Ah Shit! Here I go again

Tony Abbott has tweaked his doorstop schtick a little:  he's added a new sound bite. As well as repeating the  standard promises to repeal the carbon tax, repeal the mining tax, stop the boats, get the budget back in the black and cut red tape, he’s going to revitalise Work-for-the-Dole.

That promise to resurrect Work-for-the-Dole is straight out of the Liberals' policy platform Our Plan – RealSolutions for all Australians: The direction, values and policy priorities ofthe next Coalition Government. It's fleshed out on page 20 of the plan. The Liberals promise that they “will deliver higher productivity growth by boosting workforce participation” and “encourage every Australian to be a productive contributor in the nation's life”.

'Housing Affordability Crisis' Hits Home

On the whole, 2008 has been a pretty good year for me. I enrolled in a post-graduate course at Melbourne Uni - if I keep it up I'll be a licensed Master of Publishing and Communications. Hell, I might even go do the mortarboard and gown thing for the first time when I finish this one. By dint of not so persistent practice and application my drawing steadily improved to the point where I felt up to hanging a few of the better ones on the study wall. Things were looking good, as long as I ignored the 'housing affordability crisis' - in plain English, Australia's chronic housing shortage.

Then in late October, when I was out in the outer leafies, dog-sitting again, the usual happened: that cantankerous old bastard in the sky, the one in whom I refuse to believe, dropped a big, fat jobbie into my life. I came home for an overnight stay, after a class, and Zeppo Bakunin showed me the notice to quit that we'd received from the agents. Our landlord and landlady were splitting up and the landlord and his daughter needed a place to live. Moving us out, so that they could move in, was cheaper than moving into a rented house, in a tight rental market, and keeping up the mortgage payments on this place, regardless of the rental income and negative gearing. I used to like our landlords but, sooner or later, this country's housing market forces everyone involved in it to act like a bastard.

So now Zeppo Bakunin and I are looking for the opportunity to perform our own little act of bastardry - we're looking for a house we can move to. Whatever we look at, there's bound to be at least one young family looking at the same place. People who'll use the extra bedrooms for sleeping in, rather than accomodating desks, computers, books and assorted stuff.

Since the market is very tight at the moment, it's wise to have back-up plans. My plan B is to get really active on internet dating sites, and try to find someone with really low expectations with a bungalow in the backyard. Plan C is to pack up all or most of the stuff, put it into self-storage and use my pensioner Christmas bonus to do a bit of travelling: the way the economy is heading, I reckon the first edition of The Rough Sleeper's Guide to Australia will find a ready market.

At times like these, I envy the Swedes. Back in 2002, I read a World Bank report which gave the Swedish government a slap on the wrist for allowing a surplus of public housing to develop. This was, of course, a waste of economic resources and therefore economically irrational, if not irresponsible. Given the choice between economically responsible government and a roof over my head, I know which one I'd take right now.

Enter at Your Own Risk

A couple of my real-life friends decided to go ex-pat last year; they're now in London, doing what ex-pats do. In this case, getting sucked into a Movieum of London short film contest, where entrants had 48 hours to produce a slasher horror film for screening on Halloween. You can read a bit about the making of here, or you can just take a look at the finished entry. An extended version with more slashing is in the works.

300 Journalists

I noticed a couple of new posters advertising The National Rupert at a couple of tram stops the other day. I didn't have a camera handy, so when I got home I drew a copy from memory, for anybody out there who hasn't seen them yet.

Almost, But Not Quite, A Retraction

On September 10, reluctant culture warrior Kevin Donnelly declared, in the National Rupert, that his worst fears for the future of education had been realised:

LEADING up to the federal election, I welcomed the ALP's policy calling for a national curriculum based, as it was, on a conservative agenda very much like the Howard government's approach to reshaping the teaching of history and English.

The fear was that the devil would be in the detail and, given the cultural-Left's control over the curriculum, that the agenda would be captured by those opposed to the more academic and balanced approach.

...

The second appointment proving that the national curriculum has been captured by the usual suspects is that of Professor Peter Freebody, from the University of Sydney, who will oversee English as a subject.

Today, Kev's pleased to announce that:

THE release of the national English curriculum initial advice paper will lead to Australia's education progressives suffering apoplexy.

There's no prize for guessing who wrote the initial advice paper, and the new curriculum that has Donnelly so chuffed. If you can't guess, this report from The National Rupert has the answer.

'Age of Bastardry Over' - Bastard

HERE is the latest, shocking fashion news: nasty is out and nice is in.

Bastardry is suddenly so last season - just like Big Brother - that all the best stars must now switch their sneers to smiles.

The sooner this trend spreads from TV and radio to those newspapers, the better.

Word of the Day: Thingo

With nothing significant to report from Canberra, the front page of today's Hun is devoted to the dastardly 'West Gate Bomb Plot' of recently convicted terrorist wannabe Abdul Benbrika. According to The Hun's Keith Moor:

One of the most chilling conversations taped by police was between Benbrika terror network member Fadi Sayadi and an associate as they discussed destroying the West Gate Bridge...

Sayadi suggested it would be possible to snorkel or scuba dive under the bridge and plant "thingos underneath".

Obviously Sayadi wasn't talking about water-lilies; nonetheless he sounds completely clueless. Anyone wanting to plant thingos under the Westgate Bridge need only take a walk through Westgate Park in South Melbourne. Once you had your thingos in place at the base of the Eastern pier you could hop on the ferry to Science Works, where a short walk will take you to the Western pier with its memorial to the workers who died when the bridge collapsed during construction.

If Sayadi had ever made that little trip he might have seen how difficult it would be to bring down the West Gate Bridge with thingos, however well placed. Still, it's a good excuse for THe Hun to milk the story for another day while they wait for the man who would be Prime Minister eventually to make his move on Malcolm Turnbull. Since that's going to take at least six years we can all look forward to a lot more well beaten-up crap on The Hun's front page.

Anti-PC Beat Up of the Week

Culture Warriors Demand an End to Culture Wars

Two new appointments to the National Curriculum Board have angered the journos and pundits at The National Rupert Daily. According to Justine Ferrari, 'Education writer' at the National Rupert, the appointments of Stuart MacIntyre and Peter Freebody to prepare draft curriculum outlines for history and literacy have re-opened the history wars and the reading wars.

Former Howard hack and literary canoneer Kevin Donnelly declares that his worst fears have been realised, and an anonymous editorialist wonders if MacIntyre and Freebody were really the best available.

Next they'll be demanding that the jobs to go to Keith Windschuttle and Kevin Donnelly.

Another Day, Another Furphy

Dr Jennifer Marohasy, whose work at the IPA involves examining and critiquing the scientific claims of others, produced an amusing piece on glaciers yesterday. She claimed that:

A study of sea level rise from ice melt in Greenland and western Antarctica has just been published in Science and concludes that a rise of 0.8 metres is possible by 2100, but even 2 metres “physically untenable”.

If, like Dr Marohasy, you strive to be inquiring in your blogging, you might click through that link and read the abstract of the study report 'Kinematic Constraints on Glacier Contributions to 21st-Century Sea-Level Rise'. Here's what it actually has to say:

We consider glaciological conditions required for large sea-level rise to occur by 2100 and conclude that increases in excess of 2 meters are physically untenable. We find that a total sea-level rise of about 2 meters by 2100 could occur under physically possible glaciological conditions but only if all variables are quickly accelerated to extremely high limits. More plausible but still accelerated conditions lead to total sea-level rise by 2100 of about 0.8 meter. These roughly constrained scenarios provide a "most likely" starting point for refinements in sea-level forecasts that include ice flow dynamics.

It looks very much like Dr Marohasy has misread the abstract - a sea level rise greater than two metres is rise by 2100 is physically untenable, a rise of two metres is tenable but unlikely, a rise of 0.8 metres is plausible. Despite a comment pointing out this error, the post remains uncorrected.

The abstract page for the Science article has links to the full report (pay per view and to a podcast of September 5. If you're inquisitive enough to download the transcript of the podcast you can read what Tad Pfeffer, the report's lead author, had to say about the study:

Interviewer - Robert Frederick
What do you mean by dynamics?

Interviewee – Tad Pfeffer
Dynamics is the part of discharge of ice, from glaciers into the ocean, which is accomplished not by melting the ice and letting it run off as water, but by pushing ice as icebergs, right out into the ocean. So it’s accomplished by the flow of the glacier, and what we call the dynamics, rather than melting of glacier ice on the surface. When the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment was published, they left out dynamics, and they were very up front about it – they said, “This is an important process, but we don’t understand it well enough to make the kind of consensus statement about dynamics that is, you know, up to the standard of the IPCC.” So they said, “Since we can’t really deal with this in anything resembling a confident fashion, we’re going to leave it out.” And so, as a consequence, the sea-level estimates, they were known to be low because that process wasn’t taken into account, and since that time there have been a number of different groups and individuals who’ve tried to get a handle on what that dynamic contribution might be – how rapidly outlet glaciers might be able to move ice into the ocean, by having these outlet glaciers speed up.

Interviewer - Robert Frederick
How high do those estimates get in the published literature?

Interviewee – Tad Pfeffer
In the published literature, you can find estimates as high as 4 to 6 meters of sea level rise at rates occurring at something like 2 to 5 centimeters per year. Now that's very high sea level rise. It's based on analogies with past conditions, particularly at the last interglacial, when sea levels were at least 4 meters higher, and possibly a great deal higher. And those were conditions that were very analogous to what we're coming into today. And, in fact, in the next century, we may be in climate conditions that are more or less identical to the last interglacial, 125,000 years ago. But the timing of that sea level rise back then is very uncertain. And that was what our analysis is really about, is the question of, 'OK, sea level rise may be big, but how fast is it going to occur?

...we publish a range, we present a range of total sea-level rise, ranging from about eighty centimeters up to two meters. And there’s a great deal of uncertainty in there, again because we still don’t know the processes, but there are some very simple concepts that you can use to place brackets or bounds, if you like, on what outlet glaciers might do, how rapidly outlet glaciers might deliver ice to the ocean in the future. And, the reasonable values fall within about 80 centimeters to 2 meters – that’s not to say that it’s physically impossible that we could have a total sea level rise of greater than 2 meters in the next century. But to do so would require processes to come into play and things to happen in glacier systems that we’ve never seen before – it’s not impossible, but it’s not something that I would recommend that we adopt as a working hypothesis. If we’re going to try to make predictions based on our best understanding of glacier physics, it should be based on the range of values and processes that we know best.

If, after reading that, you remained in any doubt about the findings of Pfeffer and his colleagues, you might get inquiring enough to e-mail him (his e-mail address is on the abstract page too); that way you might avoid the embarrassment of mis-stating Pfeffer et al's findings in a public internet forum and having the error picked up and reproduced by Andrew Bolt. That sort of thing is no good for anyone's credibility.

Own Goal of the Week

HarperCollins has announced that it will remove a chapter on how to play the didgeridoo from the Australian edition of The Daring Book for Girls. The company has also issued a statement apologising for the inclusion of the chapter.

The chapter's removal follows accusations from Dr Mark Rose, general manager of the Victorian Aboriginal Education Association, that the inclusion of the chapter was culturally insensitive. Dr Rose's comments, and HarperCollins response, gave Hun columnist, Andrew Bolt, a perfect opportunity to launch a fulminating attack on Dr Rose in particular, and aboriginal activism in general.

Bolt was also able to score points off Dr Rose by citing sources who said that, contrary to Dr Rose's belief, there was no traditional prohibition on women playing the didgeridoo.

Nice one Mark.

Gutless Bolt Has a Bob Each Way on Freedom of Expression...

... and he's not the only one.

Emily Mapfuwa, a devout Christian, has launched a private prosecution against an art gallery for displaying a statue of Jesus Christ with a beef bugle. According to the good Emily's lawyers, the Baltic Centre for Conteporary Art committed an ‘act of a lewd and a disgusting nature and outraged public decency contrary to Common Law’ by displaying the statue.

The private prosecution is funded and supported by the Christian Legal Centre, an organisation whose aims include:

To promote and protect the freedoms of Bible believing Christians in the United Kingdom; to promote religious freedom as a fundamental right by means of legal action and public promotion.

The Centre's support for freedom of speech is evidently highly qualified and selective in its application, as this private prosecution shows; the Centre will obviously defend the right of Christians to 'freedom to speak and live in accordance with truth'; they take a very dim view of the right of unbelievers to depict their personal saviour with a boner:

The Christian Legal Centre believes in freedom of expression but this statue served no other purpose than to offend Christians and to denigrate Christ.

In plain English, the Christian Legal Centre believes in freedom of expression for Christians only. A private prosecution on criminal charges remains an option for those who offend Christians and, in doing so, infringe on their 'biblical freedoms'.

Andy Bolt isn't too keen on the court action, but with all those adoring Christian readers and fans to pander to, he'd much rather 'despise the cheap shot cowardice' than defend freedom of expression. Once again, it's 'Where are all the blasphemous pictures of Mohammed' time.

Recalcitrant Ice Finally Gets Its Arse Into Gear

The Arctic Ice that only a couple of weeks ago was refusing to melt seems to have woken up to itself and its obligations to the 'AGW supporters', 'hysterics' etc. It now looks set to beat last year's record low easily - as long as its stamina holds up between now and mid-September.

I wonder what keen ice watcher, Andrew Bolt, will make of this? In any case, if you need images of the arctic ice cap looking at least a bit bigger than last year, to allay your kids' fears so that they'll sleep at night you'll need to be quick. Here are today's pictures from the University of Illinois:

Over the Top

I got sucked into reading this piece in yesterday's Age by the first paragraph:

EVEN though it was just a skeleton, there was still something that said Australian larrikin about the soldier's remains that lay as he fell on a shell-blasted Belgian battlefield 91 years ago.

I just had to know what it was about this skeleton that alerted its finders to its nationality. Was it the cheeky, devil may care grin on its face? A certain louche set of his broad manly shoulders, relaxed but not slouched? The straight spine of a man not burdened by class distinction? Loose hips and rangy legs used to taking long, loping strides over a wide brown, sunburnt country? The answer came in the second paragraph:

In the green summer fields the archaeological team that uncovered him last week, was able to identify his nationality by the rising sun badges in the earth beside him.

Plimer Throws Debate, Wins Plaudits

Ian Plimer took to the hustings in Sydney on Tuesday, to defend religion against the charge that we'd be better off without it. As third speaker for the negative team, Plimer used the occasion to denounce the 'new religion' of environmentalism. Plimer's speech has been reproduced at Andrew Bolt's blog and at Jennifer Marohasy's blog of socratic irony.

I suspect Plimer's team-mates were a lot less impressed with Plimer's performance than Bolt and Marohasy.

ROFLMAO Again

This time from Andy Bolt, giving a bit of stick to another irresponsible journalist creating another 'wild warming scare':

CLIMATE change could threaten the safety of blood used for life-saving transfusions, Australian experts have warned.

A report by West Australian researchers has raised concern that rising temperatures will increase the prevalence of viruses, like dengue and Ross River, already circulating in the northern regions of the country.

Really, whichever News organisation ran that story should be looking long and hard at its recruitment policies; their journalists and editors are just woeful.

Update: you can read the abstract of the research report here. On dengue fever, it says:

[D]engue is currently of most concern to blood safety because; it can cause fatalities, there are regular seasonal outbreaks in Northern Australia and, in contrast to other viruses mentioned above an overseas case of transfusion transmission has already been documented. Notably, despite the lack of a suitable dengue screening test the ARCBS [Australian Red Cross Blood Service] already implements supplementary measures to protect the blood supply during outbreaks. (my emphasis)

Oddly enough, the fact that the ARCBS already has measures in place to protect the blood supply from dengue wasn't newsworthy enough to include in the News report.

Sound Bite Snake Oil

It seems that since two global warming 'sceptics' appeared on Sunday's Sixty Minutes, mainstream opinion on global warming has shifted back to the 'it ain't happening and even if it is, it's not man made' position. Maybe - no-one's done the polling yet.

The Sixty Minutes report 'Crunch Time', included this sound bite from Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT:

PROF. RICHARD LINDZEN: We need CO-2. It's not a poison, it's not a pollutant. It's essential for life on earth. I mean how much are we going to depend on people's ignorance in order to produce panic?

Lindzen's position, stated as a logical syllogism is:

Nothing that is necessary for life can be a pollutant.
CO₂ is necessary for life. ergo:
CO₂ cannot be a pollutant.

Or, more generally:

Nothing that is necessary for life can be an environmental problem.
CO₂ is necessary for life. ergo:
CO₂ cannot be an environmental problem.

Is this reasoning correct? Let's try applying it to some other chemical compounds and elements that are necessary to life and see:

Nothing that is necessary for life can be a pollutant.
Phosphorus is necessary for life. ergo:
Phosphorus cannot be a pollutant.

So, even though an excess of phosporus in freshwater occasionally causes algal blooms, it's wrong to call phosphorus a pollutant. And distinctly unAustralian if the source of the phosphorus is agricultural run-off.

Now let's take the general case:

Nothing that is necessary for life can be an environmental problem.
Sodium and chlorine are necessary for life. ergo:
Sodium and chlorine cannot be an environmental problem.

And that about wraps it up for salinisation of soils - it just can't be a problem.

There's something obviously wrong with Lindzen's reasoning: his major premise - that necessities of life can't be pollutants. What has me puzzled is how an environmental scientist could overlook his error and lavish praise on Sixty Minutes for including him in their report.

Qu(ot)e?

It's time for an Australian Enlightenment, where once again reason and facts prevail over mysticism and ignorance...

An Australian Enlightenment would restore ideas to the place they have occupied over the last 5cm of the football field...

Craig Emerson, Minister for Small Business, in The National Rupert Daily.

Mor LOL Denylists

"Dunno muj thrmodynamix but I no wut I like!"

Global average energy budget of the Earth

As a follow up to Alan Siddons's refutation of the quaint nineteenth century notion of 'radiative equilibrium' - a theory now as thoroughly passe as Pythagoras's quaint idea that the Earth is spherical* - Jennifer Marohasy has posted this 'proof' from Bill Kininmonth that greenhouse gasses actually cool the earth.

Kininmonth's argument starts with the diagram above and this howler:

At the surface there is a net accumulation of radiation energy because the incoming solar radiation (168 units) exceeds the net loss of longwave radiation (66 units).

The units that Kininmonth is talking about here are Watts per square meter. As commenters on Siddons's post Chez Marohasy pointed out, the Watt is a measure of power, not energy. A 100 Watt lightbulb converts one hundred joules of energy to light and waste heat every second. What's measured in Watts per square meter is either heat flux density or irradiance - that is, the number of joules that pass through a square meter of an object's surface in one second.

So, in the diagram, we have 168 joules per second reaching each square metre of the Earth's surface in an average year. To find out how much energy that is, we'd need two more pieces of information: the total surface area of the Earth, and the number of seconds in a year. That would produce a very large and intimidating figure, but the calculation is otherwise irrelevant. Let's look instead on what would happen if there really was a net accumulation of 'radiation energy' at the Earth's surface.

The joule, the unit we use to measure energy, is named after James Prescott Joule who came up with another of those quaint nineteenth century ideas that still plague modern science - the idea that heat and mechanical work are equivalent. He also had the gall to claim that he had proved it experimentally. It's in part thanks to Joule that modern physicists treat energy as just energy rather than radiation energy, heat energy, electrical energy etc. Energy is energy, however you get it.

If every square meter of the surface of the earth actually were accumulating 102 joules of energy every second, its temperature would rise. It's as simple as that. Let's look at what would happen to the temperature of a cubic meter of water, accumulating 102 joules of energy each second over an average day.

Ignoring leap seconds, each day has:

24 * 60 * 60 = 86400 seconds

So our cubic meter of water will accumulate:

86400 * 102 = 8 812 800 joules of energy

4.2 joules of energy will raise the temperature of 1 millitre of water by 1 degree Celsius; there are 1 million millitres in a cubic metre. So the temperature of the water will increase by approximately:

8.8 million/(4.2 * 1 million) = 2.1 degrees Celsius

In less than 50 days it will reach boiling temperature. Imagine that happening over every square metre of the Earth's ocean surfaces. Thanks to heat transfer from the surface waters it would take longer for the water to reach boiling point but they'd still get very hot.

Where Kininmonth has gone so hilariously wrong is that he has overlooked two heat flows out of the Earth's surface that account for the 102 'units' of 'radiation energy' that he thinks are accumulating there. They are the heat losses due to thermals - 24 W/m2, and evaporation and transpiration (evapotranspiration) - 78 W/m2. That's a total of 24 + 78 = 102, leaving no energy accumulation at the earth's surface and nothing that has to be explained away by asserting that greenhouse gases actually cool the atmosphere.

* Since this 'scientific' theory is so thoroughly past its use by date, nominations are now open for a replacement theory of the shape of the Earth. This is my first preference:

Update: Dr Marohasy is now hinting that her most recent blog posts have been exercises in Socratic Irony. I wonder who she thinks has been fooling whom.

But Would You Buy a Used Car From This Man?

A FORMER male model who ran an illegal steroid and human growth hormone business now realised he could make more money as a legitimate Gold Coast real estate agent, a court was told yesterday.

Brendan James Brophy, 28, pleaded guilty to 13 offences including importing and trafficking a variety of banned substances from his Ashmore home base from July, 2006, to March, 2007. He was sentenced to two years and six months' jail...

His defence lawyers tendered documents showing Brophy, a high achiever at school, was a promising model and keen gym goer before his arrest.

The court was told that after being caught Brophy became a successful real estate agent at Broadbeach.

Justice John Byrne ordered Brophy to serve six months of the sentence before being released.

(Gold Coast Bulletin)

If I Hadn't Been ROFLMAO, I Might Have Got Angry About This

There's one thing I've learnt to like about global warming obstructionists like Dr Jennifer Marohasy: their intellectual clowning on the subject is sometimes hilariously funny. Today (Saturday, August 16) excels herself by reproducing this argument from Alan Siddons of Holden, Massachusetts:

Radiative equilibrium is one of the foundation stones of radiative forcing theory. But it is not a law of physics, only a rather archaic and untested supposition found in climatology textbooks alone.

"For the Earth to neither warm or cool, the incoming radiation must balance the outgoing."

Not really.

Yes, really. If the Earth were to cool without radiating energy to some other part of the universe, or to warm without receiving additional energy from elsewhere, that would break a very basic law of physics: the law of Conservation of energy.

It’s best to regard radiant energy simply as a finite power source — indeed, that power is expressed as watts per square meter. An object is said to "cool" by radiating, yet this would seem to imply that restricting its radiation will make it get hotter and hotter. That’s the very premise of greenhouse theory, of course, that by disturbing outgoing radiance any magnitude of temperature gain is possible. But this is easy to test.

Confine a lightbulb inside an infrared barrier (like a globular mirror) and electrically feed one watt to it. After a while, will it be generating the heat of a thousand watt bulb? No.

When its temperature is consistent with the input, further heating stops.

This is complete codswallop, written by someone whose technical vocabulary exceeds his technical understanding. Stripped of the technobabble and trivia, the question posed, and then answered incorrectly, is "What happens if you put a light bulb in an enclosed environment and turn on the electricity?"

The correct answer to that question is that the light bulb will radiate light and heat, any air in the environment will be heated by the bulb, then whatever enclosure you've put the light bulb in will start to heat up. At that point the whole system - light bulb, air and enclosure - starts to lose heat to the outside environment and reach a thermal equilibrium where the energy it loses is equal to the energy being put in. Turn off the electricity and it will cool down again.

It’s like water seeking its own level. Lacking any means to radiate to its surroundings the lightbulb ...

The whole purpose of a light bulb is to radiate energy to its surroundings. That's what makes them useful. All that putting a lightbulb inside a reflective enclosure achieves is to make the surroundings smaller.

... merely gets as hot as a watt of power can make it, which is not much hotter than what it would be in the open. If not, we’d be able to generate incredible temperatures very cheaply. Just confine, wait, and release.

See above.

Conservation of energy: it’s not just a phrase...

Indeed not - it's a law of physics which Alan Siddons has misunderstood, at best.

The theory of radiative equilibrium arose early in the 19th century, before the laws of thermodynamics were understood.

The truth of a scientific theory isn't determined by how old it is, bnut by how well it fits the observed facts. And it appears that the laws of thermodynamics aren't universally understood, even today.

From The Analytical Theory of Heat:
The radiation of the sun in which the planet is incessantly plunged, penetrates the air, the earth, and the waters; its elements are divided, change direction in every way, and, penetrating the mass of the globe, would raise its temperature more and more, if the heat acquired were not exactly balanced by that which escapes in rays from all points of the surface and expands through the sky. — Joseph Fourier (1768-1830)

Fourier got that exactly right - later developments in thermodynamics haven't changed that one iota.

Update: more at Deltoid and Atmoz.