Britain is in the grip of an Arctic freeze, says just about every local and national news bulletin. On the BBC’s Newsnight, the great Pax-man informed us that yesterday some 2.6 million Londoners skived off work, no doubt physically unable to prise open their frozen front doors, and with trains across the land grinding to a halt owing to the presence of crystallising dew on the lines.

Outside of the big smoke, the peasants of middle England are this week suffering temperatures as low as –7 degrees, with … wait for it … a windchill of at least –10 degrees owing to the “Arctic air” blowing in from northern Russia and Scandinavia. Oh my!

But hang on a minute. How is it that your average low-fat Nordic type can happily roll naked in the snow at –20 degrees following a 10 kilometre run along a frozen river, and then a moderately warm sauna? Or manage to get a diesel engine running at –35 degrees with the aid of a small amount of petrol mixed into the tank?

There has recently been some chatter within the Earth science community about the climate impact of heating from human energy use. We are talking here of atmospheric warming due to heat produced as a product of the 15.5 terawatts of power currently used throughout the world. At just three hundredths of a watt per square metre of the planet’s surface, the contribution of waste heat to climate change is relatively small when compared with that of greenhouse gases, but it could have a significant impact on local surface temperature measurements.

In the 16 December 2008 issue of Eos (it can take a few weeks for the wheezing pigeons to land on my windowsill!) is an introduction to the subject by Jos de Laat, an atmospheric physicist based at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute near Utrecht. Access to Eos is by subscription, so for your delectation I shall précis the argument here.

Human energy use is by definition concentrated in population centres, but as anyone who follows the maps presented on TV and Internet weather forecasts will understand, man-made heat in cities can have a regional effect. In the case of London, the sum of human activity leads to a micro-climate that extends at least as far as the M25 orbital motorway. And it’s not just waste heat; weather and climate in urban areas are affected by the presence of industrial aerosols and other pollutants.

Anthropogenic climate change sceptics such as Ross McKitrick & Patrick Michaels have claimed that warming measured over land is exaggerated due to non-climatic effects. However, their study includes a somewhat arbitrary mixing of potentially incompatible datasets, a time series too short for a proper local trend estimation, and a rather simplistic statistical analysis. Oslo-based climate scientist Rasmus Benestad has thoroughly dissected of the McKitrick & Michaels paper.

If waste heat can have a significant effect on atmospheric temperature on local and possibly regional scales, could this be affecting measurements that feed into climate models and thus contribute to our understanding of global warming? Possibly, but only to a limited degree. While temperature measurements tend to be made in the vicinity of at least some human activity, there is a growing number of measurement stations in remote locations, the calculation of global average temperature variations is a methodical affair, and there are established techniques to correct for so-called urbanisation effects (e.g., Hansen et al., 2001).

De Laat says that it is unclear what the magnitude and footprint of a waste heat source must be for it to affect local and regional temperatures. That statement may be contested by climate scientists such as Jim Hansen who have considered the issue in depth, but de Laat is right to point out the magnitude of the task required to narrow down the uncertainties associated with the climate impact of waste heat from human activities.

As an interesting historical aside, in the same issue of Eos is a letter from Colby College science historian James Fleming, who challenges pedagogue and former astrophysicist Eric Chaisson for failing to acknowledge in an article published in July of last year an early contribution to the debate concerning waste heat and climate.

Back in 1969, Russian climatologist Mikhail Budyko wrote that heat from human energy use was over and above climate forcing from anthropogenic greenhouse gases, and was likely to result in potentially damaging global warming within 200 years. That prediction was made nearly 40 years ago. Since then greenhouse gas emissions have rocketed, and we have learned a huge amount about atmospheric composition and dynamics.

As Madame Baroque says, it’s nice to see the Grauniad supporting poetry, but like my Hackney friend I’m not too sure about the offering of Sean O’Brien published in today’s edition of the paper. The poem was “written in response to the latest phase of conflict between Israel and Hamas”.

Katyusha, Katyusha,
Spear of desire,
Are there green pastures,
A brave desert rose,
Or must it be prison
With pillars of flame?

Apart from this being some of the most clichéd and meaningless verse I have ever read, it is in very bad taste given the reality of bodies, families and communities left in tatters by rockets, both Hamastani and Israeli. Human tragedy becomes sheer banality. How nice. Not.

Keen to find out whether cocaine has as devastating effect on honeybee society as it does on human communities, researchers in Australia and the US have been feeding the Bolivian marching powder to bees and monitoring its effects.

Macquarie University ethologist Andrew Barron and his colleagues found that cocaine stimulates bees’ reward centres, and quickly leads to dependency and withdrawal symptoms when withheld. The researchers conclude that bees are as susceptible as humans to cocaine’s allure, and the plan now is to identify the neural pathways targeted by the drug. The overall aim is, they say, to find out more about the mechanisms involved in human addiction.

Now I’m sure it’s all very interesting, but I cannot help wondering about the ethics of turning bees into drug fiends in the cause of scientific understanding. Especially when the animals in question have a few not insignificant differences to humans in terms of basic physiology. I understand that there are research studies of addiction that focus on Homo sapiens in all its glory and depravity, so how much relevant information can scientists hope to gather from Apis mellifera? Surely addiction is about more than the biochemical disruption of neuromodulator systems.

Today will be one second longer than yesterday. And a second longer than tomorrow.

Believe me, this sort of thing can be a real pain when it comes to doing observational astronomy. But at least it’s not as bad as adding 10 whole days, as Pope Gregory XIII did in 1582, when the existing Julian calendar was seriously out of sync with the the heavens. And pity the poor buggers born on 29 February, who only get to celebrate their birthdays once every four years! A humble leap second is but a blip by comparison.

Earlier this year I commented on an opinion piece in Eos, the house journal of the American Geophysical Union. Communications consultant Susan Joy Hassol argued that climate scientists should avoid using words such as “anthropogenic” and “theory” in their press releases and public outreach material, and in effect expunge doubt and uncertainty from public debate surrounding their work. In my view this is not the way to deal with public misunderstanding of climate change. People will instinctively mistrust those who feed them science-lite.

In a recent issue of New Scientist magazine is an interview with physicist and statistician Lenny Smith of the London School of Economics and University of Oxford, whose research focuses on the improvement of numerical models. Smith accepts that anthropogenic climate change is real, but he has much to say about the models used to predict future climate, and modellers who he believes are overselling their results. The problem, he says, is that some scientists go too far in interpreting model results, and downplay the uncertainties involved.

“The temptation to interpret model noise as forecast information invades our living rooms every night. TV weather-forecast maps look so realistic it is hard not to over-interpret tiny details – to imagine that the band of rain passing over Oxfordshire at noon next Saturday requires postponing a barbecue. Rain may indeed be likely somewhere in the area sometime on Saturday, but the details we see on TV forecasts are noise from the models. I think we are having exactly the same problem with climate projections.”

Smith stresses that the models are not useless, and are correct when it comes to the physics of climate change and global warming. But the models cannot give us reliable forecasts on a regional level, and they tend to be very sensitive to initial conditions that from real-world data may not be known to a high degree of accuracy. As someone who in a previous incarnation as a research physicist created models of the Earth’s upper atmosphere, I share Smith’s caution.

You can tweak the initial conditions imposed on atmospheric models, and the computer will churn out sometimes widely differing results. Running the models again and again with different boundary conditions (a method known as ensemble forecasting) can reinforce a particular interpretation, but the results will always contain some uncertainty. And that is fundamental to science, not just the virtual world of mathematical and numerical models.

Climate models have their limits, but we now understand a great deal about the Earth’s climate. Smith believes that the reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are credible, but we must read the qualifiers very carefully:

“In the most recent report, for instance, there is an explicit acknowledgement that the range of simulations in today’s models is too narrow. That is, future warming could be greater or less than what is suggested by the diversity between models in the report. It’s good that the qualifier is in there, but it is a hell of a qualifier to find on page 797.”

Failure to discuss the limits of our climate models is potentially dangerous, in that it could hinder society’s ability to respond to climate change, and cost the world valuable time. It also damages the credibility of science and scientists.

Brave Hamas child abusers rehearsing for martyrdom

Glorious Hamas martyr in a pile of rubble

I hope the Israeli politicians and military planners have a good endgame worked out. Military action to eradicate the threat from Hamas may be both morally justified and necessary to defend the residents of southern Israel, but like Ami Isseroff I have my doubts about what the operation can achieve in practical terms.

The Israeli Defence Forces will have to raise to the ground every Hamas building and take out every operative of the organisation from mid-level up if they are to have any hope of succeeding in this endeavour. As the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen points out, there is a limited amount of time before international pressure for a ceasefire becomes impossible to resist.

There are a few thoughtful commentators in western medialand, but the loudest voices are those of supposedly left-wing Israel haters, Jewish one-staters (Palestine) and outright antisemites. Norman Geras has pointed today to one of the more nauseating examples of their rhetorical overkill.

It beggars belief how anyone can write that:

“[t]errorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept.”

and go on to accuse Israel of terrorism while describing in celebratory tones the violence of Hamas against Israeli civilians and their own people in Gaza as legitimate resistance. To the greater glory of Allah? I think not. These people are best described as death-worshipping psychopaths.

And how does Nir Rosen justify his line?

“The weak have much less power than the strong, and can do much less damage. The Palestinians would not have ever bombed cafes or used home-made missiles if they had tanks and airplanes. It is only in the current context that their actions are justified, and there are obvious limits.”

If one-stater Rosen believes this stuff, and isn’t just writing to feed the anti-Israel prejudice of your typical Comment is Free reader (it has been known), then he is devoid of functioning brain cells, let alone moral sensibility. This, despite the many references in his long and tortured essay to ethics and the justification for violent resistance to Israeli occupation.

Here are some photos from the Boxing Day 2008 meet of the Blackheath Morris Men and Fowlers Molly. It was a very cold day to be hanging around outside the local pubs, and with my trembling hands the camera work suffered. Click on the pics for slightly higher resolution versions.

“I wish I hadn’t forgotten me thermal undies!”

“Hands out of pockets!” “You must be joking!”

Margaret with gin carrier

“All right, guvnor?”

Frightening the children

“Come here, big boy!”

The next folk arts event I shall attend will be the Twelfth Night celebrations at Bankside. On the afternoon of 4 January, Fowlers Molly will dance at the George Inn in Southwark following the the arrival of the Holly Man from the Thames, and the Lions Part Mummers play by the jetty outside Shakespeare’s Globe theatre. See here for a pictorial record of last year’s do.

New brain cells (green) induced in a heroin damaged brain by transplantation of neural stem cells
(source: Hebrew University of Jersusalem)

Medical scientist Joseph Yanai and his colleagues at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Duke University in the US have found that they can reverse brain birth defects in mice using embryonic stem cells.

Neural defects that lead to learning disabilities are particularly difficult to treat as the substances responsible for the abnormalities act throughout the brain. With nervous system disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, the effects are more local.

Embryonic neural stem cells migrate in the brain, seek out the deficiency that causes the defect, and divide into the types of cells needed to repair the damage. In this way, Yanai and his fellow researchers were able to reverse brain birth defects in the offspring of pregnant mice exposed to organophosphate pesticide and diamorphine (heroin). They did this by transplanting stem cells directly into the brains of the foetal mice.

The scientists are now looking for a less invasive way of administering stem cells, in order to develop a clinically feasible therapy. The full results of the research will be presented next year in Barcelona at the seventh annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.

We are facing our inevitable comeuppance, say a gaggle of Anglican Bishops in an I told you so attack on Britain’s Labour government, the buy now pay never economic policies of which the comfortably-lifestyled and well fed priests describe as “morally corrupt”.

Immoral though the government’s policies may be, the criticism is politically naïve as it appears to be directed solely at New Labour. The bishops have been praised by leading conservatives, yet it is Tory economic thinking that the government has taken to its logical conclusion. The 1980s have come back to bite us in the bum, and it’s a little late for the Church to be joining the resistance.

While agreeing in principle with much of what the bishops say, the message comes from individuals who serve an institution at the heart of the British establishment, and which only survives thanks to some occasionally amoral investments. One of the clerics I know personally. He is not a man I would rely on in a crisis, and to my mind his comments on disasters brought about by others carry little weight.

Perhaps we should blame Robert Peston for the economic catastrophe befalling us, and offer him in sacrifice to appease the angry gods. But we should never forget that it was the BBC’s booming business editor who first suggested that the government is rewarding the feckless and betraying those who followed previous injunctions to be financially prudent and save.

I would rather be living elsewhere in Europe during this global recession. But with Sterling going down the toilet of the international currency market this is not a realistic option.

The title of this post is the name of a film by Hans Weingartner. I first saw the movie when it was released in 2005. It was broadcast on British television early this morning, which is why the title springs to mind.