Look at the detail

The fact that some crops seem to do a bit better under increased CO2 is getting quite an airing in the anti carbon tax/climate change skeptic blogs at the moment. Just this morning, for example, Bolt has a US economist saying:

The experimental evidence suggests that at least 10 percentage points of the increase in wheat and rice yields since 1750 is the result of the roughly 35% increase in CO2 in the atmosphere that has occurred over the same period.

Well, I'm not sure about the claimed yield increases, but you have to keep this recent finding in mind:

The study covered 24 cultivars studied in 112 experimental treatments from 11 countries. A significant growth dilution effect on grain protein was found: a change in grain yield of 10% by O₃ was associated with a change in grain protein yield of 8.1% (R² = 0.96), whereas a change in yield effect of 10% by CO₂ was linked to a change in grain protein yield effect of 7.5% (R² = 0.74). ...

An important and novel finding was that elevated CO₂ has a direct negative effect on grain protein accumulation independent of the yield effect, supporting recent evidence of CO₂-induced impairment of nitrate uptake/assimilation.

So, you might get more wheat, but have to eat all that extra to get the same amount of protein.

And the other point is, of course, that you don't get any wheat to eat at all if you have more severe droughts and baking summer heat.

Speaking of heat, John Nielsen-Gammon has been looking at the Texas drought. Texas certainly seems a dry place: in terms of length, this current one is not exceptional. However, combined with the degree of heat, even the cautious Nielsen-Gammon is saying this:

I don’t consider it to be the worst drought on record, because the 1950s drought lasted for seven years, and 1956 alone gives 2011 a run for its money. But, combine it with July being the warmest month on record for Texas, and it probably becomes the most unbearable. It may well be the worst drought on record for agriculture.

More generally (by which I mean, including outside of Texas) the mid West heat wave is breaking lots of records, but seems to be attracting little attention here.

Kilometer high

That tall building in Dubai comes in at 828 m, but this building for Jeddah, apparently still being designed in America, but with the promise that work on the foundations will start soon, will actually break the kilometer mark:

That little platform up on the top part is apparently this:

"....a sky terrace, roughly 30 meters (98 feet) in diameter, at level 157. It is an outdoor amenity space intended for use by the penthouse floor."

Your own little garden hanging 157 floors above the ground? Very Jetsons, but also makes me feel queasy just imagining being on it.

Anyhow, more at Dezeen.

This'll be interesting

Professor Murry Salby from Macquarie University gave a talk at the Sydney Institute last week in which he claimed to have shown that CO2 is "at the back of the bus" as regards driving the climate. The details were a tad sketchy, and seemingly left his audience a little bewildered, and no one has yet been able to get their hands on a copy of his slides. But the whole issue is to do with the carbon cycle. He says he has a peer reviewed paper coming out on this in about 6 weeks, although I don't think anyone knows in which journal either.

The claims are so extraordinary that several people in comments threads at Deltoid and Tamino (see link at side) have wondered if it is all a hoax.

The reasons as to why virtually everyone in the mainstream climate science field thinks the Professor (who appears to have done detailed and creditable work on the ozone hole and has no previous reputation as a climate change skeptic) has managed to fool himself are many, and will be apparent from the two links in the previous paragraph. I see that even John Neilsen-Gammon, a climatologist "believer" who tends to be very polite and non political in his handling of the topic, can't see that it can possibly be right.

One thing I don't think many people have noticed is that skeptic Roy Spencer turned up at Catallaxy and also didn't seem to think it was at all likely either.

So what is the explanation for this? We will have to wait a few weeks to see.

In the meantime, I can predict this: those climate change denying sites who have promoted this talk will simply move on and never mention it again if it compellingly proved to be a massive misinterpretation that convinces no one. That is how they work: raise any doubt possible, and move on when it is shown to be wrong.

There, fixed that up for you....

Memory lane

I finally got around to buying a slide/negative scanner, to deal with digitising some stuff that’s been in drawers and boxes for some time.

It was only a cheapie from Harvey Norman, so I am not sure if that is why the colour on the slides looks stronger than the colour on the scans, but still the results are good enough, from these first few attempts:

New York, December 1979.

View from top of World Trade Centre, if I’m not mistaken.

A very blue looking Washington Monument.

And who would this be?:

Pancake success

I’ve tried various pancake recipes for Sunday breakfast over the last year or two.  Sure, I was able to do basic, simple pancakes (anyone can), but my wife showed me up by making the type where you separate the eats, beat the egg white and fold it into the batter to give it an extra lightness.  (She also likes to use buttermilk.)  These quickly became the kid’s favourites (and mine.)

But today I tried a similar recipe,  with just a bit of variation on the quantities and technique involved, and it worked extremely well, even without buttermilk.  What was the secret to its great success today?   Was it that the butter that goes in the batter was unsalted, and not only melted, but “cooked” for two to three minutes too?   Was it the pinch of tartar to the egg whites before they were beaten?  Of course, the large pinch of cinnamon might have helped too.

But the key thing is that the texture and sweetness of this batch were just right. 

I’ll record it here, just in case we ever lose the magazine it came from:

1.  melt 60 g unsalted butter in small saucepan and “cook”until golden (2 –3 minutes).  Let cool a bit.

2.  whisk 450 ml milk, 50 g castor sugar, 3 egg yolks, large pinch of cinnamon and salt.  Whisk in the melted butter.

3.  sift in 380 g self raising flour.  Fold in until just combined.

4.   whisk the 3 egg whites with pinch of cream of tartar until it  peaks.  Fold gently into the batter.

5.   Cook.

This makes quite a large batch; about 10 – 12 large pancakes. 

Thank you Gourmet Traveller; although I’m going to bother with candied walnuts on a Sunday morning.

Could be something to this

Look, I found this via the religion/culture site First Things, which found it via some reader who suggested it. It's not like I have The Hairpin, self described as "a ladies website run by Edith Zimmerman" on my bookmarks, OK? Although, to be honest, now that I look at it, it looks much more interesting that I expected for a "ladies website." Anyway, someone slap me in the face quickly, and let's get back on track....

The post in question was Favourite Books of the Secretly Jerky, and I thought it was pretty funny.

For example:

Secretly Loves Himself More Than He Loves [Anything]: Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand.

He’s not going to feed your fish when you go out of town, and he’ll be mean to your mom.

Secretly Planning to Cheat on You: On the Road, Jack Kerouac. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. This book is straight up terrible. It's a bunch of rambling about eating some sandwiches and driving around while eating sandwiches, and driving around, and then making some more sandwiches, which you will then eat while driving around. It is the universal favorite book of commitment-phobes. And please don't quote me that paragraph about how the only people for you are the mad ones who pop like roman candles. You know what’s better than a dude who pops like a roman candle? A dude who can keep it in his pants, rent his own apartment, and cook you something other than a sandwich once in a while.

Someone in the comments thread (which starts off like a sandwich pun thread of doom - you should read it Tim) adds:

And YES to the quoting Kerouac's mad ones, roman candle thing. If I had a dollar for every Facebook friend who put that in their quotes/bio... I didn't realize there were so many crazy, bright, burning stars of uniqueness out there!

Cute

Short Sharp Science: To boldly go where no Lego man has gone before

The shuttle programme may be over, but NASA has not stopped taking passengers into space. Three Lego figurines - the Roman god Jupiter, his wife Juno and Galileo Galilei, who discovered Jupiter's biggest moons four centuries ago - will be hitching a ride to the solar system's largest planet aboard the Juno space probe, set to launch tomorrow. The probe is carrying the unusual passengers as part of a bid to help engage more children with science.

There is a photo at the link.

What did Howard want?

Carbon Tax

The above piece by Labor's Mark Dreyfus does a pretty good job of finding quotes from John Howard that indicate he was prepared to have an ETS ahead of what other countries would do.

Previously, I had thought Howard was ambiguous on the point in his pre-election statements.

So, it looks more and more like a full blown Coalition retreat.

Something I didn't know about rats

I think most people (well, people with rodent interests) have heard that rats can't vomit, but I didn't know this:

...rats do still need a strategy to cope with ingested toxins. Rat food avoidance isn't foolproof. Rats do experience nausea and have evolved an alternative to vomiting: pica, the consumption of non-nutritive substances. When rats feel nauseous they eat things like clay, kaolin (a type of clay), dirt and even hardwood bedding (eating clay and dirt is a type of pica called geophagia). Their consumption isn't random, though: rats offered a mixture of pebbles, soil and clay after being given poison prefer to eat the clay (Mitchell 1976).

Rats engage in pica in response to motion-sickness (Mitchell et al. 1977a, b, Morita et al. 1988b), nausea-inducing drugs (Mitchell et al. 1977c, Clark et al. 1997), radiation (Yamamoto et al. 2002b), and after consuming poisons (Mitchell 1976), or emetic drugs (Takeda et al. 1993). The incidence of pica decreases in response to anti-emetics (Takeda et al. 1993) and anti-motion sickness drugs (Morita et al. 1988a). Pica in rats is therefore analogous to vomiting in other species.

Playing at superhero

TV's Superheroes of Suburbia shows secret lives of citizens who patrol streets | UK news | The Guardian

By day he is a mild-mannered financial adviser from Devon. But at night he dons an outfit that makes him look like a cross between a riot cop and a gladiator to become "the Dark Spartan", roaming the mean streets of Torquay on Friday and Saturday nights trying to keep the good people of the English Riviera safe.

The Dark Spartan – aka 27-year-old Will – is the star of a Channel 4 programme, First Cut: Superheroes of Suburbia. According to the programme, there is a growing band of upstanding citizens such as Will to be found trying to clean up the streets of Britain. As well as the Dark Spartan, there is a former soldier called Ken who operates as "the Shadow" and uses "ninjutsu" techniques and smoke bombs to tackle boy racers in Yeovil, Somerset. In Yorkshire, Keiran, a 17-year-old comic-book obsessive, takes on the persona of "Noir" to target muggers.

Everyone needs a (stupid) hobby, I suppose...

Bubble prints?

BBC News - 'Multiverse' theory suggested by microwave background

It gets worse

'Ugly' Tasmanian town upset over Lonely Planet rating

Apparently Burnie is cited as a very ugly Tasmanian town by Lonely Planet.

I'm sure it has nothing on the old mining town of Zeehan near the West coast. There does not seem to be a decent looking house in the place - it all looks like cheap as chips mining houses thrown up in 50's or 60's.

But it does have a pretty good museum, in a couple of grand old buildings left in the middle of small town decay.

Pictures not worth a 1000 words

Philosophical Wednesday

Downward Causation | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

Sean Carroll at Cosmic Varience delves into science and philosopher again with an interesting post talking about whether higher levels of emergent phenomena can properly be said to have "downward causation" on the lower levels of physical reality.

Because this is used as an "anti-reductionist" argument by some, Carroll, strongly atheist, reacts against it, and tries to explain why.

The comments that follow are just as interesting. It is, of course, a question that has been addressed by many philosophers of the mind.

This is a topic that I often find crossing my mind. I am tempted to add a comment there that anyone who has had a strong reaction to hearing the words "I love you" knows that downward causation happens. But, probably, serious physicists would say it doesn't.

Parasite strikes again?

A Common Parasite May be Linked to Brain Cancers

According to a latest geographic analysis led by the U.S. Geological Survey and French infectious disease research institute MIVEGEC, countries where Toxoplasma gondii is common had higher incidences of adult brain cancers than in those countries where the organism is not common.

Toxoplasma gondii is a single-celled organism found worldwide in at least one-third of the human population, researchers said.

Bad figures

Anorexic at five in Britain

Nearly 100 children aged between five and seven in Britain have been treated for anorexia or bulimia in the past three years, according to figures released on Monday.

The statistics show that 197 children aged between five and nine were treated in hospital in England for eating disorders, fuelling campaigners' fears that young children are being influenced by photographs in celebrity magazines.

The figures from 35 hospitals showed 98 children were aged between five and seven at the time of treatment and 99 aged eight or nine. Almost 400 were between the ages of 10 and 12, with more than 1,500 between 13 and 15 years old.

Hansen as renewables realist

James Hansen may promote the worst predictions of global warming, but when it comes to finding solutions, he appears very much a realist about the limited potential for renewable energy to rapidly replace carbon fuels.

He has a new essay up about this, and it is attracting some attention. Basically, he thinks new generation nuclear is the way to go, but his present analysis of its promise is definitely on the shallow side.

Important overlooked climate change correlations

Reading a certain right wing blog has taught me the following relationships:

I'm hoping for a burqa version

BBC News - India 'Slutwalk' sex harassment protest held in Delhi

Most of the marchers in Delhi were soberly dressed in jeans and T-shirts or traditional shalwar kameez.