Canada – Page 55 – a sibilant intake of breath

CBC documentary on geoengineering

Like it or not, an increasing amount of attention is being given to geoengineering – the idea of deliberately modifying the climate system to counteract the warming effects of greenhouse gases.

On November 25, the CBC documentary series Doc Zone is broadcasting the premiere of Playing God With Planet Earth: Can Science Reverse Global Warming? According to the promotional materials, the documentary:

explores the last ditch efforts of scientists and engineers trying to avert a planetary meltdown.

As the threat of climate change grows more urgent, scientists are considering radical and controversial schemes to rehabilitate the climate. Since none of these wild—and possibly dangerous—ideas have ever been tried before, the filmmakers used a distinctive “painted animation” technique (like a “graphic novel”) to explore these futuristic scenarios.

“Human ingenuity could temporarily roll back the effects of global warming. At the same time, it could cause catastrophic damage and spark deadly political conflict,” says director Jerry Thompson. “We’ve interviewed some of the world’s leading scientists, engineers, environmentalists, lawyers, and disaster-relief workers about the possible consequences of intentionally manipulating the climate—versus the risk of doing nothing.”

In addition to the Thursday screening on CBC television, it will be possible to watch online on the show’s website.

If readers do end up watching it, please consider leaving a comment about it here.

Montreal Port

One interesting thing about ports is the way in which they accumulate obsolete vessels and buildings. In Montreal, there is a stretch of waterfront in the old port area which has been enhanced for tourists, but which is nonetheless situated alongside old grain elevators and other bits of industrial refuse.

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Here, light reflecting off parked cars was illuminating the shadowed side of the motorway.

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This prominent sign has a dedicated art project online. Since 2006, the ‘Farine Five Roses’ brand has apparently been owned by Smuckers.

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The City of Montreal has gone to considerable lengths to exclude urban explorers from these old grain elevators. That’s probably quite sensible, given the hazards that are almost certainly inside. Nonetheless, I did see some urban exploration photos from inside this complex during my weekend in Montreal.

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In particular, I would be anxious about using any of these rusted overhanging walkways.

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I have always enjoyed the interesting textures that are produced by rusting metal.

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Similarly, the contrast between the increasingly oxidized iron and the blue sky is attractive, when these old towers are viewed on a clear day.

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Between two of the moorings for large passenger vessels, a pair of old steamships are currently tied. Quite possibly, they are destined to be sent off for scrap.

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Whenever I see a catenary, I am reminded of the various ‘Connections’ television series’ hosted by James Burke. Like making pigments from coal, the caternary form is a connection that arose again and again on the show.

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Most of these photos were taken using Canon’s 70-200mm f/4L lens. Nearly all were shot at f/8, with the ISO setting and shutter speed adjusted to take into consideration the amount of ambient light, the degree to which I could brace the camera, and the relative brightness or darkness of the subject.

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The original purpose of both ships was obscure to me, though they were clearly designed for some industrial use, rather than the transport of passengers.

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Despite that, some details of the ships provide insight into how their crews would have experienced life aboard them.

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Perhaps something about the redox interactions between the different structural elements of the ship explains this pattern of rusting.

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I suspect these are bow thrusters, used to manoeuvre ships in relatively tight quarters.

Remember

Perhaps we honour the war dead better by declining to participate in nationalistic and militaristic state-sanctioned displays. Wars always involve at least some moral ambiguity; even if the cause for going to war was unambiguously just, innocents end up being victims during virtually all wars. Perhaps if we had really learned from the massive and numerous tragedies of the 20th century, we will feel more included to a solemn recognition of all those who have suffered from war, rather than a patriotic salute to those who participated in wars (willingly or not, justly or unjustly) while they happened to be wearing our flag (or the British ones we fought under before).

Governments have an interest in spreading the general belief that someone who takes up arms for their country, regardless of the cause, is making an honourable sacrifice and worthy of respect. Those reflexes help to keep a state alive across the centuries, by maintaining an ability to rally to their own defence when necessary. Countless people who carried that belief were sent out of the many trenches of the 20th century, straight at the barrels of the machine guns of those conflicts. Much of that was senseless, or served dubious ends. At best, war is a tragic undertaking, necessary when someone wants to impose the intolerable upon us. When collectively contemplating war, perhaps it would serve human ends most if we collectively accepted that war is almost the worst among all things, and should only be undertaken to eliminate a still-greater evil.

Blackberry PIN security

One popular feature of Research In Motion’s BlackBerry communication devices is PIN messaging – a communication protocol involving fewer steps and servers than email.

Interestingly, the Communication Security Establishment (Canada’s codebreakers) has guidance online about the security of BlackBerries in general and PIN messages specifically. They draw particular attention to the very limited protection generated by the encryption system used for PIN messages:

PIN-to-PIN is not suitable for exchanging sensitive messages. Although PIN-to-PIN messages are encrypted using Triple-DES, the key used is a global cryptographic “key” that is common to every BlackBerry device all over the world. This means any BlackBerry device can potentially decrypt all PIN-to-PIN messages sent by any other BlackBerry device, if the messages can be intercepted and the destination PIN spoofed. Further, unfriendly third parties who know the key could potentially use it to decrypt messages captured over the air. Note that the “BlackBerry Solution Security Technical Overview” document published by RIM specifically advises users to “consider PIN messages as scrambled, not encrypted”.

The document identifies other vulnerabilities, such as the potential bypassing of spam filtering and the risk that a BlackBerry that has been passed along to a new user will receive a sensitive PIN not intended for them.

The document goes on to say: “Due to the aforementioned security issues, GC departments should refrain from using PIN-to-PIN messaging and the disabling of his functionality”.

While that is probably good advice, I doubt many departments will be sacrificing this popular feature. That is probably welcome news for anyone who is intercepting these messages. As mentioned before, British Embassies and High Commissions have been conducting signals intelligence interception against friendly countries since the second world war. No doubt, other embassies in Ottawa are actively monitoring traffic between BlackBerries.

The same may well be true for more sophisticated private companies, hoping to get some inside information on upcoming policies and regulations.

Massive climate change art in Vancouver

On November 21st, 350.org is organizing the creation of a massive art piece in Vancouver, which will be photographed from space. The piece is meant to be about the Athabasca oil sands, and their contribution to climate change.

The 350 movement is named after the maximum concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere they consider safe:

Scientists told us the bottom line three years ago this fall: any amount of carbon greater than 350 parts per million is not “compatible with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” We’re already too high—our air is now 390 ppm CO2—and we’re already feeling the effects.

Please leave a comment if you are planning to attend the Vancouver event.

Tony Fouhse’s photography

Tony Fouhse is an Ottawa photographer doing great work in a range of fields, from commercial advertising to artistic portraits of Ottawa crack cocaine addicts. He has a Flash-based website (sorry, owners of iPads and new MacBook Airs) and a weekly blog.

His work was discussed in the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography I am taking through the School of Photographic Arts: Ottawa. It makes me want to undertake some more involved photographic projects, rather than just taking advantage of what there is to photograph in the general vicinity of my home.

Netflix streaming in Canada

I used to be a subscriber to Zip.ca, a DVD by mail service. I decided to give it up for a trio of reasons:

Since I couldn’t really choose the order in which I received films, I often got ones I wasn’t in the mood to see
The service was fairly expensive
I received a number of scratched and unplayable discs

Now, I am trying the new video streaming service offered in Canada by Netflix.

By far the biggest problem is selection. There are some fairly obscure television shows like Blackadder and League of Gentlemen, but no Simpsons, Seinfeld, Arrested Development, Sopranos, 24, Mythbusters, etc. The same goes for movies. I start searching for high quality films I have been meaning to see, and rarely find what I am looking for. With the Netflix streaming service, you watch what is available rather than what you want. Some of what is available is certainly decent – such as the first three seasons of Mad Men – but it definitely doesn’t have the same scope of options as the iTunes store or Zip.ca.

That said, Netflix streaming is quite cheap. It only costs $8 a month, which probably explains how popular it has become:

According to Sandvine, a network management company that studies Internet traffic patterns, 10 percent of Canadian Internet users visited Netflix.com in the week after the service launched. And they weren’t just visiting—they were signing up and watching a lot of movies. Netflix videos quickly came to dominate broadband lines across Canada, with Netflix subscribers’ bandwidth usage doubling that of YouTube users. At peak hours (around 9 p.m.) the service accounted for more than 90 percent of the traffic on one Canadian broadband network.

My sense is that Netflix streaming is really competing with free streaming sites. Against them, it has a number of advantages. The interface is fairly good, and it is unlikely to be laden with malware. There aren’t heaps of broken links to be dealt with. Also, there are no daily time limits for use.

Given how much bandwidth Netflix is eating up, it seems likely that there will be an outcry from internet service providers (including those rendered more powerful by a recent CRTC decision). Netflix itself will likely face pressure to pay ISPs, while users are likely to find themselves hit with extra charges for bandwidth usage.

The right way to do electronic voting

On Monday, Ottawa held its municipal elections. The physical process of voting achieved the major benefit of electronic voting, while retaining the security associated with paper ballots. This is the right way to handle things.

Each voter was given a piece of paper with lists of candidates for the three positions under contest. The voter selected candidates and filled in small circles beside their names with a pen – a process that should be familiar to anyone who attended high school in recent decades. The paper was then put into a sleeve to cover up the selections before being drawn through a scanner and into a storage box.

Because the scanners allowed quick tabulation of results, the outcome of the election could be known quickly. Because all the paper ballots were retained, there was little danger of an error or manipulation of the voting machines leading to an incorrect result.

I don’t know whether any auditing was done, but it would be a good idea. A certain portion of all the scanners and ballot boxes could be selected at random, with the ballots hand-counted and the tally compared with the electronic one. If significant disparities appeared, a manual recount of the whole election could then be conducted.

The only limitation I can see in the system, compared with all-electronic voting approaches, is that it cannot easily be tailored to help people with disabilities, such as very poor vision. That being said, it seems pretty straightforward for a volunteer to assist people in such situations.

Being a non-driver

When I was in high school, I took the written test that kicks off British Columbia’s graduated vehicle licensing program. I took some lessons, but never progressed through the multiple stages required to get a full license. I left for university without one, and have never since had much opportunity or incentive to get a license. I may never decided to do so.

Quite possibly, that is becoming a less unusual choice for city-dwellers. Treehugger is reporting on a study of Canadian attitudes by GWL Realty Advisors. Some of the results are encouraging from an environmental perspective, such as a growing preference for apartments over houses. The commentary on the views of young people on driving is also of interest:

There is also growing research that younger generations do not relate to the automobile as enabling “freedom.” Instead, their electronic and social media devices–whether a smart phone, small lap top computer, music player, etc.–provide an alternate means for self expression and being free to do what they want. In the United States, kilometers driven by 18-34 year olds is declining, and this is likely the case in Canada as well (Neff, 2010). Younger generations seem to have less interest in automotive use, making apartment living in dense, walkable and transit-oriented urban areas a more natural fit for their lifestyles.

For those living in rural areas – or the 1950s – driving really is freedom. For those living in the cities of 2010, cars probably do more harm than good. Rather than spending money to further accommodate the dangerous, climate-destroying machines, it seems sensible that we should focus on building walkable neighbourhoods and good public transportation networks.

I have written before about driving’s declining appeal. I have also written about how the internet increases the social value of skills other than driving, such as photography.

Federal responsibility in Canada’s oil sands

The Pembina Institute – in cooperation with Environmental Defence and Equiterre – has released a new report on Canada’s oilsands. It concludes that even with optimistic assumptions about carbon capture and storage, greenhouse gas emissions from the oil sands are set to be unacceptably large by 2050, making Canada’s climate change mitigation targets infeasible:

A key finding of the report is that the math on carbon emissions doesn’t add up. If expansion of the oil sands proceeds as planned, the oil sands industry will outspend its proportional share of Canada’s carbon budget under the government’s current target by a factor of 3.5 times by 2020 and by nearly 40 times by 2050, even assuming very optimistic application of carbon capture and storage technologies. The oil sands sector must do its fair share to reach the federal government’s commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or other sectors of the economy will be asked to shoulder the extra burden.

The report calls for oil sands operations to be subject to a carbon price, which would be applied equally across the economy.

The report stresses how, if the government gives the oil sands soft treatment, everybody else will need to work harder to achieve Canada’s climate targets.

The report does not particularly stress the sheer size of the fossil fuel reserve embedded in the oil sands, which may actually be the biggest problem from a climate change perspective.