Does Hedley Thomas care to report this?

Brisbane Flooding 'Inevitable', Hydrologist Tells Flood Inquiry

Hedley Thomas and the Australian have been doing their best to convince the public that the Seqwater engineers were responsible for the Brisbane flood.

What then don't they report (as far as I can tell on the 'net) is this crucial bit of evidence yesterday by the independent hydrologist Mark Babister, we have to go to the Fairfax press to read about it. (Even then, it is not given much prominence):

In his report released last night, the hydrologist found that "although hindsight indicates a better flood mitigation result could have been obtained ... it would have been unjustifiably risky using the information available at the time".

"The primary factor when forming this view is that there would generally be no grounds to release large flows from Wivenhoe Dam during a flood event that are greater than the inflows so far received," the report says.

The strategies would have relied on operators releasing large flows from Wivenhoe in anticipation of drastic inflows.

"Between 11am on January 8 and 1pm on January 9, both of these strategies would have involved dam outflows significantly in excess [almost double] the peak dam inflow observed until that point," the report says.

"During this period, the above scenarios would have required Wivenhoe Dam to operate as a flood amplification dam rather than a flood mitigation dam.

"The only reason to increase flows so dramatically at such an early stage would have been if there was a sure indication that future inflows [would] exceed the remaining flood mitigation space in the dam, and that storage capacity should be 'created' for later."

When similar evidence was given in July 2011, Hedley Thomas and the Australian's article on it was headed "Qld flood damage 'could have been cut' "

The Australian's, and Thomas' reporting on this has been sensationalist and pretty disgraceful.

A likely story, Part 2...

Mills denies giving access to voicemails:

Earlier, the Australian owner of Big Pictures photo agency, Darryn Lyons, told the inquiry that photographers "didn’t know where they stand" when taking images of celebrities.

"We do not know from one day to the next whether they are going to want it or not," he said, speaking via video link from Australia.

"It is so ambiguous - we do not know what is right and what is wrong.

"Fifty per cent of celebrities want to be photographed and they love it but others will pick and choose their terms."

A likely story...

Ancient Antarctic lake thought to harbor prehistoric life, Hitler clones - CSMonitor.com

You should read the link - it's very amusing. And a little bit enlightening about Nazis.

There has been some odd links around on news.com sites saying something about the Russians drilling into the lake having "disappeared"; I thought it all sounded like nonsense from the Weekly World News (now sadly only a pale online imitation of its former self), but I didn't track down the source of the story.

Stupid spice challenge

Can the cinnamon challenge kill you? | MNN - Mother Nature Network

I've mentioned before that nutmeg can be abused, but I see there is now a "cinnamon challenge" on the net, and it also appears not to be the safest thing to try.

The big fuel cell

Solvay’s 1 MW Nedstack Fuel Cell Delivers Impressive Performance During its First Two Months

We don't read enough about fuel cells and their potential contribution to cleaner energy. At the link above, you can see the photo of a very big one in Belgium, being run successfully for a couple of months, and apparently can power about 1400 homes.

A question of influence

BBC News - Did Charles Dickens really save poor children and clean up the slums?

The BBC looks at the question of how influential Dickens really was for social reform in the 19th century. Maybe not quite as much as people think, say some historians; but this has an air of pop contrariness about it if you ask me.

Climate change stuff

* Skeptical Science has a good post explaining Hansen's recent paper that details why they expect rapid warming in the near future.

* At Real Climate, a post on the study of tree rings, showing they don't well reflect cooling caused by volcanic activity. The end result is that this may have led to some underestimates of climate sensitivity.

* Nature reports that some measurements of the amount of leaking methane from at least one natural gas field indicate that gas may not be much better than coal for the warming atmosphere. There seems to be uncertainty as to how representative this is of other gas production areas, but it is still a bit of bad news.

Around the solar system by nuclear power

Robert Heinlein, writing in the the 1950's, used to have families cruising around the solar system via simple nuclear powered rockets (I remember the family discussion of the merits of different rocket models in The Rolling Stones - also known as Space Family Stone) and it may yet turn out that nuclear propulsion will be what gets astronauts around in future.

This report notes that NASA has had highly variable funding for nuclear rockets over the years, but they still think it has a lot of merit and may yet re-fund it to more realistic levels.

It's always going to be a bit controversial, though, getting the fuel into space on the top of a controlled explosion.

Speaking of Heinlein, I've recently bought a couple of Charles Sheffield novels from second hand stores. I've been reading him on and off for years, and am currently half way through The Web Between the Worlds.

He really does strike me as writing very much in the style of early Heinlein. He is more technically minded, but the way he sketches characters, has a basic optimism for the future of humanity, only ever implies sex and never describes it, and throws in the occasional off hand bit of future quirk (of the type "the door dilated", or "he took a bulb of beer") reminds me of Heinlein all the time.

I find him a very entertaining science fiction writer, and it's a pity he does not quite seem to have had the recognition he deserved. (He died a few years back.)

Worse than the disease...

gulfnews : Black magician stabs man 'to cure illness'

Time for a bizarre black magic story, this time from India:

Patna: The Bihar police have arrested a black magician who ruthlessly stabbed a man claiming that it would cure him of his mental illness and help him lead a normal life.

The 55-year-old accused was apprehended on Friday evening while he was stabbing the victim Taleshwar Murmu (45) at the latter's residence in the Mehboob Khan locality in eastern Bihar's Purnia district.

"The more you endure the pain of the stab, the faster the cure," the black magician kept on telling the victim who, police said, kept on screaming loudly due to the severe pain from the stabbing.

Zapping away fatherhood

'Sonicated' Sperm: Scientists Test Ultrasound as the Next Male Contraceptive | Healthland | TIME.com

Have I posted a story about this before?* I can't quite remember, but anyway, from the report above:

In the study, the rats’ testes were exposed to high frequency ultrasound at 3 MHz for 15 minutes each, two days apart. The sessions were enough to kill the existing sperm in the testes and stop the development of additional sperm. The first study to look at the effect of ultrasound on sperm production, in the 1970s, showed that the depletion was temporary, and Tsuruta hopes his studies will show the same result...

Some men are keen to get in on the technique:

Tsuruta stresses that the procedure isn’t something you should try at home, despite the fact that commercial ultrasound machines are available online and men are apparently purchasing them for this purpose. “I get emails asking me what conditions men should use,” Tsuruta says. “This is really not something you should do at home because we don’t know nearly enough about its safety and reversibility and what other effects there might be long term.”

I'm not sure that something that is working to disable sperm cells could be trusted to not be causing damage to testicular cells you don't want damaged.

* Yes I did - in 2010. It was a story about the same researcher in fact, and I am not entirely sure why this has made it to the news again last month.

Toilet tales

Dirty little secret: the loo that saves lives in Liberia | Global development | The Guardian

This article is quite interesting; covering both the tortured history of Liberia, and that fact that people there still need a lot of convincing that building toilets is a worthwhile activity.

Floods, politics and engineers

There's always been the very strong whiff of a Right wing witch hunt against the dam operators following the Brisbane flood. It would seem this happened with unusual haste because:

a. there is Labor government in power;
b. a theory instantly developed that, being a Labor government, it had fretted too much about releases from Brisbane's water supply because it believed climate change warnings that longer droughts are coming;
c. people like to blame someone, if it is at all possible, when natural disasters happen.

Why the government should be penalised at all, even if there was any evidence (I don't think there is) that it withheld recommended water releases out of concern for future droughts is a complete puzzle, given this report from October 2010, barely 3 months before the flood, when water was being released due to spring rains:

Seqwater said all south-east dams were receiving heavy inflows from surrounding catchments after heavy rainfalls across the region.

The water body’s decision to open the flood gates at the officially 100 per cent full Wivenhoe came under fire from the state opposition.

Opposition spokesman Jeff Seeney told parliament the dam was not completely full.

“Is not this release of water from Wivenhoe Dam, when it is holding only 40 per cent its available storage capacity, a clear indication that the government has learnt nothing from the water crisis,” Mr Seeney said.

But Natural Resources Minister Stephen Robertson said the extra capacity was needed to prevent a repeat of the 1974 floods.

“What Mr Seeney on behalf of the LNP suggests is that Wivenhoe Dam should not be used for flood mitigation purposes,” Mr Robertson said.

“As a result, that puts into jeopardy the very safety of people in Brisbane and surrounding areas.”

And on 20 December, only a few weeks before the flood, Deputy Opposition Leader Springborg repeated in detail the same view (that the dams should store more water, not less) on Brisbane radio.

The decision was made (post flood) to reduce dam levels seeing there is still a La Nina weather pattern hanging around, but I can't say that I have noticed evidence that anyone influential was being outspoken about reducing dam levels in anticipation for summer 2010/11.

In any event, the flood enquiry has taken a curious turn, after having finished its report and sent it to the printers, by virtue of journalist Hedley Thomas (who was running around promoting an "independent" expert or two who were pointing the finger at dam management almost before the flood subsided.)

It turns out that the inquiry seems to have missed that in emails and notes circulating at the time of the flood, the dam engineers were not talking about the same response levels as their later formal report to the Commission indicated.

The dam engineers have therefore been recalled and grilled over how they wrote their report: the accusations of fraud and cover up have flown fast and thick from the Counsel Assisting the inquiry: I have had the feeling that their new found aggression is partly due to the fact that a journalist has shown up the well paid lawyers, as much of this evidence was already before the inquiry, just its importance seems to have been missed.

So, the basic problem is that although the manual gives escalating classifications of response, each involving discretionary faster releases of water, on the weekend before the flood, the engineers were being rather careless to record what level their actual response was at. It even seems a bit unclear whether they recognised the level they were at. So (if I understand it correctly) when writing the report, after an incredibly tiring and stressful period, they looked at how much water they had started releasing, combined with other inflows coming into the river, and petty much retrospectively nominated that they had moved to level W3 by the Saturday morning.

This isn't an ideal way to demonstrate that you were working in accordance with a manual. In fact, in evidence on the last day, one engineer seems to have acknowledged (unwisely, if you ask me) that not knowing what level your response was at would constitute a "breach of the manual". This raises a good philosophical question: if you do the same things a manual would have required just based on your own judgement, you may not have been "following the manual," but have you actually "breached" it?

As far as I could tell from some of the figures, the move out of the lower W1 response did, for much of the weekend, involve not a whole lot more water than the maximum W1 release. (I could be wrong on that, though, as the chief engineer said it was clear that they skipped level W2 and went straight to W3.)

But - given that other independent engineers have already said they think the dam operators mitigated the flood as best they could - getting too hooked up on demonstrating compliance with the manual should surely not triumph over the practical outcome of how they operated it.

As I understand it, each response classification is triggered by the dam reaching certain levels, and it seems the dam engineers certainly recognised the significance of the threshold levels being reached. In other words, they did increase water flow as levels grew, and they did make decisions as to how fast to release water based on how fast the dam level was responding. The manual even at level W3 allows them to consider problems caused downstream by flooding the highest bridges near Fernvale, and they also took that into account in deciding rates of release.

The thing is, as far as I can tell, the manual does not say (at least at the first 3 levels - W4 is doing whatever must be done to save the dam) "once level X is reached, reduce dam levels by Y metres as soon as conceivably possible." And you wouldn't want it to. If there was blue sky forecast for the next week, you wouldn't want to be flooding Brisbane for no real reason.

So: surely you are always going to have to rely on judgements of the dam engineers as to rate of release based on a variety of factors that it is probably difficult to define precisely for all circumstances.

The importance is the outcome, and those who say they should have released a lot more water starting on the Saturday are, of course, doing this with the advantage of hindsight about what was soon to become record inflows into the dam. There must be hundreds of ways to model how releases could have been done differently - but high early releases would have caused earlier flooding of the lowest areas, and how do you recognize at the time the release rates which will turn out to strike the "ideal" balance?

I therefore await the inquiry's findings in this regard with some interest. Non compliance with the manual is said to have significant legal implications, as it would allow class actions. I wonder, however, whether a finding of non compliance might allow legal cases which nonetheless fail due to inability to prove negligence, or flood levels that would have been significantly lower. Surely insurance companies won't get paid much, or at all, if some modelled difference amounts to less than (say) 30 cm? And hydrology seems a rather imprecise science anyway. Lots of Brisbane flooded on land the Council did not expect would flood in a repeat of the 1974 flood - and this one peaked lower.

So the engineers have my sympathy, as do the politicians; the lawyers and the journalists - not much at all. In fact, I suspect Mr Thomas may only be giving false hope to a bunch of witch hunters.

UPDATE: as Hedley Thomas and the Courier Mail are hell bent on criticising the engineers (and just about everyone else associated with the enquiry,) you have to read another media outlet to get the same point I was making. From the ABC:

If the commission finds the engineers breached the operating manual, then it opens the Government to a class action, which law firm Maurice Blackburn estimates could exceed $1 billion.

Insiders question that figure, but regardless of the record keeping both Mr McDonald and an independent hydrologist have found the four engineers released the appropriate amounts of water and that has not yet been challenged.

If it stays that way, it means the only damage from these allegations are to the reputations of the four men.

A very worrying virus, somewhere in a freezer

Norman Swan ran an extraordinarily scary interview on the Health Report last week that put a lot of detail on that recent avian flu research story.

To be honest, I hadn't paid all that close attention to the controversy until now, but the details in the interview really surprised me. For example, the influenza pandemic of 1918 managed to kill about 90 million people with a mortality rate of 2%.

The bird flu in nature appears to transmit rarely between humans or mammals. The man made variety, however, spread airborne to infect about 80% of ferrets used in the experiments, with a 60% mortality rate.

And some of this is sitting in a freezer somewhere, and the details of how to make are pretty obvious to many scientists from information put out already.

Mind you, as a terror weapon, it is surely the equivalent of all out nuclear war - no one would want the world it leaves. I think the bigger worry is its accidental release, as well as the news that there appears no reason why natural mutations of bird flu won't turn as deadly, eventually.

You should read the whole thing...

Underwater circle

Even if you think it unlikely that the underwater circle on the Baltic seabed is really a UFO, this CNN report is worth watching for the view of the old Vasa ship in its own museum in Stockholm. Looks very impressive:



The museum website is here.

Update: why does this CNN video, for the last day or two, not load for me? I just watched it again on Huffington Post, so it is still available.

Getting in first

Climate Change Okay for One Coral - ScienceNOW

Climate change/ocean acidification skeptics will be onto this sooner or later, so we may as well mention it first. On the west coast of Australia, porites coral seems to be doing fine, with the benefits of warming outweighing any acidification. The article notes that this seems to be in contrast to the Great Barrier Reef, although I expect someone has probably argued that the run off effects from a much larger coastal population might be behind the coral slow down there.

Anyway, ocean acidification is just getting underway, as well as increasing sea temperatures which lead to bleaching events. I wouldn't rush to forecast the next 100 years based on this.

Encouraging, kind of

New generation of nuclear reactors could consume radioactive waste as fuel | Environment | The Guardian: A new generation of "fast" nuclear reactors could consume Britain's radioactive waste stockpile as fuel, providing enough low-carbon electricity to power the country for more than 500 years, according to figures confirmed by the chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc)....

The engineering firm GE Hitachi has submitted an alternative proposal based on their Prism fast reactor, which could consume the plutonium as fuel while generating electricity.

However, the Prism design is a sodium cooled reactor, said to have passive safety. I've always felt that liquid sodium doesn't sound all that safe. But what do I know? (Then again, what do engineers know? They build reactors besides the sea in earthquake zones.)

Trouble making moss

First plants caused ice ages: research: New research reveals how the arrival of the first plants 470 million years ago triggered a series of ice ages.

Land plants came along that late? I need to memorise evolution time lines better. Anyhow, back to the report:

Among the first plants to grow on land were the ancestors of mosses that grow today. This study shows that they extracted minerals such as calcium, magnesium, phosphorus and iron from rocks in order to grow. In so doing, they caused chemical weathering of the Earth's surface. This had a dramatic impact on the global carbon cycle and subsequently on the climate. It could also have led to a mass extinction of marine life.

The research suggests that the first plants caused the weathering of calcium and magnesium ions from silicate rocks, such as granite, in a process that removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, forming new carbonate rocks in the ocean. This cooled global temperatures by around five degrees Celsius.

In addition, by weathering the nutrients phosphorus and iron from rocks, the first plants increased the quantities of both these nutrients going into the oceans, fuelling productivity there and causing organic carbon burial. This removed yet more carbon from the atmosphere, further cooling the climate by another two to three degrees Celsius. It could also have had a devastating impact on marine life, leading to a mass extinction that has puzzled scientists.

All your "bear in the woods" questions answered

Snoring dormouse video: Do hibernating animals wake up to go to the bathroom? - Slate Magazine

Well, there's a lot of information here about bears and their winter toilet habits (they really don't go for the entire winter, and have some odd metabolic abilities to achieve it) that I never knew.

(The dormouse video is cute too.)

Rupert Post - The Second

I can't find a link to it right now, but I am sure that I have heard someone, probably former Murdoch editor Bruce Guthrie, explain that Rupert Murdoch's editorial control was not overtly a matter of directing editors what he wants them to run; it is more a matter of Rupert expressing his general feel on an issue, and then newspaper editors doing a "pre-emptive fold" to slant coverage to the way they think Murdoch might approve.

This has been on my mind ever since Rupert took to Twitter, and very early on in the piece, praised Matt Ridley's book The Rational Optimist, which has been most noted for its "meh, climate change probably isn't that big an issue after all" attitude.

I've been waiting for the "pre-emptive fold" ever since, and I take the Wall Street Journal's publishing of a letter by 16 prominent skeptics part of this. (Not that the WSJ ever needed much prompting to run with climate change skepticism.)

Today, I see that The Australia re-prints the letter, just in case people here haven't already heard about it.

Fold, fold away, opinion editors.

And perhaps let someone note that the article is outrageously dishonest in one key section, at the very least:

Nordhaus:

The piece completely misrepresented my work. My work has long taken the view that policies to slow global warming would have net economic benefits, in the trillion of dollars of present value. This is true going back to work in the early 1990s (MIT Press, Yale Press, Science, PNAS, among others). I have advocated a carbon tax for many years as the best way to attack the issue. I can only assume they either completely ignorant of the economics on the issue or are willfully misstating my findings.

UPDATE: for a very detailed take down of the letter, have a look at the Skeptical Science post about it.

UPDATE 2: Andy Revkin, who first publicised Nordhaus' complaint about how the letter misrepresented his views, has another post about the letter, and the rebuttal, which takes a very soft line on the scientists involved. He seems strangely un-inclined to note the lack of expertise in the area under discussion, just noting that "most of the authors in both camps are scientists."

UPDATE 3: I still can't work out where I got "pre-emptive fold" from (maybe a radio interview), but here is Guthrie writing about Murdoch in the context of News Ltd paper's coverage of the Labor government here:

Either way, it certainly wouldn't have been a direction. That's not Murdoch's style. It would more likely have been an observation expressed by him or a lieutenant during or after dinner or at a coffee break between sessions. His editors, better than most at reading the wind, would have noted the boss's latest leanings and applied this knowledge at the first opportunity - many of them would have arrived back in Australia the morning of the budget lock-up. Of course, it would be open to an editor to ignore the boss's preferences, but as I discovered, that can sometimes come at a cost.

Rupert Post - The First

I came across this while looking for something for my next post, but it struck me as very noteworthy in light of the arrest of four Sun journalists last week for (allegedly) making payments to police. Here is Bruce Guthrie, former Murdoch employee, writing last year when the News of the World scandal was on:

IN 1988, while attending a conference of News Corporation editors in Aspen, Colorado, I made the mistake of raising the thorny issue of journalistic ethics. The proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, was not amused.

In short order, Murdoch, who was hosting the session, turned red, then purple, as I repeatedly asked a senior executive from his London paper The Sun whether the publication had any ethical framework. It didn't, the paper's news editor finally admitted. In most media companies that admission might have earned the executive a rebuke. But instead, I copped it, with Murdoch later dismissing me as a ''Fairfax wanker''. (For the record, I wasn't at that point; I became one 12 months later.)...

I left that conference in Colorado more than 20 years ago concerned that Murdoch saw ethics or, at least, the discussion of them, as an inconvenience that got in the way of the newspaper business.

To Murdoch's (waaaaay too late) credit, it is being reported that these arrests have arisen from information News Ltd itself has provided to police. Huh: a boss who telegraphs that ethics is for sooks, then later facilitates arrests for breaching them.

What a man.