International Anthem from Entschwindet und Vergeht

Dougie has outdone himself again..
http://youyouidiot.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-international-anthem.html

Kate Hartman on TED

This excellent Ted talk by Kate Hartman, has almost all the things theSlog is interested in: design, glaciers, funnies..

Geordie Bees on the web

Ahoy! My mate and loyal Slogger, Dave, is a paid up bee fanatic, and, having persuaded Culturelab at Newcastle Uni to get him some bees and a hive, now has webcams online! Brilliant. I've added the live feed from the front door of the hive to the sidebar of theSlog. Thanks Dave!
Honeybees are of course in danger of dying out, so as well as being an interesting things to do, keeping bees is actually a very socially responsible thing to be doing. There are a few campaigns to save bees, such as this one.

Roybee

Information is Beautiful go animated

I gave my pops the Information is Beautiful book for chrimbo, so we had some fun perusing it, finding fault with things we know a little about, and being flabbergasted by those of which we know nought. It's a great book to have around and very engaging - I think its interesting and valuable to see the myriad ways in which datasets can be visualised and interpreted, and that this can be as subjective as any other artform. But as data becomes increasingly open to all we need more and varied 'information designers' interpreting that data.

Anyway, David McCandless, author of said book has just posted some rather good wee animations that make the topic of UK spending yet more interesting, if that's possible..

Happy New Year When It Comes!
Roy

David McCandless (Information is Beautiful) on TED

TheSlog favourite David McCandless gave a TED talk recently - its great to hear him explain some of his visualisations and how he got into doing them. Thanks to Georgey for first pointing out his blog.

If it was my home

A scary tool that shows you how big the gulf oil spill would be if it was centered on your home.

gareth

Eyjafjallaj�kull and Maths Sculpture � Maxwell’s Demon

Eyjafjallaj�kull and Maths Sculpture � Maxwell’s Demon

On the topic of that volcano..

Found this great image while surfing on the topic of hexayurts: mathematician Edmund Harriss, who has an interesting blog here, and has done some new layouts for hexayurts.

What the real big society means for the economy, charities and copyright

Two excellent mini docs just posted to the Guardian videostream from Heydon Prowse and William Pine:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2010/may/11/ethical-living-diy-big-society

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2010/may/12/ethical-living-real-big-society-two



These make essential viewing in my opinion, if only to come some some way to understanding where I'm coming from: ie. spending my time and earnings on the sometimes seemingly pointless area of open design. Its the empowerment stupid.

Roy

the coalition on CCS

What do certain sloggers make of this extract from our new government's new manifesto?

• The establishment of an emissions performance standard that will prevent coal-fired power stations being built unless they are equipped with sufficient CCS to meet the emissions performance standard

• Continuation of the present government's proposals for public sector investment in CCS technology for four coal-fired power stations; and a specific commitment to reduce central government carbon emissions by 10% within 12 months.

We are agreed that we would seek to increase the target for energy from renewable sources, subject to the advice of the climate change committee.

Liberal Democrats have long opposed any new nuclear construction. Conservatives, by contrast, are committed to allowing the replacement of existing nuclear power stations provided they are subject to the normal planning process for major projects (under a new national planning statement) and provided also that they receive no public subsidy.

We have agreed a process that will allow Liberal Democrats to maintain their opposition to nuclear power while permitting the government to bring forward the national planning statement for ratification by parliament so that new nuclear construction becomes possible.

This process will involve:

• The government completing the drafting of a national planning statement and putting it before parliament

• Specific agreement that a Liberal Democrat spokesman will speak against the planning statement, but that Liberal Democrat MPs will abstain; and clarity that this will not be regarded as an issue of confidence.

My questions: is this wildly different to current policy? And what on earth do the last paragraphs mean in practical terms??

Roy

Climate Tricks - Update

Well 2009 is truly over so I thought I'd update that image from the post I made pre-christmas without dropping 2009 data. Doesn't help does it? Dang. Perhaps this will become a yearly effort, that way, every new year of data I post in isolation of any trend, the greater chance I have of proving global warming stopped after 1998. Come on Eyjafjallajokull I know you want to help me out in 2010.

How do you cut UK emissions 80%?

Nice interactive on the guardian website that allows you to play being the PM by dragging sliders to try and cut UK emissions by 80% by 2050. It also demands that you balance the electricity demand from different sources (though it is not exhaustive: no gas/coal/biomass with ccs). Anyway, I tried to do it without limiting consumption and travel. Answer, impossible. And as for flying, I'm going to climate hell...

The Do Lectures

"The Do lectures are all about getting a handful of speakers together in one place, in the hope that they may inspire you to go Do something. To give you the tools and the desire to change the things you care about."

Climate Information is Beautiful/Terrifying

George sent me a great link:

David McCandless, a London-based author, writer and designer for the Guardian and Wired amongst others, has been putting together some very good graphics on the subject of climate change of late. They are over on his blog, Information is Beautiful. The corker is this post depicting typical arguments and counter arguments between skeptics and the science - would be very interested to hear people's / Gaz's views.

Not the Gaz ain't a person, but you know what I mean..

Roy, and thanks to George!

Climate Tricks

By Gareth. i.e. verbose entry warning...

I watched a debate the other night between amongst others George Monbiot on one side and Lord Nigel Lawson on the other (Maggie's chancellor of the exchequer) and something Lawson kept bringing up that was not properly refuted by Monbiot bugged me. It was this: "Global warming has stopped in the last decade". Monbiot's refutation was that 8 out of 10 of the hottest years on record have been since 2001. Which is absolutely correct, but argued Lawson, using an analogy, if population growth stopped in 2000 the last few years would still have the highest recorded number of people on the planet (ie growth stagnated). So, with that in mind I thought I'd get hold of any evidence Lawson had to prove his point then look at the data which exists in the public realm to try and back that up. With a little help from a timely Guardian article I found that Lawson is Chairman of the board of trustees of the Global Warming Policy Foundation and that their website hosts the image I've added below showing an apparent cooling or end of global warming on the header of each page (sorry it's small go to the website to see it more clearly). So here it is, Lawson's evidence for the end of global warming.


Next step, try and reproduce it using any of the global datasets that exist. I.e. the ones from the UK Met Office (HadCRUT), NASA (GISS) and the National Climatic Data Center in the US (NOAA).

I've attached another two images. The first is the entire record of temperature on land and ocean for the last 100+ years (depending on dataset, e.g HadCRUT goes back to 1850) for all three datasets. This is no small piece of work, it comes from multiple measurements and many stations around the globe and has nicely been hosted for us all to look at at the above websites (who said we couldn't get access to this stuff?!).


The first thing to point out is that any monkey could tell you that the overall trend here is 'up' ie warmer and that if you took any one ten-year section you could probably find a decrease in temperature and conclude that global warming had stopped when the overall trend is still, our monkey tells us, UP. In other words we have natural variability in the climate. But let us ignore that for it is not convenient in my search for something to back up the claim that global warming has stopped in the last ten years. How best to do this? Well, the best way I can think to do this is pick the hottest year on record (that has the biggest positive anomaly from the baseline), from the one data set that works best for us to be our starting point, then see the decline from here on in. To do this we have to ignore the NOAA and GISS datasets as they have 2005 as the hottest year and it's quite tricky to claim global warming has ended when the hottest year on record is within your frame of reference. No, much better would be to pick the the HadCRUT data (red line on above figure) as this has 1998 as the hottest year, and well, it's British so it must be better. Now, what else can we do? Well, 2009 so far is looking pretty warm on the grand scheme (see that awkward upwards tick at the end of the red line above), and you know it's only December, so we don't have a full years record yet so let's drop that point and just use 1998 to 2008 and have a look at the beautiful decline like on Lawson's website header.


Wait, what's that? Even when I do that (last image) I STILL get an upwards trend on all three datasets. Bugger. Oh well, maybe I'll just re-draw my own image with fictitious points to match my argument (you'll note that as the Guardian article above points out this image has 2003 and 2005 level pegging for temp on their image, they aren't, and 2006 and 2007 warmer than 2004, again they're not) and put that on the top of my website, much better.

UPDATE: I just noticed, after having written this, that real climate beat me to it a few months back. Still it's good to do these things for yourself every now and then huh?!

350

There seem to be endless campaigns for climate change and the environment, (we, the climate project, the big ask etc etc) but I like the simplicity of this one. And something about using numerals and sign language to reach as many people as possible is neat. How the heck we get to 350 is another question...

Aquaduct

A very neat idea...

200th Post is Black

This is the 200th post to theSlog, and it comes via Padraig!

When your pc screen is all white (like a word page, for example),
your computer comsuption is about 74 Watt. When it's all black, the
average ist about 54 Watt.

Because of this, a few month ago, Mark Ontlush wrote an article
about the amount of energy that could be saved if Google had a black
background instead of white.

Considering the high popularity of the website, according to
Mark, the energy savings would be about 750 MW-Hour per year.
Answering to this post, Google created a black version of it's
search engine named Blackle.com ( http://blackle.com ) , that works the
exact same way as the original version but uses less power.
Pass it on to friends, family and discussion list...let's all
give our support to Blackle!!

Front page news!

Calgary made front page news today on Guardian Unlimited. For all the wrong reasons...
It's a fair comment, but after being here 9 months and seeing a little of what Calgarians can and are doing in regards to climate change and sustainability issues, I'm a little more optimistic that things wont be as bad as Klein makes out. I may however have just caught the Cowtown bug. Yeehaw!