Dumber than a box of hammers

If you ever had any doubt that "they" (the people in charge, as in "I'm sure they wouldn't let people do it if it were a bad idea") can be dumber than a box of hammers, take a look at this story out of Texas: the city of Galveston has approved almost four thousand new homes and two mid-rise hotels on a barrier island shielding the city from hurricanes.

Galveston was the scene of the deadliest natural disaster in the USA in record history, a hurricane which flattened the city and killed 8,000 people. Hurricanes hit the US several times a decade, and meteorologists are warning that this figure is likely to increase in the future. In spite of this, the Galveston city officials have ignored their own geologists' advice and approved plans for a series of housing developments on the barrier island which will include decorative lakes and boat channels which will virtually split the barrier in two, giving surging waters a clear path through the island.

With the rebuilding of New Orleans still not complete two years after Katrina, one can only imagine that the Galveston officials are betting that the next big hurricane to hit the area will happen long after they retire.

The Goddess of the Yangtze

The Baiji, or Yangtze River Dolphin (poetically known to the ancient Chinese as the Goddess of the Yangtze), is essentially no more. Although a few scientists still hold out hope that there may be a few survivors, they would be too few in number for the species to recover.


It has been declared officially extinct, the first official extinction of a large vertebrate for fifty years.

(Thanks to John Lynch at Stranger Fruit.)

Leave nothing but footprints

If humanity disappeared today, how long would it take for all traces of us to disappear? Suprisingly little time.


Click image for larger view.

I could argue with some of the details from the timeline. E.g. endangered species begin recovering "immediately"? That's simplistic thinking -- sure, the immediate pressure on them will be reduced, but they still have to survive the years or decades it takes for their habitats to recover.

Similarly, it is foolish to imagine that methane will disappear from the atmosphere in the short term. So long as there are vast prairies and savannahs with vast herds of grazers, there will be methane. And don't forget the fungi and termites.

But despite these flaws, it is humbling to realise that virtually all traces of humanity would disappear after a mere fifty thousand years. After 200,000 years, even the most stable of man-made chemicals will have decayed or transformed. With the exception of some of the more long-lasting radioactive waste, in less than a quarter of a million years there won't be a sign we ever existed. We'd be lucky to even leave a fossil or two. Possibly the last trace of humanity could be a few footprints and pieces of machinery on the Moon.

It took about a quarter of a million years to go from Homo erectus to Neil Armstrong on the moon, and it could take the same again for virtually every trace of humanity to disappear from the Earth. Half a million years from appearance to disappearance. It gives you pause for thought to remember that life on Earth is about four billion years old, old enough to have seen eight thousand non-human civilizations rise, fall and disappear. There is no evidence for any of these, and good (well, moderately good at least) reason to expect that there were none, but if there were, chances are we wouldn't know.

(Original source of the timeline: http://www.treehugger.com/files/doom_1.php)

Crikey! Steve Irwin would not approve

This is not good.

At least ten sting-rays have been found killed and mutilated on the east coast of Australia after Steve Irwin's freak death.

A fisheries department official says up to ten of the normally docile fish have been found dead and mutilated on Australia's eastern coast since Steve Irwin was killed by one last week. At least two had their tails lopped off.

[...]

The head of Irwin's conservation group says any retribution is unacceptable. He says "that's the last thing Steve would want."

Damn straight. Leave the fish alone.

Steve Irwin killed by sting-ray

The "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin, who has done so much for conservation and the protection of wildlife in Australia and across the world, has been killed today in a tragic accident, aged 44.

According to reports, Irwin was killed by a sting-ray while filming a documentary in far north Queensland. The Queensland Ambulance Service have confirmed that he died of lacerations to the heart from a sting-ray's barbed tail.

Sting-rays are not aggressive, but they are dangerous, and will strike out with their poisonous barbed tail if trod on or startled.

Many Australians have been embarrassed by Steve Irwin's broad Aussie accent, his use of stereotypical slang like "crikey!" and "what a bewty!", and especially his habit of putting himself into "Danger! Danger! Danger!". But for all his joking about, he was a great populariser of nature, an environmentalist and conservationist, a man who brought a welcome sense of fun to a field that is often stuffy and boring. He was a true Aussie larrikin, in the good sense, a man who knew how to treat serious topics with affection, joy and respectful irreverence. He was a real Australian icon. He will be missed.

His producer and good friend John Stainton said:

Today the world has lost a great wildlife icon, a passionate conservationist and one of the proudest Dad's on the planet. He died doing what he loved best, he left this world in a happy and peaceful state of mind, he would've said 'crocs rule'.

Source: ABC Far North Queensland News.

More news reports here:

Bloomberg

Cairns Newspapers
(warning: contains Javascript animated banner)

Also of interest may be his "Crocodile Hunter" website, and a collection of Steve Irwin quotes.

The world is just a little bit of a darker place without him.

McDonalds to stop killing hedgehogs

It has taken five years of negotiations, but the British Hedgehog Preservation Society has convinced McDonalds to redesign their hedgehog-killing McFlurry icecream containers.

The hedgehogs push their head into the discarded containers to eat the left over icecream, and then get trapped, dying of starvation. After five years of little activity, McDonalds said they put in "significant research and testing" to make the hole in the lid smaller.

Stories on Yahoo:
Hedgehogs humble McDonalds
McDonald's tackles prickly issue of hedgehog-friendly ice cream

Corn plastic

Plastic made from corn is hyped as an environmentally-friendly alternative to standard PET plastics. One of the claims about it is that it is biodegradable and can be composted.

As Boing Boing explains, it can -- under the right conditions. And those right conditions involve being heated up to 140°F (60°C) for ten days straight. In ordinary home composting, even after six months the plastic is unchanged.

Is ethanol really a green fuel?

That depends on how it is made. Regardless though, you can bet a lot of greenies will jump on the ethanol bandwagon, as will the corporate corn farmers. There's nothing like government subsidies to have corporate CEOs falling over themselves to act green. (And remember folks, the essential nature of acting is that it is all pretend.)

Still, anything that reduces the need to pump oil out of the ground is a good thing. If I'm going to be peon to a baron, I'd rather it be a corn baron than an oil baron.

Rainbow Children versus Homeland Security

What happens when you have thousands of hippies congregating in a National Park, and Homeland Security starts putting up road blocks and issuing fines?

You get rumour, misinformation, confusion -- and a whole lot of money pouring into government coffers.

Summary: yes, the government is trying to keep the "Rainbow Gathering" from entering National Parks, but it seems to be for a mix of good and bad reasons: keeping out hordes of potentially destructive people from sensitive forests, at least if they aren't the sort of destructive people who can pay for a permit. Yes, thousands of people have been given citations and tickets, but they haven't been arrested. There are no lawyers at the hearings, because there is no jail time on offer. In other words, it is just ordinary bureaucratic greyness, and not necessarily completely unjustified greyness. Yes, in principle it would be nice for the public to have free and unfettered access to public lands... but imagine the damage if everyone decided to tramp through the forest, pulling up flowers and digging holes and dumping trash and burning timber.

It's an interesting example of Chinese Whispers. The rumour mill rapidly went crazy, describing mass arrests, people being rushed to kangaroo courts without an attorney or a jury, then being shipped off to secret prison camps. The reality is not so bad, just fines and a fairly half-hearted attempt to keep the hippies out of the forest, and hardly anyone was machine-gunned in the back.

A year off from reality

Tom the Dancing Bug has a cartoon about General Motor's offer to give new Hummer buyers a year off from reality. Link.

From the land where Up is Down

War is Peace and Slavery is Freedom.

Tim Lambert at Deltoid writes about the mud being laid on with a trowel to the doco-movie "An Inconvenient Truth".

How is An Inconvenient Truth doing at the box office? Pretty well. The gross takings have increased every weekend and have almost reached $10,000,000. It's already the number 7 on the all time box office list for documentaries.

But that's not how it's being spun by the wingnuts:

UPI reports that Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, hasn't done so well after a promising start:

Former U.S. vice-President Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" has seen its ticket sales plummet after a promising start.
[...]
The film dropped from its record $70,333 per play to $12,334 during its third week and its numbers have continued to fall as the film opens in smaller cities and suburbs across the country.

This is a text-book example of lying with statistics. As the movie is shown in smaller cities and suburbs, the average take per session falls -- but the total take increases. Strangely enough, UPI and Variety report that increased take as plummetting downwards. How curious. The right-wing media would lie about something? Say it ain't so!

Deltoid shows an impressive graph, showing clear growth, here. As the graph shows, the film is not only still making money, but the amount of money they make each week is continuing to grow.

Of course the wingnuts don't want you to know that, so what to do, what to do? There has never been a statistic that can't be distorted, so they focus on the per-session average, ignoring the fact that there are a lot more sessions. Of course, that means pretending that Up actually means Down, but hey, so long as the wingnuts continue to drink that Kool-Aid, it's all good.

Update:
Good Math, Bad Math has a good analysis of the dodgy statistics being used by UPI.

[...]when it was first released, it was being shown in a small number of showings in a small number of theaters. When it was premiered in 4 theaters, they sold out standing room only - so the gross per showing was very high. Now, four weeks later, it's showing in over 500 theaters, and the individual showings aren't selling out anymore. But more people are seeing it - every weekend, the number of people seeing it has increased!

The Powerline article (and the UPI article which it cites) are playing games with numbers to skew the results. They want to say that Al Gore's movie is tanking in the theaters, so they pick a bizzare statistic to support that, even though it's highly misleading. In fact, it's one of the best performing documentaries ever. It's currently the number seven grossing documentary of all time, and it's about $600,000 off from becoming number 5.

(Emphasis in original.)

They shoot horses, don't they?

From the Department of Corruption Given Little Media Attention:

America's wild horses and donkeys are at risk of slaughter, all so a few welfare-corporations can over-stock public land even more.

Here's how it works. The nation's 50,000 wild horses roam on federal land – that is, land held in common by the entire American people. Bigtime ranchers also use this land to graze millions of their privately-owned cattle. Able to buy and sell politicians like so much prime stock, the wealthy ranchers have rigged up a long-running sweetheart deal (100 years old and still going strong) that gives them access to this common pasturage at bargain prices: less than one-tenth of the going market rate for private grazing land. The result is an effective annual subsidy of more than $500 million to some of the richest men in America. As always, your rootin', tootin' cowboy capitalists must be protected from the risks of the "free market" at every turn – even as they impose it, at gunpoint, on others.
[...]
So the ranchers want the horses off public land so they can cram more cows in there and make more money through their sweetheart deals. The resource at issue here is grass, not oil, but the principle is the same as in Bush's witless, pig-layer adventure in Iraq: me want, they got; kill them, give me.

And as in Iraq, Bush's horse-killing policy is swaddled with lies and fearmongering. The ranchers say they must be given even more public subsidies, or else the sacred right of all Americans to churn cheap beef through their intestines twice a day might be lost – and that would mean the terrorists win, right? Meanwhile, Bush says it costs too much to let all the wild horses live out their natural lives. Yet the total annual outlay for the federal horse programs – $50 million – is a fraction of ranchers' yearly gorging at the public trough. The tiniest increase in grazing fees could cover the programs' costs for decades – while still keeping the delicate cow barons well-protected from that mean old free market.

And where there's a government pork-barrel, there is always a protective layer of lies.

Bush claims the wild horses are eating too much grass, but in truth the private cattle out-number wild horses by 50 to 1. If the wild horses are eating too much grass, those cattle are eating too-much-times-fifty grass. Past government studies have consistently warned that rangeland is being destroyed by over-grazing, and recommended reducing the number of cattle. Needless to say, the ranchers' bought Congress-critters will never let that happen.

But we do Mr. Bush and his cohorts wrong to imply they are completely witless. Certainly they exhibit a sense of humor – of the heavy, frat-boy doofus variety – in commiting their depredations. For example, the very day after Bush consigned 20,000 living creatures to unnecessary slaughter, Congress proclaimed a new "National Day of the Horse" – a yearly celebration of the animal's "vital contribution" to American culture.

And they say Americans don't do irony.

Arctic Ocean is falling

The BBC is reporting new research which, surprisingly, shows that the Arctic Ocean is falling by about 2mm per year:

It is well known that the world's oceans do not share a uniform height; but even so, the scientists are somewhat puzzled by their results.

Global sea level is expected to keep on climbing as the Earth's climate warms.

To find the Arctic out of step, even temporarily, emphasises the great need for more research in the region, the team says.
[...]
"When you get a result like this you always worry that your processing of the data may have introduced signals that are not real. But we can't find anything that we've done wrong, so that makes us think we have stumbled across something real - and we hope that will excite our colleagues," [Dr Scharroo] added.

Absolutely! The most exciting part of science is not when you discover what you expect to discover, but when you look at your results and say, "Hmmm, that's funny..."

What's with all the Hawking haters?

A few days ago, physicist Stephen Hawking suggested that it is important that the human race begin moving out into space, in order to ensure the long-term survival of the species:

"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

Suddenly, he's being attacked on all sides.

Chris Clarke asks "Who the hell does Stephen Hawking think he is anyway?". He starts with an attack on Hawking's prediction that we "could" have a permanent moon base within 20 years:

...the sheer hubris-laden assumption that within twenty years we'll be able to build artificial ecosystems, sustainable over the very long term, that can support human life at population levels necessary to preserve a worthwhile percentage of human genetic, intellectual, and cultural diversity.

That's not what Hawking said. That's some major strawman kicking going on. Hawking isn't predicting self-sustaining colonies in space within twenty years. He's saying that, if we try, in twenty years we could have a dozen astronauts living for months at a time on the moon.

Clarke goes on to describe the fiasco that was Biosphere, and entirely misses the point that Biosphere merely shows us the job is hard and we don't know how to create a self-sustaining ecosystem from scratch, not that it can't be done. The Wright Brothers couldn't build a faster-than-sound airplane either. It is no surprise that the Biosphere failed, and it will be no surprise when the next ten or thirty experiments fail too. But with every failure, we will learn more about ecology until one day we will be able to create self-sustaining ecosystems.

Clarke's argument is simply the argument from ignorance: we don't understand ecologies today, so we will never understand ecologies.

Clarke goes on:

I'm looking at the list of dangers Hawking cites: genetic engineering turning the biosphere into gray goo, climate change from burning of fossil fuels, nuclear war-- and a certain commonality among them strikes me. [...] we're not talking comet impact or flood basalt here. Every threat, every looming disaster Hawking's talking about here is human generated.

(Emphasis in original.)

It's moments like this I wonder about the intelligence of supposedly intelligent human beings. Hawking is interviewed by a mainstream newspaper, the SF Gate. Does Clarke think that the average newspaper reader would have the foggiest clue what flood basalt is? What are the clearest and most obvious dangers to the survival of the entire human race that ordinary newspaper readers with limited science education will know about?

Nuclear war. Viruses. Global warming.

Exactly the things Hawking mentions. If he had talked about flood basalts, chances are 98% of the readers would have just scratched their collective heads and filed it in the "what is he talking about?" basket. In fact, he may have mentioned flood basalts, and the paper simply edited it out as too technical for their readership.

This isn't rocket science here folks. It doesn't take a genius to realise that even if three of the four threats Hawking mentions are preventable, there are a whole lot more which aren't. Clarke mentions two of them: comet impact or flood basalt. Climate change driven by non-human activity (e.g. solar activity). Ordinary, non-genetically engineered viruses. A nearby supernova (those gamma rays could be coming straight for us right now, and we would have no way of knowing until they hit). There are many ways the world could end, and Hawking's argument holds regardless of whether they are human generated or not.

Clarke also goes on to make the analogy of human beings with cockroaches: the Earth is a home infested with cockroaches, and he's distressed at the suggestion we should allow those cockroaches to go to our neighbour's home as well. What an ... interesting ... argument that is. If we human beings are the cockroaches, who is there to get upset at the cockroach infestation? Does the house care that it is filled with cockroaches? A thinking, emotional house. Hmmm.

If there is no owner to get upset, who will care? Has Clarke perhaps considered that the Earth is troubled by that disgusting infestation of green plants pumping out billions of tonnes of toxic, corrosive oxygen gas? If not, why does he think the Earth is troubled by that disgusting infestation of mammals? There is some seriously wooly thinking going on here -- and I can't help but think of those accusations that environmentalism is the last politically correct refuge of racism. "There are too many people on the Earth -- they aren't like me!" That sinking feeling of racism would possibly go away -- or be supported -- if folks like Clarke who think people are the problem would come clean and tell us just which people they think should be allowed to live.

Amanda Marcotte writes "Stephen Hawking is a tool" and compares his suggestion to neo-Fundamentalist Christian belief in The Rapture. She goes on to say:

Now Stephen Hawking has just put his authority behind an escape fantasy that allows wingnuts who aren't Rapture fanatics to ignore the fact that we're destroying our planet and very soon going to make in uninhabitable.
[...]
The idea of starting over with a small group of people on another planet is the same racist, classist superiority complex-driven fantasy that fuels the mythology of the Rapture, where it's assumed an elite group of "Christians" (imagined as mostly white Americans) will get sucked away while the rest of us inferior humans died in the cesspool that is Earth.

How strange. What part of Hawking's statement "It is important for the human race" does Marcotte think means "It is important for white Americans"? The woman has issues. For all her furious rage at the elites who flit from mansion to mansion, fantasizing about the "inferior humans" dying in droves, the last paragraph gives a hint at Marcotte's real motives:

If I seem angry, it's because I am. I'm only 28 years old, and with the rapid degradation of the planet, if things don't slow down, there's a solid chance my "golden" years will be pretty horrible.

Frightened and terrified and striking out and anything that she thinks will spoil her life. Who cares about our great-grandchildren in ten thousand years? (Well, Hawking for one.) What's important is that Marcotte has a comfortable retirement.

Hey, I'm cool with her having a nice life. I'd like a nice life too. And I'd like to think that when -- not if -- the next "dinosaur killer" asteroid strikes, our cultural decendents will be spread all over the solar system so they can continue having nice lives too.

Marcotte inadvertently demonstrates why Hawking is right. She writes:

If you don't believe that, let me remind you that this planet had previous inhabitants

and shows a picture of a dinosaur fossil. Well yes, and that's precisely the sort of thing Hawking is thinking about. The dinosaurs didn't wipe themselves out, they were wiped out by a disaster they couldn't prevent. If Mad King George pushes the red button and wipes us all out in nuclear winter, it won't be my fault, and it won't be Marcotte's either. We'll be just as much victims of disaster as the dinosaurs. Doesn't it make sense to plan ahead for the day when we can stop putting all our eggs in one basket?

And what's with the digs about Hawking's use of the passive voice? There is something strange when both Marcotte and Clarke feel it is necessary to sarcastically say "nice passive construction". Is the passive voice the new Fascism or something?

P.Z. Myers is less hysterical than Marcotte and Clarke, but he too criticises Hawking:

Emigrating to some other world doesn't save us; under the best of circumstances, only a miniscule elite few would escape, and as Chris [Clarke] points out, the technological problems are so great (Guess what? We have no idea how to build a home on another planet that won't require continual resupply and that will last more than a few years) that even that would only be a temporary reprieve. Flicking a few gametes into the sky isn't any kind of salvation--it's desperate and sad and futile.

Myers is wrong. Under the best of circumstances (his words) disaster won't strike at all; but if it does, it won't happen until there are thriving colonies of millions or billions of people spread all over the solar system. As a biologist, Myers should know that in almost every case of a species moving into a new environment, it is a only "a few gametes" that make that first step. They don't stay a few gametes for long.

Myers too gets confused by the fact that today we don't know how to build a home on another planet, and assumes that it must therefore be impossible. Of course any moon base we build now will require continual resupply. But after there have been continuous human populations on the moon for a century? What then? How self-sufficient can they get with skill and experience?

The first priority is to put our own house in order: we need stable, sustainable human cultures that know how to maintain a healthy environment (if we can't prevent ourselves from trashing a whole planet, how are we going to ever maintain a viable home in the more limited and hostile confines of a habitat elsewhere?).

Myer's is right on that point, but that's hardly disagreeing with Hawking, who allowed that his scenario depended on humanity avoiding killing themselves off in the next 100 years. That's just common sense: if we cause massive ecological disaster and kill ourselves off on a relatively comfortable, safe planet, of course we won't be able to survive in more hostile environments.

Consider the impact of those few photos of the Earth taken from orbit or from the moon, and how they changed the mental perceptions of millions of people. How much greater effect will the struggle to build self-sufficient space colonies be? When you've just come back from a six-month work assignment on the L-5 colony, you'll never take breathable air and drinkable water for granted again.

Myers also wants to have his cake and eat it too: we can't build self-sustaining space colonies, but if we could, we'll just be creating biological competitors:

In the long run, I don't think that any of our progeny that we spin off into space will be human for long, and I don't think we can predict what a post-human race would want, or how it would interact with us.
[...]
But do we really want to create a competing race of naked mole apes?

He's right, as such: in the long term, humans on Titan and humans on Earth will become different species. (The long term might be millions of years.) But will they be competitors? Highly unlikely -- if they are as different as Myers fears they may become, naked mole apes, they are almost certainly not going to want to come back and live on Earth, or have sex with us, or even make illegal copies of our movies. There will be economic competition for resources -- they'll want oxygen, just as we will, but it isn't clear that they will want it from the same source.

Myers' argument is really as nonsensical as the argument that individuals shouldn't have children, because they might grow up to be serial killers. Sure they might. And they might grow up to be wonderful people. Saint or sinner, we can't predict before hand, and we can't possibly imagine what our descendents on Titan a hundred thousand years from now will be like. But I can't imagine what my descendents on Earth will be like in a hundred thousand years either -- will they be Scientologists or atheists, vegetarian or live-kitten-brain eaters, collectivists or anarchists?

We are the first species on the planet that can guide our evolutionary children, both genetically and culturally. Eventually, of course, just as English culture in the American colonies mutated into American culture, our children on Titan and Mars will create their own biology and culture. But in the meantime, we have the ability (and hopefully the will) to instill in them values that we will approve of, so they don't become naked mole apes.

The Last Tree of Ténéré

From the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, the last tree of the Ténéré wastelands of Niger:

By the 20th century, desertification had wiped out all but one solitary acacia. The Tree of Ténéré, as it came to be called, had no companions for 400 km in every direction. Its roots reached nearly 40 m deep into the sand. In 1973, the tree was knocked over by a drunken Libyan truck driver. It has been replaced by a simple metal sculpture.