Monthly Archives: January 2010

Thursday

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The MacDonnell Range at Glen Helen, Central Australia

The Cook-Book

The draft was reviewed last night by a knowledgeable food and cooking person; favourably. It has now reached the stage of becoming semi-public so I can get further feedback on the layout and range of recipes and chapters. Current problems are:

  • Indexing – the way I have assembled it doesn’t lend itself to automatic indexing but a solution will appear as I get closer to that activity. It would be handy now.
  • Consistency – is a bit of a mish-mash; some items are capitalized in one recipe, lower case in another.
  • Naming – some recipe titles begin with ‘Lamb’, others may be ‘Kebabs with Lamb’ so I need to develop a naming convention.
  • Assembling the components into one document – Word is notorious for falling apart when working with long documents.
  • Page numbering – because the chapters are stand-alone, I can’t get consistent page numbering.

However, I am pleased with this result so far and will continue to improve on it and solve these problems.

Technical Note

I am migrating the cook-book to the web but to get to this there were some problems. Initially, I had intended to use Microsoft Expression on a Windows server that backs-up my music files. When I moved the cook-book files across from my MacbookPro, I discovered the Word documents could only be read in Wordpad – I hadn’t installed Office on this server.

As I have Parallels Desktop on the Mac and can operate a Windows virtual machine, I updated Parallels, Vista and Office and installed Expression. The only glitch so far is not being able to share folders (directories) despite following the instructions in the manual and the support forums. Not a big issue at this stage.

Positives are that Expressions imports Word and builds the pages automatically. Once I design a suitable template, this makes authoring much simpler. Another is that Expression connects, using ftp, to my server in New Mexico so I can upload files directly from the application. I am impressed – and Vista is faster than I have ever experienced.

Climate Change

Some indication of what the Australian public thinks:

“Nice try Penny, but it’s time to take another look”, The Australian’, 14 January 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/nice-try-penny-but-its-time-to-take-another-look/story-e6frg71x-1225818991552

Before Copenhagen, public support for tackling climate change was strong, with polls showing about three-quarters of Australians backing action. That support will be tested in the next few months as the government moves to reintroduce its CPRS legislation.



Wednesday

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Flowers -- Central Australia

Climate Change

As I seek clarification of this issue I continue to read text that is barely understandable and often an exercise in point scoring. The article below by Carmody is an example of ‘barely understandable’ – about halfway through I became lost; the jargon, titles of protocols and the lengthy enumeration of his solution became an exercise in disappointment. As is my practice, quoted selectively

Geoff Carmody, “From Rio to Copenhagen the model was wrong”. The Australian, 13 January 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/from-rio-to-copenhagen-the-model-was-wrong/story-e6frg6zo-1225818572530

THE UN’s Copenhagen climate conference was substantive failure and procedural debacle. Other assessments are dishonest or delusional. We must learn the lessons of history and adapt climate policy to reflect them.

First, a big-bang synchronised response by all nations to global climate threats is a pipe dream. This was acknowledged in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio in 1992 and in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Late last year, Copenhagen amplified this lesson.

Second, nations won’t compromise economic growth by losing industry competitiveness in the name of mitigating climate change. This applies especially in the case of developing economies.

Third, a policy focused on where national emissions are produced, rather than where they are consumed, only made some sense under a big-bang synchronised global response. But it’s been retained since 1992 despite failure to secure such a response. Under a non-synchronised approach, this emissions production model generates national concerns about loss of competitiveness, job losses and carbon leakage. Nations won’t play or will only play dirty, via extensive policy exemptions, using this model.

Fourth, a focus on emissions reduction targets and their distribution funnelled negotiations into sterile, zero sum debates about who will commit to what emissions reduction outcomes when. There has been insufficient emphasis on putting a price on emissions, comprehensively applied and growing predictably through time. This caused many problems, including failure to start pricing emissions globally. No emissions price, no emissions reduction. No surprises there.

Fifth, we have failed to learn the preceding four lessons of history.

There are other lessons. From Rio to Copenhagen, the lesson has been loud and clear: it’s the wrong model, start again.

At this point I abandoned the quest for understanding.

And in the article below, Furedi moves from commenting on the northern hemisphere’s cold, Australia’s hottest decade on record to witch burning – perhaps commentators could abandon their jargon and wit and write for the people.

Frank Furedi, “It’s 15 below zero as weathermen go witch-hunting”, The Australian, 13 January 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/its-15-below-zero-as-weathermen-go-witch-hunting/story-e6frg6zo-1225818570353

IT is snowing big time in my town in Kent. The family sits in front of the television to discover whether there is more of the white stuff to come. However, instead of an informative weather forecast we are offered a political broadcast. A dramatic sounding voiceover informs us that David Shukman, who is the BBC’s environment and science correspondent, will report “on how one of the longest cold snaps for a generation fits in with theories of a warming planet and global climate change”.

Adopting a solemn tone that hints at catastrophes to come, Shukman announces that it is minus 15C in the Pennines and five cars are stranded before stating, “No wonder many are asking, `What about global warming?’ ” Just in case the cold temperature encourages the British public to assume a degree of scepticism towards climate change alarmism, Shukman reassuringly informs us that the big freeze is not inconsistent with theories of global warming. A swift cut to a chap from Kew Gardens who insists that “snowdrops are already blooming” . Apparently flowering is starting much earlier than previously, which must mean that the world is getting very, very warm.

“Britain’s cold snap does not prove climate science wrong,” argue two climate alarmist journalists in The Guardian. Leo Hickman and George Monbiot helpfully inform their readers that “weather is not the same as climate and single events are not the same as trends”. Just in case you are a complacent sceptic, Hickman and Monbiot seize on an announcement made by Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology that claims that the past 10 years are officially the hottest since records began. Apparently a rise in temperature in Australia may have direct significance for making sense of harsh wintry conditions in Britain. They speculate that the cold of the north and the warmth of the south “could be related”. It could be, and no doubt their alarmist imagination will have no problems in linking the two as different forms of extreme weather.

This then flows on to sixteenth century witch hunting and public burning at the stake, which leave me still puzzling over this connection.

Today’s Website

Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology – Sydney

I use this site several times a day and was quite surprised on 6 January to see the new format. The old text bulletin was abandoned for a pleasing style.

http://www.bom.gov.au/weather/nsw/forecasts/sydney.shtml

Monday

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Central Australia

Notes from Xanadu

We travelled to Bowral yesterday and enjoyed the Southern Highlands greeness, coolness and difference to our Inner West — very pleasant.

I have now a first-draft of the Cook-Book and am considering how to migrate it to my web server — not quite sure how to format each recipe as a separate page and will begin testing this.

Climate Change

A further example of the sorry debate over this problem:

Jonathan Leake, “Sea-level theory cuts no ice”, The Australian, 11 January 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/sea-level-theory-cuts-no-ice/story-e6frg6so-1225817853987

CLIMATE science faces a major new controversy after Britain’s Met Office denounced research from the Copenhagen summit that suggested global warming could raise sea levels by more than 1.8m by 2100. The studies, led by Stefan Rahmstorf, professor of ocean physics at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, have caused growing concern among other experts. They say his methods are flawed and that the real increase in sea levels by 2100 is likely to be far lower than he predicts.

Jason Lowe, a leading Met Office climate researcher, said: “We think such a big rise by 2100 is actually incredibly unlikely. The mathematical approach used to calculate the rise is completely unsatisfactory.” The new controversy dates back to January 2007 when Science magazine published a research paper by Professor Rahmstorf linking the 17cm rise in sea levels from 1881 to 2001 with a 0.6C rise in global temperature over the same period. Professor Rahmstorf then parted company from colleagues by extrapolating the findings to 2100. Based on the 17cm increase that occurred from 1881 to 2001, Professor Rahmstorf calculated that a predicted 5C increase in global temperature would raise sea levels by up to 188cm.

Critic Simon Holgate, a sea-level expert at the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, Merseyside, has written to Science magazine, attacking Professor Rahmstorf’s work as “simplistic”. “Rahmstorf’s real skill seems to be in publishing extreme papers just before big conferences like Copenhagen, when they are guaranteed attention,” Dr Holgate said. Most of the 1881-2001 sea-level rise came from melting glaciers that will be gone by 2050, leaving the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets as contributors. But contributions of these sheets to date has been negligible and researchers say there is no evidence to show that will change in the way Professor Rahmstorf suggests.

Professor Rahmstorf said he accepted many of the criticisms. “I hope my critics are right because a rise of the kind my work predicts would be catastrophic,” he said.

And yesterday I had the opportunity to talk to a well-connected climate change proponent and raised my doubts regarding the data and analyses that I have seen so far. I was told that:

  1. There is absolutely no doubt that climate change is a human induced phenomenon.
  2. The Bureau of Meteorology report is unequivocal that the climate is warming. That the previous Director of the BOM disagreed with the current stance was brushed aside.
  3. The complexity of weather leading to often-inaccurate forecasts does not reflect on the BOM’s ability to analyse climate.
  4. Another example of climate change is the acidification of the oceans.
  5. An American neuro-surgeon was quoted as saying if he procrastinated in medicine as the politicians were over climate change, his patients would all be dead. I thought this ironic considering the current insurance debate and litigation in the USA health system.
  6. Earth scientists, who take a long-term view like Ian Plimer, are wrong – unfortunately I can’t recall why.
  7. The fire threat in South Australia was ludicrous as there was nothing there to burn.
  8. I should have another look at the data, as I was wrong.

This is what I remember this morning and I could be mis-reporting him. But I was left with the impression what he said had the same cant I have been reading and listening too from both sides. I came home no wiser. What currently puzzles me is that after a career analyzing data looking for patterns and discontinuities, I cannot make any sense of what is currently being offered as proof by either side.

Saturday

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Madeleine snoozing on her bed of pot shards.

Climate Change

On Wednesday (6 January) I wrote, “It would be useful to now see some climate-change opinion polls for a glimpse of what a sample of Australians think about this issue”. I found a result but is it credible?

“Climate change Australia’s greatest economic risk: survey”, ABCNews, 8 December 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/08/2764753.htm

A study of 115 of the nation’s leaders in the fields of politics, business, the community sector and academia has concluded that the greatest risk to the Australian economy for the next decade is climate change. They say Australian businesses will struggle to cope with the flow-on effects of climate change including water scarcity, droughts and bushfires. The leaders were asked to consider 47 key risk areas and rate them according to how likely they are to happen and how serious that risk could be for the Australian economy. Overwhelmingly, they nominated climate change as the biggest challenge.

The Australian Davos Connection is the not-for-profit organisation behind the report, and chairman Michael Roux says the nation’s leaders are calling for action. “It was quite a surprise to me to see what a significant standout environmental-related matters were,” he said. “Climate change is a very significant factor in terms of people looking forward in terms of planning business or policy or just general concern about society going forward.

“One of the things about this report is how many of the risks are related and, of course, one of the key standouts in terms of this relationship is the requirement for innovation, new technologies, new design that needs to be applied and invested in to look for solutions to some of these problems.

“I think there is a real opportunity here for Australia and for business within the Australian context.”

Who wrote this tosh? ‘Standouts’, ‘…people looking forward in terms of planning business or policy or just general concern about society going forward…’, “…one of the key standouts in terms of this relationship is the requirement for innovation, new technologies, new design…”, and so on.

The 47 key risk areas are listed in Australia Report 2010, and the methodology set out with the warning that “…Care is … needed in interpreting the survey results which are not intended to reflect a statistically accurate estimate of the “true” risks to the Australian economy” p 21. And looking at the ‘Risk Landscape’ on p3, I can’t see that climate-change is “… a very significant factor”. What I do see is that the respondents consider extreme storm activity, droughts and heat waves, water scarcity and bushfires have greater than 20 per cent likelihood of occurring. That is not anything new. I wish our ABC would be a little more analytical when reporting these press releases.

I shall look for more random polling of what Australians think about climate change because that will shape our politicians’ behaviour rather than data analysis.

Social Media

While listening to “A Fresh New Year”, Pods and Blogs, 5 January 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/podsandblogs/ my ears tweaked at the interview with Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian, and how his casual use of Twitter caused public outrage at Trafigura’s attempt to block the publication of a parliamentary question. I mentioned this on the 17 October 2009 but never took any action. I am now following him and PodsandBlogs and will see what news arrives.

The Guardian’s article on Trafigura is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/oct/14/trafigura-fiasco-tears-up-textbook and there are follow-up links.

Friday

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Part of the front garden looking to the street.

Notes from Xanadu

The low temperatures and mild humidity, together with the compost spread last Spring, has the entire garden erupting with green and blooms. New rainbow lorikeets are flapping about being taught to feed from the banksia and grevilleas; they were quite awkward initially but rapidly developed graceful movement. It is rewarding to see these young birds –- I think it’s a first that the parents have nested nearby.

Social Media – Is it Corrupting Our Language?

On the 31 December I commented on Facebook wondering if I need to review my conservative concerns for English. The article quoted below laments that our language is turning feral. However, having thought about how the language has continued to evolve since (I believe C800AD) , it is pointless to not embrace the changes that social media users are introducing. An evolution that we can actually watch.

Natasha Elks, “Absolutely time to unfriend a few words”, The Australian, 6 January 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/absolutely-time-to-unfriend-a-few-words/story-e6frg6nf-1225816388957

IF a group of grumpy grammarians had their way, you would no longer be able to “unfriend” someone on Facebook, download an “app” on your iPhone, “tweet” about mindless nonsense on Twitter or even indulge in a spot of “sexting” with your paramour.

Based on nominations from furious wordsmiths and language lovers worldwide, an American university has published its annual list of words it would like banished from the English language for “use, misuse and general uselessness”.

Micro-blogging site Twitter sparked ire from the tongue-in-cheek linguists at Michigan’s Lake Superior State University, with calls for the word tweet and all of its variations — including tweetaholic, twittersphere and twitterature — to be banned. Hipsters should also refrain from using friend and unfriend as verbs, such as “Peter was, like, totally getting on my nerves so I unfriended him on Facebook”.

Thursday

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King Street, Sydney

Climate Change – The Debate Rolls On

From today’s The Australian, a request for leadership in place of rhetoric and point scoring. Selectively quoted with added comment.

Richard Denniss, “Rudd should never have tied carbon cuts to Copenhagen”, The Australian, 7 January 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/rudd-should-never-have-tied-carbon-cuts-to-copenhagen/story-e6frg6zo-1225816748842

In 2007, the then opposition leader declared: “Mr Howard has a responsibility to act . . . on climate change. This is a challenge which goes beyond national boundaries . . . If we are to get countries like China and India to accept global targets themselves then developed countries must act . . . Australia must show leadership.” (My emphasis).

It’s unlikely we’ll ever know what the Prime Minister was thinking, but he was right then and is wrong now. Without the leadership Rudd once advocated, there is little chance of achieving a meaningful international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Diplomacy aside, it’s in Australia’s interests to cut emissions as quickly as possible. … So where should Australia start? Surely it makes sense to stop paying the polluters before we implement a polluter pays scheme.

The second thing the government needs to do is to start shutting down Australia’s brown coal-fired power stations, which are among the most polluting in the world. …What we should do is increase the size of the renewable energy target and start building gas-fired power stations on the sites of the existing brown-coal power stations. This is simplistic; shutting down brown coal fired power and replacing with gas fired will take years and cause regional economic disruption hence will be politically unachievable.

Third, we should start taking energy efficiency seriously, in homes and commercial buildings. Ever wondered why there aren’t any doors on supermarket fridges and why it is so cold in the store? Coles and Woolworths know the answer; people buy more food when they are cold and when they don’t have to open doors. Given that Australians threw out $5 billion worth of food last year, perhaps redesigning retail spaces to reduce Australia’s energy use wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Frozen food and a number of other cabinets we observe do have doors; chilled food such as meat and dairy is in open cabinets. As an ex-Woolworths logistics person it is easier to restock open cabinets. And I have yet to see the research linking ‘cold to more purchasing and $5 billion in waste food.

Australia’s homes are the largest in the world. Every year, we build tens of thousands of homes with black-tile roofs, vast amounts of glass facing the afternoon sun and no shade trees. Who needs shade when you can air-condition? Does anybody really believe we are doing everything we can to tackle what the Prime Minister once called the moral challenge of climate change? An overblown paragraph; why weaken a sound argument with hyperbole?

Finally, we need to tackle the politically difficult task of introducing a carbon price. … No serious economist disputes the need to introduce a carbon price but there is much division about the how, what, when and where, and that is just among the economists. So, rather than argue about where we should end up in 2020, why not focus on where we should start? Denniss provides his own answer, no one can agree.

The CPRS legislation proposes that we begin with a fixed pollution permit price of $10 a tonne…. The advantage of a $10 starting price is it would raise revenue to invest in efficient technologies and send a signal to new investors that the old days are over, while not being so high that it would have a significant effect on our so called emission-intensive trade-exposed industries.

In the past year, the government has consistently linked the need to pass the CPRS with the need to get a binding agreement at Copenhagen. Rather than focusing on the real dangers of climate change and the benefits of early action, the government chose to suggest the fate of the world’s climate negotiations was in the hands of the Coalition. Now it is blaming the Coalition for blocking the domestic legislation and the Chinese for not negotiating in good faith in Copenhagen. When will it be time for the government to take some responsibility? Rudd was right before the last election. It is in Australia’s interests to reduce emissions quickly. Now is the time to stop hiding trivial domestic politics behind bad policy and get on with reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Denniss has quite a pedigree hence my disappointment in his shift from analytical thinking to journalistic hyperbole. However, at last, it is a call for leadership. Check Denniss out on https://www.tai.org.au/

Today’s Podcast

“Mona Lisa: the history of the world’s most famous painting”, Artworks, 3 January 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/artworks/stories/2010/2712810.htm

Today the story of the rise and rise of the Mona Lisa to world fame. The London-based historian Donald Sassoon is taking us through this five-hundred-year-long story. How did the portrait of the plain wife of a small-time nobleman rise to such celebrity and fame?

Wednesday

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Tianjara Falls, Moreton National Park

Climate Change – New Data, Same Arguments

In today’s SMH and The Australian are several articles written around the release of the “Annual Australian Climate Statement 2009” by the Bureau of Meteorology, http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/climate/change/20100105.shtml

Issued 5th January 2010, 2009 will be remembered for extreme bushfires, dust-storms, lingering rainfall deficiencies, areas of flooding and record-breaking heatwaves. Second warmest year for Australia

This has been interpreted by our Federal Government as clear evidence that CO2 is causing the temperature rise. The Opposition is advocating change-action to halt the CO2 instead of a tax on emissions.

Rosie Lewis And Ben Cubby, “Heatwave shows need for carbon deal: Garrett”, SMH, 6 January 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/environment/heatwave-shows-need-for-carbon-deal-garrett-20100105-lses.html

THE Federal Government has said climate data showing last year was Australia’s second-hottest on record means the Senate should pass the emissions trading scheme next month. The Opposition said it was cynical to link the data to the emissions trading legislation, and said if emissions needed to be cut then ”direct action”, such as changing soil composition to absorb more carbon, would suffice.

But the Government claimed science was on its side. “It’s up to the Senate and Mr Abbott to recognise that climate change is real, to recognise that for Australians warming is happening,” the Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, said yesterday. The report was consistent with the “unequivocal science view” that global warming was happening as a consequence of human activities, “and it’s in our economic and environmental interest to arrest it”, he said. “The Australian public expect decent climate change policy from the Leader of the Opposition. At the moment all they’re getting is mistakes and thought bubbles.”

And then there was this (quoted selectively):

Christopher Monckton, “Mr Rudd, your misguided warming policies are killing millions”, The Australian, 6 January 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/mr-rudd-your-misguided-warming-policies-are-killing-millions/story-e6frg6zo-1225816411782

You say “formal global and national economic modelling” shows “that the costs of inaction are greater than the costs of acting”. Yet, every economic analysis except that of the now discredited Lord Stern, with its near-zero discount rate and its absurdly inflated warming rates, comes to the same ineluctable conclusion: adaptation to climate change, if necessary, is orders of magnitude more cost-effective than attempts at mitigation. In a long career in policy analysis in and out of government, I have never seen so cost-ineffective a proposed waste of taxpayers’ money to stop the tide from coming in.

You led a delegation of 114 people to Copenhagen to bring back a non-result. Half a dozen were all that was really necessary. If you and your officials are not willing to tighten your belts, why should the taxpayers tighten theirs?

Millions are already dying of starvation in the world’s poorest nations because world food prices have doubled in two years. That was caused by a sharp drop in world food production, caused by suddenly taking millions of acres of land out of growing food for people who need it, to grow biofuels for clunkers that don’t. … At a time when so many of the world’s people are already short of food, the UN’s right-to-food rapporteur, Herr Ziegler, has rightly condemned the biofuel scam as “a crime against humanity”.

Yet this slaughter is founded upon a lie: the claim by the IPCC that it is 90 per cent certain that most of the “global warming” since 1950 is man-made. This claim – based not on science but on a show of hands among political representatives, with China wanting a lower figure and other nations wanting a higher figure – is demonstrably false…. Nor is the IPCC’s great lie the only lie in the official documents of the IPCC and in the speeches of its current chairman, who has made himself a multi-millionaire as a “global warming” profiteer.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Monckton,_3rd_Viscount_Monckton_of_Brenchley for background. The florid writing added to the ‘millions starving because of bio-fuels’, plus this background, has me placing him out on the ‘wacky’ fringe.

And then there was this (again selectively quoted):

Natasha Robinson, “Sceptics use temperatures to cast doubt on carbon theory”, The Australian, 6 January 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/sceptics-use-temperatures-to-cast-doubt-on-carbon-theory/story-e6frg6nf-1225816385293

THE weather bureau’s latest climate statement has nothing to suggest that warmer temperatures are the result of increased carbon dioxide emissions, climate change sceptics say. And despite the new figures indicating that the past decade was the warmest since record-keeping began, the sceptics point to the fact that there has been relatively little upward shift in temperatures since the 1980s.

Meteorologist William Kininmonth, a former head of the Bureau of Meteorology’s National Climate Centre, said yesterday the globe was still coming out of the Little Ice Age. “The globe has been warming for the past 300 years and so it is not surprising that the recent decade is probably warmer than anything else we have experienced in the last century,” he said.

Engineer and climate modeller David Evans yesterday blamed an “urban heat island” effect on thermometers, as well as the location of many thermometers at airports, for the higher temperature data. He also claimed that the weather bureau’s unadjusted raw data showed a cooling trend of temperatures. “It’s pretty clear that global warming is not predominantly due to carbon dioxide,” Dr Evans said. But National Climate Centre climatologist Blair Trewin said yesterday that the latest data indicated that long-term warming was probably the result of increased carbon emissions.

“It’s pretty solid evidence that warming trends that we have seen over the last century globally are consistent with what we would expect given the change that has happened in the atmosphere,” Dr Trewin said. A lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, University of Melbourne meteorology professor David Karoly, said yesterday there was no doubt the increased temperatures recorded were the result of human factors. “It is clear that there will be ongoing warming globally and in Australia, and that that warming will accelerate due to increased emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” he said.

With the release of new data the two camps have reacted flamboyantly which leaves me wondering what politics Rudd and Abbot will play when parliament resumes? It would be useful to now see some climate-change opinion polls for a glimpse of what a sample of Australians think about this issue..

Today’s Podcasts

For someone influenced by Bach’s music, this adds much to my appreciation.“Bach, the Evangelist”, Encounter, 27 December 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/encounter/stories/2009/2783278.htm

Silver medallist at the New York Festivals, this Encounter finds Johann Sebastian in his upstairs apartment at St Thomas’ School, a ‘cantata factory.’ Seemingly oblivious to beasts in the town square, students in the corridors, and at least eight offspring at home, he produced the world’s greatest music.

And having spent much time in the arid north this inspired me to go back to some of those isolated jewels of red earth.

“The Composition of Souls”, Encounter, 3 January 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/encounter/stories/2010/2750959.htm

Ludwig Leichhardt

In 1993 a group of men and women in the tiny township of Yowah in far Western Queensland told Encounter of their response to a vast and jewelled country of opals, red earth and heat. How did their response to land compare with the journals of explorer Ludwig Leichhardt who had travelled nearby and who is also represented in Patrick White’s Voss? This Encounter won a Silver Medal in the New York Radio Festivals for its reflections on European responses to remote Australia.

Tuesday

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Ginger in the front garden -- burst out on Sunday.

There are so many varieties of ‘Ginger’ that I can’t find any botanical details on this one.

Climate Change

Dan Harrison And Ben Cubby, “Hunger strike drives further wedge into Coalition”, SMH, 5 January 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/national/hunger-strike-drives-further-wedge-into-coalition-20100104-lq7j.html

This article is an indication of how the ‘Climate-Change Debate’ is widening. Preserving vegetation is a climate change issue but it is now setting the scene for our first Australian martyr. If he dies Rudd will lose considerable support and Joyce could be elevated to our rural Messiah (particularly in Queensland).

Mentioned in the article is, “A former ABC radio science presenter, Joanne Nova, also known as Joanne Codling…. She runs a Perth-based climate skeptics website.” I followed this up; it has a smattering of data but more interesting is the skeptics’ rhetoric in the comments to her blog, http://joannenova.com.au/

And then there is this, “An imperative read for a successful future.” Leonardo Dicaprio promoting  “Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science”, at http://www.desmogblog.com/skeptics-handbook-carbon-dioxide-climate-change which in critiquing Nova’s The Skeptics Handbook, left me wondering why I wasn’t able to read a succinct  ‘clearance of the “PR Pollution”’ instead of screens of  the usual attack English.

Note: Reading text on screens takes effort and interface designers have long recommended short text sequences interspersed with graphics. Nova has this skill; Jeremy Jacquot has missed this point. And I wonder about Leonardo Dicaprio’s climate change credentials.

Conclusion: Understandable data and clarity of analysis is still not forthcoming. Whoever draws this information together with unemotional language and understandable results will win much gratitude.

And here are some gobbledygook figures to further confuse the debate.

Kate Clark, “Old houses are environmentally-friendly”, SMH, 4 January 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/old-houses-are-environmentallyfriendly-20100103-ln83.html

The Bureau of Statistics tells us that one in seven houses built in Australia simply replaces an existing house (which is only 14 per cent). … Think of all the energy that goes into those new buildings replacing the old. The building industry is a significant contributor to global resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, along with household energy use. Building construction consumes 32 per cent of the world’s resources, including 12 per cent of its water and 40 per cent of its energy. Buildings also produce 40 per cent of the waste that goes to landfill dumps and 40 per cent of air emissions. Household energy use contributes about 9.5 per cent of Australia’s total greenhouse emissions.

Today’s Podcast

“The Romantic Movement and rock music”, The Philosopher’s Zone, 2 January 2010,  http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2010/2759561.htm

Romantic ideas and philosophy live on in certain strains of modern rock music, according to this week’s guest, Craig Schuftan, author of Hey Nietzsche – Leave them kids alone. David Bowie, The Cure, The Smiths, Queen, and more contemporary bands like My Chemical Romance and Weezer share some seriously Romantic tendencies with people like Byron, Schopenhauer, Wagner and even Nietzsche – and it’s not just because they all viewed the world through the same gloomy prism.

Monday

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The environment for The Bleed – the film I have been involved in.

The environment for The Bleed – the film I have been involved in.

Notes from Xanadu

The filming continued yesterday – 10:00 to 17:00 with a break for lunch. It is hard work being an aged mute with a crook leg living alone, let alone for the others; my estranged son who had a lot of lines, and the team. All hand-held camera work with basic lighting and equipment, and again, I was surprised at their discipline – it wore me out.

A paradox was how they concentrated on making a very short, very good film, yet during the breaks at the motel and at the support house, they reveled in TV schlock. One was affronted when I told him the choreography in An American in Paris (which I watched at the motel) was repetitive and unrepresentative of the marvelous dance that developed in the USA. Frankly I thought the dancing in An American in Paris was crap, fluffed up with a lot of effects, myth and advertising. Gene Kelly is an impressive dancer let down by bad choreography. I am a Merce Cunningham, Alvin Alley, Martha Graham person so being taken back to this Hollywood rubbish was a shock; I had forgotten how bad it is.

I look forward to seeing the final production of The Bleed and would love this team to get a Tropfest award; they deserve one for discipline and creativity.

Climate Change

A summary of how the Climate Change data has been interpreted by some in the press. The trend is now ‘anti-climate change’ but with the same unsubstantiated ‘pro-climate change’ rhetoric we were subjected to pre-Climatgate and Copenhagen.

“Another bad year for predictions of global warming”, Cut & Paste, The Australian, 4 January 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/another-bad-year-for-predictions-of-global-warming/story-e6frg6zo-1225815745712

UK Met Office long-term forecast, September 25, 2009:
The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average. It is also likely that the coming winter will be drier than last year.

Britain’s The Daily Telegraph on Saturday:
BRITAIN is bracing itself for one of the coldest winters for a century with temperatures hitting minus 16C, forecasters have warned. They predicted no let-up in the freezing snap until at least mid-January, with snow, ice and severe frosts dominating. And the likelihood is that the second half of the month will be even colder. Weather patterns were more like those in the late 1970s, experts said, while Met Office figures released on Monday are expected to show that the country is experiencing the coldest winter for up to 25 years.

Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times:
CALL me a cynic, but wasn’t it a bit premature of the climate change monkeys to have called 2009 the “fifth warmest year on record” back in November? We have now had the coldest December since Surrey was home to mastodons and pterodactyls and mammoths stalked the Lincolnshire Wolds….

Christopher Booker in The Sunday Telegraph yesterday:
What is not generally realised is that the UK Met Office has been, since 1990, at the very centre of the campaign to convince the world that it faces catastrophe through global warming. Its then director, Dr John Houghton, was the single most influential figure in setting up the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the chief driver of climate alarmism. Its Hadley Centre for Climate Change, along with the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, was put in charge of the most prestigious of the four official global temperature records…. The “Climategate” documents from the CRU, along with further revelations from Russian scientists, have shown the CRU-Met Office alliance systematically manipulating temperature data to show the world growing warmer than the evidence justified. And those same computers used to predict temperatures 100 years ahead for the IPCC have also been used to produce those weather forecasts that prove so consistently wrong. …. It is a state of affairs so bizarre that it cries out for political intervention. Yet our politicians…are so in thrall to this new religion that they cannot see evidence staring them in the face. How many more winters and summers will it take before sanity finally breaks in to put an end to this scandal?

Conrad Black in this week’s The Spectator:
What possessed [Malcolm Turnbull] and [Kevin] Rudd to sign on to this climate change rubbish? Global warming is not occurring; carbon emissions have nothing to do with it when it does occur; man doesn’t produce climate change fluctuations, trivial as they have been in the last 50 years. And Australia is a cameo player and brings little to this party, which it should not have attended and [which] has effectively ended in shambles. Copenhagen proved to be an unmitigated fiasco of pompous charlatans purporting to reach an agreement all will thankfully ignore, while the Chinese and Indians graciously pointed out the absurdity and hypocrisy of the whole exercise. Baron Black of Crossharbour is in a Florida prison convicted of criminal fraud.

And then there is this where he has ‘found himself’, (selectively quoted and my emphasis):

John Cox, “Modern green romanticism is misanthropic”, The Australian, 4 January 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/modern-green-romanticism-is-misanthropic/story-e6frg6zo-1225815743545

…I find myself nearly always opposed to the viewpoints taken by the modern greens who seem to trace their roots back to the 19th-century romantic period, which was a reaction against the scientific rationalism of the 18th century. This romantic view of nature has lead to the pervasive influence of an ecocentric rather than an anthropocentric life view in today’s world and was manifest in the Traveston Dam decision to put the possible effects of this dam on a few species ahead of the interests of hundreds of thousands of human beings.

I consider that India and China have been morally correct in their decisions to put present economic growth and the elimination of poverty ahead of possible future environmental benefits.

In my transport field I find myself coming up against environmentalists who cannot see the economic and environmental benefits of putting more traffic on freeways that have 30 per cent less fuel and greenhouse emissions, 50 per cent less particulate emissions, 70 per cent fewer crash fatalities and 30 per cent lower economic vehicle operating costs than on stop-start arterial roads.

I also find myself up against public transport advocates who cannot admit that the motor car has given people the freedom to work, travel and live where they want. They cannot admit that the car is the most equitably distributed form of transport that Australia has seen and that it was a major instrument for the promotion of gender equity in the 20th century.

It is also not well known that cars are a more sustainable form of transport than public transport as the cost of a car trip, including externalities, is lower than a public transport trip including government subsidies.

I also find myself in the camp of the sceptics with respect to anthropogenic global warning.

Today’s Website

An updated Australian Style guide – I am initially uncomfortable with it but it is worth exploring.

“Correction!” , Lingua Franca, 2 January 2010

The ABC Radio National website has an online content style guide, to provide rulings on spelling, punctuation and language usage to those who publish material there, but also for the many listeners who take standards of language expression seriously. http://style.radionational.net.au/about-guide

Sunday

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A Corrobboree Toadlet somewhere in the Kosciusko NP (sometime in the 70s).

A Corrobboree Toadlet somewhere in the Kosciusko NP (sometime in the 70s).

Notes From Xanadu

I am playing the role of a 60s year old widower with an estranged son and a stoma in the esophagus, for a Tropfest 2010 entry. Not a difficult role; I have to limp using a walking stick, not speak (my larynx has been excised), and offer a range of facial expressions from loathing for my son to new found love for my grand-daughter.

I am impressed by the creative, management skill and discipline of this young team from Fluid Screen Media. They cope with unforeseen changes, the production yesterday at a minus-3-star city motel was impeccable and the continuity of filming, set preparation, wardrobe, make-up, and support was impressive. I learned much.

The first problem arose when my about-to-be-newly-found grandson refused to be involved and had to be taken home. He was substituted by a granddaughter and a different son and it worked well – for me anyway. However, this meant sitting around the minus-3-star motel for an additional 90 minutes, which wasn’t a burden; I caught up on technical podcasts and watched the range of guests arriving and departing. This volume of people caused another problem; the scene in the motel reception had to be abandoned. And the Asian staff of this rathole were generously accommodating. At 20:30 I had had enough and was forced to abandon the set and head home for rest with a slight guilt shadow that I was letting them down.

Today we move back in time to when the son arrives at my Tempe house and we proceed through some intense ‘dislike changing to perplexed’ scenes; I am pleased I only have to script my face and not deliver a speech on what went wrong with our relationship as acting is not a simple craft.

The Tropfest 2010 deadline is the 7 January and the entry cannot exceed 7 minutes; if Fluid Screen Media get the entry in, I will be impressed; if they get to the shortlist I will be delighted for them, and that I could help. My involvement is the easiest; I just turn up and go through the various shooting requirements; they have to organize lighting, food, sets, script, people, unforeseen changes; a very complex set of logistics.

Today’s Podcast

“Mary Wollstonecraft”, In Our Time, 31 December 2009, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pg5dt

She was the mother of Mary Shelly and feminism. You will have to subscribe through iTunes as there appears to be a block on streaming this. Worth the trouble though.