03.31.07

AP gets Silence of the Frogs Wrong?

Posted in Abrupt Climate Change at 7:40 pm

The AP just broke a story that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the authoritative U.N. network of 2,000 scientists and more than 100 governments say that climate change is already impacting species around the globe.

 I would be the last person to argue with this, but they go on to give examples, including a claim that the worldwide drop in the frog population is a result of global warming. The drop in frog populations was noticed as early as 1981 and was widely recognized 9 years later.

A massive amount of research ensued, with acid rain, global warming and other causes listed as potential causes to be investigated. It was determined that global travel had spread the virus and the fungus to areas they had never been before and caused the massive deformity and death of the amphibians.

In 2006 it was reported that extinctions occurred after periods of weather conducive to the spread of the fungus. The bouts of warm, humid weather were tied to global warming.

This does not logically imply that global warming was the primary cause of the extinction. It merely implies that global warming accelerated the timing of the extinctions. Especially prior to 1980, climate swings were still within the range of normal. Once pathogens had been spread it was only a matter of time before the trigger was pulled by normal variations in the weather.

If one is trying to deal with a disaster it’s really important to recognize that more than one may be occurring at the same time. Attributing all emotionally-charged consequences to your favorite disaster just makes it more difficult for the average layman who will have to push the solution to figure out what is going on.

03.30.07

Don’t Save the World With Bamboo

Posted in Abrupt Climate Change at 3:49 pm

Time magazine helpfully laid out things people can do to cut done on carbon emmisions.

As part of their recommendations to cut emmisions they suggested planting bamboo.  Don’t do it! Bamboo will crowd out native species (that might not survive a significant warming trend, but why push them out?) and make attempts to later farm the land very difficult.

Plant a nut tree instead. (It’s a much better adaptation strategy and results in a tasty harvest even if disaster doesn’t strike.)

03.27.07

Fox on Steriods

Posted in Just A Thought at 11:29 am

Fox Viewers Agree – Just Like Anyone Brainwashed

Recently I’ve read a number of articles on the consistent alignment of Fox viewers in polls.

Basically the polls say that Fox viewers are more likely to support a conservative agenda than any other demographic group. This is backed up by at least one study shows that Fox is very effective at getting 3-8% of voters to switch to Republican candidates and at getting out the vote for previously non-voting conservatives. (Entry of a liberal news organization into a community has depressed voter turn-out at least once. I always thought the liberal agenda was confusing – & who can vote if you’re confused?.)

Several reasons are given :

    Fox’s goal to balance liberal coverage with a conservative slant and
    the lack of self-flagellation or acknowledgement when Fox pushes a story proven to be false

CNN had no trouble visiting Obama Barack’s elementary school and determining that it wasn’t a Muslim madrassah as claimed by Fox. Fox did not indulge in an orgy of self-investigation.

Fox Viewers Oblivious? I Don’t Think So.

I have a hard time buying that Fox viewers are so oblivious to their car radios, discussions at water coolers, school playgrounds and family gatherings, books and news magazines that they wouldn’t have a rational clue that that not everything that came out of a broadcaster’s mouth is 100% true.

I remember my first encounter with the difficulties of journalists getting things right. The write-up of my Jr. High School dance in the local paper bore no relation to the reality that I attended & there weren’t so many people that there that I wouildn’t have known if something was going on.

A teacher, the source for the story, felt her spin put the school in a better light. At the time I thought her spin had careened totally out of control and the journalist must have been smoking to accept her version.

If the story was so screwed up on an insignificant local item, how could people report completely accurately when high passions were involved?

My daughter is researching subliminal ads – ads that embed sexual images to increase the power of the ads. (While I haven’t read this particular book on the subject, it gives some online examples of what I am talking about.)

Fox Uses Subliminals?

Could Fox be embedding subliminals around their newscasters to give their message more oomph? Would another network be willing to try this to see if their stories become more convincing? (& then reveal the results?)

The original research in 1957 did not involve sex as the seller and was fairly rapidly discredited as either a real experiment or an effective result. There are lots of claims that it doesn’t work, but I can’t find a published study where someone tried to design the most effective use of subliminal advertising and then measures the effectiveness of them. (Of course, if these studies were done as part of a commercial effort to develop trade secrets they wouldn’t be published.)

Advertising is not supposed to contain subliminals in America or it could generate the loss of a broadcast license. Does this prohibition extend to news broadcasts?

Just A Thought.

03.26.07

Help Juneau . . . Not That They Asked

Posted in Abrupt Climate Change at 9:21 pm

Juneau Alaska has an interesting community planning / environmental disaster problem.  They have a section of town that they know is vulnerable to avalanches. This section is built-up and has had some damage before. (17 houses in 1962). The city isn’t willing to buy everyone out, a cheaper alternative than building snow barriers that may be counter-productive anyway.

In 2004, Alaska was apparently in a state of denial. They had the highest per capita avalanche death rate in the country, failed to implement state mandates for an education and forecasting program, and failed to get a cut of Federal funding for avalanche programs. Volunteers filled the gap.

Volunteers put together a shoestring program to educate and warn of avalanche dangers. In 2006 they were able to get funding to expand the forecasting capability. They are still short of their goal of getting a government-funded, voluntary buyout of at-risk areas but they’re taking actions that have cut fatalities 60% in other areas where they have been tried.
Any suggestions for them? (Put your comments here. I’ll write them up and forward them to www.avalanche.org.)

My own suggestion involved selling local “tourist” businesses advertising space on their site. – A potentially significant source of revenue in a 2006 budget of $200,000.

03.22.07

Gardening is the Answer . . .

Posted in Abrupt Climate Change at 8:40 pm

What is the single most effective thing you can do to help your kids learn to respond to a global crisis? Teach them to grow a vegetable garden.

Name that Crisis

  • Problems with the economy are causing food bank shortages? Teach your child to grow food to donate to the needy.
  • Weather patterns cause a crop to fail? Americans won’t starve but the replacement food they buy will come from somewhere and the original customers might have difficulties. Your own food supply can help.
  • Avian Flu? Having fresh vegetables can cut down on trips to the grocery store.
  • Storms cause flooding that disrupts food transportation? Again, a source of food in the backyard can be a nice safety cushion.

Gardening can make a significant difference – during WWII victory gardens supplied 40% of the US food requirements during the summer months, freeing up fuel to use in the war effort.

Guiding a toddler to plant carrot seeds – even if they all end up rather closer than you might plant them, can give a child a huge sense of accomplishment as they thin the growing plants and see the progress of the carrots. Older children can make a significant contributionto the family table.

My then three-year-old son never complained about the long hours I would work in front of the computer – he just would come in and invite me to go out and dig with him – not in the sand box – in the garden. He almost always succeeded.

Now is the time to sit with your youngster and plan just how you might maximize the produce from a small plot – broccoli planted soon, lettuce, amongst the tomato plants, and finally, fall squash. (That’s not necessarily an optimum plan – just the things I like and have time for.) Take a soil sample with your child and discuss the science behind pH, then start to adjust if necessary.

If best-comes-to-best and the disaster never occurs? Maybe your child will just acquire a lifetime hobby. This is bad?

03.17.07

NetFlicks Prize Contest – One Million Dollars Just Waiting

Posted in Just A Thought, Uncategorized at 11:48 am

My husband gets in moods where he would like to see me engaged in more gainful employment. Chauffeuring kids, answering client’s questions, chauffeuring kids, managing the house, chauffeuring kids, writing a blog do not count when he thinks about how fast we could pay off the mortgage if I would just take a consulting gig. This morning he came up with a plan.

I should win the one million dollar Netflix contest to develop a better way for Netflix to recommend movies. No problem. I look at the leader board & see that Netflix grossly underestimated the time it will take to get a solution 10% better than theirs. (Don’t they know that watching movies rots their brain?) Most of the leading contestants with websites are grad students looking for jobs, companies that already had a solution for their problem and decided for $1,000,000 they’d adapt it to Netflick’s problem, academics, and one altruist pushing Amnesty International. Double no problem. (I love my husband’s opinion of my abilities.)

I register, start downloading the large database and whip up an algorithm. (How hard is it to model talking with your friends over coffee, finding out who likes the same movies you do & what they think of movies you haven’t seen?) So my husband reviews my algorithm and immediately starts telling me I need to include a weighting factor for those viewers who don’t have the same ratings I do. Does he think I listen to my friends who liked Borat?

First issue. The database doesn’t have data to pick out who my friends are. OK. I’ll take a broader view of who my friends are. (Actually my friends are pretty diverse so I’d already done that, but seems awfully presumptuous of Netflicks to assume that I’d think the same as everyone else.)

Moving on, it’s not even in the form I want to check out if I like my friend’s taste. OK, I can fix that. Since I’m just a girl, my husband elbows me aside and starts loading the data I need into a database with the format I need. A quick speed check indicates it will take just under 2 weeks. I wonder if I still have the numbers of those nice boys with access to Crays that I dated after college?

03.16.07

Where’s the Climate Change Game?

Posted in Abrupt Climate Change at 10:41 am

You may have noticed that the structure of the ‘game’ is not completely spelled out.  Like many strategic planning games, I envisioned discussions of possible things people might implement in response to the the game scenario. Cost/benefit & impementation times would lead to reasonable proposals for communities to consider. Very dry.

The BBC has come up with a snazzy game for those anxious to be the President of the Europeon Union and address global warming. (forget being a lowly community planner). Of course, I’ve already given my opinion on the inherent uselessnes of politicians in dealing with scary problems (as opposed to just difficult problems).

 Thanks to  Climate Change Elucidated and Resilance Science for pointing me at the game.

03.15.07

Who Knew the UK Drank So Much Tea? Maybe Their Streets Are Dark?

Posted in Abrupt Climate Change at 4:06 pm

I generally keep away from the causes of global warming and whether & which mitigating factors should be pursued because:

1) What if the skeptics are right & it really issun spots, 6 billion people breathing out, too many cows not fed NO-GAS, aliens, or whatever making it hot – we still may end up with a rather unpleasent problem on our hands.

2) Many sites already address things that may mitigate one of the few things we can control – CO2 emissions.

3) I’m more interested in communities taking local actions to plan for problems on the long-range horizon.

Given that, I couldn’t resist this mitigation technique from tearfund.org:

Only boil the water that you need for your cup of tea. If everyone boiled just the water they needed, the energy saved could power over three-quarters of the UK’s streetlights.

03.14.07

Zone Roof Gardens to Plan For Abrupt Climate Change (the game)

Posted in Abrupt Climate Change at 5:09 pm

If you knew global warming would bring an abrupt climate change, roof gardens might be close to a first response. (See premise for the game.) Better yet, they offer immediate benefits.

Roof gardens are of two types. There are shallow gardens that use between 1 to 4 inches of dirt and are relatively low maintenance called extensive roof gardens. There are also intensive roof gardens that are often landscaped retreats that have at least 8 inches of soil, irrigation systems and can require significant roof reinforcement. Both offer immediate benefits of extended roof life, energy conservation, runoff control, air pollution mitigation, and ambient air temperature reduction in urban areas.

If you were only concerned with peak storm runoffs, global warming or energy conservation you might start zoning to encourage moving towards all roofs having extensive roof gardens. If you know you need to be able to maximize food production, you might start tax breaks for intensive garden roofs. Growing your food on your roof not only greatly increases the fertile area that may be available to some communities, it may provide added security for crops in the scenario postulated by the community planners game.

This is long-range strategy that could take 40 – 50 years to become fully functional. Even with great tax incentives (even more hypothetical than abrupt climate change) roofs will primarily be replaced as they wear out or as new homes are built. If new homes are built now with extensive roofs, it is expected that it will be 40 years before they require a new roof.

03.13.07

Another Dee Story – Children Terrorizing the Maid

Posted in Dee Stories, Family Legends, Hiring A Maid at 11:33 am

Dee, a respectable matron whose words flow with the gentle music of the south, gave me another story of how she terrorized Ida, her family’s maid, and with the exception of her family, the most loved person in Dee’s childhood.

The day started innocently enough. Dee and a young man from next door were playing together. Ida fixed the two of them nice sliced bananas & mayo on soft white bread sandwiches for lunch. I am assured that this was a Southern favorite and really quite good. (I thought deep fried bread was good when I was young so who am I to make comments?)

After lunch, Ida left the butcher knife used to slice the bananas on the table to dry while Dee and her friend went out to run around the yard. Dee was soon hit with inspiration. She led her young friend into the house where she directed him to smear catsup on her arm and the knife. She then started screaming for Ida that there had been an accident.

Ida came running in, turned white (not her normal color), and raced for the phone. Ida and the operator did not enjoy a state of mutual respect (completely Dee’s fault) but the operator knew her job and connected Ida to Dr. Adams. Ida sputtered out the situation and the Doctor arrived in moments.

Dee and her friend were not idle. As fast as they could, they washed Dee’s arm and the knife and ran out to the swing. When Dr. Adams arrived they assured him that they didn’t know what Ida was talking about – Perhaps she had been napping and had had a nightmare?

When Dee’s father came home he didn’t know quite what to make of the story since he had Ida threatening to leave on one hand and a pair of children saying she had a nightmare on the other. Dee does wonder if her father was part of the growing crowd that thought poor, tee-totaling Ida was tippling on the job.

If you’re new – I wrote the How to Hire A Maid like a book. Click Table of Contents for future articles and links to old blogs in a more comprehensible order – or just click here & go to the bottom to read it straight through by scrolling up to each article.