The wonderful Rex (the Runt)

I'm not sure if he has ever made an appearance on Australian TV before, but I've only recently discovered the very eccentric but very amusing Rex the Runt on ABC2. It's an Aardman claymation production, but much "edgier" than Wallace & Grommit.

Many, if not all, episodes are on Youtube, or you can find them via the official website. Here's a sample for your consideration:



It makes me happy, but why didn't I know about this show before??

In case you hadn't noticed...

... the meeting of the American Geophysical Union is on at the moment, and this Nature blog: In The Field: American Geophysical Union Archives has heaps of interesting posts about the various talks and papers being presented.

There appears to be nothing substantial in the way of global warming scepticism there (sorry my band of conservative greenhouse skeptic readers). But here are some of the more interesting posts:

* the main protagonists in the "hockey stick" controversy were together still disagreeing. (I personally am of the view that it was not that important an issue anyway.)

* here's another confirmation that Arctic ice is not just melting more in recent summers, it's getting thinner too.

* what are the odds of really abrupt climate changes? There's some relatively good news in there (Atlantic ocean circulation that keep England warm isn't expected to stop this century, and massive amounts of methane from underground may also stay in place for that long.) But, they now think ocean level rises will be faster and higher than IPCC last reported.

Even so, I don't tend to get too worked up about this (rising sea levels) as an issue, although I suppose I should if a metre in a century is possible. Certainly, it hasn't started yet, and engineering at least has a chance of addressing it in many areas. It's not as if the large rises be detected as soon as they start happening, and they will take many years to be fully realised.

My hunch is also to not be so sure on the methane issue. It seems poorly understood.

* here's a novel suggestion for climate geo-engineering that sounds much more "do-able" than most other ideas. (It's about getting rid of high altitude clouds.)

British character cycles

Paul Johnson writes about what he observed of people's stoic behaviour during the great depression in England, and it ties in well with this recent essay by Theodore Dalrymple concerning the modern change in British character.

Dalrymple describes it this way:

Gradually, but overwhelmingly, the culture and character of British restraint have changed into the exact opposite. Extravagance of gesture, vehemence of expression, vainglorious boastfulness, self-exposure, and absence of inhibition are what we tend to admire now—and the old modesty is scorned. It is as if the population became convinced of Blake’s fatuous dictum that it is better to strangle a baby in the cradle than to let a desire remain unacted upon.

Certainly, many Britons under the age of 30 or even 40 now embrace a kind of sub-psychotherapeutic theory that desires, if not unleashed, will fester within and eventually manifest themselves in dangerous ways. To control oneself for the sake of the social order, let alone for dignity or decorum (a word that would either mean nothing to the British these days, or provoke peals of laughter), is thus both personally and socially harmful.

While he doesn't really examine in detail the reasons behind this change of national character, he does make the interesting claim that the British have acted that way before:

Before the English and British became known for self-restraint and an ironic detachment from life, they had a reputation for high emotionalism and an inability to control their passions. The German poet Heinrich Heine, among others, detested them as violent and vulgar. It was only during the reign of William IV—“Silly Billy,” the king before Victoria—that they transformed into something approaching the restrained people whom I encountered as a child and sometimes as a doctor.

As always, he is an interesting, if rather gloomy, writer.

Just a naughty "manager"

Russia rewriting Josef Stalin's legacy -- chicagotribune.com

Good grief. I knew Stalin was still considered a folk hero by many older Russians who miss the days of communism, but I didn't realise his image was being rehabilitated with the help of the State. According to the story:

In Russian classrooms, history teachers are guided by a new, government-approved textbook, Alexander Filippov's "Modern History of Russia: 1945-2006," which hails Stalin as an efficient manager who had to resort to extreme measures to modernize the lumbering Soviet agrarian economy.

There were, writes Filippov, "rational reasons behind the use of violence in order to ensure maximum efficiency."

A museum commemorating Stalin as a national hero opened in 2006 in the southern city of Volgograd. The following year, a 40-episode television drama broadcast on a state-controlled network whitewashed Stalin's crimes and portrayed him as Russia's savior.

Putin apparently told history teachers "We can't allow anyone to impose a sense of guilt on us."

What a dangerous ideologue he is.

Something to look out for

Intimate Persuasion: Television: The New Yorker

William Shatner has a half hour chat show on US cable TV at the moment. The link is to a short review of it, and this is the key line:

....as it happens, Shatner’s intense weirdness makes things compelling.

Sounds reasonable to me...

Let's Buy Pakistan's Nukes - WSJ.com

Made me laugh

Thought Experiments : The Blog: The Confession of Supremely Wisegood

This post at Bryan The Orchard Farmer's blog made me laugh.

While you're there, you can read his much more serious post on torture in America, and the good set of comments which follow. (Oddly, Bryan seems to quite like American political columnists who are into "bi scenes" and have fixations on political pregnancy conspiracies.)

The mongrel holiday

It’s a Narnia Christmas - NYTimes.com

This blog has been decidedly un-cheery lately, so here's a nice essay about Narnia and what it shares with the modern feast of Christmas.

OK, back to gloom soon...

The Economist talks China

Asia's wounded giants | Suddenly vulnerable | The Economist

This is from last week, but worth noting:

Yet in China, too, the present downturn is jangling nerves. The country is a statistical haze, but the trade figures for last month—with exports 2% lower than in November 2007 and imports 18% down—were shocking. Power generation, generally a reliable number, fell by 7%. Even though the World Bank and other forecasters still expect China’s GDP to grow by 7.5% in 2009, that is below the 8% level regarded, almost superstitiously, as essential if huge social dislocation is to be avoided. Just this month a senior party researcher gave warning of what he called, in party-speak, “a reactive situation of mass-scale social turmoil”. Indeed, demonstrations and protests, always common in China, are proliferating, as laid-off factory-workers join dispossessed farmers, environmental campaigners and victims of police harassment in taking to the streets.

Well, I guess the "glass half full" way of looking at massive social disruption in China is that at least they should stop burning so much coal. (Of course, burning towns and villages might counter that somewhat.)

Things, I fear, are going to get very ugly in 2009.

A suggestion for St Mary's

Those with an interest in church affairs will have heard of St Mary's South Brisbane Catholic parish, which is (one suspects) the most liberal Catholic parish in Australia. As it happens, I've had a couple of relatives who have gone there for a number of years. (It was probably a decade or so ago that I was told "it's not your usual style of Catholic church", with the warning that there was a lot of hand holding, circle forming, and generally warm gushy stuff that said relative knew was probably not my "thing".)

The parish would occasionally get a bit of publicity for its far-from-traditional Catholic use of its church and hall: maintaining a home for the Gay and Lesbian Choir, for example. But there was occasional word leaking out about how they ran the parish in other very odd ways. (I was told, for example, that occasionally a Sunday "mass" would be led by a dancing, tambourine rattling nun, who used to strain the patience of even the most liberal parishioners.)

The parish likes to portray itself as very active and lively. In truth, however, it maintained church attendances of a moderate level (3 services each Sunday) by attracting liberal Catholics from all over Brisbane. Almost certainly, it was at the same time scaring away local potential parishioners who didn't want to be harangued about social justice and the Howard government at regular intervals.

Finally, earlier this year the Archbishop put the church on notice that the parish's novel forms of liturgy, and refusal to follow church teaching in various areas, meant that it was going to be told that it had ex-communicated itself from the Catholic Church unless it started genuinely following some Church teaching.

The parish responded with a letter which (as expected) quoted a lot of Vatican II words, and basically indicated that, in most respects, they were just going to keep on doing their stuff. (I've read it, but can't find a link to it on the web.)

Father Peter Kennedy, the nominal parish priest, has recently continued his wacky ways by holding a church ceremony with some aborigines in which a "sacred treaty" was entered into by the parish.

If you want to read an air-headed account of how important such a "treaty" is to the locals aborigines, have a read of this interview from the Religion Report, featuring Peter Kennedy himself and a couple of aboriginal activists including Sam Watson. Watson has been around Brisbane forever. I don't know if he achieves much apart from organising rallies and getting his face in the media at least once a year, but he has always struck me as a noisy belligerent advocate of the particularly irritating kind.

Of course, no function would be complete at St Mary's without the Gay and Lesbian Choir singing, so they were there for the signing of the "treaty".

It would appear that the treaty recognises the "sovereignty" of aboriginals over the Church land, or some such. This means, according to Sam, that they'll be rushing to defend St Marys if the Archbishop shuts it down. At least he seems to not be advocating violence:

Of course I'm not talking about picking up guns et cetera, that sort of thing, not talking about defending it that way, but we will be there, we're a part of St Mary's family, part of the St Mary's community.

Just more noise and agitation, although I have no idea how many followers Sam may be able to muster to defend the barricades at St Mary's. (Peter Kennedy says people may take to sleeping inside to stop the church re-possessing it. Why does a parish that talks up true authority as being within the non-material "community of faith" worry so much about having a particular building in which to meet in a few times a week?) I hope the Archbishop closes the church, if only for the entertainment value.

The Church keeps running the line that it is only catholic traditionalists of the somewhat eccentric kind who have dobbing in St Marys to the Archbishop and (when he was slow to act) Rome. They may be right, but the character and beliefs of Richard Stokes are hardly relevant if his reports of what St Marys does in liturgy are true. (And St Mary's never denies that they are.)

When discussing this over at Currency Lad's blog a few months ago, I suggested that there is already a Liberal Catholic Church in Brisbane; surely St Mary's should just merge with them and be done with. It was pointed out that that church is a bit of an oddball one, with historic ties to the Theosophical movement. (They allow for re-incarnation, for example. But then again, St Mary's had a Buddhist meditation group using the church too.)

Well, now I've found the movement for St Mary's. The Reformed Catholic Church, (Trade Mark) which is a recent innovation from Columbus, Ohio, which seems (like St Mary's) to be primarily motivated by "inclusiveness" (meaning, welcoming all gay and lesbian couples, female priests, the remarried, etc. Gay and lesbian couples are able to be "blessed", naturally.) It would not be surprising if many of its clergy were gay and lesbian too.

Oddly, it claims a significant number of clergy in Africa, a continent not particularly well known for its cultural tolerance of homosexuality. (Update: I see the reason here: it is OK with polygamy, and lets priests marry their "long time girlfriends". Still, I wonder what those African priests think of gay weddings in America?)

It seems that this reformed church shares all the values of St Mary's: a fondness for some (but only some) of the trappings of Catholics Church, while at the same time being able to make up their own doctrine based on what I would call modern perceptions of "niceness", rather than scripture and centuries of tradition.

So, parishioners and priests of St Mary's, I have found your future for you! Go, be Reformed, be happy. Leave the rest of us billion or so Catholics alone, and while we're at it, go find your own building to worship in. Sam Watson probably has a tent you can use. If you are the future of the Church, you should flourish no matter where you meet.

Methane blues

Land ice melting fast, NASA satellite data show

Well, I'm more interested in the last paragraphs, about a couple of papers which I assume will be getting more publicity soon:

Two other studies presented at the conference assess how Arctic thawing is releasing methane - a potent greenhouse gas. One study shows that the loss of sea ice warms the water, which warms the permafrost on nearby land in Alaska, thus producing methane, Stroeve said.

A second study suggests even larger amounts of frozen methane are trapped in lake beds and sea bottoms around Siberia and they are starting to bubble to the surface in some spots in alarming amounts, said Igor Semiletov, a professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. Late last summer, Semiletov found methane bubbling up from parts of the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea at levels 10 times higher than those of the mid-1990s, he said.

The amounts of methane in the region could dramatically increase global warming if they get released, he said. That, Semiletov said, "should alarm people."

Merry Christmas, Paris

Explosives found at Paris department store - International Herald Tribune

A previously unknown group calling itself the Afghan Revolutionary Front said in a warning mailed to Agence France-Presse that it had planted the explosives in the store. It demanded the withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan and warned that it would strike again if President Nicolas Sarkozy did not bring the troops home by the end of February.

Fabricator to fabricate some more

James Frey to write 'third book of the Bible' | Books | guardian.co.uk

James Frey is moving on from his drugs and booze-soaked memoirs to write the third book of the Bible, in which his version of Jesus will perform gay marriages.

Talking to online magazine The Rumpus.net, Frey said he had just finished an outline for the book, and was about to start writing it. "It's the third book of the Bible, called The Final Testament of the Holy Bible," he told interviewer and fellow author Stephen Elliott. "My idea of what the Messiah would be like if he were walking the streets of New York today. What would he believe? What would he preach? How would he live? With who?"

Do books of this kind ever sell well? They are just so obviously fantasy works of current pop morality, who can see any inherent value to them?

Take this, for example:

Frey said his version would see Jesus living with a prostitute. "It doesn't matter how or who you love. I don't believe the messiah would condemn gay men and women," he said. Judas, meanwhile, would be the "same as he was two thousand years ago", a "selfish man who thinks of himself before the good of humanity, who values money more than love".

This has "remainder bin" written all over it.

ETS lessons not learnt

Crikey - Rudd's talking out of his mandate

More on Labor's emissions trading scheme from Bernard Keane:

This scheme is so badly designed there’s a real question as to whether it is worth establishing. This is one issue on which greenhouse sceptics and ardent greenies can be in furious agreement: the Government’s ETS is profoundly flawed. Two groups previously excluded from free permits -- the coal-fired power industry and industries between 1000-1500t per million dollars revenue, will now have access to them (the coal industry will get $3.9b worth of free permits over five years -- not $3.9b in cash, as a lot of us thought yesterday). Throw in that a change to the formula to enable firms to use value added instead of revenue in determining eligibility will mean more firms will qualify for 90% free permits, and the scheme will commence with minimal incentive for our biggest polluters to cut back.

It starts off thus flawed and gets worse. Under the Green Paper, the proportion of free permits was capped at 30%, which at least constrained our most polluting industries to find more efficient and less carbon-intensive ways of operating if they wanted to expand. Under the White Paper, the supply of free permits simply increases as our heaviest polluters expand. As Martin Parkinson, head of the Climate Change department said yesterday, this has potentially serious consequences for scheme revenue. It also means that there’s a real danger that at some point in a few years’ time, more permits will be given away to heavy polluters than auctioned for use by those with low emissions.

Well done, Mr Rudd -- you’ve invented a scheme that actually punishes low emitters and rewards heavy emitters.

Yes, it is remarkable that both Jennifer Marohasy and the Greens are going to be criticising the scheme's design.

Even more remarkable that the well publicised problems with the European scheme do not seem to be being properly addressed.

I must say, however, that is more typical of the Left to not care about results so much, as long as the intentions are "good" (ie ideologically sound, or politically correct if you will). Aboriginal welfare is a typical example of that, but also the way Labor supporters considered it a virtual crime that Australia hadn't signed the ineffective Kyoto Treaty, even though it was meeting its targets as if it had. The attitude is not entirely gone: there are commenting on blogs "oh well, better than nothing."

In fact, it is worse than nothing if it takes away the realisation that nothing effective is being achieved.

For Andrew Bolt to ponder

Arctic melt passes the point of no return - Climate Change, Environment - The Independent

Andrew Bolt likes to spend time looking at satellite images of the winter Arctic ice cover lately, all the more to pooh-pooh global warming with.

He doesn't seem to often consider the issue of the depth of renewed winter cover, which common sense would suggest is just as important for the future of the cover as how much area it extends to each winter.

And he ought to read this article which seems consistent with the recent post here about satellite evidence that warmer temperatures are unduly weighted to the North of the planet:

Scientists have found the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world at least a decade before it was predicted to happen.

Climate-change researchers have found that air temperatures in the region are higher than would be normally expected during the autumn because the increased melting of the summer Arctic sea ice is accumulating heat in the ocean. The phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, was not expected to be seen for at least another 10 or 15 years and the findings will further raise concerns that the Arctic has already passed the climatic tipping-point towards ice-free summers, beyond which it may not recover.

Squid lovers take note

Rise in CO2 'affects jumbo squid'

Ocean acidification is likely to make jumbo squid unhappy.

Well, good to see that squid lovers of the world will at last be convinced to take ocean acidification seriously.

Indignity unrewarded

Colonoscopies Miss Many Cancers, Study Finds - NYTimes.com

This is startling news:

Instead of preventing 90 percent of cancers, as some doctors have told patients, colonoscopies might actually prevent more like 60 percent to 70 percent.

“This is a really dramatic result,” said Dr. David F. Ransohoff, a gasteroenterologist at the University of North Carolina. “It makes you step back and worry, ‘What do we really know?’ ”

Dr. Ransohoff and other screening experts say patients should continue to have the test, because it is still highly effective. But they also recommend that patients seek the best colonoscopists by, for example, asking pointed questions about how many polyps they find and remove. They also say patients should be scrupulous in the unpleasant bowel cleansing that precedes the test, and promptly report symptoms like bleeding even if they occur soon after a colonoscopy.

I am feeling more mortal now.

Rudd's targets, and other problems

It's hard to know what to say about Kevin Rudd's greenhouse gas targets today.

In fact, the whole CO2 issue is an ugly mess at the moment.

On the one hand, I would like to see CO2 emissions tackled seriously, and it sure sounds like Rudd's plan is one that largely avoids taking the hard decisions. As Robert Merkel said over at LP, industry has sounded so happy with the target that it looks clear that it is too generous to them.

On the other hand, countries announcing high targets which don't appear to have any realistic hope of success under emissions trading schemes similar to those already in place are just selling false hope, and a more modest target at least has the benefit of realism.

On the third hand, CO2 sequestration seems obviously a crock that the coal industry has latched onto to try to save its skin. Yet it has seemingly captured the imagination of Rudd and (probably) the Liberals. Kevin Rudd touring a new, but tiny, solar power plant for a small outback community also gives out the wrong impression about how fast solar is advancing here.

As a whole series of posts here recently has indicated, the fundamental problem seems to be increasingly recognised: there is strong reason for believing that emissions trading schemes are a hopelessly flawed way of trying to address the issue, especially if offsets are allowed. Offsets will always be at the core of the potential for corruption, unintended consequences, and a huge and difficult verification process.

It also seems that some people on all sides of the greenhouse fence (Lomborg, Lovelock and Hansen, for example) are being more forthcoming in arguing that concentrating on ETS is a bit of a sideshow: it's more important for governments to push directly for the technological developments that will generate lots of power and actually reduce CO2 emissions. To worry too much about ETS elevates process over results, and this has been at the heart of my long standing scepticism about Kyoto. (Stories of Kyoto's failures often remind me of the "Yes Minister" episode in which a new hospital completely devoid of patients, but full of busy administrative staff, is said to be operating very successfully.)

The anti-CO2 advocates emphasising innovative nuclear technology as a key feature of reduced CO2 includes Hansen. I was surprised to see that the Australia greenhouse website BraveNewClimate has also taken to posting about new generation nuclear. Meanwhile, Obama's new Energy Secretary Steven Chu is a physicist with a lot of sympathy for nuclear over coal.

Yet the Green movement is going to resist all such talk; they all give the impression they were spooked by nuclear as children and can't grow out of it. All their talk of renewable energy as being able to save the day is just not very believable.

The best hope is probably that Steven Chu will come up with a detailed, direct and innovative plan for dealing with greenhouse in a way that has a significant role for new types of nuclear power. Obama will then have to sell it to the American public and Congress.

In Australia, the truly brave but proper thing for the Liberals to do would be to argue that they will commit to higher targets, but only on the basis that nuclear is to be an essential part of the mix. Personally, I would argue for some direct involvement in the nuclear pebble bed development going on in South Africa and China. (The timetable for getting a demonstration plant in South Africa up and running just keeps on getting extended; surely there is scope for more international involvement in funding this? The technology is not dramatically new, but has the good PR feature of not being able to melt down, and should be modular in design for easy international deployment.)

I actually think that nuclear power will soon be sell-able to the Australian public, but whether the political will is there or not is yet to be seen. (Certainly, if Obama comes out strongly pro-nuclear, it will be easier for the Liberals to adopt such a policy too.)

But for the moment, there are no strong grounds for optimism that anyone has worked out the best way forward.

UPDATE: In light of what I wrote last night, I would say that Tim Colebatch in The Age gets to the heart of the problem with Kevin Rudd's scheme here:

Ross Garnaut envisaged a rigorous emissions trading scheme with few exemptions, and raising $4 billion a year to speed research, development and commercialisation of clean technology. The Rudd model spends everything on compensation, and has nothing left over to help solve the problem.

In The Australian, George Megalogenis looks at the strange decision to pay families and pensioners more than anyone expects them to lose due to the scheme. But, as was to expected from Paul Kelly's recent article, the editorial supports Rudd and calls critics of his plan "deep Greens". Hmmph.

Rich country, poor country: more Kyoto silliness

Climate negotiatiors need to overhaul their list of who's rich and who's poor. - By Michael A. Levi - Slate Magazine

This appeared last Thursday, but is well worth the read for yet another example of the ways Kyoto was flawed from the start.

Not your typical Japanese story

Wild boar goes on rampage in Wakayama; four injured

Hey, shouldn't Australia have more rampaging boar stories than Japan? We have a dangerous wildlife reputation to uphold, after all.