Phil's Blog

It's embarrass your daughter time

My daughter, Rebee, playing her band Retro Tap's first gig in Worcester's Marrs Bar this week. She's the lead singer.

Another view of the second song.

Wrong Numbers, episode 200,000,000,000

150 Barrels

Exploitable oil reserves in the ground amount to about 150 barrels for every man, woman, and child now living and all their future descendants.

So, simple arithmetic tells us that if we all fueled our oil addictions by using a mere 5 gallons a week, it would all be gone in 20 years.

Not to mention the untold damage that would do to our planet's ecosystems and climate.

Which leads to the big question:

How much should we consume now and how much should we leave for future generations?

And the other big question:

Why is the above question so completely taboo and unthinkable that it is never ever aired (except by quirky folk like Nate and myself)?

American papers do, British ones don't

You've got a cough, honey?

A recent study comparing the effectiveness of honey vs dextromethorphan in treating children's nocturnal coughs found that "parents rated honey most favorably for symptomatic relief of their child's nocturnal cough and sleep difficulty due to upper respiratory tract infection. Honey may be a preferable treatment for the cough and sleep difficulty associated with childhood upper respiratory tract infection".

This is a follow up to research done by the same team in 2004, which found that neither dextromethorphan nor diphenhydramine were effective compared to a placebo.

In 2005 a clinical trial of diphenhydramine was halted early because of the drug's ineffectiveness.

The Guardian quotes Sheila Kelly, of the Proprietary Association of Great Britain:

"Having access to safe and effective paediatric cough and cold remedies is essential. Those on the UK market have demonstrated their efficacy through decades of use and their acceptance by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency means parents can continue to rely on these over-the-counter cough and cold remedies."

I think that means, roughly translated, that they reserve the right to peddle their patent medicines to a gullible public.

The regulators would, of course, be more concerned with the dangers of these drugs than their efficacy. I doubt that the danger to a child caused by parents wasting money on quack medicines instead of effective nutrition counts as one of their criteria.

A 2004 study found that theobromine, one of the active ingredients of chocolate, is an effective cough-suppressant.

So, parents, next time your child has a cough, why not treat them (in more ways than one) with chocolate and honey?

Footnote, April 2008

Children's cough mixtures are not just ineffective, they are dangerous.

There have been five deaths in children under two since 1981 where cough and cold medicines may have been a factor, according to the Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, which has ordered six products to be permanently removed from sale for children aged under two.

Christmas Day

Worcester Cathedral tower, bathed in an orange light from the setting sun, today.

Inside, the cathedral was littered with snaking cables and floodnights, remnants of yesterday's televised Midnight Mass.

A reminder of this summer's floods.

Xmas sunset.

Photos Copyright © 2007 Phil Randal

Storm Brews over Wind Power

"Wind Power Won't Work", thunders the front page of this week's Berrow's Worcester Journal.

Things must have been very calm here this week for this story to have made the front page.

And calm, indeed, seems to be the problem, for "there is not enough wind in Worcester, and anybody planning to fix a wind turbine to their home could be wasting their money", explains the Journal.

One Michael Coyne, of Northwick, "ordered a turbine in September. But delay in getting planning permission fortunately gave him time to find out that installing it would not reduce his bills."

"'This is a big blow to Worcester', said Mr Coyne, who cancelled his order."

The emphasis there is entirely mine. One would have thought that a big blow is just what he needed.

According to the DTI, the average windspeed here is 4.7 metres per second. The wind turbine company recommended an average wind speed of over 5 metres per second at 10 metres above the ground.

It looks like installing home wind turbines isn't such a breeze after all.

Here we go again, Gordon Brown fiddles while the oil and uranium burns

The UK Government's latest energy white paper is due out on Wednesday, and it's no surprise that the spin doctors are out in force pushing nuclear power as a panacea.

We're heading for an electricity crisis within the next decade, reports today's Sunday Times. And not just Britain, as Noel Sheppard informs us in a blistering analysis of Europe's energy woes over at newsbusters.org.

"Nuclear power is the only realistic option" spins today's Observer editorial.

I covered the pro-nuclear hype last July, and not much has changed in the interim, except for the Government becoming more intransigent in its support of nukes. The British media continues to swallow the government's and nuclear industry's propaganda whole. Shame on them.

The Oxford Research group published a paper on Civil Nuclear Power, Security and Global Warming in March. It's worth a read, as is this discussion about Peak Uranium over at the Oil Drum.

There are no such things as panaceas, and anyone who proposes them should be treated with the utmost suspicion.

The reality is that mankind has already surpassed the planet's carrying capacity, and we are currently in overshoot.

Collapse will follow, and we can either follow Sharon Astyk's lead and gracefully powerdown by embracing simple living or choose to bury our heads in the oilsands and carry on as usual. A few energy-saving lightbulbs aren't enough to get us out of this situation, and recycling does not in itself equate to sustainability.

Could you cut your energy consumption by 90%? And if you could, would you?

If we don't, we're well into Derrick Jensen's Endgame (part two of his lecture is here).

Mix n Match Telly

Hung Up Over the Wrong Numbers

Our society has a love of numbers. If something can be measured, it will be, no matter how meaningless the figures are. Ever since I discovered my dad's copy of Darrell Huff's How to Lie With Statistics in my teens I've been fascinated by the misuse of meaningless measures and facile facts.

So it was interesting to read Roger Pielke Jr's commentary on The Economist's recent feature on climate change. Pielke reminds us that what has to be stabilised is not the levels of CO₂ emissions, but the levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere. And to do that at levels which will not be catastrophic is no easy task.

Socolow and Pacala's famous "wedge graphs" make this fundamental mistake, which leads them to weak conclusions.

Perhaps that's why politicians are so keen to talk of stabilising emissions at 199x levels. Choose your year, it doesn't really matter, it's still an easy but irrelevant target, despite all the government protests over the Kyoto Protocol being too difficult to attain.

The IPCC 4th Assessment Summary for Policymakers came out yesterday. On page 10 the IPCC scientists state:

"even if the concentrations of all greenhouse gases and aerosols had been kept constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming of 0.1ºC per decade would be expected."

And on page 13:

"Both past and future anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions will continue to contribute to warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium".

Baer and Athanasiou, in a chilling discussion about the European Union's CO₂ level stabilisation targets of 450 parts per million (current CO₂ concentrations are 380ppm), which corresponds to an estimated 2ºC temperature rise, argue that "even if greenhouse-gas concentrations stopped rising today, we might still already be committed to a temperature increase greater than 2ºC." And they add that "two degrees is already a compromised target, one with which we've already negotiated away thousands of species and, probably, millions of lives."

Little room for complacency there.

David Archer over at realclimate.org also points out another "wrong number":

"Most of the climate change community, steered by Kyoto and IPCC, limit the scope of their consideration to the year 2100. By setting up the problem in this way, the calculation of a safe CO₂ emission goes up by about 40%, because it takes about a century for the climate to fully respond to rising CO₂. If CO₂ emission continues up to the year 2100, then the warming in the year 2100 would only be about 60% of the "committed warming" from the CO₂ concentration in 2100. This calculation seems rather callous, almost sneaky, given the inevitability of warming once the CO₂ is released. I suspect that many in the community are not aware of this sneaky implication of restricting our attention to a relatively short time horizon."

junkscience.com isn't too happy about political influence on the IPCC scientists, and has leaked the drafts of the full 4th Assessment reports.

realclimate.org counters these claims and provides ongoing excellent coverage and debate.

The radiative forcing effects of atmospheric CO₂ have been known for almost 150 years thanks to the pioneering scientific work by John Tyndall.

If only we'd taken Arrhenius seriously back in 1896.

Spring has Sprung (II)

It's an unusual autumn we're having this year.

Roses are still still in bloom (photo taken today)

and Mr and Mrs Mallard, despite their feigned innocence below, were spotted flirting on the canal this afternoon, outdoing the courting couple I observed back in January, 2003. Why do the ducks bob their heads like that, anyway?

Footnote: Despite this being the earliest I've ever seen Mallards courting, it's not in any way unusual, according to several articles on the net. It was news to me ☺

The Times has also reported on our unusual Autumn.

Photos Copyright © Phil Randal, 2006

Spam Spam Spam

And what would you like with your spam, sir? Vegetable Strudel?

Thanks, Google, for the laugh.

(Click on image to enlarge)

Afterlife

Afterlife, the award-winning¹ ITV series about a troubled psychic medium starring Lesley Sharp and Andrew Lincoln, is back on our TV screens this autumn. Thank god I was persuaded to watch it the first time round. I expected typical ITV rubbish, but Steve Volk's scripts were intelligent, and Lesley Sharp's acting was out of this world (not to mention otherworldly). It's in a completely different class to American TV's Medium.

It repeats on ITV3 next week, every evening from Sunday September 10th till Friday the 15th at 10pm.

Series 2 starts on ITV on Saturday, September 16th, at 9pm.

The special "Behind the Scenes" programme will be screened on ITV3 the same evening at 10pm.

The DVD of Afterlife Series 2 will be available from Boxing Day (December 26th). Series 1 and 2 boxed set will be released on the same day, according to amazon.co.uk.

Don't miss it.

Steve Volk has the details on his discussion forum.

There's a forum for fans over here.

Postscript, Sept 16th

Hats off to ITV's advertising bods, the "Soul Finders" ads in the national press are brilliant.

1: Lesley Sharp: Best Actress, Royal Television Society Awards, 2006; Best Drama Actress, Monte Carlo TV Awards, 2006

Murray Ferguson: Best European drama producer, Monte Carlo TV Awards

Mentioned in Dispatches

Thanks Blake, for your kind mention in your weblog. I'm honoured!

Spring has Sprung

April Fool

Friday 13th

It's Friday 13th once again, and today I'm well jinxed!

I had to park my car at the back of the flat last night, and when it was time to depart for work I found this lovely scene:

It's obvious that the owners of X487YBR (on the left) and T422KAD (on the right, oh, the gods are ironic, KAD indeed) haven't even got an elementary grasp of geometry.

To add insult to injury, my printer committed suicide as I tried to print the photo above to stick under their windscreens.

My Christmas Number One

Why didn't I think of that?