Two Second Memory

There is a lot of talk at the moment about the amount of carbon dioxide in the air and governments arguing over whether it’s man made or not. This argument is gaining acceptance but it is by no means universal.

Lets just pause for a few moments and think about this slightly differently. That atmospheric CO2 is increasing is an incontrovertible fact. There is also a very strong correlation between temperature and atmospheric CO2 as this graph shows (this graph also indicates the current levels of CO2 which is horrifying). So irrespective of what people think there is going to be a significant temperature rise so instead of whinging about who’s fault it is we should just accept the facts and try and reduce the amount of CO2 that is being pumped into the atmosphere.

Filed by rgh at 17:17 under Environment
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I was recently reading an article by Nick Bostrom called Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? (which I implore everyone to read) when I stumbled across an article called The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant which is about aging.

A few days later I was cycling to work when some huge four wheel drive (I’ll spare you my rants about 4 wheel drive cars (or should I say trucks) and their, in general, idiot drivers) accelerated past me emitting large amounts of black diesel smoke and I thought cars are so primitive. They are inefficient, they pollute and they are using a technology (internal combustion engine) that is well over a 100 years old. Shortly after this I thought the car/oil industry is like the dragon and car drivers are like the public in the fable.

Without giving the ending of the story (yes you do have to read it away the car/oil industry is just like the dragon and it needs to be slain. There needs to be research done into new technologies (this is starting to happen but it’s painfully slow) and we need to spend so much more on it. We — the public — also need to change our attitude. The oil industry consumes an unbelievable amount of money looking for new oil reserves if only a small percentage of this money where put into researching alternative energy sources we would be so much better off. We need to tell our politicians that the current status quo is not good enough, we need to tell the car/oil industry that we do not want their polluting ways. We know there are alternatives they just have to be made a reality and this will come at a great cost. Not doing it will come at a greater cost.

At the end of the paper Bostrom gives “… a number of specific lessons” each one of these “lessons” (with the possible exception of four) applies directly to the car/oil industry and our unwillingness to find alternate power sources.

Filed by rgh at 14:00 under Environment
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In the debate between oil and hydrogen how many times do you here people go on about the fact that hydrogen is merely a store of energy and that the energy will still need to be generated before it can be converted into hydrogen, thus consuming fossil fuels. Really, gosh I didn’t know. I now feel utterly enlightened and am eternally in your debt for passing this little nugget on to me. Idiots. Oil is also “only” a store of energy. It just so happens that conversion process happen millions of years ago and therefore obviously beyond the scope of the simpletons that peddle this stupid idea.

In science it is well known that some ideas only move on once the people who believe the old ideas die. It seems a little harsh I know but there you go. Read Simon Singh’s fantastic book Big Bang for more thorough discussion on this subject.

It would be a shame to have to wait so long for this misinformation to stop.

Filed by rgh at 16:47 under Environment, Rant
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I recently looked after a house for a friend while he was oversees. As a thank you he had his Sydney Morning Herald redirected to us. Now, if you don’t know, the SMH gets thrown into the garden wrapped in industrial strength glad wrap (cling film). One morning while going through the delicate process of trying to extricate the paper from the glad wrap I decided to do a little experiment; I measured the size of the glad wrap and it comes to 400mm x 500mm which is 0.2 square meters. This doesn’t seem very much but if you consider that the circulation of the SMH is 211 700 during the week and 365 000 on Saturday — I won’t include it’s sister paper, The Sun Herald in this.

Now lets assume that 20% of the circulation are delivered to people’s homes every day (I’ve got no idea if this number is correct but it serves as a conservative estimate, especially considering that you save 21% by having it delivered) this means that there are 42 340 papers during the week and 146 000 (the paper is split into two on Saturday and wrapped separately so I’ve double the number) on Saturday which equals 357 700 over the course of one week giving a resultant weekly total of 71 540 square meters of glad wrap. This is equivalent to 9.73 soccer pitches every week and is a lot of plastic. I fact per year it amounts 3.72 million square meters or 3.72 square kilometers ever year.

There are a few assumptions in the above analysis which some may question but I’ve tried to keep it conservative so it’s possible that the number may be higher. But all in all there is a huge amount of plastic being used to wrap a newspaper for all of a few hours. Whatever happened to the paper boy?

Filed by rgh at 14:28 under Environment, General
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