The glaciers and the damage done

No doubt you're aware of the reports that the glaciers on the Himalayas are not melting quite as fast as one scientist predicted. (They're still melting, mind you). Gwynne Dyer tackles the issue head-on here:

People who know science and scientists will be disappointed both by the behaviour of Phil Jones and by the glacier incident, but they will not be surprised. This sort of thing happens from time to time, because we are dealing with human beings. But it does not (as the denial brigade insists) discredit the whole enterprise in which they are engaged.

Not all the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035, but a lot of the ones at lower altitudes will -- including some of the ones that keep the great rivers of Asia full in the summertime. That is important, because when they are gone, people start to starve. And we have all met people who are clever in theory but stupid in practice, like Foolish Phil.

The weight of the evidence rests overwhelmingly on the side of those who argue that climate change is real and dangerous. Some 97 per cent of scientists active in the relevant fields are convinced of it; all but a couple of the world's 200 governments have been persuaded of it; public opinion accepts it almost everywhere except in parts of the "Anglosphere." The United States, and to a lesser extent Australia, Britain and Canada, are the last bastions of denial.

Nothing too shocking here. The thing is, though, the "Anglosphere" has an inordinate amount of influence in the world. This "scandal", which is really about the details of climate change as opposed to the fundamentals, has the potential to seriously limit actions to deal with the problem:

U.S. President Barack Obama will do what he can, but his chance of getting even a very modest bill on emissions cuts through the Senate this year has just dwindled to near zero. The American public, worried about its jobs and its health care, doesn't want to hear about it -- and if it does hear, it doesn't believe.

If the United States is out of the game, then China is out, too. Without the participation of the world's two biggest polluters, jointly accounting for almost half of the human race's CO2 emissions, there's not much point in trying for another Kyoto-style deal, even a much better one. If you have any money lying around, put it on geo-engineering techniques for keeping the heat down. We're going to need them.

I have to say I'm not too keen on geo-engineering. Then again, I'm not too keen on the idea of taking drugs that interfere with cell division either, but if I had cancer I'd take them in a heartbeat. The stupid thing is, it shouldn't be necessary, but it almost certainly will be. Let's just hope that it works.

US conservative activists accused of tampering with senator's phone

Why am I not surprised?

The four men accused of trying to tamper with Democratic U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu's office phones share a common experience as young ideologues writing for conservative publications.

Federal authorities said two of the men posed as telephone workers wearing hard hats, tool belts and flourescent vests when they walked into the senator's office inside a federal building in New Orleans on Monday. The other two were accused of helping to organize the plan.

The most well-known of the suspects is James O'Keefe, a 25-year-old whose hidden-camera expose posing as a pimp with his prostitute infuriated the liberal group ACORN and made him a darling of conservatives.

O'Keefe and suspect Joseph Basel, 24, formed their own conservative publications on their college campuses. A third suspect, Stan Dai, 24, served as editor of his university's conservative paper and once directed a program aimed at getting college students interested in the intelligence field after 9/11.

And the fourth suspect, Robert Flanagan, 24, wrote for the conservative Pelican Institute and had recently criticized Landrieu for her vote on health care legislation. O'Keefe was a featured speaker at a Pelican Institute luncheon days before his arrest. Flanagan is the son of the acting U.S. Attorney for northern Louisiana.

From NPR (h/t jblaque). It will be interesting to see how deep this runs; hopefully this will be properly investigated.

MP calls for investigation of PETA as a terrorist organization

I should say up front that I'm not a big fan of PETA (even though I agree with them on some issues). But this is ridiculous:

A protest pie thrown at the federal fisheries minister should make Ottawa look into whether an animal-rights group should be labelled "terrorist," says an MP from Newfoundland and Labrador.

Gerry Byrne, the Liberal MP for Humber-St. Barbe-Baie Verte, said the behaviour of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is threatening and intimidating and puts seal hunters at risk.

Byrne was speaking after the group known as PETA claimed responsibility for a pie attack Monday against Federal Fisheries Minister Gail Shea in Burlington, Ont.

"There has to be a review whether or not PETA has crossed the line now by attacking a federal minister of the Crown for the purpose of public intimidation of an office-holder," Byrne told CBC News on Tuesday.

Source. Maybe Mr. Byrne needs to see what real terrorism looks like before he goes spouting off with such nonsense.

Scientologists send touch therapists to Haiti

I wish I was kidding:

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Amid the mass of aid agencies piling in to help Haiti quake victims is a batch of Church of Scientology "volunteer ministers", claiming to use the power of touch to reconnect nervous systems.

Clad in yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of the controversial US-based group, smiling volunteers fan out among the injured lying under makeshift shelters in the courtyard of Port-au-Prince's General Hospital.

A wealthy private donor provided his airplane to fly in 80 volunteers from Los Angeles, along with 50 Haitian-American-doctors, in a gesture worth 400,000 dollars, said a Parisian volunteer who gave her name as Sylvie.

"We're trained as volunteer ministers, we use a process called 'assist' to follow the nervous system to reconnect the main points, to bring back communication," she said.

"When you get a sudden shock to a part of your body the energy gets stuck, so we re-establish communication within the body by touching people through their clothes, and asking people to feel the touch."

From AFP (h/t Stimpson). It would be funny if not for the tragedy of what other things could have been done with that $400,000 -- maybe things that would actually help people.

Conference on extraterrestrial life in UK

Today and tomorrow the Royal Society is hosting a conference on the possibility of extraterrestrial life. The Times of London has a pretty good article. Several interesting things emerge from this. For instance:

Among the speakers will be Professor Simon Conway Morris, a Cambridge University evolutionary biologist, who says there is good reason to think aliens exist — and that they may well have chemical and biological similarities to us.

Conway Morris, whose talk is entitled “Predicting what extraterrestrial life will be like — and preparing for the worst”, said: “My basic argument is that, contrary to most neo-Darwinian thinking at the moment, evolution is much more predictable than people think.

“In particular, I would argue that the emergence, by evolution, of intelligence, cognitive capacity and all that stuff is an inevitability.”

In short, under the right conditions of a “biosphere” such as that present on Earth, the molecules necessary to form complex and intelligent life are already available; Darwinian evolution will do the rest.

“I think we can argue some intelligence must emerge in a biosphere,” said Conway Morris. “If that is correct — and it applies to manipulative skill — then that suggests there should be alien technologies.” (pp. 319-320)

Interesting. I've heard this viewpoint before, but as Conway Morris himself admits, it's far from being a universal viewpoint in evolutionary biology. Indeed, some of Conway Morris' own work has been influential on many who hold to the contrary viewpoint. For instance, Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life is mostly about Conway Morris' work on the fossils from the Burgess Shale, and the way I read that book it suggests that Gould thinks quite the opposite:

... if, had Homo sapiens failed and succumbed to early extinction as most species do, another population with higher intelligence in the same form was bound to originate. Wouldn't the Neanderthals have taken up the torch if we had failed, or wouldn't some other embodiment of mentality at our level have originated without much delay? I don't see why. Our closest ancestors and cousins... possessed mental abilities of a high order, as indicated by their range of tools and artifacts. But only Homo sapiens shows direct evidence for the kind of abstract reasoning, including numerical and aesthetic modes, that we identify as distinctly human. All indications of ice-age reckoning -- the calendar sticks and counting blades -- belong to Homo sapiens. And all the ice-age art -- the cave paintings, the Venus figures, the horsehead carvings, the reindeer bas-reliefs -- was done by our species. By evidence now available, Neanderthal knew nothing of representational art.

I'm not sure I'd go quite so far as Gould, but I do think that if Pikaia, for instance, had not survived the catastrophe at the end of the Permian, it's far from clear that an advanced civilization would have arisen. There are a gazillion ways for living things to adapt to their environment that have nothing to do with intelligence. Consider something like Paramecium; its cell structure is immeasurably more sophisticated than ours. Incredible adaptation... but no good for building rocket ships or writing The Critique of Pure Reason (or even Valley of the Dolls). On the other hand, if sufficiently sophisticated brains do appear, I think there's a good chance that sooner or later memetics will take hold in a big way and hasten the development of abstract reason. However, there's no telling how long that would take.

Conway Morris goes further and suggests that we shouldn't count on any hypothetical alien civilization to be friendly, nor should we expect them to think any better of us. He's hardly alone in this; anyone who's read Pellegrino and Zebrowski's The Killing Star will recall the Three Laws of Alien Behaviour:

1. Their survival will be more important than our survival. If an alien species has to choose between them and us, they won't choose us. It is difficult to imagine a contrary case; species don't survive by being self-sacrificing.

2. Wimps don't become top dogs. No species makes it to the top by being passive. The species in charge of any given planet will be highly intelligent, alert, aggressive, and ruthless when necessary.

3. They will assume that the first two laws apply to us.

With this in mind, it is particularly chilling to note that any civilization capable of fast interstellar flight is capable of wiping out other civilizations; any relativistic spacecraft is potentially a relativistic kill vehicle (indeed, this is the whole point of The Killing Star). Given this, it seems quite reasonable to suppose that any alien civilization that detects our radio signals (or other evidence of our existence) will not necessarily want to advertise their own presence. For his part, Conway Morris suggests that we take similar cautions in the event that we do detect evidence of intelligent life.

Science project prompts San Diego school evacuation

And please note that this was not any kind of project that exposed anyone to any actual hazard, just that an ignorant fuck thought it looked hazardous:

SAN DIEGO — Students were evacuated from Millennial Tech Magnet Middle School in the Chollas View neighborhood Friday afternoon after an 11-year-old student brought a personal science project that he had been making at home to school, authorities said.

Maurice Luque, spokesman for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, said the student had been making the device in his home garage. A vice principal saw the student showing it to other students at school about 11:40 a.m. Friday and was concerned that it might be harmful, and San Diego police were notified.

The school, which has about 440 students in grades 6 to 8 and emphasizes technology skills, was initially put on lockdown while authorities responded.

Luque said the project was made of an empty half-liter Gatorade bottle with some wires and other electrical components attached. There was no substance inside.

From the San Diego Union-Tribune (h/t ssdd in this sciencemadness thread); my bold. And what was it really? The fire department determined that the kid was actually trying to make a primitive motion detector. Now I can understand the vice principal having gotten a bit freaked out, but take note of what happened afterwards:

The student will not be prosecuted, but authorities were recommending that he and his parents get counseling, the spokesman said. The student violated school policies, but there was no criminal intent, Luque said.

"There will be no (criminal) charges whatsoever," Luque said.

Police and fire officials also will not seek to recover costs associated with responding to the incident, the spokesman said.

Now what in the fuck is this? He needs counselling because he happened to make something which the vice principal didn't recognize, and mistakenly thought it was dangerous? Yeah, I suppose if you're smarter than an authority figure, something has to be done about that. And this at a school which bills itself as a "tech" school?

And as an aside, the comments made by hissingnoise in the sciencemadness thread are, er, unfortunate.

An ominous sign for the future of California

There isn't enough fresh water:

Mike Chrisman looks out from his SUV as he drives through seemingly endless rows of walnut trees on his property near Visalia, in central California. "I have to be optimistic, I'm so tied to this land," he says. His great-grandfather, after trying his luck in the Gold Rush, settled in Visalia in the 1850s, and the family has been there ever since.

But as California's secretary for natural resources – a job at the intersection of the environmental and farming lobbies, perennially at loggerheads over the state's scarcest resource, water – Chrisman also knows that optimism has become a minority view.

His land is in California's Central Valley, a region that covers 19 counties and stretches for 725 kilometres from the Cascade Mountains in the north to the Tehachapis in the south, and is bounded in the east by the Sierra Nevada and the west by California's Coast Ranges.

Much of it was an inland sea in its geological past, and its alluvial soils and Mediterranean climate make parts of it, particularly the San Joaquin Valley in the south, about the most fertile agricultural region in the world.

But this status is at risk because water, the vital ingredient to make the soil productive, is increasingly scarce. Some of the reasons are natural; California has been in one of its periodic droughts since 2006, and climate change is a long-term threat to the state's mountain snowpacks.

Others are political; the pumps and aqueducts that carry water from the wetter north to the dry fields in the south are creaking with age, threatening ecosystems and endangering species.

And the absurd thing is, Californians use insane amounts of water simply making their lawns and golf courses look nice and green. They really need a reality check, though I fear their answer to the problem will be to push for something like this.