Core Dump

Widespread use of antibiotics by modern agribusiness is contributing the the rise of superbugs - bacteria that are resistant to all antibiotics. This is the first time since the 1930s that doctors have faced infections that have no treatment.

“We are seeing infections caused by Acinetobacter and special bacteria called KPC Klebsiella that are literally resistant to every antibiotic that is F.D.A. approved,” Dr. Spellberg said. “These are untreatable infections. This is the first time since 1936, the year that sulfa hit the market in the U.S., that we have had this problem.”

The Infectious Diseases Society of America, an organization of doctors and scientists, has been bellowing alarms. It fears that we could slip back to a world in which we’re defenseless against bacterial diseases.

There’s broad agreement that doctors themselves overprescribe antibiotics — but also that a big part of the problem is factory farms. They feed low doses of antibiotics to hogs, cattle and poultry to make them grow faster.

A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that in the United States, 70 percent of antibiotics are used to feed healthy livestock, with 14 percent more used to treat sick livestock. Only about 16 percent are used to treat humans and their pets, the study found.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

Here's an article describing a nasty little group in Amarillo, Texas calling themselves the Army of God (which is more or less what Hezbollah translates to). Lest you think they're just the usual run of right-wing wacko uber-Christian crazies, keep in mind that until 9/11, the worst terrorist attack in the U.S. was by a ultra-right militarist.

And they don’t just talk about this. They’ve posted a Google map (they call it the “Warfare Map”) with markers for the locations of their current targets, including Buddhist churches and Islamic mosques, and even an Episcopal church because they don’t hate gays.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, society

The New York Times has an article examining the rise of the Tea Party as a major political force in the U.S. It's well worth reading, though you may find it quite unsettling, as I did, to find what would appear to be otherwise normal, middle-class Americans seriously considering armed rebellion against their own government.

Not long ago, Mrs. Stout sent an e-mail message to her members under the subject line: “Revolution.” It linked to an article by Greg Evensen, a leader in the militia movement, titled “The Anatomy of an American Revolution,” that listed “grievances” he said “would justify a declaration of war against any criminal enterprise including that which is killing our nation from Washington, D.C.”

Mrs. Stout said she has begun to contemplate the possibility of “another civil war.” It is her deepest fear, she said. Yet she believes the stakes are that high. Basic freedoms are threatened, she said. Economic collapse, food shortages and civil unrest all seem imminent.

“I don’t see us being the ones to start it, but I would give up my life for my country,” Mrs. Stout said.

She paused, considering her next words.

“Peaceful means,” she continued, “are the best way of going about it. But sometimes you are not given a choice.”

I do find it interesting that a lot of the statements made by Tea Party members quoted in the article sound a lot li6ke those made by radical leftists in the 1960s.

Update: I'm not the only one who noticed the similarities between the populist rhetoric of the Tea Party and the radical sixites' leftists. See this post by John Taplin, where he quotes from the Students for a Democratic Society.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, politics

If you want a good example of how stupid governments can be, you'd be hard pressed to find a better example than the recent decision by the US government not to shut down the link between the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes - a canal that runs through Chicago. What's at risk? The entire fishing industry, commercial and recreational, of the Great Lakes.

With marauding Asian carp on the Great Lakes' doorstep, the federal government has crafted a $78.5 million battle plan that offers no assurance of thwarting an invasion and doesn't use the most promising weapon available to fight it off.

The surest way to prevent the huge, hungry carp from gaining a foothold in the lakes and threatening their $7 billion fishing industry is to sever the link between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River basin, created by engineers in Chicago more than a century ago.

The strategy released by the Obama administration this week agrees only to conduct a long-range study of that idea, which could take years. The government also refuses to shut down two navigational locks on Chicago waterways that could provide an easy pathway for the carp into the lakes, although it promises to consider opening them less often.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment

Antibiotic use in China is more widespread than almost anywhere else in the world, and it's resulting in strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It may result in exports that we don't want.

Studies in China show a "frightening" increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as staphylococcus aureus bacteria, also know as MRSA . There are warnings that new strains of antibiotic-resistant bugs will spread quickly through international air travel and internation food sourcing.

"We have a lot of data from Chinese hospitals and it shows a very frightening picture of high-level antibiotic resistance," said Dr Andreas Heddini of the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control.

"Doctors are daily finding there is nothing they can do, even third and fourth-line antibiotics are not working.

"There is a real risk that globally we will return to a pre-antibiotic era of medicine, where we face a situation where a number of medical treatment options would no longer be there. What happens in China matters for the rest of the world."

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

According to research conducted in 2008, the Arctic sea ice is melting faster than projections and threatens the Arctic's ecosystem.

The melting ice poses different threats. Barber said the ice is full of toxic contaminants, which are released back into the environment when the ice melts. Wildlife in the Arctic is negatively impacted by the loss of ice and degraded habitat. Animals that live in the Arctic will also experience more competition for resources as species move north. And finally, the melting ice contributes to global warming, and while there was no prediction made as to when we might expect the Arctic to be mostly melted, the impacts will be apparent in the world long before most of the ice is lost. Barber said the warming of the Arctic influenced the jet stream, which then causes warm air to move further north.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, science

From Discover, some bad news about California's water usage:

The team used the GRACE satellites to measure tiny fluctuations in the planet’s gravitational field. Researchers often use them to track changes in ice sheets, but this turning these orbiters on California allowed them to see the how much the pull on the planet had lessened there, and thus how much water had been lost from the ground.

The satellites can detect changes in the amount of water in a region but not how much is left. Regardless of how much water remains in the aquifer, the researchers note that a declining water table will degrade water quality and will eventually force Californians to drill deeper wells [Science News]. That’s bad news not just for Californians: the Central Valley accounts for an estimated one-twelfth of the nation’s agricultural production.

“The numbers we’re getting out of this analysis point to groundwater use at unsustainable rates,” said Professor Jay Famiglietti of the University of California, Irvine. “It’s leading to declining water tables, decreased crop sizes, and continued land subsidence – something that has been going on in the Central Valley for decades”

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment

If you've been using Microsoft Office's propriety DRM to protect your documents, you may have a problem. Microsoft let the security certificate expire, and now many users can't access their own files. Just another reason to avoid DRM, as if you needed one.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, Microsoft, security

This is going to be a much longer post than usual, but I think it's worth reading.

There have been some really interesting articles this week, all dealing with the subject of climate change and how public opinion is being manipulated by the manufactured doubt industry -- the same people who kept the tobacco industry in business for many years despite medical research showing it caused cancer and who fought banning CFCs despite clear evidence they were destroying the Earth's ozone layer. Now they're working for the oil industry, sowing the seeds of doubt about man-made climate change.

First we have this superb post, The Manufactured Doubt industry and the hacked email controversy by Dr. Jeff Masters. Here, in one short excerpt, you'll see what's at work here:

Let's look at the amount of money being spent on lobbying efforts by the fossil fuel industry compared to environmental groups to see their relative influence. According to Center for Public Integrity, there are currently 2,663 climate change lobbyists working on Capitol Hill. That's five lobbyists for every member of Congress. Climate lobbyists working for major industries outnumber those working for environmental, health, and alternative energy groups by more than seven to one. For the second quarter of 2009, here is a list compiled by the Center for Public Integrity of all the oil, gas, and coal mining groups that spent more than $100,000 on lobbying (this includes all lobbying, not just climate change lobbying):

Chevron $6,485,000
Exxon Mobil $4,657,000
BP America $4,270,000
ConocoPhillips $3,300,000
American Petroleum Institute $2,120,000
Marathon Oil Corporation $2,110,000
Peabody Investments Corp $1,110,000
Bituminous Coal Operators Association $980,000
Shell Oil Company $950,000
Arch Coal, Inc $940,000
Williams Companies $920,000
Flint Hills Resources $820,000
Occidental Petroleum Corporation $794,000
National Mining Association $770,000
American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity $714,000
Devon Energy $695,000
Sunoco $585,000
Independent Petroleum Association of America $434,000
Murphy Oil USA, Inc $430,000
Peabody Energy $420,000
Rio Tinto Services, Inc $394,000
America's Natural Gas Alliance $300,000
Interstate Natural Gas Association of America $290,000
El Paso Corporation $261,000
Spectra Energy $279,000
National Propane Gas Association $242,000
National Petrochemical & Refiners Association $240,000
Nexen, Inc $230,000
Denbury Resources $200,000
Nisource, Inc $180,000
Petroleum Marketers Association of America $170,000
Valero Energy Corporation $160,000
Bituminous Coal Operators Association $131,000
Natural Gas Supply Association $114,000
Tesoro Companies $119,000

Here are the environmental groups that spent more than $100,000:

Environmental Defense Action Fund $937,500
Nature Conservancy $650,000
Natural Resources Defense Council $277,000
Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund $243,000
National Parks and Conservation Association $175,000
Sierra Club $120,000
Defenders of Wildlife $120,000
Environmental Defense Fund $100,000

If you add it all up, the fossil fuel industry outspent the environmental groups by $36.8 million to $2.6 million in the second quarter, a factor of 14 to 1. To be fair, not all of that lobbying is climate change lobbying, but that affects both sets of numbers. The numbers don't even include lobbying money from other industries lobbying against climate change, such as the auto industry, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc.

Next, we have this article from the Globe and Mail, about a group dubiously calling itself Friends of Science, who are sponsoring a spectacularly wrongheaded series of radio ads.

Friends of Science, a Calgary-based non-profit group, is running a national radio advertising campaign mocking the whole idea of climate change that has mainstream environmental groups miffed.

The groups are claiming that funding for the anti-global warming effort is coming from the oil and gas industry.

James Hoggan, chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, lashed out Tuesday at Friends of Science in a speech in Toronto, calling it one of several “industry front groups” in North America that are trying to create uncertainty about the existence of climate change to undermine next month's United Nations climate change talks in Copenhagen.
The ads, which claim the planet has actually been becoming cooler in the past 10 years, have been running this month in 15 cities, including Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary, according to the Friends of Science group.

I heard one of these on Q107 and I almost had to take a blood pressure pill. "The Earth isn't warming. It's coooling." I'd like to see the evidence for that statement, especially in light of this article in the Globe and Mail, which descirbes recent research that clearly refutes one of the claims often made by climate change deniers - that Arctic polar ice is increasing, not decreasing.

Experts around the world believed the ice was recovering because satellite images showed it expanding. But David Barber says the thick, multiyear frozen sheets crucial to the northern ecosystem have been replaced by thin “rotten” ice which can't support the weight of the bears.

“It caught us all by surprise because we were expecting there to be multiyear sea ice – the whole world thought it was multiyear sea ice,” said Dr. Barber, who just returned from an expedition to the Beaufort Sea.

“Unfortunately what we found was that the multiyear [ice] has all but disappeared. What's left is this remnant, rotten ice.”

Permanent ice, which is normally up to 10 metres thick, was easily pierced by the research ship, said Dr. Barber, who holds the Canada research chair in Arctic science at the University of Manitoba.

The team finally reached what it thought was stable ice, only to watch a crack appear just as researchers were preparing to descend onto the floe.

“As I watched, over the course of five minutes, the entire multiyear ice floe broke up into pieces,” Dr. Barber said. “This floe was 10 miles across. Something that's twice the size of Winnipeg, it just broke up right in front of our eyes.”

The ice is unable to withstand battering waves and storms because global warming is rapidly melting it at a rate of 70,000 square kilometres each year, he said.

Multiyear sea ice used to cover 90 per cent of the Arctic basin, Dr. Barber said. It now covers roughly 19 per cent. Where it used to be up to 10 metres thick, it's now two metres at most.

Maybe it's getting colder in Calgary, where the group is located, close to their oil-industry sponsors. There may be reason to doubt the role of humanity in climate change (although I think that it's pretty well settled), but that statement is a Big Lie in the same class with Holocaust denial.

Here's an article by Tyler Hamilton of the Toronto Star in which he looks at how the media are handling the climate change story, and finds them wanting.

I apologize on behalf of my profession.

If it's true that Canadians and Americans have become less concerned about the potential impact of climate change, and that more consider global warming a hoax, some blame can certainly be directed at the news media.

"The media (are) giving an equal seat at the table to a lot of non-qualified scientists," Julio Betancourt, a senior scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, told a group of environment and energy reporters during a week-long learning retreat in New Mexico.

I was among them, listening to Betancourt and two of his colleagues describe the measurable impacts climate change is having on the U.S. southwest. Drought. More frequent and damaging forest fires. Northward migration of forest and animal species. Hotter, longer growing seasons. Less snow pack. Earlier snow melt.

"The scientific evidence reported in peer-reviewed journals is growing by the day, and it suggests the pace of climate change has surpassed the worst-case scenarios predicted just a few years ago.

Here's what he has to say about the recent hacking of climate change scientists' emails, about which I posted earlier this week.

The emails, from what I've read, do show that not all scientists agree, that some scientists don't like other scientists, and that some scientists are struggling with the complexity of their work. What these emails do not show is that there's any conspiracy or that consensus around the reality of human-influenced global warming is beginning to crack.

Still, that won't stop the skeptics from cherry picking what's in those emails and claiming this is some kind of smoking gun that will derail Copenhagen. The blogosphere is abuzz, and news media are never ones to turn down a juicy controversy. The timing of the hack makes it all the more suspicious, but no less dramatic.

It's a shame.

It really is. And we and our children are going to pay the price.

Finally, a column from the Star by Peter Gorrie looking at the issue of the Anglia emails. He ties the hack into both the campaign of disinformation that this post started out describing and the effects of the real warming that our planet is experiencing.

Black, they thunder, is white, and – skilled and persistent communicators that they are, with plentiful political, media and industry backing – they manage to convince, or at least confuse, many people.

Keep that in mind when considering the hacking of 4,000 emails and documents from the Climate Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia, a major centre of climate change study.

Climate skeptics claim a few bits extracted from those generally innocuous discussions among climate scientists – misunderstood or taken out of context – constitute a scandal. The gist: the scientists faked and fudged numbers, then masked their chicanery by attacking their opponents.

They skeptics got what they wanted from what many journalists, apparently without embarrassment, call "Climategate." We're now parsing emails and reporting demands for inquiries instead of focusing on the evidence of human-made climate change.

Tellingly, coverage of a new report that shows greenhouse gas emissions are rising and impacts are happening much faster than previously forecast was dwarfed by excitement over the emails.

This is one article that Tyler Hamilton won't have to apologize for.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, science

There's been quite a bit of controversy in some circles about the e-mails from a climate research lab that were leaked after a hacker broke into the lab's servers. Some of the anti-climate-change sites are calling it ClimateGate and the like, and saying that it proves that global warming is a conspiracy among scientists. Here's one typical view, from Jerry Pournelle, whose views I generally respect -- except when it comes to climate change:

It's getting pretty clear what happened. These academics, who were influential in framing the UN climate report on which most of the political decisions on what to do about man-made global warming depend, became alarmed when the data over the past few years didn't support the predictions of their models. At this point they had a choice: to accept the new data and see what that did to the theory, or simply to cover it up because they were convinced the basic theory was correct and the issue was too important to allow the theory to come under serious doubt.

I tend to agree with the perspective in this post from BoingBoing.

Evidence of vast conspiracy is sorely lacking. Ditto evidence disproving the scientific consensus on climate change. This isn't the "nail in the coffin" of anything. However, the emails do prompt some legit questions about transparency and how professional researchers respond to criticism in the age of the armchair scientist.

In fact, the whole reason the CRU seems to have been hacked is that the Unit was fighting off requests for access to the data sets it used to put together its climate models. This is one of the issues that gets discussed in the e-mails. Basically, some of the CRU researchers didn't want to release the data to people who weren't trained scientists because they were tired of spending their time fighting with bloggers and wanted to focus on research. Which is great, except for two things: First, from what I'm reading it looks like there might have been some ethical lapses in how the researchers went about blocking the release of data; Second, when you block the release of data, no matter what your real reason is, people will assume it's because you're hiding something nefarious. One of the positive outcomes of this whole hacking debacle is that it's forcing some discussion about when circling the wagons becomes protectionism, and might lead to the climate change data sets becoming more open source. Frankly, I think that's a good thing.

Unfortunately, the whole issue just feeds into the neo-con, right wing, pro-conspiracy mindset. It's probably set the prospects for fighting climate change back by quite a lot. In the mean time, the ice caps will keep melting (Arctic sea ice was at a record low for the month of November this year), the oceans will keep getting more acidic (although there is some evidence that after an increase in Ph of .15 that they may have reached their limit), and by the end of the century, everything between 20 degrees of the equator will be uninhabitable.

The BoingBoing post includes an extensive set of links. Follow them, and draw your own conclusions.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, science

I've seen articles that propose that international shipping is reasonably "green" because of the efficiencies of scale - a single ship can carry as many as 14,000 shipping containers. But, as this article points out, that's just not true.

For 31 years, the IMO has operated a policy agreed by the 169 governments that make up the organisation which allows most ships to burn bunker fuel.

Christian Eyde Moller, boss of the DK shipping company in Rotterdam, recently described this as ‘just waste oil, basically what is left over after all the cleaner fuels have been extracted from crude oil. It’s tar, the same as asphalt. It’s the cheapest and dirtiest fuel in the world’.

Bunker fuel is also thick with sulphur. IMO rules allow ships to burn fuel containing up to 4.5 per cent sulphur. That is 4,500 times more than is allowed in car fuel in
the European Union. The sulphur comes out of ship funnels as tiny particles, and it is these that get deep into lungs.

Thanks to the IMO’s rules, the largest ships can each emit as much as 5,000 tons of sulphur in a year – the same as 50million typical cars, each emitting an average of 100 grams of sulphur a year.

With an estimated 800million cars driving around the planet, that means 16 super-ships can emit as much sulphur as the world fleet of cars.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, economics and finance, environment

Here's a video showing what would happen to the Alaskan Way freeway/viaduct along Seattle's waterfront in the case of a major earthquake. You wouldn't want to be there.

A video made two years ago depicting the collapse of Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct has finally been released. It’s pretty sensational–after an earthquake, cars are crushed, half of the city’s power goes out, soil liquifies and whole streets disappear

Labels: Another thing to worry about, science

John Taplin writes about a chart that shows the decline in investment in productive goods and industries over the last few decades. It does not bode well for the future.

We can talk all we want about building a better future full of “Green Jobs”, but on the current trajectory, that future will arrive in China long before it reaches our shores. The “chicken and egg” problem described by the Wall Street Journal won’t be solved until the government starts aggressively seeding the Green Tech Business, because alternative energy is the only place where we have undercapacity. And this can be a “bottoms-up” strategy simply by requiring every utility company to buy excess solar and wind capacity from consumers at some sort of fixed rate. Consumers in California could easily afford to shift to solar if they knew they could make a profit from their excess capacity. The second thing the government could do would be to designate certain less scenic parts of the millions of acres of government land as open for solar and wind development in a public private partnership.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, economics and finance, politics

If Cory Doctorow is correct (and I really hope he's wrong on this one), TSA could have a new acronym, They Search Asses.

Uh-oh. Now that a terrorist has tried unsuccessfully to blow up a Saudi prince with a bomb shoved up his ass, the TSA is obliged to perform rectal exams on every flier for the rest of time. After all, once a jihadi failed to blow up a plane with his shoe, we all needed to start taking our shoes off. Then some knuckleheads believed they could blow up a plane with energy beverages and hair gel, so now we have to limit ourselves to 100ml of all liquids and gels, unless they're for babies or are prescription (because no mass-murderer would be so evil as to forge a doctor's note, which, as every junkie knows, cannot possibly be forged).

Now we found someone who was made to believe he could kill people with an asshole bomb, and so it follows that the TSA will have to ban -- or at least inspect -- our assholes. They're like opinions, you know, everybody's got one. Except, of course, most of us got to keep our assholes to ourselves. Not anymore.

And you thought having to take your shoes off at airport security was bad. Just wait.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, security

According to this unsettling article in the Globe and Mail, Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting faster than predicted.

New satellite information shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica continue to shrink faster than scientists thought and in some places are already in runaway melt mode.

British scientists for the first time calculated changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially bad at their edges. That's where warmer water eats away from below. In some parts of Antarctica, ice sheets have been losing several metres a year in thickness since 2003, according to a paper published online in the journal Nature.

Some of those areas are about a kilometre thick, so they've still got plenty of ice to burn through. But the drop in thickness is speeding up. In parts of Antarctica, the yearly rate of thinning from 2003 to 2007 is 50-per-cent higher than it was from 1995 to 2003. These new measurements, based on 50 million laser readings from a NASA satellite, confirm what some of the more pessimistic scientists thought: The melting along the crucial edges of the two major ice sheets is accelerating and is in a self-feeding loop. The more the ice melts, the more water surrounds and eats away at the remaining ice.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment

This, by a doctor in Afghanistan, is one of several reports I've read recently from people who've contracted H1N1 flu. The medical experts may describe it as a mild influenza, but it sure doesn't seem mild when you have it.

It started as a cough. It wasn’t the kind of cough where something is temporarily stuck in your throat. It wasn’t the kind of cough where simply clearing your throat would’ve been adequate. This was the kind of cough that hurts when you do it. A stinging pain that makes you wince and guard and hope that you don’t have to cough again any time soon. I thought I might have a fever, but of course, I was in the middle of covering a war in Afghanistan, and the conditions were… well, hot. So, maybe it was that. Problem was, the next day I wasn’t feeling any better – in fact, I was worse. I woke up in my dusty desert tent and tried to step out of my sleeping bag. Two steps later, I almost hit the deck. Incoming. Except this wasn’t due to any sirens going off, this was due to my own body simply being unable to hold myself up. I was lightheaded and freezing cold – even though it was over 100 degrees outside at that early hour of the morning.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

With the normal flu season coming up with a second wave of H1N1 on top of it, it's likely that you won't be able to avoid coming in contact with someone who's sick. But what do you do if someone close to you, a roommate or a family member, gets the flu? This article has some practical advice.

* Don’t share towels. Use paper towels to dry your hands after washing them, or use a cloth towel that isn’t shared with anyone else. If each person has a towel of a different color, you’re less likely to get mixed up.

* Clean common surfaces. Influenza viruses, including the H1N1 virus, are spread mainly through uncovered coughs and sneezes. Respiratory droplets containing the virus can end up on doorknobs, keyboards, and other surfaces. A person may become sick through touching a contaminated surface, and then touching his or her eyes, mouth, or nose.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

Yesterday I listened to one of the scariest documentaries about the environment that I've heard. CBC's Quirks and Quarks science program did an entire show about the state of the oceans, based on the book, Sea Sick, by Alanna Mitchell. The show was divided into five parts; each part focused on a different problem (dead zones, ocean pH, coral reefs, fisheries, garbage zones).

The most worrisome part of the show was learning about the increase in the pH levels of oceans, an increase largely caused by increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The increase in the last century would be fatal to a human being if it occurred in their blood, and is having serious effects on oceanic life.

I highly recommend this show - you can download the podcast from the show's web page.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, science

If you think the economy is bad and getting worse - you're right. According to the metrics published in this article, the world economy is following the same path as the Great Depression and may be even worse in some areas.

To sum up, globally we are tracking or doing even worse than the Great Depression, whether the metric is industrial production, exports or equity valuations. Focusing on the US causes one to minimise this alarming fact. The “Great Recession” label may turn out to be too optimistic. This is a Depression-sized event.

That said, we are only one year into the current crisis, whereas after 1929 the world economy continued to shrink for three successive years. What matters now is that policy makers arrest the decline. We therefore turn to the policy response.

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Labels: Another thing to worry about, economics and finance, politics

We don't usually think of the North American east coast as being prone to tsunamis, but there is evidence that a large one hit the New York area about 2,300 years ago.

Steven Goodbred, an Earth scientist at Vanderbilt University, said large gravel, marine fossils and other unusual deposits found in sediment cores across the area date to 2,300 years ago.

The size and distribution of material would require a high velocity wave and strong currents to move it, he said, and it is unlikely that short bursts produced in a storm would suffice.

"If we're wrong, it was one heck of a storm," said Dr Goodbred.

If you think this is an unlikely scenario, remember that Newfoundland was hit by a tsunami in 1929.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, history

A lot has been made of the fact that the H1N1 flu currently spreading around the world appears to be relatively mild as such things go. However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be worried. There exists a possibility that it could merge with the much more virulent H5N1 avian flu. Given that H5N1 has a mortality in humans of about 60 percent, that could be very bad news indeed. And that is why the Egyptian government is killing all the pigs in Egypt. For more, read this post by Scott McPherson.

The Egyptian government is scared to death that H1N1 will come around and reassort with H5N1, which they believe to possibly be endemic in their pig population. And if you look at the continuing increase in suspected and confirmed Egyptian H5N1 human bird flu cases, I think you'd agree there is much to be concerned about.

Likewise, the situation in Indonesia and in China also involoves informed speculation on behalf of animal and human influenza researchers that H5N1 may have made a small foothold in the hog populations there. Especially Indonesia, which remains Bird Flu Central for human cases and potential pandemic explosion, despite the competition from ongoing Egyptian human infections. Researchers already know that some 20% of the stray cat population in Indonesia has H5N1 antibodies. Likewise, some hogs in Indonesia have tested positive for H5N! antibodies.

And if you think this is just a case of another blogger being paranoid, read this article in the Globe and Mail.

Bird flu kills more than 60 per cent of its human victims, but it doesn't easily pass from person to person.

Swine flu can be spread with a sneeze or a handshake, but it kills only a small fraction of the people it infects.

So what happens if they mix?

The scenario is a concern for scientists: The two viruses meet — possibly in Asia, where bird flu is endemic — and combine into a new bug that is both highly contagious and lethal and can spread around the world. Experts are unsure how likely this possibility is, but many note that the new swine flu strain — a never-before-seen mixture of pig, human and bird viruses — has shown itself to be especially adept at snatching evolutionarily advantageous genetic material from other flu viruses.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

Last month, I posted about the possibility that severe solar geomagnetic storms could take down the power grid. Wired has an article that describes a recent NASA report called Severe Space Weather Events — Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts. It's rather chilling, even if you discount the Mayan "end of the world in 2012" nonsense in the middle of the article.

Ultra-high voltage transformers become more finicky as energy demands are greater. Around 50 percent already can't handle the current they're designed for. A little extra current coming in at odd times can slip them over the edge.

The ultra-high voltage transformers, the 500,000- and 700,000-kilovolt transformers, are particularly vulnerable. The United States uses more of these than anyone else. China is trying to implement some million-kilovolt transformers, but I'm not sure they're online yet.

Kappenman also points out that when the transformers blow, they can't be fixed in the field. They often can't be fixed at all. Right now there's a one- to three-year lag time between placing an order and getting a new one.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, space

The Taliban are making a major advance in Pakistan, something that seems to be under-reported in the mainstream US North American press. I suspect that the thought of a nuclear-armed Taliban, or an Islamist government in Pakistan, is one the things that keeps Obama awake at 3:00 a.m.

The Taliban has seized control of an area just 60 miles from the Pakistani capital Islamabad, provoking fears that militants are attempting to spread their insurgency – and with it their extreme brand of Islam – across the country.

Pakistani forces came under fire yesterday as they attempted to wrest back control of the strategically important district of Buner. The seizure by militants of the district in recent days underlines the strength of the insurgency and its ability to advance from the neighbouring Swat Valley which the Taliban controls, into the heart of Pakistan. Two policemen and a soldier were gunned down as six platoons of the Frontier Constabulary, a paramilitary force, were despatched to Buner to attempt to secure government buildings and bridges.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, politics

According to this article, there's little the U.S. can do to prevent Pakistan from degenerating into a collection of nuclear-armed, Islamist fiefdoms.

"The implications of this are disastrous for the U.S.," he added. "The supply lines (from Karachi to U.S. bases) in Kandahar and Kabul from the south and east will be cut, or at least they'll be less secure, and probably sooner rather than later, and that will jeopardize the mission in Afghanistan, especially now that it's getting bigger."

The experts McClatchy interviewed said their views aren't a worst case scenario but a realistic expectation based on the militants' gains and the failure of Pakistan's civilian and military leadership to respond.

"The place is beyond redemption," said a Pentagon adviser who asked not to be further identified so he could speak freely. "I don't see any plausible scenario under which the present government or its most likely successor will mobilize the economic, political and security resources to push back this rising tide of violence.

"I think Pakistan is moving toward a situation where the extremists control virtually all of the countryside and the government controls only the urban centers," he continued. "If you look out 10 years, I think the government will be overrun by Islamic militants."

Labels: Another thing to worry about, politics

Fresh Bilge links to a SpaceWeather.com article about a rather unsettling phenomenon that's happening on the Sun - coronal mass ejections are slowing down to the point where they can barely escape the sun. This, coupled with the lack on sunspots, indicates that the current solar minimum may be deeper than anyone expected.

Vourlidas has examined thousands of CMEs recorded by SOHO over the past 13 years, and he’s rarely seen such plodding explosions. In active times, CMEs can blast away from the sun faster than 1000 km/s. Even during the solar minimum of 1996, CMEs often revved up to 500 or 600 km/s. “Almost all the CMEs we’ve seen since the end of April 2008, however, are very slow, less than 300 km/s.”

Is this just another way of saying “the sun is very quiet?” Or do slow-motion CMEs represent a new and interesting phenomena? The jury is still out. One thing is clear: solar minimum is more interesting than we thought.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, space

With the end of the cold war, many people stopped worrying about the possibility of a world-wide nuclear war and the accompanying nuclear winter. But although tensions have eased somewhat between the superpowers, there are still hot spots, like India and Pakistan and the middle East, that could spark a smaller nuclear exchange. Recent studies show that even a smaller, regional nuclear war could have devastating global consequences.
The intense heat generated by the burning cities in the models' simulations lofted black smoke high into the stratosphere, where there is no rain to rain out the particles. The black smoke absorbed far more solar radiation than the brighter sulfuric acid aerosol particles emitted by volcanic eruptions. This caused the smoke to heat the surrounding stratospheric air by 30°C, resulting in stronger upward motion of the smoke particles higher into the stratosphere. As a result, the smoke stayed at significant levels for over a decade (by contrast, highly reflective volcanic aerosol particles do not absorb solar radiation and create such circulations, and only stay in the stratosphere 1-2 years). The black soot blocked sunlight, resulting in global cooling of over 1.2°C (2.2°F) at the surface for two years, and 0.5°C (0.9°F) for more than a decade (Figures 1 and 2). Precipitation fell up to 9% globally, and was reduced by 40% in the Asian monsoon regions.

This magnitude of this cooling would bring about the coldest temperatures observed on the globe in over 1000 years (Figure 1). The growing season would shorten by 10-30 days over much of the globe, resulting in widespread crop failures. The effects would be similar to what happened after the greatest volcanic eruption in historic times, the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia. This cooling from this eruption triggered the infamous Year Without a Summer in 1816 in the Northern Hemisphere, when killing frosts disrupted agriculture every month of the summer in New England, creating terrible hardship. Exceptionally cold and wet weather in Europe triggered widespread harvest failures, resulting in famine and economic collapse. However, the cooling effect of this eruption only lasted about a year. Cooling from a limited nuclear exchange would create two to three consecutive "Years Without a Summer", and over a decade of significantly reduced crop yields. The authors found that the smoke in the stratosphere cause a 20% reduction in Earth's protective ozone layer, with losses of 25-45% over the mid-latitudes where the majority of Earth's population lives, and 50-70% ozone loss at northern high latitude regions such as Scandinavia, Alaska, and northern Canada. A massive increase in ultraviolet radiation at the surface would result, capable of causing widespread and severe damage to plants and animals. Thus, even a limited nuclear exchange could trigger sevejavascript:void(0)re global climate change capable of causing economic chaos and widespread starvation.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, military, politics

If you think things are bad, and getting worse, it looks like you're right, at least according to this article from Naked Capitalism. By almost every indicator, the economic indicators are worse than in 1929-1930, and show no sign of improvement.

To sum up, globally we are tracking or doing even worse than the Great Depression, whether the metric is industrial production, exports or equity valuations. Focusing on the US causes one to minimize this alarming fact. The “Great Recession” label may turn out to be too optimistic. This is a Depression-sized event.

That said, we are only one year into the current crisis, whereas after 1929 the world economy continued to shrink for three successive years. What matters now is that policy makers arrest the decline.

And there's more along the same theme, with a detailed analysis in the Wall Street Journal.

Update: Here's a couple of more links. This article posits that the US or the UK could actually default, or run into a scenario where the only other option would be massive inflation or a currency devaluation. On the other side of the coin, this article shows that world trade may finally be picking up.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, economics and finance, politics

I just read an absolutely fascinating article in the LA Times, about how a NASA archivist saved a priceless piece of NASA's past - some of the first images of the moon from orbit. Nancy Evans kept the tapes from the Lunar Orbiter mission, which included the first picture of the Earth rising above the Lunar horizon, and tracked down three priceless recorders to read the data -- and stored them in her garage for years until finally getting funding to restore them.

There was no point, she realized, in preserving the tapes unless she also had an FR-900 Ampex tape drive to read them. But only a few dozen of the machines had been made for the military. The $330,000 tape drives were electronic behemoths, each 7 feet tall and weighing nearly a ton.

Evans scoured salvage lists for a castoff FR-900. As a member of the federal government's Trash Evaluation Board, she was privy to everything being thrown away from government institutions.

One day in the late 1980s, she got a call from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida: "We heard you're looking for FR-900s. We've got three of them. Where do you want us to send them?"

Having already stretched her bosses' goodwill at JPL by storing the tapes there, she reluctantly agreed to take the drives herself. Evans stored the three tape drives from Eglin and a fourth she got off a salvage list -- none of which worked -- in her own garage.

There they sat, for two decades.

There are lessons to be learned here, about how the digital revolution is creating a void in our past as older forms of digital media and the equipment used to read them become obsolete. I've been through this a few times - I've copied data files from 5-1/4" disks to 3-1/2" floppies and then to CD. I'll probably have to copy the CDs to another format one of these years. It's easy for me to do this on a my personal data; it's much harder for organizations to do it for the mountains of data they collect. To give one prominent example, the original tapes of the Apollo 11 landing have been lost; what we have are low resolution copies made from TV monitors.

How much more of our history will we lose?

Labels: Another thing to worry about, history, science, space, technology

We're currently in the middle of an extreme solar minimum, so we probably don't have to worry about solar storms for a few years yet. But as this New Scientist article points out, we should be thinking about it and what we can do to mitigate the risk. And it's not science fiction - a solar storm in 1989 blacked out a large part of Quebec and there was a much more intense one in 1859.

The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: "two patches of intensely bright and white light" emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.

There were eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The world's telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers were driven off the scale.

Though a solar outburst could conceivably be more powerful, "we haven't found an example of anything worse than a Carrington event", says James Green, head of NASA's planetary division and an expert on the events of 1859. "From a scientific perspective, that would be the one that we'd want to survive." However, the prognosis from the NAS analysis is that, thanks to our technological prowess, many of us may not.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, space

Here's another article about the disastrous state of the housing market in the U.S., describing what's been going on in Cleveland, Ohio. It's a seriously depressing article, showing just how far downhill things have gone, and just how hard it's going to be to get out of this mess.

As early as 2000, a handful of public officials led by the county treasurer, Jim Rokakis, went to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and pleaded with it to take some action. In 2002, the city passed an ordinance meant to discourage predatory lending by, among other things, requiring prospective borrowers to get premortgage counseling. In response, the banking industry threatened to stop making loans in the city and then lobbied state legislators to prohibit cities in Ohio from imposing local antipredatory lending laws.

In the ensuing years, the city’s real estate was transformed into an Alice-in-Wonderland-like landscape. Local officials began keeping track of foreclosed homes by placing red dots on large wall maps. Some corners of the map, like Slavic Village, are now so packed with red dots they look like puddles of blood. The first question outsiders now ask is, Where has everyone gone? The homeless numbers have not increased much over the past couple of years, and it appears that most of the people who lost their homes have moved in with relatives, found a rental or moved out of the city altogether. The county has lost nearly 100,000 people over the past seven years, the largest exodus in recent memory outside of New Orleans.

Banks are now selling properties at such low prices — many below what they sold for in the 1920s — you have to wonder why they bother to foreclose at all. (The F.D.I.C. estimates that each foreclosure costs a bank on average $50,000, more than if they were to do a loan modification.) All of this leaves Brancatelli in a constant state of exasperation. When asked how he’s doing, he often takes a breath and replies, “Another day in paradise.”

It's a long article, but well worth reading.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, economics and finance, society

Here's a list (PDF link)of 10 of the worst political risks worldwide for 2009. Number one is obvious - the inability of the US Congress to get any sort of a handle on the current economic situation.

By the end of 2009, the critical question will be whether the White House or Congress will have driven most of the lasting domestic economic policy agenda. In even the most optimistic assessment, a combination of economic crisis and a stronger Congress means that the balance is likely to tilt considerably from where it has been over the past decade, making the rise of the US Congress the world’s top risk in 2009.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, economics and finance, politics

Living in Pickering, almost within sight of Canada's largest nuclear reactor complex, I'm somewhat conscious of the fact that my life could be turned upside down in an instant by an accident at the station. I consider it a pretty low probability, obviously, or I wouldn't be living where I do. However, I suspect the workers in the town of Pripyat, Ukraine probably felt that way too, at least until the roof blew off Reactor 4 at Chernobyl.

Abandoned now for almost 25 years, the town of Pripyat is slowly decaying into piles of rust and dust. Here's an evocative and sometimes eerily beautiful set of photographs from Pripyat taken earlier this year.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, places, technology

Having a large contingent of unemployed people, especially young unemployed people, is a surefire recipe for social unrest. Because of the sudden recession, China has a huge number of unemployed, possibly as many as 26 million according to this USA Today article. Many are returning to the villages that they left years ago to find work.

The average income for Chinese farmers is about $690 a year — less than a third of what is paid in urban areas. The shortage of well-paying jobs explains why as many as half of the laborers in Bamboo Pole, population 50,000, decided to seek factory jobs — and why their return is so problematic now.

"It'll be a troubling year," predicts Victor Shih, a Northwestern University professor who researches China's economy.

Many of the jobless migrant workers will stay in cities to try their luck, possibly at smaller salaries.

For those who go home and stay, Shih says, rural life will come as a shock. "These young people were farmers, but they have lived in big cities, and their expectations are now a lot higher."

Labels: Another thing to worry about, economics and finance

Scott McPherson puts together a few articles about bird flu that paint a very disturbing picture.

But bird flu, it seems, is back. This year, China has already recorded eight human cases of the disease. Last month five people died in locations as far removed from each other as Beijing in the north, Xinjiang in the west, Guangxi in the south, Hunan in the center and Shandong in the east — and one of the highest tallies of bird flu deaths China has ever recorded in a month. "From a disease-control perspective, the increase in cases in China is notable — as is the wide geographic spread," says Dr. Hans Troedsson, the World Health Organization's representative in China. There is still no evidence that the virus has mutated to spread easily between humans, he says. But while such a nightmare scenario, which could set off a global flu pandemic that could kill millions, has shown no signs of being an immediate threat, serious concerns remain. "The fact that this is the highest number for a single month in China reminds us that the virus is entrenched and circulating in the environment," Troedsson says. See pictures of the resurgence of bird flu.(

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

Here's a chart of job losses in the current recession compared to 2001 and 1990. Yes, this one is worse - a lot worse.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, economics and finance

Given the dependence of the West on Chinese manufacturing, the prospect of widespread civil unrest in China is rather disquieting. The Chinese government exercises tight control over domestic media, so you won't see much reporting about civil problems there. But a report in the Times Online suggests that the situation there is worse than has been widely reported, and could get worse.

Bankruptcies, unemployment and social unrest are spreading more widely in China than officially reported, according to independent research that paints an ominous picture for the world economy.

The research was conducted for The Sunday Times over the last two months in three provinces vital to Chinese trade – Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu. It found that the global economic crisis has scythed through exports and set off dozens of protests that are never mentioned by the state media.

While troubling for the Chinese government, this should strengthen the argument of Premier Wen Jiabao, who will say on a visit to London this week that his country faces enormous problems and cannot let its currency rise in response to American demands.

And later in the article:

Even security guards and teachers have staged protests as disorder sweeps through the industrial zones that were built on cheap manufacturing for multinational companies. Worker dormitory suburbs already resemble ghost towns.

In the southern province of Guangdong, three jobless men detonated a bomb in a business travellers’ hotel in the commercial city of Foshan to extort money from the management.

The Communist party is so concerned to buy off trouble that in one case, confirmed by a local government official in Foshan, armed police forced a factory owner to withdraw cash from the bank to pay his workers.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, economics and finance, politics

My friend, Chris Coggon, has put together a nifty PowerPoint presentation which illustrates quite qraphically just how big the U.S. and world-wide debt really is. A $1,000 one-dollar bills in a stack is about 5" high. So how high do you think a trillion dollars would reach? Watch the presentation to find out.

Incidentally, Chris is a serious PowerPoint whiz, who is available to help you spice up your presentations. Leave him a note on the SlideShare page or you can email me and I'll pass it along.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, economics and finance

SF author and futurist Bruce Sterling has a piece in Seed in which he takes a look at what we can look forward to in the coming year. It's not pretty.

Every year, insurance rates soar from mounting "natural" catastrophes, obscuring the fact that the planet's coasts are increasingly uninsurable.

Insurance underlies the building and construction trades. If those rates skyrocket, that system must keel over. Once people lose faith in the institution of insurance — because insurance can't be made to pay in climate-crisis conditions — we'll find ourselves living in a Planet of Slums.

Most people in this world have no insurance and ignore building codes. They live in "informal architecture," i.e., slum structures. Barrios. Favelas. Squats. Overcrowded districts of this world that look like a post-Katrina situation all the time. When people are thrown out of their too-expensive, too-coded homes, this is where they will go.

Unless they're American, in which case they'll live in their cars.

But how can dispossessed Americans pay for their car insurance when they have no fixed address? Besides, car companies are coming apart with the sudden savage ease of Enron's collapse. Indeed, the year 2009 is shaping up as a planetary Enron. Enron was always the Banquo's ghost at the banquet of Bushonomics. The moguls of Enron really were the princes of contemporary business innovation, and the harbingers of the present day.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, society

Vancouver SF writer Crawford Kilian has started another blog; this one called Climate Wars, focused on the effects of climate change on human society. If you want a picture of what the future might bring, read this article by Gwyn Dyer.

About two years ago, I realised that the military in
various countries were starting to do climate change scenarios in-house --
scenarios that started with the scientific predictions about rising
temperatures, falling crop yields, and other physical effects, and examined
what that would do to politics and strategy.
The scenarios predicted failed states proliferating because
governments couldn't feed their people; waves of climate refugees washing
up against the borders of more fortunate countries; even wars between
countries that shared the same rivers. So I started interviewing everybody
I could get access to: not only senior military people but scientists,
diplomats and politicians.
About seventy interviews, a dozen countries and eighteen
months later, I have reached four conclusions that I didn't even suspect
when I began the process. The first is simply this: the scientists are
really scared. Their observations over the past two or three years suggest
that everything is happening a lot faster than their climate models
predicted.
This creates a dilemma for them, because for the past decade they have been
struggling against a well-funded campaign that cast doubt on the phenomenon
of climate change. Now, finally, people and even governments are listening.
Even in the United States, the world headquarters of climate change denial,
85 percent of the population now sees climate change as a major issue, and
both presidential candidates in last month's election promised 80 percent
cuts in American emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment

Is Britain going to follow the same path as Iceland, into near-bankruptcy and a financial meltdown? That possibility is raised in the articles linked in this post from Naked Capitalism.

For the first time since this crisis began eighteen months ago, I am seriously worried that British government is losing control.

The currency has fallen five cents today to $1.39 against the dollar. It is now perched precariously on a two-decade support line -- the levels tested in 2001 and 1992. If it breaks that line, traders may send it crashing down towards dollar parity.

The danger is blindingly obvious. The $4.4 trillion of foreign liabilities accumulated by UK banks are twice the size of the British economy. UK foreign reserves are virtually nothing at $60.6bn. (on this, more later in a piece I'm writing today)

Labels: Another thing to worry about, economics and finance

There are several disturbing reports coming out of China about human cases of avian flue that don't appear to be connected with outbreaks of the bird-to-bird H5N1 flu. This raises the spectre of asymptomatic avian flu in chickens. To put it mildly, this would not be good.

If we are producing, either through vaccine boo-boos or via natural selection (or both) an H5N1 virus that no longer causes chickens to die in staggering numbers but still continues to shed H5N1 virus, now that is scary news.

So what if, suddenly, we have lost our most important sentinels in the fight against pandemic H5N1? What if the virus has not changed, but the conditions for infection have? I am saying that if it is true that we have asymptomatic fowl in China and in other parts of Asia, and possibly Egypt, and as a result it is becoming easier for humans to get infected simply because fowl are not doing their duty and dying to warn us, then perhaps it is time to reassess that threat level once again.

When you lose a major source of intelligence when fighting a deadly foe, what do you do? When intelligence experts lose their eyes and ears, they ratchet up the threat level to compensate while they regroup and re-establish their eyes and ears.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

There have been reports that an outbreak of the plague hit an Al Qaeda training camp, forcing the closure of the camp, and possibly killing as many as 40 terrorists. If so, this would be a rather chilling development. Although modern antiboitics make it unlikely to be a serious threat to developed nations, it still has potential to cause quite a bit of havoc.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health, politics

I was going to hold off posting until tomorrow, but this story is too important, and I haven't seen a lot of details about it in the mainstream media.

There's a lot of seismic activity in the Yellowstone National Park. While it might mean nothing, it might also be a precursor to an eruption. And Yellowstone is the site of one of the world's supervolcanoes - an eruption there could have devastating consequences for much of the US and Canada.

The best site I've seen for keeping on top of what's happening is Alan Sullivan's Fresh Bilge, in particular these posts: Influence, Yellowstone Caveats and New Year Fireworks.

Update: And for a somewhat less worrisome view, here's this post from the Discovery News: Earth Impacts blog.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment, science

So if the bird flu doesn't get us, maybe extremely drug resistant tuberculosis will. Here's an article from the New York Times that will get you cringing the next time someone near you on the bus starts coughing.

When doctors here in Armenia said they would introduce me to XDR patients, I figured we would all be swathed in protective clothing and chat in muffled voices in a secure ward of a hospital. Instead, they simply led me outside to a public park, where Mr. Hakobyan sat on a bench with me.

“It’s pretty safe outside, because his coughs are dispersed,” one doctor explained, “but you wouldn’t want to be in a room or vehicle with him.” Then I asked Mr. Hakobyan how he had gotten to the park.

“A public bus,” he said.

He saw my look and added: “I have to take buses. I don’t have my own Lincoln Continental.” To his great credit, Mr. Hakobyan is trying to minimize his contact with others and doesn’t date, but he inevitably ends up mixing with people.

Afterward, I asked one of his doctors if Mr. Hakobyan could have spread his lethal infection to other bus passengers. “Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “There was one study that found that a single TB patient can infect 14 other people in the course of a single bus ride.”

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

Although the financial crisis may seem like something that doesn't affect ordinary people - after all, Wall Street is a different world than most of us live in - the credit crisis is beginning to have a big effect on world trade, and that is something that will affect all of us, sooner or later, if it continues to get worse. The London Banker has a good article on why we should be worried, especially since our governments seem to be ignoring the problem as they deal with more politically urgent issues like how to bail out the auto dinosaurs.

If cargo trade stops, a whole lot of supply chain disruption starts. If the ore doesn’t go to the refinery, there is no plate steel. If the plate steel doesn’t get shipped, there is nothing to fabricate into components. If there are no components, there is nothing to assemble in the factory. If the factory closes the assembly line, there are no finished goods. If there are no finished goods, there is nothing to restock the shelves of the shops. If there is nothing in the shops, the consumers don’t buy. If the consumers don’t buy, there is no Christmas.

Everyone along the supply chain should worry about their jobs. Many will lose their jobs sooner rather than later.

If cargo trade stops, the wheat doesn’t get exported. If the wheat doesn’t get exported, the mill has nothing to grind into flour. If there is no flour, the bakeries and food processors can’t produce bread and pasta and other foods. If there are no foods shipped from the bakeries and factories, there are no foods in the shops. If there are no foods in the shops, people go hungry. If people go hungry their children go hungry. When children go hungry, people riot and governments fall.

Everyone along the supply chain should worry about their children going hungry.

When that happens, everyone in governments should worry about the riots.

Controlling access to trade finance determines who loses their jobs, whose children go hungry, who riots, which governments fall. Without dedicated focus on the issue of trade finance and liquidity from those in the emerging world most interested in sustaining the growth of recent years, little progress can be expected.Trade finance is rapidly communicating the stress on bank liquidity to the real economy. It presents a systemic risk much more frightening than the collapsing value of bits of paper traded electronically in London and New York. It could collapse the employment, the well being and the political stability of most of the world’s population.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, economics and finance

While the financial crisis may have eased slightly for stock markets and big banks, there are major troubles in the financial systems that grease the wheels of trade between companies and nations.

We have been writing for a few weeks that the credit crisis had engulfed letters of credit, a crucial instrument in international trade, particularly of commodities (ex oil) and other raw materials. With banks hesitating to extend credit to each other much beyond overnight (finally changing only by virtue of massive liquidity measures and recapitalizations), they are leery of taking each other's letters of credit (when used to facilitate a sale, an L/C from a buyer must be accepted by the seller's bank of title to the goods to pass hands).

However, despite its importance, letters of credit are a low-margin, operationally intensive banking business that seldom gets the attention of senior management. With so many trouble areas competing for attention, this one has been largely neglected.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, economics and finance

Just in case you're loosing sleep over what's happenning to your RRSP's, here's an article from Discover outlining 10 ways the world could end to give you something that's really worth worrying about. There are links to several Discover articles - the ones on tsunamis caused by asteroid impacts are particularly scary.
Update: Fixed the link.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, space

Imagine yourself on an international flight, when the person next to you suddenly becomes ill. It happened to Jared Diamond recently.

All I could think of was another sick person, a man from Guangdong province in southern China, who spent the night of February 21, 2003, at the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong, an upscale establishment with a swimming pool, fitness center, restaurants, a bar, and all kinds of areas where visitors could socialize and connect. The man stayed a single night in room 911. Unfortunately for him and for many other people, he had picked up severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS—perhaps directly from an infected bat or from a small, arboreal mammal called a civet, common in one of Guangdong’s famous “wet markets” that sell wild animals for food, or else from a person or chain of people ultimately infected from one of those animal sources.

And all of us in the Toronto area know all too well what that lead to - 44 people dead from SARS.

The Discover article looks at what causes pandemics and where we might expect the next one to emerge.

n Venezuela today, the Ministry of Health keeps a lookout for the appearance of unusual numbers of dead wild monkeys, such as howler monkeys. Because the monkeys are so susceptible to yellow fever and can act as a reservoir from which the virus leaps to the human population, an explosion of monkey deaths serves as an advance warning system, signaling the need to vaccinate humans in the vicinity.

This pattern of cross-infection from animals to humans is par for the course in emerging infectious disease. In fact, the big killer diseases of history all came to us from microbes living in other species, overwhelmingly from other warm-blooded mammals and, to a lesser extent, from birds.

On reflection, this all makes sense. Each new animal host to which a microbe adapts represents a new habitat. It is easiest for a microbe to jump between closely related habitats, from an animal species with one sort of body chemistry to a closely related animal species with very similar body chemistry.

And in a fast-paced, globally linked world, it is something to worry about.

By connecting distant places, meanwhile, globalization permits the long-distance transfer of microbes along with their insect vectors and their human victims, as evidenced not only by the spread of HIV around the world, but also by North American cases of cholera and SARS brought by infected passengers on jet flights from South America and Asia, respectively. Indeed, when a flight from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles stopped in Lima in 1992, it picked up some seafood infected with the cholera then making the rounds in Peru. As a result, dozens of passengers who arrived in Los Angeles, some of whom then changed planes and flew on to Nevada and even as far as Japan, found that they had contracted cholera. Within days that single airplane spread cholera 10,000 miles around the whole rim of the Pacific Basin.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

While the uproar in global financial markets is certainly worrisome (yes, I've seen what TSX stock is selling for these days), what the credit crunch is doing to manufacturing and shipping could be even worse in the long run.

However, as has been discussed in gruesome detail, banks are reluctant to take credit exposures to other banks on the most plain vanilla. short term exposures, namely interbank lending. It has been a struggle for central banks to get banks to lend to each other for longer than overnight. Trade financing is a backwater, operationally intensive, low profit area that simply does not register on senior managements' or regulators' radars. And problems in this area would have virtually no impact on banks, so even acute problems here would simply not register, particularly in comparison to all the other fires that central banks are struggling to smother.

Further confirmation of our theories came from a UBS Equity Derivatives Macro Sales note from last week (hat tip reader Scott). The article indicates that one reason the scarcity of finance has not yet led to manufacturing shutdowns is that users are running down inventories.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, economics and finance

From Naked Capitalism, a couple of very disquieting articles.

The first on the decline of commodity shipping world-wide. If people aren't shipping bulk commodities, it means that real goods aren't being produced, which means that more jobs are at risk.

Dry bulk shippers are going the way of the global economy: under water. Among the shippers, DryShips and Excel Maritime Carriers have been hit particularly hard because of their large debtloads and significant spot market exposure. For the 13th straight day, the Baltic Dry Index, which measures dry bulk shipping rates on 40 routes across the world, tumbled Wednesday, falling 71 points to 1,221.

The BDI began its slide over the summer, and it has been taking shipping stocks down with it...

“Day rates have fallen below costs for some ship owners,” Landsberg said. “Rather than take inadequate fixtures, they are anchoring their vessels and letting them sit idle.”

Then there's this gloomy prediction from Nouriel Roubini - that regulators may need to close down financial markets in the near future.

``We've reached a situation of sheer panic,'' Roubini, who predicted the financial crisis in 2006, told a conference of hedge-fund managers in London today. ``There will be massive dumping of assets'' and ``hundreds of hedge funds are going to go bust,'' he said....

``Systemic risk has become bigger and bigger,'' Roubini said at the Hedge 2008 conference. ``We're seeing the beginning of a run on a big chunk of the hedge funds,'' and ``don't be surprised if policy makers need to close down markets for a week or two in coming days,'' he said.....

I wonder what effect that would have on the U.S. election?

Labels: Another thing to worry about, economics and finance

These videos of McCain/Palin supporters at a political rally are truly scary. Think Nazi Germany in 1933 scary.

First, the media should be ashamed of themselves for not covering this until now. The McCain-Palin supporters in my videos are not new, they are not exceptional, they are not hiding. This is who they are. It has been brewing for months, and not one mainstream media outlet has taken the time to expose them. Not one. And that is dangerous. If America is about to decide on its president based on this level of hate and ignorance, without a single question being asked as to why, then America is in for a rude awakening.

Update: Finally, some people in the media are beginning to take McCain and Palin to task for their dangerous and desperate rhetoric.

John McCain, you are no fool, and you understand the depths of hatred that surround the issue of race in this country. You also know that, post-9/11, to call someone a friend of a terrorist is a very serious matter. You also know we are a bitterly divided country on many other issues. You know that, sadly, in America, violence is always just a moment away. You know that there are plenty of crazy people out there.

Stop! Think! Your rallies are beginning to look, sound, feel and smell like lynch mobs.

John McCain, you're walking a perilous line. If you do not stand up for all that is good in America and declare that Senator Obama is a patriot, fit for office, and denounce your hate-filled supporters when they scream out "Terrorist" or "Kill him," history will hold you responsible for all that follows.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, politics

One of the predictions that climate scientists have been making about global warming is that it would happen first and most severely in the world's arctic regions. Recent observations show that this summer had the highest observed snow melting in northern Greenland - almost double the average of the last thirty years.

“Having such extreme melting so far north, where it is usually colder than the southern regions is extremely interesting,” Professor Tedesco said. “In 2007, the record occurred in southern Greenland, mostly at high elevation areas where in 2008 extreme snowmelt occurred along the northern coast.”

Tedesco says that the runoff is 88 percent higher than the 1979 – 2007 mean. In addition, analysis of ground measurements from World Meteorological Organization automatic weather stations located close to where the record snowmelt was observed indicate surface/air maximum temperatures up to 3° Celsius above average.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment

Economist Nouriel Roubini, who has been pretty accurate in his economic predictions about the recent crisis, thinks that the world may be on the brink of a global financial collapse and subsequent depression, and that only immediate and extreme measures by governments and national banks will stop it.

At this point the risk of an imminent stock market crash – like the one-day collapse of 20% plus in US stock prices in 1987 – cannot be ruled out as the financial system is breaking down, panic and lack of confidence in any counterparty is sharply rising and the investors have totally lost faith in the ability of policy authorities to control this meltdown.

This disconnect between more and more aggressive policy actions and easings and greater and greater strains in financial market is scary. When Bear Stearns’ creditors were bailed out to the tune of $30 bn in March the rally in equity, money and credit markets lasted eight weeks; when in July the US Treasury announced legislation to bail out the mortgage giants Fannie and Freddie the rally lasted four weeks; when the actual $200 billion rescue of these firms was undertaken and their $6 trillion liabilities taken over by the US government the rally lasted one day and by the next day the panic has moved to Lehman’s collapse; when AIG was bailed out to the tune of $85 billion the market did not even rally for a day and instead fell 5%. Next when the $700 billion US rescue package was passed by the US Senate and House markets fell another 7% in two days as there was no confidence in this flawed plan and the authorities. Next as authorities in the US and abroad took even more radical policy actions between October 6th and October 9th (payment of interest on reserves, doubling of the liquidity support of banks, extension of credit to the seized corporate sector, guarantees of bank deposits, plans to recapitalize banks, coordinated monetary policy easing, etc.) the stock markets and the credit markets and the money markets fell further and further and at an accelerated rates day after day all week including another 7% fall in U.S. equities today.

When in markets that are clearly way oversold even the most radical policy actions don’t provide rallies or relief to market participants you know that you are one step away from a market crack and a systemic financial sector and corporate sector collapse. A vicious circle of deleveraging, asset collapses, margin calls, cascading falls in asset prices well below falling fundamentals and panic is now underway.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, economics and finance

It's not hard to build a nuclear bomb, especially if you can get your hands on enriched uranium 235. US scientists were so certain that their design for a U-235 bomb would work that they didn't test it before dropping it on Hiroshima. (The Trinity test was of a plutonium-based bomb, which was much harder to design and build). So it's a matter of some concern that new techniques are making it much easier to enrich uranium to make bomb-grade material.

For the past four years, Charles Ferguson has been tracking the progress of a technology known as laser isotope separation. Still experimental, it requires only a warehouse-sized space and the kind of lasers within reach of a high school science geek. "The A. Q. Khan network is old-school," Ferguson says, referring to the Pakistani scientist who sold bomb secrets to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. "The next Khan network could use this new technique."

Labels: Another thing to worry about, technology

It appears that large quantities of methane are being released into the atmosphere from melting methane clathrates on the Arctic sea floor. This is not good news, as methane is 20 times as a potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, and huge quantities of it are buried on the ocean floor.

Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia's northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.

In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment

There's a new round of malware attacks out there in the wild -- these ones seem to be variants of "CNN Alerts" or "MSNBC Breaking News". No attachments are involved, but if you click on the link embedded in the email, your PC will no longer be yours.

From Jerry Pournelle's View from Chaos Manor:

This spam/malware campaign is very prolific. I am seeing dozens per minute at the office mail system.

The anti-virus guys aren't fully cleaning - or even detecting - this one. One indication of infection is a strangely-named (random letters) folder in your "Program Files" folder, along with some entries in your registry that help keep your computer infected.

One good place to go to help clean up your computer is here: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial42.html . Follow the instructions carefully to get their expert help in spyware/virus removal. I've had good experiences with their help.

Using Thunderbird instead of Outlook and Firefox instead of Internet Explorer will help to reduce the chances of getting infected by malware, as you'll at least be able to see the real URL in the email and Firefox won't run ActiveX controls, but it still pays to be careful.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, security

The New Yorker has a long article about antibiotic resistant bacteria, commonly known as superbugs. The article begins with a description of a bacteria called Klebsiella pneumoniae that caused an outbreak in a New York ICU in 2000 and has now spread to other hospitals in the US. I haven't heard of this one before -- most of the news coverage in Canada has been about C. difficile, which has killed dozens of people in Ontario hospitals and many more in Quebec.

In late autumn of 2000, in addition to pneumonia patients began contracting urinary-tract and bloodstream infections from Klebsiella. The latter are often lethal, since once Klebsiella infects the bloodstream it can spread to every organ in the body. Wetherbee reviewed procedures in the I.C.U. again and discovered that the Foley catheters, used to drain urine from the bladder, had become a common source of contamination; when emptying the urine bags, staff members inadvertently splashed infected urine onto their gloves and onto nearby machinery. “They were very effectively moving the organism from one bed to the next,” Wetherbee said. He ordered all the I.C.U.s to be decontaminated; the patients were temporarily moved out, supplies discarded, curtains changed, and each room was cleaned from floor to ceiling with a bleach solution. Even so, of the thirty-four patients with infections that year, nearly half died. The outbreak subsided in October, 2003, after even more stringent procedures for decontamination and hygiene were instituted: patients kept in isolation, and staff and visitors required to wear gloves, masks, and gowns at all times.

“My basic premise,” Wetherbee said, “is that you take a capable microörganism like Klebsiella and you put it through the gruelling test of being exposed to a broad spectrum of antibiotics and it will eventually defeat your efforts, as this one did.” Although Tisch Hospital has not had another outbreak, the bacteria appeared soon after at several hospitals in Brooklyn and one in Queens. When I spoke to infectious-disease experts this spring, I was told that the resistant Klebsiella had also appeared at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, in Manhattan, and in hospitals in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, and St. Louis.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health

Last winter was a bad one - that is to say, it was a normal Canadian winter rather than the extended autumns or springs we've been blessed with the last few years. But a according to climate research being done by some German scientists we could have a winter that would be a lot worse -- so bad that one winter could trigger an ice age.

THE last ice age 13,000 years ago took hold in just one year, more than ten times quicker than previously believed, scientists have warned.
Rather than a gradual cooling over a decade, the ice age plunged Europe into the deep freeze, German Research Centre for Geosciences at Potsdam said.

Cold, stormy conditions caused by an abrupt shift in atmospheric circulation froze the continent almost instantly during the Younger Dryas less than 13,000 years ago – a very recent period on a geological scale.

The new findings will add to fears of a serious risk of this happening again in the UK and western Europe – and soon.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment

Here's a new twist on the PC malware front. A new worm transcodes MP3 files into Windows Media format, adds an ASF wrapper and adds links to more copies of itself in the form of a codec. So if you're playing downloaded music and you get a prompt to install a codec to play the file - don't!

Advanced Systems Format is a Microsoft-defined container format for audio and video streams that can also hold arbitrary content such as images or links to Web resources.

If a user plays an infected music file, it will launch Internet Explorer and load a malicious Web page that asks the user to download a codec, a well-known trick to get someone to download malware.

The actual download is not a codec but a Trojan horse, which installs a proxy program on the PC, Emm said. The proxy program allows hackers to route other traffic through the compromised PC, helping the hacker essentially cover their tracks for other malicious activity, Emm said.

The malware has wormlike qualities. Once on a PC, it looks for MP3 or MP2 audio files, transcodes them to Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format, wraps them in an ASF container, and adds links to further copies of the malware, in the guise of a codec, according to another security analyst, Secure Computing.

The ".mp3" extension of the files is not modified, however, so victims may not immediately notice the change, according to Kaspersky Lab.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, security

If you want a sign of how serious and deep the current economic woes are, then look at what's happening in Las Vegas.

The onset of global slowdown, high petrol prices, and a nation-wide housing slump is spelling disaster for a town that owes every aspect of its wealth – from that gaudy replica of the Eiffel Tower to those scale models of Venetian canals and the Pyramids of Egypt – to its ability to inspire free-spending hedonism.

With Americans cutting back on luxuries, and the price of transport rocketing, the so-called "Vegas vacation" is facing the axe. This week, as the nation celebrated Independence Day, major hotels were taking stock of a fall in all-important room occupancy rates from their usually impressive 95 per cent levels to nearer 80 per cent.

More worryingly, new figures showed gambling revenue has also dropped – a further 3 per cent this month – starting a price war between worried firms anxious to lure punters back. Hotel rooms, which last year averaged $130 each, now go for less than $100 (£50).

At the vast Planet Hollywood resort, the clatter of fruit machines and poker chips was this week replaced by an uneasy – and, for Vegas, very unusual – calm. A large if slightly tatty double room could be found for less than $80.

Labels: Another thing to worry about

If you think carbon dioxide is an environmental problem, you ain't seen nothin' yet. According to a paper to be published in Nature tomorrow, release of methane frozen in ice and permafrost could cause a runaway greenhouse effect that could leave the Earth ice free in less than a century.

n his study's scenario, methane frozen together with water in what's known as a clathrate (or gas hydrate) became destabilized at lower latitudes and began to release methane gas. The warming this gas induced began a cascade of clathrate destabilization running up towards the poles, acting as a runaway feedback mechanism that rapidly changed the earth's climate from glacial to tropical.

Kennedy chose the period known as the Marinoan deglaciation because he sees parallels from that distant event with the rapid rise in temperatures the Earth is now experiencing due to increased so-called radiative forcing from higher levels of greenhouse gases.

This isn't a new scenario, BTW. I remember this being described in John Barnes' novel, Mother of Storms, more than ten years ago.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, environment

According to Michael Geist, the Canadian government may be considering a "3 strikes and you're cut off" law for Internet copyright violators. Given how essential the Internet has become in people's lives, I hardly need to say how profoundly awuful an idea this is. I very much doubt that it would stand up to a Charter challenge, but even the idea our government would consider such a stupid policy raises my blood pressure.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, Internet, politics

While H5N1 (avian) influenza is definitely something to be concerned about, personally I'm more worried about the possibility of contracting one of the new superbugs that seem to be running rampant in hospitals and healthcare settings.

A spore that can live and infect people for months! A CFR of nearly ten percent! Infections disgnosed and confirmed in 38 states (see map at left)! The possibility that if you try to calculate the number of unreported or undiagnosed cases, the total number of infected could reach half a million!

I am reminded of a line from the recent and groundbreaking film "Cloverfield." In the scene in question, youthful adults are fleeing from some incredible monster that is trashing Manhattan. They run straight into an Army patrol in a department store that has been turned into a command post.

One of the young adults blurts out, "What is that thing?"

The soldier replies, "Whatever it is, it's winning."

Labels: Another thing to worry about, health