But I have a question...

How intuitive morality has challenged the rationalists

Ross Gittins spends this column summarising a book he has just read:   The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion, by Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia.

Here's the key part at the end:

Haidt argues morality is, in large part, an evolved solution to the free-rider problem. We develop norms of acceptable, co-operative behaviour and find ways to sanction people who aren't co-operating.

His empirical research into the moral sentiments of people from around the world leads him to identify six dimensions to people's moral concerns. First is care/harm; we are sensitive to signs of suffering and need, and despise cruelty. Second is liberty/oppression; we resent attempts to dominate us. Third is fairness/cheating; people should be rewarded or punished in proportion to their deeds.

Then there's loyalty/betrayal; we trust and reward team players, but want to sanction those who betray the group. Next is authority/subversion; we recognise rank or status and disapprove of those not behaving properly, given their position. Finally there's sanctity/degradation; we care about what we do with our bodies and what we put into them.

Haidt believes these moral concerns are shared by people regardless of their culture, nationality or wealth. But, of course, people interpret them differently and put more weight on some than others.

Our differing moral emphases are reflected in our differing political sympathies. So the unending battle between small-L liberal and conservative policies is a manifestation of ''deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society''.

Haidt finds that small-L liberals' moral concerns are limited to just the first three dimensions: they care deeply about the harm suffered by minorities and the needs of the poor, about oppression and about fairness.

Conservatives, on the other hand, care about all six dimensions. Their most sacred value is to ''preserve the institutions and traditions that sustain a moral community''. So they worry also about maintaining loyalty, acceptance of authority and the sanctity of our bodies.

The conservatives' broader range of moral concerns means they understand the motivations of liberals better than liberals understand the motives of conservatives.

Haidt argues the community benefits from the ever-present tension between the two sides - each emphasises important aspects of maintaining a good society - if only we could restore a greater degree of civility between the contending parties.

OK, that sounds pretty good for conservatives.  But here's the thing: in the matter of the biggest free rider problem of all, why are conservatives in the US so prominent in climate change denial?   

Is it that they are merely temporarily in the midst of a over-inflated concern about liberty (the second moral sentiment listed above)?    Certainly, that would explain why US libertarians have (mostly) aligned against believing in AGW, but why are US social conservatives (including evangelicals, for example) along for the ride with them? 

Of course, the Pope and European conservatives are counter-examples and show conservatism does not have to be that way.   (See Roger Scruton in particular.)  But the US remains a special example.

Maybe a good product?

V3Solar | The Most Efficient Solar Energy Under the Sun

A somewhat dubious sounding report at phys.org  led me to the above site, for a company promoting its new spinning solar panel system.

Interestingly, it seems to be based in Australia.   Looking at the website, I'm not entirely sure that there aren't some big exaggerations.   Parts of their claims just don't sound right to me, but I'm no electronics engineer.

If it does work as claimed, and can mean a massive reduction in area devoted to solar panels, I wonder whether they would make PV solar farms a more viable thing.  We'll see.

Ignoring the evidence on "Dexter"

I see that Slate is giving Dexter publicity (again.)   It's funny how certain TV shows are deemed so important as to gain continual assessment on certain liberal media outlets, isn't it?   The Guardian does it with Doctor Who; Slate with various Showtime or other cable shows.

In any case, I've never watched more than 20 minutes or so of the show, but I've always had reservations about it thematically:  a man with a compulsion to kill who channels it only towards those who deserve to be killed.   The psychological set up for it is pure comic book:  as a kiddie he saw his own mother murdered and sat in her blood for days.

Apparently, the show did have its critics at the start who worried about it encouraging empathy with a serial murderer, as this discussion in the article linked above notes:

Waldman: I'm interested in the way the show portrays people stressed to the breaking point. Everyone has an idiosyncratic coping strategy. Quinn and Batista knock back doubles at the bar. Deb runs alone on her treadmill. Dexter murders people. Do you think the show is trying to normalize Dexter's kills? By showing us all these dysfunctional outlets for stress in other characters?

Bosch: I've always thought that this is less about normalizing serial killing—when the show debuted, many critics were disgusted at being asked to empathize with a murderer—than about trauma. How Dexter might have been a normal person had he not been subjected to the unthinkable trauma of witnessing his mother being murdered, then sitting in her blood for days. Really, the show tackles PTSD—and its lesser forms—in a spectacular way.

Waldman: Yes. I think you’ve nailed the show’s philosophy. But in its throwaway details, I sometimes feel we’re asked to believe that Dex isn’t that bad. And then there’s the question of whether he could be a vigilante hero.

But such quibbles seemed to stop worrying critics (and the studio) a long time ago.

Therefore, I was surprised to read a few months ago (it previously had some publicity apparently, but I had missed it) about a Canadian murderer who, it was clear, drew inspiration from the show: 

Twitchell, 31, was found guilty by a jury last April 12 in the October 2008 slaying of Johnny Altinger. He is serving a life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.

Altinger, 38, was lured to a southeast Edmonton garage by an ad on an internet dating site. He was bludgeoned and dismembered.

Twitchell's fondness for the television show Dexter was well documented during the trial, and he had a Facebook profile under the name of protagonist Dexter Morgan, a vigilante serial killer who masters the perfect crime.

Here's the article in the Fairfax weekend magazine that fills in more detail the highly imitative aspects of this gruesome murder.  It's a really horrifying read.

Googling around, this is not the only murder (or planned murder) associated with the show:   a 17 year old who strangled his 10 year old brother claimed to have felt "just like Dexter";   a 21 year old was committed to psychiatric care amidst allegations that he was directly inspired by Dexter to kill people who he thought had committed crime;   murderers in Sweden and Norway claimed similar inspiration; and a woman who killed and dismembered another in Los Angeles was very clear about the connection:

In a profanity-laced note in which she described in grisly detail how she killed a 22-year-old Marine wife, one of the three people now charged with murder says she patterned the killing after the television show "Dexter," about a serial killer.

In the note to police, Jessica Lopez describes strangling Brittany Dawn Killgore "as if my idol Dexter had spoken directly to me."

Lopez, 25, wrote that she then decided to dismember Killgore's body: "I made a few attempts to chop her up like Dexter with Masters power tools but I was afraid it was too loud and it sucked at cutting flesh."

Killing Killgore was not as easy as the television show, Lopez wrote: "I thought I was defending the family and it would be simple like Dexter."

Yet has this effect of the show received the attention that it deserves?  No.

Is it really necessary for there to be dozens of victims of a murderer imitating a movie villain (as in the "Batman" shootings) before people think hard about the effects of making fictional violence "cool", or deserving of empathy?

I've always been leery of movies that make "bad" cool, or darkly attractive in any way really.  "Silence of the Lambs" left me cold;  "Pulp Fiction" I have frequently complained about; and I can't think of another good example right now, since the genre is not one I am keen to see anyway.  But at least any individual movie is a short lived experience, compared to (what will end up as) 8 seasons of a TV show all about a serial killer.  How many hours of living in the mind of a serial killer is that for the psychologically disturbed viewer?

Now some people will say that this is an over-reaction: if it wasn't Dexter, a mad person might claim inspiration by something else, or indeed may find it convenient when caught to claim fictional inspiration.   (On the other hand, are there psycho killers out there who haven't mentioned to the investigators how they felt Dexter gave them ideas?)

I'm not convinced.   Basically, I think the makers of this show, the critics who got over their doubts about the "empathy with a serial killer" question, and the audience that is care free about its clear, demonstrated and repeated effect on encouraging psychos to attempt to imitate it,  all have something to be a bit ashamed of.  

Derren hunts ghosts

Last week's episode of Derren Brown Investigates was pretty much a waste of time.  No one sensible has ever seriously believed that some Russian system for teaching the blind to see via their psychic power was genuine, have they?   So why bother investigating them?  It was mildly amusing in parts, and showed that people can really fool themselves into believing anything, but still.

This week's episode dealt with more "concrete" psychic stuff:  an American ghost hunter who believed he had good EVP (electronic voice phenomena) and photos of spirits.  I had never heard of the guy before - Lou Gentile (who has died since the program was made) - but it appears he was reasonably well know in the States via a radio show.

Well, the evidence turned out to be very underwhelming.  In fact, I'm starting to suspect that atheist Derren might go looking for evidence of the paranormal from slightly flaky characters.

Still, the show was of interest because Lou showed a video of an exorcism he had organised, and Brown later went to a neurologist who specialised in epilepsy to discuss it.  The neurologist showed video of a woman having a type of fit which did suggest how exorcists could mistake some serious back bending as levitation.  The relevant part is shown starting at about 5min 20 sec into this section of the show:



Lou also got quite irate when an audio expert told him his EVP were most likely interference.  But Brown was basically gentle with the guy, concluding that he was just fooling himself, but not being dishonest.

Quite interesting.

Moonrise seen

I went off to see Moonrise Kingdom, the latest Wes Anderson film which was very well reviewed, yet has mainly had an art house release in Brisbane*.   I pretty much understand why now.

I enjoyed it well enough, but I do think it was a little too "art house arch" for its own good.  I'm a latecomer to WesWorld, and have only seen Fantastic Mr Fox and  The Life Aquatic (etc), so I don't really know whether he always gets a bit over the top silly in parts of  his films or not.  (Yes, I know, I must see Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums:  I will one day, they are waiting at the DVD hire.)  But this one did have a sequence or two which were too unrealistic even for a highly stylised movie like this one.

On the up side, the child actors are very good, but the adult parts are a bit underwritten and the eccentricity seemed bit forced.   The direction is pleasing in its own way; in many respects it is reminiscent of how he did Fantastic Mr Fox.    Music seems really important to Anderson, and this is certainly the case in this film, and it's one of its best features.   The staging of the Noah play in the church was particularly charming.

It's definitely worth a look if you are sympathetic to his eccentric approach.

* It's at the Palace Cinemas, which have (like all cinemas should) a bar in the foyer and the ability to bring your glass of wine into the cinema with you.  Sure, in Gold Glass cinemas they bring the wine to you, but this seems a much better idea.  I've never been to a Palace Cinema before, but I expect I will be going there again...

A fair look at budget woes

Where did the mammoth US budget deficits come from? - CSMonitor.com

This article from the CSM seems to me to take a very fair approach to the not so simple question of how to apportion blame for the US deficit.

While it agrees that the recent Obama response to a question on this was wrong, it remains clear that Republicans must allow for a very significant part of the problem to have come from George W Bush policies.  Given that tax cuts and defence spending were a large part of those, don't Republicans wonder that Romney  policies to reduce tax rates (yes, I know, even if removing deductions is supposed to make them revenue neutral,) and increase long term defence spending, just don't sound right?

A pleasant day out

I'd been looking at Google maps and pondering places around Brisbane I had never been to, and settled on Jacobs Well - a small spot on the water stuck away between Brisbane and Southport, and mainly known (as far as I could recall) for fishing.   Insert map here:

I work on the assumption that all places are interesting for at least one visit, so it was the destination for a day out yesterday.

The drive between the motorway to Jacobs Well reminded me a lot of driving around Bundaberg - fields of sugar cane (which I thought had more or less stopped being grown in the South East corner) and very flat land.  Jacobs Well itself is, as I expected, small but pleasant enough.  It has a swimming enclosure in the bay waters, but the day was cloudier and much windier than expected, so no one felt like getting wet, or even fishing off the jetty.   I just took a photo of some slightly disgruntled pelicans instead:

Jacobs Well does feature a small tavern, but I saw a sign saying on the Sea Rescue building advertising an Irish pub at nearly "Calypso Bay"; an expensive canal/marina estate just outside of town that looks like its been there for a few years, but presumably has been suffering sales problems given the GFC.  There's certainly plenty of land still available around the millionaires houses.

But what a surprise Harrigans Drift Inn is.   It has a bland exterior, but inside it's very nice indeed:

The menu was very good and reasonably priced for an Irish pub: there was a four piece jazz band playing (music on a Saturday and Sunday is routine, apparently); it has a lovely beer garden area outside near the water; and its own jetty to pull up to when I own a two million motor yacht.   I guess it goes to show that it does help a small village to have rich people move in next door.

Anyway, after lunch, and given that it was still windy, we went back to the motorway and down another exit or two to visit Hope Island/Sanctuary Cove, which I haven't been to for some years (maybe 6 or 8?)   It seems to have been developed a hell of a lot more since then, and this area really reminds me a lot of parts of Florida.  (Mind you, it's been 25 years or so since I was happily spending days by myself at DisneyWorld.)

Someone had told me a couple of years ago that Sanctuary Cove itself was suffering quite a bit with the downturn in the economy, and that several cafes were closed.  As far as I could see, there were plenty open yesterday, and not many shop spaces vacant.   "Ladies who lunch" were very much in evidence, as well as rich Asians.   The place still screams money.

If ever a cyclone devastates the marina, I hate to think how many hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage would be incurred - have a look at this local site for prices of new and used boats in the area.  All we could afford was an ice cream for the kids, but it's nice to dream. 

So, there's my recommendation, particularly if you are on the South side of Brisbane - Jacobs Well will take less than an hour, and an Irish pub awaits you.
 

Graham Lloyd's transparent war on science

Sea level fall defies climate warnings | The Australian

The defiantly transparent attempts to twist stories which do not contradict climate change warnings into ones that do continues apace at The Australian.

I mean, seriously Graham (and whoever it is who comes up with the headlines for your stories,)  people can read, you know.   Or do you simply hope (probably with good reason, I fear) that climate change fake skeptics simply read headlines and are convinced by them alone?

Anyway, the interesting thing in the article is the talk about how it does indeed seem that the drop in sea level rise over the last few years was due to water - a huge amount - going onto the land in the form of rain.  Queensland knows all about that.  I can't actually find the paper or articles Lloyd is talking about, however. 

As with my earlier post this week about the Brisbane floods, it seems that News Ltd has developed a special talent for headlines which don't gel with the material within the article.

The divided media

This article in the SMH today, about the sharply divided media coverage of the US presidential election, was a good read.

One thing I know for sure:  Fox News will be a pretty entertaining watch when Obama is re-elected.   (I'm on the media side that just can't see Romney coming back, because of the intrinsic problem that he is captive of the running away from reality element of the US Right.)

A long, long complaint about Hollywood

Has Hollywood Murdered The Movies? | The New Republic

Wow.  David Denby must have been working on this essay about what has gone wrong with Hollywood movies for a long time.  There may not be too much that hasn't been said before, but it's said in a lot of detail, and it is all convincingly argued and gives voice to many similar thoughts I have had over the years about the decline of Hollywood.   One of his main themes (about how digital technology has meant many directors don't really film "spatially" any more) makes for a good extract:  

 It is also a drama of space. What audiences feel about characters on the screen is probably affected more than most of us realize by the way the space surrounding the people is carved up and re-combined. In John Ford, the geographical sense is very strong—the poetic awareness of sky and landscape and moving horses, but also the attention to such things as how people are arrayed at a long table as an indication of social caste (the prostitute at one end, the fine lady at the other). The best use of space is not just an effective disposition of activity on the screen, it is the emotional meaning of activity on the screen.

Directors used to take great care with such things: spatial integrity was another part of the unspoken contract with audiences, a codicil to the narrative doctrine of the scriptorium. It allowed viewers to understand, say, how much danger a man was facing when he stuck his head above a rock in a gunfight, or where two secret lovers at a dinner party were sitting in relation to their jealous enemies. Space could be analyzed and broken into close-ups and reaction shots and the like, but then it had to be re-unified in a way that brought the experience together in a viewer’s head—so that, in Jezebel, one felt physically what Bette Davis suffered as scandalized couples backed away from her in the ballroom. If the audience didn’t experience that emotion, the movie wouldn’t have cast its spell.

This seems like plain common sense. Who could possibly argue with it? Yet spatial integrity is just about gone from big movies. What Wyler and his editors did—matching body movement from one shot to the next—is rarely attempted now. Hardly anyone thinks it important. The most common method of editing in big movies now is to lay one furiously active shot on top of another, and often with only a general relation in space or body movement between the two. The continuous whirl of movement distracts us from noticing the uncertain or slovenly fit between shots. The camera moves, the actors move: in Moulin Rouge, the camera swings wildly over masses of men in the nightclub, Nicole Kidman flings herself around her boudoir like a rag doll. The digital fight at the end of The Avengers takes place in a completely artificial environment, a vacuum in which gravity has been abandoned; continuity is not even an issue. If the constant buffoonishness of action in all sorts of big movies leaves one both over-stimulated and unsatisfied—cheated without knowing why—then part of the reason is that the terrain hasn’t been sewn together. You have been deprived of that loving inner possession of the movie that causes you to play it over and over in your head.

 Any regular reader will know what I am likely to say next:  this is one reason why Spielberg remains an awesome director - he gives the audience an excellent sense of space; his action sequences are rarely too quickly edited and you can understand what's going on perfectly.  And,  to concur with Denby,  Spielberg's most artificial film of all, last year's Adventures of Tin Tin, was a failure because of the technology taking away the same sense of spatial and kinetic realism that his best films have.

One other incidental point near the start, which I didn't fully realise before:

In the 1930s, roughly eighty million people went to the movies every week, with weekly attendance peaking at ninety million in 1930 and again in the mid-1940s. Now about thirty million people go, in a population two and a half times the size of the population of the 1930s.

 I am not entirely sure about this next selection, but from my own childhood, there is a certain element of truth in it:

 My friends’ attitudes are defined so completely by the current movie market that they do not wish to hear that movies, for the first eighty years of their existence, were essentially made for adults. Sure, there were always films for families and children, but, for the most part, ten-year-olds and teens were dragged by their parents to what the parents wanted to see, and this was true well after television reduced the size of the adult audience. The kids saw, and half understood, a satire such as Dr. Strangelove, an earnest social drama such as To Kill a Mockingbird, a cheesy disaster movie such as Airport, and that process of half understanding, half not, may have been part of growing up; it also laid the soil for their own enjoyment of grown-up movies years later. They were not expected to remain in a state of goofy euphoria until they were thirty-five. My friends think that our current situation is normal. They believe that critics are naïve blowhards, but it is they who are naïve.

I remember sitting in the back seat at the drive in being bored by The Graduate, and falling asleep.   But certainly, I think that the moderation in the depiction of sex and swearing in pre-1960's cinema certainly meant that children could be exposed to what was still "adult" cinema and influenced their feel for the medium in a positive way.

All in all, a job well done, David.

That's ridiculous

Japan's NTT breaks fibre optic data speed record 

Japan's incumbent telecommunications carrier, NTT, is claiming a telecommunications speed record, demonstrating a fibre technology able to carry 1 Petabit-per-second - a million gigabits - over a distance of 50 kilometers, using a single fibre.

The technology - at this stage a research demonstration not ready for commercialization - would serve not end users, but the "trunk" links between exchanges. The carrier selected the 50 km distance as reflecting the typical distance between medium-haul telecommunications exchanges in Japan.

NTT's report states that it used a specially-designed optical fibre in which one fibre strand contained 12 "cores" - light paths within the fibre that don't interact with each other. Each of those fibres carried an 84.5 Terabit-per-second signal to achieve the total 1 Pbps throughput.

So, how much data does this really represent in something we can understand?:

 The 1 Pb/s capacity of the NTT-demonstrated link would carry the equivalent of 5,000 two-hour HDTV movies each second, the company says.

More on the Republicans not making sense...

A column in the Washington Post puts the problems with Romney squarely on where his party has gone:

Why won’t Romney, an intelligent man, fluent in economics, explain his economic policy? Because any sensible answer would cause a firestorm in his party.

It is obvious that, with a deficit at 8 percent of gross domestic product, any solution to our budgetary problems has to involve both spending cuts and tax increases. Ronald Reagan agreed to tax increases when the deficit hit 4 percent of GDP; George H.W. Bush did so when the deficit was 3 percent of GDP. But today’s Republican Party is organized around the proposition that, no matter the circumstances, there must never be a tax increase of any kind. The Simpson-Bowles proposal calls for $1 of tax increases for every $3 of spending cuts. But every Republican presidential candidate — including Romney — pledged during the primaries that he or she would not accept $10 of spending cuts if that meant a dollar of tax increases.

So Romney could present a serious economic plan with numbers that make sense — and then face a revolt within his own party. His solution: to be utterly vague about how he would deal with the deficit.

And it ends:

 The Republican Party has imposed a new kind of political correctness on its leaders. They cannot speak certain words (taxes) or speculate about certain ideas (immigration amnesty) because these are forbidden. Romney has tried to run a campaign while not running afoul of his party’s strictures. As a result, he has twisted himself into a pretzel, speaking vacuously, avoiding specifics and refusing to provide any serious plans for the most important issues of the day.

 All sounds about right to me.

Williamstown discussed

Maritime and tide

This short article in The Age talks about some of the history of Williamstown, which is pretty much my favourite part of Melbourne.

Clever mice

BBC News - 'Scar free healing' in mice may give clues to human skin repair, says study

There was a report just a day or two ago that new work on how axolotls re-grew limbs indicated that it was trick unlucky to be able to be artificially copied in humans.

But then this article on some African mice can repair skin with no scars, and full hair, indicates mammals may be better at regeneration than we thought.

Rubbery figures?

Climate change already harming the global economy - environment - 26 September 2012 - New Scientist

I remain very skeptical that reliable economic modelling can possibly be done for the economic effects of global warming over the long term.

Just use common sense, and don't limit your thinking to some artificial target like the turn of the century.

I mean, can anyone reliably model the economic effects of eventual ocean level rise of (say) 3 metres over the course of 100 - 200 years?   I would rather just assume that turning many centres of civilisation (known as "cities") into empty versions of Venice is a bad idea, and you do what you can now to reduce the possibility in as economically sound way as you can.

We'll see

Short Sharp Science: Newly spotted comet may outshine the full moon

These predictions when new comets are spotted so far out are not at all reliable, but we'll see around Christmas 2013.

Unfortunate

Exercise increases life span (Science Alert)

Yes, but so might castration, and I wouldn't enjoy that either.

Hedley stamps his foot

First, I noticed that the Courier Mail website this morning has a headline that is utterly at odds with the contents of the story:

How strange.  An independent report that looks at the dam operation and backs the SEQWater engineers is going to "open lawsuit floodgates"?

The headline at the actual report page is just slightly better:

Multi-billion dollar lawsuit in wake of report backing Wivenhoe Dam flood engineers 

Readers might still be somewhat puzzled as to the chosen headline when the report opens:

A MULTI-BILLION-dollar lawsuit is set to become the next chapter in the January 2011 flood saga after a crucial US Government report backed the actions of the four flood engineers who controlled Wivenhoe Dam.
 
The report - by the Department of the Interior and the US Army Corps of Engineers - has warned the massive dam sitting above Brisbane is far more lethal than previously believed, and further re-inforced previous criticism of the dam's manual.

But it strongly backed the actions of the four dam engineers who were repeatedly accused in the $15 million flood inquiry of mismanaging the dam and confecting a fraudulent report to cover their tracks.

The report is a potential blow to flood victims seeking compensation but lawyers are determined to proceed with legal action, with thousands of claimants signed up to a class action demanding billions of dollars in compensation.

Where's Hedley Thomas' commentary about this?  Well, he's having a big stamping of the foot over at the Australian:

Why Campbell Newman has a billion reasons to airbrush the floods 'facade'

 Hedley complains that the Queensland government asking the US engineers to review the report that the SEQWater engineers wrote but without considering the inquiry's findings that the engineers had been not accurate as to how and when they made their water release decisions.

Hedley, you see, is exceptionally proud of having made life a living hell for the three engineers for about 18 months, despite the fact that the CMC recently declined to take any action against them, and explained in its review that the problem basically lay in a poorly drafted manual: 

Retired Appeal Court judge John Jerrard, QC, headed up the CMC investigation and wrote in his findings the engineers had believed they were following the dam manual when they adopted their water release strategies during the floods.

In his advice Mr Jerrard said prosecution of the trio would be ‘‘oppressive’’ if they were simply trying to follow a manual that contained contradictory statements....

‘‘An honest belief that the engineers had always intended to comply with the Manual would justify the engineers describing themselves as adopting strategy W3, when strategy W2 was not appropriate, even when they had earlier thought W2 was appropriate, and had said that they were in it,’’ Mr Jerrard said in the CMC report.

‘‘If the engineers believed they had followed the Manual, it is not dishonest, criminal, or misconduct, for any of them to say that they did.

‘‘Nor is it dishonest, criminal, or misconduct, to misunderstand what the Manual required.’’

Has Hedley ever done a detailed report on the findings of this review?   Not as far as I know.   (Correct me if you're reading, Hedley.)

No, instead, Thomas is still on a campaign to encourage people that there is someone to blame for a natural disaster.   His longer review article in The Australian today complains:

IT should be no easy feat to turn the serious, damning, evidence-based findings of a $15 million royal commission-style inquiry -- one that nailed an egregious cover-up - into a glowing endorsement barely six months later. 

But that is precisely what a group of US engineers, asked to review the performance of another group of engineers - those in control of Wivenhoe Dam's massive releases of water in January last year, water that became most of the Brisbane River flood - have managed to achieve.

 As ever, he is more interested in a populist campaign: 

Nine months ago, as a direct result of a series of stories in The Australian highlighting the evidence of a cover-up that had been overlooked by the floods inquiry, Holmes decided to restart public hearings and resume investigations. An inquiry that had effectively completed its year-long assignment, save for the release of a final report yet to be printed, went back to work. Flood victims saw a glimmer of hope that their concerns of a man-made disaster, or at least a disaster that could have been minimised with a more prudent dam operation, were justified.

 I have explained in detail before how the flood inquiry shows convincingly that this was not a man-made disaster, and it's only because of a shameful campaign of sensationalist reporting by News Ltd outlets and Thomas in particular that any member of the public should be thinking this way.

Furthermore, the evidence at the commission by the independent expert was that the rate of water release  (despite a technical non-compliance with the manual) was only likely to have been inappropriate for a period of about 7 hours.  That expert's modelling indicated that following other release scenarios was likely to have been only capable of modifying flood levels by (perhaps - subject to many uncertainties) 30 to 50 cm.  For a city that looked like this at the height of the flood, 30 cm was not going to make a hell of a lot of difference:

It is therefore no surprise that other water engineers should be agreeing that the engineers here had acted reasonably. 

Hedley Thomas, it's time you starting reporting realistically on the matter, and give up on running campaigns more in your own interests than those of the public.

One extreme to another?

Andrew Glikson from ANU has a new article up at The Conversation, arguing that there is ample evidence of an increase in the number of anomalous weather events since the 1970's to be confident that they have been caused by the AGW that has presently only reached .8 degree.  Give the planet  another 1 or 2 degree increase, and things can be expected to be much worse.

But as for the attribution of any individual extreme events, that work is still tricky, and Nature last week noted that some climate scientists doubted whether it was really useful to try to make attribution claims at all.  The editorial thought this was too harsh, and in any event, it seems to me that it was more concerned with whether climate modelling could predict future individual anomalous events, rather than attribution in hindsight.

There certainly still seems to be a tension between some folk at NOAA who were very, very fast to claim the Russian heatwave was just one of those things, and other scientists who thought it was attributable in significant part to AGW.   Climate fake skeptics, like Anthony Watts, lap this all up as reason to do nothing, of course.

At the local level, Brisbane's weather, which was extremely wet and cloudy about two years, just seems to have had the water turned off like a switch over the last couple of months.    A month ago they said it had been 32 consecutive days without rain; I would say that it has effectively been extended to 62 days now, even if at Brisbane Airport they might have had a day with technically 1 mm of rain.   On the side of town where  I live, there was one day last week where a very fine spray came down for about 10 minutes,barely damping the bitumen before it evaporated.  I'm not counting that as break in the dry spell.  The small-ish water tank we have at home has emptied for the first time since it first filled 3 or 4 years ago.

Well, at least I expect it will be good weather to be a the beach this year; but I also expect more fires around Brisbane than usual.

Update:  After yesterday's complaint, Brisbane got its first widespread storm of the season, with a bit of hail thrown in.   We'll see how this changes things. 

Roger defects? Maybe not...

Why doesn't Roger Scruton want to be labelled as "of the right"?

Well,  England has still got something going for it when people there can go to a debate between Roger Scruton and Terry Eagleton.  The New Statesment notes that it was most interesting for the fact that Roger Scruton declared that he does not like being labelled as "of the Right" (although the magazine just uses small "r" right):

It was at this point that Scruton’s squirming began - both physically and rhetorically. He has, it turns out, a great aversion to being identified as “of the right”.

“People on the right don’t identify themselves as such, not as part of a group. We’re just holding on to the things we love,” he said, in what appeared to be a sleight-of-hand justification for secretly quite liking the Changing of the Guard.

“But you said of Thatcher...” Eagleton began, only to be interrupted as Scruton retorted: “I’ve grown up since then.”

I wonder what Scruton thinks of the Right as currently represented by the Republican Party.