The environment is something I’m quite passionate about and like a lot of people I imagine: I get worried about the misquoting and lies that people are telling to justify continuing along without lifting our game.

Original letter

The letter I was responding to went like this:

Cheap energy must be given priority

Saturday’s front-page photograph of a wheat farmer knee-deep in mud should serve to remind us it was not so long ago that climate experts were predicting south-eastern Australia had moved into a state of permanent drought (“This drought may never break”, January 4, 2008).

The inability of climate experts to predict even a few years into the future casts much doubt on the credibility of their 50-year forecasts, and the extent to which man-made carbon emissions can affect these forecasts.

Politicians should take great care about formulating carbon emission policies that will result in large energy price rises based on the advice of those demonstrated to be frequently wrong in their predictions.

The climate does change: sometimes it gets drier and sometimes it wetter; sometimes it gets warmer and sometimes cooler. We would be better served by policies that recognise these cyclical changes occur and that result in securing our most critical resources: cheap water and energy.

Ron Blombery McMahons Point

To which I applied a bit of sceptical thinking to what he was claiming and thought “hey, that doesn’t sound like a prediction climate scientists would make”. Sure enough the original article “This drought may never break” made no such claim that if climate change was correct: we’d see no more rain..

My letter

My response to Ron Bombery’s misinterpretation of what was said:

Scientists didn’t come down in the last shower

Ron Blombery (Letters, December 6) wrongly says a rainfall prediction was made by climate experts in the 2008 article he cites. The story was very clear. It said: ”There is absolutely no debate that Australia is warming.” On the subject of drought (rainfall and temperature) it said: “There is a debate in the climate community, after … close to 12 years of drought, whether this is something permanent. Certainly, in terms of temperature, that seems to be our reality, and that there is no turning back.”

Short of reading only the headline (which says the drought ”may” never break, not ”will”), I fail to see how one could conclude that the scientists had staked the validity of climate science to a prediction of zero rainfall in a specific part of Australia. There was no failure of science, only a failure by Mr Blombery to read the article properly.

Nathan Lee Surry Hills

I think we have given preference to cheap energy plenty: cheap and dirty unfortunately. Mr Blombery needs to go to China to see what focussing on cheap energy, cheap manufacturing, cheap goods results in. So what if we’re wrong on climate change anyhow?
Looks like others agreed on the topic:

The recent rain is an example of weather, which is difficult to predict even a few weeks ahead due to its inherently chaotic nature. Climate is weather averaged out over a longer period. The recent rain does not somehow cancel out all the observations of the past

60 years that show south-east Australia is getting hotter and drier, or that the past decade has been the hottest on record.

The CSIRO’s State of the Climate Report 2010 confirms this, and points out that the number of record hot days has been rising since 1960, and the number of record cold days over the same period has been decreasing.

Unfortunately, too many politicians exhibit a similar level of logic and misunderstanding when it comes to differentiating between weather and climate, and this is partly why we find ourselves in the do-nothing position that characterises so much public policy associated with climate change.

Jim Russell Balmain

Cheap energy is the problem, not the solution. Whether or not carbon emissions are changing the climate, oil production is peaking and the coal and gas won’t last forever. The cheaper they are, the faster they run out. Raise the price and they last longer and encourage people to invest in alternative and renewable sources.

Hey presto, we postpone or even avoid wars over expensive, dwindling energy resources.

Jeffrey Mellefont Coogee

I love the Australian approach to climate change. “The climate does change: sometimes it gets drier and sometimes wetter; sometimes it gets warmer and sometimes cooler”. Onya Ron, problem solved, no worries. What do these bloody scientists know anyway?

Steve Durham Northbridge

Good to see there was a decent amount of column space to people replying to his climate change denial. I don’t think it’ll change his mind one little bit that he has managed to misread an article as supporting his view somehow when the scientist clearly said there’s no debate.

What if we're wrong on climate change?

I wonder at what point the guy reckons we stop focusing on cheap (dirty) energy? If not today: in 1 year? 5 years? 10 years? When the coal runs out and global temperature is many degrees higher? When we ARE able to predict that certain parts of Australia will be in permanent drought? When?

A search for Ron Blombery’s letters
It looks like Ron, like myself, likes to write letters to the SMH. It is easy to see why he thinks climate change is crap when he has shares in mining companies (or at least superannuation that he’s concerned about):
he doesn’t want them taxed more that’s for sure:

To fund our retirement, superannuation funds invest in businesses such as mining that offer good asset growth and dividends. Now the government is going to make these businesses pay a lot more tax, which will reduce their asset value and dividends. At the same time, it encourages us, and forces employers, to put more money into the superannuation system whose future returns it has just diminished. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

Ron Blombery McMahons Point

Perhaps they will move shares to green energy companies? Or do investors never sell shares?

He also seems concerned about the environmental benefits of the insulation scheme: though with a pro-mining, climate change denying stance it’s hard to see why he would care one little bit about environmental outcomes when he doesn’t think we’re changing the climate anyhow:

No one seems to be asking the most obvious question about home insulation: what did we get for $2.5 billion? The evidence shows we got rampant opportunism, skulduggery and employment of “the most vulnerable, youngest, unskilled workers” (”Spin and silver tongues can’t hide an empty morality”, February 18). But did the program achieve anything for energy conservation?

By now, a significant proportion of houses should be enjoying the benefits of new insulation. The energy companies can readily produce statistics on power consumed on comparable summer days this year and last year. If there were measurable benefits, surely the government would be telling us. Where are the results? Or did we just waste $2.5 billion?

Ron Blombery McMahons Point

Isn’t ripping out cheap coal and burning it despite clear evidence that it is polluting the atmosphere some sort of opportunism? Or is selling boatloads of it to China for cut price “opportunism”.

So perhaps instead of just thinking about purely financial matters: Ron should think about the future of the environment. If we dig up and burn away everything in the pursuit of Ron Blombery’s personal financial well being: we’ll not achieve much. We have to consider the children and grandchildren of Ron Blombery even if he won’t.

From the guys at PhDComics

And I guess just typical journalist misquoting:

The curse of headlines.

shinya kimura @ chabott engineering from Henrik Hansen on Vimeo.

If anyone wants to buy one of his bikes for me.. Well, I’d be a happy chappy they look pretty unique.

If you thought bottled water was a scam, listen to this.

Homoeopathy (homeopathy for the yanks?) is based around the idea that water has a memory. Although it seems the memory only works immediately after preparing a homoeopathic preparation (the past 4 billion odd years of floating through everything from oceans to dinosaur bladders to beer kegs is forgotten).

Homoeopathy has a memory right?

Anyhow, the water is shown/exposed/whispered something nasty that would cause the symptoms or make them worse (so for cancer you’d stir it with a cigarette? For stiffness you pour it over a playboy magazine.. makes sense right?), then diluted to the point of a drop of water in the pacific ocean or something similar. So basically turned back into plain old water. It remembers what the bad stuff was and somehow magically does the opposite and makes you well.

I propose homoeopathic cures are paid for with homoeopathic solutions of money. Take money, show it to water, dilute til no more money left. Could even be delivered via bladder.

It’s touted as a cure for everything. I was going to list out what it is claimed, but like all good snake oil it fixes everything (and given it is water: also cleans your dishes!).

If homoeopathy worked: drinking water would simultaneously kill and heal you for any number of ailments. A swim would mean no one ever died from skin cancer cos I’m sure somewhere in the ocean some time ago there was cancerous material diluted away.

What is the 10:23 campaign then?

For those not in the know, the 10:23 (or ten to the power of 23) is a campaign against the afore mentioned quack remedies on shelves next to real medicine.

10:23 Campaign.

The 10:23 (or 10²³) refers to the time of day the campaign was to take place and a nod to Avogadro’s constant (a chemistry figure that you learn about in highschool chemistry and then forget sometime between now and then.. but basically dealing with concentrations/atoms etc).

Letter to Boots about the above

Boots is a chemist/pharmacy chain in the UK. It (like other chemists) seems to be pushing homoeopathy as a viable treatment for a range of ills. My letter to boots about homoeopathic “remedies” in response to the underwhelming death-rate (e.g. zero) of the 10:23 campaign.

To Boots customer support,

It has been well established that homoeopathy has no active ingredient, described by various medical groups as “quack treatment” or “snake-oil” and consistently fails to differentiate itself from placebo in any scientific tests performed. Additionally people may take these treatments instead of actual medicine/vaccines which means treatable conditions end up going untreated. Of particular worry is the notion that people can cure anything from headache to cancer or replace vaccinations with this snake-oil “treatment”.

So in light of that: why is Boots stocking such ridiculous products?

If they are to be sold they should be labelled as sugar pills (and sold in the same location) as the sweets and chocolate bars.

Please could you also explain or comment on:

• What medical benefit you think this provides beyond placebo?
• Will you be pulling them off the shelves after the rather convincing 10:23 homoeopathy “overdose” which resulted in no noticeable impact on hundreds of people worldwide?

and

• Will you clearly label these products as having no medical affect whatsoever other than as a placebo so that customers are not lulled into believing they are purchasing a real medical treatment?

Regards,
Nathan Lee

Take that with some magic memory water Boots..

Will post up the reply (if I get one).
Does it really matter?

If you’re thinking “what’s the harm” perhaps check out some of the examples given by Simon Singh in “What’s the harm” including:

• Homoeopathy practitioners advising parents against vaccines (many diseases are returning thanks to this and other vaccine crackpot theories about vaccines)
• Might replace conventional (i.e. “useful”/”real”) treatment e.g. malaria prevention

In addition millions of dollars are spent on these sugar pills and overpriced water.

People can, have and will continue to die from these things because they are fed a load of rubbish instead of real medical advice.

There is, I think, a moral duty (that Boots and other chemists would do well to consider) to inform people of what is real (backed by real results) medicine vs some made up shit.

That’s why it matters.

Electric vehicle fleet

A tonne of Government vehicles could be run on batteries and electricity for a number of reasons (this on conservative/out dated notions of what electric vehicles can do):

• short trips within urban areas (let’s assume electric means short range.. a myth but hey.. Let’s be conservative)
• idle time spent in other government spots or depots (which could easily have, or already have, electric outlets handy)
• large fleet purchasing power to kick the arses of the car manufacturers to stop stalling with proper electric cars (see “Who killed the electric car” if you want to get mad about it)

If nothing else the government could throw some money and give a big boost to the efforts of groups like Better Place who are rolling out electric vehicle infrastructure in Australia and other parts of the world (go to their site and get a bumper sticker if nothing else).

Electric vehicle street park-and-charge

Imagine never having to go to another petrol station again. Smelly, dirty places based around pumping stinky, dirty fuel into your vehicle. I’ve spent plenty of time at service stations while touring (I managed to make one video of that journey before I got distracted by work/life/play etc)

Sure, perhaps a way to win over the fuel supply guys would be to have removable battery packs (I’ve been talking about this for years..) and make removable batteries the equivalent of “fuel”:

That could work too.. But whether that’s done or not: Government car spots could have re-charging stations built in just as easily as they build in parking meters (and there are a growing number of those around aren’t there??). Hell, you could make it via induction plates on the ground hooked to some sort of RFID on the bottom of the car I’m sure wouldn’t be too much of a technological stretch.

At a minimum to support the move to an electric fleet any reserved parking spots for government vehicles should have recharge points. Then you could make certain public spots “electric only” (not to suggest it’s like a disabled parking spot.. far from it!). I have heard some rumblings that this is starting to happen for hybrid vehicles in some parts of the world. It’s an ok start, but we really need proper electric cars and infrastructure. Hybrids are always going to be a half arsed attempt to get away from oil. Plug-in hybrids are better, but really: we should just cut our losses (we’ll be paying off that environmental debt for some time now) and revel in the clean air in our cities as we push on with solar.

I only hope the car companies don’t pull the same shit that resulted in some perfectly good (and loved by owners) cars getting crushed rather than serve as a reminder that we could have ditched coal a long time ago. The idea of not selling but leasing electric vehicles smacks of that sort of thing all over again.

BUT, let’s assume someone else brings out a device like the iPad, but with a name that at least appears to have had a woman on the marketing panel and with ability to do more than just suck down overpriced useless apps.. well, here’s some ideas on how to present the magazine.
MartView
I’ll start with the one that’s not vapourware;this actually exists and has been around for some time.

But it isn’t really anything more than an e-book reader for magazines. That’s because it hasn’t got content that has been purpose built to take advantage of the interactive nature.
So that’s the base line. Let’s see what else there is out there.

Sports Illustrated
Aah, sports illustrated. I once had a girlfriend who kept a copy of the swimsuit edition handy under the bed (beats Cleo or Woman’s weekly right?). So I know at least one person who likes the content in the magazine in paper form. So, let’s take a look at their idea for a tablet based magazine:

Here’s a new user getting a walk through to prove it is at least partially hacked up:

Bonnier Research & Development
Another mob have mocked up their vision for content on a tablet device.

Their idea is complete mock up at this stage by the looks of it.

Guinness World Records

More of an annual publication, here’s a look at Guinness’ tablet version:

IKEA Catalogue
I guess this’ll be the next thing we see popping up in stores: tablet devices for searching through the store without having to walk around much. I suspect there’d be a need to try and really direct the “related” stuff in order to get the impulse/proximal buying that current store layouts work so hard to achieve.

The Sun Newspaper
Expect a lot of this in the future, the “I’m low tech so screw you techno hippies”.

They do raise some good points however: things that companies like apple make a pain in the arse. Stuff like sharing content (oh sorry, the DRM doesn’t even cope with one person having 5 devices let alone 5 friends with 1 device), problems with getting a display big enough etc. All things these companies could fix if they weren’t so damned short sighted about extracting maximum dollar even at the expense of end user convenience.

Or perhaps the idea of having computers we carry around is going about it the wrong way. Imagine this concept on steroids:

Businesses will get away with using as much energy, polluting as much as possible unless there is a cost attached to doing so. More than that actually, they have a duty to their shareholders actually to continue to pollute as much as possible while ever it is free to do so. So CO2, like any number of pollutants that had a cost attached via regulations/fines/taxes needs to have a cost associated. If you look back in time you’d see that any number of things have gone through this transition:

• lead
• asbestos
• CFCs
• DDTs
• etc

Prior to the health or environmental impact of the above triggering change it was the wild west type situation for businesses. Lead was in paint, added to petrol (gasoline for the yanks), smelters didn’t have to worry about minimising the contamination of ground water/soil around refinery/smelter operations. Then when the science and medical research came rolling in: it was either banned, phased out or required to be cleaned up (e.g. a fine last year for lead contamination). That made lead expensive to pollute with because it had to be treated with consideration to the impact on children etc.

Same deal with asbestos. It was (and still is) great for a number of things: heat proofing, building materials (the old version of “fibro cement” with asbestos was superior to the current cellulose variety (which is nowhere near as durable, strong, fire retardant or flexible.. seriously, asbestos is magic stuff). But while not as good in some ways, it doesn’t get into your lungs and cause nasty growths/cancers that will slowly kill you.

But back to global warming/climate change. What if we’re wrong about it?

I think the following cartoon sums up my thoughts on the matter:

The "horrible consequences" that await!

So I’ll take the argument from point of apathy: the “do you REALLY care” option.

• Does anyone care if they drive a petrol or an electric car if they both get you to and from your destination (assuming they start making them look half decent)? What if the electric one can be charged from the sun and doesn’t pollute the air around population centres?
• Would you care if you plugged in the car or dropped in a battery pack vs filling up with petrol? Battery packs should stink less and service stations look a bit cleaner (without run-off into drains etc).
• Does anyone care (or know for that matter) whether the electrons running your monitor that you’re reading this come from sunlight via solar cells or wind via wind farm or kite or does it HAVE to come via burning fossil fuels like coal? e.g. does your ability to put food on the table depend on energy being generated from fossil fuels, and if it does: could you possibly do one of the many new jobs away from coal?
• Would anyone notice if the hot water for the morning shower was heated via a solar hot water unit on the roof or is burning coal necessary for a good scrub temperature?
• Do you care if there are millions of new jobs in green industries created as environmentally dirty jobs are phased out?
• Do I care if my amazing Triumph Daytona 675 motorcycle is superseded by something sexy and electric like the MotoCzysz E1pc?

If you don’t really care about stuff like the above then keep your coal industry fibs to yourself, shut the hell up and let the people pushing for those things get on with the job. The absolute worse thing about these misinformed twits is that they are campaigning against improving the world for no other reason than because they want to go with the “do nothing and let everything get more polluted for our kids” option.

Want to see where we’re headed worldwide: take a look at China’s worst polluted spots for some hints (it isn’t pretty).

Yeah: what if it is (by some hugely unlikely plot by tens if not hundreds of thousands of scientists) a hoax and we end up with a world that doesn’t care about oil or coal. A state of being where we can let that shitty, dirty internal combustion technology retire into being another of those strange oddities in a transport museum (along with the coal fired steam engines and those planes with flapping wings failing on takeoff). If we lose the car noise and smoky exhaust smell in the cities and have the whir of electric driven wheels (or better yet trams/trains or electric buses) instead.

I would hope that certain jobs go quietly into the night and were replaced with many others:

• coal power plant technician
• oil rig drilling engineer
• internal combustion mechanic

Working in heavy dust, Chinese migrant workers invariably start to have health problems after 1-2 years.

Perhaps “replaced” with:

• solar array technician
• recycling engineer
• electric vehicle mechanic

But I suspect the anti-green Luddites and the climate change deniers will be digging in hard for many years to come.

The struggles post disaster although heightened dramatically are but a big bang version of the daily problems faced ongoing in developed nations. Extreme disease, poverty, health issues, hunger, thirst and helplessness are a constant when you’re in that half of the world that live on less than $2 a day.

Water

The most urgent need after any widespread disaster would have to be availability of clean water. The massive infrastructure damage that follows earthquakes is no exception: pipes and dams rupture, sewage leaks, electricity is knocked out to pumping stations, transport routes disrupted etc. For tsunamis the contamination of drinking water is a major problem. War and plague situations the problem becomes competition for limited fresh water or crowding near water which results in disease outbreak. Michael Pritchard’s got a device to turn undrinkeable water drinkable:

As a side note to get an idea of the scale he’s talking with the filtration of virii see my earlier post: Zoom in! Enhance.. Enhance! Oh, look! There’s a carbon atom.

So the idea is instead of shipping the rather heavy, bulky and “single shot” bottles of water: ship these filtration packs. They can then turn thousands of litres into drinkable water and most importantly they can do it away from central distribution centres (which means less risk of people in close contact spreading disease and less need to make risky treks or relocation to camps). If it can make the Thames water + rabbit shit + pond sludge drinkable then it can be used by people to get drinking water from the flood waters or stagnant dams.

Health

Life threatening injuries require urgent medical assistance, which often involves delivering things like vaccinations, antibiotics and other medications. These are sometimes delivered by doctors, other times by semi-skilled healthcare volunteers and sometimes by completely untrained people.

Marc Koska looked at what happens in poorer nations with reuse of syringes in poorer nations and proposed a solution that doesn’t cost any more than the standard syringe out there in circulation today:

So to prevent a natural disaster (or simply being a poor nation) turning into a subsequent AIDS/HIV, Hepatitis or other blood borne outbreak after the dust has settled: any and all syringes sent into a disaster zone need to have this “fire once and break” mechanism.

Aside from the immediate/urgent injuries of the masses affected by the disaster there’s also the medium to longer term concerns. Many are instantly thrown below the poverty level as their possessions may have been lost, destroyed or left behind. Sight is perhaps one of the most important sensory tools we have as humans and Josh Silver has an amazing demonstration of cheap, easily adjustable liquid filled eye glasses which could restore clear vision to people. This is in addition to the worth of such a device in any developing nation as a means for increasing productivity and removing poor vision as a barrier to economic independence for many aging people.

Bill Clinton (an idol of mine for public speaking) talks about the core problem with many developing/poor nations: the need for healthcare systems.

He makes the interesting point that one of the biggest problems in nations without systems is that in an environment of chaos you have no guarantee that effort will result in certain outcomes. Everything becomes a struggle, absolutely everything. Take a developed nation: you know that making the effort to go to a doctor with a child for vaccination will almost always result in you walking away with a vaccinated child (or an appointment the next day if for some reason they couldn’t see you that day).

Bill’s talk is about creating a repeatable model for installing self maintaining healthcare systems in countries that will address the issue of incapacity in those nations which is starting to become the biggest hurdle to tackling various health problems.

Money
A huge need for any disaster recovery is via emergency relief funds flowing in quickly and to the right people. This is what I’d probably call top down aid. But taking a step either side of the disaster event (lead up or later stage recovery) and you have a need for funding at the bottom level in the developing world.

The individual need for economic growth beyond organic funding (e.g. you need a piece of equipment that you simply do not have the cash for but which will allow you to generate income). What will work is not charity necessarily as the old “give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime” states.

Jacqueline Novogratz proposes an alternative to straight out charity she calls “patient capital”:

So rebuilding and pre-building (preparing a nation to be strong and ready to cope with disasters) this is of great importance. Low income entrepreneurs need access to finance too. There are now a number of micro-finance or micro lending options out there.

Now I’ll stretch the mandate of this blog entry (I am the boss of it after all) a bit and attempt to link into post economic credit crisis (see here for my background on the credit crisis in pretty pictures and animations) consumer spending habits and how it could be a good thing for having money available for such disasters. Watch John Gerzema talk about value shifts in consumerism:

So the idea he was discussing was that we’d move away from mindless consumption (I hope it sticks!). People becoming more humble in their purchasing or indeed less likely to purchase unnecessary goods in the first place.

Tourism is trending towards trips that are a bit more low key (which would perhaps make less “touristy” places more likely destinations, perhaps helping to get tourism going in developing nations).

Consumers could also start to put pressure on companies to make ethical choices and be less exploitative/more inclusive of the 3rd world (e.g. stuff like the Fair Trade Association).

I could go on for pages and pages with extrapolations from this basic concept with respect to the 3rd world, but perhaps I’ll leave that for another time.

Education
Education can’t be quickly dropped from helicopter and stuck in a kids arm via some healthcare worker. BUT I strongly believe that the key to solving just about any of our problems (and dramatically lesson the impact of natural disasters) is via education.

Health problems, inescapable poverty, religion based persecution/superstition etc. can all be pushed out of the spotlight by giving people access to education. Access to good, secular education (yes, I do happen to think that teaching kids that “god did it” instead of real science is a rather horrible thing to do) can and does help people’s lives get better. Unfortunately the very worst of bible thumping misinformation (Dying from AIDS is preferable to using a condom type stuff) is getting pushed in massive amounts into the poor nations where lack of funding leaves a massive gap.

But I digress!

With education comes the ability to read and write. This means health pamphlets, coordination with government/aid workers etc. It means independent research/learning can take place (see the end for a great example!).

So in the pre-disaster situation: with education comes the opportunity to better your position in life (economically, intellectually etc). Women are often (always?) the last in a given society to access this basic mechanism for improvement. With that in mind, Michelle Obama’s plea for education (filmed last year) directed at girls is definitely worth a listen:

Education is one of those ways of “disaster proofing” (well.. strives toward disaster proofing at least). It replaces ignorance with knowledge, superstition with reason and prevents a whole sway of flow on consequences throughout society if people are uneducated, poor and with no possibility of escaping such a situation.

Like any good teacher, the ones servicing the eager young minds in developing nations will need materials. So to address that, from a technology standpoint: Richard Baraniuk talks about a system for sharing/open sourcing learning:

I don’t need to go into how beneficial free, shareable knowledge can be in boosting the education levels in any given country. A number of universities have opened up their course materials to anyone with an internet connection. Of course this does tend to be a bit inaccessible where internet is not available or computers are scarce so I guess he talks about community authored, publish on demand inexpensive books which could be extended to poorer nations with little access to the internet. This links in with the programs to bring laptops and internet to the developing nations, so access to content in the first place is definitely an important part of multi-pronged approach to educating the poor.

Mapping

Back to an immediate need in any disaster operation: The need for maps in terms of directing basic humanitarian functions through to use of GPS devices for efficient transport is critical.

There are programmes out there like Tracks 4 Africa who take the approach of handing out GPS mapping units to a community of volunteers and create an average of some fairly volatile paths.

Another community/volunteer approach is described in the “Making maps to fight disaster, build economies” by Lalitesh Katragadda at TEDIndia last year:

Communication

“Data is king” an old buddy of mine Rob once said and making sense of the massive amount of data that is produced during these disasters is far beyond anyone’s ability to sift through it all. So Erik Hersman’s TED Talk on reporting crisis via texting proposes a solution:

It’s a bit of a longer term goal, but a universal means of communication is important in any disaster situation. While I won’t claim that English is the panacea of communication the point is made by Jay Walker on the world’s English mania. It certainly seems like English is in many places in the world the possible “go between” language to unite many different nationalities.

In terms of lifting up the developed world the vast quantity and quality of materials available in English is undeniable, so ability to understand that is great.

Information Visualisation

Hans Rosling shows the best stats about the developing world you’ve ever seen (maybe you have seen it before in my previous post), particularly important to make the right policy decisions and to separate out the myth from that supportable by the data:

Having the right data analysis and visualisation tools is important for managing both the recovery from a disaster (the obvious problem being the collection of data to begin with. The wild variations over initial days of crisis of “estimated deaths” is but one example) and the prevention of the next event via generally improving the country’s situation to begin with.

Optimism for the future

I’ll end this rather lengthy post with some talks (or “grim inspiration” for the first one) on Optimism.

The first (a bit of a long one) by Robert “I’m not Mr optimism” Write is assuring us that history has an overall direction despite the apparent downs. From single cell organisms to today there is hope found in our evolution(s):

And I think a great example of how someone with nothing but a bit of ingenuity and some scraps of materials can do something quite impressive:

and his return to TED two years later a much more confident speaker (even throwing in some jokes..).

Which reinforces my earlier section on education and access to knowledge. William had access to a fairly hard won education. In his readings he came across one book that talked about the principles of wind electricity generation. This gave him the inspiration to dig up some pipes, an old bicycle dynamo and some other bits to make a windmill to power lights, radios and later irrigation pumps and the neighbours’ mobile phones.

If there’s a thing that people need particularly in a disaster situation or at the bottom of the economic rung: it’s optimism.

As William said in his speech: “Trust yourself and believe. Whatever happens don’t give up.”

Donations

All the best wishes for those doing good in Haiti and helping rebuild a destroyed country.

In terms of providing no bullshit assistance (without trying to convert people/spend it on bibles) I’d recommend Oxfam and the Red Cross, two great organisations that have helped millions over the years:

• Oxfam Australia’s Haiti donation page (or the US one for the yanks and UK one for the poms)
• Australian Red cross Haiti Quake appeal (or the US one, UK one)

In terms of some of the longer term goals I talked about, I think the tireless work of people like Fred Hollows is invaluable (restoring sight to people in the poorer nations). See The Fred hollows foundation to donate there. Again, another “let’s get maximum bang for buck” type organisation.

FOOTNOTE: As a (kinda) disclaimer I donate to the above charities as per any “ordinary bloke” off the street might, but have no financial/business or any other ties whatsoever. This blog is not funded by anyone other than myself.

It means attempt to digg or share links end up with the ugly beast rearing its head.

The solution

Find the header.php in the theme editor, locate the bit that looks like:

<?php wp_title(); ?>

and change it to:
<?php wp_title('-'); ?>

The explanation is that wp_title takes in a separator character and defaults to the dreaded “»” if none is supplied (so .

Thanks to this guy here for the info.

Not only can they fly, squeeze under fridges, withstand a wide range of squash/flush and crush attempts (once I squashed one only to have then rip its “spine” out of its squashed body and keep on walking: just head, legs and trailing entrails as if nothing were the matter: better even because it was now a light weight version) but the bloody things don’t even need to piss!

The only known cute cockroach

That means there’s no “breaking the seal” problem on cockroach drinking nights thanks to this amazing little bacteria they picked up 140 million years ago. No conflicts between male cockroaches and feminazi cockroaches over the toilet seat issue.

Fantastic logic on this one "nearly fell in" etc

The cast iron bladdered creatures can stay up all night drinking in the post apocalyptic world without having to head off to the little cockroach’s room if they so choose. As an added bonus they’ve completely removed the whole awkward standing next to strangers at pub urinals issue (play the urinal etiquette game here if you don’t know what I’m talking about)!

Then after a hard night of drinking and recycling urine they can stumble home in the dark using the Earth’s magnetic fields to find their way. Amazing little revolting things.

The report, prepared by the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, finds the cost increase to coal electricity generation if fully-fledged clean coal technology is installed will be up to 78 per cent.

78 percent! Assuming of course they can actually do it at all. To me it still smells like good old snake oil:

Premium quality clean coal snake oil. Guaranteed to prolong the inevitable.

So all that bleating about “nuclear is expensive” or “solar is expensive” is garbage. The alternatives are only expensive because their manufacturing waste needs to be dealt with rather than just puffed up the chimney into the atmosphere (well, unless it is pollution in China I guess.. Then it all probably ends up in the air, land or river regardless). It’s assuming there are the magic clean coal breakthroughs that allow the long term storage of carbon dioxide such that it won’t just float back up (I wonder if the cost of developing a brand new technology factors into this figure?).

The Government will spend $2.4 billion over nine years developing two to four commercial scale carbon capture projects.

It’s money spent on what will have to be dead technology. I mean it’d be great to have some magic process for capturing the CO₂ but I’d have to think the energy/resources that go into that will be so high as to be a waste of time in the long term.

I think we can do almost anything if we exert enough money, manpower and energy (hell, that’s why I want widespread renewable energy to have oodles of energy to do crazy stuff like desalination to overcome drought and remove pressure on rivers.. if you have the electricity for “free” then you can do that sort of thing AND repair the environment). But at some point you start making so little energy that it isn’t worth doing or you compromise on your original goal. I suspect coal companies will settle on a massive compromise. Like a small dick Hummer driver recycling a softdrink can and proudly proclaiming they are green, the coal industry will settle on locking away some small fraction of emissions or in such a way as to be non permanent. Perhaps it will be enough to deflect opponents sufficiently to milk another few decades.

Money spent on solar or wind generation is money on a real technology that works now and has many large scale installations worldwide. Carbon sequestration technology today (as far as I can tell) has no real viable option to long term lock away the gas. The closest we have to “capture” is pumping it into oil wells (to help squeeze more oil out). That notion of using it to help get out more carbon dioxide producing fossil fuels seems to me to not really be helping reduce overall emissions (e.g. “oh look, the coal’s emissions are buried to help us get hard to get oil which is then burnt in cars”).

The Glowing Green Green
I’d say if we’re going to have money spent on currently theoretical but likely looking: go the new generation IV reactors I reckon. We know that nuclear power generation works, because it powers big chunks of the population around the world. It’d power even more if not for the scaremongering.

Generation IV Nuclear reactor timeline. If we only get over demonising nuclear!

The advantage of some of these designs are that they can run off what we currently call waste, unlocking some of the large amount of remaining energy thus making use of the current stockpiles of waste from aging nuclear facilities.

But let’s get back to renewables.

Ideal “best” approach

The ideal best solution overall would be a combination:

1. using less energy to begin with
2. re-using things rather than endless/mindless consumption
3. solar
4. wind
5. geothermal/tidal/hydro/whatever other clean energy sources there are available for the locality

I think massive amounts could be attained via the first 4 of those things which require no new technology (next gen nuclear or magical as-yet-no-working-scale carbon dioxide capturing).

The first is definitely achievable as an article today “Pull the plug, it’s socket science” says:

ALL over the world, electrical appliances are blinking away on standby – and burning so much energy they need 60 coal-fired electricity stations a year to power them, analysis by the International Energy Agency has found.

And they go on to say that “efficiency is the fastest way to cut greenhouse gas emissions” and discuss the role of legislation (since market forces aren’t usually enough):

Dr Jollands believes legal standards on energy efficiency are important where the market is failing to deliver reform and cited the example of set-top boxes for pay television, which are usually switched on all day, every day.

In most homes and offices, set-top boxes are supplied by a company that has no incentive to make them energy efficient because the electricity bills are paid by the consumer. An analysis by the energy agency found that in the United States about 150 million switched-on set-top boxes burned the equivalent of six supertankers of oil a year.

Dr Jollands said there was a cultural aversion to regulation in some parts of the world, but if the market was not working, regulations could be effective without imposing additional costs.

I agree we need legislation to push this stuff forward. History has shown that left to their own devices things do not progress past the “what ever is cheapest”. You have to put a cost or penalty on polluting in order to get things cleaner.

Consumption is not success

The second thing (reusing and cutting back on consumption) would require a major shift in how we view a successful economy. This is probably a topic that requires its own blog, the idea of banishing consumption driven measures. But basically I think that consumption should NOT be the primary measure of success as it is currently because it largely consists of rewarding inefficiency and celebrating unnecessary buying of items. Consider the reuse of something in a consumption based economic model: bad! Bad because no new products are consumed, thus no new jobs making stuff, delivering stuff, stocking shelves, retailing etc.

Consume! Consume!

Should goods cost a bit more to be made robust, repairable and reusable? Hell no: that’s going to damage consumption down the track!

But back to clean coal: it’s no surprise the cost estimates are high because they’re just subsidised by society at large copping the pollution. Naturally when they start adhering to environmental standards they, like every other industry subject to environmental controls, will start to cost more. We already force other types of polluters to wear the costs of filtering, processing or otherwise dealing with waste: coal should have to do the same.

ABOUT 2 million people are considering ditching their fixed-line home phones, as Australians move closer to becoming one of the world’s first wireless economies.

I don’t think I even know any of my friend’s home numbers because they all have mobiles. 100% of them have a mobile phone that is generally going to be in their pocket or handbag versus a home phone that will most likely ring out. Going off the statistics there are more phones than people:

There are 105 mobiles for every 100 people, making Australia one of the most saturated markets in the world behind South Korea, with 114 mobile phones for every 100 people.

This is the inverse of the older generations (say the retirees):

An ACMA study last year found the decline of fixed lines has been led by younger consumers. About 91 per cent of retirees said their main form of communication was the fixed-line phone, while 70 per cent of 18-to-31 year-olds consider mobile phones as their main form of communication.

Death to fixed lines I say! Until we discover we’re giving ourselves brain cancer or something.

Well, that’s not completely accurate, but it is roughly along the lines of “The Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy” in which the dilemma for vegetarians is solved by genetically engineering a creature who wants to be eaten or else feels pain.

In this NewScientist article: “Pain free animals could take suffering out of farming” there’s some discussion of how various findings could be used to lessen the discomfort of farmed animals. So not quite “animals that want to be eaten”, but animals that don’t so much care about pain.

I think the better solution is to step back from the ultra-packed in “factory farming” that seems to be the norm in the USA and parts of Europe and let the poor animals roam around a bit. I grew up in a rural area and I’d have to say any animals I came across appeared to have a pretty good existence:

• nice big open paddocks for the cows or long sheds for the chickens
• farmers keeping away predators and providing healthcare (sounds better than the deal most US citizens have currently)

With modern slaughtering techniques there’s an attempt to minimise the pain/discomfort at the end of the animal’s life, well, except for the barbaric Jewish and Muslim “halal” and “kosher” slaughter.
(Start religious rant)Those religious slaughter techniques are nearly as barbaric today as they were thousands of years back. Still not sure why animals have to continue to have their throats cut and bleed to death slowly today when they could just get the bolt gun to the head (as per the more humane “normal” slaughtering technique). All because some people think that their superstition needs extra suffering to appease some sky god.
(end rant)

I guess the ultimate would be growing meat in a vat though. I mean if it doesn’t have a brain or nervous system then it probably can’t really be in a state of pain as per any reasonable definition. Or perhaps we could reduce the number of farm animals via some sort of human recycling a la the movie “Soylent Green”.

Soylent green.. is PEOPLE!

After all if we’re going to say it’s ok to eat other animals, we should at least be fair about things right?