Posts by Jim Birch

New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD

When global warming deniers spruik nuclear power breakthroughs...

...you'd reasonably expect it's tribalism not science.

This of course has nothing to do with the safety or otherwise of nuclear power, it just that coming on the top of the usual unbalanced output of this reporter I would expect that this story is more of the same crud.

Why screw around with nuclear, when there is plenty of coal, if, as Mr Page regularly tells us, CO2 is not a problem, the earth isn't warming, scientists are on the take, it's all just a hippy fantasy, etc, etc, etc? Nuclear power will always be difficult. (OTOH if AGW is real, nuclear power should get very serious investigation. But that means Mr Page has been pumping out BS.)

Personally, I think nuclear is off the real world agenda for a long time. There's a lead time of a couple of decades to get from a current best-and-safest design plan - eg, with breeder technologies, passive shutdown, geological disaster proofing, etc - to actual operational plants. This comes at a cost that private firms are unlikely to feel like investing, unless there are (1) massive development subsidies by taxpayers and (2) guaranteed approval at the end of the big spend, and (3) a taxpayer waiver of the like hundred billion dollar cleanup operation if something goes wrong. These prerequisites are going to be extremely tough to sell to voters. Should a dogey old reactor in somethingastan go pffft during the long development period all agreements are off again.

The descent of the AGW science and carbon pricing into tribal narratives gives a pretty good indication of how much hope the required the consensus for something like a serious nuclear revival has got. And even if this latest uranium-from-seawater tech actually pans out, it only crosses off one of the little problems.

Cloud engineering could save humantiy, suggests boffin

"In fact that's exactly what is happening, so - assuming for the moment that global warming is a real and terrible menace - perhaps Wood has a point."

Assuming? But Lewis, you've told us many times that AGW is a con job.

So, this kind of thing is just a profligate waste of resources.

Greenland ice sheet not going anywhere in a hurry, say boffins

Lewis Page has a perfect record of selective (mis)reporting of results that support his own maverick opinion rather than the near universal view of actual climate scientists.

That's not science reporting.

Amount of CO2 being sucked away by Earth 'has doubled in 50 years'

YALPDA = Yet Another Lewis Page Disinformation Attempt

The standard YALPDA template: some of the myriad of available climate numbers somewhere have changed as research progresses therefore I am right there is no AGW.

YALPDAs never explicitly make this claim because it is a joke. As usual, there is no context because it would evaporate the story. Even if this result was accepted (it is not yet) AND the increased CO2 sink capacity persisted indefinitely (highly doubtful) it won't stop atmospheric CO2 increases (and it demonstrably hasn't). The real conclusion is that if this result holds up and persists it does give a bit more time to break the CO2 addiction. However, there are a lot of unknowns here, the big one of course being the ability of modern states to respond to the AGW threat with anything more that wishful thinking.

Q. Is Lewis Page collecting cheques from some right wing US "think" tank, or is he just a science incompetent, or both?

Forget 'climate convert' Muller: Here's the real warming blockbuster

Good Stories != Science

Oh dear. So a revision of the methodology for analysis US temperature records disproves AGW (once again.)

Sorry science kiddies, complexity hurt your heads, doesn't it? The analysis of temperature records is complicated and the technology and methods improve over time. Expect more improvements in future which may push different data sets up or down. The heat island effect is particularly nasty because the artefact is typically larger than the signal and the raw US record is clearly increasing at an anomalously high rate. This ain't news. This is why climatologists use a range of temperature records, satellite measurements and a variety of proxies to estimate the global temperature, not a single localised geographical data set like US airports.

Sleek new Macs violate fanbois' Retinas with display garbage

This is fun!

Slagging off Apple glitches has got to be one of the most exhilarating things in my life!

Study: Climate was hotter in Roman, medieval times than now

If the earth was at any time warmer than now then global warming is ok. If you've ever had a broken leg before then having your legs broken is ok.

etc.

easy.

Global warming: It's GOOD for the environment

Is this news?

It well known that most plants will grow faster at higher CO2 levels. CO2, water and sunlight are the primary nutrients plants absolutely require, and CO2 may be a limiting nutrient (depending). Not only can plants grow faster at higher CO2 levels but they can also grow better and are able to increase the levels of secondary metabolites that they embed in their cells to make themselves toxic to the insect and megafauna that want eat them. That megafauna includes us and things that we like eating. There is a level of CO2 at which grasses will become too toxic for ruminants.

Of course, things adapt. On long time scales, natural selection produces new species that do better in new environments. New insects and herbivores with different biochemistries will appear if you wait long enough. In the meantime there's a lot death and extinction.

Humans adapt too. The Black Death wiped out half Europe's population but humans survived. Some of the American natives survived the arrival of European diseases. This is adaption in action. It typically involves massive levels of suffering and death.

Humans are generally pretty stupid. We do have the capacity to adapt intelligently before things screw up, but this is the exception not the rule. We are creatures of habit. If something works, it feels good, we keep doing it, then we invent satisfying stories about why it's a good idea and can't imagine things could be different. Nature doesn't give a rodent's rectum about our stories. It's a machine that brings beings like you into existence and destroys them without a thought.

The science is in on anthropogenic global warming. It will have good and bad effects. If you're a certain species of bacteria living in the Siberian permafrost it might be a great thing. The dawn of a new age. For human it will average pretty bad. If you don't mind the deprivation it brings to you, your kids and your people, the good new is that we'll survive as a species and maybe even come out of it smarter and better. Just remember that natural selection works by elimination of individuals just like you, not by magic.

Amount of meat we eat will barely affect future climate change

Re: Same s*** different day

Did Gore actually say that we'd be inundated after 20 years. I think not. You made that up.

You can read the IPCC reports and see what they actually say if you can be bothered. If you don't want to be drip fed crap go to the authoritative sources.

Climate change is slow. It's not cataclysmic, now, next year, next decade. More like a slow accumulation of some negative impacts - albeit with some positives. On time scale of a hundred years or two there will be significant negatives and they'll be wondering why we let it happen for a marginal short term benefit. If you don't care about the future of the world past your lifetime you don't have to worry much about climate change. And if you find small modifications of your own behaviour for the common good just too offensive to contemplate, well, that's you. What really beats me about you guys is that you need to believe these crazy factoids to feel ok.

May 2012 was second warmest on record. The warmest? 2010

How long is climate?

Climate is the weather averaged over a sufficiently long period that we don't have to worry about it.

Study fingers humans for ocean heat rise

Re: memory

I'm a little older and I can remember when scientists thought the the sun went around the earth. This is complete and irrefutable proof that scientists are wrong and the little guy is right. Anyway, they're all involved in an enormous international conspiracy to steal research grants from hard-working taxpayers then they just make stuff up and never do anything useful. If you want something you can really put faith in I'd go for a think tank funded by US billionaires, these guys obviously know which side of the bread is buttered.

NHS axes HealthSpace: 'Just too difficult' to use

Governments waste large amounts of money trying ideas that don't work and private companies don't?

Sorry, wrong. Fashion and group-think exist everywhere. Being anti-government might be the basis of a philosophy but the idea that it will result in a world free from bad decisions and useless activity is a complete empirical failure. Successful enterprises of all kinds recognise that not everything will work and failures are more that just a fact of life but also an opportunity. The idea that this would not apply to government is a more than a little strange.

Who seriously wants a government that takes zero risks?

Greenland glaciers not set to cause disastrous sea level rises - study

The Page Rule holds True

If the by line is Lewis Page and the subject is climate change then the content is crap.

So far so good but now we've reached a weird new place. Is this guy having some kind of mental event or something? He's actually moved on from cherry picking to something we might call inverted cherry picking. Why would he include a quote in his article that directly contradicts his article FFS?

How politicians could end droughts forever But they don't want to

Sea water contains a lot of boron which passes through the osmotic filters. You wouldn't want to drink it undiluted if you are young, old, etc. Allowable levels of boron have been bumped up lately in places where osmosis plant are being built without any new empirical evidence. I think you'll find recycling waster water is a much safer, smarter and cheaper option if possible. People just have to get over drinking recycled water.

For a good summary see

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/problems-with-desalination-plants/3796870

Himalayan glaciers actually gaining ice, space scans show

Re: Watch the excuses come out

If your sister part of the Let's Make Up Science Mega Conspiracy tell her to stop.

Death Star dinosaur aliens could rule galaxy

Dinosaurs, but nice

The success of humans is dependent on the ability to cooperate. Sophisticated technology requires many hands and minds to work together with a reduced tendency to exploit, threaten, kill and/or eat their neighbors. Of course, it's an ongoing battle between exploiting your fellows as resources or partnering up to get the big stuff done because the many biological payoffs are with the exploit and cheat strategy.

In the end, it's the dinosaurs/newts/whatever that have evolved the cooperation genes along with brains that will be able to build spaceships. I doubt they'll think we are just a new type of breakfast.

Amount of ice in Bering Sea reaches all-time record

Golden Cherry Picker Award

Even by Lewis Page's standards that article takes weirdness to new level. It deserves an award.

Alternately, kick him off the Reg and resume normal standards for rational discourse.

What does the Titanic's sinking tell us about modern science?

Quick summary: Lewis Page declares that some science doesn't say a lot.

This long and wandering article didn't say a lot either.

Climate change linked to extreme weather surge

It's the bullets, not the gun...

Anyone who thinks it's the H2O not the CO2 that's important needs to be able to describe how to raise the CO2 level without raising the H2O level. They are coupled. In a simple column model of the atmosphere this is a clear no brainer, CO2 drives H2O. In the real atmosphere this would be the "default" effect that you would expect if other things tend to balance out. You'd want a good reason to believe otherwise - well, I would anyway, because random processes tend to work like that: dice rolls work as physically expected, dead things rot, etc. Strange attractors are unusual.

For the people who haven't totally departed from actual physical science (into flat out denial, wild conspiracy theories, etc) the most likely process that might throw a strange attractor are clouds which are made of water and reflect sunlight back to space. It's logically possible that increased H2O might mean more clouds and stop or reduce the heating. This is, of course, a simplistic take on clouds, since clouds are dynamic phenomena. More water vapour does not make more condensation if the temperature is increased. This isn't something we can deduce from simple theory, we have to go out and measure it in the real atmosphere. It's hard to measure, since we need a statistical results. The result - to date - is that the cloud feedback is not going to stop global warming but more work is needed to get better numbers on the cloud effect. Nailing this effect down is one important experiments that is being designed into current meteorological satellites.

Of course, there's another extremely powerful experimental result that demonstrates that clouds won't stop global warming: the global temperature record. The fact is: CO2 is increasing, water vapour is increasing, and temperature is increasing. And, when known confounding factors like aerosols, the El Nino cycle and net solar insolation are removed from the global temperature record it shows a remarkably steady increase, just like the CO2 level, see link below.

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/the-real-global-warming-signal/

SUNKEN LINER Titanic iceberg riddle answer FOUND ON MOON

Another spanking theory heading for a tone down

The biggest influences on iceberg variations are currents and time of year. Currents are largely driven by winds. Even if the moon zipped in real close and floated a lot of grounded icebergs up North those bergs have to get down to the Titanic. In fact, the Titanic sank in an area where the current is usually the northward flowing ice-free Gulf Stream, not the southward Labrador Current that would bring icebergs. An unusual wind pattern over the preceding months would be required to increase the Labrador Current so it pushed down to the UK-NY shipping route bringing the icebergs. I don't have any record to prove that, but that's how currents work.

So, kind tides might have floated a few more icebergs; but a bumper current was needed to get then down into the shipping route.

Wireless breakthrough: one frequency, multiple signals

Breakthrough

This would be a real breakthrough if they could send more signals point to point along the same line, but they can't. They are effectively splattering the signal across a wider area and using some phase jiggery-pokery to send different bits of the signal to different places. They're using a new spatial encoding trick but it doesn't change the basic physics.

More complex spatial antennas could always send more stuff, the trouble is they're spatial so don't expect one built into in your mobile phone. To get the sort of bandwidth that you can get from a strand or two of fibre out the chunk of spectrum a telco might hold, you'll need an antenna the size of a city and a massive amount of cables and electronics to drive it. Which is kinda what's happening, when you think about it.

Oceans gaining ACID faster than last 300 MILLION YEARS

My guts are better than you guts!?

A rough simplified guide to the science:

The pH is a logarithmic measure of the density of hydrogen ions (H+) in water. That means that a pH difference of 0.1 is is actually a 25% change. It won't matter so much to big organisms but the microbiota that use calcium carbonate in their shells will find they need to do more biochemical work to stop their shells from dissolving. This includes things like algae and plankton that form the first rung or two of the food chain. If they go, everything up the ladder gets whacked. Calcium carbonate is actually soluble in seawater already but organisms are able to add other stuff to the crystal structure to stabilise it. It's a question of how difficult it becomes as to how well they survive. If they go, something will replace them eventually but it might take 10,000 human lifetimes to get going, during which time there will be no fish to eat. This hasn't happened yet, we're just at the worrying signs stage.

The history of pH doesn't rely on dinosaur oceanographers - it can be figured out to to a fairly precise level because certain minerals will or won't form in sediments at a given pH. You just look at what's in the rocks laid down at the time in question; the basic chemistry doesn't change.

There is an alternate take on this data which runs like this: if some scientist disagrees with what I feel in my guts then they are incompetent fools and/or part of a sophisticated global conspiracy. Take your pick.

Some people take the approach that if they've got

Conclusive proof of human activity causing glacier to vanish

Tenuousness as an art form

Lewis Page has claimed the Most Tenuous Factoid Used To Attack Climate Science Award with this article, completely trashing the previous incumbent, himself. I can't image how this one could be beaten I'm sure he'll be able top it. Obsession is the mother on invention.

Arctic freshening not due to ice melt after all, says NASA

Sad

Does poor old Lewis Page spend his entire life hunting down potential denialist news articles, or only a large part of it? I'm waiting for an article that openly admits global warming, or one that debunks some of the crap that is sprouted by denialists and then repeated endlessly even after it has been torn to threads. Give it a try Lewis. You can't be as stupid or scientifically incompetent as you are making out.

It might not hurt. Then again, it might.

Cops target climate-sceptic bloggers in three countries

Onwards and Upwards...

Ok, "Norfolk police are operating under the orders of climate scientists" now. I guess that was the next logical step in the Great Global Climate Conspiracy, a coordinated activity of tens of thousands of pseudo-scientists around the globe so cleverly camouflaged as real science that it can only be recognised by people who can't do basic statistics.

I don't see a problem with that, how about you?

Greenland 'lurched upward' in 2010 as 100bn tons of ice melted

Sea level, surface response to loading and changes in ocean floor level are actually quite complex phenomena that require careful analysis and modelling.

But fuck that, let's just go with some simplistic single factor intuitions. Viola! We're all experts. Cool.

Wi-Fi may damage sperm, boffins warn

The secret of a successful science story

Invisible rays and genitals.

Suspect science is not an issue.

Duff Mars probe team sweats under Medvedev menaces

As usual, Stalin gets held up as Mr Bad Guy because he's no longer around to defend himself.

Superhero oil-burping algae will save the world

Sustainability is a certain future, get over it

I don't get how you can poo-poo sustainability when you're proposing a sustainable solution. Sustainability is a dead certainty: we can't degrade the earth indefinitely. It's just a question of how trashed the environment will get before sustainability is achieved. I agree with you that sustainability will be achieved with some high tech solutions rather than returning to the days of Jethro Tull but it will be sustainability none the less.

You might benefit yourself by investigating why you have an emotional reaction to sustainability. The answer is biological. Your brain was forged in in an environment where exploitation of available resources was the only successful strategy. Factors outside the individual's control - disease, homicide, warfare and starvation - kept human numbers at sustainable levels. Sustainable thinking, indeed any thinking beyond the present and immediate future was biologically unnatural, a waste of precious energy. It is only really achieved with the aid of surplus, order, and the guidance of mythologies, and then only precariously - just a little stress and we fall back on our built-in pleistocene mental framework.

Breaking news: Man lands on Moon!

...and I thought all news was recycled :(

Peat bogs will not cause runaway global warming

Back on track

Good to see that the Reg is back on track with cherry picked simplistic hooha. A couple of recent real-world complex science articles in the Reg - of all places! - were giving me category confusion. Thanks for returning to the familiar tribal landscape.

Google's anonymity ban defied by Thomas Jefferson

Reputation

Martin Nowak's work on the evolution of cooperation imply that large communities are likely to be destroyed by free riders without mechanisms for creating and advertising personal reputation. This is a result based on solid mathematics and validated by simulation experiments. I regard these kind of results as a lot more robust than listening to the opinions of the day. (Anyone who is interested should read Nowak's book, Supercooperators, for a review of his and others work in this field.)

In practice, the negative effect of the lack of a reputation process is clearly present on the net. We only need compare the average quality and civility of anonymous versus named commentators on blogs for a vivid demonstration of this. Outfits like eBay use reputation to weed out crooks and incompetents but the mechanism is actually corrective: we have probably all seen the strenuous attempts of eBay sellers to protect their reputation. This is the theory of cooperation in living detail.

Google's policy seems to me to be fundamentally good for the future of the Internet. I expect to see a time where groups will only allow interactions with people who have a good online reputation, for example, discussion groups only open to people with a G+ or similar validated identity and history. I expect to see systems evolving that allow a reputation to receive negative and positive points and for those attributions to be sourced to known individuals, so that an attribution is rated by the reputation of the giver (and back-rates the giver.) The maths and the systems are complex and will need to evolve but the potential benefits are enormous, and probably essential. The members of a traditional village can learn each other's reputation and protect and extend themselves appropriately for the interaction; a global village requires more sophisticated mechanisms.

As for the supposed attack on liberty, I'd say this: Liberty won't survive without good systems to protect it. Free riders will always have payoffs to rort large open systems unless they are detected and advertised. Google's real name policy does benefit Google but in the long run it is critical for us punters too. I'm happy for the monitoring and limiting of Google's use of our identities (and, despite it's large size, I'd generally rate Google's behaviour as pretty good, ymmv) but mechanisms for reputation are intrinsic to the survival of liberty. We all want the ability to free ride when it suits us, and, as Nowak shows, generosity is required for cooperation to persist, but it should be given by choice, not taken at will.

Room-temperature brown dwarf spied just 9 light-years off

Well Done El Reg!

Thanks for going the extra 9 light years and sending a photographer out to get that high quality snap of our new warm friend.

Google lands patent for, um, estimating shipment time

The patent system is crazy.

The patent system needs to be subverted. The big patent holders have it sown up to everyone's cost. It won't improve until it becomes unworkable for the big players. It's a pity Google don't have a patent on the electronic submission of patents.

Patents are supposed to support real invention, not be a land grab by the powerful. Software patents are the worst case. There's very few patents that a few smart people couldn't reinvent in a few hours - or minutes - when presented with the problem. They are incremental improvements in systems that fail any realistic obviousness test.

DDoS attack, sex warrant won't stop Assange's leaky discharge

Goddam atheist liberals

Invade somewhere that Assange isn't, trash the country, kill 100,000 people, blow a trillion dollars and blame it on goddam atheist liberals and homosexuals. And, nearly forgot, bring on GFC II.

Much of recent global warming actually caused by Sun

Read the paper

Anyone who imagines that this paper is some kind of substantive rebuttal of global warming should actually go read it. The paper basically suggests that some of the ideas about the effect of insolation may need tweaking but that's all folks. That is, of course, if you don't believe that global warming is a complete fiction invented by thousands of so-called scientists who despite years of study really haven't got any clue at all and are just saying whatever they need to so that can get their grubby fingers on those lucrative research grants. They probably communicate with secret handshakes too.

All CO₂-spewing kit now in existence is OK for the planet

Yeah, but...

This analysis is correct but it's a bit of a strawman. No one is seriously expecting existing CO2 sources to be replaced en masse. This would provide environment benefits but it would be incredibly costly and take a lot of time, and, it just won't happen. The best we can hope for is improving the worst bits of existing infrastructure.

The real problem is not the existing stuff, it's the new stuff. The analysis indicates that we could forget about global warming if all new plant was CO2 neutral. Great! Unfortunately, a really big IF seems to have crept in unnoticed. Coal power plants are being built in massive numbers and there's a huge number of people out around who want to use that power to move into a middle class high energy lifestyle.

The analysis that really counts includes the projected growth in energy use, and the CO2 hit of that energy. Desirable scenarios require low CO2 solutions for that new stuff and old stuff that gets replaced. The economically reliably - and equitably - way to achieve that is via carbon pricing. The problem is, this will cost, and a lot of people want a free ride and have got a great story about their special needs.

(Then again, the whole AGW thing might be some totally weird incredibly complex plot by thousands of trained earth scientists and their economist mates who have managed to hoodwink the trusting public, with the only people who are smart enough to pick it up are a bunch of libertarian nut jobs, a handful of right wing think tanks (aka PR outfits), and few fat journalists. Yeah, right.)

Budget to cost over a million jobs: Official

Oh dear...

Suddenly everyone is an economics professor sprouting zombie zero-sum linear economic theories that might be able to run a pie cart.

Ad industry OKs climate porn

Porn?

So that's what porn is? I've been suffering an illusion, thanks.

Britain needs meat trimmers and boners, not techies

Frank said it first...

You could make more money as a butcher.

-- Frank Zappa, "Cosmik Debris"

Google Earth faces terrorist target airbrush bill

Street Directories

Terrorist might use might Street Directories to plan attacks too. We mustn't allow this kind on information out. If you want to own a street directory you should at least have to register with Homeland Security and get vetted, inside and out. Ditto GPSs. Ditto sunglasses.

What's the cost of global warming?

Two Bob Experts

I can't believe how a helluva lot of people think they are experts in an incredibly complex area of science. I've got a degree or two in this stuff, but right now I'm not spending a large chunk of my life analysing the problem in collaboration with people who actually know what they are talking about, so, I'm going to have to trust the experts. There's no good alternative to putting in a sustained effort on big complex questions. What we see in this article and it's comments thread what humans do when presented with a problems that are way more complex than their brains can absorb in an hour or day or two: grab a few feel-good factoids and fashioning them into a narrative.

I guess you guys wouldn't baulk at redesigning your car engine to improve fuel efficiency or building a jet plane for your next holiday? Or would you trust the people who have put in years of actual training, data collection, sustained analysis and collaboration. Why do you bother going to a doctor when you're seriously ill, consult a lawyer if you need a watertight contract or even get a electrician to wire your house?

When your DIY heart surgery goes well, I might trust you as an instant climate expert. Climate is tougher.