Fukushima radiation: should we worry?

First, the scare. Michael Snyder gives a raft of facts to show that post-Fukushima, radiation levels have increased around the west coast of America. Professor Michel Chossudovsky discusses the spread of radiactive fallout from Japan under the shock title "... A Nuclear War Without A War..." - somwhat insensitively bearing in mind that Japan is the only country to have been atom-bombed. The Liberty Beacon relays official US information on the plume of water-borne radioactivity.

Then, some critical comment and reassurance. American Live Wire shows that a dramatic graphic purporting to show the spread of radiation across the Pacific is actually a map of increased wave height from the tsunami. And the ever-informative xkcd freely offers the following infographic on normal and acceptable radiation dosage (click on caption for full size picture):

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Finally, the rational concern: as with the now-banned pesticide DDT, the most significant potential damage could be concentration of the toxic substances as they rise through the food chain. Now, shoppers in Korea are using Geiger counters to check imports of "eastern sea" fish, and as early as January 2012 the readings from seaweed were 3 times higher than background:



Fish (like tuna) that eat other fish; scavengers like crab and lobster; plankton and krill (and the whales that eat them), squid... we may be advised not to eat Pacific seafood. Already Seoul has banned imports from the Fukushima region. And it's possible that wildlife is suffering from the disaster.

What if there was a bigger disaster? There's been much excited speculation about the consequences of a potential collapse of the spent fuel storage that could result in fire and evacuation. Paul Blustein at Slate.com discusses this coolly and concludes that it could be very bad, though not apocalyptic.

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Enter The Chinese Dragon - and the start of bonded servitude

Under foreign flags

Readers may be aware that I am generally untroubled by inward investment and foreign ownership of UK assets, though this is clearly not a view shared by all who visit these pages.

The Chinese aspect in this week's jaw-dropping (if highly trailed) nuclear announcement is a bit different, though.  There is the national security angle, of course, and many will be most agitated by that.  I don't dismiss it, but it's not what strikes me the hardest.  Security of supply is a non-issue: the Americans tried to pin that on Russia as a gas supplier during the Cold War and it never stuck.  Safety ?  Technology ?  All issues that can be resolved - if you count buying the ridiculous EDF / Areva EPR technology as a good idea in the first place.

More foreign flags

I am more concerned about what it signals, or rather confirms, about what I have long felt to be the probable strategic response of European governments to our parlous financial position.  A couple of years ago I wrote that when we are really up a gum tree the Chinese will have a deal for us, and we will meekly sell the farm.

This is a particularly acute risk for the UK, in my assessment.  In our semi-detatched euro-positioning, our vulnerability to having the City isolated by jealous continental and American financial authorities, and our commendable centuries-old willingness to roam the high seas, we will always be inclined to 'trade our way out of trouble'.  

Now true commercial trade is a great thing and would indeed be the ideal way forward.  But increasingly what we see is a baser trade: the prostituting of our institutions to the whim of Russian and Chinese wealth.  If they want to lavish their money on our libel courts or Mayfair shops, that's one thing.  But it won't be ending there.

Today we see the first of the mega-bargains our desperate UK politicians will enter in order to engineer short- and medium-term relief from our woes.  Faustian is just one way to describe it.  Another would be the PFI-ing of the UK economy to China.  Future generations will curse Camerosborne roundly, as they pay grotesque prices for electricity and probably a great deal more.

And the prices may not only be measured in currency.  Bonded servitude may be the term we are looking for.

This post first appeared on the Capitalists@Work blog 


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Teaching our children to be fat diabetics?

Market Ticker commentator Karl Denninger is a convert to low-carbohydrate diets, having lost 60 pounds. He says - and I've seen this allegation elesewhere - that dietary advice in favour of starch suits commercial interests while bloating and killing the populace.

Meanwhile, around the UK, a standard part of the primary curriculum continues to promote carbs as the foundation of healthy eating, as witness this graphic from a local school:

Do we teachers know anything at all?

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After "Silent Spring", "silent sea"

Australia's Herald newspaper reports no birds in a trans-Pacific crossing, post Fukushima.

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John Cook's Climate Change Mythbusters 18

This is part of a series reposting material from John Cook's Skeptical Science website. Although he is a physicist rather than a specialist in climate science, he is a convinced "global warmist" and tries to rebut frequently-raised objections to the theory. However, it is always possible to question the data (e.g. this valuable note about measuring temperature) and the line of argument. Please help advance the debate - with facts and logic.

What is the link between hurricanes and global warming?

What The Science Says:
There is increasing evidence that hurricanes are getting stronger due to global warming.

Climate Myth: Hurricanes aren't linked to global warming
“According to the National Hurricane Center, storms are no more intense or frequent worldwide than they have been since 1850. […] Constant 24-7 media coverage of every significant storm worldwide just makes it seem that way.” (Paul Bedard)

The current research into the effects of climate change on tropical storms demonstrates not only the virtues and transparency of the scientific method at work, but rebuts the frequent suggestion that scientists fit their findings to a pre-determined agenda in support of climate change. In the case of storm frequency, there is no consensus and reputable scientists have two diametrically opposed theories about increasing frequencies of such events.

The background to these enquiries stems from a simple observation: extra heat in the air or the oceans is a form of energy, and storms are driven by such energy. What we do not know is whether we might see more storms as a result of extra energy or, as other researchers believe, the storms may grow more intense, but the number might actually diminish.

What do the records show? According to the Pew Centre, “Globally, there is an average of about 90 tropical storms a year”. The IPCC AR4 report (2007) says regarding global tropical storms: "There is no clear trend in the annual numbers [i.e. frequency] of tropical cyclones."

But this graph, also from the Pew Centre, shows a 40% increase in North Atlantic tropical storms over the historic maximum of the mid-1950, which at the time was considered extreme:



But while the numbers are not contested, their significance most certainly is. Another study considered how this information was being collected, and research suggested that the increase in reported storms was due to improved monitoring rather than more storms actually taking place.

And to cap it off, two recent peer-reviewed studies completely contradict each other. One paper predicts considerably more storms due to global warming. Another paper suggests the exact opposite – that there will be fewer storms in the future.

What can we conclude from these studies? About hurricane frequency – not much; the jury is out, as they say. About climate change, we can say that these differing approaches are the very stuff of good science, and the science clearly isn’t settled! It is also obvious that researchers are not shying away from refuting associations with climate change, so we can assume they don’t think their funding or salaries are jeopardised by research they believe fails to support the case for AGW. The scientific method is alive and well.

Never mind the frequency, feel the width

So far, all we’ve managed is to document here is what we don’t know for sure yet. But we do know there is extra energy in the system now, so could it have any other effects on tropical storms? Here, the science is far less equivocal, and there is a broad consensus that storms are increasing in strength, or severity. This attribute, called the Power Dissipation Index, measures the duration and intensity (wind speed) of storms, and research has found that since the mid-1970s, there has been an increase in the energy of storms.

Recent research has shown that we are experiencing more storms with higher wind speeds, and these storms will be more destructive, last longer and make landfall more frequently than in the past. Because this phenomenon is strongly associated with sea surface temperatures, it is reasonable to suggest a strong probability that the increase in storm intensity and climate change are linked.

Basic rebuttal written by GPWayne

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Seven climate theories

Or is it eight... or nine?

Back in 2010 a booklet called Seven Theories of Climate Change by Joseph L. Bast was published by the Science and Public Policy Institute.

It lists seven climate change theories, one of them being the AGW CO2 theory. The booklet is worth reading not so much because it delimits what we know of climate drivers, but because it highlights how exceedingly complex the issue is. Vastly more complex than popular journalism would have us believe.

Climate science is dominated by uncertainty and there are also highly uncertain connections between these theories, so I’ll merely summarise them below. Additional theories and ideas from readers are very welcome – this is an evolving, not an evolved science.

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1 Anthropogenic Global Warming

The mainstream theory of climate change heavily promoted for reasons beyond the scope of this post. Greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide are said to be causing a catastrophic rise in global temperatures.

2 Bio-thermostat

The second theory of climate change is really a number of theories bundled together. Feedbacks from biological and chemical processes are said to contribute towards global temperature stability by suppressing temperature increases. These are :- 

• Enhanced carbon sequestration by plants as atmospheric CO2 increases, thereby causing increased rates of plant growth.
• Carbonyl sulphide (COS) produced biologically is said to form sulphate aerosols in the atmosphere which reflect solar radiation and lead to a cooling effect.
• Biosols are biologically derived plant compounds which circulate in the atmosphere and may act as condensation nuclei for clouds. They may also diffuse solar radiation close to the ground, reducing the effect of shade and increasing photosynthesis and CO2 uptake.
• Iodine containing compounds formed in sea air by marine algae may act like biosols.
• Dimethyl sulphide is emitted by oceans and may be a source of cloud condensation nuclei.
• Other aerosols. There are other natural aerosols which may also have an impact on climate.

3 Cloud Formation and Albedo

A third theory says that the climate is controlled by the formation and albedo of clouds.

4 Land Use

A fourth theory is that climate is affected by large scale changes in land use such as forestry, irrigation and building cities.

5 Ocean Currents

The fifth theory claims that climate cycles are the result of changes to ocean circulation patterns.

6 Planetary Motion

The sixth theory is that gravitational and magnetic oscillations of the solar system cause solar variations and/or other influences which change the terrestrial climate.

7 Solar Variability

The seventh theory is that solar variability accounts for most or all climate change.

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Immigration, abortion and demographics

Some days ago, I answered a post on Raedwald's site regarding the economic effect of immigration to the UK and the claimed impact on our per capita wealth. The official statistics I found told me that actually, both GDP and per capita GDP showed a rising trend until the bankers' bubble burst in 2008. That's not to say that GDP is necessarily the best measure of well-being: eating more sweets and having more fillings at the dentist's both increase GDP.

Arguing for (or against) immigration purely on economic grounds is not as simple as it might seem. A 2004 paper by David Coleman and Robert Rowthorn ("The Economic Effects of Immigration into the United Kingdom") concludes (my emphases):

"This article has examined the impact of immigration on citizens of the United Kingdom. The claim that large-scale immigration will be of great economic benefit to them is false. Some will gain, but others will lose. With respect to the existing population of the UK and their descendants, the purely economic consequences of large-scale immigration could be negative or positive, but either way they will be small. Two earlier reviews of the economic effects of immigration to the UK came to carefully argued conclusions that stopped far short of a clear endorsement of its advantages, despite being presented in collections that otherwise served to underpin the new policy (Findlay 1994; Kleinman 2003). Immigrants are the only unequivocal economic beneficiaries of migration. There is no guarantee that anyone else will be, not even the sending countries from which the migrants come.

"The more important effects of sustained large-scale immigration on the UK are demographic, social, and environmental: provoking unexpected renewed growth in population and in housing demand and risking new and intractable social divisions and a corresponding weakening of national identity and cohesion, with the prospect of an eventual eclipse of the population receiving the migrants and of its culture..."

In a self-indulgently showy phrase ("filling a demographic gap created by sterile, murderous British selfishness"), I added another dimension to the debate, namely the impact of abortion and birth control in the UK, and was challenged on it by "Wolfie". But I think I can show that this has made a difference, in more ways than one.

To help me answer, I've used Wikipedia's article on the UK's demography, and Johnston's archive on abortion statistics. The latter stops at the year 2010, so I've assumed that for the following three years the number of abortions was the same as in 2010 (i.e. 208,935). If that is so, then since 1968 (i.e. the year after abortion was legalised) there have been over 8 million "terminations". The rate of slaughter increased over the decades:

It's said that 98% of abortions are carried out for "social" reasons, so we'll assume that in all cases the children would otherwise have survived, though obviously a percentage would have died at some point (but not a very high one, in our country). Now because the overwhelming number of terminations happened in the last 50 years, all those individuals would be of working age or younger, and here is how the demographic might have looked:

 

This opens up a can of worms, as they say. For example, I don't know whether if an aborted child had been allowed to live, its mother might have chosen not to conceive another later on.

But other things being equal, we would now have a population of 71 million rather than 63 million. Or possibly not, since we would have hit a housing crisis much earlier and presumably public policy on immigration would been different.

And getting the balance between young and old isn't enough. For although there would have been an extra 4 million people of working age, that doesn't automatically mean that there would be another 4 million jobs for them to do. So policy on globalisation would have had to be rethought.

Instead, the government develops its theme of seeing people as inconvenient, and seeks to adjust the demographic equation by slaughter of the old, to boot. The Liverpool Care Pathway, the creeping program to decriminalise assisted suicide, and now the £50 bribe to GPs to save the NHS £1,000 by denying patients the ambulance ride to terminal care in hospital.

Just as, surrounded by CCTV and cyberspies, we are still told that this isn't "1984", we are sliding into dehumanisation while being reassured that we're not Nazis. My father could have spared himself the trouble of fighting the latter in North Africa and Italy; they're back, and winning.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.