RealClimate has an article up discussing potential tipping points in our climate which, among other things, elaborates further on Jim Hansen’s ‘ten years left’ comment:

The ‘10 year’ horizon is the point by which serious efforts will need to have started to move the trajectory of concentrations away from business-as-usual towards the alternative scenario if the ultimate warming is to stay below ‘dangerous levels’. Is it realistic timescale? That is very difficult to judge. Wrapped up in the ‘10 year’ horizon are considerations of continued emission growth, climate sensitivity, assumptions about future volcanic eruptions and solar activity etc. What is clear is that uncontrolled emissions will very soon put us in range of temperatures that have been unseen since the Eemian/Stage 5e period (about 120,000 years ago) when temperatures may have been a degree or so warmer than now but where sea level was 4 to 6m higher…

Scientific American has a blog post which tackles one of the common global warmign skeptic srguments, namely that the present warming could be a natural uptick. It examines all the different sources of evidence for global warming and explains why the current warming is almost certainly man-made and not a natural uptick. Well worth a read, simply to give you an idea of the depth of evidence. It’s also part of a series of articles dealing with common themes of global warming skepticism, so it’s worth reading the other articles in the series too.

Seymour Hersh has an article in the New Yorker outlining the US military’s unease at the current war planning being focused on Iran by the White House.

Several current and former officials I spoke to expressed doubt that President Bush would settle for a negotiated resolution of the nuclear crisis. A former high-level Pentagon civilian official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the government, said that Bush remains confident in his military decisions. The President and others in the Administration often invoke Winston Churchill, both privately and in public, as an example of a politician who, in his own time, was punished in the polls but was rewarded by history for rejecting appeasement. In one speech, Bush said, Churchill “seemed like a Texan to me. He wasn’t afraid of public-opinion polls. . . . He charged ahead, and the world is better for it.”

That’s all we need. The village idiot who thinks he’s Churchill.

The Bush administration tried to prevent Jim Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, talking to the press about climate change but the plan backfired. Here he gives his expert opinion on the global warming debate in the New York Review of Books, including this alarming warning:

As explained above, we have at most ten years — not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions. Our previous decade of inaction has made the task more difficult, since emissions in the developing world are accelerating. To achieve the alternative scenario will require prompt gains in energy efficiencies so that the supply of conventional fossil fuels can be sustained until advanced technologies can be developed. If instead we follow an energy-intensive path of squeezing liquid fuels from tar sands, shale oil, and heavy oil, and do so without capturing and sequestering CO2 emissions, climate disasters will become unavoidable.

An article in Scientific American details the latest research on how supervolcanoes form and erupt, and how their eruptions can have long term effects on the atmosphere.

The oxygen 17 excess and other chemical patterns that we found in sulfate from the Yellowstone and Long Valley ash samples thus implied that significant amounts of stratospheric ozone were used up in reactions with gas from the supereruptions in those regions. Other researchers studying the acid layers in Antarctica have demonstrated that those events, too, probably eroded stratospheric ozone. It begins to look as if supervolcano emissions eat holes in the ozone layer for an even longer period than they take to cool the climate.

This loss of protective ozone would be expected to result in an increased amount of dangerous ultraviolet radiation reaching the earth’s surface and thus in a rise in genetic damage caused by rays. The magnitude and length of the potential ozone destruction are still being debated. Space observations have revealed a 3 to 8 percent depletion of the ozone layer following the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. But what would happen after an event 100 times larger? Simple arithmetic does not solve the problem, because the details of atmospheric oxidation reactions are extremely complex and not fully understood.

A surgeon answers the question ’What’s it like to cut in to somebody?‘:

Nowadays, routine surgery, such as breast biopsies or other elective surgery, it doesn’t even raise my pulse anymore. But I never forget that, society has granted me and relatively few others the privilege to cut into living human bodies legally in order to try to cure them of disease. I like to think that I’ve earned that right through my skill, but it could just as easily have gone the other way.

Freedom is when your government illegally eavesdrops on your phone calls and keeps records of who you called, when and for how long.

Freedom is when your government illegally tracks your international financial dealings and those of foreigners.

Freedom is when your government fingerprints and iris-scans all visitors to your country.

Freedom is when your government illegally demands personal information on people flying through your country’s air space.

Freedom is when your government scans the internet and your emails for personal information to add to its databases so it can keep tabs on everything you do.

Democracy is when your government steals your election.

Is this the sort of freedom & democracy the U.S. wants to spread to the world?

A couple of months back, I got a phone call from Becs asking if I wanted to do the Kathmandu adventure race which we did last year. I agreed, thought no more of it and continued with my half-marathon training. After completing that, I pretty much sat on my arse for a few weeks. My legs took quite a beating during the run so I wanted to take things easy, and once the World Cup started my sleep patterns went out the window anyway and training suffered.

Still, I was determined to do the race, as was Becs, so we rocked up to the Royal National Park at 7am on Sunday as ready as we’d ever be. The format was pretty similar to last year apart from the fact that we’d be bussed to the start after registration, and would only be given our course maps once on the bus. This left us very little time to mark up the maps with our chosen route, but given the terrain, and the admonition to stay on the tracks and not go cross-country, there was really only one route to take.

We were in the second wave starting at 9:30, so when we got the command 200 people headed off on the run segment, starting from Heathcote. Another 200 had left at 9:00 to avoid overcrowding on the course, and once we’d reaced the second checkpoint the crowding wasn’t too bad. Neither myself nor Becs were overly keen on the run section and took it relatively easy, especially since the still freezing air was aggravating Becs’s asthma. The run to CP4 & 5 was rocky and involved a lot of climbing and descending which hammered my legs. There was only one way to go and we ended up behind a line of people travelling at around our pace, so there was no point in attempting a pass.

We finished the run section in 1hr 20mins and went straight to the canoes, this year’s surprise discipline. The canoes were Canadian style, so it was a quick paddle to CP7 and back to the boathouse at Audley Weir. We both had paddles, so thankfully Becs had to do some work unlike last year when we had to row a section and I did all the work! No sandbagging this time! Once out of the boats we had to climb the same bloody set of steps as last year up to CP8 and the bike transition. We walked the steps, same as last year, as it was still early in the race and my heart rate was already up around 170.

Got to the top and onto the bikes which was going to be our best leg. This section of the course overlapped a lot with last year’s, so it was faily easy to navigate and we’d no problem finding CPs 8, 9 and 10. My mountain biking in Canberra paid off in spades as there was a long, rocky downhill between CP 9 & 10 which I flew down, passing quite a few other riders who were a bit more tentative. All was going well until we were heading towards CP11. We had a bunch of people following us down some singletrack when we got to a slow, twisty, rocky section. I made it through and kept going only to hear a shout from behind as Becs had crashed. I went back and discovered that while she’d gone over the handlebars at a slow speed, she’d landed on her kneecap on a rock and was in quite a bit of pain. She was adamant that she was continuing, so we took off again a bit more slowly.

The next couple of checkpoints were OK, though Becs found it increasingly hard to put significant power through the pedals, so riding uphill was an issue, and running anywhere was out of the question. Thankfully we’d got the running out of the way early, though there were still two short sections which we had to walk instead of jog.

Once we’d made it to CP16 there was another surprise in store for us. We were given a map of an old folks’ home and had to run around looking for answers to clues, and also shovelling some dirt as the hard-labour part of a landscaping project. Once we had all the boxes ticked, we had our cards examined and, if satisfactory, we got our CP17 marked and were back on the bikes.

By this stage we’d been going for four hours and Becs’s knee was swelling up and getting more painful. Thankfully we’d only a few bike CPs to go, none of which involved riding uphill. There’s a rule in AR which states that both team members must remain within 100m of each other at all times, so we made full use of that by getting Becs to stop once we got close to the CP and having me go and punch our card. We checked off CPs 19 – 23 in quick succession, then we’d a high speed descent of Audley Hill back to the registration area for our final leg – kayaking.

Heading out on the kayaks was made particularly hard since we were leaving from beside the finish area, and quite a few of the better teams were already sitting there enjoying their post-race hot food. The smells were particularly enticing after surviving the previous 4.5 hours on gels and water! Max Adventure had acquired solid, plastic kaaks for this year which were a marked improvment on last year’s inflatable ones. With me weighing a good 20kg+ more than Becs, sitting me in the back of the inflatable ones saw them bend in the middle and become a pain in the arse to paddle. This year it was much better and we’d no problem flying down the river to our last two CPs, 24 & 25. Once we’d got 25, it was a straight race back up the river to get in under the five hour mark. We made it with 40 seconds to spare, crossing the line in 4:59:20 which we were pretty happy with.

We munched our way through the post-race food, hung around for the presentations and congratulated Amanda & Matt who’d won the mixed teams division. We also managed to pick up a spot-prize! Woo hoo! The official results were posted on the Max Adventure web site on Tuesday and we managed to come 13th in the mixed category which we’re delighted about. Becs reckons that if she hadn’t crashed we could have got as high as 8th too. All in all it was a pretty good day, particularly as it didn’t rain at all – a first for our AR team. We’ll have to examine the calendar now and decide when our next race is going to be!

I’ve been engrossed in the World Cup over the last two weeks, deciding that, since Ireland didn’t qualify and I’m in the process of applying for residency, I’d support Australia. I went out and bought myself an official jersey and got used to staying up late, or rising early, to watch games live from Germany.

As Australia have progressed through the tournament the general public has been getting more and more involved, which is a good sign in a country in which cricket, rugby union, rugby league and Aussie rules dominate the sporting landscape. We played Japan off the pitch, contained Brazil quite well, and managed a well-deserved draw against Croatia to see us through to the knockout stages.

That game was last night against Italy. Well, 1am this morning here! It was a disaster. Went to bed early, got up at 12:30am and settled in front of the TV. We started well, playing good football and dealing with the Italian threats in an efficient manner. Luca Toni had a couple of snapped shots on goal, but he wasn’t given the time or the space to get organised and Schwarzer was able to save. At half-time it was 0-0 and things were looking good. The ref was playing well, allowing the game to flow and restricting his use of the whistle to when it was really warranted.

A few minutes into the second half, he made his first mistake, sending Materazzi off when he should probably only have received a yellow. Italy immediately switched into defensive mode and looked to a few counter-attacks to seal the game, but nothing came of it. We were constantly pressuring them, but with Kewell injured on the bench, we lacked the necessary incisiveness to slot one home. 3 minutes of injury time were indicated and it looked like we were heading for extra time and probably then to penalties.

Then, it was all over. Grasso brushed off a challenge from Bresciano outside our penalty area, then Lucas Neill tackled him inside the box, playing the ball and not touching Grasso at all. However, he ended up prostrate in front of him, whereupon Grasso prompty tripped over him and the ref blew for a penalty with 20 seconds remaining. Totti fired past Schwarzer and the dream was over. What a shit way to exit the World Cup!

No-one would have minded if Neill had screwed up, but the guy was far and away our best player of the tournament and he was spot on with this challenge too. It should never have been a penalty. With the score level, and only 20 seconds to play, the referee should be absolutely certain that a penalty is warranted, and there’s no way he could have been last night.

Out of the four games played in this tournament, Australia have been the recipient of some shocking refereeing decisions. Japan were awarded their only goal after their defender took out Schwarzer, preventing him from making the save, a fact later acknowledged when the referee apologised for his error. Croatia got away with two deliberate handballs in the penalty area, and one of their players received THREE yellow cards! Even the least controversial game against Brazil saw the fouls stacked 25-9 in their favour although it didn’t appear to be a physical game at all. Then to top it off we get last night!

Sure, it all sounds like sour grapes and there’s certainly an element of disappointment tinging my analysis, but I’ve watched enough games of football in my time to be able to distinguish clear screw-ups from grey areas and there were definitely more of the former than the latter. Still, for a team who were labelled as “easy beats”, we did pretty well, and certainly far better than most, including the average Australian, expected. For that, the team can be proud.

An animated GIF of a time-lapse photo series, taken by one of the Mars Rovers, showing Earth rising in the sky as seen from Mars. That little dot rising on the right hand side encompasses everyone you’ve ever met, or will meet, every place you’ve been or will visit and your entire existence, past, present and future. Insignificant in the grand scheme of things, isn’t it?

Very interesting.

Picture a psychiatrist at her desk reviewing a case file. The report describes a young, teenaged male who, with several others his age, killed nearly a hundred victims. The case is astounding—not only because of the intensity and magnitude of the violence, but because nothing remotely like it has ever happened in the community before. Not even a single murder. As the psychiatrist turns the pages and reads on, the pieces of the puzzle start to come together. A few years before, the young killers had witnessed the massacre of their families and been orphaned. Afterwards, although still very young, they were relocated to another community with few adults to raise them; importantly, it was absent of older, mentoring males.

Read the full article for a surprise.

Just ordered my new MacBook Pro.

:-)

After an abortive return to running the week before last, I finally got going again this week. The weather was crap all last week; rain stopped play as it were, or at least provided a convenient excuse for sitting on the couch eating all those Ferrero Rocher that Jacqui brought home! Couple that with distorted sleeping patterns brought on by World Cup fever and you have a recipe for lethargy.

however, I’ve an adventure race in two weeks so i figured I should really get going again. Went for a short run on Tuesday evening and another on last night, 3.1 and 4.2kms repsectively. Took it nice and easy, just to get back into the flow of things. Today’s a day off, then I’ll try and maintain a two days on, one day off ratio.

R: 7.3km