Never bored again? Dream on...

When abibliophobe meets iPhone something beautiful happens. Could happen. I, a self-confessed sufferer of the fear to not have something to read, had a bit of an Eureka-moment when I realised iPhones can be used as eReaders, and that the number of eBooks available is staggering. One needs to never be bored again! Until one's battery runs out. And that happens fairly soon with an iPhone.

Picture the moments where a supply of eBooks on one’s phone would come in most handy. Say; one gets stuck in an elevator. One visits a friend but he or she is late and can't let one in. One is driving and encounters mechanical problems. These are all situation in which charging a phone might prove a challenge.

There is, theoretically, a solution to this. There’s manual chargers; just rotate away and you breathe life back into your device! I’d bought one, as my car doesn’t have a cigarette lighter, and thus won’t charge my satnav. I unfortunately found out that so much rotation is required to produce the slightest noticeable increase in battery power on the satnav one runs a serious risk of hurting oneself providing it. But would an iPhone need so much less power it would become feasible to manually charge it?

I tried it. The answer is no. There seems not to be such a thing as a free lunch! Another lesson learned…

It could be so beautiful!

Climategate ponderings

…”after all, all evidence of anthropogenic warming has been disproved…”

I don’t hear it very often, probably because I spend most of my time among people well-educated in climate matters, but every time you hear it it’s one time too many. I heard it a few weeks ago, from a person not educated in climate matters, but surely a most intelligent character. And it kept haunting me. He said this referring to “climategate”. Everyone has heard of it, but most have no real idea what it was about. As the allegations by climate sceptics who has found a flaw, and thus a stick to beat the dog with, were serious, big investigations were conducted to find out if indeed climate scientists were all crooks who made it all up and were all part of a big conspiracy, or whether they are just humans who are fallible like everybody else. Yes, sometimes people sit on their data; yes, sometimes people express themselves in a somewhat unfortunate way. Of course it pays off to display your results in such a light they look most interesting. And yes, of course there are cases in which people go little bit too far with this. Does that invalidate all of climate science?

I can’t possibly grasp how many people are working in this discipline, and how much data we gather in total, and how many papers we produce all together. It’s huge! Just suppose the investigations would have disclosed man-induced warming to be a myth; wouldn’t that have meant that thousands and thousands of scientists worldwide would have been fired? Wouldn’t governments worldwide have withdrawn their funding? Wouldn’t that have been a much bigger event than the Gulf Oil Spill*, for instance?

It’s not a useful question, for through investigation after investigation the data stood solid as a rock. (I know I'm only linking to Wikipedia in this entry, but that's a source people tend to trust more than most other sites I could link to!) That, however, is hardly a juicy piece of information. It’s more fun to keep your blinkers on and claim all evidence of anthropogenic warming has been disproved! As untrue as it is.

It’s even possible the guy who inspired this blog post was jesting, and I just didn’t notice. It's happened before. But the thought stands. There are really people out there that think it’s all a scam and such has been proven, but how do they fit that in with their vision on how society works? Are all governments in the conspiracy too?? Maybe they don’t think at all. Maybe I shouldn’t even care; governments know better to such extent they still support climate science, and how are some anonymous angry ignoramuses in the street going to affect that? But it bothers me anyway…



*ps I know the oil spill did goodness knows how much damage to the Gulf ecosystem, which hardly makes it comparable to mass collapse of a hypothetical climate scientists conspiracy, but I am certain that such event would beat the oil spill in human death toll...

From troglodyte to lady in two weeks

One of the most important things in life is good health! If you don't have that it's bad enough as it is, but almost everything in life that is enjoyable suffers from it. Take me, for instance! It has been almost 2.5 weeks since I last did something remotely silly and muddy. A few days later I fell ill, and since then I have only been able to blog about literature, science, architecture, and promenading along the sea front. I haven't gone underground, I haven't dangled from ropes, I haven't participated in some race over a ludicrously muddy track, I have done nothing irresponsible or muddy at all in what seems ages! I think I'm turning into a lady. I think I'm teetering daintily on the brink of an identity crisis. I might very well switch back soon to my former troglodyte self, but there are no guarantees! Maybe this is permanent...

Not the best editing job in the world, but it serves the purpose...

Two-hour seaside holiday

The plan was to have a whole week of holiday. But day after day was consumed by ill health. Even the new year came without my normal shape having been restored. But then, on the second day of the year, I had recovered enough to merit a modest and calm trip. Hugh, in spite of still having plenty of employment for his handkerchief, had proposed a little road trip, and I felt up for it. That way we could have one day of careless leisure before working routine would take over again!

After due consideration we decided to go to Fowey; it had a tiny little fortress; not anywhere as impressive as many in the vicinity, but in contrast to most this one could be visited in winter. It had some other architectural gems, and plenty of coastal path, and undoubtedly some nice pubs, and it wasn’t too far away. And we had never been there before. I couldn’t resist googling if there were any interesting remains of the quite considerable (cluster of) mine(s) with which I associate this town: Fowey Consols, but unfortunately, there seemed to be little left of it.

The other side of the estuary mouth seen from Fowey.

Through weather that couldn’t decide on rain or shine we drove thither. And were greeted by a very charming town indeed! Unfortunately, we were also greeted by a phenomenon I greatly dislike: the parking machine that only accepts coins. I had none of value, and Hugh only managed to rake together enough for 2 hours of parking. We would later decide on whether we would get change in town and refill the machine, or limit ourselves to these two hours, and seek solace elsewhere afterwards. We would in the end choose the latter, and regret it.

Fowey

View from Fowey over the estuary

We walked down to the beach from where the little fortress could be reached, and subsequently to the fortress itself. It was most charming! We even tried to scale the walls in the most innocent of ways, but from the inside that was little success, and from the outside it didn’t provide the excellent photo opportunity I had hoped. And while at it we even gave some kids what their parents clearly viewed as the wrong ideas.

The fortress

The fortress from the inside

Having seen that we strolled leisurely through town like a proper English lady and gentleman. Time was pressing though; we would have no time for lunch before our parking time would run out. And that was when we regrettably decided to leave, and find a country pub to have lunch in.

The pub of our choice was reached without problems; parking, though, proved trickier as there was some horse-related event going on which lead to many cars, often with cumbersome trailers. But that was the least of our worries; the kitchen of the pub was closed! And we feared the same may hold for all country pub kitchens nearby. We had been spoiled a bit by the pubs on more frequented Dartmoor...

By the time we got back to the car, only a minute or so later, some horse-pertaining person had already deemed it a good idea to block our exit. And acted as if our request to move his car was the grossest injustice ever hurled at man. The day had clearly taken a wrong turn! We decided to try Launceston; we had to drive through anyway, and larger towns might have more liberal opening hours. But before we could check that we had yet another encounter with a parking machine; this one delightfully did not only accept coins but also credit card payment performed by telephone; a feature I hadn’t come across before, and with which I struggled a bit with due to the use of voice recognition software that couldn’t distinguish between my “P” and “D”, but which did work in the end. I want more of that! No more Dickensian scenes with coins as the only tender.

We went into town to check our faint hope on a pub meal. Launceston presented itself to us at its bleakest and most soulless; our already slim hope shrank to nothing, and quite numbed and hungry we devoured a pizza at a depressing kebab joint. The pizza refuelled us such that we had the energy to ogle the Roman castle the town boasts on from a distance; of course it was closed. In the fading daylight it did provide an impressive sight though. One day we may be back to have a closer look, and then we will make sure we seek lunch before 2PM!

All in all our holiday had boiled down to these 2 hours in mainly sunny Fowey. It’s better than nothing! Tomorrow back to the grinding mill...

Cute seals: a good thing?

The times of paracetamol and cough syrup aren’t over yet, and therefore, neither is the time for blog-backlog-reduction. Months and months ago, I attended the Second Marine Institute Research Centre Conference, and I was struck by a talk dealing with how the public views the marine realm, and its environmental issues. Some of the findings were unexpected, or somewhat sour, or funny, or a combination of the above. The full title of the talk was “Public interest in ecological health for marine conservation communication: why charismatic megafauna are not always the answer” by Rebecca Jefferson from (then)MarCoPol.

After her talk I asked if she would mind if I blogged about all this. She didn’t; on the contrary, she was so kind as to send me three chapters of her thesis, on which the talk was based. And thanks to these I could now, six months later, finally convey some of that knowledge to my blog.

What she had set out to investigate boiled down to what sort of people know what about the UK subtidal realm, how they know it, in what way they are worried about it and why, and how one should go about if one wants to communicate about these issues with them. 

For finding out something about who knows, and worries, about what a survey was held among people in the categories: coastal resident, inland resident, coastal manager, recreation employed, and marine scientist. Interestingly, all groups tended to roughly worry about the same things. Except the managers. They worried about management. Nobody else did; they worried mainly about pollution and overfishing. Managers really live in a different world! 

Other findings were that hose with an interest in the marine realm generally had acquired that by rummaging around on the beach as a youngster, even though that often does not involve actually seeing spectacular animals. Documentaries seemed to help too. Scientists were the most concerned about climate change, and inland residents worry about what they see on TV, while coastal residents worry about what they see themselves. Maybe not so surprising. When it came to learning more, it turned out that the best trusted source of information is, (sigh of relief), scientists. Unfortunately; these overwhelmingly mention it does nothing for one’s career (perhaps even the opposite) to engage in education of the lay, so they are quite reluctant to fulfil this possible role. (Yes we have heard this before.) 

Rockpooling (even at night, as I did when I took this picture) sparks interest in the marine realm!

Addressing the question how one can make people care, the author investigated who is familiar with what UK marine species, and which of these they are interested in. Species actually most relevant to marine health are structural plants and invertebrates, but these might not spark the imagination very much. Flagship species for conservation campaigns tend to be charismatic macrofauna, such as dolphins. They arouse lots of sympathy, and can serve to make something fuzzy as biodiversity easier to grasp. Polar bears, for instance, do a good job of making people care about arctic warming. But there is a catch, of course; in the US there is a positive correlation between charisma of a species and the level of protection it gets under the Endangered Species Act, and a negative correlation between protection and how endangered it actually is

A specimen of CMF (Charismatic MegaFauna)

Source: Creative Commons

When a large number of people was asked about whether they had heard of twelve carefully chosen species, whether they thought these species occurred in UK waters, and whether they were interested in them, interesting patterns emerged. The list covered a range of charismatic and less endearing, ecologically important and unimportant, economically interesting or commercially trivial species. And of course, everybody had heard of seals, puffins and sea horses, and cared about them. Funnily enough, people overestimate the occurrence in the UK of non-charismatic species and underestimate that of charismatic ones; in the general eye, UK seas are seen as low in worth, so they can’t possibly host charismatic species such as puffins. Surely they live in more exotic waters! But dull worms; yes, they must certainly abound in UK waters. There’s potential here for raising enthusiasm for marine protection! 

A sand mason worm; quite an unloved species from the study

The public might swoon over cute seals, but it is not fooled into believing their presence or absence is the best indicator of a healthy marine environment. However; what you see is what you care about, so though it has no basis in fact, presence or absence of litter on the beach was seen as the best indicator of a healthy sea. 

What I thought was the most hilarious finding of this project, was that the results in who is interested in what species were also split out according to gender and level of education. And it turns out that women are interested in cute animals, while men are interested in animals they can eat. Typical! And a university education lessens that gender difference… 

Requiem for a species

The patient’s library has more to offer! After books full of history, politics, trivia, and even fiction it’s time for a review of yet another climate related book. I must confess I didn’t read this in my sick bed, but when I did read it I didn’t have time to write a review. And now I have, although it has become a bit of a blend between a book review and me just having a private rant. So what book is it this time? It’s the view on the climate issue from a professor in public ethics. Not a climate scientist, but clearly a man who has informed himself well. It’s littered with relevant references. And what does he have to say? Roughly this: anthropogenic climate change is a massive problem, and there are endless lists of reasons why it’s not been dealt with properly at present, but we should change that. Have we heard that before? Yes! But is this book worthwhile? Yes! So as I don’t think there are many sour climate sceptics visiting this blog I suggest, reader, you read on, if only to remind yourself of some of the matters at hand.

Requiem for a Species, by Clive Hamilton.

He starts by saying that anthropogenic climate change is as close to fact as science gets. For me, that is evident. And yes, I am a climate scientist, so yes, I may be in some global conspiracy that aims at world domination by spreading climate lies. Whatever. The science is clear, whatever non-scientists may think. The problem is, non-scientists are allowed to base themselves on cherry-picked information, or none at all, and we aren’t. And we say what people don’t want to hear. And we can prove it, but nobody will ever have a look at our proof. Is any member of the public willing to plough through piles and piles of scientific articles, which hold the data? Of course not. And one could say: we made all these data up. Hmm. Sometimes a scientist is caught making things up. And there goes their career! Anyway; I digress.

The science is clear, but politics don’t respond. Once in a while targets for cutting CO2 exhaust are formulated, but has any nation ever reached such a target? And even if they were reached: they are based on what is politically feasible, and that has NOTHING at ALL to do with what’s scientifically justified. And exhaust of greenhouse gases goes faster and faster and faster. And it is not necessary; if you want to know what could be done read either George Monbiot’s "Heat", or Chris Goodall’s "How to live a low-carbon life". But both books suggest rather thorough change. And as the neighbour isn’t making that change, we are not likely to do it either. This also work on the larger scale; many are the politicians who point at China, and say it’s no use trying to do something about climate change as long as they don’t either. But since when is “somebody else is worse” an excuse for detrimental behaviour.

And it’s scary; hardly anyone has any grasp on what CO2 does. It’s just a number; isn’t it, reader? How many of you have an idea of pre-industrial levels, of the natural variability, and such things? Even with a well-educated audience I suppose not many have a solid grip on these things. And when it comes to the changes already taking place: if you’re a farmer, you might notice changing life cycles (plants in bloom earlier and earlier in the year, strange species invading), but most people aren’t farmers, and spend most of their time staring at screens.

It has been estimated that September 25th, 2009 was what is called “World Overshoot Day”; the day at which what the Earth produces is equalled by what humans consume. So every day since then, we consume more than can be replenished. And in spite of that, every government around the globe want “growth”. That’s a collision course if there ever was one. Can we do without? This book tries to answer that question. And could, perhaps, technology save us from the link between growth and destruction? In this light it makes sense to behold the “IPAT equation”: I=P*A*T (environmental Impact depends on Population, Affluence and Technology). Trying to curb population won’t do much good; it’s the rich that exhaust most, and they already have few kids. Affluence: nobody wants to spread poverty. So technology here is the only one that might give hope; however, Tim Jackson has calculated how much technology has to provide to keep the “I” within limits. It does not inspire much optimism.

And back to growth: Stern already famously calculated for us that said mitigation is cheaper than adaptation, but nobody looks at the longer term, especially now, in times of economic hardship. Cynically enough, growth may be a good thing in societies where people still die of hunger or easily preventable diseases, but in western society it doesn’t, as above a certain threshold (and in western Europe, we are generally above it) money doesn’t make one happier, as long as it is everybody who doesn’t gets richer. It matters more how much you earn with respect to the neighbour, than what the absolute amount is. Growth, as well, is a silly thing in a society where you can make money by selling self-help books on de-cluttering your house.

This is turning into a bleak story. (How surprising). So we do know what should be done, we know how to, but these days there is no political will; many a “green” energy plan (link gives example) has recently been scrapped since the European economies started faltering. And consumers are more likely to buy into green wash than into initiatives that really make a difference. Some may say we could invest in geo-engineering, but beside the fact that I'm sceptical about it, there is even less money for that sort of jokes nowadays.

Not everybody is enthusiastic about this book

So what will happen now? A thorough evaluation of that question needs much more reading than I can currently afford, but count on changing precipitation patterns, rising sea level, melting ice (also where it’s necessary as drinking water supply), and of course simple higher temperatures. The latter will be felt worst on land, due to its lower heat capacity; and land, that’s where we live. Canada and Siberia will probably benefit, due to more land coming within the climatically arable zone, but that’s little solace for, say, African famers, whose land will migrate out of that zone. And in general, the Southern Hemisphere is screwed, as it will lose arable land, but won’t win any, as at the crucial latitudes there’s only sea there.

So what must we do? Clive Hamilton says: shake off all indifference, ignorance and fatalism, and act anyway! And that is probably the only reasonable thing to do. Though I admit that every time I write such a review, my heart is heavy. So don’t listen to me: listen to Hamilton! And Monbiot! And Goodall!

Happy new year!

May you all have a marvellous 2012!