Minimizing grid use

Novel battery system could reduce buildings' electric bills

I don't know what to make of this, but in some places (like all of Australia from about Sydney up), it's easy to imagine that domestic large scale batteries to store excess electricity generated by solar panels during the day could mean a house uses very little electricity off the grid.  If, say, an extra $10,000 on a new house build could give a very large saving on electricity use both during the day and night, would it make more sense to do that rather than having solar panels that feed back into the grid?  It would at least avoid the problems to the grid that feed in solar panels can cause.

Discouraging ocean predictions

Equatorial refuge amid tropical warming

From the link:

Upwelling across the tropical Pacific Ocean is projected to weaken in accordance with a reduction of the atmospheric overturning circulation¹, enhancing the increase in sea surface temperature relative to other regions in response to greenhouse-gas forcing. In the central Pacific, home to one of the largest marine protected areas and fishery regions in the global tropics, sea surface temperatures are projected to increase by 2.8 °C by the end of this century^{2, 3, 4}. Of critical concern is that marine protected areas may not provide refuge from the anticipated rate of large-scale warming, which could exceed the evolutionary capacity of coral and their symbionts to adapt⁵.

I am, like George Costanza, no marine biologist, but that does sound like a heck of an increase in sea surfaces temperatures in waters that are already pretty warm.

The article goes on to explain that there might be some compensating upwelling which will cool certain Pacific Islands, but even so the temperatures will be up.  Just not as much.

Sounds like a hot time for many coral reefs.

In another article in Nature Climate Change, some researchers think that increased CO2 will hurt, not help,  phytoplankton, contrary to what you might expect:

Carbon dioxide and light are two major prerequisites of photosynthesis. Rising CO₂ levels in oceanic surface waters in combination with ample light supply are therefore often considered stimulatory to marine primary production^{1, 2, 3}. Here we show that the combination of an increase in both CO₂ and light exposure negatively impacts photosynthesis and growth of marine primary producers. When exposed to CO₂ concentrations projected for the end of this century⁴, natural phytoplankton assemblages of the South China Sea responded with decreased primary production and increased light stress at light intensities representative of the upper surface layer. The phytoplankton community shifted away from diatoms, the dominant phytoplankton group during our field campaigns.

 So how does the increased light happen in future?  This seems to be explained in the last part of the abstract:

Future shoaling of upper-mixed-layer depths will expose phytoplankton to increased mean light intensities⁵. In combination with rising CO₂ levels, this may cause a widespread decline in marine primary production and a community shift away from diatoms, the main algal group that supports higher trophic levels and carbon export in the ocean.

Well, there you go.  More news of the giant climatological and ecological experiment that is underway, and that serious people should take seriously.  

Extremes

BBC News - Gaia creator rows back on climate

Climate change deniers (as they have adopted "alarmists" and "warmenists" as a matter of routine, I'm not going to worry about using "denier" any more, although I have a soft spot for "fake skeptics") were all excited about Lovelock's recent interview where he said he had been too alarmist in his previous talk about how climate change would only leave a handful of breeding humans in the Arctic, and that "no one knows" what the climate is doing.   

As I tried to tell the selectively stupid at another blog, it's not as if Lovelock was ever "mainstream" on the topic.  My sentiments were summarised by a climate scientist quoted at the BBC (link at the top):

 One IPCC scientist, who said he didn't want to be drawn into a personal argument with Dr Lovelock, said: "Jim exaggerated the certainties of climate change before, which wasn't helpful then. His recent comments aren't helpful now

"They will be seized on by people who argue that science is too uncertain to inform policy - and that's absolutely not the case. He's blown too hot, now he's blowing too cold."

Prof Hans von Storch of the Meteorological Institute at the University of Hamburg told BBC News: "Lovelock certainly exaggerated in 2006. It seems that the extreme position on both sides are losing ground, and that is good."

James Annan is also happy to point out that he and others called out Lovelock's extreme pessimism at the time, including Tim Lambert in Australia.

That said, nearly everyone still likes listening to Lovelock.   He is a very interesting character with lots of good work behind him.  It's just that he has been well out on his own in terms of pessimism on climate change.

But does this wash with the selectively stupid will take his current view as indicating that everything is so uncertain that nothing should be done about CO2 emissions?  No, of course not.

Weasel watch

Weasels are sometimes very cute.  But not always. 

More to come.

Dream knowledge

Shortly before I woke up, I was having a dream which was set in a sort of fantasy RNA Show (the Ekka, if you're from Brisbane.)  I think it was Dick Smith who was walking around with me.   (Don't ask me why - apart from the fact he was recently on some TV promo for a current affairs program giving away money to people.)

It ended up at a table where Bob Geldorf and, I think, some other famous person, were drinking with Dick Smith and me.  There were nuts on the table being eaten as a snack (I remember walnuts in particular - toasted walnuts are perhaps my favourite nut) and Bob made the comment that he used to lead an unhealthy lifestyle in which the only thing he ate was nuts.  I asked whether he knew that peanuts were not actually a nut.   Then the person sitting next to Geldorf said "that's right, they're a legume."

When I woke up, I couldn't quite recall whether that was right (the bit about being a legume, I mean.)  The Peanut Institute confirms it is.

Some people dream of winning lottery numbers, or solve scientific puzzles.  My subconscious is quite a bit more useless.

The dangerous tub

The Japan Times has an editorial on an unusual topic:

An investigation into one of Japan's favorite pastimes — bathing — has found a startling statistic: 14,000 people a year die during bath time. That's nearly three times more deaths than from car accidents, 4,612 people....

Bathing seems such a comforting and pleasant activity that it is hard to associate it with danger. However, the deaths come from several different problems. Some deaths resulted from drowning when bathers fell asleep. Other causes were heart attacks, subarachnoid hemorrhages or strokes from the sudden shift in temperatures. Dehydration and injuries resulting from slipping were also among the causes.

Researchers at Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine found last year that the danger of heart attacks is nearly 10 times greater in winter than in summer — and much higher than the risk of cardiac arrest during exercise. The rapid blood pressure drop that happens when getting in the bath stresses the heart more on a cold day, which can lead to a number of complications.

Trying out the macro

My wife bought a new little digital, and readers would know I love how digital cameras, even the cheapies, do macro pretty well:

Not bad.  I must try and track down a bug now...

An interesting analysis

We need to talk about energy, not rates - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Alan Kohler is upset that badly needed investment in electricity in Australia is being stalled due to uncertainty, caused in large part by the Tony Abbott "must revoke the carbon tax" policy.

I'm sure Kohler is not alone in this view.   But where are the economists who feel this way?   Are they just going to sit on their hands, or wait until an election is looming and then say that dismantling the governments carbon pricing scheme, and replacing it with Abbott's second rate "direct action" really doesn't make sense?

Anyway, here is Kohler's depressing conclusion:

If they're all thrown out, as promised, then the new minister will have to start the process all over again. By the way, the shadow minister is Ian Macfarlane, who came within a bee's willy of negotiating an emissions trading scheme in 2009 with the then minister, Penny Wong.

Presumably he no longer believes in that crazy stuff.

Anyway, aside from whatever carbon abatement costs are imposed by either political party (they both have the same reduction target of 5 per cent by 2020), electricity prices are already set to double by 2017 because of chronic under-investment in east coast transmission and distribution over previous decades.

This price increase cannot be avoided – it is already locked in. In fact, it will be greater than that if the 20 per cent renewable energy target is to be met because renewable generation is always further away, so that transmission costs more.

The only antidote to the huge, looming increase in the price of electricity, not to mention the possibility of brownouts caused by the lack of investment in base load power, including nuclear, is energy efficiency.

Unless urgent action is taken, the rising price of power will destroy manufacturing and retail businesses far more effectively than the internet and the currency, which has a tendency to go down as well as up.

Japanese tornado

God really seems to have it in for Japan at the moment. 

A compilation video of yesterday's tornado, looking very much like footage we more commonly see from the middle of America, can be see here.

Of course, people interested in climate change will be curious as to how rare this is.  As the Wikipedia knows all, it indicates that tornadoes are indeed pretty rare, but not unknown, in Japan.  Other odd places that have had tornadoes on that list include Moscow in 1904.  I guess that wherever you can get a storm, a tornado may be possible.

Moogerah Dam

Enhanced version at Dodopathy. 

Good movies

First, Addams Family Values. The original Addams Family movie was on TV a couple of weeks ago, and went over well with the kids, so I went looking for the second at the DVD rental place. (Does everyone feel a bit of melancholy like I do for this slowly dying line of business which will probably be gone completely in 5 years?)

Both Addams Family movies are based almost entirely on the funny one-liner, but so many of them are terrific. I think the best from the second movie would have to be when Joan Cusack, playing Uncle Fester's conniving love interest, says "Isn't he a ladykiller", to get the cheery response from Gomez "Acquitted!"

Watching these movies made me realize how much I like the sense of humour of director Barry Sonnenfeld. He did the Men in Black movies too, and has a third one coming out soon. I will be there early unless it has catastrophic reviews: even though the second MIB was not thought of highly by many, and I found it to be better than I remembered when I re-watched it recently.

Second movie from yesterday: Charade. I'm not sure, but I think I had only seen this once, as a teenager on TV. I remembered liking it very much, but only recalled a rooftop fight and the ending. Re-watching it 30 something years later therefore was a relatively fresh experience, and I have to say, the only wonder is why it isn't more often talked about as the classic bit of entertainment it truly is. In my books, it was Audrey Hepburn at her peak: a screen presence who (as we all know) was impossible to dislike in anything. But give her a script full of funny one-liners, and a role that let her do her vulnerable/playfully assertive act with Cary Grant as her love interest: well, what can go wrong? (Don't worry, nothing does.).

For those who don't know, it is like a funnier Hitchcock movie, and set in Paris in the early 1960's.  (JFK's photo is seen on the wall of the US Embassy, and the movie was released just a couple of weeks after his assassination.  I wonder if that unfortunate timing, when I imagine lots of Americans were too shell shocked to be seeking out lightweight entertainment, partly accounts for it not being as well known as it deserves.)  

 I see that Jonathan Demme did a remake which I have never heard of: why does anyone ever think it a good idea to remake movies which worked fantastically well in their first incarnation?

Anyway, a good viewing day was had by all.

Liking hospitals

I've been at hospitals on and off a fair bit in the last few years, but never for anything too dramatic - it's just what happens when you have kids and an elderly mother.  Getting my Mum to one over the last few days is why I haven't been posting much.

It almost feels like this is something that one shouldn't say - but I really like hospitals.   I like them architecturally - the way they grow and expand, usually with walkways joining different wings and buildings.  (Doesn't everyone like elevated walkways?)   I think being an architect working on a hospital re-vamp must be one of the most interesting jobs around.  I like the challenge of finding your way around these complexes. I like the way beds get pushed around and up and down different floors. 

I like buildings with helipads and red flashing lights on the roof.   I like high technology of all types, and x ray and medical imaging technology is some of the fanciest and cleverest stuff you are ever likely to see.

I usually like the staff:  working odd hours, usually with good cheer.  I like how hospitals are much more convenient places than they used to be - the car parks are usually not too expensive; there may be a Starbucks in the foyer, or a sushi place just outside, even in public hospitals.    During the day they'll probably be a volunteer at a desk to help find you something.  

I don't really care for waiting for 5 hours to see a doctor, but hey, it's a free service and I don't feel I can complain too much as long as the person I am with is not in pain.  Besides, waiting there is a bit like a free drama show - trying to overhear what the drug addicted or mentally ill person is complaining about at the admissions counter, or wondering what sort of illness the guy clutching his abdomen might be suffering.  It also gives me the opportunity to understand how boring and regrettably enduring is reality TV, because I will not sit at home to watch 4 couples arguing with each other about their designs and accidents while doing a renovation of a row of old terrace houses. 

I'm not sure how many people feel this way.  The Yahoo Questions page asking "Is it strange that I like hospitals"  has few responses.  Hospital fans need their own support group, perhaps.  I'm here to help.

Something you've never thought about before

YKK zippers: Why so many designers use them. - Slate Magazine

Exactly

What an excellent bit of video which was not shown on the ABC's fairly forgettable climate change documentary last week "I can change your mind about climate."



I think Nick Minchin (the skeptic ex-politician), obviously liked Anna Rose (the young climate change "believer"), so much so that by the end he tried to come up with a compromise, along the lines of saying that as all fossil fuel sources are finite, he could support a move towards renewable energy now.

It's a pity this position doesn't make much sense, as far as doing anything about emissions - especially in Australia, where we have enough coal to burn for hundreds of years.   There is no urgent imperative to implement clean electricity at all out of concern for running out of dirty ways to make it.  (The argument might have a chance of working if it restricted to finding a way to make good electric cars, given oil will presumably start running out sooner than coal.)

As someone wrote about Minchin:

In all, five of Minchin’s seven experts appeared in the documentary, but only three of Rose’s. While this might sound unfair to Rose, I think that Minchin’s experts did more harm to his cause than good.

That said, I was concerned to read Minchin being quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday as saying that the documentary was a “terrific opportunity to convey to an ABC audience that there remains a significant debate”. If Minchin had any insight he would realise that the documentary simply exposes his gullibility.

 Quite true, I think, and all the more galling that the documentary left out the video above.

Sounds like an important paper

From Science:

Fundamental thermodynamics and climate models suggest that dry regions will become drier and wet regions will become wetter in response to warming. Efforts to detect this long-term response in sparse surface observations of rainfall and evaporation remain ambiguous. We show that ocean salinity patterns express an identifiable fingerprint of an intensifying water cycle. Our 50-year observed global surface salinity changes, combined with changes from global climate models, present robust evidence of an intensified global water cycle at a rate of 8 ± 5% per degree of surface warming. This rate is double the response projected by current-generation climate models and suggests that a substantial (16 to 24%) intensification of the global water cycle will occur in a future 2° to 3° warmer world. 

Still busy...

For ANZAC Day

Prisoner of war: my father's story - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Barrie Cassidy tells at length the story of his father's war.  A good read.

A bit busy....

More Beard

Lucky me. Here's another, meatier, bit of writing by Mary Beard. She's reviewing a new book about Caligula.

While he was undoubtedly a terrible man, Beard notes that some of the stories about him are not quite what they seem. In fact, the worst thing he did in I Claudius (the TV series of which I have only seen, once, when it was first run on TV in the 1970's) was completely invented:

Much more shocking was the portrayal of Caligula in BBC Television’s 1976 adaptation of I, Claudius. In his novels, Robert Graves had exploited the ancient allegations that Caligula had a suspiciously close relationship with his sister Drusilla. The inventive Jack Pulman, author of the screenplay, went even further. In a terrifying scene that has no source either in ancient accounts or in Graves’s narrative, he has Caligula (John Hurt) take on the guise of Jupiter and cut the baby Drusilla is carrying from her belly and – on the model of some versions of divine gestation and paternity in Greco-Roman myth – eat the foetus. The ‘Caesarian’ itself was not shown on screen, but Caligula’s very bloody mouth was. Deemed too much for American audiences, the scene was cut out of the PBS version of the series.

Odd how we got the full scene on the ABC, but the Americans didn't.

Anyhow, there is lots more good stuff in the review, and as usual, Beard is a good read.

Revelation considered

A witty and informative review by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker about a new book by Elaine Pagels on the Book of Revelation can be found here.

In my experience, Revelation has not been paid much attention in Catholic education or liturgy.  I think most see it as a bit of an oddball book full of obscure references and not really worth trying to decode in full.   Protestant evangelicals, on the other hand, do treat it as a big Hollywood movie, as Gopnik amusingly compares it to in his opening paragraphs:

That ending—the Book of Revelation—has every element that Michael Bay could want: dragons, seven-headed sea beasts, double-horned land beasts, huge C.G.I.-style battles involving hundreds of thousands of angels and demons, and even, in Jezebel the temptress, a part for Megan Fox. (“And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.”) Although Revelation got into the canonical Bible only by the skin of its teeth—it did poorly in previews, and was buried by the Apostolic suits until one key exec favored its release—it has always been a pop hit. Everybody reads Revelation; everybody gets excited about it; and generations of readers have insisted that it might even be telling the truth about what’s coming for Christmas.

Gopnik notes the unoriginal part of Pagel's book:

Pagels then shows that Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back.

but goes on to point to the more novel argument put by her:

 Revelation is essentially an anti-Christian polemic. That is, it was written by an expatriate follower of Jesus who wanted the movement to remain within an entirely Jewish context, as opposed to the “Christianity” just then being invented by St. Paul, who welcomed uncircumcised and trayf-eating Gentiles into the sect. At a time when no one quite called himself “Christian,” in the modern sense, John is prophesying what would happen if people did. That’s the forward-looking worry in the book. “In retrospect, we can see that John stood on the cusp of an enormous change—one that eventually would transform the entire movement from a Jewish messianic sect into ‘Christianity,’ a new religion flooded with Gentiles,” Pagels writes. “But since this had not yet happened—not, at least, among the groups John addressed in Asia Minor—he took his stand as a Jewish prophet charged to keep God’s people holy, unpolluted by Roman culture. So, John says, Jesus twice warns his followers in Asia Minor to beware of ‘blasphemers’ among them, ‘who say they are Jews, and are not.’ They are, he says, a ‘synagogue of Satan.’ ” Balaam and Jezebel, named as satanic prophets in Revelation, are, in this view, caricatures of “Pauline” Christians, who blithely violated Jewish food and sexual laws while still claiming to be followers of the good rabbi Yeshua. Jezebel, in particular—the name that John assigns her is that of an infamous Canaanite queen, but she’s seen preaching in the nearby town of Thyatira—suggests the women evangelists who were central to Paul’s version of the movement and anathema to a pious Jew like John. (“When John accuses ‘Balaam’ and ‘Jezebel’ of inducing people to ‘eat food sacrificed to idols and practice fornication,’ he might have in mind anything from tolerating people who engage in incest to Jews who become sexually involved with Gentiles or, worse, who marry them,” Pagels notes.) The scarlet whores and mad beasts in Revelation are the Gentile followers of Paul—and so, in a neat irony, the spiritual ancestors of today’s Protestant evangelicals.

 All interesting stuff.

 

But, as a long time fan and promoter of the importance of gnostic writings (perhaps too much so), Pagel's book apparently goes on to talk about them, again, in the context of the times.  Gopnik quotes a "feminist" poem found at Nag Hammadi with this very funny line:

As an alternative revelation to John’s, she focusses on what must be the single most astonishing text of its time, the long feminist poem found at Nag Hammadi in 1945 and called “Thunder, Perfect Mind”—a poem so contemporary in feeling that one would swear it had been written by Ntozake Shange in a feminist collective in the nineteen-seventies, and then adapted as a Helen Reddy song.

As to how the book got into the Bible at all:

Pagels’s essential point is convincing and instructive: there were revelations all over Asia Minor and the Holy Land; John’s was just one of many, and we should read it as such. How is it, then, that this strange one became canonic, while those other, to us more appealing ones had to be buried in the desert for safekeeping, lest they be destroyed as heretical? Revelation very nearly did not make the cut. In the early second century, a majority of bishops in Asia Minor voted to condemn the text as blasphemous. It was only in the three-sixties that the church council, under the control of the fiery Athanasius, inserted Revelation as the climax of the entire New Testament. As a belligerent controversialist himself, Pagels suggests, Athanasius liked its belligerently controversial qualities. “Athanasius reinterpreted John’s vision of cosmic war to apply to the battle that he himself fought for more than forty-five years—the battle to establish what he regarded as ‘orthodox Christianity’ against heresy,” she writes.

That's probably about as much as I should fairly quote.  Go read the whole thing: it's great.