December 2007 – Page 4 – a sibilant intake of breath

Mocking the Bali conference logo

Substantive commentary on the concluded Bali conference can wait a while. Digging through UN pages in search of news, I came upon the terrible official logo:

A blue planet, in front of an ambiguous gray shape, with freakish hands of different hews clasped in front. On top of the sphere, some time of weird, viscous, milky fluid is spreading downwards. Somehow, the logo manages to denigrate both the inspiring unity embodied in photos of the Earth from space and the spirit of cooperation represented by clasped hands. The hands are especially objectionable: drawn with no regard for human anatomy and clearly engaged in arm wrestling rather than a respectful handshake.

Hopefully, the members of the UNFCCC will prove more capable at climatic negotiation over the next few years than they have proved at graphic design, in relation to this conference.

Salmon farming and sea lice

Recent work by Martin Krkosek of the University of Alberta has demonstrated strong links between the practice of salmon aquaculture and the incidence of sea lice infestations that threaten wild populations. One study used mathematically coupled datasets on the transmission of sea lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis) on migratory pink (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) and chum (Oncorhynchus keta) salmon. They concluded that:

Farm-origin lice induced 9–95% mortality in several sympatric wild juvenile pink and chum salmon populations. The epizootics arise through a mechanism that is new to our understanding of emerging infectious diseases: fish farms undermine a functional role of host migration in protecting juvenile hosts from parasites associated with adult hosts. Although the migratory life cycles of Pacific salmon naturally separate adults from juveniles, fish farms provide L. salmonis novel access to juvenile hosts, in this case raising infection rates for at least the first 2.5 months of the salmon’s marine life (80 km of the migration route).

Packing fish together in pens that are open to the sea is an almost ideal mechanism for breeding and distributing parasites and disease. In nature, you would never find salmon packed 25,000 to an acre. Keeping them in such conditions – and making them grow as quickly as possible – generally requires chemical manipulation. The earlier discussion here about antibiotic use and its role in the emergence of resistant bacteria is relevant.

These concerns also exist in addition to the fundamental reason for which fish farming cannot be sustainable: it relies on catching smaller and less tasty fish to feed to the tastier carnivorous fish that people enjoy. It thus lets us strip the sea bare of salmon or cod or trout and compensate for some period of time by using cheaper fish as a factor for their intensive production. Given that those cheaper fish are caught unsustainably, however, fish farming simply delays the emergence of truly empty oceans. And the industry is trying to have farmed salmon labelled ‘organic.’ Ludicrous.

Source: Krkosek, Martin et al. “Epizootics of wild fish induced by farm fish.” Proceedings of the National Association of Sciences. October 17, 2006, vol. 103, no. 42, 15506-15510.

P.S. Shifting Baselines also has some commentary on sea lice and salmon farming.

Rejecting Canada’s new copyright act

As a student, I was constantly being called upon to support various causes, through means ranging from making donations to attending rallies. Usually, such activities have a very indirect effect; sometimes, they cannot be reasonably expected to have any effect at all. Not so, recent protest activities around Canada’s new copyright act: a draconian piece of legislation that would have criminalized all sorts of things that people have legitimate rights to do, such as copying a CD they own onto an iPod they own.

Defending the fair use of intellectual property has become a rallying point for those who don’t want to see the best fruits of the information revolution destroyed by corporate greed or ham-fisted lawmaking in the vein of the much-derided American Digital Millennium Copyright Act. At their most controversial, such acts criminalize even talking about ways to circumvent copyright-enforcement technology, even when such technology is being mistakenly applied to non-copyrighted sources: such as those covered by the excellent Creative Commons initiative or those where fair use is permissive for consumers. Watching a DVD you own using a non-approved operating system (like Linux) could become a criminal offence.

For now, the protests seem to have been successful. Of course, the temptation for anyone trying to pass a controversial law is to hold off until attention dissipates, then pass it when relatively few people are watching. Hopefully, that will not prove the ultimate consequence of this welcome tactical victory for consumer rights.

Trains and buses

Commenting on the possibility of Seattle installing a streetcar system, Dan Savage has argued: “People like trains. People hate buses.” Though public transportation policy is hardly his area of expertise, he does understand how people think and he is able to express himself forcefully and directly. On some level, it is definitely true. I like trains and subways. In London, I took the subway all the time; not once did I ever take a bus. Taking the train from Oxford to London feels like a luxury; taking the bus feels like a jerky, tedious chore.

In Heat, George Monbiot argues that the solution is to make buses nicer: cleaner, newer, and with attractive add-ons like wireless internet. He also argues that inter-city buses should avoid city centres, with all the nightmares of traffic and fiddly intersections they inevitably involve. While that would improve point-to-point travel in the UK, it doesn’t really reveal the reasons for which buses are treated with everything from moderate dislike to outright disdain. Is it a class issue? Lisa Simpson called the bus “”the chariot of the poor and very poor alike.” Is it a practical matter of comfort and efficiency, as Monbiot describes? If so, can it be overcome through practical measures like those he suggests. Are buses doomed to forever be an inferior good?

It is generally recognized that increasing bus services is the cheapest way of expanding public transport – both in terms of capital considerations and overall lifetime costs. That said, if transit use is significantly hampered by the dislike people feel for buses, perhaps alternatives should be more strongly considered. Arguably, this is especially true when it comes to people who have the financial means to use a car instead. If they get driven off the public transit system as soon as they hit that level of affluence, the system remains dominated by users without a great deal of political influence. In an argument akin to those about two-tier healthcare, it is possible that the self-exclusion of the wealthy from the public system perpetuates mediocrity.

One way or another, we need to hope that the private vehicle is reaching its apex in human history. Even with the eventual development of electric vehicles and other low or zero-emission options, the sheer amounts of space and resources devoted to producing and maintaining private transportation infrastructure are probably not sustainable. Given that it will be politically impossible to drag people from their cars kicking and screaming, we need to think seriously about how to encourage voluntary shifts to public or non-motorized transport. Better bike infrastructure and public transit seems crucial tot that campaign.

Entertaining physics demonstrations

His name is Julius Sumner Miller and physics is his business.

For those who lacked my good fortune in seeing most of these demonstrations a number of times at Vancouver’s Science World, the videos should give a sense of how physics can be made universally comprehensible and exciting. The facts that Mr. Miller looks like a mad scientist and that he has a penchant for hyperbole may well contribute to his ability to hold one’s attention.

My involvement as a camper and leader at SFU’s Science Alive daycamp also impressed upon me the effectiveness of physical demonstrations in sparking children’s interest in science. That is especially true when the demonstrations involve rapid projectile motion, strong magnets, cryogenic materials, aggressive combustion, and explosions.

Geminid meteor shower

Those of you with clear skies should make a point of peering at them tonight. The shower – produced by debris from a near-Earth asteroid called 3200 Phaethon – should become increasingly intense throughout the night, peaking in intensity around dawn. According to NASA, this should be the best meteor shower of the year. It may well be worth getting up before dawn (or staying up especially late) and looking to the western sky.

3200 Phaethon is thought to be a former comet, dust from which began intercepting Earth’s orbit annually during the American Civil War. The object is about 5 kilometres wide and misses the earth by only 2 million kilometres. If you have access to a decent telescope (many university observatories are open to the public some nights), you can observer Phaethon in the constellation Virgo. It only has the brightness of a 14th magnitude star, so neither the naked eye nor binoculars are sufficient to pick it out.

Climate and the boreal forest

According to data submitted by Global Forest Watch Canada to the International Boreal Conservation Campaign (IBCC), Canada’s boreal forest contains 186 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. That is equal to about 27 years worth of present global emissions. Permafrost – which is rich in methane – makes up about 25% of the world’s land area and about 50% of Canada.

Significant permafrost melting would release gasses that would accelerate the warming trend. Making boreal areas into parks and avoiding deforestation there isn’t a terribly effective mechanism for keeping the bulk of these greenhouse gasses in the soil. The trees themselves are increasingly threatened by pine beetles, as warm winters permit their continued spread. Maintaining the soils as a carbon sink essentially requires that they remain cold – an increasingly distant prospect as emissions continue to grow and other carbon sinks become saturated.

No Arctic summer ice in 2012-13?

According to a BBC article, some scientists are predicting the disappearance of all Arctic summer ice within five to six years. This projection is based on computer modeling by Wieslaw Maslowski and uses data that doesn’t even take into account the spectacular loss of Arctic ice last summer. Maslowski’s team has produced an estimated rate of loss much higher than those of other groups who have studied the issue, but he defends the quality of his modeling:

“We use a high-resolution regional model for the Arctic Ocean and sea ice forced with realistic atmospheric data. This way, we get much more realistic forcing, from above by the atmosphere and from the bottom by the ocean.”

Even the work of other teams suggests the loss of summer ice between 2040 and 2100: a very rapid climatic change, given how most forms of natural climatic forcing operate on the timescale of millennia

The progressive deterioration of the northern polar cryosphere is disturbing for a number of reasons. Because water absorbs more energy from sunlight than ice does, the loss of the icecap would accelerate global warming. It would also eliminate or substantially alter the lifestyles of those living in the north, as well as most Arctic species. That said, there is some chance that the sudden disappearance of the Arctic icecap would be dramatic and irrefutable enough to kick off much more serious global action to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and prepare to adapt to the amount of change that is now inevitable. In a world where the Arctic vanished before our eyes, radical ideas like those of Monbiot may start seeming reasonable to a lot more people.

Statements with no content whatsoever

There may be nothing more frustrating in the world than being unable to convince somebody that something is a tautology. You try as hard as you can to convince them that something is true by definition, but they persist in failing to see how you have designed the terms of the statement to be indistinguishable from the conclusion. Saying “Dogs are dogs therefore dogs are dogs” and having someone say, “Ah, but there are many kinds of dogs” is enough to drive one batty, if it happens often enough. Essentially, this is because the supposed point of contention is nothing of the kind – it is just a non sequitur that the other conversant thinks is some kind of rebuttal.

For some reason, training courses seem to spawn these sorts of logically agonizing discussions.

iBook dead

After running a routine maintenance script, my iBook has decided that it no longer wishes to perform any of the functions traditionally associated with a computer. It will probably be a few days before I am up and running again, during which time I will be unable to check my personal email.

Given that I will probably have to wipe my hard drive and start over, it makes sense to pick up a copy of the new release of Mac OS before I do so.

Back in a few days.

[Update: 2:37am] After $100 and seven hours of backing up, formatting, and installation, the computer is healthy enough to access the web – and running Leopard to boot. The lengthy task of bringing back all my data and applications will need to wait for a later time.

[Update: 12 December 2007] It seems having byte-for-byte backups of data held in Apple software is not terribly useful. I can import my 14,000 image files back into iPhoto easily enough (though it takes six hours), but they lose all the information I have spent dozens of hours entering: locations where they were taken, who is in them, whether they have been used as blog photos, etc. This whole recovery process has me tearing out my hair in frustration, while spending six hours or more each night working on it.