Satellite images from last year (left) and earlier this month (right) give an indication of the extent of this year's Pakistan Floods. Terrible though they are, are they just a taste of things to come?

Really, you’d have to be living in a complete news vacuum to have missed the awful disaster which this year’s monsoon floods have caused in Pakistan; The UN has now declared that the scale of the crisis is greater than the combined effects of the Haiti earthquake (Jan ’10), the Kashmir earthquake (Oct ’05) & the Asian tsunami (Dec ’04) and has left over 14,000,000 without food or shelter and at risk of falling victim to the host of diseases which commonly occur in the aftermath of major flooding.
One bright note is that this disaster has seen an unprecedented response from the public, with donations actually increasing as the crisis entered it’s second, then third week; very different from the usual pattern seen in these kinds of cases, where “donor fatigue” tends to kick in after the first week irregardless of how well the effects of the disaster are being dealt with at that stage.
However, for all that the response, both in the UK and internationally, has been amazingly generous so far there is still much work for the aid agencies to do, and many, many flood victims who still need the help of the international community if they’re to have any hope of returning to a normal way of life any time in the foreseeable future!
Unfortunately there are many despicable scammers in this world, and in particular on the internet, who’ll take any chance to profit from the misery of others, so if you’re planning on making a donation it’s best to go through the DEC, or one of their well known, reputable members such as Oxfam who, like most of the major UK charities, now have a page dedicated to the Pakistan Flood appeal.

Anyway, that was all a bit of an aside, an incredibly important aside, but a tangent none the less.
The real question I wanted to ask in this blog post was whether these floods, described as a “once in a century” event, are another sign that Climate Change is indeed a real and pressing problem which should concern the whole global community?

I understand the principle that climate is a long term pattern, and that it can’t judged by single isolated events, no matter how catastrophic, but it seems to me that we’ve been getting more and more of these “once in century” type of weather events over the past decade or so, and I truly wonder how much longer the climate change deniers will be able to keep their heads in the sand and continue to refute that there is a shift occuring in the planet’s weather patterns?
I can accept that there’s still a lot of debate to be had over the extent of anthropogenic climate change, and, in turn, how much humanity can do to mitigate the global climate change, but surely we’re now getting to a stage where denying the existance of a pattern of climate change is a thoroughly asinine position, and one which is only likely to be held by either the woefully gullible or those who are motivated by profound self-interest.

Flowering only very rarely the Corpse Plant is guarenteed to cause a stink in the botanical world whenever it blooms.

However, amongst botany geeks the Corpse Flower appears to be quite a hit; There aren’t many of them to be found outside the plant’s natural habitat, the rainforests of Indonesia, and they rarely flower in the wild, let alone in cultivation, so maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that whenever one of these bizarre organisms blooms in captivity flora-philes come flocking to see the unusual sight, and “experience” its unique scent.

On this occasion it’s the specimen held at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) which is due to flower, and such has been the buzz it’s created that not only have the HMNS set up a webcam, & a “Corpse Flower Watch” on their blog, complete with daily updates on the plant’s progress and measurements of its growth, but, with the fragrant flower due to open its petals any time this week, they’re also planning on opening the museum 24hrs a day while it’s in bloom.

The plant, named Lois, has also become a bit of a celebrity on Twitter, so if you’re a would-be botanist, but not based within travelling distance of the HMNS you can still keep up to date with its progress minute to minute.

However, as the show progresses it would appear that it’s not all doom and gloom for the aviation industry. It seems that this year’s big winner will most likely be the military hardware sector, and it’s no surprise that companies which produce military aircraft are lining up to take part in the show, one consultancy recently estimated that Middle Eastern spending on military aircraft would top £100bn by 2014.
Amid all the clamour and competition it’s nice to see a British company, BAE, managing to grab it’s share of the sales. It would appear that so far they’re having a pretty good show, as part of the consortium which makes the Eurofighter Typhoon they’ll no doubt have been buoyed up by how much interest the jet fighter has generated from Gulf States during the airshow.

BAE have also generated quite a bit of buzz with the annoucement that their unmanned Mantis aircraft completed it’s maiden test flight recently. This is particularly significant since the Mantis is the first ever fully autonomous, twin-engined UAV. It hasn’t all been military hardware for BAE though, their Avro Business Jet has also proved popular; not only has it been selected by the governments of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and Dubai as their VIP aircraft, it’s also won orders from the British firm Infinite Engineering Services.

Another big piece of news from the show is the annoucement by the UAE’s national carrier, Etihad, of a £750m investment package to enhance their operations across the board; no doubt they’ve got a few quid to splash around after all the flights to Dubai which they sold to those attending the airshow.

So, maybe the doom mongers are wrong; some sections of the civilian aviation industry might still be looking a little flat but overall it’s obviously far from penniless, and military spending never seems to go out of fashion. Overall it looks like the speculation that the Airshow would be a complete and utter flop may have been a little premature.

It also quite clearly reveals that the govts objections to cannabis and ectasy seem to come down to “drugs are illegal because they’re bad, and they’re bad because they’re illegal”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that these drugs are 100% harmless, but if an expert, whose job it is to know, is stating that they’re less harmful than substances which are legal and freely available then surely that has to be a pretty good arguement for their legalisation?
OK, you could take the opposite tack and say that maybe tobacco and alcohol should be made illegal instead, but apart from being a non-starter in terms of getting the populace to accept such a move, not to mention how much it would cost the exchequer in terms of lost duty, there comes a point where govt has to butt out and let people make their own choices (and take responsibility for them) even if there is some risk involved; Else we’ll eventually end up as a society of joyless wage slaves whose only purpose is to be good little workers. I mean, if you want to start talking about banning anything which is dangerous then lets start by looking at privately owned vehicles; how many deaths and injuries do they cause each year on our roads? By contrast we’re talking about cannabis & ectasy, susbstances which routinely kill less people each year than bed related misadventures!

There’s also the fact that history has shown that prohibition doesn’t work, where someone stands to make a profit you’ll just get a black market economy spring up to meet consumer demand for prohibited goods. As things stand in this country millions of otherwise perfectly law abiding, productive members of society are criminalised because they want, and choose, to smoke cannabis. If the govt truly represented the people they’d accept that for most users cannabis is a relatively benign substance with minimal knock on effects for wider society, and they’d legalise it.
Yes I said legalise it, forget decriminalisation, although it’s often touted as an acceptable method for govt to look the other way and quietly accept that maybe cannabis isn’t such an evil drug after all, decriminalisation is in fact the worst of both worlds from a societal point of view. Users are still forced to interact with the black market, organised criminals, in order to get the stuff, and this has a number of wider implications. It means that there aren’t any safe guards on quality, no product information in terms of the strength of any particular batch, and most importantly of all, money spent on cannabis is going to support organised crime!
On the other hand if it were legalised these issues could all be eliminated; users could be sure they knew what they were getting, and wouldn’t be funding criminals, but on the contrary could be providing revenue for govt.

At a time when we’re being told that, due to the banking bail out, our country is going to be in debt for decades to come you’d think that the govt might be open to new means of raising revenue. The Home Office estimates that in 2006 the UK drug trade was worth between £3.5 and £5.8 billion, not enough to solve the country’s money woes, but getting a slice of any figure which is measured in the billions isn’t to be sniffed at!

Really it seems like a no brainer to me. Now that “the genie’s out of the bottle” it’s never going away, people are going to take these drugs, they’ll find a way to get them because someone else can make money from supplying them. When even the experts are saying that dope is less harmful than substances which society already makes freely available, why can’t the govt just get over the outdated dogma that “drugs are bad m’kay” and do the thing which would benefit everbody except the organised criminals?

This piece in the New Scientist lays out the wider picture, in terms of the govt’s rocky relationship with it’s own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. There’s also a petition running on the No. 10 site here, if you want to join the call to re-instate Dr Nutt.

The study in question was carried out by British and Australian academics & investigated the likely effects of global warming on flowers, and other plant species. My first reaction was actually pedantic rage brought on by NASA’s use of the phrase “Global Warming“. All too often this term is used incorrectly as a synonym for climate change, and it’s one of my pet hates, since the label “global warming” implies that climate change will lead to warmer weather globally; whereas the reality of climate change is that some places will get hotter while others get colder, or that specific locations will become hotter in the summers but get colder winters than they’ve previously experienced.

In short, climate change comes down to much more than the idea that everythings going to get warmer, & I believe imprecise use of the term “global warming”, when one is talking about climate change as a whole, only adds confusion to a debate which is already bogged down in misunderstanding, statistical chicanery, &, at times, downright dishonesty.
For a start it implies that everywhere is going to get warmer, which makes some people wonder “What’s the problem, hotter summers would be nice!”, but it also gives especially ignorant anthropogenic climate change sceptics an excuse to crow on about how “global warming” is a myth, whenever it snows badly, or there’s a cold snap. Of course, what the poor fools are missing is that climate change could very well lead to much hotter, wetter summers for us in the UK, but leave us (in worse case scenarios) with winters they’d be more familar with in Moscow; London’s only a few degrees of latitude south of Moscow, and if the Gulf Stream &/or Jet stream were to pack up it’s likely that the UK would become a good deal colder!

In anycase misuse of “global warming” to mean “climate change” it’s one of my pet hates, and it especially grates when a source which should know better does it, hence my initial reaction to the piece. However, on reading through it I discovered that I had perhaps been too hasty, as the piece in question appears to be looking at a “global warming” scenario, rather than climate change as a whole; Of course how much validity there is in a study which is predicting an overall warming pattern, rather than considering the possibility that weather will become more extreme, and erractic, all round is another question entirely, and one which I’ll maybe rant about another day.

Think of the flowers! won't somebody please think of the flowers?

“So what’s the problem?” you may be asking; how do flowers appearing earlier in the year have a negative impact on anyone, except for possibly shops which sell flowers losing sales around Valentine’s day. The answer is that, most likely, there wouldn’t be any direct negative effects for humans, but when one thinks about the numbers of other species, particularly insects, whose life cycles rely in some way on flowers, and other species who, in turn, rely on those species, it’s clear that ecologically this could be a pretty big deal.
A great deal of effort is spent on highlighting how climate change might end up directly effecting humans, and while that is definitely a worthy goal, I think that too often it’s wider ecological effects are only vaguely touched upon. The stark truth is that, despite all of our scientific advances, humanity’s welfare is still, very much, tied to the ecosphere which we inhabit, and if other species which play important roles in the ecosystem start to fail then the overall impact of climate change could be far greater than many realise.

Of course the first thing to remember when one considers electric cars or vans is that the electricity has to come from somewhere, and if that’s from a power station which uses fossil fuels then really all you’re doing is obfuscating the vehicle’s carbon footprint, rather than reducing it significantly. Although, saying that, it has to be more practical to employ carbon capture technology in a power station than in a vehicle.

Electric cars and vans actually have a much longer history than most might realise, and in the early days of motorised transport, were far more common then petrol powered vehicles. However, advances in the internal combustion engine (ICE) & petroleum production technology during the early 20th century allowed ICE powered cars to be produced substantially cheaper than equivalent electric vehicles, and as a result electric vehicles pretty much died out for severeal decades.

In some ways it seems ironic to me that we started out on a track we’re now re-embracing, but given the advantages which the ICE had at the time, such as longer range & faster refueling times, it’s hard to blame the people of the time for embracing it, &, I have to wonder whether humanity would have advanced nearly so much as it did during the 20th century without the ICE. Some may argue that less advancement may actually have been a good thing for our species, and the planet in general, and in many ways I have sympathy for that view, but it would feel somewhat hypocritical to get too fervent about it.

In any case the modern generation of electric vehicles do appear to be shaping up rather nicely, and it once again looks like they might be able to give ICE powered vehicles a run for their money. The days when the only electric vehicles on the streets were the old fashioned milk floats are long gone, and although the technology definitely still needs some work, to make it affordable and convenient some of the forerunners of this new generation of electric cars and vans give hope that they may indeed be a viable solution in the very near future.

One of the most impressive is possibly Tesla Motors’ Roadster; A car based on the Lotus Elise which boasts a top speed of 135mph, a 200 mile range, & can go from 0 to 60 in ~4 seconds. Tesla also have plans for a solar powered version which they claim could make the car “carbon positive”, impressive stuff, if it comes about. Even it’s price tag of £90k isn’t that bad if one views it as a luxury sports model, although it is obviously out of many people’s price range. Anyway, take a look for yourself, if you want:

There’s also hope for those who can’t afford that kind of price tag, as more mainstream brands, such as Mitsubishi & Mini, release more affordablle electric vehicles, while others, like volkswagen, clamour to jump on the band wagon. It looks like business is starting to take the idea of electrics seriously too, with some courier companies starting to adopt the use of electric vans, especially around urban areas, where their pollution reducing benefits might be most tangibly felt. Also a number of the big name car and van rental companies are looking at offering electrics as an option, or are already doing so; good news for those who don’t own a car for green principle reasons, but occasionally find the need for something more reliable and flexible than public transport. I suppose it would even give the sceptics, a chance to “try before they buy”.

Overall, I think this technology does have an awful lot of potential; it may not be quite “there” yet, but I think over the next few years it’s likely to become more and more commonplace. The Govt announcement that they’ll support the construction of the required infrastructure has to be a big step forward- An easily accessed, widespread, network of charging points will surely only help encourage people that electrics are more than just an eccentric fad. As I said at the start of the piece, I do have some concerns about the source of the electricity that powers these vehicles, but, in terms of transport, I think we may well be looking at the shape of things to come.

This article on the BBC site caught my attention today; It not only appeals to my inner tree-hugger, but also to my geeky science streak too.

A prototype of Dr Lackner's artificial trees. A valuable weapon in the fight against climate change?

The theory behind the artificial trees is that a large surface area is coated in a substance which will readily react with atmospheric CO₂ to form a solid compound, thus removing it from the air. The chemistry behind the process is pretty simple, in fact anyone who remembers using Lime Water as a test for CO₂ in science at school has used exactly the kind of process that we’re talking about here. (The cloudiness which one sees when CO₂ is bubbled through lime water is due to the formation, & precipitation, of insoluble calcium carbonate.)

Dr Klaus Lackner, the man behind the idea, reckons that each of these artificial trees could capture up to 90,000 tonnes of CO₂ each year, the equivalent of the 15,000 cars’ exhaust fumes, and if the idea is adopted it’s best use might very well be to line the sides of busy roads. Industrial plants have other options for carbon capture, and possibly more efficient ones than removing CO₂ which has already made it’s way into the atmosphere.
With motor vehicles though it’s simply impracticle to try and capture CO₂ as it’s produced. For a start burning 14g of petrol produces 44g of CO₂, meaning that any carbon capturing vehicle would get heavier during the course of a journey, and as a result loose fuel efficiency. Clearly a non-starter.

Before you all rush out and start buying shares in artificial tree companies, it’s only fair to point out that it’s not likely to be a panacea for all our climate change woes. The biggest sticking point at the moment seems to be the question of renewing the “trees” once the CO₂ binding chemicals have been used up; This in itself could be a logistical nightmare, and could potentially make the idea a non-starter, unless a cost effective, carbon neutral, method of collecting and cleaning the artificial trees’ foils can be found.

Obviously, Dr Lackner and his team continue to work on these details, and personally I hope they do manage to find a viable way to implement this technology. In theory it seems like it could be one of our best approaches to tackling excessive atmospheric CO₂ levels in the time frame we have.
If you want to know more about the theory behind Dr Lackner’s artifical trees this BBC article goes into a bit more detail than the one I linked to at the top of the page, or if you wanted to get into serious levels of detail you could read his paper on Capturing CO₂ from Air.

In some senses this news shouldn’t come as a surprise; the left side of the brain processes input from the right ear, and is the side of the brain which tends to be focused more on interpreting speech and language, and, apparently, also tends to be more ammenable to requests.

The studies mentioned in the article don’t seem to use the kinds of sample sets one might hope for, in order to produce truly significant results, but the indications do seem to be that if you’re trying to blag a fag in a night club, you’re more likely to get one if you ask people in their right ear.

On the other hand though I’m a trained masseur, with over ten years experience of treating a variety of conditions, though I tend to specialise in back problems. From my own experience I know that there are good physiological explanations for why soft tissue, and bone, manipulation can help with some conditions, and even witnessed positive results from acupressure, which is somewhat harder to explain. But in anycase, I’m sure that chiropractic treatments can be effective for treating some conditions, I just find some of their claims a little wooly and nebulous.

I’ve also experienced the bias which many conventional doctors have when it comes to any form of complementary health care, and I have to wonder whether Dr Singh falls into this category; although actually he’s not a medical doctor, instead having gained his PhD in particle physics, something which the Independent’s article neglects to mention. The reason why I wonder whether Dr Singh is totally impartial is his use of the term “alternative medicine” in the title of the book he co-authored with Exeter University’s Professor of Complementary health, Edzard Ernst. Alternative medicine is in itself a loaded term, it implies that the treatment is a replacement for modern “conventional” medicine, rather than something which can be used in combination with conventional treatments. Some conditions are best treated conventionally, others can be more effectively treated with, for example, massage, yet other conditions can be best treated with a combination of the two approaches.

The term “alternative medicine” is actually a pet hate of mine, & I’d be less inclined to trust a practitioner who described themselves as “alternative” rather than “complementary”; It’s a tiny semantic difference, but to my mind it hints at an underlying attitude and one which does the reputation of complentary health as a whole absolutely no favours. In short, as someone who considers themselves an ethical and sensible practitioner I worry that the term “alternative”, along with treatment forms which promise great results with little evidence to back them up, undermine the credibility of respectable practitioners. Although part of the problem is that so many different treatment forms are labelled under the umbrella of “complementary”.

In anycase, I wonder whether Dr Singh’s agenda is as much about creating a name for himself, as it is about investigating which Complementary health forms have real therapeutic merit, but at the same time am also highly sceptical of chiropracty, or more specifically some of the ailments they claim to be able to treat through spinal manipulation.
Certainly if I judge that a client of mine might benefit from bone manipulation I’d always advise seeking out a good osteopath, rather than a chiropractor, from my knowledge of the two disciplines I’d say that osteopathy has a more solid root in accepted science.

To be honest this is an issue which I’m very much split on. I hate the idea that rather than engage in scientific debate over whether there’s any basis for their claims, the BCA has instead decided to try and settle the problem in the courts; It’s an absolutely horribly precedent to set, and as someone with a scientific background I find the idea that legitimate scientific debate could be stiffled by legal action both ridiculous, and somewhat worrying! A judge isn’t qualified to rule on the merit of scientific evidence, or to understand the complex nuiances that scientific debate often involves, therefore they can only rely on what they’re told by experts. Now the problem comes when the issue at hand is a contentious one for which there is, as yet, incomplete evidence either way; Complementary health is one example of this, but we could just as easily look at the climate change debate and all the claims and counter-claims which go on there from the pro and anti brigade; For the lay-person it’s a morass of confusing, conflicting information, with too many, so called, experts representing hidden agendas, rather than honestly assessing the science. I digress.

So, I don’t like the idea that the BCA have choosen to go to the courts rather than “man up” and have a proper debate, where they present evidence to defend their claims over chiropractic efficacy. I can accept that the treatment has the potential to help with back problems, but cynicism kicks in when they start claiming to be able to treat conditions which, from a scientific view point, seem unrelated to back problems. For example one of the BCA’s own leaflets entitled Happy Families states “There is evidence to show that chiropractic care has helped children with asthma, prolonged crying, breathing difficulties, bed-wetting, colic, sleep and feeding problems, hyperactivity [and] frequent infections, especially in the ears.”

But where is this evidence? To my mind the fact that they felt the need to get involved in litigation calls into question whether it actually exists, afterall if it did then Dr Singh’s allegations should be relatively easy to dismiss. At this point I do have to declare a slight bias, like Dr Singh I do have doubts, both over the “science” (and I’m using that term really loosely) which chiropracty bases it’s treatments on, & over some of the conditions which they claim to be able to treat through spinal manipulations.

This post is turning into a bit of a monster, so I shall have to finish it tomorrow…