Urban heat island, meet rural cool island

Here's something I hadn't heard much about before. Global warming skeptics go on a lot about urban heat islands causing a significant part of temperature increases over the 20th century.

But there is another effect - increased irrigation causing an artificial cooling:

Scientists are just beginning to get a handle on irrigation's impact. In a hundred years, the amount of irrigated farmland has grown four-fold, now covering an area four times the size of Texas. Puma and his coauthor, Benjamin Cook, a climatologist at Goddard and Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, are the first to look at the historic effects of mass watering on climate globally by analyzing temperature, precipitation and irrigation trends in a series of model simulations for the last century. They found that irrigation-linked cooling grew noticeably in the 1950s as irrigation rates exploded, and that more rain is now falling downstream of these heavily watered regions. ..

Globally, irrigation's effect on climate is small—one-tenth of one degree C (about 0.2 degree F). But regionally, the cooling can match or exceed the impacts of greenhouse gases, say the scientists. For example, the study found some of the largest effects in India's arid Indus River Basin, where irrigation may be cooling the climate up to 3 degrees C, (5.4 degrees F) and up to 1-2 degrees C in other heavily irrigated regions such as California's Central Valley and parts of China. The study also found as much as .5 degree C cooling in heavily watered regions of Europe, Asia and North America during the summer.

Irrigation has increased because it boosts crop yields, supporting many millions of small farmers, said Upmanu Lall, head of the Columbia Water Center at the Earth Institute. But concern is growing that groundwater supplies in India and China may not keep up.

So, use up your groundwater, and suddenly you may find your local area quite a bit hotter than before.

I trust Watts up With That will post on this soon. They had better, after spending so much time on urban heat islands.

A new government. Yay.

This is, at the very least, going to be a very interesting term of Federal government to watch. 

Labor is lucky not to have to run everything past Bob Katter.  If it were up to him, I expect it would be decaying spaceports and opera houses on Cape York in 20 years time, and stalled development of a revolutionary baby formula using freeze dried bananas and barramundi oil.  

Now Julia Gillard should prove her conservative social views claim by quickly getting married to Tim. 

Her parents turned up on ABC 24 hour news channel yesterday, and they seem very nice.  It also became clear that Julia gets her over-endowed earlobes from her mother.   Sadly, the computer I was watching it on did not have an easy screenshot save on it, so I missed that. [ Hopefully, mentioning Julia’s earlobes will again cause a 500 extra visitors over the next couple of days.]

And how’s this for a perfect picture for a caption competition today:

If I had enough time I would supply a few myself, but I’m late for work.

Dawn of D Day

So, we should know who the independents will support in government by this afternoon.

There seems to be a late swing of opinion that maybe the Coalition will get their support after all, despite many reports over the weekend that it had pretty much given up hope. Well, with Bob Katter involved, anything could happen.

Never has the matrix of the good, the bad and the ugly of political policies on offer at an election been so hopelessly mixed between the parties. I've already disclosed this elsewhere, but I voted informal in the House of Reps, and a Labor - Liberal mix in the Senate. I made sure the Greens were far down the list, as even though they have one good idea (a moderate introductory carbon tax) I am loathe to give them too much power to implement their mostly objectionable policies.

By rights, this means I have no real grounds to complain about the election outcome. But I still think a severely chastised Labor has the better chance of making a good government than an Abbott-led Coalition. I simply don't trust Abbott's instincts as leader, and the substantial rump of climate change skeptics who form his support base make me very pessimistic about the party as a whole. His Swedish style parental leave plan is a folly introduced in exactly the same self centered way Rudd would get some of his flakier ideas up. His is similarly populist on immigration limits, and there were clear errors (and hidden elements barely noticed by the electorate - such as big savings in pharmaceutical benefits) in their policy costings.

On the other hand, I couldn't quite bring myself to be seen to be rewarding the large amount of rushed, barely justified policy making of Labor. I think the NBN, while sounding all shiny and impressive, is overkill for Australia, and the ideal solution is almost certainly one that falls between the Coalition and Labor extremes (probably closer to the Coalition plan). To take a couple of other examples: a laptop for every student was a populist waste from day one, and the insulation scheme had absolutely hopeless implementation in the face of plenty of warnings.

One hopes that the way these policies were developed (seemingly on the back of a Rudd envelope) will not be repeated with the removal of uber control freak Kevin.

Also in Labor's favour, I have to say that, regardless of the exact amount it will raise, I don't understand why any government should not proceed with a mining super-profits tax if you have in principle agreement from the major miners. My impression is that, as with nearly all new taxes, it is likely to raise more than expected rather than less.

Perhaps this indicates I should have voted for Labor anyway, but although I like her personally, there wasn't a Gillard led government record to vote on. I share the view of the Labor strategists who now say that going to the election early was a mistake.

With any luck, if Tony Abbott does not become PM he'll have another burst of self doubt and not be leader next time around. No one seems to think that will happen, because he has been deemed a success merely by not being entirely the mistake ridden campaigner that everyone expected. (The all running, never sleeping action man image was as shallow as the Kevin 07 campaign really, although I always knew there was an element of deceit in the latter's public persona.) I still consider Abbott a policy flake, too willing to change on a whim, and in that respect, he is actually close to the Rudd model in terms of policies he will run, even if he is much more collegiate in dealing with his Parliamentary colleagues. (Mind you, no one else would have run a government like Rudd, not even Turnbull.)

Ha ha

The new green Germany can't afford to be so Green after all:

The German government has decided to extend the life spans of the country’s 17 nuclear plants while alternative energy sources are developed, a move that is also likely to create windfalls for both power companies and strained government coffers. ...

New taxes levied on utility companies as part of the deal will be used in part to help develop renewable energy sources, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Monday. But she said Germany could not afford to get rid of nuclear power as planned because the amount of renewable energy available would not be sufficient to fill the gap.

“Nuclear energy is a bridge,” she said.

Under a German law, passed by a previous government in 2002, the last nuclear power plant was to be shut by 2022. That decision, bitterly resented by the nuclear energy companies, was largely supported by the German public, which has a deep aversion to anything nuclear, a sentiment that intensified after the nuclear accident at Chernobyl.

Recent polls have shown attitudes shifting, however. A survey by Forsa, an independent polling institute, in July found that 81 percent of Germans said the country could not do entirely without nuclear power, up from 59 percent five years ago.

Bad writers

The Independent has a long-ish article listing the ways in which several prominent British children’s authors were, in their private lives, not very nice people.

It spends most of its time on Roald Dahl, as there is a new biography of him out. I think I have read before about his famous rudeness, but it takes some talent to write to your publisher threatening to leave it and get this responce:

"Let me reverse the threat," he wrote to Dahl. "Unless you start acting civilly to us, there is no possibility of our agreeing to publish you. Nor will I – or any of us – answer any future letter that we consider to be as rude as those we've been receiving."

I think I have read elsewhere that he was nice to his children, at least when he was home and not sleeping around town, but that might one of the few examples of considerate behaviour.

The article then gives shorter histories of other British authors who it is a pleasure not to have known. Even Enid Blyton gets a serve, with one of her daughters writing:

"The truth is," wrote Imogen later, "Enid Blyton was arrogant, insecure, pretentious, very skilled at putting difficult or unpleasant things out of her mind, and without a trace of maternal instinct. As a child, I viewed her as a rather strict authority. As an adult I pitied her."

The unifying theme is that they pretty much all had tragedy in their early lives. Maybe that’s why I don’t care for Harry Potter: a mere divorce is hardly enough for Rowling to be a good writer.

On a related matter, I recently read the short autobiography of Graham Green “A Sort of Life”. (This was another of my triumphant finds from the Lifeline Book Fair.) It was well written and pretty interesting, dwelling a lot on his unhappy teenage years in school and how he ended up in therapy for a time.

Greene clearly recognized as an adult that he had always had mental health issues, describing how boredom had always felt like a ballooning pressure inside his head which led to both reckless behaviour (Russian roulette to make him feel more alive) and extensive travel. Given that he is now well known for his rampaging sex life, it was a little disappointing that he only relates his very first erotic feelings (when seeing some actress in a play) but then says nothing at all about how or when he lost his virginity.

It also ends rather abruptly, and although I know he did a second volume of autobiography, I can’t say I have ever seen it around. But still, a good read.

Ancient brews

Biblical Archaeology Review covers all the important stories, such as the one discussed in detail in this article: "Did the Ancient Israelites Drink Beer?" The short answer: yes, but you wouldn't realize from the Bible:

Beer was a staple in the Israelite diet, just as it was throughout the ancient Near East. Yet a search of most English translations of the Bible will produce few, if any, occurrences of the word “beer.” Ancient Israel’s affinity for beer has largely been ignored. I believe this is for three reasons: (1) confusion about the meaning of the Hebrew word shekhar (שכר), (2) a general snobbery in academia causing scholars to scorn beer drinking while celebrating wine culture, and (3) the unique challenges archaeologists have faced in finding (or identifying) beer remains in the Israelite material record.

It's a pretty interesting article generally, shining light on the possible importance of beer to the evolution of human society (seriously!):

Humans have been making beer for at least 5,000 years, and most likely much longer. Some anthropologists have argued that it was a thirst for beer, rather than a hunger for bread, that led to the Neolithic Revolution (c. 9500–8000 B.C.E.), during which humans gradually abandoned a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in favor of sedentary farming. Beer eventually became a defining characteristic of human culture, much like wearing clothes.

Sounds to me like there's a faction of anthropologists who study this just so they can count visits to the local pub as research. Anyhow, ancient beer was something I'm not entirely sure I would enjoy:

Beer was often produced by creating a bread or cake made from malted barley or wheat. The bread was then placed in water, forming a sweet liquid known as a wort. In a few days, after adding yeast, the carbohydrates would be converted to alcohol and carbon dioxide, which would cause the liquid to bubble, indicating fermentation. Thus the wait from the time it was produced until the time it was consumed would have been only a few days. Moreover, beer did not keep well, so it was made for immediate consumption.

I wonder if there are ancient beer brew hobbyists out there who try to recreate this. I wouldn't be surprised.

Dump and gone

On Saturday night, I ended up at a Highgate Hill park with hundreds of other people watching the Brisbane Riverfire fireworks display, most noteworthy this year because it apparently really is the last time the city (or anyone in Australia?) will see an F111 dump and burn.

An explanation as to why this is a unique trick of this particular aircraft is given here:

Wing Commander Gray, who will be piloting one of the F-111s on Riverfire night, says the dump and burn is simply down to a quirk of design.

"Every big aircraft that carries a lot of fuel - even big airlines have that ability to be able to dump fuel in case they need to come back to lighten the load," he said.

"With the F-111 the dump port where the fuel comes out is actually between the engines and because we are an after-burner aircraft, which is gives us more power, we basically inject fuel into the exhaust. That's what most fighter-type aircraft do.

"If we're dumping fuel at the same time when we're in afterburner the fuel ignites, whereas in other aircrafts it would just be seen as a vapour stream."

Given that they have always been based at Amberbley, I suspect Brisbane is pretty unique in having this as a regular feature of our fireworks and other displays.

I think, but haven't been able to confirm through Google yet, that the first time it was done here for entertainment purposes was for the Commonwealth Games in 1982. There were four of them that peeled apart while alight, causing some surprised residents to think the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were paying a visit.

Anyhow, the people in the park on Saturday night seemed particularly pumped to see the F111, which did put on 3 particularly long burns this year. Low cloud makes it look brighter too. I've looked at various movies taken of it on Youtube, and I think this is one of the best:

Sydney tiltshrunk

Well, I was in Sydney recently, and I haven’t played with Tiltshiftmaker.com for a while, so here goes:

Saturday stuff

* Richard Glover provides a somewhat refreshing list of good things about the today's Australia. It's good to reflect on such stuff from time to time.

* On the other hand, last night on TV there was a quick shot of a girl at her soldier Dad's funeral (in Brisbane, I think), and the way she started to cry after putting a message on his coffin broke me up suddenly too. Life's a funny balance between blessings and pain, isn't it.

* Back to the upbeat: there's a really long article from the New York Times magazine about William Shatner, and much of it is pretty funny. Such as this scene:

At 3 in the afternoon, we slid into a booth at Tony Roma’s restaurant in Lexington. I told Shatner I was exhausted from chasing him all over in the rain. “I was just trying to torment you,” he said. The waiter appeared. I said I wanted a salad for an appetizer, and Shatner interrupted: “No! He’ll have the ribs appetizer.” I said I didn’t want the ribs. “You’re having the ribs,” he said. “They’re delicious.” Liz said, “But honey, he doesn’t want the ribs.” Shatner said: “He’s. Having. The. Ribs.” Then, sharply, he added: “This is the man’s table. Go sit over there at the woman’s table.” Liz ignored him and began talking about the equestrian games. Shatner shrugged, as if defeated. When the ribs arrived, we all picked at them. “These are good,” I said. “I think I’ll have them as a main course, too.” But Shatner said: “No. Have something else.” I said, “But I want the ribs!” Shatner said: “Some. Thing. Else.” I ordered a sandwich. The waiter asked if I wanted coleslaw or fries. Shatner answered, “He’ll have the fries.” I said I wanted the coleslaw. Shatner said: “I. Want. The. Fries.” I pointed out that he was having a baked potato. He said: “All right. I’ll let you have some of my potato.”

The article brought to my attention that Shatner has done a long running series of TV ads in the States for Priceline (for discount travel.) Never having seen them here, I've watched many on Youtube now, and would say these are my favourite:





On a related matter, this clip from Big Bang Theory was pretty amusing.

Katz's Ring

This week's column by Danny Katz, about Melbourne staging Wagner's complete Ring cycle in a few years time, is amusing. I've never been to any opera, but this sounds right:

It's going to be a stupendous show, this four-ring Ring Circus, though there's just a couple of teeny near-negligible things that may put some audiences off. Like its length: it's going to be 16 hours long, and opera-hours are like dog-years, they're a ratio of one to seven, so this will feel more like 4½ days, but with only two toilet breaks. And it's going to be pricey: this is a $15 million production, so producers will need to charge high ticket prices to recoup their investment - and with a total of only nine Aussie fans on the ''I heart Wagner'' Facebook page, it may have to be $1.7 million for an A-reserve ticket, with a much cheaper $1.2 million obscured-view ticket, sitting behind the left side of Brunhilde's armoured hydraulic uber-boob.

Sick oceans news

The biggest political surprise this week was that Bob Katter, who I took to be a climate change skeptic, came out with this comment on radio in explaining why he didn't bother meeting Nicholas Stern & Garnaut:

"Just to indicate how stupid those people are, there is a very unassailable scientific case that there will be a problem arising in the oceans. They don't mention that."

What? I can only assume he means ocean acidification. He's about the last politician I would have expected to have concerns about that. But then why would he not meet leading economists who want to talk about the best way to reduce CO2? He's an enigma under an akubra wrapped in a banana skin.

Anyhow, onto other sick ocean news:

* a study of naturally low pH ocean waters near some CO2 vents in the Mediterranean indicates that it's very bad for the biodiversity of single celled organisms called Foraminifera:

The study, published in the September issue of the Journal of the Geological Society, found that increasing CO₂ levels caused foram diversity to fall from 24 species to only 4.

'Previous studies have shown a reduction in diversity of 30%, but this is even bigger for forams', said Dr Jason Hall-Spencer, one of the study's co-authors. 'A tipping point occurs at mean pH 7.8. This is the pH level predicted for the end of this century'.

...

'At a mean pH level of 7.8, calcified organisms begin to disappear, and non calcifying ones take over. We are headed towards that being the case in this century. The big concern for me is that unless we curb carbon emissions we risk mass extinctions, degrading coastal waters and encouraging outbreaks of toxic jellyfish and algae.'

Not exactly encouraging.

* Meanwhile, the krill in the Southern Ocean is being increasingly fished (to provide feed for acquaculture, it appears), and there is concern about its sustainability. Nature reports:

The total krill catch this season is expected to be 150,000–180,000 tonnes, exceeding last year's total by about 40%.

Another worry is the number of fishing vessels being deployed in the Southern Ocean. Norway is now operating three ships, for example, and China is expected to rapidly increase its krill fishing after sending its first vessel this year. "If China starts fishing in a big way, catch will expand rapidly, outstripping our ability to orderly manage it," says Steve Nicol, a marine ecologist with the Australian Antarctic Division in Kingston, Tasmania, who advises the Australian government on krill fisheries.

But more generally, climate change may well be an issue with them too:

Researchers suspect that Antarctic krill are also feeling the effect of climate change. Krill larvae feed on algae living on the bottom of sea ice, which is rapidly dwindling around the Antarctic Peninsula. According to one estimate, the number of krill in the Southern Ocean may have dropped by 80% since the 1970s. But "there is no definite answer as to how the krill responds to warming", says Nicol. It is also unclear whether krill stocks are transient or fixed to given areas, and how many live deeper than 200 metres, below the most heavily fished and studied region of the ocean.

So keep your concerns about the oceans going, Bob.

UPDATE: Curious as to how big 180,000 tonnes of krill really is, in terms of the total amount of fish caught in the sea? I turned up this from 2005:

AFTER DECADES OF GROWTH, the reported global wild fish catch peaked in 2000 at 96,000,000 tons, then fell to 90,000,000 tons by 2003, the last year for which worldwide data are available. The catch per person dropped from an average of 17 kilograms in the late 1980s to 14 kilograms in 2003--the lowest figure since 1965.

As fishing fleets expanded through the late 1980s and fish-finding and harvesting technologies became more efficient, the world's fishers systematically have gone after their catch at greater depths and in more remote waters. Over the past 50 years, the number of large predatory fish in the oceans has dropped by a startling 90%. Catches of many popular food fish such as cod, tuna, flounder, and hake have been cut in half despite a tripling in fishing effort.

Thinner by the week

In the newsagent today, I picked up a Time magazine and noted how very thin it seemed to be. I had noticed this a couple of weeks ago too. Newsweek has undergone the same process, and we know how that has ended up.

The cover story was also about organic Vs regular food, which seems a rather insipid topic for a news magazine. (I suppose they are worrying about their eggs at the moment, but still.)

Add it to the list of worries

Not sure that I’ve heard this before:

Recent work by UTS researchers shows that future scarcity of the element phosphorus (P) will be a major threat to food security and a potential source of conflict.

…Professor Stuart White, Director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at UTS, said that unless further attention is paid to the issue of P scarcity, we risk a global 'hard landing' as demand outstrips production in less than 25 years.

……the world resources of phosphate rock, concentrated in Western Sahara and in China, will not be sufficient to keep up with growing demand as a result of changing diets, increasing population and increasing biofuels production.

"We will need to dramatically improve the efficiency of use of P if we are to have a 'soft landing' to avoid significant fertiliser and food price volatility," Professor White said.

Oddly enough, the article ends with mentioning “P” of a different nature:

"In cities, capturing and reusing human waste, especially urine, can help in completing the nutrient cycle."

Sex, murder, mayhem, bees

All of the cinematography on Life is great, and last Sunday I particularly liked this story of Australian desert bees where life is brutal, especially if you're a male:



They look a bit like the blue banded bees which the kids found in our garden last year, and the females of which also live in burrows. I wonder if their mating is such a disaster zone too.

Slow on science

So, Andrew Bolt picks up a story of a potential asteroid threat, but misses that it this was discounted by NASA 8 years ago after closer observation of its orbit.

If this is an indication of the attention as he pays to science reporting, I'm expecting he'll be a global warming convert by 2018.

Bring on the entrails

Seems to me that if you're going to say that a WA National who says he could never support a mining tax, but doesn't want to absolutely support the, um, national Nationals, is going to be counted as part of the Coalition seat count, you may as well count the Green who has already pledged he couldn't work with the Coalition as part of the Labor count.

So that leaves us with effectively 73 seats all, with 4 Independents trying to decide what to do.

Wilkie and Oakeshott seem dead keen on a carbon price. Windsor supports it too, but had big reservations about the ETS. (Colebatch's column this morning explains.) He also likes the soil carbon ideas of Abbott, even though no one really seems to know how to properly account for it in your CO2 abatement figures. Katter will do anything that he thinks will support farmers or the general population in his electorate, but a carbon price doesn't seem to help there.

Gillard ruled out a carbon tax before the election, but Bandt would presumably be pushing for it again rather than a revised ETS.

Abbott claims that he'll never have a carbon price of any form. I would have thought that this would factor large in the minds of Wilkie and Oakeshott, but maybe they are figuring that with Gillard's silly "peoples convention" on the topic, Labor is not planning on getting anything going during the current term anyway, so maybe it's really more of an issue for the next election.

So, this is all rather complicated.

I personally am leaning towards more traditional methods for selecting the leader. The Governor General in a white priestess gown slaughtering a duck on the forecourt of Parliament House and studying its entrails sounds a good start. Then Julia and Tony have to do a Masterchef cook off with the body to be judged by a team comprising Clive Palmer, Graham Richardson and a third independent person with absolutely no interest in the outcome. Perhaps a Chilean miner. (Sorry.)

One other factor should be taken into account: if you want stability, I think I know which leader is less likely to die of an accidental death during the next term of government, and it's not the one who was nearly wiped out by a semi trailer a few months ago, swims with the sharks, and goes bicycle riding nearly every day*. On the other hand, I think we can be pretty sure there won't be any repeat mystery Prime Ministerial disappearances at sea with Julia.

* I see cycling takes out around 30 -40 Australians a year. I don't know how many it leaves with brain injury.

Today’s miscellany

* It’s looks rather like a cross between George Jetson’s digs and a Bond eco-villain’s lair, but it is in fact a German house that generates five times the electricity it consumes. At least while the sun is out. Looks kind of cool, even if ridiculously expensive. But do they have a law against curtains in that country?

* Several English papers are mentioning the high death toll in northern Italy caused by picking mushrooms. Not poison mushrooms, just ill prepared people who keep falling off hillsides and tumbling down ravines. As the Guardian explains:

…this year most of the deaths have been caused by falls. In many cases, the victims had been trying to outwit rival gatherers by going into remote and steeply inclined woods before dawn.

"It's a problem of mentality, unfortunately," said Gino Cornelli, head of alpine rescue in the Fassa valley in the Dolomites. "Many arrive in the dark. They set off with lights on their heads, even though it is banned. They dress in grey or brown to disguise themselves from the others."

He told La Repubblica newspaper: "They do the opposite of what they should. Too many cock a snook at the rules, and unfortunately this is the result."

Dying in the unsuccessful pursuit of an inanimate fungus does seem a fairly ignoble way to go. But then again, I suppose there aren’t all that many noble choices around.

* There’s a long article by PJ O’Rourke in the Weekly Standard about a trip to Afghanistan that seems quite full of interesting observations in the O’Rourkian style, but I haven’t finished reading it yet. One assumes he has recovered fully from his embarrassing variety of cancer. Hat tip to JF Beck.

* Finally, who can resist a series of photos of a monkey and its pet /captive cat? I predict the cat will be out of there as soon as it realises this primate can’t operate a can opener.

Biggest Christian country of the future

The BBC ran a story recently about how the Chinese government (or some subsets of it at least) has decided it quite likes Christianity after all.  This comment piece from the Guardian discusses the report, and adds some more details.   It ends with this:

On its current trajectory and with state backing, as the former Time magazine Beijing chief David Aikman notes, within three decades there may be nearly 400 million Christians in China. The future of Christianity may well lie in the east.

Knock yourselves out, libertarians

I can safely predict there will be argument about this amongst the sweary, teenage boy libertarians  over at Catallaxy:

TEN years of suicide data after John Howard's decision to ban and then buy back 600,000 semi-automatic rifles and shotguns has had a stunning effect.

The buyback cut firearm suicides by 74 per cent, saving 200 lives a year, according to research to be published in The American Law and Economics Review.

The numbers game

It’s quite surprising, isn’t it, that the purpose of Russian “numbers stations” is still not known for sure.  According to Gizmodo, the numbers have changed recently.   As I imagine a lot fewer people now spend time listening to the shortwave band than when I was a youngster, perhaps fewer people know about them?