Quotulatiousness

June 14, 2011

Pack up your worries about global warming: unpack your parka and mittens

Filed under: Environment, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:18

I’ve been skeptical about the whole global warming issue, and I’d like to be equally skeptical about a new ice age threat:

What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth — far from facing a global warming problem — is actually headed into a mini Ice Age.

Lower sunspot activity translates into likely lower temperatures here on earth, just like in the “Maunder Minimum” period, also known as the “Little Ice Age”.

Early records of sunspots indicate that the Sun went through a period of inactivity in the late 17th century. Very few sunspots were seen on the Sun from about 1645 to 1715. Although the observations were not as extensive as in later years, the Sun was in fact well observed during this time and this lack of sunspots is well documented. This period of solar inactivity also corresponds to a climatic period called the “Little Ice Age” when rivers that are normally ice-free froze and snow fields remained year-round at lower altitudes. There is evidence that the Sun has had similar periods of inactivity in the more distant past.

As I wrote back in 2004, “I’ve never been all that convinced of the accuracy of the scientific evidence presented in favour of the Global Warming theory, especially as it seemed to play rather too clearly into the hands of the anti-growth, anti-capitalist, pro-world government folks. A world-wide ecological disaster, clearly caused by human action, would allow a lot of authoritarian changes which would radically reduce individual freedom and increase the degree of social control exercised by governments over the actions and movement of their citizenry. “

On the other hand, as Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, humanity is better adapted to dealing with higher temperatures than lower ones — as are most living creatures. Given a choice between the risks of increasing temperatures globally and the risks of a new ice age, it should be pretty easy to figure out which scenario allows the better chances for all of humanity to survive and thrive.

Update: Anthony Watts has more. “If we are right, this could be the last solar maximum we’ll see for a few decades,” Hill said. “That would affect everything from space exploration to Earth’s climate.”

Update, 15 June: My skepticism is overwhelmed by the skeptic-in-this-instance New Scientist‘s Michael Marshall, who does the quick math that a Maunder Minimum for the next 90 years would only lower global temperatures by 0.3C. And New Scientist is still bullish on the global warming potential of between 2 and 4.5 degrees Celsius over that same time period. They’re science writers and I’m not, but I have to say I’m still much more worried about the potential cooling than the potential warming.

June 12, 2011

QotD: A scene from an Australian National Park

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Environment, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:53

A few years ago, two National Park rangers were doing a similar service while assorted tourists looked on and took their happy-snaps. The birds, whatever they were, had moved along the road a few yards when a dingo walked out of the long grass, killed one and started to stalk the remainder.

The two Rangers became embroiled in an ideological argument as to which protected specie was to be left alone. The tourists, appalled at the slaughter, then chased the dingo away. The Rangers were instantly reconciled and started issuing citations to the offending tourists for trespassing in a National Park, threatening protected species, obstructing traffic, affray, foul language etc. The tourists were told their cars could be impounded and all, eventually, got court summonses. Fines were levied and they were warned that the offences potentially carried jail time.

One disgruntled victim opined that he should have run over the Rangers and the birds. This was overheard by ‘authority’ and he was hauled into court again.

Visitor numbers at the National Park declined dramatically.

Roger Henry, posting to Railroad_Modeling_Still_Makes_Me_Grumpy@yahoogroups.com, 2011-06-11

Bureaucratic details of the wild camel slaughter proposal

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

Remember the deliberate destruction of the massive bison herds that used to roam the central plains of North America? Australia’s environmentalists are looking to do an Outback version of their own. Viv Forbes looks at the details included in that Australian government “climate change” proposal:

Think this is all a hoax? Then check this out:


http://www.climatechange.gov.au/government/initiatives/carbon-farming-initative/methodology-development/methodologies-under-consideration/management-of-feral-herbivores.aspx

Yep, our bureaucrats have put together a 62 page proposal to issue carbon credits for killing feral camels. They note that there is not much use in killing an old camel so the cullers will be required to declare the age of each camel killed, so that that the Government auditors can determine how much pollution will be saved. To help this complex calculation the government is researching the average life expectancy for feral camels.

The document is full of endless dribble, including how the cullers discount the credits they will get by the amount of pollution that is created by the culling.

Here is a sample:

“There are two options for measuring fuel consumption for EVc,j,y as detailed below. Option 1 is preferred.

Option 1) Recording of all fuel purchased or pumped for use in these vehicles during the management activities.

Option 2) Recording of all ground vehicle and fuel types and odometer readings before and after management activities.

For Option 2 the amount of fuel consumed is calculated by taking the fuel consumption rating of the vehicle as a litres per kilometre figure and multiplying this by the kilometres of travel undertaken as part of the management activity, then divided by 1000 to convert to kiloLitres, as per the equation below:

Where:

GDgv,c,j,y = Ground distance travelled by vehicle gv using fuel type j in undertaking the management activities c in year y
LPKgv,j = Litres of fuel type j combusted per kilometre for vehicle gv

Update: The Retronaut has some photos from the near-annihilation of the buffalo in the late 1800s.

June 11, 2011

China finally admits to (some) problems at the Three Gorges megadam

Filed under: China, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:47

It’s been “officially” a wonderful thing with absolutely no negative attributes for so long that it’s almost refreshing that the Chinese government is finally admitting it’s not all good news around the massive Three Gorges dam and reservoir:

In private, officials have worried about the project for some time and occasionally their doubts have surfaced in the official media. But the government itself has refused to acknowledge them. When the project was approved by the rubber-stamp parliament in 1992, debate was stifled by the oppressive political atmosphere of the time, following the Tiananmen Square massacre three years earlier. Last July, with the dam facing its biggest flood crest since completion in 2006, officials hinted that they might have overstated its ability to control flooding. On May 18th, with the dam again in the spotlight because of the drought, a cabinet meeting chaired by the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, went further in acknowledging drawbacks.

Having called the dam “hugely beneficial overall”, the cabinet’s statement said there were problems relating to the resettlement of 1.4m people, to the environment and to the “prevention of geological disasters” that urgently needed addressing. The dam, it said, had had “a certain impact” on navigation, irrigation and water-supply downstream. Some of these problems had been forecast at the design stage or spotted during construction. But they had been “difficult to resolve effectively because of limitations imposed by conditions at the time.” It did not elaborate.

June 6, 2011

Tyler Cowen discusses “The Great Stagnation”

Filed under: Economics, History, Science, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:13

“How are we supposed to have a mature debate when any criticism is seen as treason?”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:18

Mark Piggott on the need to be honest about the state of the British NHS in order to improve healthcare:

The UK National Health Service is like a relative: we are allowed to slag off this national treasure, but woe betide anyone else who tries it. I have no idea if the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, really wants to improve the institution or dismantle it and sell it off to the highest bidder, but whatever his motives, anyone who uses the system knows it needs surgery; no amount of knee-jerk op-eds will change that salutary fact.

In this unhealthy climate I feel obliged to state that I believe in the NHS; many medics do a fine job and healthcare should be free at the point of need. Yet having witnessed the care provided to my grandmother, 89, following a diagnosis of lung cancer, I believe that unless the NHS is willing to admit and tackle its flaws, it will have to shoulder some of the blame if the private sector convinces politicians it can run things better.

[. . .]

After collecting my father from the lobby, we went back to the ICU. A bossy woman at the nurse’s dock insisted she wasn’t on that ward; I had to point nan out, in one of the few occupied beds behind her. The woman compounded her mistake by acting as if we were in the wrong. Many users of the NHS will be familiar with this attitude: that ill people and their relatives are simply a nuisance preventing the otherwise smooth running of the system.

[. . .]

The doctors organisation, the British Medical Association (BMA), reacting with customary promptness, has called Lansley’s reforms ‘mad’. They may be right, but the BMA, like the politicians, has a vested interest in how the NHS is run. As can be witnessed by its endless lectures on the evils of alcohol, the BMA appears to be in the fortunate position of being able to get any message, no matter how authoritarian, to the media, who then obligingly splash it across every front page and news bulletin. Perhaps we haven’t really changed that much from the days of my grandparents, who always believed that doctor knew best.

June 5, 2011

Brendan O’Neill goes whale watching

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:43

Where our hero gets a thrilling ride he didn’t expect, but finally gets a bit of revenge:

 It’s the hippyish family of three from Norfolk that I feel sorry for. There they were at the Old Harbour in Reykjavik, their multicoloured fleeces zipped up to the chin to protect them from a light but Arctic breeze, talking gaily about going to ‘meet the whales’. I’m sure one of them had even used the word ‘commune’, as a verb, it being fashionable now to believe that humans can make a spiritual, spine-tingling connection with whales and dolphins.

Yet little did this excitable unit know that within the hour they’d be clinging to any bit of the boat’s infrastructure they could find, as we got tossed around by a pissed-off Poseidon, minke whales mocking us with their mighty tails for daring to enter into their cruel and alien world.

Admittedly it was our own fault. The woman at the whale-watching office at the harbour had warned us that the weather was unpredictable. ‘We might not go out today,’ she said, in that wonderfully weird accent that Icelandic people speak English in: part-Viking, part-Scouse. ‘It’s looking a bit patchy,’ she explained.

Now, in a country famous for its angry climate, for its spewing geysers, for having the word ‘Ice’ in its name, where tourists can buy T-shirts that say ‘Lost in Iceland’ on the front and ‘Is anybody out there?’ on the back, and where they have actually made a horror film called Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre, you might think that we would have taken more seriously this native harbour woman’s warning of ‘patchiness’ at sea. But no. So determined were we to see the whales that, in a mish-mash of European accents, we all said: ‘Let’s go! We don’t mind if it’s a little rough.’ They would make for brilliant famous last words.

The Marmite affair hits Port Hope

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Cancon, Food, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:57

Apparently the bureaucratic reach of Danish food nannies now extends as far as Port Hope, Ontario. I dropped in to the British Pantry to stock up on my usual assortment of pickled onions, crisps, toffees, and floral gums, to discover that not only did they not have any Marmite, they couldn’t get any more. This is serious . . . food DefCon Three level serious.

A quick interrogation of the sales person revealed that this is due to some strong disinformation activity on the part of the anti-Marmite faction: “Oh, we can’t bring that in anymore because it’s got beef extract in it. We’re not allowed to import that without a beef importing permit.”

My (sadly) empty jar of Marmite proclaims on the front that it’s 100% Vegetarian:

20110605-105004.jpg
100% Vegetarian
20110605-105347.jpg
Ingredients: Yeast Extract
Salt
Vegetable Extract
Niacin
Thiamin
Spice Extracts (contains Celery)
Riboflavin
Folic Acid
Vitamin B12

June 1, 2011

When is plastic better for the environment than paper?

Filed under: Environment, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:29

The answer: when the product gets dumped in a landfill.

Stateside boffins say that, contrary to popular perception, it would often be better for the planet if people avoided using biodegradable products compliant with the recommended US government guidelines.

This is because biodegradable wastes — for instance cardboard cups, “eco friendly” disposable nappies, various kinds of shopping and rubbish bags etc — often wind up in landfill, where they will degrade and emit methane. Methane is, of course, a vastly more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, so it is seen as important to prevent it getting into the atmosphere.

[. . .]

The answer, according to Barlaz, is to get away from the idea that rapid decomposition is always a good idea — especially on things which won’t be recycled much but will probably wind up in landfill, for instance disposable nappies, fast-food packaging etc.

“If we want to maximize the environmental benefit of biodegradable products in landfills,” Barlaz says, “we need to both expand methane collection at landfills and design these products to degrade more slowly — in contrast to FTC guidance.”

More on the Greenland settlements

Filed under: Americas, Environment, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

In a follow-up to yesterday’s post on the end of the Viking settlements in Greenland, Sonya Porter provides more historical background:

In 891 AD. Eric The Red set off from Iceland with a few followers to explore a land to the west which they had probably spotted some time before while sailing out in their longboats, and then returned three years later with about 500 fellow Vikings. At first they settled on the south-east coast, close to the tip of this new land and then, as the population grew, created a further settlement to the south-west. They called their new home ‘Greenland’.

It has been said that this name was a ‘spin’, a publicity stunt to entice more Vikings to come to join the new settlers, but this would have been pointless if it had been impossible for them to survive. They must at least have been able to create their own dwellings, build their own fires, make their own clothes and above all, grow their own food. The settlers might have been able to trade such things as polar bear-skins and fox furs for iron and other necessities on occasional trips to Europe, but their compatriots in Denmark and Iceland would have been neither able nor willing to row their longboats out each month with groceries.

At present, the temperatures in Greenland range from a maximum of 7C in July to -9C in January. This is too cold for grain such as wheat and even rye to grow and ripen in the short summer of such northern latitudes. Nor are sheep and cattle happy at those temperatures. Hill sheep might be able to nibble away at moss and short grass, but cattle need lush meadows and hay to fatten and live through a winter. Solid wood is needed for building, boat building and warmth, but only bushes and such weak trees as birch now grow in Greenland.

In 1991, two caribou hunters stumbled over a log on a snowy Greenland riverbank, an unusual event because Greenland is now above the treeline. (1) Over the past century, further archaeological investigations found frozen sheep droppings, a cow barn, bones from pigs, sheep and goats and remains of rye, barley and wheat all of which indicate that the Vikings had large farmsteads with ample pastures. The Greenlanders obviously prospered, because from the number of farms in both settlements, whose 400 or so stone ruins still dot the landscape, archaeologists guess that the population may have risen to a peak of about five thousand. They also built a cathedral and churches with graves which means that the soil must have been soft enough to dig, but these graves are now well below the permafrost (2).

May 31, 2011

A bit of climate-change panic juxtaposition

Filed under: Americas, Environment, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:26

First, the panic:

In a world of climate change, freak storms are the new normal. Newsweek‘s Sharon Begley on why we’re unprepared for the harrowing future, and how adapting to the inevitable might be our only option.
[. . .]
From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone. Which means you haven’t seen anything yet. And we are not prepared.

And, in the interests of balance, the eeeevil climate change denier:

Greenland’s early Viking settlers were subjected to rapidly changing climate. Temperatures plunged several degrees in a span of decades, according to research from Brown University. A reconstruction of 5,600 years of climate history from lakes near the Norse settlement in western Greenland also shows how climate affected the Dorset and Saqqaq cultures. Results appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [from Brown University] — The end of the Norse settlements on Greenland likely will remain shrouded in mystery. While there is scant written evidence of the colony’s demise in the 14th and early 15th centuries, archaeological remains can fill some of the blanks, but not all.

What climate scientists have been able to ascertain is that an extended cold snap, called the Little Ice Age, gripped Greenland beginning in the 1400s. This has been cited as a major cause of the Norse’s disappearance. Now researchers led by Brown University show the climate turned colder in an earlier span of several decades, setting in motion the end of the Greenland Norse.
[. . .]
The researchers also examined how climate affected the Saqqaq and Dorset peoples. The Saqqaq arrived in Greenland around 2500 B.C. While there were warm and cold swings in temperature for centuries after their arrival, the climate took a turn for the bitter beginning roughly 850 B.C., the scientists found. “There is a major climate shift at this time,” D’Andrea said. “It seems that it’s not as much the speed of the cooling as the amplitude of the cooling. It gets much colder.”

The Saqqaq exit coincides with the arrival of the Dorset people, who were more accustomed to hunting from the sea ice that would have accumulated with the colder climate at the time. Yet by around 50 B.C., the Dorset culture was waning in western Greenland, despite its affinity for cold weather. “It is possible that it got so cold they left, but there has to be more to it than that,” D’Andrea said.

May 30, 2011

NASA’s changing goals for Orion

Filed under: Politics, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

The ever-sarcastic Lewis Page looks at how NASA has been trying to reposition their planned Orion spaceship:

NASA has declared that its pork-tastic Orion moonship — whose primary mission disappeared with President Obama’s decision that there will be no manned US return to the Moon — is now to be a “deep space transportation system”, suggesting that the agency plans to send it on missions beyond Earth orbit.

It remains unclear how the newly-renamed Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) will travel into space, when it will do so and what its destination might be — though a near-Earth asteroid is a likely possibility. A major reason for Orion’s continued survival appears to be ignoble porkbarrel politics — but there is a tantalising possibility that it might fly beyond Earth orbit in the relatively near future.

What Page calls NASA’s “pork map” shows why the MPCV has strong, bi-partisan political support regardless of its actual utility for the space program:

Regardless of the political support, however, the most likely view of US federal government finances indicates that Orion/MPCV won’t be viable in the proposed timeframe. There’s a non-governmental choice, however:

Famous geekbiz-kingpin Elon Musk and his upstart rocket company SpaceX have come from nowhere in just eight years to successfully test-fly their brand new and very cheap Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule, already apparently quite capable of performing the ISS supply mission. Only a few years ago, many in NASA and the established industry were arguing that this would never happen.

It’s also no secret that Musk and SpaceX are working on a new Merlin 2 rocket engine, much bigger than the current Merlin 1 which propels the Falcon 9. A multicore heavy lifter based on Merlin 2 would be in the 100-tonne-plus realm required to mount a Mars mission, and will surely be the cheapest offering competing at the 2015 heavy lift Mars-rocket decision.

May 29, 2011

More on the Anglo-Danish Marmite affair

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Food, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:34

Colby Cosh rounds up the details on the Marmite affair:

Nothing stirs the blood of the British like a nice slapfight over European regulation, and this goes double when food is involved. The UK press has found its latest excuse for tut-tutting and finger-waggling in the unlikeliest of places: at the bottom of the squat, distinctive little jar in which the vile breakfast spread Marmite is sold. This week, English-language journals in Denmark reported that the Scandinavian kingdom’s food regulator was having the dark brown yeast extract cleared from the shelves of shops which serve Brit expatriates.

The British reared up as one, displaying a spirit of indignant unity. “What have the Danes ever done for global cuisine?” thundered the Belfast Telegraph, breaking Godwin’s Law into splinters over its knurled Ultonian knee. (Unfortunately, a good answer might be “Not given it Marmite, at any rate.”) Fans of the quasi-foodstuff gathered on Facebook to form a “Marmite army”. Social campaigners used the ban to call attention to dubious patches in Denmark’s record on human rights and environmentalism.

As he points out, nobody at the Danish food nanny office suddenly issued a ban: technically Marmite had never been cleared for import at all. So it’s just a matter of filling in a form or two and Bob’s your uncle? Not quite:

Marmite’s status as a “fortified food” has apparently only just been noticed, and the DVFA says that “it has not received an application for marketing in Denmark of Marmite or similar products with added vitamins or minerals.” A glance at the DVFA’s procedure for obtaining approval to market these foods reveals why brand owner Unilever might not be in such a hurry to file. (And it also reveals that free-trade fanatics like me should probably rein in their admiration for the EU’s trade barriers just a little.) The agency not only requires compliance with EU-wide regulations, but insists that each product pass an “individual risk assessment” performed using a made-in-Denmark scientific procedure.

May 26, 2011

More on resveratrol in red wine

Filed under: Health, Science, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 15:04

Every few weeks, there’s another study result published (or, in some cases, mangled in the publishing) about the benefits to human health from the resveratrol in red wine, but few of them will go this far:

Drink 8 bottles of wine, you’ll be unharmed if hit by Mike Tyson
True medical fact: Trials with boxers underway

Top boffins in Texas believe they will soon provide solid proof of an astonishingly useful biological fact: that if you drink eight bottles of red wine you can be punched in the head by a professional heavyweight boxer and it will do you no harm at all.

We’re paraphrasing slightly, of course.

The Danish Marmite affair thickens

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Food, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

Lester Haines has the latest on the plight of ex-pat Brits suffering under a dictatorial food regime in Denmark:

According to this official statement, neither Marmite nor its Oz rival Vegemite are banned in Denmark, because they’ve never actually been approved for sale.

A 2004 law controls the distribution of products with “added vitamins, minerals or other substances”, and in order to punt such foodstuffs, they “need to be approved by the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration before the product can be marketed”.

[. . .]

In effect, then, those shops selling Marmite are dealing in unauthorised enhanced substances.

We and the Daily Mail have no doubt that any attempt to legalise Marmite would be met with a swift rejection, in defiance of EU directives on free trade. As Copenhagen-based expat Lyndsay Jensen put it: “They don’t like it because it’s foreign. But if they want to take my Marmite off me, they’ll have to wrench it from my cold dead hands.”

It’s been said that Marmite is an “acquired taste”, but Denmark’s health regulators are moving quickly to ensure that Danes never have the opportunity to develop that taste. Of course, like most other forms of prohibition, it might actually increase the attractiveness of the “forbidden fruit”.

Denmark has a long coastline, so smuggling in the little black jars across the North Sea would be quite possible . . .

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