Permafrost worry

That commentary piece that has appeared in Nature on the great uncertainties in the amount of greenhouse gas likely to come from melting permafrost is indeed a worry.    The basic message is that things are going faster in the North than anyone expected:

Current models of greenhouse-gas release and climate assume that permafrost thaws gradually from the surface downwards. Deeper layers of organic matter are exposed over decades or even centuries, and some models are beginning to track these slow changes.

But models are ignoring an even more troubling problem. Frozen soil doesn’t just lock up carbon — it physically holds the landscape together. Across the Arctic and Boreal regions, permafrost is collapsing suddenly as pockets of ice within it melt. Instead of a few centimetres of soil thawing each year, several metres of soil can become destabilized within days or weeks. The land can sink and be inundated by swelling lakes and wetlands.

Abrupt thawing of permafrost is dramatic to watch. Returning to field sites in Alaska, for example, we often find that lands that were forested a year ago are now covered with lakes². Rivers that once ran clear are thick with sediment. Hillsides can liquefy, sometimes taking sensitive scientific equipment with them.

This type of thawing is a serious problem for communities living around the Arctic (see ‘Arctic permafrost’). Roads buckle, houses become unstable. Access to traditional foods is changing, because it is becoming dangerous to travel across the land to hunt. Families cannot reach lines of game traps that have supported them for generations.

In short, permafrost is thawing much more quickly than models have predicted, with unknown consequences for greenhouse-gas release. Researchers urgently need to learn more about it. Here we outline how. 

 There current guesstimate as to how much worse it could be than that in current models:

We estimate that abrupt permafrost thawing in lowland lakes and wetlands, together with that in upland hills, could release between 60 billion and 100 billion tonnes of carbon by 2300. This is in addition to the 200 billion tonnes of carbon expected to be released in other regions that will thaw gradually. Although abrupt permafrost thawing will occur in less than 20% of frozen land, it increases permafrost carbon release projections by about 50%. Gradual thawing affects the surface of frozen ground and slowly penetrates downwards. Sudden collapse releases more carbon per square metre because it disrupts stockpiles deep in frozen layers.

Furthermore, because abrupt thawing releases more methane than gradual thawing does, the climate impacts of the two processes will be similar⁷. So, together, the impacts of thawing permafrost on Earth’s climate could be twice that expected from current models.

The rarity of a TV show that ends well

I see via Twitter that the dying episodes of Game of Thrones are continuing to upset quite a lot of long time viewers.   So someone asked "what TV series ended for you in a satisfying way", and people are nominating things I don't agree with (the ending of MASH left me cold, but I had stopped caring much about the show long before the final season) or shows I haven't seen at all (The Shield).

And it's true, so few lengthy TV series do end in a satisfactory way.   Most people were underwhelmed with Seinfeld's final episode;  even worse, it seems The X Files make a final series which everyone simply ignored after the poor quality of the penultimate come back series.   Most sitcoms go on for about 3 seasons too long, and I stop watching them long before the end anyway.

I continue an old devotion to the Mary Tyler Moore show, and I've probably mentioned before that I did think the ending of that show was funny - new management at the TV station recognise that ratings are bad, and decide that the problem isn't the ridiculous newsreader Ted, but the rest of the newsroom which promptly gets the sack. 

I'm struggling to remember another show that I did watch to the very end, and found satisfying in the last episode.

A culinary note

I'm still in long weekend mode, ok?

The culinary note: I really like the distinctive flavour of washed rind cheeses.  They should be more popular than they seem to be. 

I'm eating one from Italy as I write.   This makes me feeler wealthier than I am, and if it got here via airplane it's probably a climate change sin, but I am trying to support the fancy deli/cafe/restaurant in King Street, which seems to have so many experienced staff I fear that Brisbane isn't sophisticated  enough for it.

The Australian sparkling wine I am having with it is quite pleasing too, and carries no guilt.

The passion post

It's the Labour Day holiday in Brisbane.  Beautiful clear blue sky and 24 degrees.  May to September is just great weather here...pity the daylight hours get short.

Anyway, a boring post about this plant:

We have a yellow passionfruit vine growing out of a not very big pot, over an arch that' only about 1.5 m wide.  It is about 2 years old and has produced fruit before, but at the moment, it has gone berserk.   I reckon there are about 35 fruit coming on this  rather small area vine which we basically ignore, apart from watering in dry weather.

I have no idea what will happen if I actually fertilize it.  Or should I just let a happy plant be?

Election on track (I think)

So I've been reading Twitter and some other commentary, and watched Insiders.

Two weeks out from the election I think the view has firmed up that Labor is not in danger of losing the election after all.  Apparently, the betting market has turned in Labor's favour again; people think the social media campaign being run by the Liberals looks desperate and run by people without a clue (the Star Wars themed tweets, for example); and Josh Frydenberg looked and sounded far from confident on Insiders today, which also brought the delightful news that Tony Abbot really is looking likely to loss his seat.  

The best thing that can come from a Labor win would be that it involves not just Abbott but other conservatives losing seats and sparking the internal confrontation that the Coalition has to have in order to rid itself of climate change denialism.  It would be a real disaster if the Liberals scraped home and avoided that fate. 

On a side note, I see from a peruse of the Catallaxy threads that an old commenter DD (Daddy Dave, I think) has turned back up after what would be years of absence.   He used to be one of few moderate Righties on the site, and nearly always maintained a polite disposition.   I think he used to occasionally look in here too, but commented that he thought it a boring and would never have a big readership because it didn't really attempt to engage with readers, or some such.  C'est la vie.

I find it to believe he will continue commenting at Catallaxy for long, given the ludicrous Down Under American Right Culture War site that it has become.  But we will see...

An unromantic lead

A review of Long Shot begins:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least in cinematic comedies of the past decade or so, that just about every woman on-screen must be in want of Seth Rogen. From Knocked Up to Zack and Miri Make a Porno to Neighbors, Hollywood has continually presented the star as a romantic lead while marveling at the supposed ludicrousness of the concept, to the extent that his new vehicle is a rom-com called Long Shot. The premise? That Rogen, playing to type as an avuncular, bearded fellow who’s no stranger to sweatpants, gets entangled in a relationship with an impressive and a spectacularly beautiful politician played by Charlize Theron.

I could be mistaken, but isn't the defining aspect of a Seth Rogan film that they have quite a lot of pretty crude sexual humour?   As such, I have never seen one of his films, and would guess that he and his ilk are behind the death of decent romantic comedies we have witnessed over about the last 10 - 15 years.

Even I find this a weird approach to policing

I may give the impression that there isn't a government intervention into lessening illicit drug use that I don't like, but even I find it pretty amazingly intrusive that police in Sydney users sniffer dogs (and strip searches) for drugs on your average commuter crowd at places like Central Station.    I mean, even for someone like me who hates the drug taking aspect of music festivals and am dubious about policies that semi endorse it can see that random searches of commuters is just extraordinary.

The only thing I can say about this is - did Labor have any different policy before the last election?  If so, sorry people, but you got the police state you voted for...*



*  I see that Labor was saying that music festival pill testing should not be off the table, so they do sound as if they were reform minded.

Automation unfairly getting the blame

Here's the article at The Week I was looking for.  Found via Peter Whiteford's twitter feed:

How robots became a scapegoat for the destruction of the working class

The gigantic Murdoch problem

I agree with a lot of this article, particularly the way it criticises the genuine journalists working within Murdoch who put up with the editorial bias of their employer.   It's moved into outright cowardice, really.  Anyway,  this is it:

News Corp: Democracy’s greatest threat

What did we do before the internet?

I went looking at The Week for an article on robots taking jobs, and saw this great contribution to humanity there instead:

I put Pringles in the fridge and it changed my life

I still read it.  Might even try it.

Far too late

The SMH repeats the news from the Washington Post:

Facebook said on Friday it had permanently banned several far-right figures and organisations, including Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, Infowars host Alex Jones, commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, for being "dangerous", a sign that the social network is more aggressively enforcing its hate speech policies under pressure from civil rights groups.

Helen's made a goose of herself, again

Only yesterday I mentioned Helen Dale in the context of climate change, noting that she had once at least called on libertarians to stop denying it.   

I had missed, though, that only last week she had a nasty sounding tweet about Greta Thunbergpril: 

She explains at the Spectator this was "fairly obviously" a joke.

Very few people took it that way.   Helen has apparently deleted Twitter from her phone, such was the blowback she was getting.   And given that Dale herself has claimed she probably has a degree of Aspergers, it is very hard to see her tweet as anything other than (at least) somewhat callous from a person who should know better.   (Jealousy at the attention Thunberg has received is another theory I've seen in the Twitter response.)

Now look - I don't hold any great interest in Greta Thunberg and have paid her very little attention.   I actually share Dale's view in her Spectator attempt at self-justification that under 18's should basically never be shoved into political leadership roles.   And Britain in particular is having an outbreak of idealistic climate protest founded on exaggerated slogans and claims.   (I am extremely rarely impressed by any form of protest, though.  Not a joiner that way.)   I just take the view of "at least their heart is in the right place" and don't resent that it might have some political consequences in a useful direction.

I still say, though, that it's hard not to see behind Dale's Tweet the typical libertarian ideological motivation to just ignore climate change - either deny it exists, or deny it's bad enough to do anything about, or deny we're capable of doing anything about it and put all the eggs in the techno basket of successful geo-engineering that would have to done for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. 


She belongs on a seasteading "nation" with all other libertarians.  

A diet would help

I don't know anything about the rapper/comedian/actor Adam Briggs apart from seeing him on The Weekly from time to time.  I'd put him in the category "mostly harmless".   But last night on the show, he joked, as on Twitter, that as an indigenous man he may be 32 but (in terms of much lower indigenous life expectancy), that's like 67 in "white years":

Look, the guy's from Shepparton and it seems he has lived either there or in Melbourne all his life.     As such, he has (unlike some fellow indigenous)  ready access to healthy food and all the medical services he could need.  Yet he clearly carries quite a lot of excess weight - and on his gut, which is well recognized as the worst kind of overweight to be.

He may well be the equivalent of 67 in "health" years (I am surprised he is only 32 - he could pass for much older), but it's a bit rich to even joke that it's due to just being a "Blackfulla". 

Judith not good at analogies (when it suits her)

Whenever The Australian or AFR run articles by the likes of Judith Sloan or Alan Moran on climate change economics, they should (but don't) put a large rider in bold "READERS SHOULD KNOW:  THIS ECONOMIST DOES NOT BELIEVE CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL OR NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED IN ANY MANNER AT ALL.".  Because, of course, if your analysis is springing from  that fundamental belief, there is no reason to trust its objectivity at all.

So I see today that Sloan's column in The Australian on the modelled costs of Labor's climate plan is able to be accessed.  

To be honest, much of her account of the uncertainties is pretty well aligned  with what I heard on Radio National this morning - she could have put more effort into poohing-poohing Labor's policy than she did.   Is this a sign of a crack in her noggin that is letting in light that action is going to happen and she had better start sounding like she hasn't always been a flat earth climate change denier when talking about policy responses?

But my main reason for posting about this:  she claims to be completely puzzled by Bill Shorten's "fat person eating 10 big macs" analogy.  It's not perfect, but the point is clear enough:  the fat person [Australia] can't just continue with the easy and fast fix for hunger [energy needs] by eating fast food all the time [building coal power stations], because we all know that in the long run it will hurt/kill them [climate change effects].   They  have to put the effort in to get a better diet [clean energy and reducing all emissions] even if a good meal costs more than a Big Mac [that's where the analogy starts to go off road - although if the only choice were restaurants, it might work.]

She's just being deliberately obtuse in saying she doesn't understand it.

Suicide, poison and phones

The Washington Post has an article noting the increase in girls trying suicide by poison (boys prefer guns and strangulation), but it then talks more broadly about the rise in youth suicide and the search for a plausible causes.   Some think the rise of the mobile phone is more than a coincidence:

Spiller said he and others have overlaid their findings with other data to try to identify why the rates have spiked so sharply since 2011. They studied data from the rise of opioid addiction and deaths in recent years, thinking that the sharp increase could be due to increased access to drugs or fallout from parents’ deaths or addictions. But the timing did not fit precisely — the beginnings of the opioid epidemic traces back years before the 2011 spike.

They also compared it against economic data, but much of the country’s downturn occurred in 2008 or 2009.

“Unfortunately, we can’t definitely answer the why. That’s not how the data works,” said John Ackerman, a co-author and clinical psychologist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

Ackerman and Spiller, however, suspect the sudden increase in recent years has to do with the advent of smartphones and how they have made social media much more pervasive in young people’s lives.

The iPhone 3 came out in 2008, Spiller notes, and the Android phones had come into widespread use by 2011. Adults adopted such devices first, but within a year or two, such smartphones became more common among adolescents.

For years now, across all demographic groups, the death rate from suicide has been rising broadly. Experts cannot easily explain it. There is no single factor driving the phenomenon.

Vegan health

Isn't it kind of obvious that veganism (as opposed to mere vegetarianism - especially of the variety where dairy and eggs are still eaten) isn't that great a health plan for humans when pro-vegans have to write articles about the great care that must be taken by vegan pregnant mothers to get all the nutrition they and their embryos need?

Yesterday, I saw on twitter some young women who said she was going to try eating some form of flesh again for health reasons, but she tried mussels and found them repulsive.  She also went on and on about how traumatic it had been and how the mere idea of eating flesh (even of a brainless bivalve) makes her skin crawl.   It sounded to me like some borderline form of anorexia.

I know that most people have some image of eating some forms of animal food as being repulsive - I wince at the idea of eating roasted bone marrow on My Kitchen Rules for some reason, and lamb brains are icky too -  but to have a generic revulsion for all form of animal protein, including all forms of seafood, seems pretty exceptionally broad.

Anyway, you do read of her type of health issue from time to time - did I post about the vegan Youtube woman who secretly started eating a small amount of meat again on doctor's advice?   I'm not sure how many vegans do have to give it up for health reasons, but it seems to be a not insubstantial problem...

More Shinto

Surely I can't be the only person who was surprised at the apparent simplicity of the ceremonies for the replacement of the Japanese Emperor?    But I see now that there is more Shinto stuff to come, but not til October:

As Emperor Naruhito ascended the throne on Wednesday, a key imperial succession ritual related to Shinto rekindled controversy over the separation of state and religion that is stipulated in the Constitution.

Shinto is a Japanese indigenous religion in which the emperor is venerated as a descendant of a sun goddess. In the ritual, the emperor inherited the imperial regalia, which are said to have been bestowed by the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami as proof of his ascension to the throne.

As the Kenji to Shokei no Gi rite marking the emperor’s enthronement was staged as a state occasion financed by public funds, critics pointed to the possibility that it violated the Constitution banning the government from engaging in religious activities.

Japan’s postwar Constitution stipulates no religious organization shall receive any privileges from the state or exercise any political authority.

The regalia, called Sanshu no Jingi, consist of a sacred mirror, sword and jewel. In the ritual, the jewel and a replica of the sword were passed to the new monarch together with the state and privy seals.

Besides the regalia inheritance ceremony, the government decided in April last year to publicly fund the main Shinto-linked imperial succession rituals to be held in the fall, following the precedent set for the ceremonies of Emperor Emeritus Akihito’s enthronement in 1990.

The upcoming key rituals are Sokuirei Seiden no Gi on Oct. 22 to proclaim the enthronement of the emperor and the Daijosai grand thanksgiving rite in November, in which the emperor will make offerings to ancestral deities and pray for the peace and prosperity of Japan and its people.

 Interested readers in what goes on in Shinto ceremonies for an ascending Emperor might like to read this previous post from 2017.

Seasteading enthusiasm dwindles

According to Slate, the libertarian dreams of seasteading seem to be fading.  Peter Thiel, apparently, seems less enthusiastic these days.

I kind of wish it would work, so that a few score of the most dangerous libertarians (Kochs, Thiel, Stark*, etc) - those who either deny climate change or think you just watch the world burn and then work out if you can science your way out of the extremes - could be set adrift in the Pacific Ocean and lose all influence in the rest of the world.

*  Oh wait, he's taken care of.

Not exactly the law and order country

India seems to have a very real problem with mob justice.   It sounds like a rather lawless and dangerous place (if not for visitors, then at least for residents!)   Some examples from today's perusal of the Times of India:

Some peculiar artwork decision with this sad story, too:

Bear in the mind the undue influence that WhatsApp has for spreading false rumour there too, and the number of deaths it has caused, I'm adding it to my list of "no hurry to visit" countries.

Negative interest

Aren't conservatives going on and on about the Folau matter to a ridiculous degree?   Yeah, sure: climate change is a crock of no interest but the really important thing is whether a rugby player will get booted or not.

My interest level in this is already in negative territory.   I could only be less interested if it were a racing horse up for a Code of Conduct hearing for tweeting offensive stuff about jockeys.