A kind of milestone

And before anyone disses the numbers, just remember this:

Average book sales are shockingly small, and falling fast. Combine the explosion of new books with the declining total sales and you get shrinking sales of each new title. Here’s the reality of the book industry: in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells about 500 copies. (Publishers Weekly, July 17, 2006). And average sales have since fallen much more. According to BookScan, which tracks most bookstore, online, and other retail sales of books, only 299 million books were sold in 2008 in the U.S. in all adult nonfiction categories combined. The average U.S. book is now selling less than 250 copies per year and less than 3,000 copies over its lifetime.

The Fearless Bolt

OK, we all know people are easily spooked by nuclear radiation scares, and anti-nuclear activists are no doubt making exaggerated claims and worrying some people unnecessarily.

But....

I think it's high time we did a quick pass the hat around to collect the air fare to get Andrew Bolt over the Fukushima area and reassure everyone that they are being very, very silly.

I mean, we have it on good authority from Andrew, even today, after his earlier reassurances were proved to be, um, groundless, that:

The problem remains serious, but still no one has been killed or is likely to be, although two workers are said to be missing.....

The panic this emergency has induced is astonishing.

As there actually seems to be a high degree of uncertainty as to whether the workers who remained at Fukushima have already exposed themselves to levels of radiation that will lead to a premature death, it is foolhardy in the extreme to be talking about no one "likely to be killed."

Americans advising an 80 km exclusion for their citizens is not advice coming from nutty Greenie types. It's called "taking sensible precautions based on scientific advice". (A phrase with which, as I will note again in a second, Andrew shows a complete lack of familiarity.) Does Andrew think it's no big deal to evacuate even a 30 km zone in a country like Japan, which is not exactly renown for its big empty spaces?

There are two effects that I can see from his over-the-top "bah humbug" attitude to this; one I welcome, and one I don't:

a. he makes pro-nuclear types look like right wing macho nutters with a surplus of testosterone that over-rides sensible caution. This I don't welcome, because I haven't given up on nuclear myself: although I have to say, some of the things that they seem to have not thought of in enough detail - like "is it really a good idea to store this many old fuel rods here for so many years, when , if we ever lose the water in the cooling pool, they'll start to burn" - are pretty surprising.

b. he makes himself, as a very influential anti AGW writer in Australia, especially for the followers of the Coalition, look like an untrustworthy twit when it comes to his judgement about science, technology, risk and sensible precaution. This is a very, very good thing. (And don't anyone in comments give me any grief that I want to see the Fukushima problems get worse so as to further discredit him. I figure his performance to date, with the silly and borderline offensive downplaying of the consequences of Chernobyl and atomic bombs, and his rush to promote the "it's already under control" line, when it clearly wasn't, he's already discredited himself mightily.)

If Andrew Bolt looks foolhardy on nuclear accidents - and he does - it should make him look foolhardy on climate change - as he is.

He also has quite a following at Catallaxy, a blog with which careful readers may note I am currently having something of a feud. While it's not as if they haven't been ridiculous for years, their gung-ho "people are wimps" jeering on this topic is making them look like the clowns they really are (with some honourable exceptions) on virtually any topic to do with the environment. That is also a good thing.

UPDATE: I see Andrew is hard at it again, posting this evening:

The accounting begins. Here’s a wall of shame of just some of the journalists who have fed the hysterical fear of a nuclear incident that has killed no one and probably never will.

Funny, as he writing that, the news was that Japan had upgraded the seriousness of the emergency from its previous level 4 to level 5. OK, apparently that's still only the same as Three Mile Island which didn't kill anyone; but the point is that it's still not exactly a good look to be upgrading a week after it started. And besides, the IAEA already had it at a six. Even Barry Brook said a couple of days ago "In sum, this accident is now significantly more severe than Three Mile Island in 1979."

Maybe the people of Japan worry a bit because: - not even regulatory bodies and experts can agree on exactly how serious it is.

But People of Japan: do not be alarmed: Andrew Bolt says there is no danger to life.

Look, it's one thing to complain about poor journalism (of which there has been much, as there is every day of the year) that exaggerates danger, and it is true to observe that some people will make bad decisions due to irrational fear of very low levels.

But it's also ridiculous to pretend that this is not very serious, particularly for the plant workers.

Have a look at these radiation figures from Barry Brook's blog for yesterday. They give a pretty good indication why the helicopters were not inclined to get too close to the reactor buildings they were trying to dump water onto:

Radiation Levels

o At 9:20AM (JST) on March 17, radiation level at elevation of 1,000ft above Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station: 4,130 micro sievert.

o At 9:20AM on March 17, radiation level at elevation of 300ft above Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station: 87,700 micro sievert.

o At 11:10AM on March 17, radiation level at main gate (approximately 3,281 feet from Unit 2 reactor building) of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station: 646.2 micro sievert.

o At 7:50PM on March 17, radiation level outside main office building (approximately 1,640 feet from Unit 2 reactor building) of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station: 3,599 micro sievert.

o For comparison, a human receives 2,400 micro sievert per year from natural radiation in the form of sunlight, radon, and other sources. One chest CT scan generates 6,900 micro sievert per scan.

I don't want to encourage people in China or California to swallow a mouthful of iodine either; but downplaying the danger to the extent that Bolt is doing is embarrassing in the other direction.

A question

Given the haphazard way water has been attempted to be delivered to the cooling pools and reactors at Fukushima, I assume there is a good chance some radioactive water is getting into the adjacent ocean.

Has anyone been talking about what this will mean for the safety of the fishing and seafood industry around the Japanese coast line?

I would assume this may be a very serious consequence for the Japanese in particular, given that they harvest and eat virtually every type of living thing to be found in their seas.

Update: on a related note, the New York Times again proves to have been a pretty good source of reporting on the nuclear crisis, and this report explains in detail that storage of used fuel rods at reactors is a widespread problem not only in Japan, but America too:

Some countries have tried to limit the number of spent fuel rods that accumulate at nuclear power plants: Germany stores them in costly casks, for example, while China sends them to a desert storage compound in the western province of Gansu. But Japan, like the United States, has kept ever-larger numbers of spent fuel rods in temporary storage pools at the power plants, where they can be guarded with the same security provided for the plants.

Figures provided by Tokyo Electric Power on Thursday show that most of the dangerous uranium at the power plant is actually in the spent fuel rods, not the reactor cores themselves.

The electric utility said that a total of 11,195 spent fuel rod assemblies were stored at the site. That is about four times as much radioactive material as in the reactor cores combined.

There will be a lot of re-consideration about the America practices to come out of this, and none too soon, by the sounds.

No counselling required

Mind Hacks has a timely post noting the decline of "post disaster counselling" as a practice.

Pure idiocy

What does the media think it is doing, promoting this schoolyard bullying incident that has "gone viral"?

Everyone knows that the videoing of fights amongst school kids and posting them up on Facebook has become a large part of a bullying/cyberbullying vicious cycle. Apparently, this particular one was pulled from Facebook/Youtube pretty quickly, only to appear in the Fairfax media yesterday. What was Fairfax thinking? It was giving more publicity to a video that did not deserve it, and has only led to further appalling consequences.

The reason for it being pulled from Facebook (or Youtube?)was not clear to me, but from the Sky News report noted on this page of the Daily Telegraph, it might have had something to do with the fact that the idiots who posted it put a telephone number at the end as being the one for the young bully's home, and encouraged people to ring and abuse him and his family.

Turns out the number was for the home of a couple of old folk who have nothing to do with this at all, and received many highly abusive calls; some from overseas.

So, you might say: good on the Daily Telegraph for including this corrective.

Um, no, wait a minute. The body of the Daily Telegraph article says that the mother of the bully was interviewed on Channel 7 Today Tonight and "demanded an apology from the victim":

"We don't need this posted everywhere," she said. "I would like him to apologise."

This Daily Telegraph report was picked up in the (second) post on the story by right wing Anerican site Hot Air. Given that their first story was full of comments with gushing praise for the victim having had his revenge on the bully (with barely a handful of comments noting that it was pure good luck that he didn't accidentally kill the bully and end up at real risk of a trial for manslaughter) this revelation of the mother wanting an apology was too much:

Listen up, you worthless brood mare: if you raised your kids not to be bullies, they wouldn’t get bodyslammed. Now f**k off, because there’s a good chance you’re going to be demanding another apology in the future from the judge that puts your stupid brat behind bars.

That was a comment by "Madisonconservative". Yes, there is so much to admire on the Right of American politics at the moment.

One small problem: go look at the video of the story from Today Tonight (I am not sure how long it will be available) and it appears clear that the Daily Telegraph has misquoted the mother. She is referring to her own boy apologising.

The mother in fact comes across very well in the Today Tonight story. She is very embarrassed by her son's actions, and becomes emotional when she complains about it being splattered all over the internet. Who can blame her? She considers her son has made a big mistake and paid for it; it doesn't need to follow him indefinitely on line.

Now, hopefully the mother has more sense than to be reading the internet to see what people are saying about this. But The Daily Telegraph has had the uncorrected story up all day - and unless they have seen some part of the Channel 7 video that we haven't - it is a clear mistake which should be corrected immediately. If she is receiving abusive phone calls, and given what happened earlier in this story, that would seem very likely, I hope she sues the Daily Telegraph.

The Daily Telegraph Facebook page has had a comment up for 7 hours pointing out they are mis-quoting the mother: why is the webpage uncorrected?

As for the continued simple minded praise and cheering that is coming from websites about this video: they continue to disgust me.

UPDATE:

The Daily Telegraph is featuring an apology this morning, but it's hardly profuse:

IN an article published in The Daily Telegraph yesterday headlined "Bully's angry mum wants victim to apologise", it was written that bully Ritchard Gale's mother Tina wanted her son's victim to apologise for slamming her son to the ground.

But she had, in fact, said she wanted her son to apologise to his victim.

The Daily Telegraph apologises for the error.

What's more, on line, it appears above the original story of the incident from (at least) a couple of days ago, not the story in which the paper defames the mother! In fact, as you can see from the screenshot, the apology is the most popular story; but the second most popular story is still the (uncorrected when you click on it) report from yesterday:


Clearly, as at the time I write this, there may still be hundreds (thousands?) of people following Tweeted, emailed or Facebooked links to the incorrect story, and they will not see the correction.

When I posted last evening, I noted there had been a message on the Daily Tele's Facebook page for at least 7 hours telling them they had got it wrong. It also looks like some of the commenters took to emailing the Tele to point out the mistake, as this poor woman was copping abuse from all over the world for something she never did.

The apology seems to have gone on line at midnight local time, and yet, as I say, the link to the original wrong story still does not carry the apology.

Hey, Daily Telegraph: look at the title of this post. It's for you.

UPDATE 2: I see that Hot Air has a large "correction" now - although it is not as clear as it could be:

Update: Corrected — bully’s mom wants son to apologize

Whose son? Why not try this - Corrected - bully's mom wants her son to apologize.

Idiots.

UPDATE 3: what did it take? A phone call from a lawyer? I see that sometime in the last hour or two, the Daily Telegraph finally made their incorrect story page disappear. Congratulations, and where's your cheque book?

UPDATE 4: the Daily Telegraph has dropped the apology from its front page already. (It is still on the site, if you know where to find it.) Barely 12 hours is considered enough to give the apology prominence, is it?

UPDATE 5: Pssst: Daily Tele. Your Facebook entry for this story is still headed:

The mother of a school bully whose video has gone viral wants the victim to apologise. See her side of the story.

And the only link is to the now removed story. Try putting a link to the apology and correction, you incompetents.

For urgent delivery to Catallaxy

Female hormone could be key to male contraceptive

A question of timing, part 2

A couple of physicists have been speculating on whether the LHC could send a particle to the past, with the suggestion being that messages could be sent that way.

Apart from “don’t buy Betamax” (a joke I have borrowed from “Good Omens”,)  messages from the future could be even more useful, as Japanese events are showing.

But here’s another interesting point:  is anyone connected with CERN looking at particle sprays with the intent of deciphering any encrypted messages therein?  Something of a long shot, I would have to admit.

Here’s an idea for a short story (possibly been already done?):  physicist interprets CERN message as “turn LHC off now!”, then has to convince his fellow scientists he’s not mad.

A question of timing - Part 1

I don't have any doubt that anti-nuclear campaigners take political advantage of nuclear crises while they are underway.

However, it seems to me to be actually counter-productive for the pro-nuclear lobby to have been continually talking down the seriousness of the problem at Fukushima, particularly in the early days when no one knew how it would pan out.

But this what the well meaning Barry Brook has been doing, not to mention those who are simply anti-Green for political reasons, such as Andrew Bolt.

Here, for example, is Barry Brook's opening comment on 11 March:

1. There is no credible risk of a serious accident.

A reactor building exploding and/or catching fire on TV every day since then does not, shall we say, seem entirely consistent with that.

Andrew Bolt had been running with "Chenobyl only killed 65", including on Insiders last week, but finally did a column explaining (pretty pathetically) why he was not acknowledging that the WHO expects the total toll to be 4000 "extra deaths". I see that the New York Times noted today:

The great tragedy of Chernobyl was an epidemic of thyroid cancer among people exposed to the radiation as children — more than 6,000 cases so far, with more expected for many years to come. There is no reason for it to be repeated in Japan.

If you're going to talk about Chernobyl honestly, this might be something worth acknowledging. (In fact, I see now, that he finally has in a post that has just appeared this evening.)

A few days ago, Andrew was also happy to quote from a Brook's column the words of MIT expert Oehman:

The plant is safe now and will stay safe.

Even William Saletan at Slate was complaining two days ago:

Early reports said four Japanese plants were in trouble. Now it appears only two were disabled. Early reports said three employees had radiation sickness. Now we're hearing only one is sick, and even in that case, the radiation dose appears relatively low. Two reactor buildings exploded, but these were explosions of excess hydrogen, not nuclear fuel, and neither of them ruptured the inner containers that encase the reactor cores. Some radiation has leaked, but according to measurements outside the plants, the amount so far is modest. Any leak is bad, and the area of contamination, even at low rates, will probably spread. Japan needs our sympathy and our help. But let's not exaggerate the crisis.

Doesn't that seem, after another couple of days of nothing under control, to sound like a pretty feeble attempt at putting lipstick on a pig?

Here's the lesson: with nuclear power, it doesn't pay to spend a lot of time downplaying a crisis until the crisis is actually resolved.

In all honesty, when you're evacuating tens of thousands of people within tens of kilometres from a nuclear accident, you just have to 'fess up and acknowledge that when nuclear goes wrong, it can really go wrong. At the very least, if you have nuclear anywhere near a populated area, it stuffs up the lives of a large number of people in a very major way. It may not end up killing any (or many) of them, but even so, they have a high degree of anxiety and uncertainty in all manner of things (safety for the kids to go back there, is the soil safe for food crops, are their houses now effectively worthless, can you eat the fish, etc.)

So, does this mean I have joined the nuclear nay-sayers club? No, not at all.

The pro-nuclear lobby is still right, in the big picture, and in the long run.

I still believe that nuclear power will be important to reduce CO2 emissions in the future, and the best moral argument to not abandon it is to say that, if you think the problems for people within a 30 km radius of a malfunctioning nuclear reactor are bad, it is likely to be small change compared to the suffering that the worst predictions of global warming and climate change may entail for a huge portion of the world's future population.

And people do need to be reminded of the huge, annually recurring, number of people directly killed globally in the coal mining and oil industries (not to mention the environmental damage of oil spills.)

But even so, don't start saying that yet. Once the current emergency is over, hopefully with much less radiation leaked than the worst case scenarios paint, that may be the time to start talking up nuclear again, emphasising the low number of casualties compared to other industries, and that there are ways that passive safety can be built into future reactors. (Not putting them right beside the ocean might help too.)

But talking up nuclear right now - it just won't wash.

Another danger

It’s a little surprising to read in the New York Times that it’s not only the Japanese reactors which are the source of danger, but the cooling pools around them too:

The pools, which sit on the top level of the reactor buildings and keep spent fuel submerged in water, have lost their cooling systems and the Japanese have been unable to take emergency steps because of the multiplying crises.

By late Tuesday, the water meant to cool spent fuel rods in the No. 4 reactor was boiling, Japan’s nuclear watchdog said. If the water evaporates and the rods run dry, they could overheat and catch fire, potentially spreading radioactive materials in dangerous clouds. …

The pools are a worry at the stricken reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant because at least two of the reactors have lost their roofs in explosions, exposing the spent fuel pools to the atmosphere. By contrast, reactors have strong containment vessels that stand a better chance of bottling up radiation from a meltdown of the fuel in the reactor core.

If any of the spent fuel rods in the pools do indeed catch fire, nuclear experts say, the high heat would loft the radiation in clouds that would spread the radioactivity.

“It’s worse than a meltdown,” said David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists who worked as an instructor on the kinds of General Electric reactors used in Japan. “The reactor is inside thick walls, and the spent fuel of Reactors 1 and 3 is out in the open.”

More on passive safety in nuclear reactors

I just found this at Technology Review (talking initially about the Japanese reactors):

The reactors at the nuclear plant, built in the early 1970s, rely on active cooling systems that require electricity. Newer plant designs would lessen or eliminate the need for active cooling, making use of natural convection or a "gravity feed" system to cool reactors in the event of an emergency.

In one design, for example, the relatively new Westinghouse AP1000, water is suspended over the reactor housing. If pressure within the system drops, this allows the water to fall into the reactor area, submerging it in enough water to keep it cool.

While passive systems could be better in the event of electrical failures, they might not always be the safest systems. Kadak says that in an active system, it's easier to ensure that coolant gets exactly where it needs to be—it's simply pumped to the right location. Designing passive systems, on the other hand, requires complex models of how fluids will behave in a system that could be rendered incorrect if the system is damaged.

Kadak says that even more advanced reactor designs could overcome these issues. Some advanced reactors use molten metals to cool the reactor—the mass of these systems is enough to provide cooling in an emergency, he says, although if the molten metal were displaced by an earthquake, that could be a problem of its own. He's devoted much of his career to another advanced alternative, the "pebble bed reactor," which is designed to make it impossible for the fuel to get hot enough for a meltdown. The tradeoff is that the reactor has to be much larger--for a given amount of power--than a conventional reactor.

Life's too short...

....to spend too much time abusing other internet identities.

But it has to be said - I've been wanting to say it here for so long - Catallaxy has the largest collection of obnoxious, immature, misogynistic, unreasonable, dishonest, disingenuous, lazy, dumb, gullible, un-insightful, self absorbed, uncharitable, childish, abusive, detached from reality, unpleasant, unscientific, selfish, tribal, repetitive, hypocritical, pedantic, tedious, psychologically unbalanced, and flat out wrong collection of commenters in all of the Australian blogosphere.

They are free to choose which adjective goes with which of them. Most there deserve more than one epithet. This is no shock to them - most have been told at their own blog many times.

Now, to resume normal blogging....

Update: some mis-spellings corrected, although epitaph for epithet might be explained as a Freudian slip.

Huh. Scientists can really can sound like Sheldon

I normally really like James Empty Blog, run by climate scientist James Annan and his wife Jules, both of whom are living in Japan (near Tokyo.)

But I can't quite get around the tone of their posts regarding the Japanese earthquake. The first was by Jules who noted she had a "pleasant earthquake" in a new building that suffered no damage.

The next was headed "Earthquake fun" by James, talking about having to walk along the train track after the train he was on stopped short of the station.

Then came "Mildly Inconvenienced" by James, confirming that they were not suffering at all really.

Next, a series of pretty sunset photos.

And then, a post "Don't Panic", complaining that there is too much media hype (I think about the nuclear problems and the effects of the earthquake in Tokyo) and ending with:

Come on people, get a grip. It's an inconvenience. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a catastrophe down here, and the best thing most people can do is to get back to normality as quickly as possible. Turn off the wall-to-wall disaster porn on TV and have a look out of the window. It's a beautiful spring day and the cherries are starting to blossom.

I actually then sent a comment saying, in effect, that I like their blog and doubt that they really meaning to sound this way, but they were doing a very good job of sounding like they were completely insensitive to major human suffering happening just down the road, so to speak.

It must have sounded harsher than that, because it has not come out of moderation.

But they have let a couple of other comments through of similar effect.

I'm sorry, but this is weird. More than 10,000 of your neighbors have suddenly died and nearly all of your neighbors will suffer economic consequences well into the future. While the nuclear threat ight be overstated, it is certainly plausible. yet you wax indignant about "hype".

I agree. And as far as disaster porn is concerned, you can hardly expect a still evolving, unprecedented type of disaster in Japan with that amount of loss of life and property damage to not have blanket coverage.

My message to the Annans: you're probably not Sheldon-like scientists incapable of normal human empathy for suffering that is happening not all that far from where you live.

But if you keep making cheery posts making light of how a nearby disaster has not affected you, you're sure doing a damn fine job of sounding like insensitive arses.

Word games

After admitting on Insiders that Tony Abbott uses weasel words on climate change, so that his position of spending billions of dollars to attempt to match Labor’s target for CO2 reduction is somehow “sellable” to climate change skeptics/deniers, Andrew Bolt today tries to make out a case  that when other journalists/commentators say effectively the same thing, they are “verballing” him.  (OK, maybe Combet is to a degree by use of “denier”, but Lenore Taylor – I’m not accepting that she is at all.)

Passive safety in nuclear design

Long term readers of this blog would know that I used to follow with much interest the development of pebble bed reactors - in particular in the development program South Africa had going until they ran out of money. (Use the "search this blog" bar at the side for "pebble bed reactors" and you'll find lots of past posts.)

The big attraction of the pebble bed was its (claimed) passive safety features. As the Wikipedia article on pebble bed reactors notes (although it does sound like it has been written by a strong proponent of pebble beds):

When the nuclear fuel increases in temperature, the rapid motion of the atoms in the fuel causes an effect known as Doppler broadening. The fuel then sees a wider range of relative neutron speeds. U²³⁸, which forms the bulk of the uranium in the reactor, is much more likely to absorb fast or epithermal neutrons at higher temperatures. [2] This reduces the number of neutrons available to cause fission, and reduces the power of the reactor. Doppler broadening therefore creates a negative feedback because as fuel temperature increases, reactor power decreases. All reactors have reactivity feedback mechanisms, but the pebble bed reactor is designed so that this effect is very strong and does not depend on any kind of machinery or moving parts. Because of this, its passive cooling, and because the pebble bed reactor is designed for higher temperatures, the pebble bed reactor can passively reduce to a safe power level in an accident scenario. This is the main passive safety feature of the pebble bed reactor, and it makes the pebble bed design (as well as other very high temperature reactors) unique from conventional light water reactors which require active safety controls.

The reactor is cooled by an inert, fireproof gas, so it cannot have a steam explosion as a light-water reactor can. The coolant has no phase transitions—it starts as a gas and remains a gas. Similarly, the moderator is solid carbon, it does not act as a coolant, move, or have phase transitions (i.e., between liquid and gas) as the light water in conventional reactors does.

A pebble-bed reactor thus can have all of its supporting machinery fail, and the reactor will not crack, melt, explode or spew hazardous wastes. It simply goes up to a designed "idle" temperature, and stays there. In that state, the reactor vessel radiates heat, but the vessel and fuel spheres remain intact and undamaged. The machinery can be repaired or the fuel can be removed. These safety features were tested (and filmed) with the German AVR reactor.^[6]. All the control rods were removed, and the coolant flow was halted. Afterward, the fuel balls were sampled and examined for damage and there was none.

Wikipedia has a short article on passive safety design in nuclear reactors generally, noting that there are some designs using liquid metals as a heat sink for passive safety. Somehow, I can't help but think that using liquid metal just doesn't sound as passively safe as a gas cooled pebble bed.

In any event, surely recent events show that the goal of passive safety deserves to be a major component of future nuclear design.

Back to Australian politics

It feels a little early to go back to speaking about anything other than the death and destruction in Japan, but I’ll briefly note some recent political commentary about Australia that seems about right:

* Annabel Crabb wrote on Friday:

Let's look at the basics here.

Labor's problem is one of trust and consistency.

Political advocacy is about believing something, and setting out to bring a majority around to your point of view. In the best political advocates, principle and determination work together to the extent that even voters who fundamentally disagree with their position on a particular policy stance will grudgingly support them anyway.

Federal Labor is a long way from that right now, thanks to the messages it has sent out to the electorate on a number of issues.

Sounds about right to me. As I was arguing elsewhere on the weekend, with climate change policy in particular, it doesn't seem to be a case (unlike in the Coalition) where actual scepticism of the science has any real sway in Labor (if there were any strong private sceptics in the party room, I am betting we would have heard about it from Rudd aligned leakers during the last election campaign), but rather it just seemed to be lack of will to take on a populist campaign.

While I think there is some under-appreciated value in the way Gillard has announced the intention to have the carbon price in place before the details are worked out (it gives the “Ju-Liar” factor a longer time to burn out before an election,) what was the sense in announcing Tim Flannery was going to be paid to convince Australians of the need for a carbon price only a week or two before announcing we were getting one in a year's time anyway? And whoever thought that it was a good look to have two podiums at the announcement, making Bob Brown look like a co-Prime Minister, won’t be making that mistake again, I bet.

There has been something a bit screwy going on about how policy is made and announced in Labor ever since Kevin Rudd got elected, and it still seems kind of hard for the media to pin down exactly whose fault it has been.

Still, on climate change policy I remain as appalled as ever that Tony Abbott got the leadership on the back of a substantial number of climate change sceptics in the party room who (I am betting) get their science from reading Andrew Bolt.

Speaking of Andrew Bolt, I was a bit surprised to see that even he acknowledged on Insiders yesterday that Abbott uses weasel words on the science which the climate change deniers in the Party can interpret so as to give “plausible deniality” to the idea that Tony might really take climate scientists seriously. Look at his words on Friday after Minchin said warming wasn’t happening:

Climate change does happen, mankind does make a contribution…

As Bolt said, you can easily interpret this to mean that the contribution is absolutely minimal compared to natural forces.

And look at the answers he gave to a series of on-line questions from climate change denying skeptics on Thursday. One of them brings up the “but a carbon tax by Australia it won’t affect the world’s temperature at all” line, as well as giving a spray about how all of climate science is completely corrupt, and Abbott comments:

Good point. People shouldn’t act out of mere environmental vanity

Well what exactly is the point of your plan to match Labor CO2 reduction targets by spending billions of taxpayer dollars, young Tony?

Journalists do know how inconsistent and willing to court climate change denial Abbott has been; I think they just tire of pointing it out all the time because they have bad poll numbers of Labor to talk about instead.

* But going back to Labor’s problems, David Penberthy wrote recently:

The best thing Gillard could do right now is to start a policy fight with the Greens – go and visit Olympic Dam perhaps and come out behind BHP’s push to expand its uranium exports – just to remind them and the voters that she’s the Prime Minister and is running the show. It’s not like Bob Brown is going to pack his bags and go and sit with Tony Abbott. On the current polling the alliance between Gillard and Brown is paving the way for an Abbott Government anyway.

I think that's probably right, although nuclear power is going to have a public image problem until we see how the Japanese post earthquake crisis evolves.

Japan on our minds

There is some anxiety in our house at the moment about the inability to contact some relatives in the earthquake affected areas of northern Honshu. One in particular works in one of the tsunami affected towns, quite close to the waterfront.

In the meantime, the best commentary on the Japanese character and its response to natural disasters I have read is by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times. It is well worth a read.

Update: an email came through this afternoon that the people we were most worried about are OK, but there’s still a couple of others about whom we have not yet heard. They would not have been close to the water, however, so we trust they are OK.

Update 2: of course there are heaps of videos being put up on Youtube, but I haven't yet spotted the remarkable seaside town destruction footage that I was watching on TV earlier tonight. But Boing Boing had this video up, showing some very unnatural looking behaviour by some Tokyo buildings:

Actually, I see that a couple of million people have watched this version of the video on Youtube (because it has the link from Boing Boing), but only 5,000 or so have watched the original, uncropped version which the guy also has up on his Youtube account. I actually find the original more interesting, as you get to see other people on the street watching the sway:

Update 3:

I don't want to turn this into disaster porn, but the video below is similar to th longer one I mentioned above that I saw on TV earlier tonight. It does get a bit upsetting when it turns briefly to the scared child and shocked adults watching from their safe point:



Update 4: Let's hope he's wrong, but a UK geophysicist is quoted at the Nature web site saying this:

"Although certainly very big, today's quake was not totally unexpected," says John McCloskey, a geophysicist at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, UK. "Technically, it was in fact an aftershock of the weaker quake earlier in the week — even though it may sound odd that an aftershock can be stronger than the main shock." ...

"The previous quake, although much smaller, significantly increased stress in the fraction of the fault zone that ruptured today," says McCloskey.

The sequence of quakes has probably also affected the stress field further south along the fault zone, critically increasing the earthquake risk in the Tokyo region, he says.

"There is a strong interaction of quakes along a subduction zone, and we can certainly expect a number of major aftershocks in the next weeks," he says. "Some may be as large as, or even stronger than, the quake that last month devastated Christchurch in New Zealand. And chances are that another very large shock could occur to the south near Tokyo."

My apologies for worrying reader Geoff, who's due to fly into Tokyo soon.

Count me as a skeptic...

...when it comes to the Zero Carbon Australia plan that says Australia could be powered by renewable energy by 2020:

Our research was undertaken with two explicit parameters: energy technologies selected had to be both commercially available and from carbon-free renewable energy sources. This explains why the ZCA Plan identifies a 60/40 mix of concentrated solar thermal (CST) power and large-scale wind developments as the backbone of a decarbonised energy system. Together with existing hydropower, investment in CST with molten salt storage, backup from a small percentage of biomass power, an upgraded electricity grid, and comprehensive energy efficiency measures, Australia can reliably meet its energy needs from renewable electricity generation. The technologies selected were not preordained; rather they were chosen on the basis that they worked within ZCA’s parameters.

The ZCA scenario also includes natural gas. Under the plan, Australia would use existing gas infrastructure in a staged scale-back, until the last gas power plants are mothballed in 2020. The most carbon-intensive coal power plants must be first to be decommissioned as large-scale renewables come online, made possible by the deployment of CST power towers with molten salt storage for 24-h operation.

Brave New Climate has been critical of this plan before. Here's one post about it, but there are others.

Too big for my backyard

Time Magazine has a story on the newly retired space shuttle Discovery: it spent a total of a year in space; was the shuttle that delivered the Hubble Space Telescope; and first flew in 1983: a long time in aviation terms, let alone a space plane. (In fact, it's kind of surprising that it handles the vibration of repeated launches so well, isn't it?)

Here's something I didn't know from the story; there are twin astronauts:

The [next] mission will be commanded by the husband of wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Mark Kelly. His identical twin brother Scott is currently the skipper of the space station; he returns to Earth next week on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

The New York Times wrote about where the retired shuttles will end up. There is hot competition amongst various museums, but it seems the Smithsonian is sure to get one.

The Kennedy Space Centre wants one too. I reckon they'll need it, as the tourist value of that place while there's a big gap in developing a new manned rocket will likely diminish.

Higher water

Real Climate talks about the recent finding that some Antarctic ice freezes from the bottom, but also notes the big picture with ice melt:

....there is a new assessment of the net mass balance of Antarctica and Greenland. Rignot et al have updated results, including those from the GRACE gravity measurement satellite, to the end of 2010 and show that the downward trend in ice mass is continuing (stronger in Greenland than in Antarctica). The net rise in sea level associated with this decline is about 1.3 mm/yr, which will likely accelerate with further warming. Complementary analyses of the surface mass balance of Greenland (Tedesco et al, 2011) also show that 2010 was a record year for melt area extent.

This rate of melting is more than was figured into the tabulated IPCC AR4 estimates of sea level rise, and any further acceleration will obviously make the discrepancy worse. Indeed, even in the highest forcing A1F1 scenario, the IPCC calculated only a 0.3 mm/year contribution from the ice sheets averaged over the whole 21st Century! This was clearly a gross underestimate.

Extrapolating these melt rates forward to 2050, “the cumulative loss could raise sea level by 15 cm by 2050″ for a total of 32 cm (adding in 8 cm from glacial ice caps and 9 cm from thermal expansion) – a number very close to the best estimate of Vermeer & Rahmstorf (2009), derived by linking the observed rate of sea level rise to the observed warming.

The Song of the Mice

Physorg notes that there is research going on about how mice sing (ultrasonically):

Whether or not mouse song involves learning either through auditory imitation or behavioral feedback (e.g., from the mother)... is a subject of hot debate, and the answer is proving elusive. To highlight the difficulties facing researchers, two studies published on March 9, 2011 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE have come to differing conclusions about whether mouse vocalization patterns are innate or learned.

Rodents sing and they laugh. Sound like good company, really.