– via XKCD

Taylor Wilson, is known as the boy who played with fusion, because at the age of 14 became the 32nd individual on the planet to achieve a nuclear-fusion reaction.

Andrew Weaver, Newly elected Green Party MLA for Oak Bay-Gordon Head

The British Columbia Green Party just made history, voters in the riding of Oak Bay-Gordon Head elected Andrew Weaver, Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria, and a lead author for a chapter of the IPCC AR4, to the Legislative Assembly.

Andrew Weaver is the first Green party member ever to be elected to the legislative Assembly; his election continues the trend started by Elizabeth May, who was the first ever federal Green party member to be elected to the Canadian Parliament in the 2011 election.

Aside from the historic aspect of having a green party member elected to government, an aspect I find more important is having a practising scientist working in the Legislative Assembly. Scientists, often look at the world through a different lens; a lens that gives them a unique perspective and the ability to find innovative solutions to difficult problems. But this is a lens that is underrepresented in most governments and though it is still underrepresented here in British Columbia, Andrew Weaver’s victory ensures that the scientific lens will be a little more represented going forward. A trend I hope catches on elsewhere.

In the end, despite polls showing that the left-of-centre NDP had a sizeable lead, the right-of-centre BC Liberals retained their majority in the legislative assembly. The NDP retained their status as official opposition.

What is perhaps of more interest to readers of Planet3.0 is what the BC election will mean for climate policy.

In 2008 the BC Liberals (which are not affiliated with the federal Liberals) introduced North America’s first revenue neutral Carbon tax. This was a dramatic turnaround for the Liberals; before introducing the tax they were not seen as a government that cared for the environment, quite the opposite actually. In the 2009 election the NDP, who generally had the support of environmental organizations, ran an ‘axe the tax’ campaign to repeal the carbon tax, this caused a dramatic reversal which saw the BC NDP with the lose that environmental support and subsequently lose the election.

After the defeat the NDP learned to accept the tax. So this time around there was little chance that the carbon tax would be repealed. In fact the only party who wanted to repeal the carbon tax was the BC Conservatives (which are not affiliated with the federal Conservatives), but their support in the election was minimal and they failed to win any seats.

That being said none of the parties were talking about increasing the carbon tax which currently sits at $30/tonne.

The other major climate related issue affecting BC are the pipeline proposals to transport diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to the BC coast.

The BC Liberals have said that since BC is taking on most of the risk of spills, BC should receive a decent chunk of the revenue generated by the pipelines. That proposal has been flatly rejected by Alberta, so there is little chance the BC government will accept the pipelines. But the truth is that the Government of British Columbia, strangely, doesn’t have much of a say in either approving or disapproving the pipeline proposals.

In Canada pipelines fall under federal jurisdiction, and the Canadian Government has essentially rewritten the entire canon of Canadian environmental law in order to ensure that the pipelines are approved. Currently the biggest hurdle to the pipelines are the various First Nations groups that are opposed to having the pipeline traverse their territories. Their opposition could easily tie up the pipeline proposals in court for years.

Ultimately this election, aside from Andrew Weaver’s win, wasn’t really about climate change. British Columbia is already ahead of the curve in regards to climate policy and it seems as if there is little appetite from our politicians to move even further ahead of everyone else.

Many people have written eloquent criticisms of this move by the Canadian government. Phil Plait (at the above link) does a good job of explaining the why the move away from pure science funding is a bad idea from a scientific perspective (we don’t know ahead of time what research will yield economic benefits), but I find that Andrew Coyne (a right leaning commentator writing in a right leaning newspaper) does an excellent job of demonstrating why this is a bad idea from an economic perspective:

The redirection of public funds from basic to applied research may be bad science, but it is even worse economics. Whatever the distortion of the NRC’s raison d’etre is implied, it is nothing compared to the distortion of the economy. Far from a pragmatic matching of public research dollars to the real-word needs of industry, it reveals a basic confusion about the appropriate public and private roles in funding research.

Let’s start from the beginning. To understand what governments should or should not do in the economy, you have first to understand what markets can and cannot do. Governments, that is, should do what markets cannot. They should not try to do what markets can. This is a matter of scarce resources, if nothing else: the more government spends in areas where it is not needed, the less it will have left to spend in areas where it is essential. As a maxim, government should only do what only government can do.

Basic science, the kind of blue-sky research with no immediate commercial application, is an example of something the market cannot do, or not at a level that is optimal for society. Not only is there little obvious incentive for a private firm to spend money on research that does not pay off in new products or better processes, but so far as such research can be adapted to commercial uses it could as well benefit its competitors as itself: so the sharing of research that is a critical part of scientific progress is discouraged.

Hence it is well-established economic principle that basic research is the sort of thing governments should fund. By the same token, however, government should not be in the business of funding applied research, that is research directed to commercial uses. Not only is this unnecessary — business can perfectly well fund this sort of thing on its own — but it inevitably tilts the pitch in favour of certain activities over others: some technologies, innovations, products, firms and industries will be funded, at the expense of the rest.

Or in other words, “picking winners,” with all of the misallocation of resources that term implies. (If a product, firm or industry is really a “winner,” it shouldn’t need a subsidy. If it isn’t, all the more reason it shouldn’t get it.) What the government’s supporters might think is hard-headed realism is in fact simply central planning by another name — an illustration, once gain, of the difference between being “pro-business” and “pro-market.”

As you might recall the first (and probably most important) requirement for an ideal replacement for Google was that the back-end syncing service become an open standard. Think of it like IMAP for feed readers.

Ok so that is the back-end, what about the front end? You know the part people actually see and interact with?

Even before the untimely demise of Google Reader there has been a long-standing debate about whether the inbox model that most RSS readers used even made sense anymore. The argument goes something like this: Trying to follow a lot of feeds in your RSS reader increases stress because the count of all the unread items just sits there getting larger, taunting you. A better approach is to use the stream model (most famously employed by Twitter) where you can just dip into the stream when you want and not worry about making sure you read absolutely everything. There are no unread counts to taunt you. You could go away for weeks and come back and never feel overwhelmed by an unread count in the thousands (or worse!).

There is definitely some truth to this. Just like it is easy to get overwhelmed by a torrent of emails, it is easy to get overwhelmed by a torrent of unread articles in your feed reader. But there are also advantages of the inbox model. The downside of the stream model is that if favours people who are prolific in producing content. I follow some very interesting people on Twitter but almost never see their tweets because they rarely tweet. Their occasional tweet is quickly pushed down the stream by people who are always tweeting. With an inbox model even if these people only have something to say once every few months (or years) I could ensure I never miss it. I don’t know about you but, I find that often it is people who rarely have something to say why are the most interesting. Twitter, or any stream based client doesn’t do a good job of serving anyone who isn’t constantly talking or anyone who want to listen to people who aren’t constantly talking.

Trying to get caught up on more than a day or so of Tweets is virtually impossible for anybody who follows more than a few dozen active users — you simply can’t comprehensively take in the full stream. With RSS, on the other hand, you can scan through headlines and save them (or, yes, share them) and it’s possible to do so after a few days off the internet. Or a few hours. Woe betide the nine to fiver who wants to come home and quickly catch up on the day’s news via Twitter. Not everybody has the luxury of being able to keep tabs on Twitter all day. Twitter is realtime and RSS is time-shifted. Both are important. Just tell these same people you’re taking their DVR away and see what happens.

But, importantly, I think we have been presented with a false dichotomy in the inbox vs stream debate. Why can’t we have both? Put people who are always talking in the stream, and those who only pipe up occasionally in the inbox. Or use any criteria you want to categorize people into either the stream or inbox buckets. This way we get the best of both worlds.

And while we are at it, why limit our feed readers to just RSS, why not include social feeds, like Twitter Facebook and Google+. Make what ever replaces Google Reader a true reader for web content regardless of where it comes from.

That would truly be an ideal replacement for Google Reader. This is what I want, I would pay for something like this. Is anyone willing to make it?

As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it’d be easy to be scared. It’d be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something — anything — to keep us safe.

It’d be easy, but it’d be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators’ hands — and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don’t have to be scared, and we’re not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there’s one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.

…

Don’t glorify the terrorists and their actions by calling this part of a “war on terror.” Wars involve two legitimate sides. There’s only one legitimate side here; those on the other are criminals. They should be found, arrested, and punished. But we need to be vigilant not to weaken the very freedoms and liberties that make this country great, meanwhile, just because we’re scared.

Empathize, but refuse to be terrorized. Instead, be indomitable — and support leaders who are as well. That’s how to defeat terrorists.

It almost seems like every single developer is working in a replacement for the Google Reader API. Feedly, Superfeedr, and even digg (and probably plenty others that I have already forgotten) all have something in the works. My personal favorite feed Reeder has also indicated that the app will transition to some other back-end API (though what exactly that means remains a mystery). It would be a shame if all of these developers didn’t come together and create some sort of standard (kind of like the equivalent of IMAP for feed reader as I mentioned in my previous post). This would prevent us from going down the same path that got us into all this trouble in the first place.

A long time ago the RSS ecosystem was a vibrant place. Developers were experimenting and trying out cool new thing. Sure some of them were terrible but this experimentation lead to an understanding of what worked and what didn’t. It eventually lead to the creation of Google Reader, which offered a fast, simple and efficient UI. But more importantly it was one of the first cloud based readers, which meant your feeds and all the articles you had read were synced across devices.

This might seem like an obvious feature, but back then the ‘cloud’ was just getting started. Back then most feed readers were native applications that did not sync with anything. If you spent a few hours reading articles on your laptop, you would have to wade through all those articles again when you sat down on your desktop and fired up your feed reader to do more reading.

In fact Google Reader was so good that it quickly dominated the landscape. Most other feed readers faded away, or pivoted to something else. Once the dust had settled only Google Reader remained. Innovation in the RSS space ground to a halt.

With the launch of the iPhone and Android phones, there was a renewed interest in RSS and a new crop readers emerged (like Reeder). There apps were great, but generally they depended on Google Reader for they backend feed management and syncing. The ones that didn’t simply weren’t very useful. They locked you into their walled garden and made it difficult to keep one centralized list of feeds and read articles. Without syncing with Google Reader these RSS apps were about as useful as the feed readers we all abandoned in favour of Google Reader. Reading a bunch of articles on one device, meant that those articles would still show up as unread on all other devices.

But this reliance of Google Reader made the entire feed reader ecosystem brittle. If Google Reader ever shut down then the entire ecosystem would come crashing down as well. That is exactly what is happening now.

It would be very short-sighted if now that Google Reader is shutting down we went down the same path and all coalesced around one proprietary feed syncing service (Feedly seems like the leading contender right now) It would leave us in exactly the same position.

A far more robust approach would be for the various developers working on replacing the Google Reader syncing backend each worked together to create a standardized API to access any feed reader service.

This would allow feed reader app developers to connect to any sync backend. Much like email clients can connect to any email server.

That was the first feature I want to see in whatever replaces Google Reader. I want to replace the reliance on one single backend syncing service and instead  rely on a standardized syncing API that anyone could implement  that doesn’t have a single point of failure. One that lets me, the user, chose who I want to trust with my feeds and articles.

I would even be more than happy to pay for such a service.

In Part 2 I’ll delve into the misguided river of news vs inbox debate.

Open the pod bay door, HAL.

What would it take to develop the capability to send humans to another star system? That is the ambitious challenge taken up by the 100 Year Starship project. And they have set a deadline of achieving this ambitious goal within, as their name implies, the next 100 years.

Meeting the challenge of sending humans on an interstellar journey that, in all likelihood, will last thousands of years, requires a massive rethink of just about everything. Take something as simple as clothing. It represents a large part of our identities, but it is a major challenge in the closed system of a starship. Can we make clothing that will last the entire journey? If not, can we manufacture clothing on the starship? The answer is probably not, given the lack of new raw materials that the starship will encounter along the journey and the astronomical cost of bringing enough cotton on the starship to supply everyone with new t-shirts for a thousand years. Not to mention that the making of new clothing and the disposal of old clothing is an incredibly toxic process.

So what is the solution? Well given that a starship is climate controlled we could just abandon clothing all together. That would satisfy the technical hurdles but would run into a lot of resistance from most people who not only see clothing as an integral part of their identity that is so entrenched that giving it up just doesn’t enter into their train of thought, but also the cultural aspect of wanting to keep certain areas of our bodies private and hidden from others. So here we have an easy technical solution that flies in the face of what most of us consider ‘appropriate’.

And that is just clothing, one of the easier problems that needs to be solved.

But what do a bunch of naked astronauts have to do with Planet3.0’s core mission of exploring sustainability?

The clothing example above is actually good illustration. Many things we rely on become obviously unsustainable when done in the small closed system of a starship. What is less obvious is that they are still unsustainable when the closed system is scaled up by several orders of magnitude.

By any practical definition, our planet is such a scaled up closed system, but it is so large that we often don’t think of it as a closed system. Scaling down the system can help put the sustainability of the things we do everyday into a clearer focus.

Another critical area of sustainability is, of course, energy. Here too the 100 year starship project has goals that align nicely with what we need in order to achieve sustainability here on earth.

Developing the capability to generate the massive amounts of energy required in order to propel a starship to another star system within the small closed system of the starship would also mean that we have developed the ability to generate more than enough sustainable energy here on earth. Enough energy to satisfy any demands, regardless of how large the planet’s appetite for energy gets.

In fact the energy requirements of the 100 Year Starship are so large that it raises another problem. The amount of energy needed to travel to another star system is so large that if not used carefully could completely destroy life on earth. Think of the destructive power of nuclear energy multiplied a thousand of times. The destructive power of that much energy is hard to comprehend. Like many aspects of interstellar travel the scale is orders of magnitude larger than we are used of thinking about.

So one of the larger challenges involved is how we deal with ourselves.

We don’t have a governance model that is robust enough to survive the journey to another star system, a journey that could last a thousand of years. The effort required for solving this cannot be overstated. A cursory glance at even the most well functioning democracy, to say nothing of the level of governance in Washington DC, or the United Nations, shows how our current governance systems fall completely short of what is required.

But the benefits of building a more robust and effective governance model here on earth are obvious. In fact the lack of such a model is a major reason why solutions to the problems we have (including climate change) remain elusive.

In short by forcing ourselves to solve the problems inherent in developing the capability to send humans to another star system we develop the capability to live sustainably here on earth. Huge challenges are needed because we won’t get where we need to go (be it sustainability or another star system) with incremental steps. Giant leaps (for mankind) are required.

Framing the problem as developing the capability to travel to another star system is a creative way to spark people’s imagination and ambition towards developing our capacity to create sustainable systems here on earth.

There is a potential pitfall involved in such an approach. It is one of timescales. 100 years seems awfully ambitious in order to build the capability to travel to another star system. However, 100 years is far too long if we want to solve many of the problems we face here on earth while avoiding significant suffering. On the other hand, much can potentially be achieved if the project is managed effectively and real attention is paid to the problems facing us here on earth.

That being said there is something incredibly worthwhile in aiming for something better than what we currently have, especially when what we currently have is taking us down a path we know is disastrous, and we haven’t yet found how to change course.

We don’t have the same ambition for the future we used to have. We are still coasting from the large breakthroughs of 30-50 years ago, and the future certainly doesn’t have the level of funding it used to have.

We are the most materially rich people in history, yet our discourse is one of scarcity. If nothing else the 100 Year Starship project will be successful if it improves our level of ambition for the future.

Good luck!

The problem is that Google Reader was more than a website, it was a backend that powered a bunch of useful services. All of those services are now in trouble.

So how, assuming you thought it was the right thing to do (which it isn’t!), do you shut down something as important as Google reader?

You start with the back-end. Make it a standard. A standardized feed aggregator service that keeps track of which feeds you are subscribed to and which articles you have read. Most importantly is that it have a standardized and open API.

An open standardized feed aggregator platform (think of it as the IMAP of feed readers). Once this is built, Google could encourage others to run this standardized feed aggregator. Third parties could build front-ends that innovate and meet people’s needs what ever they might be, (like my favorite, Reeder).

In essence having a standardized back-end would allow for real competition. Don’t like what some company is doing (say Google shutting down Reader), no problem since you can move from Google’s service to something else (perhaps something running on your own server so you have absolute control), and all the front-end apps you use to access your RSS feeds can continue to work just as they did before.

In essence the experience would work similar to the way email works today, where you can use any email application with your email service. Want to use Outlook, or Thunderbird with your email? You can. And if you decide to switch to another email provider you can still use Outlook or Thunderbird, or something else.

This is the beauty of standards and this is what we need for feed readers.

If Google had gone down this road (instead of just announcing their plan to turn off the service) there wouldn’t have been the huge outrage today. And RSS would be in a much better place.

If Google had gone down that road people would have just moved away from Google Reader and started using something else. Easily.

While this isn’t fully happening Feedly is looking to pick up the void left by Google Reader by creating a similar back-end service. This is a great short-term fix, but ultimately it leaves us in the same boat if Feedly decides to shut things down.

I hope the RSS developers community comes up with a more long-term solution (be it the one I propose above or something else).

Otherwise this might happen:

UPDATE: Fixed a bunch of typos. That will teach me to quickly write a post when I am exhausted!

If you look at the global fossil fuel emissions data, all of the major disruptions to energy and oil use in the past 60 years caused carbon emissions to drop or level off. Annual emissions would later continue to rise at a rate similar to that before the disruption, but the total annual emissions would not “catch up” to where it “would have been” without the disruption.

The recent world financial crisis appears, on the surface at least, to be an exception. Carbon emissions stopped rising in 2008 and 2009, but rebounded so strongly in the past couple years, that emissions have reached the level to which they appeared to be headed, presuming linear extrapolation, before the crisis.

Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III is no smelly hippie.

North Korea just annulled the 1953 armistice ending its war with South Korea. China and Japan are locked in a dispute over an island chain. But the greatest long-term threat to the peace of East Asia and Pacific Ocean — the part of the world at the heart of the Obama administration’s aspirational defense strategy — is climate change, according to the admiral in charge of U.S. military operations there.

Via The Climate Desk

The difference between the warming at the end of the last ice age (left side of the graph) and the current warming (right side of the graph) demonstrates how truly abnormal the current change in climate really is.

In the article in science A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years the authors took 73 proxy records of temperature, including isotope ratios and pollen records in order to construct a global temperature record for the entire Holocene period. The reconstruction shows warming as we exit the last ice age, followed by a stable temperature plateau, followed by about 5000 years of gradual cooling ending around the beginning of the last century.

The decade of 1900-1909 was colder than about 95% of all other decades in the Holocene. But since then there has been rapid, unprecedented, warming so that by the end of the most recent decade (2000-2009) temperatures were warmer than about 82% of all decades in the past 12,000 years.

In 100 years we have undone 5000 years of natural cooling!

This new reconstruction agrees nicely with the previous temperature proxy reconstructions

This reconstruction fits nicely with what we already know (especially for the past 2000 years) and doesn’t really change the big picture, it just adds some details. This gives us confidence that these results will withstand the inevitable post publication scrutiny.

There are a few important takeaways from the paper. The first, is a concern raised by Robert Rohde:

In discussing their result, there is one important limitation that I feel deserves more attention. They rely on proxy data that is widely spaced in time (median sampling interval 120 years) and in many cases may also be subject to significant dating uncertainty. These effects will both tend to blur and obscure high frequency variability. They estimate (page 1, column 3) that only 50% of the variance is preserved at 1,000-year periods. This amount of variance suppression is roughly what you would expect if the underlying annual temperature time series had been smoothed with a 400-year moving average. In essence, their reconstruction appears to tell us about past changes in climate with a resolution of about 400 years. That is more than adequate for gathering insights about millennial scale changes during the last 10,000 years, but it will completely obscure any rapid fluctuations having durations less than a few hundred years. The only time such obscuring might not occur is during the very recent period when dating uncertainty is likely to be low and sample spacing may be very tight.

While Michael Mann disagrees:

Regarding the resolution issue, this was my main concern initially when I looked at the paper. But I’m less concerned now that I have read the paper over more carefully, because I think that Figure 1a and 1b give a pretty good sense of what features of higher resolution reconstructions (specifically, our ’08 global reconstruction which is shown) are potentially captured. Based on that comparison, I’m relatively convinced that they have the resolution to capture a century-long warming trend in the past were there one comparable to the recent trend.

I think there is something to Rohde’s concern. It is possible than a century long blip in temperature might not show up in this reconstruction so in some way we are limited in how we compare this reconstruction to the past 100 years of warming. However we know with a lot of certainty that our current warming trend is not just a blip. Since the CO2 we have emitted into the atmosphere is going to stay there for a very long time the current change in temperature will be much longer than a simple blip. And were something similar to have happened in the Holocene this reconstructions would have very likely picked it up.

The other thing to keep in mind, also brought up by Michael Mann (and echoed by Jeremy Shakun, one of the study authors) is that the variation in the ‘shaft’ of the hockey stick potentially has more variation than it should:

My only real concern is that their data and approach (e.g. the use of pollen records in the higher northern latitudes) seems to emphasize the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, during the summer season. This is an issue because we know there is a substantial long-term natural cooling trend for high-latitude summers because of Earth orbital effects, but the trend is nearly zero in the global annual average. One gets the sense from looking at their reconstruction that there is a very strong imprint of this orbital cooling trend — stronger than what one would expect for the global annual average.

The interesting thing about that, is that it suggests that the true conclusions might even be stronger than their already quite strong conclusions, regarding the unprecedented nature of recent warming. That is, it may be that you have to go even further back in time to find warmth comparable — at the global scale — to what we are seeing today. If you look at their tropical stack for example (Figure 2J) [a particular set of data], the modern warmth is unprecedented for the entire time period (i.e, the past 11,000 years). That’s why I said that there results suggests recent warmth unprecedented for at leaat the past 4,000. It’s possible, given the potential seasonality/latitudinal bias, that there is in fact no precedent over the past 11,000 years (and likely longer, since the preceding glacial period was almost certainly globally cooler than the Holocene) for the warmth we are seeing today. In that case, we likely have to go back to the last interglacial, i.e. the Eemian period (125,000 years ago) for warmth potentially rivaling that of today.

Here is Jeremy Shakun being interviewed by Andy Revkin:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgnMuKuVXzU&w=560&h=315]

So while this reconstruction indicates that current temperatures are still slightly cooler than the Holocene climatic optimum (this isn’t anything new) there is reason to think that this might represent a bias in the data and not reality. It would not be surprising to learn that current temperatures are higher than anytime in the past 125,000 years.

Regardless, if we aren’t yet warmer now than in the past 125,000 years then our current temperature trajectory means that we will get there before too long.

Lastly one of the most important features in the reconstruction is the difference between the warming at the end of the last ice age (left side of the graph) and the current warming (right side of the graph). It demonstrates how truly abnormal the current change in climate really is.

What matters more than how much climate changes, is how fast it changes. If it changes slowly, then human society and natural ecosystems (and everything in between) will have a much easier time adapting. If, on the other hand, the change is quick (as the reconstruction shows that it has been) then adaptation becomes much more difficult and suffering becomes inevitable.

But quick change seems to be where we are headed, and we are doing little to mitigate that change. We might be able to adapt to it, but we wont be able to avoid suffering. That is the path our inaction is leading us towards.

It isn’t the path I want to be on.

China now emits more carbon dioxide per year than any other country.  They are changing our atmosphere, and by doing so they are changing our climate.   We ought to be outraged!