[PHOTO] Looking south at Dupont

Looking south, Dupont subway station.

[LINK] "Carbon emissions 'will defer Ice Age'"

80 Beats' Veronique Greenwood has linked to a new study, reported by BBC News' Richard Black, suggesting that global warming--product of human industries--may have postponed the next Ice Age.

In the journal Nature Geoscience, they write that the next Ice Age would begin within 1,500 years - but emissions have been so high that it will not.

"At current levels of CO2, even if emissions stopped now we'd probably have a long interglacial duration determined by whatever long-term processes could kick in and bring [atmospheric] CO2 down," said Luke Skinner from Cambridge University.

Dr Skinner's group - which also included scientists from University College London, the University of Florida and Norway's Bergen University - calculates that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would have to fall below about 240 parts per million (ppm) before the glaciation could begin.

The current level is around 390ppm.

Other research groups have shown that even if emissions were shut off instantly, concentrations would remain elevated for at least 1,000 years, with enough heat stored in the oceans potentially to cause significant melting of polar ice and sea level rise.
[. . .]

Using analysis of orbital data as well as samples from rock cores drilled in the ocean floor, Dr Skinner's team identified an episode called Marine Isotope Stage 19c (or MIS19c), dating from about 780,000 years ago, as the one most closely resembling the present.

The transition to the Ice Age was signalled, they believe, by a period when cooling and warming seesawed between the northern and southern hemispheres, triggered by disruptions to the global circulation of ocean currents.

If the analogy to MIS19c holds up, this transition ought to begin within 1,500 years, the researchers say, if CO2 concentrations were at "natural" levels.

As things stand, they believe, it will not.

The authors note that while human output of carbon dioxide may well have postponed an ice age, the amount being produced goes far beyond the minimum levels necessary to sustain our currently warm climate.

The UK lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, for example, has flagged up a 1999 essay by astronomers Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, who argued that: "The renewal of ice-age conditions would render a large fraction of the world's major food-growing areas inoperable, and so would inevitably lead to the extinction of most of the present human population.

"We must look to a sustained greenhouse effect to maintain the present advantageous world climate. This implies the ability to inject effective greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the opposite of what environmentalists are erroneously advocating."

Luke Skinner said his group had anticipated this kind of reception.

"It's an interesting philosophical discussion - 'would we better off in a warm [interglacial-type] world rather than a glaciation?' and probably we would," he said.

"But it's missing the point, because where we're going is not maintaining our currently warm climate but heating it much further, and adding CO2 to a warm climate is very different from adding it to a cold climate.

"The rate of change with CO2 is basically unprecedented, and there are huge consequences if we can't cope with that."

[LINK] "Resolving the Mysteries of Titan’s Weather"

Centauri Dreams' summary of the latest findings concerning the moon Titan's lakes. Why are the lakes concentrated in the north pole, not the south?

Titan can a frustrating place for meteorologists to understand because during the course of a year some things happen that, in the early days of research, didn’t make a lot of sense. The moon’s equator, for example, is an area where little rain is supposed to fall, but when the Huygens probe arrived, it saw evidence of rain runoff in the terrain. Later, storms were found occurring in the area that did not fit then current models of circulation. The new three-dimensional model simulates Titan’s atmosphere for 135 of its years, which converts to 3000 Earth years. And it produces intense equatorial rains during Titan’s vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

According to the researchers, rain is indeed rare at low latitudes, but as Schneider says, “When it rains, it pours.” And the equatorial regions aren’t the only venue on Titan that the new model addresses. Titan’s methane lakes cluster around the poles, and it has been established by Cassini’s unceasing labors that more lakes exist in the northern than the southern hemisphere. According to Schneider, methane collects in lakes near the poles because sunlight is weak enough in those regions that little methane evaporates.

As to why more lakes are found in the northern hemisphere, let me quote from the Caltech press release on this work:

Saturn’s slightly elongated orbit means that Titan is farther from the sun when it’s summer in the northern hemisphere. Kepler’s second law says that a planet orbits more slowly the farther it is from the sun, which means that Titan spends more time at the far end of its elliptical orbit, when it’s summer in the north. As a result, the northern summer is longer than the southern summer. And since summer is the rainy season in Titan’s polar regions, the rainy season is longer in the north.

[LINK] "Does a single person in England care if the United Kingdom breaks up?"

A blog post by Ed West, journalist for the conservative The Daily Telegraph, appeared on my Facebook friends feed, shared by several people. The blog post seems to articulate fairly clear the vein of sentiment in England that doesn't much care what Scotland does.

[T]he English Empire offered Scots a chance to grow rich and to punch well above their weight on the international stage (from 1750 to 1950 Scotland’s contribution to trade, science and engineering was staggering for a country that size). But a common national identity was successfully forged, based on a common language, religion and empire.

Now the last two have gone, and the first is less important in the age of global English. Furthermore, British national identity has taken a consistent battering in recent decades, and the policies of Margaret Thatcher have meant that one of the major two parties has a negligible presence in Scotland and now wants to commit a mass suicide-makeover. So we have a situation where the main party in Scotland wants an independent Scotland, the main party in England, just as in 1707, has every reason to want an independent England, and the only party with a constituency in both doesn’t believe in nations at all but in super-states, universalism and diversity.

Scotland and England are already on diverging tectonic plates, with the former already looking towards Scandinavia (Scotland already has a “Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning" and a "Cabinet Secretary for health and wellbeing" – very Nordic).

And the union is likely to end because the Scots seem to show little emotional attachment to it (last I was in Edinburgh I saw one Union flag), for which a surprising amount of blame must be placed with Mel Gibson; similarly, the English will suffer very little psychic damage from the break-up. All the ideas of “Britishness” we have are basically Englishness by another name; when the English think of Britain they are essentially imagining Greater England, which politically and demographically the United Kingdom has always essentially been. An independent England would not see itself any differently, except that the highly stylish and beautiful Union Jack would be replaced with the rather dull St George’s Cross.

The comments are frequently dire, but sometimes interesting. Two noteworthy themes that came up repeatedly include a denial that the Scots have a distinctive identity and complaints about immigrants likewise destabilizing British identity.

Thoughts?

[BRIEF NOTE] On republicanism and homophobia in Jamaica and that Commonwealth, again

Comment is free featured a remarkable essay by one André Wright, "It's time for Jamaica to say goodbye to the Queen". Writing after that country's recent general election saw the victory of Portia Simpson Miller, an avowed republican, Wright wrote approvingly of what he expects to be Jamaica's shift from the current arrangement, where--just as in Canada--the Queen is head of state and is represented by her governor-general, to one where Jamaica's head of state is Jamaican. Jamaicans, Wright writes, don't identify with the British monarchy that just doesn't visibly benefit Jamaicans. The existing Commonwealth ties constraining Jamaicans' freedom of action.

(I suspect that my readers would find two of the below grounds for complaint unreasonable.)

Many Jamaicans consider it offensive and outdated to have retained a governor general as a figurehead of "our" Queen. What are the benefits? After all, there is no automatic right to British citizenship by virtue of having the Queen. Hell, some Jamaicans sweat it out on the sidewalk outside the British high commission before being allowed to undergo screening for a visitor's visa.

And there are other sentiments that embitter the brew. Calls to replace London's judicial committee of the privy council with the Caribbean court of justice, as Jamaica's final appellate jurisdiction, have triggered debate. Many Jamaicans believe the privy council has sought to obstruct capital punishment. A culturally less tone-deaf CCJ, the argument goes, would allow regional governments to hang some hoodlums.

[. . .]

Folks are also angry at David Cameron's threat to withdraw aid from Commonwealth countries such as Jamaica that criminalise "buggery". The overwhelming rebuke from letter writers and talk-show callers was: "Bugger off, Britain! Keep your money."

Simpson Miller finally has the mandate she missed out on in the 2007 general election. Now, she's seeking to define her legacy. And Britain will just have to deal with the sore reality of a Jamaican boot to Regina's royal rump.

Commenters noted the apparent tone of support for capital punishment and the country's terrible record on gay issues, some mischief-making ones noting how the Guardian's left-wing commenters must have been confused. What is to be said when someone wants to gain full independence from a colonizer to finally able to do terrible things without restraint? To confuse things terminally, Wright himself noted that Jamaican republicanism co-existed with a strong streak of Anglophilia, even nostalgia for (doubtless idealized) British rule over Jamaica.

[H]ere's the contradictory bit. In an opinion poll commissioned by the Gleaner newspaper, 60% of Jamaicans said they believed the country would have been better off had it remained a colony of Britain. Only 17% said the country would be worse off.

This is not only the nostalgia of senior citizens who grew up pre-independence; even younger generations view neighbouring British dependencies such as the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands as having a higher quality of life. Why? They don't notch 1,000 murders annually. They don't have sprawling slums. And per capita GDP in Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands dwarfs Jamaica's.

We love Britain: its fish'n'chips; the adorable accent; the BBC; the pounds sterling in immigrant remittances; The stiff upper lip. the ability to impose law, order, propriety. We just don't want the royal brand.

As I noted in 2009 at Demography Matters, Jamaica is one of that select group of countries with a population projected to decline as a consequence of emigration, in Jamaica's case to the United Kingdom that is motherland of the Commonwealth, to fellow Commonwealth member-state Canada, and to that could-have-been-Commonwealth United States. Metaphorically trying to distance Jamaica from the Commonwealth via changes in the technicalities of government aren't likely to succeed in the face of that kind of intensification of lived Jamaican experience.

The hell of it is, it might not mean much in the long run. Simpson Miller came out on national television against normative homophobia in Jamaica, calling for a revision to that contry's sodomy laws and announcing that her cabinet wouldn't arbitrarily exclude gays.

Thus: the republican whose republicanism is popular--according to one person--because a republic and full independence would better enable the persecution of non-heterosexuals is the person whose promised policies would actually alleviate the plight of non-heterosexuals far more than anything done by the constitutional-monarchical non-republic that is supposed to be the agency capable of making things better (except that the constitutional-monarchical non-republic introduced those anti-buggery laws and anti-gay norms in the first place, oops).

Does your head hurt yet? And do you now have a sense of what the Commonwealth actually does, as opposed to being implicitly promised to do?

[BRIEF NOTE] Is Harper learning from Orbán, Putin, and Netanyahu?

The two likely markets for the oil processed from the tar sands of Alberta are the United States and Asia. To export to the United States, a pipeline connecting northern Alberta with the United States' grid would be needed, the proposed Keystone Pipeline; to export to Asia, a pipeline to a harbour on the British Columbia coast where oil tanks would dock would be required, the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway. Both pipelines have encountered considerable opposition on environmental grounds, connected to potential damage from the pipelines themselves and to concerns over the environmental impact of processing the tar sands. The Keystone Pipeline is on hiatus right now, while the Enbridge Northern Gateway has embarked on what looks to be a long and controversial series of public hearings.

Canada's Minister of Natural Resources, Joe Oliver, is upset. He wants the radicals threatening the pipelines to be stopped. Oliver doesn't only want to make the environmental assessment shorter, but he wants to go after the foreign interests that--he says--are driving it. And, shades of Hungary and Israel and Russia, there are rumours afoot that the Canadian government will go after foreign funding of Canadian environmental groups.

Environmental and other "radical groups" are trying to block trade and undermine Canada's economy, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver said Monday.

Oliver's comments came one day before federal regulatory hearings begin on whether to approve Enbridge's Northern Gateway pipeline, which would deliver crude from Alberta's oilsands to Kitimat, B.C., for shipment to Asia.

More than 4,300 people have signed up to address the proposed pipeline over the next 18 months.

"Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade," Oliver said in an open letter.

"Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams."

Oliver says the groups "threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda," stack the hearings with people to delay or kill "good projects," attract "jet-setting" celebrities and use funding from "foreign special interest groups."

Sources say the government isn't just talking, CBC's Margo McDiarmid reports, but will be targeting environmental groups when the House finance committee reviews charitable funding next month.

The committee could recommend changing the rules to stop them from getting U.S. money. Sierra Club's John Bennett says he's worried.

"This is just a way to undermine our credibility and sweep out all environmental protections in Canada," he said.

[. . .]

While Oliver took aim at foreign funding for environment groups, foreign investment is a major part of the oilsands. American, British, Chinese, French and Norwegian companies have all invested in the oilsands.

The difference, Oliver said, is that Canada needs the foreign capital.

"They’re helping us build infrastructure to help us diversify our market. Other groups are trying to impede … the economic progress; they’re trying to block development; they’re trying to block projects which will create hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in government revenue and trillions of dollars in economic development. That’s the fundamental difference."

One group contacted in the article, the Pembina Institute, claims to receive just one-tenth of its funding from outside Canada.

All this alarms me.

The labeling of environmentalists and other groups opposing the Northern Gateway project as radicals I find risible. There probably are deep greens and NIMBYists active in the opposition to that project, and to the tar sands, but there are equally good, legitimate reasons to be concerned about both projects, or even just about the pipeline. "Radical" is simply a scary-sounding noun when used by Oliver, representing the decay of political discourse in Canada. (And why single out the economic cost of the project's non-development to families, specifically? Are singles fair game?)

The efforts to limit foreign support of troublesome NGOs threatening government priorities is something I find much more troubling. In Hungary, Israel, and Russia, governments of greater or lesser democratic legitimacy have lately decided to respond to certain critical domestic groups by going after the support--financial, material, and otherwise--these groups receive from outside foreign lands. "Our sovereign democracy is threatened by foreign intruders," the thinking seems to go, "we have to prevent them from supporting their proxies." Globalized civil society is rejected in favour of controlled domestic public opinion pruned of troublesome foreign influences.

This is not a good paradigm for any Canadian government to adopt. Civil society is increasingly global, of necessity, and all manner of causes are prosecuted on a global basis. This is particularly true in circumstances where a particular cause will affect people in more than one country, or where the balance of forces are such that help from the outside is needed and welcome, but it's generally true across the board. One world, people. Any Canadian government that claims the right to isolate Canada from global civil society deserves to be carefully watched.