Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Holiday Music: Pop TV Lives, in reply to JacksonP,
BBC Synth Britannia.
Also very good. I've got a few things like this on my hard drive ...
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Today's news: the prospect of parts of Christchurch being underwater within a century -- and consequent "voluntary" or "forced withdrawal" from some neighbourhoods.
When people have to confront things like this, it really does underline how irrelevant clowns like Rodney Hide are.
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Hard News: Holiday Music: Pop TV Lives, in reply to JacksonP,
Amazing documentary on New Order’s iconic Blue Monday was just posted on their Facebook page, made by Swedish National Television. Recorded last year, and includes interviews with the whole band, including the estranged Hook, and sleeve designer Peter Saville.
That's superb.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Lilith __,
The Canterbury Plains are rich soils in a dry climate perfect for cropping, currently being replaced with intensive dairying made possible with government-funded irrigation using our super-pure artesian water.
It's actually worse than that -- read Rebecca Macfie's excellent feature in this week's Listener. It's not all negative either -- she looks at real examples of what can be done to reduce dangerous run-off and improved productivity at the same time.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Bart Janssen,
If we are really serious about doing something about the climate change effects of ruminant burps worldwide then the solution is to free up the regulations around GM research and fund research into make grasses and ruminant bacteria that don’t produce methane.
Ah. So there is real promise there. Rod Oram has banged on repeatedly about various others ways we could get first-mover advantage on emissions and energy reform. To no avail, sadly.
That research could be applied worldwide and really could do some good. By all means put a levy on the dairy industry to pay for some of that. Just not a simplistic carbon tax that will simply get used to pay for another stupid road.
Given the extent to which the ETS has been compromised, I'm thinking a straight-up carbon tax would have been more effective.
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Hard News: Holiday Music: Pop TV Lives, in reply to paul mckessar,
Doctor Hook, live on German TV, you say? Oh yes.
I'm sold already.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Shaun Lott,
So the real challenge here is to respond to a certain prediction of a threat of uncertain magnitude. Will the sea level rise in my lifetime be 2cm, 20cm or 2m? Personally, I’d choose to build my house a little further up the hill…
Quite. It should be straightforward thinking to assess the risk and determine it is such that doing nothing would be very unwise. Modelling will always be uncertain but when the models say what they're saying it actually doesn't matter if they turn out to be somewhat over or under.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to George Darroch,
Hmmm, the edit function has been disabled.
It shouldn't have been. Is anyone else seeing this?
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to George Darroch,
It really does come down to smearing the people who make this science (tens of thousands of them) as hopelessly naive or horrifically deceptive, in some combination.
I once sat in a room being addressed by a Watt’s Up reader who pretty much filled the whole bingo card – including claiming that Niwa scientists were basically corrupt and falsifying results. The poor guy from Niwa next to me was quietly getting really upset.
I went into bat for him and his colleagues, but I was astonished at the number of apparently intelligent people in the room (it was at Kiwi Foo) who were lapping it up, regardless of the logical contortions the speaker was expecting people to accept. It was quite an eye-opener.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Bart Janssen,
and less regulation of cow burps (although to be fair, crippling our biggest industry to make an insignificant change to global warming is dubious).
How viable is it to talk about replacing pastures with grasses (GM or otherwise) which will reduce the emissions of our ruminants? And if not now, at some point?