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Dr Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, beaten and arrested at US border Boing Boing http://bit.ly/6nGsQL /via @GreatDismal

Cheers,

Chas

Posted via email from Chas's posterous

#BAD09: Climate Change: Reduce, reuse, recycle, relieve and reverse.

Climate change is a reality - to get that out of the way that's my opinion.  I also believe it's mostly anthropogenic - caused by humans.  There is a very direct correlation between our CO2 - check out these graph http://rainforests.mongabay.com/09-carbon_emissions.htm and you can clearly see the start of the Industrial Revolution.  If you argue it's a coincidence I think you're clutching at straws. 

Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle... The simplistic tagline for the whole movement but there are some bits missing here, it seems to me.  I think this should be changed to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Relieve and Reverse... 

Reduce

By far the most popular strategy as it sounds so simple… turn off that light, buy a Class A fridge and ride to the shops on a bike made from coconut husks… let’s take a look a some figures. 

• Power         25.9%
• Industry      19.4%
• Forestry      17.4%
• Agriculture   13.5%
• Transport     13.1%
• Waste & Water  2.8%

Source: http://bit.ly/rrtce

With Power at the top of the list renewable are our salvation surely?  Well not exactly… for a start renewable does not always equal sustainable.  I'd love to know the percentage of readers are nodding sagely or scratching their heads at this point.  But it is, I assure you, true.  Renewable energy falls into two categories that I like to call "replaceable" and "effectively inexhaustible".   

Effectively inexhaustible is the easy one - as long as the moon orbits close enough to affect sea levels we have tidal energy.  As long as the sun warms the earth we have hydro, solar and wind.  As long as earth is hot in the middle we’ll have geothermal. By the time any of those things cease to be true we'll either have migrated off planet or ceased to exist.  However, the slowness of governments to invest has left them all woefully underfunded until recently.  They can’t escape the blame for that misjudgement now the fossil fuels are both dwindling and causing a problem when consumed. 

Replaceable is rather subtler.  Growing plants for biodiesel or bioethanol seems like a win, win - it's replaceable and you get the benefits of "biosequestration" - the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere by the plant.  But there are two slight snags here - one is that the removal of these plants from the food chain in large quantities is causing concern in third world and developing countries where they form part of the staple diet of the people who live there.  The second snag is deforestation - the economic benefits of growing agrofuels are a direct stimulus to the destruction of forests in many poor countries.   

There is some hope here though as the 2nd generation non-food crop fuels using cellulose to produce bioethanol addresses the first snag - though not the deforestation issue as wood is a potential source of cellulose.  The 3rd generation biofuels using algae to produce a diesel like substance seem the most promising.  One has to wonder though, when we start using those in industrial quantities whether we will cause another distortion in the Earth's biosphere and simply trade one set of problems for another. 

Power consumption then is going to take time and money to reduce.  

Tackle industry then, the next biggest contributor.  The biggest producers and the fastest growing, China and North America aren’t keen to contract their industrial or economic growth – particularly during recovery from the recession.  

The constant growth in population means agriculture is set to grow rather than shrink, as is the need for waste processing and fresh water production (more on that later). 

Why, you may ask, are politicians so obsessed with the item that’s fourth on this list?  They are all offsetting their flights, cycling and driving hybrids while they tax us with substantial fuel duties and airport taxes… the simple answer is in the short term they are tackling what they can with the tools they have.  Transport is the only thing left where a quick short-term to medium term gain can be made… or is it? 

Our democratic systems let us remove (eventually) people who say things we don't like. This is problematic when the news is as bad as this because they almost literally can't tell us without losing their job... what should they be saying? Three suggestions: 

•                Stop shopping
•                Eat less meat
•                Stop breeding 

However, you will notice that my first point would have a direct effect on the first two items.  If we aren’t making things and moving them around we immediately cause greenhouse gas output to drop.  So there’s the first thing they should be saying but won’t: The recession has caused the biggest drop in CO2 for 40 years – more than 2%. Stop Shopping. 

The conversion of crops into animal proteins has several down sides.  First it is inherently inefficient and uses a lot of water - another increasingly scarce resource in some areas.  There's a huge range of figures for water use from 100,000 litres per kilo of beef, to 60 litres but even the lower figure would be a cause for concern bearing in mind that water purification has a carbon footprint.  Second it removes viable foodstuffs from the human food chain - why feed it to an animal when you could just eat it?  Third it generates waste in the form of methane and solid waste.  Modern industrial farming is fairly well geared up to deal with the solid waste by re-using it but methane capture is still a comparative rarity.   

Methane is, of course, a significant greenhouse gas.  Methane is around 8 times more potent per molecule as a greenhouse gas but is present in smaller concentrations.  The relative effects of the greenhouse gasses can be seen here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas Note water vapour at number one, CO2 a distant second and methane third.  Though the action of sunlight on methane causes it to degrade into, oh dear, CO2 and water, the top two. 

Thus you can see that simply eating the crop would lead to a decrease in the number of cattle kept domestically, a drop in methane production, a drop in the greenhouse gasses inherent in the feeding, slaughter, processing, storage and transport of meat plus an abundance of spare crops and water.  Also you have more flexibility to leave a plant growing in the ground instead of killing and refrigerating it and uneaten plants are 100% recyclable.  Eat Less Meat.  Why politicians fight shy of this I’m not entirely sure… maybe those of you in the know could leave a comment on my blog? 

Breed Less.  Referred to in the BBC’s “Costing the Earth” series as “The Elephant in the room” this is, far and away, the topic politicians are most wary of.  Cancel the voter-breeding program?  Decrease the number of future taxpayers? Are you mad?  But the fact remains that each human life equates to an average of 4 tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year (but skewed towards richer countries where birth rates are high and the figure between 10 and 20 tonnes CO2-eq per year).  With the population nearly quadrupling from the year 1900 (1.65 billion) to 1999 (5.9 billion) and due to reach 9 billion by 2050 it doesn’t take a mathematical genius to see we have a problem.  Remember these mouths all need food, shelter and fresh water… and will all make climate change worse by their very existence. 

And so to the second R… 

Reuse

This is another good one.  Everybody gets it.  No one likes waste and taxpayers can easily equate savings to lower taxes.  The politicians are barging down an open door here – except for the fact they’re greedy.  Using chip oil biodiesel is nowhere near as cheap as it should be in some countries (notably the UK) because they simply couldn’t resist taxing it.  And this is the chief problem with using tax as an incentive to change behaviour – as soon as they succeed in changing your behaviour they lose tax revenue that they need to suck up from somewhere else.  If that somewhere else is an area where you pay tax then you gain absolutely nothing. 

Landfill off gassing, methane capture from agriculture all an absolute doddle to understand, but actually quite hard to do and requiring significant investment in storage and transport infrastructure. 

Recycle

Another easy to sell and easy to understand measure – I’ve nothing to add here except to observe that recycling must itself have a carbon footprint and I’ve made a mental note to blog at some future point on whether the gains from recycling compare favourably with the carbon footprint of producing a new item from scratch.  My gut tells me there may be some surprises there. 

Relieve

The two principal effects here are direct effects like the rise in sea level or desertification and indirect effects like the impact on a country’s economy from a change in dominant weather conditions and average temperatures.  

This is a seldom-discussed point in the mainstream media or politics because it is generally accepted that all problems must be “solved” and that it is government’s job to solve them.  The idea of accepting and mitigating a problem is not considered a valid solution.  However, while curing street crime by giving us all stab vests might well be considered dereliction of duty, I don’t think acting directly to avoid the impact of things we can no longer entirely prevent is a bad idea. 

We should immediately start moving vulnerable populations from coastal areas to avoid the problems caused by rising sea levels.  This would also reduce the death toll in future tsunamis.  At the other extreme we should also use climate models to either evacuate or irrigate areas that will be affected by desertification. 

Various European countries whose economies are based around winter sports are already adding non-snow based activities to their resorts to avoid the economic consequences of not having snow.  Countries whose temperatures will drop will wish to pursue an opposite strategy moving away from activities that assume a large amount of sunny weather. 

Reverse

The recent Discovery Channel series “Ways to Save the Planet” showed a number of geoengineering techniques aimed at slowing, stopping or even reversing the current trends in climate change.  Governments worldwide really need to get behind these efforts, as their current strategies all seem to be piled into the first three Rs… let’s not repeat the error we made with renewable energy, let’s all get behind the research NOW and find something that works.

Posted via email from Chas's posterous

Cue the Violins

I watched the second episode of the new series of House tonight (Broken part 2) and, I confess, I cried and I'm not at all ashamed to admit it. The plot was brilliant (and a welcome departure from the usual formula) and the closing music Seven Day Mile by the Frames put the finishing gloss on my tear streaked cheeks.

Music can do that can't it - I've found myself welling up simply listening to a violin played by Nigel Kennedy.  But sadly those skills are not available to me and at my age I think are beyond my reach.  But writing is not...

I'm elated, inspired and excited by House making me blub.  You see I want to write professionally, so to be affected in that way by writers at the top of their game fills me with the desire to emulate that feat.  To form an emotional connection with a reader, listener or viewer is, to me, a magical and precious thing...

Please join me in my journey,

Posted via email from Chas's posterous

Testing Posterous

Day 1 of 30 Missed the midnight deadline so back at day one. Testing
Posterous to see if I've set it up right. Should do blogger, facebook
and Twitter.

Posted via email from Chas's posterous

Maybe it is rocket science...

Be a Blogger Day 1 of 30: I was struck by the power of accumulated experience this morning while working on a website. I bet X would really enjoy doing this, I thought. He's a smart guy, he wouldn't be phased by this, it's easy enough, it has structure and patterns that make it easy to see what it does. I was staring at a page of XML.

To me it did look comfortingly easy and clear. But last week my Mum pointed out I've been programming computers since I was 16 - as near as damn it 30 years. So I paused for a second, looked at the code again and thought about it. I tried to remember how it felt to first look at a language I didn't understand. I tried to recall that "first driving lesson" feeling - but I don't have it. I remember struggling really briefly - seems like a day or two - but my youthful enthusiasm battered it down like a balsa wood door. Though I rather suspect I struggled a lot more and that time has dulled those memories.

Those memories are viewed through the lens of 30 years of accumulated knowledge. I've learnt five 3GLs, four or five 4GLs, half a dozen scripting languages, several dozen tools for designing, coding, testing, debugging, version control and documentation. I also realised the best skill of all is the skill of acquiring new skills. I haven't had any formal training in XML but, as part of a Joomla! template, its purpose in the larger picture is as plain to me as what I've just written

I have to conclude I really shouldn't use the phrase "It's not rocket science..." or "It's quite straightforward..." to people who are just starting out. I'm incapable of seeing it from their viewpoint now. With regard to X, he's 22 and could shower the world balsa fragments if he chooses to, but I shouldn't tell him it'll all be easy, because it won't.

Raisin Bar

I retrieved this from the cut off back of a packet of Sun-Maid (tm) Raisins. My Mum made it for me many times when I was a child and it is, needless to say, a fond childhood memory. I'm leaving all the brand names in out of courtesy to the original copyright holder.

Ingredients

• 4oz (115g) Butter or Margarine
• 6oz (170g) Soft Brown Sugar
• 2 Eggs
• 1/2 tsp Vanilla Essence
• 4oz (115g) Plain Flour
• 1/2 Level tsp Salt
• 2oz (60g) Kellogg's All-Bran(tm) or Bran Buds(tm)
• 6oz (170g) Sun-Maid(tm) Seedless Raisins

The original recipe calls for icing but I think it's better plain.

• Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.
• Beat the eggs and vanilla essence together and gradually beat into the creamed mixture.
• Sieve flour and salt together and fold into the mixture with the All Bran/Bran Buds and the Sun-Maid seedless raisins.
• Grease the bottom of an 8 x 8 inch (20 x 20 cm) square cake tin and spread the mixture level.
• Bake at Gas Mark 4/350F/180C for one hour.
• Turn out and cool.

Victoria Sponge

Sat in bed reading Paul McKenna's "I Can Make You Thin" I gently brush aside the crumbs of Victoria Sponge and turn the page. I stare at the cake box mulling over the idea of a third slice, with the stern words of a Doctor ringing in my ears with the phrase "morbidly obese".

It seems odd that as a species we are so successful, yet, as individuals, so often flawed. Why does something as marvellous and complex as the human brain come with no instructions? How has has evolution propelled us to such heights when most of us can so happily indulge in potentially harmful habits like drinking, smoking and eating crap?

It took the emergence of Richard Bandler and John Grinder to make a first quantum leap in self control. I have their tool (NLP) firmly in my grasp, and I've had a degree of success with it in the past (destroying a phobia my Mum had in about 10 minutes) However, I have consistently failed to use that tool for my own benefit.

The answer, I think is the sheer power and comfort of habits. Every weekend I come home with the firm intention of swimming a couple of times, going for a bike ride and making an impact on the two hundred plus unread books I've bought from Amazon in the last ten years. And every weekend I completely fail to do those things. This is because I have a habit, a pattern, a furrow which I find comfortable and reassuring.

I have a two and a half hour drive home on Thursdays and I'm usually quite tired from a week of sleeping badly in strange hotel beds. When I get in I enjoy, without a pang of guilt, the jumbo sausage, fried chicken and chips that Sue brings home. I enjoy a couple of Murphy's and a bit of TV before bed. I enjoy going to bed gone midnight, getting up around 10:30. But these are things I need to change. The adult swimming session starts at 07:00...

I spend Friday productively, for the most part, progressing various projects... but that bike ride... when do I do that bike ride? It's evening again and I've been working all day, time for more Murphy's, more TV, another late-night-and-lie-in. Something has to change...

Saturday is chores day followed by an evening out with friends. Another swim missed another bike ride avoided... Something has to change...

Sunday, big lie in, listening to BH on Radio 4 and the Podcast of Friday Night Comedy. Another missed swim and the overcast skies make a bike ride an unattractive prospect. Something has to change!

I've bought Bandler's new book "Get the Life You Want" and the chapter headings indicate that there are elements of moving towards desirable behaviour as well as curing bad memories and modifying bad behaviour. A month from now I hope to be reporting the wonders dipping cellery into a tub of houmous and talking nostalgically of deep fried chicken. I'll keep you all informed how it goes.

PS To all snooping health insurers I only really had one guilty slice of sponge, call it artistic licence!

They're well meaning but those round robin letters people send at Christmas have their funny side, here's my take: http://ping.fm/RSXLo

RT @Glinner: http://bit.ly/3hukrY Please retweet this if you agree with the sentiments. G.Linehan's take on the Express/Dunblane story

I've got an excellent example of parpering http://tiny.cc/nerb #parper #wikifictionary