An odd connection

Coffee, tea may stop diabetes

Researchers at The George Institute have discovered that high consumption of coffee and tea is associated with a substantially reduced risk of type 2 diabetes. Lead author, Associate Professor Rachel Huxley, The George Institute, says that people who consumed on average three to four cups of coffee a day had one-quarter lower risk of developing diabetes compared to non-coffee drinkers.

But it doesn't appear to be the caffeine:

“In those individuals drinking more than three or four cups of coffee per day, the reduction in risk of developing diabetes was even greater; up to 40 per cent in those drinking more than six cups per day compared with non-coffee drinkers. Interestingly, similar reductions in risk were also observed for tea and decaffeinated beverages suggesting that any diabetes-sparing effect is not driven primarily through caffeine as previously thought.”

Odd. I wouldn't have expected too many other similar compounds in tea and coffee. Maybe it's just drinking hot beverages that does the trick.

To know the future - consult the all-knowing Kitty

Japanese Fortune Telling: Of Cats’ Paw-pads, Penguins, Monsters, and Gundams

A very odd collection of books from Japan about unique forms of fortune telling.

Actually, I'm torn between consulting Kitty-chan or the capybara.

Geothermal blues

Double blow for 'hot rock' geothermal power - Short Sharp Science - New Scientist

In Australia, though, it's just got new funding from the Federal government.

I remain somewhat skeptical of this technology's potential.

Things that make me happy, No. 1

Hey, after a big rant a few posts back, I said I would post about reasons to be happy.

Well, I'll have to break it up into short bits of things that are at least making me happy at the moment, so here we go:

1. the birdbath outside the dining room window. Watching bird drink and bathe while you eat breakfast or lunch is much more enjoyable than I expected. My wife yesterday even bought a bird identification book (more for the kids than me), but I can't see myself being drawn too far into the somewhat peculiar world of obsessive birdwatchers. If the birds come to me, fine; but I'm not going to them.

Ocean acidification calmly explained

It's from earlier this year, but I have just got around to watching this video of a talk on ocean acidification given at the University of California by a marine chemist. It's a very straightforward but convincing explanation of the problem and the issues, and is well worth watching if you have a spare hour:

Sunspot connection questionned

Sunspots do not cause climate change, say scientists - Climate Change, Environment - The Independent

I see the (at least noteworthy) skeptic Dr Roy Spencer had a recent post looking for sun/climate connections in 2008/2009.

He suspects there might be some connection, but it by no means clear.

Meanwhile, in Iran

Iran 'building nuclear bomb trigger' | News.com.au

The interest in Copenhagen seems to be dampening media and public interest in the worsening situation regarding Iran.

I missed this report last week, for example:

...Iran accused western-backed Saudi Arabia of handing over a missing Iranian nuclear scientist to the US and claiming that Washington is holding 10 more of its officials...

Tensions between Tehran and Washington have ..been fuelled by the allegation that Saudi Arabia sent an Iranian nuclear scientist to the US. Iran said Shahram Amiri disappeared during a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia in June and accused the US of acting like a "terrorist".

All very reminiscent of the Cold War, really, except this one probably stands a better chance of going "hot".

A useful summary

Long-term goals the big hurdle

Tim Colebatch in The Age gives a useful summary of the massive task ahead if the world is really to achieve the 2 degree target:

The only fair basis for determining long-term emission rights is population. At Copenhagen, they are negotiating on total emissions or emissions growth. Yet inescapably, the currency we will end up dealing with is emissions per head.

Ross Garnaut saw this clearly, and made it the central feature of his report's design for a global agreement. He proposed that the world adopt a goal of convergence to equal per capita emissions by 2050. With a 50 per cent cut in global emissions, that implies cutting emissions to about 2.5 tonnes per head.

That implies Australia and the US would have to cut emissions per head by 90 per cent over the next 40 years, and China by 45 per cent. But a poor country like India would be able to expand emissions by 90 per cent. And countries could trade emission rights to meet the target.

Cut emissions per head by 90 per cent? Sounds unlikely, to say the least.

Reasons to be unhappy

Here at Opinion Dominion your blogger generally likes to talk up optimism for the future. But this attempt to look at all empty-ish glasses as in fact being half full has taken a savage beating over the last few weeks, and it's hard not to disagree with Time magazine that it is looking like a dispiriting end to a particularly uninspiring decade. Cases in point:

* An outbreak of aggressive stupidity Part 1: climate change skepticism has never been known for its sense of calm, dispassionate reason, but with the release of the CRU emails, they've just gone bat-sh*t crazy, following their own echo-chamber memes over the edge of the cliff of sanity. It's remarkable how few on the blogosphere drive this: I would guess that Watts up With That, Roger Pielke Snr, Steve McIntyre and Andrew Bolt probably account for about the dispersal of about 90% of all "skeptic" memes.

Bolt in particular shows no interest in counter arguments, although as I have acknowledged before, Watts will sometimes post something that runs counter to a skeptical line. McIntyre seems to have made one half reasonable point in his skepticism career, and has continued to dwell on it for years, as if uncertainty as to accuracy of tree ring proxies really had created a crisis for the whole of climate science. His view of his own self importance seems remarkably over-inflated.

It's not the claimed "skepticism" per se of the followers of these views which is so aggravating; it's the seeing of conspiracies, the "it's always been a hoax", the outright deceptive nature of much of their sloganeering that is driving me to distraction. Any post in a blog headed sarcastically "hide the decline" shows the person is a non-serious partisan player, and makes me want to reach for my pistol. (And no doubt that last comment will be claimed by a 'skeptic' as showing that I am a violence-threatenting fascist out to gun down non-believers.)

These same people take the same shrug shoulders approach to ocean acidification, so there is no point in trying to argue with them that there is fact a matter of at least equal significance as to why CO2 should be reduced. (And my official position remains that acidification alone is enough to take urgent action. An actual drop in global temperatures over the next decade would not change that.)

* An outbreak of aggressive stupidity Part 2: The Coalition parties in Australia have been taken over by the do-nothing climate change "skeptics."

Tony Abbott, a smart enough guy who nearly everyone has liked for his forthrightness as a Minister, saw right-wing skepticism (especially amongst rural folk, who were presumably already glued onto the Nationals anyway) as an opportunity to grab a leadership that he probably figured was never going to evolve naturally towards him.

I predict he will pay for this disingenuous opportunism. I'll certainly not be voting for a party in such complete disarray on such an important issue, and for a leader who has surrounded himself with a deeply unimpressive shadow cabinet.

* The Right in America goes off the deep end: I don't agree with everything Charles Johnson says about how the Right has gone wrong in the United States, and even suspect that he may be unfairly criticising or misrepresenting some figures. But still, overall, it's hard to disagree that the Republicans have been taken over by anti-science "skeptics," have few people left who argue with reason and clarity, and it is indeed a worry that the very strange Glenn Beck is taken seriously by a significant number of people.

It's hard to see from where a plausible Republican Presidential candidate is next going to emerge.

* Even those who are "right" are wrong, Part 1: Just because I think the Republicans are in complete disarray doesn't mean I am particularly impressed with the other side of politics in America. I always thought Obama was over-hyped, as if the ability to deliver a platitudinous speech in a deep voice was all it needed to lead America out of its funk. Well, it's hard to see how I was wrong. He's likely to be unable to convince Americans of the need for serious money to be raised and spent on clean energy; I suspect he will cause NASA to flounder for another 20 years; it seems that he has been unable to get through serious health reform. (That the right wing equates access to reasonable health care for everyone as too much "socialism" is one of the sillier features of the Republicans today. You really get the feeling Republicans just need to travel more.)

* Even those who are right are wrong, Part 2: To deal with a problem you have to first acknowledge it exists. Hence my anger at the skeptics/deniers. But, even if you get over the hurdle, there is still little evidence that those nations that do take climate change seriously can think of anything beyond emissions trading schemes as a "solution".

I reckon the carbon tax proponents simply left their run too late.

I actually wonder whether it's worth worrying about precise targets at all: we simply want governments to raise money for massive investment in research and deployment of clean energy and to just get on with it. It seems the simplest way of doing that is to impose a carbon tax.

Economists have a fear of governments picking favourites, and would prefer to let the market work out the best combination of solutions. But at times when serious and urgent action is needed, nations don't let that happen. It's a bit like the heads of industry telling the generals how they should run a war that it is expected to take 30 years to play out.

I strongly suspect that Bjorn Lomborg is right on this point.

Of course, the Labor Party in Australia has its head in the sand on nuclear power too, which is another reason to grind one's teeth.

* Is Copenhagen worth anything at all at the end of the day? The Wall Street Journal seems to editorially be about the only paper in the world that promotes climate change skepticism. However, they might have a point in this article, which argues that even the most optimistic agreement that seems politically possible is not going to help keep CO2 within the levels needed.
I suppose I should be skeptical of anything the WSJ runs on AGW, and I note that the article seems to be based on continued extremely high economic growth in China. Still, it seems a worry.

* It's been stiflingly hot in Brisbane. The last couple of weeks have been hot and breath-sappingly humid to a degree I am sure is unusual even for Brisbane in early December. There have also been few storms to provide evening relief. It is starting to remind me of the summer of 1998, but we will have to wait and see.

* Why can't directors I don't like fail? This has been a disappointing year for my hopes that Tarantino might have made a career ending film. Instead, we get violence with no redeeming moral context being praised as entertainment again.

Now, James Cameron, who appears to be a complete and utter real-life jerk from all reports, has apparently made a successful CGI heavy film at a time I thought just about everyone was getting sick of CGI, and starting to get leery of 3D too. (It certainly makes going to the cinema a much more expensive exercise.)

Obviously, karma has been proved again as an implausible theory.

* I didn't even like last Saturday's episode of Mythbusters. This is the one where they spent time on looking at the movie inspired myth that putting a person's head into liquid nitrogen for a short time will freeze it enough to make it shatter on a bench top. The movie in question is (apparently) Jason 10, which I presume is another example of the Hollywood slasher/horror/sadism genre which has developed in the last decade and is purely about how to raise the bar in imagining gruesome ways to die.

This was not, in my books, a "myth" worthy of attention, and was far too gruesome a topic for a show with a large following amongst smart kids. I hope they got some criticism for it.

In fact, I am starting to worry that they are running out of myths to deal with. I'll have to put my mind to suggesting some.


OK, that's it for now. For my next post, I will attempt to revert to reasons to be happy.

Returning soon

Awaaay

Space beer

Sapporo taking orders for ISS brew

Sapporo Breweries Ltd. will sell a limited volume of beer made using barley grown from seeds that were stored in outer space under a joint project with the Russian Academy of Science and Okayama University.

The brewer will receive orders for the Sapporo Space Barley beer via the Internet until Dec. 24, making 250 six-packs, holding 330-ml bottles, available at a price of ¥10,000 each, Sapporo said Thursday, adding the product will be delivered to customers in late January. Proceeds will be used for the promotion of science education.

The original barley seeds were stored for five months in the Russian module of the International Space Station.

Good to know the Russians and Japanese have their space research priorities right...

Sonic booms

I see that residents near the northern New South Wales coast were almost certainly shaken by a distant sonic boom last night. (The RAAF was doing exercises off the coast.)

This reminds me: last week's episode of Mythbusters where they were testing the effects of sonic booms on glass, cars and structures was very enjoyable. You can see some clips from it here.

It's a fantastic show, and is about the only thing on TV that is a "must see" every week in my house when new episodes are on. (The boys in the family are a bit more enthusiastic about it than the girls, though. Is that a surprise?)

Nature comes out swinging

Climatologists under pressure : Article : Nature

A pleasingly aggressive editorial in Nature on "climategate".

"Hockey sticks" without tree rings

Another excellent, succinct post from Skeptical Science. (Which, of course, "skeptics" won't read.)

Now it's serious

That Jon Stewart is not always very careful with his analysis was made very clear earlier this year when he opined that Truman was a war criminal for using atomic bombs. In particular, he suggested that it would have more appropriate to set off an A-bomb off shore as a warning first; a view that might make sense if you had certainty that the weapons would always work, had more than two at your disposal, and did not have to make such a massive effort to get even those ones made.

The right wing blogs in the US (correctly) lamblasted Stewart for such careless, off the cuff, thinking.

Now Stewart is being careless and trivialising again, but this time the Right is applauding it, because it's about "Climategate".

What's worse, this wasn't Stewart being put on the spot during an interview, it was a prepared piece. It also tried to have it both ways, claiming at the end that it doesn't prove global warming is a fraud, and trying to ridicule Senator Inhofe for his rabid climate change denial.

It would seem that Stewart, like Monbiot, is not smart enough as to realise that if you offer anything that apparently supports AGW skepticism, AGW skeptics will take it as confirmation that they have "won".

Worse, Stewart's "analysis" of the story was completely trivialising and misleading in exactly the same way AGW skeptics have dealt with it. Going on about the phrase "hide the decline" without knowing the context is completely misleading. (Even Trenberth's "the fact is we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty" comment is not the same worry that it first appears.) Stewart ended by saying that scientists shouldn't "cut corners" because it undermines the science. As far as I can tell, "climategate" suggests nothing about shortcuts at all. It does raise issues about the provision of data for scrutiny, but even then the context of the (often) harassing and time consuming use to which FOI can be put needs to be considered.

This is a worry because Stewart is (apparently) an influential source of news for his mostly young, hip audience. If even he is going to provide ill-informed or context-free discussion of the issue, he is misleading his audience in exactly the same way some of them probably first thought "hey, that's right. Why didn't we just set off an A bomb as a warning first?"

Someone (a scientist directly in the field, not just a political advocate like Gore) ought to be on the phone to The Daily Show and asking for a "right of reply" to put the emails in context. Stewart might claim "but I said I still believed in AGW", but there is no doubt in my mind that he has done harm to the promotion of good science and policy.

State of play

BBC News - Climate science, from Bali to Copenhagen

This seems like a fairly well balanced account of the current issue in climate science.

Sports Illustrated covers more than I expected

Of course I don't read Sports Illustrated, but First Things posted about what is probably the oddest paragraph ever written in that magazine:

Whether you consider him genuine or fake, Tebow, at the end of the day, is a Heisman Trophy-, SEC- and BCS-title winning quarterback who goes to class, goes to church and circumcises people less fortunate than him. More people should be so intolerable.

Made me laugh, anyway.

Anything good from Copenhagen?

Barry Brook is feeling very, very pessimistic about anything at all useful coming out of Copenhagen:

In December, we’ll see politicians from all manner of countries strutting around on the world stage saying how seriously they take the climate change issue, why delay on action is unacceptable, and why the world must move towards a low carbon economy — “blah di blah blah blah“. They’ll most certainly earnestly commit to a definite emissions reduction target for some far distant date (probably 2050), and will probably also agree to some vague notion of an in-principle x% cut by 2020 (choose whatever value you want for x — it’s meaningless). Everyone will then head home, and the world will go on cranking up the carbon, much as before.

Then, as we continue to dither and meander our way through the next 10 or so years, the squeeze will start to be felt, with the grip of increasingly severe climate impacts (most notably extreme events and some unanticipated abrupt changes), and energy insecurity, inexorably tightening. Oil and natural gas prices will rise substantially, as unavoidable production shortages begin to seriously constrain business-as-usual. Those who can pay for the oil and its derivatives, or those who have the large remaining reserves, will be set inequitably apart from the rest. Continued rising temperatures, increasingly severe short-term events, persistent rainfall shifts (each with a decent chance of sudden step changes), and so on, will make the reality of global warming starkly apparently to all but the most delusional pea brains. At some point — well within the next two decades I suspect — humanity will, under considerable duress and societal upheaval, move at last into emergency mode.

The only problem with that scenario is that it does indeed appear possible that global warming might not take off again in a big way for 5 to 10 years, thereby failing to supply the crisis that Brooks thinks is necessary, and instead give the re-invigorated skeptics air to continue their campaigns.

In an ideal world, a hold in temperature increases for long enough could actually give some breathing room for the development and deployment of new technology. But, in the very real battle of science, human nature, and politics that is underway, its by no means certain how it is going to play out.

Winners(?) and losers

The Great Beyond: Climate change creates shell-size surprise

Nature reports that a new lab study of several types of sea creatures confirms that some actually grow bigger and better shells in lower pH sea water:

Ries and colleagues from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution grew 18 different species in tanks with differing levels of carbon dioxide. They found seven species had more shell under higher carbon dioxide: crabs, lobsters, shrimp, red and green calcifying algae, limpets and temperate urchins (image top – larger animal grew under higher carbon dioxide).

Another 10 species did worse: oysters, scallops, temperate corals, tube worms, hard and soft clams, conchs, periwinkles, whelks and tropical urchins (image lower – smaller animal grew under higher carbon dioxide). Only one species was unaffected, the humble mussel, they report in Geology.

That Nature link at the top will probably stop working soon, but the press release it is based on is here. The researchers note that this study is pretty preliminary, as the didn't account for nutrient levels. Moreover, the ecological effect of one species building a bigger, stronger shell is not at all clear:

“I wouldn’t make any predictions based on these results. What these results indicate to us is that the organism response to elevated CO2 levels is complex and we now need to go back and study each organism in detail.”

Ries concurs that any possible ramifications are complex. For example, the crab exhibited improved shell-building capacity, and its prey, the clams, showed reduced calcification. “This may initially suggest that crabs could benefit from this shift in predator-pray dynamics. But without shells, clams may not be able to sustain their populations, and this could ultimately impact crabs in a negative way, as well,” Ries said.

In addition, Cohen adds, even though some organisms such as crabs and lobsters appear to benefit under elevated CO2 conditions, the energy they expend in shell building under these conditions “might divert from other important processes such as reproduction or tissue building.”