Potentially Huge Climate Agreement Struck In Paris Last Week

The Paris Agreement on the reduction of greenhouse emissions could end up being one of those things that most people ignore while it's happening but which future generations consider among the most significant events of the 21st century.  Good on the world leaders for being able to make it happen!

At the very end of the article there's mention that

"All the countries agreed on demands from the US and European Union for five-year reviews of their emissions reductions – an exercise that had been resisted by China."

This seemingly trivial detail may turn out to be tremendously important, as it provides a framework for what's known as "inspection and adaptation" in the Agile software community.  The inclusion of a frequent, recurring process for seeing how you're doing, what's working and what isn't, allows you to adapt your methodology as you go along.  It takes away the necessity of getting everything just right from the start and empowers you to use whatever you learn along the way to do a better job.

On the other hand, it's particularly sad that the U.S. government is currently so dysfunctional that the agreement had to include wording to prevent the Luddite Republican party from vetoing America's participation in the deal.  Many Canadians like me were embarrassed by PM Stephen Harper's head-up-his-ass leadership over the past decade, but I can't imagine how awful the life of an intelligent citizen of the US must be these days with Donald Trump as the poster boy for one of the ruling parties.

Calling Out America's Anti-Intellectualism And Its Cost

Here's a really great Psychology Today article detailing many of the ways in which the U.S. is embracing ignorance and paying a high price for doing so.

Tesla Opens Its Patents To The World

Wow.  This is actually pretty impressive.  Elon Musk has decided that the various breakthroughs he and his team at Tesla have made with electric car technology will better serve mankind and the planet (and even the company itself) by being available to all rather than zealously guarded as is usually the case with secret sauces.  The more I learn about this Musk guy, the more I like and admire him.

John Oliver's Takedown Of The Climate Change "Debate"

I really miss John Oliver since he left The Daily Show to star in his own weekly comedy program, Last Week Tonight.  He clearly showed just how talented he was during Jon Stewart's summer-long sabbatical last year (to film a movie in Iran) so it's no wonder the British comic was given his own show shortly thereafter.

Anyway, in case you haven't seen it, Oliver did a hilarious bit on climate change and the false equivalency that most media reports give to both sides of the "debate" as to whether it's man-made or not.  If you haven't already seen what he did, you should definitely check it out.

Wind Turbines Don't Kill Many Birds

The next time someone tries to warn you against building more wind turbines "because of all the birds they kill", just refer them to this article (and chart) and you'll be good to go.

5 Terrifying Statements In The Upcoming IPCC Climate Report

Read it and weep, especially for your children and their children and their children...

Solar Windows? I Like The Sound Of That!

A new breakthrough in solar technology may make it a reality in the near future, too!

Manmade Climate Change Vs Evolution: Who Wins?

According to a recent study: for most species, the changes in their environment that we're causing will happen many orders of magnitude faster than evolution can adapt to.  Way to go, humankind!

Fukushima Power Plant Not A Disaster After All

For anyone who watched the coverage, back in March of 2011, of the Fukushima nuclear facility in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan, it seemed like a full-scale disaster: the cooling systems weren't functioning, workers were being sent in on suicide runs, and the area around the plant was going to be irradiated for generations to come.  Some Americans even worried that the radioactive cloud from Fukushima was going to contaminate the west coast of the U.S.!

Well, two years later, a couple of reports have come out of independent studies, and the results are surprising, to say the least!  No one died from radiation sickness, many of the areas surrounding the nuclear facility are already safe to return to, and even those brave workers who entered the plant during the immediate aftermath of the tsunami have been spared the awful fate we'd all ascribed to them.

It'll be interesting to see if the good news represented by these reports gets anywhere near the same level of coverage that the drama back in March 2011 received.

Never Underestimate The Power Of Lobbyists

On this, St. Patrick's Day, here's a very un-green story out of Australia about one lobbying group's unfortunate success in trying to undermine the wind industry. 

2012: The Warmest Year On Record

Climate change denialists will keep right on denying that anything's happening, I'm sure.  But the evidence against them is starting to get ridiculously overwhelming of late.  As this article shows, it was a pretty one-sided story in 2012.  Not only was it the warmest year ever recorded, but there were also 362 new high-temperature records set in the U.S. compared to zero records on the low side.  That's right: the score was 362-0 in favour of a warming planet. And yet somehow the media will manage to convey the impression that there's still lots of room for debate here.

Breaking News: World Doesn't End!

It's already December 22nd in parts of the world - including where Tammy is - and civilization continues to exist, unfazed by the so-called 'Mayan catastrophe.'  People will go on killing each other, both quickly with guns and slowly with greenhouse gases, and we'll eventually probably go extinct.  But not this week, at least.

More On Denialism

Paul Krugman has a great article on how far down the rabbit hole the Republicans willingly and willfully fell in the run-up to this year's election, as well as a look back at some of the same behaviour during the Bush Jr era.  I love the way they actually felt empowered by 'unskewing' the polling data until that it became supportive of their unrealistic views.  Usually that sort of thing has caused enormous problems for the rest of us - see the economic disaster under Bush, as well as the ongoing climate change denialism - but in this case, it actually did a lot of good.  It kept them out of power for another 4 years and gave Obama another shot at fixing things.  That's a tall order, I know... but it still beats the alternative!

Life In The Parallel Universe

It's seemed for a while now that some of the Conservatives in the U.S. live in a parallel universe with some significant differences from our own.  You know the universe I'm talking about: where climate change is a hoax, the planet is only a few thousand years old, lowering taxes on the rich magically improves the situations of everyone, and evolution's still - at best - a crazy theory that could never be proved.

Well, in the aftermath of this week's election results, we can add another line item to that list of differences: the reliability of polls in predicting outcomes, and by extension, how math works.  Romney was apparently shocked by what happened as the election returns came in.  Why, when it had been so clearly forecast by a multitude of polling-aggregators?  Well, as an article at Huffington Post puts it:

'[T]he campaign was unprepared for this in part because it had ignored polling that showed the races favoring Obama. Instead, it turned to its own internal "unskewed" polls, which it believed more accurately reflected the situation on the ground. They didn't.'

That's what life must be increasingly like for those folks.  They know, to their very core, all kinds of things that just keep turning out not to be true.  That's pretty rough, but I find it hard to feel sorry for them.

A Great Day For America And The World

Yesterday's U.S. election went as well as any left-leaning observer could've reasonably expected.  And it went just about exactly the way Nate Silver, at FiveThirtyEight predicted it would, based on his aggregation of thousands of polls.  If Florida goes to Obama, as it looks like it will, then Silver will have gotten all 50 states right, as well as most of the Senate races.  And yes, Elizabeth Warren, one of my favourite voices on economics, will be sworn into the U.S. Senate in January!

Now that it's over, here are a few reflections and observations on what it all means:

• Nate Silver FTW!  It's fun to watch the same Conservative attack dogs who, just a few days ago were claiming that Silver's results were "skewed" by his liberal bias, suddenly declaring that "he just averaged the poll data; he didn't do anything special."  That's right, you dummies: he didn't do anything special, and yet it was still more than you could manage!  Makes one wonder what value any of you have, doesn't it?
• So yeah, the rampant denialism about what the polls were saying about the election, among Conservatives especially, was soundly and dramatically thrashed.  What are the chances that those folks will learn anything useful from that experience, such as what that might say about their similar attitudes toward climate change and evolution?  (Slim to nil, is my guess.)
• In my mind, the single most important outcome of last night's events is that Obamacare will survive long enough for the American people to get used to it.  Yes, there are going to be problems with it, and likely some will hate it.  But what won't happen, that's been occuring with shocking regularity over the past couple decades, is families won't be going bankrupt when someone gets sick any longer.  And people won't decide against visiting a doctor about a condition out of fear of not being able to afford it.  I personally believe that, once they get a taste of this - a watered down version of what the rest of the industrialized world takes for granted - there'll be no chance of ever getting rid of it.  Welcome to the second half of the 20th century, America!
• Mitt Romney, the Etch-A-Sketch candidate, has finally been erased from the political landscape. He may enjoy firing people, but in this case he couldn't even land the job in the first place. Romney can now continue not caring about the 47% of Americans who he views as parasites, and in fact can just go back to focusing on the top 0.01% of income earners, which is where he does well.
• These results aren't going to make the country to our south any less divided, but that would've been true even if Romney/Ryan had won.  The growing diversity within the U.S. - blacks, latinos/latinas, gays - is something that those who fondly remember an America that never was just aren't going to accept.  It's possible, maybe even probable, that their children will, but that's at least another 10 years away.
• Having said that, the fact that several states legalized gay marriage last night is huge!  These are examples of a popular vote favouring it, rather than a judge or political figure.  That shows real progress, if you ask me.  But, of course, as someone tweeted overnight, the real progress comes once it's not called "gay marriage" any longer... but just "marriage."
• And did I mention that Elizabeth Warren will soon be a U.S. Senator?  I can't wait to see what effect she has on that stodgy out institution when she gets there.

Anyway, it was a truly exciting night. I coughed most of the way through it, unfortunately, but at least the good guys (and gals) won. And that lessened the pain considerably.

New York City Under Water: A Glimpse Of Our Future

Scenes like this are going to become more and more common, as we continue to heat up the planet with all of our self-indulgent excesses.  So get used to it, people.

Climate Change: Here, And Worse Than Expected

That's the finding of a soon-to-be-published new analysis of recent weather changes, as NASA scientist James Hansen reports in a new article:

"This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change."

and

"These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills."

This peer-reviewed analysis won't stop the deniers from denying, of course. I just hope that someday they get called on the carpet and held accountable for all the damage they've done by spreading their misinformation. It'd be a very small bit of justice served, admittedly, but at least there'd be that.

The Art Of Assessing And Mitigating Risk

When I was still in the software business, it always amazed me how inadequate most of us are at dealing with risk (and I include myself in that group, to some degree). I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, because as a species we usually suck at it. Think about what percentage of adults are afraid of flying, versus the proportion of us who are afraid of driving. The former phobia's much more common, and yet the risks associated with the former are virtually nil compared to the risks associated with the latter. Or consider how many parents worry that they're children will be abducted, despite this being almost unheard of statistically-speaking, while doing little or nothing to prepare those same offspring for the complexities of managing their finances, navigating sexual relationships or fulfilling personal responsibility, all of which they're virtually guaranteed to encounter in life.

Over the life of a typical, non-trivial software project, there will be dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands of risks undertaken. In very broad strokes, those can include estimates of work effort being ridiculously low, dependencies not being met, new technologies being unreliable, and specifications changing haphazardly, just to name a few. Since most IT projects fail - where failure means late, over-budget or under-scope, or any combination thereof - I guess we shouldn't wonder that risks usually aren't well-defined nor guarded against.

All of which leads us to the point made in this excellent article, which is that the level of certainty associated with any risk should obviously vary according to the circumstances. As the author notes, 99+% certainty makes sense when talking about Higgs boson calculations, but is a ridiculously (and dangerously) high bar for something like climate change. Put another way: if you told a mother that her child had a 10% chance of coming down with cancer if he used a certain brand of fingerpaints, there's no way that product would ever be brought into the home. And yet climate change deniers use the fact that scientists are only, maybe, 90% certain that we're heading for a catastrophe as reason enough to discount the science and go on about their business. It's an insane inversion of logic, but no more startling than the "fear of driving vs fear of flying" result that we've all witnessed.

It's a curious failure of our species that seems to be poised to do us a whole lot of harm in the not-too-distant future.

As Short-Sighted Species Go, We're First Rate

As this Economist article highlights, the situation in the Arctic is just one more example of how we, as humans, are so incredibly good at the practice of "short term gain for long term pain."

What Global Warming Feels Like

You're soaking in it! (as they used to say in the Palmolive dishwashing liquid commercials)