Northman's Fury

The United States is starting to look like a slowpoke on the Internet. Examples abound of countries that have faster and cheaper broadband connections, and more of their population connected to them.

What's less clear is how badly the country that gave birth to the Internet is doing, and whether the government needs to step in and do something about it. The Bush administration has tried to foster broadband adoption with a hands-off approach. If that's seen as a failure by the next administration, the policy may change.

The US is definitely falling behind, dropping from 4th to 15th between 2001 and 2006 for the number of households with broadband access. Even more to the point, broadband access in many other countries is both much faster and much cheaper than in the US.

The reason?

Now, ten years ago Japan had slower internet than the US. So they looked to the US to see how to do it - and they saw that the US had open access laws (where in the old days, companies could buy access to the lines at wholesale rates - which is why there was an ISP on every corner in the 90's) and decided they were key.

So they opened up broadband access - mandated that phone and cable lines had to be available to whoever wanted access. As SaveTheInternet points out:

If this quaint idea of “competition” seems familiar, that’s because America invented “open access” policies in the first place. And open access worked for decades to bring lower prices and more choices in long-distance phone service and dial-up Internet access.

The Japanese first adopted open access because they were worried about falling behind us. But under pressure from our own phone and cable monopolists, the Bush administration abandoned open access – and the fundamental protections for Net Neutrality along with it.

Now they’re standing idly by as America drops further and further behind the rest of the world in every measure of broadband progress.

. . .

When you don't have competition, with few exceptions, you don't get progress or better products. And so the US has worse broadband. It has worse wireless. It has worse (and deliberately crippled) phones. It's falling behind in the very industry it invented. All because a few gatekeeper corporations don't want to have to compete and because the Bush administration and conservative justices believe in concentration of wealth rather than progress and competition.

Net neutrality isn't just about fairness; it's about competitiveness, and the big telecoms in the US don't want to have to deal with competitors. As long as their government allows them to set the rules, the US as a whole is going to keep falling behind.

An interesting situation brewing in the southern U.S. over water use by several competing interests.

No gauges are necessary at Lake Lanier to measure the ravages of the Southeast's drought.

Wooden fishing docks tower 10 feet over dried mud that used to be squishy lake bottom. Boat ramps begin at the parking lot and end in sand. New islands emerge from shallows.

"If the water drops another foot, I don't know that anyone will be able to get a boat in," said Mike Boyle, 64, a resident who has long trolled the lake for spotted and striped bass.

The waters of Lake Lanier, funneled through federal dams along the Chattahoochee River, sustain about 2.8 million people in the Atlanta metropolitan area, a nuclear power plant that lights up much of Alabama, and the marine life in Florida's Apalachicola River and Bay.

The story goes on to detail the sniping between the competing interests and states demanding that they deserve a larger share of what remains of the water flow. I've read other versions of this story about other rivers, streams and reservoirs across the states, and it is also becoming a major issue for the oilsands in northern Alberta, where the drive to expand oil production is running into the limits of the water supply.

Hell, even the Great Lakes don't appear to be immune from the problem.

Basically, the problem appears to be becoming more common, and the reason is generally uncontrolled growth without much mind to the sustainability limits of the local resources. In such cases, I thought it might be useful to remember just how bad things can get when such activities get out of hand.

Forty years ago, Muynak was a busy fishing port where the waters of the Aral Sea lapped up against the shoreline.

Today the waters have receded so much, that there is not a drop as far as the eye can see.

. . .

The human misery is huge. One victim has tuberculosis, which is rife and on the increase in the rest of the population. Cancer, lung disease and infant mortality are 30 times higher than they used to be because the drinking water is heavily polluted with salt, cotton fertilisers and pesticides.

Rim Abdulovich Giniyatullin of the International Agency for the Aral Sea Program hopes that the rest of the world can learn lessons from the Aral Sea tragedy.

"Don't allow the misuse of water," he warns.

"Be careful about how much you use, and stop before the source starts to shrink."

Here's the Aral Sea in 1976.

and in 1997

[LINK]

I wonder if we North Americans are smart enough to learn the lesson the Soviets taught the world.

I came across this little video yesterday at Woman at Mile 0’s site:



To be frank, I don’t find the guy too terribly convincing, but his little exercise is a good place to start.

For one, he posits that the worst-case scenario for doing nothing about climate change is major catastrophe, but still leaves the earth habitable and humanity intact. Last I checked, the worst-case scenario is Venus; runaway temperature rise until the oceans boil away and all life is exterminated by heat and pressure intense enough most metals become liquids.

Even scenarios that allow the earth to survive as habitable don’t guarantee humanity’s making it through. One thing I’ve learned about the major extinction events of the past is that the megafauna is always on the top of the list of who bites it. And like it or not, we humans fall into the megafauna category.

The other problem I have is with his choice of rows. Even most of the opponents of climate change have now acknowledged that the climate is changing. There’s only so much science you an ignore before you start looking like the creationist kooks, flat-earthers, and those who haven’t accepted the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around. The arguments have already shifted to whether or not humans are responsible, and/or if we should do something about it.

That leads me to an article posted at The Issue.com called, “How to argue with a global warming enthusiast”.

It’s probably significant that he informs his readers that the most difficult person to argue with is the “informed believer”. He doesn’t really explain why, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say its because these oxymoronic constructs will have the facts to refute your contentions. (Okay, he does kind of explain it, contending that the people who are well-informed about climate change are more willing to act on faith. I said it was an oxymoron.)

Anyway, the post is a good run-down of the skeptics case, and you’ll note that there isn’t anything there denying climate change outright. It is all about cyclical climate variations, the suns effect, warming on Mars, and so forth.

A couple of his points, like the ones on sea ice and water vapour, seem to be designed more to discredit the hopefully ignorant “believer” rather than refute any point about actual climate change at all.

Anyway, the major point is that the argument over the rows in our video buddy’s chart has pretty much ended for most observers, skeptics or otherwise. Climate change is happening.

What’s important to note at this point, is that even if the skeptics are correct, and mankind isn’t responsible for climate change, and therefore shouldn’t bother trying to stop or mitigate it, there isn’t any smiley face in our future. The top row of the chart is gone. If we can’t stop climate change, either because we don’t bother trying or because is isn’t our fault to begin with, we still wind up in box #4.

And we just got handed some more science to prove that isn’t an exaggeration:

Whenever the world's tropical seas warm several degrees, Earth has experienced mass extinctions over millions of years, said a first-of-its-kind statistical study of fossil records.

And scientists fear it may be about to happen again — but in a matter of several decades, not tens of millions of years.

Four of the five major extinctions over 520 million years of Earth history have been linked to warmer tropical seas, something that indicates a warmer world overall, said the study published Wednesday

. . .

The author of the second study, which focuses on carbon dioxide, said he does see a cause-and-effect between warmer seas and extinctions.

Peter Ward, a University of Washington biology and paleontology professor, said natural increases in carbon dioxide warmed the air and ocean. The warmer water had less oxygen and spawned more microbes, which in turn spewed toxic hydrogen sulphide into the air and water, killing species.

Ward examined 13 major and minor extinctions in the past and found a common link: rising carbon dioxide levels in the air and falling oxygen levels. Ward's study will be presented Sunday at the Geological Society of America's annual convention in Denver.

For some reason, I suspect the only thing the skeptics will pick out of this post is that the second study didn’t see a link between warmer oceans and extinctions. Of course, what the second study links the extinctions to is higher levels of carbon dioxide.

Given that both temperatures and carbon dioxide levels are increasing these days, I’m not particularly comforted by the fact that the two studies can’t determine which of the two is more likely to kill us all.

In any case, there’s one final point to make about the whole should we/shouldn’t we debate over climate change. And while I said the first row of the chart was already decided, the skeptics still point to the enormous costs and terrifying economic consequences of that first box to keep people from making action on climate change a priority.

I find it is ever useful to remember just what it is they are arguing against, and for that, I’ll re-quote David Brin:

Still, ponder this -- it has already been proved repeatedly, that humanity is capable of affecting ecosystems, atmospheric systems (I grew up in LA) and even (in the case of the ozone hole) planetary systems. Thus, it is simply mind-boggling that a concerned majority of world scientists should have to prove their worries valid, beyond all doubt...

...before humanity decides to take simple precautions THAT MAKE SENSE ANYWAY.

10) And that is the final kibosh. The devastator. The ultimate eviscerator of this horrific mass-cult.

Because they never make clear exactly what it is that they are afraid of!

What? Efficiency?

Let me reiterate.
That is what it boils down to. Fear and loathing of... efficiency.

It is what Al Gore, the world’s scientific “consensus” community, the community of nations and all the sensibly worried folks out here are talking about.

Simply putting efficiency at or near the top of our civilization’s urgent agenda.

Investing in research, tweaking some incentives, adjusting some market parameters (that were already meddle-skewed anyway, in wrong directions)...

... all with the goal that we should ...
...get... more... from... less!

And that last part is the real mind-boggler, when you stop to think about it. That all of these polemical maneuvers and illogical arguments and contradictions and hypocrisies should be aimed at diverting us from becoming more productive while depending on fewer resources.

If anyone ever writes a post about how to talk to a climate change skeptic, the first question should be, “How does it help us economically to be wasteful?”

Who knows? Maybe when oil hits $100/barrel, people will figure out that “efficienct” and “economical” are synonyms and not antonyms. Until then, we can keep arguing whether or not doing something about climate change is a good idea.

The amount of carbon dioxide being absorbed by the world's oceans has reduced, scientists have said.

. . .

Results of their 10-year study in the North Atlantic show CO2 uptake halved between the mid-90s and 2000 to 2005.

One of the major reasons the rise in CO2 emissions hasn't corresponded exactly to temperature rise is in large part due to the effect of the world's oceans as a carbon sink. Scrubbing, according to the BBC story, at least a quarter of the CO2 we produce out of the atmosphere every year.

Like the feedback loops regarding the polar ice caps melting, or the out-gassing of methane from permafrost melting, one of the major signs that we are in big trouble climate wise was predicted to be when the oceans became saturated with CO2 and could no longer absorb the greenhouse gases we're spewing into the atmosphere at ever increasing levels.

Even worse, once that saturation point was hit, the bleaching of coral and other industrial-caused die-offs in ocean wildlife could actually make the oceans a net emitter of greenhouse gases rather than a sink for them.

And that saturation point is what the scientists now fear we may be hitting. Thus the title for the post, because those are the words that went through my head as I read this first thing in the morning as I'm waiting for my coffee to brew.

Well, easy to predict this will cause all sorts of outrage.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

The problem, of course, is that what most “intelligence” tests actually measure is knowledge, not intelligence.  Science has yet to come up with a quantifiable way to measure intelligence, at least last I checked.  That automatically introduces biases into the tests by the selection of the knowledge being tested for. Saying that "testing" has shown anything about racial "intelligence" is just flat out wrong.

There are also any number of environmental factors that probably have far greater effects on people’s reasoning ability than any purported genetic differences could; such as the chemical soup we live with in the industrialized world and malnutrition as a child.

It’s also pretty clear from some other comments Dr. Watson has made that he’s not exactly the most fair and open-minded individual out there:

In 1997, he told a British newspaper that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. He later insisted he was talking about a "hypothetical" choice which could never be applied. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, positing the theory that black people have higher libidos, and argued in favour of genetic screening and engineering on the basis that " stupidity" could one day be cured. He has claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would great."

Admittedly, I kind of like that last one, at least in theory.  In practice, if the modeling world is any indication, it could lead to a depressing sameness in what “pretty” means. But I digress.

The whole idea of genetic selection for intelligence, or some other trait, has always fascinated me.

His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: "There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."

The reason its fascinating is because it is to some extent true.  Anyone familiar with animal breeding can tell you that’s its more than possible to selectively breed for certain traits, and geographical isolation can bring with it changes in different populations.

Where it breaks down, (well, one of the many ways), is in the assumption that somehow living in Africa compared to living in Europe wouldn’t continue selecting for intelligent people over stupid ones.

In fact, an unbiased assessment of such an idea would have to recognize that Darwinian pressures for weeding out the less intelligent specimens of humanity would be the greatest in the areas of the planet were survival is the most difficult.  People in the Western world are a bunch of fat, lazy slobs compared to most people in Africa or other parts of the developing world.  If this theory is accurate, people in the developing world should be leaving us in the dust intelligence-wise.

One other thing animal breeding can teach us, is that being highly selective in your breeding regimen has the unfortunate side effect of a very limited gene pool, with all the ugliness that implies.  It’s no accident that the push for “perfect” cattle or other types of livestock have left them hugely susceptible to being wiped out by a single disease or infection because of their too-close genetic similarity.  Or that the healthiest type of dog or cat you can have is a mongrel.

There also isn’t any human populations so isolated that their genetic material isn’t well mixed in with the rest of humanity.  To pretend otherwise is beyond foolish, and frankly, given what I said above about evolutionary pressure, I'm thinking we white folks should be grateful for that.