Archive for July 2010
Odd prose from the Bangkok Post
Posted on: July 29, 2010
The process of national reconciliation does not stand a chance even of getting started.
It called for a ban on the use of shackles in order to conform with the United Nations’ principle on human rights.
Home care from migrant women perfectly answers their needs.
Where will they live the last days when the hospital bills have exhausted their life long savings?
When they insist on staying underground they get arrested.
The legal wage and health welfare do not come with their legal status.
Death has to stare you in the face in order to understand her feelings.
Thailand is quickly becoming an ageing society with little support for things to come.
Most elderly women cannot dream to have this.
- Two NY Times columnists appeared in the Bangkok Post days apart pushing the global warming agenda and challenging skeptics with temperature data from the heat wave (Our beaker is on the boil, Bangkok Post, July 21, 2010; and Who cooked the planet, Bangkok Post, July 27, 2010).
- The real issues that separate climate science and its critics have little to do with heat waves or cold waves. They address the question of whether climate science has been faithful to science in making its case for catastrophic man-made climate change controllable by human intervention [LINK] ; that is, whether there is catastrophe in climate change and whether a scientific basis exists for the proposed policy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.
- The catastrophe part of the argument includes extreme weather, rising seas, water shortages, crop failures, deforestation, and desertification. In the wake the Climategate scandas climate science has withdrawn most of these claims. The slew of retractions leaves global warming without any claim to catastrophe and therefore with little leverage to influence policy.
- Besides catastrophe, there are also serious questions about global warming theory that include the central question of whether it is possible to control temperature by making changes to our use of fossil fuels. Such policy implications are derived from relationships that are built into the the climate models on which climate science relies that are pre-programmed with the assumed relationships such that these assumptions predetermine the predictions of the models.
- Climate science has not presented convincing evidence that changes in fossil fuel consumption will change temperature. Correlation alone does not tell us whether carbon dioxide causes temperature or whether temperature causes carbon dioxide or whether a third unobserved variable causes both temperature and carbon dioxide. Only some kind of intervention experiment or controlled laboratory experiment can determine cause and effect – particularly that the temperature effect of carbon dioxide exists in the magnitude needed for the proposed policy to work.
- Your columnists seem convinced that the heat wave has proven the climate models to be correct. If they took a look at the predicted temperature curve against the data they would think otherwise as there is a wide divergence between prediction and reality [LINK] . In every case where their predictions could be checked against data, the models have failed. The only predictions that remain standing are the ones sufficiently in the future to evade verification.
- The many humiliating retractions the IPCC were forced to make and the recent audit of their 2007 report by Dutch scientists have damaged their credibility possibly beyond repair. Aside from inexplicable school boy errors, the audit also found a systematic bias in the IPCC to link climate change with catastrophe. It will take more than a heat wave to get policy makers to trust them again.
Press Conference at the Launch of the IPCC Synthesis Report (Tivoli Conference Center, Lumbye Room) (REMARKS, Q&A) (with Mrs. Ban) (Nesirky)
Odd prose from the Bangkok Post
Posted on: July 26, 2010
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Pyongyang backhanded the United Nations.
International observers determined the events that sank the Cheonan.
The government has repeatedly slapped the UN and other diplomatic groups.
North Korea is a long-time security threat.
Pyongyang should stop its rabble-rousing threats.
South Korea has conducted military exercises without a threat towards North Korea.
Instead of UN engagement with North Korea, the world is left with large war games.
China is giving North Korea cover for the most scandalous and harmful behavior.
The continual shielding of North Korea is a shocking act by China.
North Korea denied the act.
That was a serious act of war.
North Korea increased tension in the region with a number of steps.
North Korea could lower the growing tension with merely a few steps.
Glacier mass balance
Posted on: July 23, 2010
- The dynamics of glaciers that feed rivers are best understood in terms of a mass balance which states essentially that: input – output = accumulation.
- The input term is usually the amount of precipitation in the glacial basin that flows to the glacier. The output term is the meltwater that feeds the river plus evaporation. If the accumulation is positive the glacier is growing and if it is negative it means that the glacier is shrinking.
- If it is shrinking it could mean one of two things. Either the amount of precipitation is declining relative to the melt rate; or the melt rate is increasing relative to precipitation. There is a big difference between these two scenarios in terms of water flow in downstream rivers.
- In the former case, the water flow in downstream rivers would remain unchanged while in the latter case, there would be an increase in flow possibly associated with rising river levels and flooding. In the absence of rising river levels downstream, it is not possible to conclude that the glacier is retreating because of an increase in the melt rate.
- Yet, all instances of glacial retreat are presented by climate science as an effect of increased melt rate caused by global warming without providing the necessary data on changes in the flow rates of downstream rivers that the glacier feeds.
Chaamjamal, Thailand
Glacial melt-water arithmetic
Posted on: July 22, 2010
According to Nature News (http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100610/full/news.2010.292.html) , melt water supplies 1.5 times other sources to the Indus and 0.25 times other sources to the Brahmaputra and glacial melt water constitutes 40% of the total melt water with the balance coming from seasonal snowfall.
The melt water percentage is 1.5/2.5 = 60% for the Indus and 0.25/1.25 = 20% for the Brahmaputra. The glacial melt water portion of the total melt water is 40% for both rivers. Therefore, the glacial melt water percentage is 0.6*0.4 = 24% for the Indus and 0.2*0.4 = 8% for the Brahmaputra.
Cha-am Jamal
Thailand
Himalayan glaciers melting again
Posted on: July 22, 2010
Reference: Our beaker is on the boil, Bangkok Post, July 21, 2010
In its 2007 assessment of climate change, the IPCC had warned that global warming is causing Himalayan glaciers to melt and recede and that this process, unchecked by their prescribed intervention of carbon emission reduction, would dry up Asia’s great rivers including the Yellow, the Yangtze, the Mekong, and the Ganges and leave more than a billion people without water (Himalayan glacier melts to hit billions of poor, Bangkok Post, December 7, 2009).
Skeptics were quick to point out that glacial meltwater plays a very minor role in feeding these rivers and that therefore the loss of glaciers would not affect these rivers in the way postulated by the IPCC. The IPCC was forced to make a full retraction of this assessment.
Soon thereafter climate scientists started looking for rivers in the region that do depend on meltwater from Himalayan glaciers in order to resurrect their glacial-melt agenda. They came up with the Indus and Brahmaputra rivers as possible candidates on the basis of their dependence on glaciers (Our beaker is on the boil, Bangkok Post, July 21, 2010).
The Brahmaputra does receive a greater portion of its water from glacial melt than the Ganges, but at about 8% or so it is still too small a fraction to cause the river to “dry up” without glacial meltwater. The Indus, however, is a different story for there the complete loss of glacial meltwater would cause a 24% decline in flow and that would indeed be a catastrophic impact.
There is a small problem with geography, however. The source of these rivers is not in the region where the receding glacier is identified. In particular, the source of the Indus is in the Karakoram range where most glaciers – including the Siachen glacier that feeds the Indus – are growing and advancing and certainly not receding.
The assertion that global warming will cause the Indus and Brahmaputra to run dry is based on data from the wrong glacier and is therefore not valid. It is yet another example where climate science has attempted to generalize local data when such generalization is not possible. All glaciers in the Himalayas are not receding. Many are advancing and many more are at steady state – neither advancing nor retreating; but you won’t hear about them from climate scientists because they cannot be used to evoke fear and loathing of carbon dioxide. This kind of fear based activism appears to be an integral and important part of the science of climate science.
Cha-am Jamal
Thailand
Odd prose from the Bangkok Post
Posted on: July 21, 2010
- In: Bangkok Post | odd prose | Thailand
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It is possible to agree that Mr Korkaew might say something harsh.
The law does not recognise that a person might violate the law by speech.
There is a need to take action against illegal writing or speech which incites.
The blocking of websites has spread the idea that censorship is a policy and weapon of the government and other authorities.
Such questionable censorship seems to have gained ground.
The censorship board has the power to gag TV and radio material before it is broadcast.
The EC may believe Mr Korkaew will go beyond speech permitted by election candidates.
Under common practice and the Constitution, each citizen has freedom of speech.
Mr Praphan said that the speeches, which he has not heard, could be inappropriate.
- In: Bangkok Post | global warming | Nature | Thailand
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- All through August of 2008 the National Disaster Warning Centre of Thailand warned citizens living in Bangkok and Samut Prakarn provinces to prepare for disaster because the worst storm and storm surge in 50 years was predicted to hit the region in August or September due to climate change.
- The forecasters said that the storm would have winds of 118 km/hr, waves 2.2 to 4.5 meters, and a huge storm surge that would wipe out everything in its path. These warnings appeared in various forms almost daily in newspapers and television and caused widespread panic and economic cost in the affected regions.
- The dreaded storm surge never came. The heroic weather forecasters who had become media darlings overnight quietly faded from public view and the whole sordid affair was soon forgotten.
Cha-am Jamal, Thailand
- In: Bangkok Post | politics | Thailand
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Reference: Quick probe now unlikely, Bangkok Post, July 20, 2010
Truth and reconciliation commissions, normally tasked with exposing ugly truths about the past – rather than burying them – as a way of resolving social bifurcation, have historically been formed by a succeeding government to investigate the wrongdoings of a prior government. The two cases I know of where a truth commission was authorized by the sitting government are Thailand’s truth commission of 2010 and Canada’s truth commission of 2008.
Thailand’s case is unique and it likely requires a home grown Thai approach without boilerplate guidelines from other truth commissions imposed on Mr Kanit; but if there is a model that Thailand could use to learn from history one would think that the Canadian commission would serve that purpose better than any truth commission ordered by one government to investigate wrongdoings of another.
The Canadian truth commission was set up for reconciliation between aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians with respect to acrimony over the residential school scandal. The necessary details and documents may be available from the embassy.
Cha-am Jamal
Thailand
Goofy Bureaucratese
Posted on: July 19, 2010
Interview with Jeremy Browne MP, Minister of State, UK, by the Bangkok Post
Question: British citizens in Thailand are concerned about the high fees charged by the Embassy for routine services. Why is the fee for passport renewal 150 pounds in Bangkok and only 77 pounds in London?
Answer: The Thai government helped to keep our staff safe during the red shirt protests for which we are very grateful. It was a difficult time for everyone and one of our primary concerns was for the safety of not just our staff but our customers too.
Thongchai Thailand 