Not unexpected around here

Long-term users of ecstasy risk structural brain damage

The MRI scans showed that hippocampal volume in this group was 10.5% smaller than that of their peers, and the overall proportion of grey matter was on average 4.6% lower, after adjusting for total brain volume.

This indicates that the effects of ecstasy may not be restricted to the hippocampus alone, say the authors

"Taken together, these data provide preliminary evidence suggesting that ecstasy users may be prone to incurring hippocampal damage, following chronic use of this drug," they write.

They add that their findings echo those of other researchers who have reported acute swelling and subsequent atrophy of hippocampal tissue in long term ecstasy users....

Other research has suggested that people who use ecstasy develop significant memory problems, so the Dutch researchers wanted to find out if there was any clinical evidence of structural changes in the brain to back this up.

"Did you bring me a gift?"

Sexual transmission of insect-borne virus

It's about yet another virus you can catch in Africa, the Zika virus, and it sounds nasty:

within five days of their return became ill. They experienced symptoms of rash, fatigue, headaches, and swollen joints. Foy also experienced painful urination and blood in his semen.

The uncertain remedy

BBC News - Climate 'technical fix' may yield warming, not cooling

Interesting discussion of one of the simpler proposed methods of turning down the planet's heat if it keeps going up: ships spraying seawater in the air to encourage more clouds to reflect away heat.

Seems, though, if you didn't get it right, it could have the opposite effect.

All very unclear, and given that it seems a much less dangerous thing to try than, say, shooting sulphur into the stratosphere, it's probably not a bad thing to start trialling now.

Just can't stop the cultural slide

Big Brother returns with celebrity special after move to Channel 5

Yes, Big Brother will again be running in Britain for another couple of seasons, after being dropped by Channel 4. The onwer of Channel 5 apparently has all the worst qualifications to run the show:

Certainly, the factors that led the original British broadcaster to cancel the commission – a tiring franchise that was becoming increasingly sexualised and verbally violent – seem unlikely to bother Desmond, whose media portfolio includes the adult entertainment channels Television X and Red Hot TV.

Critics who felt that the first British version of the format had already lowered broadcasting standards, with scenes of racial bullying and sexual congress with a bottle, will fear that such moments may come to seem highbrow peaks in comparison with Desmond's version.

Top marks...

...for the most annoying and pretentious newspaper blogger/writer head shot ever devised:



Yes, for some reason, I recently made the click from the Sydney Morning Herald to have a look at what long time irritant, but puzzlingly popular, writer Sam de Brito was talking about now*, and once again grimaced at this photo, which seems to have been there for so many years I wouldn't be surprised if he has less hair now.

Maybe it wasn't his idea. Maybe it was his girlfriend at the time. But truly, how can it not grate?

I have posted before about how distasteful I find his all too public disclosure of his private life; but I think I have overlooked mentioning that Sam noticed the last time I talked about him here, and bagged me in his column! He refused to link to me, though, which is fair enough, but enough of his readers promptly Googled to find the source of complaint that I realised something was up via my Sitemeter.

So, what is he up to now? As far as I can gather, Sam is in a custody dispute over his young child, the mother of whom broke up with him when the baby was either very young, or (perhaps) not even born.

This is not funny for anyone, I'll grant you: particularly for a male with an unseemly urge to write about absolutely every intimate detail of his life, body and self perceived character.

As someone in comments at his blog made mention to Sam that perhaps he should not talk about his custody fight on Twitter, I went looking for it. Of course, if ever there was a type of person Twitter was designed for, it's de Brito. Hence, we get gems like these (keep in mind, this is a man - with a big media profile - having custody issues over his one year old):

Do you really need to wash all baby clothes before you put them on the kid?

Ok. Finally seem to have got rolling on the second half of this novel. The words are flowing. About time. Feel like having sex now.

I had no idea how heavily the law weighs in women's favour when it comes to child custody: never put yourself or your child through it.

Precursor chemicals for meth? Hypophosphorous acid, iodine, pseudo, benzene, metho, toluene ... since I asked, I shall inform as well.

Damn these kids next door and their basketball. I'm gonna leave some ice in the letter box. And a pipe.

Damn, just sucked my little finger and forgot I'd had it in my earhole ten minutes earlier. Nasty.

Well, it seems wrong to kick a man when he's down (although it seems he is having the kid sleep over now, so maybe he's not that down, and he can afford a $850 a week two bedroom apartment), but hasn't his lawyer told him something like this: "For God's sake Sam, no good ever comes of running a Twitter feed on every silly thought that comes into that inky faced head of yours when you're having custody fight with your ex! Just stop it. The world will get by without knowing you just tasted ear wax, or the age at which you grew your pubic hair!"

And Sam, if you're reading: it's just a bit of friendly advice to someone who seriously needs it.

* given that he's previously shared with us his the varieties of venereal bugs and infections he's picked up, as well as what an idiot he was when he last took cocaine, I was hardly surprised to see a recent column was all about he was relatively late in developing pubic hair.

Fox appears late

Here's trivial information for you: it would appear from the Japan Times that Fantastic Mr Fox - one of the most eccentric and enjoyable animated films of the last couple of years - has just been released in Japan. The world of movie distribution is indeed mysterious.

Speaking of animated films - I saw Rango last weekend. It is quite possibly even more eccentric a film than Fox, with a remarkable, slightly creepy, visual style; a plot that actually seems to forget to resolve a couple of key mysteries; but also the amazing vocal humour of Johnny Depp. Depp always grabs eccentric comedic roles by the throat and does them spectacularly well. (I'm not sure if I have mentioned it before, but his version of Willy Wonka in Charlie and Chocolate Factory is much more amusing than Gene Wilder's attempt.)

Rango is not perfect, but very enjoyable.

One anomaly solved, a new one arrives?

In physics news, it seems that the Pioneer anomaly may have been resolved without modifying gravity.  That seems a pity:  I would like gravity to be modified, especially at the local level.

But there may be a new big physics finding on the way:  Fermilab is about to formally announce they think they’ve  found evidence of either a new particle, or a new force.  Or, as the New York Times says:  “it could be there is something they do not understand about so-called regular physics”, which doesn’t quite have the same ring of excitement to it.

I see that the Cosmic Variance blog is taking a fairly cautious tone about this, so maybe it’ll come to naught.  But let’s hope not.   It seems something unexpected has to be found in physics in order to kick it out of its decades long rut. 

Rodent news

Rat plague bears down on Alice Springs

That's not quite as bad as it sounds - it's a native rat making a a reappearance, in a big enough way to be called "an eruption":

The long-haired rat normally lives on isolated black soil plains in the Barkly Tableland of the Northern Territory and in western Queensland.

But it is taking advantage of high rainfall across the region to migrate en masse.

The rats have been sighted in Alice Springs for the first time in 25 years, and has also been seen in the remote community of Aputula, 250 kilometres further south.

"It really is a huge event and is pretty much down to that run of consecutive good, high rainfall seasons," said Peter McDonald, acting scientist with Northern Territory Biodiversity Conservation.

Mr McDonald says the rat migration is a unique event.

"It is unusual in the rodent world but Rattus villosissimus are unique in that way and they are pretty famous for their eruptions," he said.

"Probably the only similar expansion by a rodent is seen in the lemmings in the northern hemisphere with their eruptions.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, there seems to be no doubt that at least one rat has taken up residence in the floor space between the downstairs living area and the upstairs level. I can hear it scurrying around while I blog late at night.

I guess it got there via the roof, where rats are an annual problem, and down through the walls. Maybe it moves between the roof and the floorspace daily: that would at least give me a chance of baiting it via the roof.

I just realised tonight that I can probably access the floorspace for baiting purposes by removing one of the kitchen downlights, and I did hear it scurrying a bit close to that area tonight. But if it dies in the floorspace, I'll have no hope of removing the dead body, and we know from experience that dead rat smell permeates ceiling plasterboard quite well.

I think we need a reliable rodent repellent that can be sprayed in ceiling spaces. That might be the only hope of keeping them away.

Ayn causes pain

Hey, another bit of anti-Randian material comes my way. (Must be the movie coming out soon that's prompting this?) Bit of a sad story, really, of a father who becomes a self absorbed objectivist (is there any other type?), and a pain to his daughter in the process. I like this anecdote:

One time, at dinner, I complained that my brother was hogging all the food.

"He's being selfish!" I whined to my father.

"Being selfish is a good thing," he said. "To be selfless is to deny one's self. To be selfish is to embrace the self, and accept your wants and needs."

It was my dad's classic response -- a grandiose philosophical answer to a simple real-world problem. But who cared about logic? All I wanted was another serving of mashed potatoes.

Woops, forgot the baby

The Economist notes that "White America" (sounds to me like there might have been a better way of putting it) is showing a dramatic drop in birth rate, while minority groups are growing strongly.

Not quite sure why this would be.

Recommended again

This short example of a Bryan Appleyard post (including comments following) shows why I am really pleased to have him blogging again.

Sounds important

The 'molecular octopus': A little brother of 'Schroedinger's cat'

Kind of a bad explanation of what they did here, but still the result sounds significant - a large organic molecule of about 430 atoms was shown to be in a state of "superposition", like the presumed state of Schroedinger's Cat.

I wonder if this leads us any closer to a theoretical understanding of what a quantum superposition means?

For those interested in this topic only

The topic being: how stupid is Catallaxy. (The rest of you should look away.)

I see that yesterday, a few of the regulars (CL, d-d and IT) decided that Tony Abbott really wasn't performing well at the moment. Policy cut through wasn't happening, with IT noting something like "he's too busy riding his bicycle for that".

What, I wonder, has changed in the last six months to lead to these conclusions? The answer: absolutely nothing, in fact. There is nothing in their present criticisms that wasn't true of Abbott in the immediate period after he became leader, and which I had been saying since then; including the fact that his enthusiasm for exercise makes him look not entirely devoted to thinking about policy.

Yet when yours truly made these comments, it was all derision and ridiculous psycho-sexual analysis of why I have an issue with a politician who seems to spend just as much time in the media in lycra as in suits.

Speaking of psycho-sexual analysis: it's an ironic sign of his lack of insight that CL routinely answers criticism of his views and conduct in debate(at least if it is made by a perceived enemy) by claiming that his critic must be psychologically disturbed. No, he can't ever be wrong, or admit overstepping a line: instead, the explanation must be that it's the critic who is psychologically troubled. We saw this again in his counter-attack on HC last night, who pretty much followed my line in attacking Fisk and CL's ridiculous support for more Koran burning: because, you know, there just haven't been enough deaths of UN workers and police shooting into rioters to satisfy them yet. (Harry, you missed my point, though, that the most offensive thing in their rants was Fisk's use of "worthless sub-human animals" for the people of Afghanistan.)

Anyway, the weirdly tribal inner circle of Catallaxy has spoken - Abbott is a bit of a dud and a lightweight after all.

What a bunch of maroons.

Deathbed visions surveyed

Going into the light - The Irish Times - Tue, Mar 22, 2011

There's an interesting report here on a study from Ireland that asked members of the Irish Association of Palliative Care to report their experiences of deathbed visions.

It appears to confirm that deathbed visions of relatives, a white light in the room, or even the smell of roses, are well known events in palliative care circles. A sudden emergence from a coma, with an ability to recognise the people in the room, before then dying peacefully, seems also relatively common.

The drug or fever induced hallucination as an explanation is not widely believed:

One common sense explanation may be that the visions are drug- or fever-induced hallucinations. But 68 per cent of respondents agreed, or strongly agreed, that DBE have different qualities from such hallucinations.

MacConville says there appears to be a difference in the quality of the visions: they appear with greater clarity, and they are experienced as meaningful, with significant associations, rather than random, as they would be in drug-induced cases.

An earlier study also indicated that patients experiencing deathbed phenomena are usually calm and composed. In contrast, drug- or fever-induced hallucinations can be disturbing and frightening, with other symptoms of drug-induced toxicity and high temperature present as well.

All very fascinating.

A few things arising from Fukushima

Here's a few things I have learnt from the coverage of the Fukushima accident:

1. Criticality accidents: well, I'm not Homer Simpson, and haven't ever read that much about dangers of operating nuclear plants, but the uncertainty over whether Fukushima has had some criticality incidents led to this explanation of what they are at the Time Ecocentric blog:

To nuclear workers, there are few events more fearful than a criticality accident. In such a scenario, the fissile material in a reactor core--be it enriched uranium or plutonium--undergoes a spontaneous chain reaction, releasing a flash of aurora-blue light and a surge of neutron radiation; the gamma rays, neutrons and radioactive fission products emitted during criticality are highly dangerous to humans. Criticality occurs so rapidly--within a few fractions of a second--and so unpredictably that it can suddenly kill workers without warning. There have been 60 criticality incidents worldwide since 1945. The most recent occurred in Japan in 1999, at an experimental reactor in Tokai, when a beam of neutrons killed two workers, hospitalized dozens of emergency workers and nearby residents, and forced hundreds of thousands to remain indoors for 24 hours.

Nature has a post detailing the controversy as to whether small scale criticality accidents have been happening at Fukushima.

2. Jimmy Carter took part in a dangerous reactor rescue in 1952:

The reactor in Chalk River, Canada, about 180 kilometres (110 miles) from Ottawa, was used to enrich plutonium for America's atomic bombs. On December 12th 1952 it exploded, flooding the reactor building’s basement with millions of litres of radioactive water. Lieutenant Carter, a nuclear specialist on the Seawolf submarine programme, and his men were among the few people with the security clearance to enter a reactor. From Schenectady, New York, they rode the train up and got straight to work.

"The radiation intensity meant that each person could spend only about ninety seconds at the hot core location," wrote Mr Carter in "Why Not the Best?", an autobiography published in 1975 when he was campaigning for the presidency.

The team built an exact replica of the reactor on a nearby tennis court, and had cameras monitor the actual damage in the reactor's core. "When it was our time to work, a team of three of us practised several times on the mock-up, to be sure we had the correct tools and knew exactly how to use them. Finally, outfitted with white protective clothes, we descended into the reactor and worked frantically for our allotted time," he wrote. "Each time our men managed to remove a bolt or fitting from the core, the equivalent piece was removed on the mock-up."

Impressive.

3. A commentary piece in Nature News today shares my view that the rush of some nuclear proponents to downplay the extent of the problems from this accident has not been helpful. It notes three lessons with wide implications for the nuclear industry around the world:

a. co-siting of nuclear reactors is (apparently) common in Western countries "because the only communities that will accept new nuclear plants are those that already have them." Yet the problem is, as we can see, have one go seriously wrong, and it can badly hamper the safe operation of the rest on the same site.

b. light water reactors melt if the water isn't there:

These designs are compact and relatively inexpensive, but their potential for meltdown was once obvious enough that Britain spent 30 years trying to develop gas-cooled alternatives. But, now that PWRs are the only viable design for new nuclear build, that extensive search for a safer design seems to have been forgotten by many of those who promote a nuclear future.

c. spent fuel rods have no where to go in Britain and the US.

The commentary then notes:

These legitimate technical criticisms of Fukushima, and of planned nuclear build, have been largely drowned out by the flood of technical reassurance offered by nuclear scientists and engineers in the wake of the disaster. For example, reassuring soundbites offered to journalists by the London-based Science Media Centre (which is funded by a variety of scientific bodies and industries, including Nature Publishing Group) in the days immediately after the earthquake contained barely a cautionary note on how serious the situation at Fukushima was set to become. Instead, the scientific establishment and those whose careers are invested in nuclear power have sought to convince the public that 'science' supports nuclear power. Too many specialists have assured us of the general safety of nuclear power without adequately addressing specific concerns.

Pretty much what I said.

For my benefit (and yours?)

Often, when helping the kids with something for school being prepared on the computer, I want to find a free bit of relevant clipart. Unfortunately, mere Googling often takes me to clipart sites that are not actually entirely free, and it can take a while to again find collections that are.

The always fun to read Red Ferret Journal (I still say its the wittiest gadget blog around) has had a few links to completely free clipart over the years, and I usually go and search that site. But it's probably simpler to list them all here, for faster searching:

WP Clipart

Open Clip Art Library

Public Domain Clipart

Free Graphics.com

FreeFoto.com (not clipart per se, but useful)

Stockvault (photos)

On a different topic, Red Ferret also had a recent post entitled:

15 Best Websites for Free E-Books

I haven't checked any of them yet, but I will one day. The only free book download place I have used before is ebook3000.com, but now it seems to be mainly full of illegal scans and copies; although if you into old esoteric copies of Playboy (Playboy Latvia, March 2011 is already there, for example), it would seem to be the place to go.

The Return

Well, that was remiss of me, not noticing the return of Bryan Appleyard to regular blogging after a significant break.

And he's in fine, cheery form. Here, for example, is his short take on Ayn Rand:

Now I have just been watching a film by a friend of mine which includes some startling material about Rand, all of which confirmed my dismal judgment of this ‘thinker’ as a dud novelist, a terrible philosopher and a political theorist of staggering and dangerous naivete. Hearing about her life with her circle of infatuated admirers, it suddenly came to me who she is. Ayn Rand, a Russian, is the reincarnation of another Russian – Madame Helena Blavatsky, the theosophical prophetess who wowed polite but gullible London society until her death in 1891. Blavatsky did, in fact, promise reincarnation, her last words were, ‘Keep the link unbroken! Do not let my last incarnation be a failure.’ The reincarnation was a roaring success: Rand was a chain smoker, like Blavatsky, and a total bozo, like Blavatsky.

A very good comparison, I think. And Rand gets a mention in passing later, when talking about Alan Greenspan's apparent recant of his recant, which I'll copy in full:

Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve and one of Ayn Rand’s innermost circle, writes a curious piece in the FT. The piece is curious, first, because Greenspan writes a little like F.R.Leavis – incredibly badly, clotted, pompous, circumlocutory in away that is designed simultaneously to advertise and conceal high intelligence. It is, secondly, curious because, it seems, Greenspan, having created the over-financialised system that made the crash inevitable, then having recanted, is now recanting his recantation. Leaving aside the details of the Dodd-Frank Act, Greenspan points out that nobody forecast the crash, quite the contrary, that there is no hard science of markets, and that, on the whole, global financial markets are good for growth. He points out that finance has seized a much larger share of all major economies and, finally, wonders whether this larger share ‘has been a necessary condition of growth in the past half century‘ and whether there is a necessary link between greater financial complexity and higher standards of living. This is obfuscation, as is the suave justification of bankers’ bonuses. In power, Greenspan got it wrong because of his Randian market superstition and, as many of the commenters say, that fact alone is enough to destroy his authority in these matters. Recent evidence suggests strongly that excessive financialisation of our economy increases risk and, in the long term, reduces growth. Doesn’t everybody know that?

So good to have him back.

Makes me feel better

Gee, when the very reasonable Ken Parish at Club Troppo does a post that talks at length about aboriginal problems being intractable until traditional aboriginal cultural ideas change (such as the belief in sorcery and curses, which lead to protracted payback violence between clans, and "sorry business" that means aboriginal businesses close for a long period to mourn a death), it makes me feel better about having suggested years ago that maybe it's currently pointless trying to built permanent, vandal proof housing in all remote localities. Really nice tents, or yurt-y type things, sited around shared ablution blocks was my suggestion. Just give then a new one every year or two. They can pack up and move away from the clan they're fighting with, too.

I'll keep repeating this idea once a year until someone notices and mentions it to the Minister.

Told you they were evil...

BBC - Earth News - Males make pregnant horses abort

Horse breeders, including thoroughbred breeders in the UK, often send mares to stables to be mated with stallions.

But a study reveals that, when they return, the pregnant mares engage in "promiscuous sex" with males in their home stables, in an attempt to disguise the paternity of the foal.

When this is not possible, the mares often abort the pregnancy.

So, they look dumb and are depraved. I miss the days when animals were put on trial...

Wrong again, times two

Watts Up With That from 24 March ran at the top of its blog for a good few days the story of the excruciatingly tedious Steve McIntyre finding that there was “deleted data” at the starting end (so to speak) of a graph of tree ring proxy data by Briffa that appeared in Science in 1999. “Where are the academic cops?” asked Watts in a facetious post heading.

Of course, this then got picked up by Andrew Bolt on 25 March, and Catallaxy, the blog where the centre right and libertarians go to be wrong about climate change, on 28 March. The only surprise in this process is that Tony Abbott didn’t turn up in Parliament flourishing a copy of the graph.

Someone at Watts (after scores of comments claiming this was another outrageous outrage) did suggest that, well, maybe excluding the data that is so obviously not a reliable proxy in the period in question is the right way to go if, you know, you are trying to work out the correct temperature in the period.

Turns out the explanation is even better. Nick Stokes explains:

A file had been discovered which showed data down to 1400, and if you plot it, it goes into oscillations in the years before 1550. Since it is clear that this is in a period of rapidly diminishing data, and very likely caused by that, I thought that would die fairly quickly, but no, as these things go, it was promoted to a grand ethical violation, megaphoned at WUWT, and taken up at the Air Vent, where it was seen as "unbelievable fraud"….

Well, it seemed clear to me that the available data is just getting low as we go back beyond 1550, and the wild swings are just the result of the growing noise, as you'd expect. And I haven't found anyone who seems to seriously think they reflect any kind of reality. So Briffa sensibly stopped at 1550 to avoid misleading the public….

[Referring to graphs of the number of sites plotted to produce the data]: As you can see, the number of sites is dropping rapidly before 1600, and is down to about 40 near 1550. Here is the expanded region between 1400 and 1600

As you can see, the rate of decrease is quite sharp near 1550. There's no absolute rule on where you have to say that a plot has to be stopped. The noise rises relative to the signal in a continuous way, and I don't curently know how to quantify whether 40 sites is likely to be sufficient. But neither do the critics. What is clear is that the observed rapid changes observed in McIntyre's graph are closely associated with the steep reduction in data. In those circumstances, I would be very uncomfortable about presenting them as real. And I don't think referees would let me.

Nick goes on in the next post to show why having fewer sites can easily lead to spurious oscillations.

So, as expected, there is an explanation, and it is not sinister, especially in the context of a Science piece which was also (apparently) only a short commentary.

Will the readers of Andrew Bolt ever know that? Will Andrew ever have read this explanation.

Would Sinclair Davidson ever offer an explanation post at Catallaxy? Does he ever offer anything other than skeptic stories recycled from skeptic sites?

The other “Watts is wrong” story making the news is the “hero to zero” path that Berkley physicist Richard Muller has made in the space of a few months.

Once again, Sinclair Davidson gave this story recent prominence at Catallaxy by posting a Youtube of Muller’s lecture about “hide the decline”. Muller’s take on this always appeared to me to show self-aggrandisement about how it wouldn’t be done like that at Berkley, and he had been criticised at ">Skeptical Science for muddling the details.

But his other claim to fame was to be on the BEST project to independently compile a temperature record set.

As everyone knows by now, Muller has told Congress that the early results show close uniformity with the existing temperature sets: you know, the ones that Anthony Watts has spent years trying to show were defective and misleading.

The Economist has the story, told in relatively dispassionate terms, and many on the “AGW is real” side of the fence are now enjoying enormously the swing against Muller from the climate skeptics side. Of particular amusement is the vehemence with which the professional disinformation site Climate Depot, of Marc Morano fame, has gone for his jugular. As the headlines will change, have a look at this screenshot (complete with Muller with a snake photo, presumably designed to make him look at tad nutty):

Of course, sites like Salon are enjoying the whole turnaround, as well they should.

I said before recently that the climate skeptics have been slowly moving away from their pet idea that temperature increases over the 20th century were all an illusion. This only confirms the move – from now on it’ll be nearly all “lukewarmenist” arguments: yes, the temperature has increased over the 20th century, but not quite as fast as climate science said, and look at the last [insert cherry picked period] has not got significantly hotter at all: it’s probably all stopped now and that just shows what idiots those scientists were! And besides, even when the graphs go up again, maybe it’s all a good thing. etc etc.

Update: I just typed a really long comment in response to the politely worded skepticism of sfw in comments, but Blogger did not want to accept it (Blogger seems to be having some widespread comment issues lately). I did not want to lose the work, so here goes:

Hey, it's nice to have someone on your side of the fence who is moderate in tone, and thanks for the comments on the blog.

I'm not sure if you've been reading me for long time, but I was initially a bit of a fence sitter on the AGW issue. But I decided that ocean acidification was a sufficient enough reason to push for less CO2 urgently anyway. It is a problem with no easy solution other than "stop putting so much CO2 in the air", and initial studies nearly all showed serious problems with the sea critters they were testing.

Over the years, I think it fair to say that the fact of the ocean pH drop at the predicted rate has been confirmed by measurements, but the results of lab tests have become more ambiguous. My initial thoughts were that these tests would be straight forward in identifying which creatures would suffer first and and which wouldn't, but the process of doing this accurately was a lot more complicated than I initially credited. Also, a bit to my surprise, the detailed biochemistry of sea life seemed to have a lot more gaps in it than I would have expected. So, the type of test results that have been coming out in the last year or two have been harder to understand.

I still think it is a serious issue. I have particular concern about the future of pteropods, which appear to be a very important link in the food chain in polar waters. As for reefs, I still have an open mind as to how soon or how badly they will be effected. Some corals do worse than others in lab tests, and generally it seems to me they are hardier than expected, although combining acidification with much higher ocean temperatures just makes predicting their future very hard.

In any event, it now seems to me that the slow moving nature of the process makes it harder to convince people of the need for action on CO2.

At the same time, it seemed to me that the evidence for AGW and associated climate change was firmer than I had understood, and as I was never convinced of the issue by popularisers like Gore and Flannery (in fact, I have always been a tad suspicious of them), it mattered little to me that they had made mistakes in their presentations.

I also realised that the opposition to it is in fact ideologically driven. I genuinely find the climate science sites of Real Climate and Skeptical Science to be measured in tone and reasoned in exactly the way that the likes of WUWT are not. Skeptics just continually ascribe the worst motives to climate scientists, usually from a position of ignorance.

The popularisers of the skeptic side, with their grab bag of arguments, also made me realise there was no genuine attempt to be rationally critical of climate change science; the likes of Monckton and his ilk had clearly decided that it was all rubbish (often alluding to ludicrous conspiracies behind it) and anything would go in advocacy. Mistakes would be repeated and believed, all because it fitted into preconceived ideas in the audience.

Now, I do accept that there are actual scientists on the climate change side who have made careless overstatements, but usually on very particular things like glaciers, droughts, the future of snow etc.

And I can understand why people like you say that it looks like its unfalsifible.

Here's what I think: it's actually really complicated, and not easily communicated with simple messages. Messaging mistakes will happen, and will cynically be exploited by ideological skeptics, but that's no reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

It turns out, for example, that a significant number of papers had talked about more drought in the long term for Australia, but broken by more intense periods of rain. This is what we just saw happen. Yet it is so easy to point the finger at Flannery and say "hey, he said cities would be running out of water by now."

I figure: he's not even a climate scientist per se, and big deal, he made an exaggerated comment here and there. M'eh, if papers are there that did predict what would happen, big deal.

The same with heavy snow in the Northern Hemisphere this last couple of winters. Yes, it seems few scientists predicted it before it happened, but some in fact did. The mechanism seems credible (less ice over northern areas such as Hudson Bay), but won't be proven for some time yet. So, one guy said British kids wouldn't see snow again. He was wrong, he exaggerated. But he wasn't speaking for every scientist and simply should have been more cautious.

The Russian heatwave: a really severe event, which (I note) some NOAA scientists say wasn't really caused by AGW. I'm kind of expecting that they have in fact leapt too far to the cautious side on that one. In any event, it (together with the European heat wave of some years ago,) shows how serious (including for food supply) more regular severe heatwaves could be.

Climate change scientists are always going to be hobbled to a degree by the complexity of the climate system and the short term blips along the way to seeing the long term trend.

I think it is reasonable in such a system to make allowances for things that may yet happen to the weather that were not predicted in detail or more widely. (In fact, as I say, it can turn out they were predicted, but were just less emphasised in the public arena.)

But here's the key thing: the uncertainty in how exactly the climate change manifests locally (and, in a sense, globally) is no reason to dismiss the seriousness of AGW. The examples of the last couple of years of floods, heat waves and even blizzards have not been (more or less unexpectedly) good events: they have been (more or less unexpectedly) bad events, and there are mechanisms to explain them as a consequence of AGW.

So, while you see non falsifiability, I see danger, and all the more reason to take CO2 reduction seriously.

Quite a length for a comment, hey!