Xenu preserved

Here's a good and entertaining read about L Ron Hubbard's life and works - perhaps a tad more sympathetic than what most non Scientologists would write.   I hadn't heard this before:

At a remote compound in Trementina, New Mexico, plans have been made to preserve his writings forever, in an underground vault designed to withstand a nuclear blast. Written on steel and encased in titanium capsules filled with argon gas, they might conceivably outlast most of the other works that our civilization has produced. Future generations may well read Hubbard, assuming that he is all that survives. But they might be the only ones who will.

How distressing to think that future visiting aliens (long after humans have left the scene) might think this convincing evidence or a real, all pervasive, religion.

Nuclear revival not coming

In other news from The Japan Times, have a read of this story of the financial trouble and difficulties Toshiba is in over some new American nuclear plants it said could be built quickly and on budget:

On Tuesday, Toshiba is expected to announce a massive write-down, perhaps as big as $6.1 billion, to cover cost overruns at Westinghouse, which now owns most of Shaw’s assets. The loss may actually eclipse the $5.4 billion that Toshiba paid for Westinghouse in 2006 and has forced the Japanese industrial conglomerate to put up for sale a significant stake in its prized flash-memory business. Toshiba had to sell off other assets last year following a 2015 accounting scandal.

Toshiba made a big bet on a nuclear renaissance that never materialized, in part because it couldn’t build reactors within the timelines and budgets it had promised. The company had anticipated that Westinghouse’s next-generation AP1000 modular reactor design would be easier and faster to execute — just the opposite of what happened. Now Toshiba may exit the nuclear reactor construction business altogether and focus exclusively on design and maintenance.

“There’s billions and billions of dollars at stake here,” says Gregory Jaczko, former head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). “This could take down Toshiba and it certainly means the end of new nuclear construction in the U.S.”

It really seems that intense skepticism over the revival of nuclear as an answer to global warming is justified.   (John Quiggin is vindicated, in short.)

It's a cultural thing

Wow.  Japanese litigation sounds as ambulance chasing as anything you see in America:

Twenty-eight girls and women suffering what they say are side effects from a cervical cancer vaccine that was recommended by the government demanded compensation from the state and drugmakers Monday as their trial opened at the Tokyo District Court.
The plaintiffs, ranging in age from 15 to 22, said they have experienced a wide range of health problems, including pain all over their bodies and impaired mobility, after receiving the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines between 2010 and 2013.
Each is demanding ¥15 million in damages.
Erina Sonoda, a 20-year-old college student, said she started to suffer strong menstrual pain after receiving the second of three recommended shots of the Cervarix vaccine, and the pain spread to other parts of her body after the third vaccination.
Due to agonizing pain, Sonoda said she has difficulty walking without a cane and often must use a wheelchair.

Have a look at the PR photo at the link, too.

I suspect that there is a strong cultural element to this.   The Japanese, for reasons not entirely clear, are extremely cautious about anything "unnatural" to do with women's reproductive health.  The prime evidence for this:  the contraceptive pill was only legalised in 1999, and its use is still startling small:

In 1999, Japan became the last industrialized country to legalize oral contraceptives (OCs). Have contraceptive use patterns changed as a result?

An analysis of national survey data indicates that, as of 2014, prevalence of condom use and OC use was 83% and 3%, respectively, among all Japanese women aged 16 to 49. According to the UN, among married women in 2011, the proportions using OCs were 1% (Japan), 16% (U.S.), 21% (Canada), 28% (U.K.), 37% (Germany), and 41% (France). Prevalence of OC use in Japan did not significantly change following government approval.

So with this background, hysterical reaction to an injection that affects something to do with female reproduction was probably foreseeable.

Where is the pressure to embrace coal coming from?

Alan Kohler gets stuck into the Coalition (and Turnbull) for their silly coal embrace:

It’s true that wind and solar are intermittent, since the wind doesn’t blow all the time and the sun doesn’t shine all the time. But instead of helping the states to deal with this problem sensibly, Coalition politicians including the Federal Minister for Energy Josh Frydenberg, are just trying to score points and embed the hoax.

It raises a broader issue: why is politics the only part of society doing this?

The academic, scientific, corporate, not-for-profit sectors have long ago accepted that the problem is real and are working towards a more sustainable future; the only ones not showing leadership are the nation’s leaders.

The line I highlighted is the one that most interests me.  Where is the pressure coming from on the Coalition to aggressively promote coal?

Is it just generically from the Minerals Council?  It has the feeling of something more specific...

Hot hot hot

I can't remember the last time it was 40 (or 41?) degrees in the part of the Brisbane where I live.  But yesterday it was hot, still, and the temperature dropped to 27 degrees overnight, making for a very unpleasant weekend.  I don't know how the people of Western Sydney, who have had a much worse run of heatwave weather than Brisbane, have been able to put up with it.  It certainly makes one disinclined to go out, at least if the airconditioning is working at home...

And heat is in the news globally.   Last week it was in the news that the Arctic has had 3 bursts of sudden winter temperature rises this northern winter, and the Washington Post analysed it this way:

Scientists believe that a number of different factors are feeding into these warming events, including the steady march of climate change and interactions between the air and Arctic sea ice, which global warming is melting a little more each year. And a good low-pressure system, like the one that barreled through this week, can help to jump-start these kinds of sudden warming events by carrying a large amount of warm air up to the North Pole all at once.

The presence of the storm itself isn’t exactly unusual, according to atmospheric physics expert Kent Moore of the University of Toronto. Each year, there are some storms that roll through the northern Atlantic. What’s uncommon is just how far north some of them have been making it lately.

“There’s these extratropical cyclones that appear to be tracking farther north than they usually do, and these low-pressure systems are bringing the heat up into the polar region,” he said. It’s unclear why this happens, he added. But when it does, temperatures can vault up above zero degrees, or in extreme cases, sometimes even above freezing.

In a recent paper published in December, Moore notes that these types of anomalous warming events have been recorded since the 1950s — but they usually only occur once or twice a decade. Scientists believe that factors related to climate change may now be making it easier for weather systems like this week’s storm to carry warm air into the Arctic.

Changes in Arctic sea ice extent are one major issue. As a result of global warming, temperatures in the Arctic are rising at about twice the global average rate, and one of the consequences is a reduction in Arctic sea ice. These changes are most obvious in the warm summer months, when sea ice is at a minimum anyway — but lately, scientists have been observing record lows for the frozen winter months as well, a time of year when the ice is actually expanding. But where it is missing, those parts of the ocean become warmer.
“As that sea ice moves northward, there’s a huge reservoir of heat over the north Atlantic,” Moore said. “As we lose the sea ice, it allows essentially this reservoir of warmth to move closer to the pole.”

I think it's fair to say that it seems that the energy from global warming is acting to stir up the atmosphere so that warm air and cold air masses are being distributed to places they normally wouldn't be.  Or wouldn't be so often...

Low score for consistency

Look, Judith Sloan - no one in their right mind treats you or Alan Moran seriously when you talk energy and renewables, because you both deny climate change is real and therefore think there is absolutely no reason a nation should be considering clean energy at all, let alone try to develop policies to encourage its growth.   All of your commentary is therefore tainted unavoidably.

But can you at least try to be a bit more consistent.  And stop with the bold shouting, while you're at it.

Today at Catallaxy (my italics, her bold):

And here’s a point that the greenies fed Barrie: there have been more peaks in wholesale electricity prices in Queensland than SA this year – therefore nothing to do with renewables.  Of course, this is just spin.

The peaks generally last a very short time and the key is average electricity prices.  Here are the figures for 2017:

But in the Australian, 19 July 2016:

It is unusual for any story related to South Australia to appear on the front page of this newspaper. But when wholesale electricity prices in that state reached more than 30 times the prices recorded in the eastern states last week, the broader interest in the issue is obvious.

To give you a feel for the figures, last Thursday at 1.45pm, the wholesale power price in South Australia was recorded at $1001 per megawatt hour, compared with prices of between $30/MWh and $32/MWh for the eastern states. At one point, the maximum price in the state hit $1400/MWh.

Not a lot of mention about average electricity prices detectable there.

Left wingers really need to be less snobbish, sometimes

I'm not really surprised by the Domino's Pizza article in the SMH today - it has been hard to believe for some time that all of the franchisees of such a cut throat priced business could make a good living out of it, and not face the strong temptation to illegally cut staff wages to make it "work".  

That said, I was sort of encouraged to see that Dominos had started to charge a Sunday surcharge, due to increased staff costs, which made me think the franchisor was at least being realistic about improving their franchisees' bottom line in the face of penalty rates that most fair minded people feel have gotten out of hand.

But it is annoying to see Bernard Keane respond with a Left wing snob comment:

One suspects he hasn't tried one since last century, and may be completely unaware of their considerably improved range and quality over the last 5 years or so.   Even their vego pizza is not bad. 

I really don't see why anyone should be a food snob about any fast food, which (if eaten once a week) does no one harm and (if the price is right) can keep everyone in a family happy. 

Why isn't gas generation subsidised, somehow?

With the argument over electricity generation going on, I make the following observations:

*  no one seems to be disputing that there would in fact have been enough electricity for South Australia to avoid load shedding last Wednesday if an additional gas generator had been turned on.  

*   The SA government and Labor politicians therefore blames the Australian Energy Market operator for not having directed Pelican Point to go fully online.   The authority (if not them, then someone) tried to blame the government for not telling it via an emergency direction to turn on the generator.  (The government responds that realising a forecast high temperature does not count as an "emergency" - and that seems more than a reasonable argument.)

*  The Federal government, up to and including Turnbull, has politicised the blackouts to an extraordinary and quite  sickening degree:  using it as an opportunity to deride renewable energy and promote coal as it if is a magic elixir, instead of the more obvious question - how do you make a system that already has adequate capacity use it to avoid brown outs.

* Ross Gittins wrote a plain speaking article a few days ago explaining what lots of people have said - the core of the current problems revolve around government policies regarding gas.   Here's Gittin's conclusions:

Turnbull blames South Australia's blackouts on its excessive enthusiasm for renewable energy which, pending the development of storage arrangements, has a problem with intermittent production.

He doesn't admit his parity-pricing policy is contributing. It was expected that gas-fired power generation would ease the transition from coal-fired to renewable generation.

That's because gas-fired power stations emit far less carbon dioxide and can be turned on and off as required to counter renewable energy's intermittency.

Guess what? South Australia has a new and big gas-fired generator at Pelican Point, near Adelaide, but it's been mothballed.

Why? Because the operator had a long-term contract for the supply of gas at a price set at the pre-export-parity level, and decided it was more lucrative to sell the gas into the East Asian market.

Last week Turnbull had the effrontery to argue that now gas-fired power had become uneconomic, we needed to fill the gap by subsidising new-generation "clean" coal-fired power stations.

Small problem. They're hugely expensive, only a bit less emissions-intensive than existing coal-fired stations, can't easily be turned on and off, and would supposedly still be operating 60 years later.

If there's a case for subsidising any fossil fuel-powered generators the obvious candidate is the gas-fired plants the feds' export-parity pricing policy has rendered uneconomic.

So great is the coal industry's hold over the Coalition that, not content with subsidising increased supply of coal from Adani and others at a time when coal is a sunset industry, Turnbull is now making up excuses to subsidise increased demand for coal by local electricity producers.

Economists are always telling politicians not to try picking industry winners. In reality, the politicians are far more inclined to back known losers.

 I cannot see any flaw in the argument in the highlighted paragraph.....

And finally:   maybe I am not reading widely enough, but has any journalist or commentator explained more about what's behind the Turnbull/Frydenberg/Morrison rapid new found love affair with coal?   It seems kinda suspiciously like they are responding to intense behind the scenes lobbying that the public might not be fully aware of ...

Update:  Lenore Taylor's article is a fine, angry bit of commentary which covers a lot of the above, but still doesn't uncover anything about specific recent lobbying efforts.

Current temperatures

Out of curiosity, just checked current temperatures (the Google result is accurate, is it?) for Penrith and Parramatta - both 44 degrees.  Birdsville - 43.  Walgett (well inland in northern NSW) - and a routinely hot place, I'm told - is 42.

Is it urban heat island effect that makes Western Sydney so hot?

"Conservative carbon tax"

Further on the point that a carbon tax being promoted by a couple of Reagan era fellows doesn't stand a chance.  From Vox:

A carbon tax won’t get enacted over the next four years unless Republicans get on board. But most of the Republicans currently in Congress loathe new taxes. Many of them also don’t believe global warming is real. Under the circumstances, it’s hard to see why they’d sign up for a big carbon tax, no matter how many times you write “conservative” on the packaging.

Some numbers: To date, exactly zero Republicans currently in Congress have publicly endorsed a carbon tax. On the contrary, last June, every single member of the House GOP voted for a resolution saying a carbon tax “would be detrimental to American families and businesses, and is not in the best interest of the United States.”

A year ago, carbon tax supporters did have one bit of leverage. Republicans also really dislike President Obama’s climate policies, which involved intricate EPA regulations like the Clean Power Plan. It’s entirely possible that some conservatives could’ve been sold on adopting a carbon tax in exchange for curtailing EPA power. Except then Donald Trump got elected and promised to scale back those rules anyway. Today, as Grover Norquist points out, Republicans have little incentive to sign up for a carbon tax trade

Death in the news

*  An anonymous junior doctor from Sydney notes that three of her colleagues have committed suicide.  Doubts about the whole culture of making juniors work long hours under much pressure (because their forebears did it, so why can't they?) have been around for so long, but it never seems to be satisfactorily resolved.   A combination of money and culture is the problem, I guess...

*  The Washington Post had a story yesterday about people who chose to do their suicide live streamed on Facebook.   Very disturbing, but how to stop it?

* I haven't read all of this yet, but at the NYT Magazine, an article about a somewhat nutty sounding transhumanist who drove a coffin shaped bus around the US campaigning against death.  

Maybe this is where the wall should be built

NPR notes:

Thousands more troops and billions more dollars are needed to break the war in Afghanistan out of a "stalemate," the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan warned Congress on Thursday.
Army Gen. John Nicholson also told the Senate Armed Services Committee that outside powers have increased their meddling in Afghanistan over the past year, especially Russia, in ways that make it tougher for the U.S.-backed government in Kabul to make and keep gains against insurgents.
That's why the U.S. and its allies must send more troops and spend more money to help the Afghan military become more effective at attacking and defeating its enemies and keeping control of the ground they capture.

What a neverending mess.  

More on that NOAA fight

I see that Science has a good, dispassionate, look at the Bates/Karl dispute.  

It confirms there is nothing harmful to climate science to it.

Hearing sounds before they arrive

I've heard about this mystery before:  how it is that people witnessing a large meteorite passing overhead sometimes report hearing sounds from it, but before any sound waves could have arrived from that distance.

A new theory as to what is happening is this:

Concurrent sound associated with very bright meteors manifests as popping, hissing, and faint rustling sounds occurring simultaneously with the arrival of light from meteors. Numerous instances have been documented with −11 to −13 brightness. These sounds cannot be attributed to direct acoustic propagation from the upper atmosphere for which travel time would be several minutes. Concurrent sounds must be associated with some form of electromagnetic energy generated by the meteor, propagated to the vicinity of the observer, and transduced into acoustic waves. Previously, energy propagated from meteors was assumed to be RF emissions. This has not been well validated experimentally. Herein we describe experimental results and numerical models in support of photoacoustic coupling as the mechanism. Recent photometric measurements of fireballs reveal strong millisecond flares and significant brightness oscillations at frequencies ≥40 Hz. Strongly modulated light at these frequencies with sufficient intensity can create concurrent sounds through radiative heating of common dielectric materials like hair, clothing, and leaves. This heating produces small pressure oscillations in the air contacting the absorbers. Calculations show that −12 brightness meteors can generate audible sound at ~25 dB SPL. The photoacoustic hypothesis provides an alternative explanation for this longstanding mystery about generation of concurrent sounds by fireballs.

Hard to believe

As noted at Axios:

A group of former senior U.S. officials from past Republican administrations have called for a tax on carbon emissions to help fight climate change, per the Financial Times. The group — known as the Climate Leadership Council — is led by James Baker, former secretary of state for George H.W. Bush and Treasury secretary for Ronald Reagan; George P. Schultz, former secretary of state under Reagan; and Henry Paulson, former Treasury secretary under George W. Bush.

They are scheduled to meet with White House officials later today, including Vice President Mike Pence, Jared Kushner and Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, to present their plan for addressing global warming. They argue the proposal — which would tax carbon emissions at $40 per ton, with all of the revenue recycled in dividends paid back to the public — will "embody the principles of free markets and limited government."

Why this matters: The proposal puts influential members of the GOP on the record as favoring action on climate change — a position that is not publicly supported by establishment Republicans, as most GOP members have promised a rollback of emissions regulations now that they have control of both houses of Congress and the White House.

This is the exact policy that James Hansen (actually, a registered Republican) has supported for a decade or two, no?  I don't know whether I've ever seen much discussion amongst economists about how well it might work, but it's probably 100 times better than the current Republican policy - do nothing.

The true blockage to this ever being possible would be Republicans - including Trump - acknowledging that climate change is real, after all their years of denial and conspiracy mongering.

Can't see it happening, but it's encouraging that some Republicans - and old ones at that!* - are willing to push for it.

* Maybe I have to qualify my continual dismissal of anyone over 80 being unreliable on everything!

Stoat loses trust in Timmy

I noted recently that I hadn't realised Tim Worstall was in Farage's party and a pro Brexit-er, and as such, his judgement in anything should be seriously downgraded.

Now long time slightly contrarian climate blogger William Connolly seems annoyed to realise that Tim swallowed David Rose's article whole.

The Stoat should have paid attention to me...

Message to monty

Well, this is a bit of a surprise.  It seems to me the uber Catholics of Catallaxy (CL, db and Philippa, primarily, but some of the others too) do seem to be admitting shame about the extent of the Catholic Church child abuse issue as a result of the present inquiry. 

Yet, they still seem to hold the view that it was started as a Catholic witch hunt by Gillard, designed to hurt Abbott.  (I don't think there was ever any credible reason to believe that this was a primary - or even secondary - motive of Gillard.  But they hated her with a passion and were willing to fantasise about her evil plottings.)  In any event, it would seem that some are of the grudging view that some good is coming out of the exercise.  Quite a turnaround.

As for their insistence on celibacy not being relevant - why is Philippa, seemingly changed by her peripheral involvement in an investigation of a priest having an affair with another woman, insisting still that celibacy is not an issue at least in the case of priests having affairs with adult women??   

Could you ask that question of her?   I think she blocks emails, as she fantasises I am obsessive stalker.

Women and hair

A short article at The Atlantic gives some historical background as to why modern Western women disdain body hair.  (It doesn't cover that most recent trend, by that's been discussed a lot elsewhere.)  Some extracts:

The campaign against body hair on women originates in Darwin’s 1871 book Descent of Man, explains Herzig. Men of science obsessed over racial differences in hair type and growth (among other aspects of physical appearance), and as the press popularized these findings, the broader American public latched on. Darwin’s evolutionary theory transformed body hair into a question of competitive selection—so much so that hairiness was deeply pathologized. “Rooted in traditions of comparative racial anatomy, evolutionary thought solidified hair’s associations with ‘primitive’ ancestry and an atavistic return to earlier, ‘less developed’ forms,” Herzig writes. Post Descent, hairiness became an issue of fitness.

An important distinction in this evolutionary framework was that men were supposed to be hairy, and women were not. Scientists surmised that a clear distinction between the masculine and the feminine indicated “higher anthropological development” in a race. So, hairiness in women became indicative of deviance, and researchers set out to prove it. Herzig tells the story of an 1893 study of 271 cases of insanity in white women, which found that insane women had excessive facial hair more frequently than the sane. Their hairs were also “thicker and stiffer,” more closely resembling those of the “inferior races.” Havelock Ellis, the scholar of human sexuality, claimed that this type of hair growth in women was “linked to criminal violence, strong sexual instincts … [and] exceptional ‘animal vigor.’”...

....“In a remarkably short time, body hair became disgusting to middle-class American women, its removal a way to separate oneself from cruder people, lower class and immigrant,” writes Herzig.

As hemlines rose, threatening to reveal hairy limbs, women took extreme measures to remove hair.  In the 1920s and ’30s, women used pumice stones or sandpaper to depilate, which caused irritation and scabbing. Some tried modified shoemaker’s waxes. Thousands were killed or permanently disabled by Koremlu, a cream made from the rat poison thallium acetate. It was successful in eliminating hair, and also in causing muscular atrophy, blindness, limb damage, and death. Around the same time, X-ray hair removal emerged as another treatment option. Women would sit for three or four minutes in front of the invisible rays of a boxed X-ray machine, and the radiation would do its work. So great was the appeal of each hair withering away in its sheath that for nearly two decades women underwent dangerous radiation that led to scarring, ulceration, and cancer.

Men and body hair seems more a matter of more temporary fashion.   The 70's perception of masculinity still looks funny today, although I suppose hipster beards is something of a return to hairiness as manliness.   I'm not sure as to the average hipster's attitude to their bodily hairiness, though.    

The Turnbull problem

I'm not impressed by the Turnbull performance in Parliament yesterday:  I didn't care for the theatrical personal attacks by Keating;  I don't care for them in politics generally.  Attack ideas passionately, not personalities.  And, to my mind, seeing backbenchers getting thrilled by vitriol makes them look childish more than anything else.

I'm persuaded by Peter Martin's take on Turnbull - instead of pulling the Right into line in his party, he's trying to placate them.  I don't think it's going to end well.   

I don't care for Shorten as a performance politician much either, but I think Labor remains sounder policy wise, for the moment.

A bit nutty, Jason

Jason Soon keeps noting things said by Nassim Taleb, including re-tweeting extracts of an interview with him that have appeared at Zerohedge.

As far as I can tell, he has a general reputation of being a bit of a loudmouth quasi-contrarian, but with some basic credibility behind him.   He seems, for example, to be on the right side of climate change, arguing that the potential for disastrous temperature rise really means that action should be taken, and those to the contrary bear the burden of proving their do-nothing position.

And on economics, I have the feeling he might be more or less right (if you ignore the personal sledging of Obama) that the economic problems are not really solved:  

Oh, absolutely! The last crisis [2008] hasn’t ended yet because they just delayed it. [Barack] Obama is an actor. He looks good, he raises good children, he is respectable. But he didn’t fix the economic system, he put novocaine [local anaesthetic] in the system. He delayed the problem by working with the bankers whom he should have prosecuted. And now we have double the deficit, adjusted for GDP, to create six million jobs, with a massive debt and the system isn’t cured. We retained zero interest rates, and that hasn’t helped. Basically we shifted the problem from the private corporates to the government in the U.S. So, the system remains very fragile.

So, he worries about "massive debt".   But things start looking wonky in the second part, when he is asked how the Trump administration can address this:

Of course. The whole mandate he got was because he understood the economic problems. People don’t realise that Obama created inequalities when he distorted the system. You can only get rich if you have assets. What Trump is doing is put some kind of business sense in the system. You don’t have to be a genius to see what’s wrong. Instead of Trump being elected, if you went to the local souk [bazaar] in Aleppo and brought one of the retail shop owners, he would do the same thing Trump is doing. Like making a call to Boeing and asking why are we paying so much.

OK, he's stop making any sense. So, Taleb is giving Trump for being a non-expert who talks at a level people can understand.   The problem is - he's ignoring Trump's actual, and plain to see, ignorance on a swathe of economic and other problems, and on those matters where you can tell his general direction, Trump's approach (lower taxes, big infrastructure spend, Mexican wall, the EPA) is only going to make  matters Taleb complains about ("massive debt", climate change) worse.  Not to mention that the path Trump is taking is to decrease banking regulation - no sense of a banker punishment there;  quite the opposite.

As for Trump putting "business sense" into the system - Trump proudly pays no tax and brags about using debt to his advantage, and the string of litigation against his business conduct is embarrassing.

So yeah, sorry, but I have trouble taking Taleb seriously.