James E. Hansen Retiring From NASA to Fight Global Warming

One of the few modern heroes. Willing to stick his neck out and fight for what he believes.

James E. Hansen Retiring From NASA to Fight Global Warming

Tory Polluters Win Energy Bill

BBC News - Government delays setting carbon target until after election

How does one read this?

Tories

a) refuse to commit to CO2 reduction
b) as a "compromise" continue to commit to funding of alt.energy
c) I bet that that alt.energy includes nuclear, hence the Tories plan to funnel money to their friends in nuclear industry

Crap.

Stone Spray

Nice! Architectural scale 3D printing with eco-material.

The Wrong Kind of Magic

The Arch-Druid on the Wrong Kind of Magic

The Physics of Collapse

Excellent systems model of how complex societies collapse.

Hat-tip : Jean-Luc Delatre

Here's a thought, vibing off that previous idea of combining processing and heat generation, I'm answering a Quora question on BitCoin.

Why not a special heater who's heating element is a custom processor designed for bitmining? You create bitcoins as a side effect of heating your room, or boiling your kettle :-)

Update : It's happening.

I've wondered about this for a while :

in the United States heating uses even more energy (6 percent of the national total, according to the Department of Energy) than servers do (3 percent). If servers doubled as heaters, we’d be getting the same services for half the energy cost.

From the funeral of Jose Claudio Ribeiro da Silva

Nice example of a house which generates energy.

George Monbiot :

Yesterday in the Guardian Peter Preston called for a prophet to lead us out of the wilderness. "We need one passionate, persuasive scientist who can connect and convince … We need to be taught to believe by a true believer." Would it work? No. Look at the hatred and derision the passionate and persuasive Al Gore attracts. The problem is not only that most climate scientists can speak no recognisable human language, but also the expectation that people are amenable to persuasion.

In 2008 the Washington Post summarised recent psychological research on misinformation. This shows that in some cases debunking a false story can increase the number of people who believe it. In one study, 34% of conservatives who were told about the Bush government's claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were inclined to believe them. But among those who were shown that the government's claims were later comprehensively refuted by the Duelfer report, 64% ended up believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

:-(

Normblog worries that Monbiot goes "too far" in that :

That people are sometimes resistant to being persuaded of what is true (when it is indeed true) is readily observable. But a theory purporting to explain why they must be resistant to persuasion is something else. It risks opening on to suggestions of an alternative method of 'winning' them over. There is no democratically acceptable alternative method. Sometimes you can persuade people, other times not. Welcome to the real world.

But there's more to be said than that. Daily, science is going to turn out evidence of human decision making being irrational : affected by unconscious environmental cues, learned associations, chemical triggers, partisan feelings etc. Yet our belief in democracy is fundamentally, philosophically, committed to humans as rational and free decision makers. What should we do when this commitment becomes scientifically untenable?

Will this, itself, become a reason for politicians to reject science? To deny the results of psychological research in favour of an unjustifiable faith in human agency? Will someone come up with a philosophical compatibilism? (As in "don't worry, decisions are still free and rational even though we can now see their causes"? But how sustainable will this be as we also discover better ways to manipulate beliefs?)

We have always sought to persuade. Sometimes we succeed. And sometimes we don't. But what happens when it becomes clear that persuasive power is mere "engineering", available to the highest bidder?

The Guardian discusses "scrappage" for the UK.

Seems to me that this could (and should) be done, but with a far more aggressive green agenda.

Why not have the government give :
- £3000 to anyone scrapping their car and buying an electric one.
- £2000 for a small hybrid (accepts bio-diesel or alcohol)
- £1000 for a small, fuel efficient car
- £500 for anyone upgrading to any new car (on the assumption that new cars are more efficient)

In response to the last post Oli commented :

I'm not convinced that an economy with a growing numerical size (as measured by some currency) necessarily has to have a growing ecological footprint.

Agreed in principle. But probably hard to find counter-examples in practice.

Basically, if the *numbers* are growing, but the "consumption" isn't, then that's just *inflation*. And governments are already concerned to keep inflation low, meaning to keep the growth of the money in sync. with the growth of consumption.

But then Fractional Reserve Banking specifies that money *has to* grow, so to avoid either catastrophic failure or inflation, the only thing governments can do is try to *increase* "consumption".

That's the big issue as I see it. Not that *we* consumers are affected by FRB - we'd like to consume anyway - but that government policies are hostage to the desire for growth.

So when, for example, BAA promises that a new terminal at Heathrow will help increase business in the UK, the government is faced with a choice between a rather vague, "long term" threat of ecological damage (and frankly there's a tragedy of the commons because they think that if they don't allow it, another government will); and a very concrete risk that they won't make their growth quota this year and either a) they raise interest rates, throttle borrowing, create less money and a whole lot of debtors will go bust and people lose their jobs; or b) they don't raise interest rates, borrowing continues, extra money is created to pay the interest on last year's debts, but without new consumption, the extra money is soaked up in rising prices.

Now it's possible, in theory, that with technological innovation, consumption can increase while the ecological footprint decreases.

In practice, a) an innovation is a one-time event which drops the cost of a particular product, but doesn't alter the *trajectory* of increasing consumption (in other words, it's a delay, not a solution); and b) - worse - often the reduction in resources consumed by a product simply becomes a drop in price, which, in turn, *accelerates* consumption. People buy 20 dresses a year instead of 2.

In other words, to have growth in consumption without growth in ecological footprint, you need a constant and reliable stream of technical innovations which are reducing the footprint of a product-category *faster* than the increase in consumption of that category including acceleration of consumption due to the fall in price.

It's hard to think of examples.

What Johnny Chung Lee said.

Today's fascinating miscellaneous links :

• Amazing account of the bias against maneuver aircraft and in favour of strategic bombers. Seems that people in air-forces just can't see the evidence in front of them.


• I support(!!!) Boris Johnson's gardening initiative.


• How will Peak Oil affect dentistry? - read and shudder.

It's now too late to stop global warming.

Now it's just a question of where to try to hold the line. (In the middle of all kinds of unknown unknown feedback loops.)

Meanwhile even the IEA admit peak oil is coming within 15 years. (Watch the video)

Simon Dale's Woodland Home is cool.

Great rant against the idiocy of buying bottled water.

Of course, people buy bottled waters because they're addicted to branding. So, what's the answer? Here's a Viridian Design challenge : to design a trendier re-usable water bottle. One that looks good and makes a statement. If the iPod can make pirating music trendier than buying CDs, why can't a "tethered" aquaPod? NO! Nestlé already got there first with that branding. It *is* a bottled water :-(

Need a better name too, then.

Depressing.

Hard to know how to stop this. The Amazon is way too big to police. There are always going to be people at the edge who are tempted to cut further into the forest. Do you devise a ring of "farm-free zones" all the way around? Prohibit exports of soya or crops from the surroundings? What about the millions of people who already live in the forest?

Big spider
Originally uploaded by interstar.

There's a very big spider that lives under the house where the owners and the building workers are living (Serra Bonita is under construction).

Everyone calls her Rosa.

This isn't Rosa, but one of her (slightly) smaller sisters. (About 7 or 8 inches in diameter.)

Humming Birds
Originally uploaded by interstar.

Every afternoon, the humming birds come to be fed. They've got so tame that they'll land on your hand. This, however, is definitely the most dramatic photo I got.

See that grey in the background? This is cloud forest and the clouds roll right up the valley and engulf the research centre.