Unliveable desert countries

I'm told by a relative that Doha is already an unbearable place to live for any length of time, but researchers are saying that the Arabian Gulf is going to get much worse and perhaps become virtually unliveable*:

A human body may be able to adapt to extremes of dry-bulb temperature (commonly referred to as simply temperature) through perspiration and associated evaporative cooling provided that the wet-bulb temperature (a combined measure of temperature and humidity or degree of ‘mugginess’) remains below a threshold of 35 °C. (ref. 1). This threshold defines a limit of survivability for a fit human under well-ventilated outdoor conditions and is lower for most people. We project using an ensemble of high-resolution regional climate model simulations that extremes of wet-bulb temperature in the region around the Arabian Gulf are likely to approach and exceed this critical threshold under the business-as-usual scenario of future greenhouse gas concentrations. Our results expose a specific regional hotspot where climate change, in the absence of significant mitigation, is likely to severely impact human habitability in the future.

*  OK, without airconditioning.  Although, it's actually pretty incredible to me that people lived there at all before airconditioning.  Here's the summary from phys.org:

It would still be rare, and cities such as Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Doha wouldn't quite be uninhabitable, thanks to air conditioning. But for people living and working outside or those with no air conditioning, it would be intolerable, said Eltahir and Pal. While Mecca won't be quite as hot, the heat will likely still cause many deaths during the annual hajj pilgrimage, Eltahir said.

Furry Hannibal Lecters

The case against otters: necrophiliac, serial-killing fur monsters of the sea - Vox

Wow.  This article really makes the case for otters having some very surprising, and horrible, behaviours.

Nasty virus tricks

HIV latency: a high-stakes game of hide and seek

It's interesting to read about the devious way HIV, even when people are on treatment, hides itself:

In latent infection, HIV integrates its genetic material into the DNA of the patient and becomes “silent”.

A brilliant added tool is the use of a long-lived critical cell of the immune system, the resting T cell, as its preferred hiding site. These latently infected resting T cells can slowly divide and, given HIV is now part of the patient’s DNA, the HIV is passed down to the daughter cells too.

HIV usually replicates in activated T cells and can efficiently kill those cells in several ways. First, the virus directly damages the outer membrane of the cell. This membrane usually keeps the cell intact.

Following infection of a cell, bits of the virus are quickly revealed to the immune system which, once activated, can zoom in and eliminate the infected cell.

However, if the virus manages to get inside a resting cell, in contrast to an activated T cell, all the machinery needed to produce new viruses is not available and the virus life cycle essentially shuts down.

If things shut down after the virus has already entered the patient’s DNA it gets stuck there – forever.

As the article also notes, people who go off the antiviral drugs quickly get high viral counts - within weeks.


What a nasty virus it remains.

Yet more on climate policy

Here's a very worthy bit of commentary about the Vox article I posted about on Sunday - pointing out that one has to be on the lookout for fatalism in the way the problem is described.   (It's by Michael Tobis, who is doing guest posts at ATTP lately.)

Movie economics

Turns out that Greg Jericho knows a lot about the matter of government subsidy for the movie business. 

I suspect that the benefits of this sort of government support are a bit stronger than Jericho thinks.  I reckon that of the type of industries government can be seen to be helping,  this one has a certain high profile, confidence building factor that others don't share.   All the publicity surrounding a major star staying for protracted periods on the Gold Coast or in Sydney (and saying nice things about these places) must count for something, no?  (Unless, of course, you are Barnaby Joyce and manage to turn a national image of relative youth and vigour into something more resembling a patronising fogey-ness.)

About Gary

I've been reading up a little about Gary Powers, the key figure in Bridge of Spies.

The Smithsonian.com has a short article about him, which contains a couple of surprises (he was allowed a conjugal visit with his wife, but she was an unfaithful alcoholic; and he kept a journal while in prison that indicates he may have had a touch of Stockholm syndrome.) 

His son has a website up, which doesn't have a lot of content, but some of it is interesting.

As for the old poison needle in the coin trick:  yes, this was true and the poison used was saxitoxin, derived from shellfish.  

You can even read an account of his accident on the CIA website, where we get a good description of his dangerous exit from the U2:

The young pilot had been flying for almost four hours when he heard a dull thump, the aircraft lurched forward, and there was a bright orange flash from a nearby surface-to-air missile. The plane’s right wing began to droop and the nose started to go down. Powers tried to correct it, but the plane continued its downward trajectory. Powers was uncertain if the control cable had been severed or if the tail was gone. He was certain, however, that he no longer had control of the plane.

Powers initial reaction was to pull the destruct switches, but he decided he’d better secure an exit plan for himself first. This, however, was proving difficult as the g forces had hurled him to the nose of the plane, which was spinning tail first towards the earth. Powers thought of ejecting but realized, in his current position, he likely would have had both off his legs cut off while trying to escape the plane.  

On the verge of panic, Powers decided he would climb out of the plane. The whirling aircraft had passed thirty-four thousand feet when he removed the canopy. He took off his seat-belt, which sent him flying halfway out of the aircraft. His face plate frosted over rendering him visionless. Powers tried to get to the destruct switches twice but, realizing time was running out, he began kicking frantically and miraculously the oxygen hoses that were holding him hostage in the U-2 broke and freed him from the spiraling plane.

Suddenly, all was silent, except for the rustling of material as the chute opened and settled in the wind. Powers hung in the air desperately trying to comprehend what had just happened and trying to assess his current situation. He was fifteen thousand feet above the Soviet Union and the ground was growing ever closer. As he clutched the straps of his chute, he saw a piece of the plane float down past him.

Maybe not exactly as portrayed in the movie, but pretty close.

Bridge spied

Hmmm.   This is an odd situation.  For once, I think a Spielberg film has been a tad overpraised, collectively, rather than my usual feeling that there are too many critics too cynical about him.

It's not that there's anything wrong with Bridge of Spies:  the acting is fine; the script has witticisms at times; and I don't think anyone now does history with finer and more authentic feel in the art direction than  Spielberg.  

It's just that I missed an element of tension, and had been expecting a bit more, I guess, intrigue in the story.   Out of Spielberg's last few films, I admit, this impressed me less than both War Horse or Lincoln.  (And Lincoln was a bit similar in that we already knew the ending - the interest is in how the movie gets there.)

I am also a little surprised that it hasn't had a wingnut backlash in the US, as it can be read as impliedly criticising the handling of those captured by the US in the war on terror, yet Breitbart gave it a glowing review too. 

Anyway, it's worth seeing, as Spielberg always is.  I just wish I could have been more gushing in praise.

Climate change economic modelling questionned

David Roberts at Vox has a good article up explaining the doubts about how valid any of the long term economic modelling of climate change can really be.

Given that I had noticed those doubts being expressed in some of the quieter corners of the 'net for a year or two now, it's good to see this is  finally getting some broader attention.

I did raise this issue in a thread at John Quiggin's blog recently too, noting Pindyck's criticism of the whole IAM exercise, but he didn't comment on it.

More about that Berkeley study...

The Economist has a good article up giving some more of the background of the Berkeley study that looked at the economic effects of global warming in a new way.  Here's part of it:

A paper published this week in Nature challenges this finding. The authors—Marshall Burke, Solomon Hsiang and Edward Miguel—suspected that economists had been looking for the wrong thing: a linear relationship between temperature and growth. Instead, they looked for an optimal temperature, on the assumption that excessive cold could harm growth as much as punishing heat. That is exactly what they found: hotter-than-usual years benefit countries, rich and poor alike, up to an average annual temperature of 13°C, after which hotter weather begins to sear growth. That allowed them to draw inferences about the likely effect of climate change: for Brazil, for example, an increase in temperature of 3°C will lead to a fall in output of 3% (see chart).

The apparent heat resistance of rich countries, it turns out, is simply because some of them, such as Germany and France, lie on the colder side of the optimum, so grow faster in hotter years, whereas others, such as America and Australia, lie on the hotter side, and so wilt as temperatures rise. Within individual counties in America, for instance, every hot day (with an average temperature over 24 hours of 24-27°C) lowers the average income per person that day by 20%, according to a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research by Mr Hsiang and Tatyana Deryugina. Very hot days (over 30°C) lower income per person by 28%. Looking at the average impact of rising temperatures in rich countries as a group had obscured such strong responses.

 David Appel shares my skepticism of (as he puts it) an economic model atop a climate model, but his post extracting some of the material from the paper is worth reading too.  (I added a comment to his post along the lines of what I said here.) 

Much mirth caused

'Offers over $40,000': Tony Abbott joins the international speakers circuit

According to article:

Mr Abbott's preferred topics include advice on leadership, negotiation, election forecast and analysis, current events and Asia.

The disappearance of Mussolini

Seems to be the day for updating previous pop culture posts.

In July, I wrote about seeing the musical Anything Goes.  (One of those posts I like a lot, but no one comments on.)  Today, I see that Beachcomber has a post about the mysterious appearance and disappearance of a reference to Mussolini as a "top" in the song "You're the Top."  

Seems Wodehouse was responsible, although the matter is not without uncertainty.

Not entirely sure it was worth the update, but still....

Well argued

Hockey the fantasy economist may as well have farewelled Middle-earth | Greg Jericho | Business | The Guardian

I liked this piece from Greg Jericho that really showed up Joe Hockey as not up to the job of Treasurer.

Seems a nice enough guy in real life, but a bit of a hypocrite in politics and just all over the shop on matters of economics.  

You don't see that every day

Remember earlier this year that I had a bit of fun reading up on the nudist panic of the early 1930's in the US and Australia? 

Well, upon stumbling upon a new resource of scanned materials from museums and what not, it's always tempting to just search "nudist" and see what pops up.   That's how I found out (via the Digital Public Library of America) that the Smithsonian has in a box somewhere this photo from 1930:

The description is: Staged nudist wedding on a parade float with a mechanical dinosaur.

I have a suspicion that these particular nudists were trying to really annoy the anti-evolutionists in the South, but I could be wrong...

Your new word for today: phantosmia

It sounds a little like the phenomena of the phantom limb, that often hangs around when people lose their real one; but I hadn't heard of phantom smells before:

It occurs in people who lose the sense of smell. People with phantosmia imagine smells which can be odd, unnatural, unpleasant or even euphoric. It is a rare condition which can occur in relation to brain injuries, strokes, seizures, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. 

From a recent episode of the Science Show.  You can read more in the transcript that is at the link on this page.

UnEnglish and Unmanly

That's the title of a .pdf paper  I've stumbled across from 1982 about Anglo-Catholicism in England and its appeal to homosexual men.  It's by Adelaide historian David Hilliard, who (I think) has been on the ABC from time to time.

I vaguely knew about this topic, but didn't realise how "hot" an issue it was at the time of Newman and his followers.  Haven't read all of it yet, but it's an interesting read.   (I also wonder whether this aspect of the Anglican Church put off a figure like CS Lewis from moving towards the Catholic Church.)

Spectre arrives

I see from Rottentomatoes that the first British reviews for Spectre are pretty strong.  (Mind you, they still seem to be classifying one dubious review as a good one.)   That's pleasing.

But of course, all right thinking people will be off to see Bridge of Spies this weekend, to bask in the magnificence of a well made Spielberg. 

Another go at the economics of climate change

Expect to hear a lot about this study just out from some Berkeley researchers.  The headline from the Washington Post:

Sweeping study claims that rising temperatures will sharply cut economic productivity 

The claim is simple, but interesting:

Culling together economic and temperature data for over 100 wealthy
and poorer countries alike over 50 years, the researchers assert that
the optimum temperature for human productivity is seems to be around 13
degrees Celsius or roughly 55 degrees Fahrenheit, as an annual average
for a particular place. Once things get a lot hotter than that, the
researchers add, economic productivity declines “strongly.”

“The relationship is globally generalizable, unchanged since 1960, and
apparent for agricultural and non-agricultural activity in both rich and
poor countries,” write the authors, led by Marshall Burke of Stanford’s
Department of Earth System Science, who call their study “the first
evidence that economic activity in all regions is coupled to the global
climate.” Burke published the study with Solomon Hsiang and Edward
Miguel, economists at the University of California, Berkeley.

If the findings are correct, they add, that means that unmitigated
global warming could lead to a more than 20 percent decline in incomes
around the world, compared with a world that does not feature climate
change. And this would also mean growing global inequality, since poorer
countries will be hit by worse temperature increases — simply because
“hot, poor countries will probably suffer the largest reduction in
growth.” Indeed, some already wealthier countries with cold weather,
like Canada or Sweden, will benefit greatly based on the study, moving
closer to the climatic optimum.

 But things start to sound a bit more shaky here:

Assuming this relationship between temperature and productivity is
correct, that naturally leads to deep questions about its cause. The
researchers locate them in two chief places: agriculture and people. In
relation to rising temperature, Burke says, “We see that agricultural
productivity declines, labor productivity declines, kids do worse on
tests, and we see more violence.”

Yes, not sure I'd be entirely confident of the heat and violence connection, but if we go over to the university press release on this study, there is more reason to question the accuracy of the new study:

Unmitigated climate change is likely to reduce the income of an average
person on Earth by roughly 23 percent in 2100, according to estimates
contained in research published today in the journal Nature that is co-authored by two University of California, Berkeley professors.

 So far, so disastrous.  But look:

The Nature paper focuses on effects of climate change via
temperature, and does not include impacts via other consequences of
climate change such as hurricanes or sea level rise. Detailed results
and figures for each country are available for download online.

Or, I might add, rainfall pattern changes, or ocean acidification and potential large scale changes to the food cycle there.  How the heck can you be confident of projections if you cannot be certain how many poor countries may be destined to longer droughts and/or more frequent ones, followed by larger floods?    And what about poor coastal countries where local fish is an important food source?

So, I think there are grounds to argue that this study is another example that accurate predictions of the economic consequences of global warming decades into the future are pretty much guesswork. But at least it notes that the uncertainty is no grounds for complacency, as techo-optimist libertarian types seem to think.

And it does support one thing that I reckon common sense suggests:     the poor nations will suffer disproportionately from climate change; and even if some pro-development-at-any-climate-cost proponents had their way and we had every poor country building coal burning power plants as fast as they could, they are not going to develop their way economically fast enough to outpace the damage from climate change.   They're not going to be able to aircondition their agricultural sectors, after all; nor are they all going to be manufacturing centres, or financial hubs making a living from mobile money.

Back to how bad some of the study's projections are (from the University link above):

They find climate change is likely to have global costs generally
2.5-100 times larger than predicted by current leading models. The
team’s best estimate is that climate change will reduce global economic
production by 23 percent in 2100.

“Historically, people have considered a 20 percent decline in global
Gross Domestic Product to be a black swan: a low-probability
catastrophe,” Hsiang warned. “We’re finding it’s more like the
middle-of-the-road forecast.”

Half of the simulation projections suggest larger losses. The hottest
countries in the world are hardest hit: in less optimistic scenarios,
the authors estimate that 43 percent of countries are likely to be
poorer in 2100 than today due to climate change, despite incorporating
standard projections of technological progress and other advances.

 Richard Tol is already bleating about this, I see.  Given that I consider him a discredited jerk, I'm not surprised, but it will still be interesting to read more coverage about this.

Update:  here's the abstract from Nature in full:

Growing evidence demonstrates that climatic conditions can have a profound impact on the functioning of modern human societies^{1, 2}, but effects on economic activity appear inconsistent. Fundamental productive elements of modern economies, such as workers and crops, exhibit highly non-linear responses to local temperature even in wealthy countries^{3, 4}. In contrast, aggregate macroeconomic productivity of entire wealthy countries is reported not to respond to temperature⁵, while poor countries respond only linearly^{5, 6}. Resolving this conflict between micro and macro observations is critical to understanding the role of wealth in coupled human–natural systems^{7, 8} and to anticipating the global impact of climate change^{9, 10}. Here we unify these seemingly contradictory results by accounting for non-linearity at the macro scale. We show that overall economic productivity is non-linear in temperature for all countries, with productivity peaking at an annual average temperature of 13 °C and declining strongly at higher temperatures. The relationship is globally generalizable, unchanged since 1960, and apparent for agricultural and non-agricultural activity in both rich and poor countries. These results provide the first evidence that economic activity in all regions is coupled to the global climate and establish a new empirical foundation for modelling economic loss in response to climate change^{11, 12}, with important implications. If future adaptation mimics past adaptation, unmitigated warming is expected to reshape the global economy by reducing average global incomes roughly 23% by 2100 and widening global income inequality, relative to scenarios without climate change. In contrast to prior estimates, expected global losses are approximately linear in global mean temperature, with median losses many times larger than leading models indicate.

Paranoia, probably

The average gun owner now owns 8 guns — double what it used to be - The Washington Post

The Right wing paranoia that's been on the rise in the US would have to play a significant part in this, surely.

Well, he does appear a lot on Fox News, so what do you expect?

Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu stirs trouble by linking Muslim leader to Holocaust

I can't even see any Right wing blog cite defending Netanyahu's history claims.  Not yet, anyway.

Something Back to the Future missed

Westmead Hospital to offer life-saving, stomach-churning, poo transplant cure

Yes, poo transplants are going mainstream.

It's pretty amazing, really, how no one seemed to see the importance of our gut microbiota until recently.

And for all you fans of a what's basically a new field of medicine, I see there is a website up with the great name Gut Microbiota Worldwatch, run by a bunch of European gastroenterologists, it seems.  (Which, come to think of it, is probably appropriate, since I think Germans have been a bit ahead of the field in having a keen interest in observing poop for health reasons.  Whether they truly have a national interest in all things poop related seems up for debate, however.)