More interesting ways to present information

This was posted to our listserv and it reminded me of another interesting video map that can really put things into perspective.

---How to take back our media:

--ATTN: blogees: several times at the BookClub I mentioned how corporations are taking over America's media, and I met up with disagreements. I have paid close attention to media issues (reading Robert McChestney, Lawrence Lessig, Amy Goodman, and Eric Alterman @ The Nation magazine; along with the blogs: www.mediamatters.org & david.a.dobbs@gmail.com). Big media is taking over radio, broadcast TV, the newspapers; they have tried to debunk NPR and PBS, and public libraries--trying to deny their public funding. The people rallied to save our media since 2003. It is now deja vu all over again. We have to write to our Congress-officials ASAP to ask them to please rescue our public treasures, our libraries and our public broadcasting. Anyone who wants to get involved can attend The National Conference For Media Reform (NCMR)--- to learn How To Confront the Big Business Take-Over of American Media --- April 8-10 --- @ the Boston Seaport Trade Center ---to register: www.freepress.net the people of the ScienceBookClub know that I am a public media supporter---who lists each month the shows-not-to-overlook on PBS and DW-TV & C-span --- which you can access via Public Access-TV. over&out Carolyn

Washington vs. the Merciless

Joe Levee asked that this be posted on the blog for your consideration:

Click on this link to go to the New York Times article.
Washington vs. the Merciless

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: March 19, 2011

My subjective gut feeling

My view is that we should accept the IPCC findings as correct- they do seem to be our best source of information. (It's very disturbing that we have eliminated US funding for the IPCC in our present budget.)
My subjective gut feeling (very subject to change) is that the one degree change we have seen so far isn't going to do much- but a 3 or 4 degree change in the next 50 years or so is reason for concern, but not for alarum.
We should proceed in a thoughtful and objective way, freely facing up to the good points and bad points of the various remedies. Some solutions may well make things worse. We can fill the west with windmills chopping up raptors, but windmills might not really cut significantly into our use of fossil fuels. The energy loss in transmitting electricity long distances is huge. Power plants can’t always use the extra power from sources which are sporadic.
We are going to be generating CO2 for some time, but hopefully not for ever.
We should be monitoring the tundra very carefully, a sudden increase in methane from this source could really mess things up.
It’s ironic that most of the proposed solutions have a much bigger foot print than the nuclear and fossil fuel plants we are presently using.
I’m not thrilled with thousands of acres of windmills or solar panels.
I’ll be struggling through Jefferson Tester’s Sustainable Energy-Choosing Among Options. This 800 plus page work is a text book used in a graduate level MIT course on these issues. I consider Dr. Tester a much more objective student of these issues than Lester Brown and his ilk. .

Global Warming

This is a comment about global warming. To begin we might ask how to make a decision about the following:

1. Is Global Warming (GW) a fact?
2. If so, is a significant part of it due to humans?
3. If not, how can we correct the claims for GW?
4. If 1 or 2 is correct, should we do anything about it?

First I note that science is not a democratic process. Both the education and experience of a writer are very important as well as their recognized expertise. Within mathematics and physics (my areas), the important problems are most often set by experts in the field. There is also a general consensus about the identity of the experts. While there are exceptions (else new experts might seldom emerge) there are standard paths by which one becomes an expert. (A Cincinnati boy, Thomas Kuhn, discusses this in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions---I hasten to add that GW falls in the area of Kuhn's "normal science.")

While consensus indicates a kind of democracy, one should not think that there are "votes" on the important problems in graph theory. Nor are there "votes" on the direction that particle physics should take.

With that in mind, I will refer the reader to the NASA website on Climate Change:
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

There are links to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) at the NASA site.

We find there this statement:
"The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years."

There is also a quote from the IPCC:
"Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal."

Radiation in Japan

Randall Monroe always make information clear and interesting.
http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Economics for the future

This was posted by Roy Auerbach on our listserv, but I am cross posting it here for public consumption and comment.

I am somewhat of a pessimist about the current state of affairs, but am hopeful for humanity in the long term. You can translate that to mean that we will step into the coming crisis, with attendant waste of resources, death, and human suffering, but hopefully blunder our way through to the other side poorer, but living more in line with our means. In doing so, we will squander an opportunity to better use the easily gained resources we now have.
What I find interesting is that we have had a nearly unbroken rise in technology over the last several thousand years. It is true, we find some interesting artifacts such as batteries and astronomical computers from ancient times, but overall, regardless of the rise and fall of civilizations we seem to progress. I anticipate the same happening, even if we must stop being so proliferate with our carbon resources.
We will eventually deal with climate change, but only when it is too late.

I am reminded of a realization when I was a teenager. I read about a crop failure leading to a rise in a food commodity price (today I can't remember anymore what it was). I saw that supermarkets had marked up the prices in stores. I was puzzled by this as the supermarket had clearly bought the items on the shelves at the lower price. The reasoning behind this change was that the supermarket had to price according to the replacement value of the goods it contained. We find ourselves in the same place which is much of the point of ecological economics. Our current market structure and philosophy seems adamantly opposed to this way of thinking.

I must admit I am not a fan of free market economics. It suffers from two failures. The first is that it assumes the individuals and companies making up the market are rational. It is quite clear that this is a fallacy. There are recent books on real behavioral economics such as "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely that illustrate this. The second is that free market economics is too cruel a philosophy. It may be efficient, but will leave a trail of destruction and death in its wake.

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