys still in Parliament, though.

The "Scotty from Marketing" fail

Look, I know that people can exaggerate on Twitter and social media, and get a false sense of where broader community attitudes lie, and hence I don't take the outpouring of condemnation that I have been reading from those sources as necessarily accurate;  but I nonetheless find it hard to believe that, in their heart of hearts, anyone on the Right of Australian politics could possibly feel that PM Morrison has struck the right tone in speech or action since the present spate of widespread bushfires started before Christmas.

I have a clear feeling of schadenfreude from watching a politician from a public relations background, and given to pro-fossil fuel stunts like bringing coal into parliament, now trying to work out how to express sympathy about a type of disaster that has, scientifically, a clear climate change connection, and not sound like a hypocrite on climate change policy.

And I do think that the sarcastic twitter hashtag "ScottyfromMarketing" is very amusing.

I doubt that Morrison will lose his job over this, but surely there are some on his cabinet who are seriously disappointed in his performance.

Update:  After seeing the video of his visit to the disaster area last night, I am now not at all sure that he will keep the PM job.  In fact, it seemed that he barely had the social skills to be a politician, let alone a PM.   A truly terrible performance.

Images brought to you by climate change

Yeah, well, here's hoping the dire bushfire season is killing any last vestiges of PR credibility of climate change denialism/lukewarmism for the great majority of the Australian public, as images like these are pretty powerful:

To be honest, I know it won't change the mind of those who have spent a decade or two determinedly believing every fake "sceptic" and billionaire funded denialist with crap arguments that were repeatedly debunked by actual scientists.   They are too invested in their view to risk losing face by admitting that they were wrong.

But there must be an element of the public that thought they would start taking it seriously when they could see how it could affect them personally.  Their day has come.

PS:  to Graeme - I'm just going to delete everything you have to say about this.  I have no time for your nonsense on this issue on a day like today.

Oh, and in light of recent anti-Semitic violence in America, all Jew-ish referencing crap from you I'll just be deleting as soon as I see it.

Christmas greetings

This year's Christmas art has a Chinese theme, in a modest attempt to suck up to our coming overlords, of course:

Actually, it's from this:

The Life of Christ by Giulio Aleni (1637) is a picture-narration of the life of Jesus drawn by that early Jesuit missionary for the Church in China. It contains almost 60 engraved images, probably the earliest and definitely the most precious collection of Chinese icons.

I think you could safely describe his style as "busy".  Not always great with faces, though.  Have a look at this detail from next page, on the Presentation at the Temple, which features, if I am not mistaken, the (rarely depicted these days) circumcision of a not very bothered baby Jesus:

   
You can't half tell that the illustrator is Italian, from the way everyone is dressed, especially the kids and Joseph.  And as for the faces of Jesus and the kid in the front...I guess engravings are hard to re-start from scratch.

Anyway, have a good Christmas season, readers.

The range of future warming considered

Zeke Hausfather is a great read on climate change, although as usual I will now gripe about how you have to read Twitter instead of blogs to keep track of his comments.

Anyway, he wrote a piece talking about the recent fierce argument (largely between climate scientist types - I think) about what "business as usual" might mean - a crispy Earth, or something a tad less dire.  Here's his tweet at the start of his Twitter discussion:

The link to the start of his Tweet thread is here;  and the link to the actual article is here.

Now, Noah Smith has a piece in Bloomsberg which summarises it too, and Zeke thinks it's a good article, even though it doesn't discuss uncertainty:

And here is the link to the Noah Smith article itself.

Noah Smith is very much against any suggestion that you have to kill capitalism to meet lower temperature ranges.   After all, it is under capitalism that the changes have been taking place which have made BAU not a complete, planet killing disaster - just an enormously costly dire problem.

And this is the "glass half full/glass half empty" aspect of the matter.  As Andrew Dessler said:

I think it fair to say that all of this suggests as follows:

1.    Extinction Rebellion style complete and utter doom-for-planetary-life forecasts are, how should we put it?, somewhat exaggerated yet not completely able to be ruled out.   (Whether they help in terms of political motivation, or simply encourage depression and defeatism, is a good question the answer to which I am never 100% certain.)


2.    Progress towards limiting future warning to 2 degrees is not so far beyond reach of humanity as to be unachievable, despite the fact that the political (and societal) will across the globe is not unified enough;

3.  Defeatists such as Jason Soon (and, to be fair, some of my other readers) seem to think that everything is stuck politically forever where it is now on this issue, whereas I do not see that as being the case.   Trump and dumbass Republicans and their culture war, and their similar populists in other countries, are not going to rule the roost forever.   And China by the nature of its government has the ability to make great interference in industry such that I suspect that even the reports of their new coal power plants is not the dire problem that it first appears.

There are many ways in which to ensure that climate change  becomes a more severe problem than it potentially can be - be an outright denier; put your libertarian/small government biases above everything else and run a blog that caters to denialism and encourages old fools to keep voting against any effective action;  accept climate science but get  more interested in Lefties and culture war issues and adopt a defectist attitude;  get in thrall to some billionaire's pet ideas that there is only one way forward with energy.

They are all harmful to useful action.   It seems rather obvious to me that anyone who takes the issue seriously should concentrate on the overthrow of Right wing denialism and inaction in the USA, and the dubious takes on science that appear in India too.     The West needs to have a unified front, and I think that China will ultimately too, in the interest of self preservation.

Update:   Tobis and Dessler make another point (one which I have made before, too):

Animal sympathy will save us?

First, a couple of tweets:

To be honest, it's hard to be sure it really is a koala, and not (say) a backpack - but it does look the right shape; and honestly, who ever knew until relatively recently that wild koalas, who normally do not interact with us all, could be so charmingly trusting of humans when fires are around?

Next:  poor cockatoos:

  
Apart from being woken up by them screeching at 4.45 am in a Brisbane summer, how can you possibly dislike these smart, clean looking birds?  That they should fall out of trees due to heat stress is...distressing.

It's obvious from the internet, but also confirmed by my daughter, that the impact of fires and heat on wildfire can cause more sympathy and upset than seeing dozens of burnt out houses, or hearing about someone who died in their car escaping a fire.

You can say that we shouldn't be like that, really.  But it's human nature to perceive animals (or at least, the more charming variety that we can empathise with and like seeing outside our window) as helpless victims, whereas humans take the risk of bush living and know what they might be getting into.     

So I'm not going to get too concerned about any arguments that (I would bet) some Right wing types are probably making somewhere about misplaced sympathy:  anything that leads to more political pressure to take meaningful action to limit emissions and hence limit the worst case scenario in terms of climate change is a good thing. 

The Jason Soon solution to the tragedy of the commons: "There is no solution!"

I prescribe gas masks, as inhaling smoke for a month likely interferes with thinking; and a relocation from the Western side of Sydney, as contagion from Mark Latham's angry-man-who-can-see-the-truth vibes is proving really detrimental to a susceptible mind. 

Liberal PMs can never get this "the right image for a PM during a bushfire" thing right

Either they're rushing out of the house to put on their volunteer firefighting gear and looking like they are too closely involved in the dirty work instead of taking in the big picture from an Ops room; or they're secretly sitting on the beach in Hawaii until the PR officer says "really, this is bad, bad optics, you've got to get back", and even then taking a couple of days to do so.

Yes, the problem is the Force

I haven't seen Rise of Skywalker yet, but if this article in the SMH is anything to go by:

Star Wars suffers a disturbance in The Force – and it's The Force itself 

I have no reason to re-assess my view in my post about Last Jedi - the problem with the Star Wars universe is the lack of coherency in dealing with the nature of the Force through the movie series.

Which is a pity, because it was a clever part of the appeal of the first movie, as that opinion piece argues:

Back in 1999, George Lucas explained his thinking in creating The Force. "I don't see Star Wars as profoundly religious," he told interviewer Bill Moyers. "I see Star Wars as taking all of the issues that religion represents and trying to distil them down into a more modern and more easily accessible construct that people can grab onto to accept the fact that there is a greater mystery out there.”

A bit of this, a bit of that, all thrown in together, heated and stirred: religion soup, in other words. Or, if you prefer, a non-specific kind of spiritualism, free of structure, hierarchy, church or cant.

Back in 1977, Obi-Wan Kenobi explained Lucas' hocus-pocus thus: "The Force is what gives the Jedi his power – it's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together."

It was nice and vague, with a bit of something for everyone; the monotheists could read that as God, the mystics as an iteration of Brahman, the atheists as a poetic rendering of universal matter.

Yes, indeed.    

Cool

This is the right thing to do, I reckon, and I think the soft Right commentators who don't like Trump but still think the Democrats will shoot themselves in the foot are just showing themselves up as more interested in the mere game of politics than the nation being left in safe hands:

And even if (or rather "when") the Senate acquits, the Trump letter, and his behaviour at rallies, indicates that it really, really hurts his narcissistic pride.

If it leads to him having some kind of mental break down and leaving the White House in a straight jacket, so much the better for the country. 

Just drink milk

Look, there needs to be a real push back against veganism by vegetarians, I reckon:

A vegan diet is generally healthy, low in cholesterol and protective of heart disease, but its followers must take vitamin B12 supplements or risk a condition that causes permanent numbness in their hands and feet, experts say.

Most people get their vitamin B12 from milk, but the plant-based substitutes do not have high enough levels to protect adults and children from peripheral neuropathy, which is irreversible.

Young festival-goers on a vegan diet may be at particular risk. “Kids these days inhale laughing gas,” said Tom Sanders, professor emeritus of nutrition and dietetics at King’s College London. “That can actively cause vitamin D deficiency. There is a danger of young people going vegan, not having B12 and it could tip the balance to them getting a serious neuropathy.”

It could easily be remedied by the manufacturers of plant-based milks, he said. “Levels should be higher in plant milks than they are at the moment. If they were three times higher, there wouldn’t be a problem.”

Internet claims that vegans do not need extra B12 were not evidence-based, he said. “I’m concerned that many people think it is a myth,” said Sanders. Gorillas eat a vegan diet, but B12 is produced in the colon and “they probably don’t wash their hands”, he said, so end up ingesting it. The Jains in India eat a vegan diet, but, he said, “all the Jain doctors I know have B12 injections”.

I am somewhat sympathetic to vegetarians who do so in the interests of minimising animal suffering;  but vegans, you're going too far.

Dress ups discussed

Gee, the Washington Post has more than a thousand comments following an article on whether it is a good or bad thing that most modern cruise line ships are downplaying "formal night", and the passengers are now not under much pressure to dress up in their best gear on any night of their holiday. What a first world problem, as many in comments are saying.

Anyway, I only post about it because of this photo in the article, of a 1920's ship (the Saturnia) which was, obviously, ridiculously ornate (at least in First Class):

You can read more about the ship on this website, and I see that it was Italian designed (that explains a lot), and yeah, completely over the top in other rooms too:

 

It's like they were trying to make the interior refuse to acknowledge it was inside of a ship.  Makes me laugh, really.

More solar power in the Northern parts of Africa

The other day I mentioned Morocco getting into renewable power in a big way.   Turns out Egypt is ramping up solar power too:

ASWAN, EGYPT – Near the southern Egyptian city of Aswan, a swath of photovoltaic solar panels spreads over an area of desert so large it is clearly visible from space.

They are part of the Benban plant, one of the world’s largest solar parks following the completion last month of a second phase of the estimated $2.1 billion (¥229.8 billion) development project.

Designed to anchor the renewable energy sector by attracting foreign and domestic private-sector developers and financial backers, the plant now provides nearly 1.5 gigawatts to Egypt’s national grid and has brought down the price of solar energy at a time when the government is phasing out electricity subsidies.

In 2013, Egypt was suffering rolling blackouts due to power shortages at aging power stations. Three gigantic gas-powered stations with a capacity of 14.4 GW procured from Siemens in 2015 turned the deficit into a surplus.

National installed electricity capacity is now around 50 GW, and Egypt aims to increase the share of electricity provided by renewables from a fraction currently to 20 percent by 2022 and 42 percent by 2035.

The article doesn't explain how they are doing to deal with the storage issue, but I assume some plans must be being made.