An under-reported effect of an El Nino

I  hadn't even realised, until some recent reports out of the mainstream news media came to my attention, that New Guinea suffered a severe drought in 1997, and is in the midst of El Nino related drought again.

And recall that only last year, a paper predicted a doubling of severe El Nino as a result of global warming.

In light of the dire effect these have on our poor neighbours, you'd think the media might report the tropical droughts more prominently....

Worst PM gone

Quite a few people are noting that Abbott was PM for less time than either Rudd or Gillard.  Couldn't happen to more deserving embodiment of the Peter Principle. 

Let's not forget, Abbott got his party's leadership by waving his finger in the breeze and going with the climate change denying populists of the Right:  Bolt, Jones and a host of Murdoch writers.   He in fact had never been particularly interested in science, or economics, and his sloganeering tactics ever since he took the top job discredits the idea that he's more than a political opportunist with no idea who to take advice from.   He has spent his Prime Ministership with no sense of consistency or principle - the "say anything" PM adjusting his message according to the audience in front of him.  

What's worse, he sought legitimacy through the creepy upscaling  of the role of the military and paramilitary in day to day government.   He shows no remorse or misgivings over the plainly cruel permanent warehousing of men, women and children to deter others from attempting sea entry into Australia; his refusal to support Gillard in attempting the relatively humane Malaysian solution, while now seeking to send people to dirt poor Cambodia, is a stunning case of cynical political opportunism that deserves condemnation.   The swathe of secrecy that he has legislated, or co-opted from pliant military figures, regarding the tactics being deployed on the high seas and in his detention centres  is an absolute low for open, democratic government in this country.  His highly personal attacks on Gillian Triggs and the ABC also showed a somewhat eccentric  political thin skin that wasn't so  obvious until he became PM.

Going back further in time, don't forget his hidden role in funding action that lead to the jailing of a political problem, Pauline Hanson.   People seem too willing to overlook how dirty he has been prepared to get as a political operative.

He may have done some worthy work when a Minister under Howard, but his elevation to leadership has proved to be the long term disaster that even half of his party suspected it may be when he got the job.

I can only say that there was one good thing resulting from his election as PM - the resignation of Kevin Rudd from politics and his poisonous destructive role within Labor.   Yeah, thanks for that, Tony.  Pity you then had to hang around to prove yourself to be the PM with the least worthy legacy of any in my lifetime.  

Seems I may as well be writing this now

Gillard legacies:    some serious education reform (NAPLAN, widespread acknowledgement  of increased funding needed), wide-ranging and permanent change to improve disability services;  world leading public health measures (plain packaging); a carbon pricing scheme that showed it could work. 

Abbott's legacies of value:   [insert cricket sounds]

Spill

While I was thinking about the future of sex in cars, I see that a challenge to Abbott's leadership by Turnbull is definitely on.



Good news - I think.

I actually wonder whether much of the incentive for this was Abbott's disastrously poor interview on 7.30 last week.  The thing that struck me most about it was his apparent genuineness when he was claiming that  he was leading a good government that had achieved a lot.  I can just imagine cabinet members rolling their eyes and thinking "He really doesn't have a clue.  It's time..."

Driverless cars and bad behaviour

I can't say that I have noticed one potential issue about driverless cars being discussed - how will they stop users doing unsavoury things in them whilst going for the ride?

Come on, everyone has heard stories about airline passengers trying to get away with sex under blankets, or in the toilet; and that's in a place with the obvious potential for detection.  I predict it will be barely a week from when the first driverless car fleet comes into service that someone will have a video on the net of "what my girlfriend and I got up to when we didn't have to drive".   Or there'll be some solo act on show.   Maybe big windows will be a daytime deterrent from this.  Not sure about nighttime, though.

How will they stop it?   Photos taken inside every 30 seconds?  Random video monitoring?   Apart from the likely privacy uproar, how hard would it be to cover the camera, anyway?

For that matter, there might also be issues with littering in them; or late night drunks' vomit.   (I suppose if one is too much of a mess, the person being picked up may just report it and wait for the next.  But it would be much better not to have them messed up in the first place.)

I trust Google is working on this...

Just retire, part 3

Good to hear that even Abbott Ministers are now talking about their inglorious leader getting the boot. 

Andrew Bolt doesn't seem to be on the case yet, but surely he'll be out with fear and loathing of a Turnbull leadership any minute now....

Update:   I wonder how Catallaxy threadsters are taking this?

Pretty much as expected, then.

[But honestly, where else but on Australia's "leading Libertarian and Centre-Right blog" can one get such a scintillating mix of quasi homophobic insult and "blame the woman" analysis.]

Update 2:  and how are Catallaxy threadster's coping with political reaction to two women being killed in public by their ex partners in Queensland last week?   And the news that there are about 12,000 breaches of domestic violence orders in Queensland each year?:

Help for the aging gut

Delaying Age Related Diseases by Keeping Gut Bacteria in Balance | Neuroscience News

Interesting research here, showing that fiddling with the gut bacteria of fruit flies as they age can significantly increase their life expectancy.  It would be pretty amazing if they could squeeze an extra 10 years or so of average healthy human life by adjustments to our own gut microbes, too.

As as aside:  I wonder if some scientist is out there gathering the poop of particularly healthy 80 or 90 year olds, and checking the composition of its microbes.  Given the massive interest in this area of research now, I wouldn't be surprised...

Abbott's Canadian inspiration is on his way out

Why David Frum Is Wrong About Stephen Harper and Canada's Conservative Party - The Atlantic

The tactics of Stephen Harper are not identical to those of Tony Abbott, but reading this article, there are certainly many similarities.  I get the impression that Harper may be nastier and much more assertive in private than Abbott, who is probably more just an ambitious dill out of his depth who doesn't know who to listen to.

From this morning's AFR

Explaining the Abbott pathology, one of his senior colleagues said it is rooted in a biblical belief of good and evil, hence his frustrations with a nuanced Obama administration. "Abbott would have us do things in the Middle East that would have had your hair stand up on end," said this individual without going into details.

Link.

He writes well

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show – both a beginning and the end? | Daily Review: film, stage and music reviews, interviews and more

Gee.  Guy Rundle's dissection of American late night talk shows is pretty good.  He writes well, even if you can't always agree on every point.

I haven't watched my recordings of Colbert yet.  Maybe tonight.

In Australian political nonsense news...

I see that, apparently, David Leyonhjelm's look-at-me "Nanny State" enquiry  has received most of its submissions on bicycle helmet laws    Not only are Leyonhjelm's findings on this (and any other "nanny State" issue) utterly predictable, so is the fact that experts will disagree with him, and more importantly - it's a State responsibility, not a Commonwealth one.

I see Chris Berg will also turn up and bleat about lock out laws, amongst other things  - again, entirely a State responsibility, and one which the Commonwealth has utterly no power to intervene in.   OK, tobacco plain packaging laws will get a mention too - as if any party except Leyonhjelm's one man show is going to seriously propose undoing those while the smoking figures continue to drop.

This inquiry is a complete and utter waste of time.   I would much prefer that Leyonhjelm pleasure himself in private. 

The fractured Australian Right

OK, it's not (quite) the same level of disaster as the US political situation, but it appears that there are many unhappy campers in the Coalition at the moment.  I wonder how many of them are secretly hoping for a bad result in the Canning by-election, so that a move on Abbott's leadership can be convincingly mounted.

PS:  on the populist Right, Andrew Bolt is in a frenzy of Muslim-mania again, and is virtually unreadable. 

PPS:   according to Phil Coorey, even frontbenchers are saying there'll be another leadership challenge. 

The fractured American Right

Oh look, George Will not only disses Trump, but finds big hypocrisy in the GOP on the matter of gay marriage and the law:

Some, who loudly lament how illegal immigrants damage the rule of law, have found a heroine in Kentucky. A county clerk, whose devotion to her faith is not stronger than her desire to keep her paycheck, chose jail rather than resignation when confronted with having to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court and the Constitution regarding same-sex marriage.

Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker think her religious freedom is being trampled. So does Ted Cruz, who surely knows better. He clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and must remember the 1892 case in which a Massachusetts policeman claimed that rules restricting political activity by police violated his constitutional rights. Rejecting this claim, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court wrote that the officer “may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.”

Meanwhile, armed paranoid Right wing nutters claim they will "defend" said clerk, and what's the bet that followers of gormless Gateway Pundit will clap their hands in excitement and approval.  (There are only 2 comments there so far, but I'll check back later.)

The American Right is truly in a crisis of disunity and nonsense. 

A very strange ruse

US politicians face sack for gay sex ruse - BBC News

Tea party Republicans Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat concocted a false
story that Mr Courser had solicited a male sex worker, to make the story
of their affair less credible....

The allegations stem from a spurious email that Mr Courser asked an
aide to send, that claimed he was caught with a male prostitute.

The email was sent to party activists in the hope it would make allegations of his and Ms Gamrat's affair sound less credible.

The report doesn't explain how a Republican politician could think he faced less trouble by spreading a rumour that he used male prostitutes than he could from knowledge of an affair with a woman...

Japanese floods - worldwide floods

The remarkable sight of the Japanese floods on television last night was "old news" by this morning, but yet again, I make the point that flash flooding from increased extreme rainfall is an underacknowledged immediate consequence of global warming.

So I was a bit surprised to read this at the end of one report about yesterday's flood:

Kei Yoshimura, a hydrologist at the University of Tokyo’s Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, said the magnitude of the Kinugawa River flooding on Thursday was “something that takes place only once in 100 years.”
He added that it was too early to conclude the flooding was linked to climate change, saying the heavy rainfall happened to occur along that river.
“It’s my view that the effect of climate change on this particular incident is zero, or unknown at this point,” he said.

This is one of those cases of over-caution on the matter of attribution to individual events.  If Kei had wanted to paint the "bigger picture" he might of cited this 2007 paper about increased rainfall intensity in his country:

This paper explores features of long-term changes in precipitation in Japan based on recent studies using daily data from 51 stations since 1901, partly updated for the present article. We show that heavy daily precipitation ( 200 mm and 100 mm) has significantly increased during the last century as weak to moderate precipitation ( 1 mm to 10 mm) has decreased.  New analysis using hourly precipitation records at over 600 stations on the AMeDAS network has shown an increase in very intense hourly and six-hourly precipitations ( 100 mm/h and 300 mm/6h) during the last 28 years.

Or he might have referred to the worldwide trend, as discussed here in a 2012 paper:

Based on the discussions above, we can make the following conclusions. First, the large increase in global average precipitation intensity increase derived from the GPCP data, with the top 10% heavy precipitation increased by about 108% for each degree Kelvin increase in global mean temperature and the bottom 30%–60% bins decreased by about 20% K 1, is credible. Increases in heavy precipitation can lead to more and worse floods and mudslides, while decreases of light and moderate precipitation can increase the risk of droughts. The 100-year linear trend (1906–2005) of global temperature is 0.74 C 0.18 C, and is expected to increase even faster [Solomon et al., 2007].  This implies that the global top 10% heavy precipitation had already increased by about 80% and will continue increase at a faster rate. Meanwhile there are corresponding increases in the risk of droughts. It follows that the increasing occurrence and severity of floods, mudslides, as well as shortage of water resources has been and would increasingly be one of the worst hazards to the global ecosystem as the result of global warming.

The lesson:  this key damaging aspect of climate change is already happening.

And, second lesson:   ANDREW BOLT - YOU ARE WRONG AND A FOOL FOR NOT ACKNOWLEDGING CLIMATE CHANGE HAS LONG BEEN PREDICTED TO INCREASE BOTH FLOOD AND DROUGHT.   

 

When Americans Loved Taxes

Interesting short history here about how Americans used to be enthusiastic about taxes (in the form of tariffs).

All connected

Ocean life triggers ice formation in clouds

This would suggest to me further reason to worry about the unknown, global effects of ocean acidification.

Seeing things

Here's part of the latest close up of the bright spot on Ceres:

Sure, the centre bit is now looking like an ice volcano, if you ask me, but I am more concerned about the odd shaped outline to the upper right that seems to be pointing to it.  Could a rude 14 year old boy already have been there?

Cryptosystems and quantum computers

Online security braces for quantum revolution : Nature News & Comment

What a cool word - "cryptosystems" - which gets used repeatedly in this article about how mathematicians and computer security specialists are trying to keep ahead of the anticipated arrival of quantum computing in 10 or so years time:

“I’m genuinely worried we’re not going to be ready in time,” says Michele Mosca, co-founder of the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo in Canada and chief executive of evolutionQ, a cyber-security consulting company.

It will take years for governments and industry to settle on quantum-safe replacements for today’s encryption methods. Any proposed replacement — even if it seems impregnable at first — must withstand multitudes of real and theoretical challenges before it is considered reliable enough to protect the transfer of intellectual property, financial data and state secrets.

“To trust a cryptosystem, you need a lot of people to scrutinize it and try to devise attacks on it
and see if it has any flaws,” says Stephen Jordan, a physicist at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. “That takes a long time.”

And how about this science fiction sounding explanation of one of the potential replacements for current public key encryption methods:

One such system is lattice-based cryptography, in which the public key is a grid-like collection of points in a high-dimensional mathematical space. One way to send a secret message is to hide it some distance from a point in the lattice. Working out how far the encrypted message is to a lattice point is a difficult problem for any computer, conventional or quantum. But the secret key provides a simple way to determine how close the encrypted message is to a lattice point.

The only movie I can recall which was specifically about modern encryption was Sneakers, which I found rather dull and completely forgettable.

Seems to me there must be a good speculative but plausible story to do with quantum computing and security failure, but I doubt that it's been written.

Colbert begins

Well, I'm pleasantly surprised to note that Stephen Colbert's much anticipated Late Show is going to be shown in Australia at 11.30pm on the free to air channel that normally just specialises in re-runs of the Simpsons, Futurama and the like.  (Channel 11).

Let's hope they can stick to the timeslot, to make recording easy.