Can painting a mountain restore a glacier?. Although even if this painting a mountain white will have only a small local effect, it is an inspiration. There are a lot of us (part of the problem) so if we all undertook something similar in scale the impact on climate would be great.
All posts by Rob
Forty years on
The Limits to Growth report is nearly 40 years old. I read it when it was published and was dismayed that it seemed to gather more negative than positive assessment. At last there is a government response to it: Government review to examine threat of world resources shortage.
RealClimate has an excellent discussion on “How do we know what caused climate to change?”: On attribution is by Gavin Schmidt whom I find the sanest exponent of global warming issues. For the mathematically inclined there is a link to a beautiful discussion of stochastic versus deterministic trends: Not a Random Walk. It is worth comparing these with the petty put-downs being thrown at Gavin: Real Climate’s Gavin Schmidt: A Foot in His Global Warming Mouth by John O’Sullivan, guest post at Climate Realists. Real scientific discussion requires a lot of detail. Sometimes for general interest one has to miss some of the irrelevant details. The complaint is that in a discussion, Learning from a simple model, Gavin mentioned a factor two in an equation because the atmosphere radiates up as well as down, when really any volume of the atmosphere radiates in all directions. So Gavin was not strictly correct. However, if you do the math properly the factor in the equation is indeed two – the sideways radiations are not relevant, what matters is what eventually goes straight up and straight down (I had better say at the point on the earth that you are considering else someone will say that up & down depends where you are). Why did John O’Sullivan not do the math to show that Gavin was wrong in essence? – because Gavin was not wrong.
From code to code
The start of digital computing as we know it came from Alan Turing’s work for code cracking during WW2. There have been other big developments from the push to simulate nuclear weapons and forecast weather & climate to the mass use of small personal computers for playing graphic games. Code again seems to be a driving force in development: The number crunchers who are saving lives. I remember this chemistry by computer starting in the 1980s and this is an amazing development in scale since then. Probably this will be a mutually beneficial development in more that the obvious way; maybe we can eventually genetically engineer a computer to grow from biological parts.
Food, nutrition and diet
On a whim, last year, I started to look into what is known about insulin. I mentioned this to my GP one day who then said, “You are not diabetic are you?”. He persuaded me to have an A1C that after some delay, as a typical always-ignore-medical-problems male, I booked myself in for. I was within the bounds but at the higher end for blood glucose level. This turned the insulin search into one biased towards practical understanding of the effects of food on insulin and fat. The starting point was a UCSD-TV lecture by Robert Lustig on childhood obesity that you can find on www.ucsd.tv (with other fascinating lectures). I have forgotten how I came across that early but it was a great inspiration. I was stunned by the discussion of glucose & fructose metabolism.
I had a wonderful teacher of chemistry at school, Bill Waterhouse, who spent extra hours with me to give me a good start with organic chemistry and later he told me he thought that I should have done a degree in biochemistry, but that was not the route I took. [I mention my teachers from decades ago in part to remember them but also to flag the importance of this profession for our human future.] Over the years I have picked up some biochemistry and physiology partly from interest and partly to help in projects I have been involved with but I always accepted the experts without any delving into details. So I thought fructose was good and fats bad because that was what the government scientists advised.
I saw a lecture by Michael Pollan on uctv.tv and was thereby introduced to his writings. He was discussing his book, In Defence of Food. He gave a summary of its important conclusion: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” and commented that with that you did not really need to read the book. Of course reading the book then becomes irresistible. There is a rich diet in its 208 small pages.
The most important insight for me was that the recent rise of the industrially produced diet of heavily processed ingredients has a big danger. We have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to choose the mix and quantity of the food we eat. There was a big change already in going from hunter-gatherer to pastoral agriculture that Pollan suggests we have not yet fully adapted too, but we will leave that aside. Of the foods that were available up to about 1900 we knew if they were good or bad for us without consulting a nutritionist, otherwise humanity would have ceased to exist. 100 years on and we can manufacture food for which we can no longer tell that. It may smell and look and taste like good food, but it could have no real food value for us, it could be harmful. Some is harmful, not with deliberate intent of the manufacturers because at the very least they don’t want to kill their revenue source, as it leads to obesity and its consequences such as diabetes and cancer and joint problems. Sugar especially was just a small part of some produce, now the world is awash with sugar in almost every processed food; with its enhancement – high fructose corn syrup. We do not have a gut way to decide on these foods, they seem fine by our evolved criteria but our built-in instruments are deceived.
We are focussed on acute disease that kills or disables fast, less so on chronic disease that takes decades to develop. This is not to say that there can be no input from scientific study but we need to be sure that it really does improve our food.
Interpretation with many variables
This is an excellent example of the difficulty of interpreting historical data. Tree rings: Chainsaws at dawn. Tree ring widths are determined by several factors, including temperature and rainfall. We need other information if we are to deduce temperature from tree ring width. In practice this seems to be choosing only trees in areas, “You can extract climate information from trees – mostly pines – from more extreme environments, like northern Scandinavia and Siberia; trees from high altitudes and high latitudes where the summer warmth was very important.” There is no escape from complex modelling.
Another of those hockey-stick trends
Man-made climate change blamed for ‘significant’ rise in ocean temperature is about the rate of rise of ocean temperature in the top 700 m, with a finding of significant rise over the 1993-2008 period of the study. A little more exegesis in A worrying set of results for marine life – and for humans.
Unlike the Bullingdon Club members who could easily pay the bill for trashing a place for fun, if we do not start soon we will be unable to pay the bill for the planet trashing we are doing and will be thrown into a hostile world. We seem to be under the spell of The Markets.
REWORK and the NHS
I read about Ramon Niekrash, a surgeon at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, who was suspended for raising concerns about patient care: NHS targets and secrecy are hurting patients. He took his case to an employment tribunal and won. I was stuck by the information that, He was suspended on 9 April 2008 for “excessive” letter writing and because two senior managers from the surgical department had complained, in writing, on the same day, about his conduct, attitude and, most worryingly, his clinical competence. He was writing letters about his concerns for patient care. Apart from the personal issues and the patient safety issues something is seriously wrong when a publicly funded organization is determined to keep its problems secret. This fits with the book I read recently Putting Patients Last.
REWORK (in my reading list) has many recommendations that could be applied. I realize that there is a difference in scale between an organization of 10 people and one of 1.5 million but the NHS consists of hospital departments and surgeries where there are 10s of people that in many ways work autonomously, though linked for patient care. So there may be things to learn and apply from small organizations. One piece of advice is “hire managers of 1″, which in the context of the NHS would mean keeping management minimal and local to the department. It seems from the Ramon example that the department is in the service of the ‘higher’ management, whereas the ‘higher’ management should be in the service of the departments. This fits with the mission statement of putting patients first; the clinicians are in the service of the patients and the administrative staff should be in the service of the clinical staff. In particular this is not to imply a hierarchy of power merely a flow of service. REWORK has rough comment on Mission Statements!
The management’s concern for the good of the universal NHS (to steal a recent (mis)quote from somewhere else) is clearly more to do with self protection than public protection. By this I do not mean to blame individual managers anymore than one can blame any creature that finds a niche from growing and protecting itself. We are all to blame for not doing what Ramon did and demand openness and honesty in public organizations.
A wonderful comment has come from the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, Sir Norman Bettison: I’m not worth £213,000. This wage bill is mad. He comments on the Sheehey recommendation that top public sector jobs should match private sector CEO pay: “What nonsense! Furthermore, it now looks to have been costly and irresponsible nonsense. People join, and remain in, the public sector because of a sense of vocation — to make a difference to society or to the quality of people’s lives. The best leaders are those who can secure long-term public value and a vision for their staff. Not some mercenary performance manager peddling a short-term fix.”
Ecobuild
I visited the ecobuild exhibition in London last week mainly to see what firms were offering products that would clad a non-cavity wall to reduce heat loss. I found some and will be following up with quotations from them. Details will appear on my permanent page about this in a few weeks time.
I looked round the whole exhibition and noted the large number of stands for photovoltaic panels and some for heat pumps. Although the PV technology is still evolving, and I will keep checking what is on offer over the next two years, I was encouraged by the effort now be made on technologies that can reduce our CO2 emissions.
Politically the situation does not reflect this. Here are two excellent articles on global warming politics: The Attack on Climate-Change Science & The Wrong Kind of Green. Fortunately many developers and manufacturers are working to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.
Excellent comment on science, using climate science as example
I don’t think it could be better expressed in the same number of words: Climate scientists must be ruthlessly honest about data. My own view of a few weeks ago was too forgiving. I thought the science is really OK so I will allow the means to justify the end. David Colquhoun is totally right; science works best through openness. If scientists are being targeted because of the results of their research, that research can only become better if the whole methodology is open for review by anyone. The mitigating circumstance is also mentioned – targets and target-decided funding decided by those who do not do research.
And out of iniquity came forth goodness
Founders of British obstetrics ‘were callous murderers’ and The incredible story of the most important woman in the history of modern medicine. The research on which the first article is based presents circumstantial evidence that the pioneers of obstetrics, Hunter and Smellie between 1749 and 1774 procured the death of women (probably rural girls who had come to the city and could disappear without questions) in various stages pregnancy in order to study the details of the anatomy of the process. The second article is about cervical cancer cells taken from a slave descended woman in 1951 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The woman died but these cells have been propagated for research ever since as they propagated aggressively in culture, with an estimated mass of cells to date of millions of tonnes. Neither she nor her children have had any benefit from this use, but commercial companies have enjoyed large incomes and the cells have been invaluable in helping develop treatments.
These histories bring to mind the Christian hymn, God moves in a mysterious way, written by William Cowper who wrote an anti slavery poem, The Negro’s complaint, and was a friend of John Newton at one time a slave ship commander (after spending time as a slave himself) who wrote Amazing Grace and who presided at the funeral of William Cowper. The tortuous sentence is meant to match the tortuous history.