Quotulatiousness

January 13, 2010

Haiti death toll could be in the tens of thousands

Filed under: Americas — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 15:22

The scale of the disaster engulfing Haiti is hard to comprehend. When the reports started to come in yesterday afternoon, it sounded bad (a hospital was said to have collapsed in the quake), but more recent reports show the situation is unimaginably worse:

Haiti’s prime minister on Wednesday warned the death toll may top 100,000 in a calamitous earthquake which left streets strewn with corpses and thousands missing in a scene of utter carnage.

Hospitals collapsed, destroyed schools were full of dead and the cries of trapped victims escaped from crushed buildings in the centre of the capital Port-au-Prince, which an AFP correspondent said was “mostly destroyed.”

Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN the final death toll from the 7.0 quake could be “well over 100,000,” as an international aid effort geared up in a race against time to pull survivors from the ruins.

Twitter and Facebook posts are encouraging people to donate to the Haiti relief efforts, but there’s some confusion as US residents can donate money by sending a text message to a certain address, but this method does not work for Canadians. Canadians can donate by visiting the Canadian Red Cross website (www.redcross.ca), by phone 800-418-1111, or in person (cash or cheque only) at any Red Cross office.

Update: CBC News reports that the Salvation Army can accept donations for disaster relief in Haiti by text message:

Canadians looking to donate money to earthquake disaster relief in Haiti through text messages can do so via the Salvation Army.

Cellphone users can send donations of $5 by texting the word “Haiti” to 45678 through a system set up by the Mobile Giving Foundation, a group that enables charities to collect money by text messages.

The Salvation Army is a member of the group, as are several other charities including the Children’s Wish Foundation and Princess Margaret Hospital.

According to the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, the cellphone industry’s trade group, 100 per cent of all donations that go through Mobile Giving are forwarded to their respective charities.

Update, the second: The US Navy is reported to be assembling ships to send to the scene:

It looks like the Navy is developing a massive Sea Base operation centered around the USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70), the USS Bataan (LHD 5), USS Fort McHenry (LSD 43), and the USS Carter Hall (LSD 50) with cruisers and frigates in support (note helicopter capable vessels). Also as should be expected, significant Coast Guard and assets from other services are being mobilized as well, so far I think I have seen 4 different cutters mentioned.

The USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) in particular will be what I am watching. With significant fresh water production capacity, that may turn into one of the most important early assets needed. It cannot be overstated the strategic and tactical significance of a large deck aircraft carrier arriving quickly to this situation. Consider for a moment what it means to look out into the sea following this disaster and seeing the distinct and globally recognized silhouette of a Nimitz class aircraft carrier. That really is by definition strategic communication of hope that the US is there to help. We should never take that symbolism for granted should we wish to remain a global power, as that soft power influence factors strategically well beyond the capacity for critics who desire to create hard power tactical alternatives.

From scaling to NSFW images in a few short steps

Filed under: Health, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 15:10

I mentioned to Jon, my former virtual landlord, that I’d been to the dentist this morning for a scaling. Somehow this went straight to the hidden blogging streak he’s been concealing for the last few years:

Every three months? Wow — that’s aggressive. You’re showing that plaque who’s boss, I guess.

[We] picked up a set of powered toothbrushes — I think they might be the Arm and Hammer brand — and we’ve been using them for several months now. I think the powered brush has made a noticeable difference in icky build-up and in the time it takes the dental assistant to pry said ick from my stumps.

Previously, the inside surface of the lower stumps would become noticeably grainy as the dental appointment approached, and that’s the area in which the most scaling work is usually done. You can really hear it when the ultrasonic pointy-ouch machine digs in to the ick — the pitch of the tool changes from that of stepped-on marmot to roto-tilled kitten.

The brush seems to be able to reduce all that — I don’t notice an accumulation of crud on the bottom teef, and the scaling at the last appointment went very quickly. Which was a bit of a disappointment, really, as it reduced my face time with the dental assistant’s lovely bosom. Oh, yes — there is a trade-off for everything. A normal scaling may mean having to hold your mouth open uncomfortably wide whilst a machine making a sound like a flayed kitten dipped in hot oil digs around your gums, spewing forth a geyser of spit and blood and pus and plaque and tissue and soul which spatters all over your shirt and pants and shoes and the wall opposite whilst your fingernails splinter as you shred the arms of the chair with a grip that would turn coal to cubic zirconia, but all is forgotten as the young dental assistant nestles your head in her firm yet alluringly soft and ever-so-subtly yielding breasts. You know what? I can feel the plaque hardening on my teeth even now, just thinking about my next cleaning.

I think I blew it last time, though, when she paused in the ultrasonic inquisition to ask if I was OK. “Oh god, yes”, I replied. “More! More!”

But there was to be no more. We were done.

A point-by-point fisking

Filed under: Environment, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:58

The twinned arts of strawman construction and deconstruction, as illustrated by Fred Pearce (construction) and Viscount Moncton (deconstruction):

The Daily Telegraph, on 8 December 2009, produced what it called the “Climate Skeptic’s Q&A”, a piece written by Fred Pearce, a long-standing environmental extremist campaigner on the climate question. There was no attempt in the piece to produce balanced or scientifically-accurate answers. A reader has sent the “Q&A” to us and has asked us to put matters to rights. Mr. Pearce’s “straw-man” questions are in bold face; his answers are in italics, and my comments are in Roman face.

How can scientists claim to predict climate change over 50 or more years when they can’t even get next week’s weather forecast right?

They can’t tell us in detail. But forecasting climate change is more like forecasting the seasons than the weather. We know winters are cold and summers are warm. Always. And it’s like that with greenhouse gases. Physicists have known for 200 years that gases like carbon dioxide trap heat. These gases are accumulating in the atmosphere, thanks to our pollution. They will heat up the atmosphere just as certainly as the summer sun heats us.

This is a classic “straw-man” set up and then knocked down by Pearce. It is not and has never been the contention of skeptical scientists that there is no such thing as the greenhouse effect. The question that is hotly debated among climate scientists is not whether the doubling of CO2 concentration that is expected this century can in theory cause warming: the question is how much warming we can cause, and the increasingly frequent answer in the peer-reviewed journals is “very little indeed”.

Pearce also tries to suggest that forecasting climate change is “like forecasting the seasons” — i.e., easy. Unfortunately, Edward Lorenz proved that claim to be false very nearly half a century ago, in the landmark paper in a climatological journal that founded chaos theory. Lorenz demonstrated that unless we knew the values of the millions of parameters that define the climate to a precision that is not and can never be in practice attainable the long-range prediction of climatic behavior would be impossible “by any method”. Yet the UN’s case for climate alarm is based almost exclusively on the output of models that have been demonstrated, time and again, to fail. Not one of the models on which the UN relies, for instance, had predicted that there would be 15 years without any statistically-significant “global warming” — the years 1995-2009 inclusive.

“times online commenters absolute RETARDS”

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:24

The headline is the ever-nuanced Giles Coren expressing his opinion about the folks who left comments on his Times Online column on climate change:

Right, there is something that is going to have to stop right this second, and that is people making jokes about “If the globe is warming up then where did all this snow come from, eh? Eh? Tell me that?” Because it is driving me crazy.

And when I say “people”, I mean mostly columnists, cartoonists and comedians. I know there is nothing else to write about at the moment (God help me, I’m writing about people writing about the snow) and I grant that it was a nice little coincidence that the Copenhagen summit happened just as it started snowing, but please, people, stop making jokes about the weather in relation to climate change. Stop pretending to be surprised that you had to put a scarf and hat on this morning when the world is supposed to be warming up. The two things are not related. Nobody who understands the science is claiming that global warming (if it happens) is going to make Britain hotter in the long run.

Toronto bureaucrats and politicians at odds over pond skating

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:11

After yesterday’s article at the National Post, Peter Kuitenbrouwer finds that the new “no skating” policy was implemented without informing the elected politicians:

Toronto parks department bureaucrats permanently banned all skating on city ponds without consulting any elected city officials, Councillor Paula Fletcher, the parks chief, said yesterday.

Ms. Fletcher (Toronto-Danforth) and the committee’s vice-chair, Karen Stintz (Eglinton-Lawrence), believe the ban on pond skating is wrong, and plan to bring the topic to the Parks and Environment meeting at City Hall this morning. Ms. Fletcher suggested yesterday people should continue ignoring the signs, as long as they believe the ice is safe.

“I believe that there should be skating on ponds,” Ms. Fletcher said yesterday.

“It certainly was not a public policy,” she added, to ban skating on city ponds. The councillor said she was unaware of a document, “Activities on Frozen Open Bodies of Water Policy,” until I reported on it in the National Post yesterday.

“When this is a public debate it should be a public document,” added Ms. Fletcher.

Powered by WordPress