The irony continues as those who shun action on climate change are suffering the most from climate change.
Along with the United States, Australia has suffered a major drought this year, “the worst for 1000 years.” Australia and the U.S. are the only two industrialized countries that have not ratified the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
More… ➡
I’ve just finished the last book in Peter Watts’ Rifters Trilogy. To say I like them would be an understatement. But, saying why I liked them is probably more relevant.
The trilogy consists of the following books:
Now, how can a trilogy consist of four books? Well, when Watts wrote the third book of the trilogy, Behemoth, if ended up too long and the publishers forced him to divide it into two parts – strange but true.
If you can tolerate Science Fiction, then I highly recommend these books because they provide and excellent view into what our world’s future might look like. The story line, itself, is fictional and imaginative but the world he paints behind the story line is an excellent extrapolation of where today’s trends may well take us.
Like the better SciFi writers I’ve read in recent years, he has a background in science and the attitude of a generalist and these things deeply inform his work. He switches easily from biology to computer science to psychology and back again as he weaves.
I especially like the Notes and References section he includes at the end of these books. Many of the ideas he paints into his plot have a basis in the things science is revealing today.
Enjoy!
– The economic miracles which are China and India are filled with people who, quite reasonably, would like to translate their new economic successes into living lives like Americans do.  Lots of consuming, eating meat, wasting power – all the things we take for granted in the US.
– The bummer is, the world hasn’t enough resources to allow a billion or more more people to live lives like we do – there simply isn’t enough ‘stuff’ to go around. And this isn’t going to be easy to explain to them – indeed, no one wants to listen. “You got to drink from the fountain of plenty – now it’s our turn!”
It’s just another reason why I’m not particularly hopeful about how things are trending.ÂÂ
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SHENZHEN, China — When Zhang Feifei lost her job in this booming Chinese factory town, she was not terribly concerned. Jobs had always been plentiful in Shenzhen’s flourishing economy.
Then Ms. Zhang, a 20-year-old migrant laborer, lost her identity card and was shocked to find that no factory would hire her without a bribe that she could not afford. Desperate for money, she ended up working in a grimy two-room massage parlor in a congested alley here, where she has sex with four or five men each day.
“I was terrified at first, and I was really embarrassed not even knowing how to use a condom,” said the soft-spoken young woman, casting her eyes downward as she spoke. “I didn’t have any choice, though. Little by little, you have to get used to it.”
Few cities anywhere have created wealth faster than Shenzhen, but the costs of its phenomenal success stare out from every corner: environmental destruction, soaring crime rates and the disillusionment and degradation of its vast force of migrant workers, Ms. Zhang among them.
Shenzhen was a sleepy fishing village in the Pearl River delta, next to Hong Kong, when it was decreed a special economic zone in 1980 by the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. Since then, the city has grown at an annual rate of 28 percent, though it slowed to 15 percent in 2005.
Shenzhen owed its success to a simple formula of cheap land, eager, compliant labor and lax environmental rules that attracted legions of foreign investors who built export-based manufacturing industries. With 7 million migrant workers in an overall population of about 12 million — compared with Shanghai’s 2 to 3 million migrants out of a population of 18 million — Shenzhen became the literal and symbolic heart of the Chinese economic miracle.
Now, to other cities in China, Shenzhen has begun to look less like a model than an ominous warning of the limitations of a growth-above-all approach.
More… ➡
– this story is in the NY Times which requests an ID and password to login.  Getting these is a one-time free deal and well worth it.
How balmy has it been in the Alps these last few months? At the bottom of the Hahnenkamm, the famously treacherous downhill course in this Austrian ski resort, the slope peters out into a grassy field. And it’s just 10 days before Christmas.
Snow cannons are showering clouds of white crystals over the slopes, but by midmorning each day, the machines have to be turned off because the mercury has risen too far for the fake snow to stick.
“Of course I’m nervous about the snow, but what am I supposed to do?” said Signe Kramheller-Reisch, as she walked in a field outside her family’s hotel, wearing suede shoes and a resigned expression. “We have classic winters and we have nonclassic winters.”
This season is certainly shaping up as a nonclassic, but it may be a milestone of another kind. The record warmth — in some places autumn temperatures were three degrees Celsius above average — has brought home the profound threat of climate change to Europe’s ski industry.
If venturing outdoors without a jacket is not enough evidence, there are two new studies — one that says the Alps are the warmest they have been in 1,250 years and another that predicts that an increase of a few more degrees would leave most Alpine resorts with too little snow to survive.
More… ➡
– note this article in in the NY Times and they often ask for a login ID & password. These are free to obtain – you just sign up.
New studies project that the Arctic Ocean could be mostly open water in summer by 2040 — several decades earlier than previously expected — partly as a result of global warming caused by emissions of greenhouse gases.
The projections come from computer simulations of climate and ice and from direct measurements showing that the amount of ice coverage has been declining for 30 years.
The latest modeling study, being published on Tuesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, was led by Marika Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
The study involved seven fresh simulations on supercomputers at the atmospheric center, as well as an analysis of simulations developed by independent groups. In simulations where emissions continue to rise, sea ice persists for long periods but then abruptly gives way to open water, Dr. Holland said.
In the simulations, the shift seems to occur when a pulse of warm Atlantic Ocean water combines with the thinning and retreat of ice under the influence of the global warming trend.
Scientists ascribe most of that planet-scale warming, including a warming of the shallow layers of the oceans, to the buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases in the atmosphere.
After 2040 or so, ice persists in summer mainly around Canada’s northern maze of islands and the northern coast of Greenland, a region that always tends to accumulate a clot of thick ice.
Separately, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder found that the normal expansion of sea ice as the Arctic chilled in fall had been extraordinarily sluggish this year, following a pattern seen in recent years. The November average ice coverage was by far the lowest since satellite measurements began in 1979, said Walt Meier, a scientist at the ice center.
“It’s becoming increasingly unlikely that things will be able to turn around,” he said. “It would take several very cold winters and cool summers, which seems unlikely under global warming conditions.”
Several experts not involved with the studies said they were significant for human affairs, as well as biology.
More… ➡
– note this article in in the NY Times and they often ask for a login ID & password. Â These are free to obtain – you just sign up.
– I agree with the folks at Southern Methodist who oppose the Library.ÂÂ
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The New York Daily News reported last month that President Bush and “his truest believers” are launching “their final campaign — an eye-popping, half-billion-dollar drive for the Bush presidential library.”
Bush is attempting to raise $500 million to build a library and think tank at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the alma mater of First Lady Laura Bush. “The more [money] you have, the more influence [on history] you can exert,” one adviser said. Much of the money will be used to build a “legacy-polishing” institute:
The legacy-polishing centerpiece is an institute, which several Bush insiders called the Institute for Democracy. Patterned after Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Bush’s institute will hire conservative scholars and “give them money to write papers and books favorable to the President’s policies,” one Bush insider said.
Now, SMU faculty, administrators, and staff are speaking out. In a December 16 letter to R. Gerald Turner, president of the Board of Trustees, members of SMU’s Perkins School of Theology have urged the board to “reconsider and to rescind SMU’s pursuit of the presidential library.”
We count ourselves among those who would regret to see SMU enshrine attitudes and actions widely deemed as ethically egregious: degradation of habeas corpus, outright denial of global warming, flagrant disregard for international treaties, alienation of long-term U.S. allies, environmental predation, shameful disrespect for gay persons and their rights, a pre-emptive war based on false and misleading premises, and a host of other erosions of respect for the global human community and for this good Earth on which our flourishing depends.
The letter concludes, “[T]hese violations are antithetical to the teaching, scholarship, and ethical thinking that best represents Southern Methodist University.”
Original article: ➡
A gray and overcast day in Christchurch, New Zealand but it isn’t dampening my spirits at all. Today is shaping up to be an interesting and fun day.
Moving day
Today is moving day for me. If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that when my wife, Sharon, and I came here back in August, we bought an apartment in Christchurch. Well, today is the day that the deal is completed. In the US, we’d say “Closing is today.” Here in New Zealand, they say, “Today is Settlement Day.” Either way, the papers we signed back in August come to fruition today and, hopefully by noon, money and papers will have changed hands between the bank and the solicitors (that’s what Lawyers are called here in NZ) and it will all be a done deal and I will be handed the keys.
I’ve been leasing an apartment on the ground floor of the same building where the unit we’ve bought is. Our new unit is on the 6th level. In the US, we’d call it the sixth floor because we number floors so the ground floor is one. But here in New Zealand, they seem to prefer to call the ground floor zero. So in NZ terms, our apartment number is B5-2 for Building B, Floor 5, Apartment 2. It has a slightly different floor plan and I will be taking some photos once I get up there and post them here. Here’s one of the building, itself.
Moving should be easy. I’ve got the things I carried here and suitcases and a few additional things I’ve bought since arriving a month ago. I’ve gotten a desk, an office chair and a printer, for example. I think I’m going to become good friends with the building’s elevator, today. Both the apartment I was leasing and the one we’ve purchased came fully furnished.
Technical Fun
Back on December 2nd, I installed new Stats software here on this Blog. Stats are how you can follow how many people are reading your blog, where they are coming from and when they’ve visited. You can even see which pages they’ve been looking at and for how long. The software I’m using is called BBClone and it is from Germany. Many thanks to Kevin at cryptogon for helping get it installed.
It’s interesting and a bit of an ego addiction to look and see how many people have been reading along and where they are.
This morning, for example, I noted there was a burst of 18 readers in a single hour. I went and looked in the detailed stats and I could see that someone in Estonia on an XBox had apparently ‘discovered’ the site and passed it on to a number of other readers – at least, I think that’s what happened.
If you are curious what my stats look like, you can see them here: ➡ Note, they are divided into Global, Detailed and Time categories.
There is another way to see traffic on this web site and that is via a piece of software called ClusterMaps. With this product, you can see a map of the world and it will show you where the readers are coming from and in approximately what volumes. You can see this here: ➡ Once you have the world map on your screen, you can click on any continent to see it expanded for more detail. Note also, that you can request that the cluster sizes be made smaller for better detail/resolution.
Both of these facilities are also available for you to look at along the right margin of this web site towards the bottom. Look for ‘Stats’ and the world map image.
More Technical Fun
Yesterday, I had several windows open on my screen here. In one window was a real-time web cam image of the room at home (near Seattle, Washington in the USA) where our computers are. In another window was an exact image of what was on my wife’s computer’s screen at that moment in that room at home.
I watched my wife walk into the room, spend a moment petting Kali, our cat, and then she sat down at her computer and opened an E-mail I’d written to her a few minutes earlier. After she read it, she replied to it.
As she wrote her reply, I watched her typing at her computer via the web cam as Kali walked back and forth over the keyboard ‘helping her’ and I could see an exact copy of her screen her as well and I saw the words there as she typed them.
As this was going on, I had an image in another window here of the screen of my computer at home, which was just across the room from her, where I was doing some accounting work. And,I was listening to music via the Internet on KUOW FM which is a radio station in Seattle and I was also pinging half a dozen server systems here and there to make sure they were all up and running and available to me if I needed their services.
I’ve been working with computers continuously since 1977 and I am still amazed year after year at what they can do. If my wife has a problem on her computer at home, I simply link to her screen from here in New Zealand, and as I fix the problem, she can see me zooming the mouse cursor around on her screen and typing – just as if I was sitting there with her.
If I forgot some files at home, I simply attach to my system there and transfer them here.
When I want to do accounting for our business there, Sharon just scans the documents I need into her computer and they are then available to me here to read on the screen or print so I have hardcopies.
Currently, we have the web cam setup in the hallway. Here a shot from just a few minutes ago of two of our cats just hanging out:
I am careful with my bandwidth usage. The Internet is not an infinite resource. When I listen to music via the Internet, I always choose low bandwidth feeds. When I’ve got a web cam running, I only update the image at intervals rather than continuously. And, the software that lets you see and control other computer screens remotely (radmin) is quite gentle on bandwidth. So, don’t be thinking that all this hi-tech fun is wasting huge bandwidth. It ain’t so.
– If you want to see what the end of an empire looks like, you don’t have to look too far to see it in subtle clues like this.  Political and religious conservative right-wing types are rotting a nation into mediocrity from within.  They are giving away what was one of the greatest political experiments in human history. There could be no surer course for sending a nation backwards in time than by bending its scientific findings to conform to religious and/or political aims.
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Some 10,000 US researchers have signed a statement protesting about political interference in the scientific process.
The statement, which includes the backing of 52 Nobel Laureates, demands a restoration of scientific integrity in government policy.
According to the American Union of Concerned Scientists, data is being misrepresented for political reasons.
It claims scientists working for federal agencies have been asked to change data to fit policy initiatives.
The Union has released an “A to Z” guide that it says documents dozens of recent allegations involving censorship and political interference in federal science, covering issues ranging from global warming to sex education.
Campaigners say that in recent years the White House has been able to censor the work of agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration because a Republican congress has been loath to stand up for scientific integrity.
More… ➡
– I’ve written on this story before here and here. It is amazing to me that certain threads within Christianity have gotten so far off the road and into the bushes.
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A loose coalition of progressive social-advocacy and Christian groups are lobbying major retailers, most-notably Wal-Mart, to stop carrying a high-end video game that they say urges born-again Christians to convert or kill others who don’t adhere to their extreme ideology – including Muslims, Jews, and Catholics.Â
The game is Left Behind: Eternal Forces, based on the popular Left Behind series of Christian-themed novels, which are based on the theology found primarily in the book of Revelation, according to the publisher’s Web site.
The action of the novels takes place after the Rapture, when Christian believers have been shuttled to heaven and the nonbelievers have been left behind to face the return of the Antichrist.
The Campaign to Defend the Constitution, Crosswalk America, Talk2Action and the Christian Alliance for Progress are among some of the groups that have joined forces to boycott the game and to lobby Wal-Mart to remove the Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game from its shelves.
Said Clark Stevens, co-director of the Campaign to Defend the Constitution, to the San Francisco Chronicle this week:
It’s an incredibly violent video game. Sure, there is no blood. (The dead just fade off the screen). But you are mowing down your enemy with a gun. It pushes a message of religious intolerance. You can either play for the good side by trying to convert nonbelievers to your side or join the Antichrist.Â
This is the fourth in a series of postings on this topic. You’ll need to read the earlier posts to see what’s on here.
The big new today is not that Telecom has fixed the problem. They have not, to my knowledge. It is that a fellow up in Auckland has devised a functional work-around until Telecom does get things sorted out.
You can find a “How To” document on on the fix here: ➡
Read everything before trying this and if it doesn’t work for you, do not contact me – I am not going to do technical support of this.
You are welcome to add comments to this post, however, to record your experiences with this fix so others can learn from your work.
Cheers.
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