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Climate change explained through probability and risk: It doesn’t matter if it exists, we should act anyway

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Craven has created a series of fun, educating videos that should be watched by all.Science teacher Greg Craven posted a video entitled ‘The Scariest Video you’ll ever see’ on Youtube in June 2007. The ten minute video garnered over 7000 replies including many criticisms from global warming sceptics. Craven decided to rebut these criticisms. He spent four months of his spare time researching data on the debate, ticking off each criticism that had been made. He then released “How It All Ends”, another ten minute video but this time with an ‘expansion pack’ of videos going into each of his arguments in exhaustive detail.

 

Interestingly, much of the content of the six-hour, 44 part series is not devoted to proving whether global warming is happening or not, or whether man is causing it or not. He looks instead at the four main outcomes: global warming exists and we do something, it exists and we don’t do something, it doesn’t exist and we do nothing or it doesn’t exist and we do something. He concluded the costs of doing nothing far outweigh the cost of doing something, so it makes sense to take action even if we don’t know whether global warming is happening or not.

A site has also started up devoted to the videos, where the forum members critique and find responses to each new criticism as it comes through on Youtube. The efforts of these people to encourage reasoned debate is heartening. Many of the arguments against combating climate change revolve around the fact that science doesn’t agree 100% with the precise outcome. Well, science never will agree, not totally, especially with oil industry-paid advocates in the mix. But even without more and more evidence leaning towards the ‘we need to do something camp’, the logical thing to do is to take action, even if it turns out we didn’t need to. There’s also a great interview with Kim Stanley Robinson at BLDGBLOG about this.

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Floating houses – Dealing with flooding without fighting it

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One of Dutch architect Koen Olthuis’s floating housesWith floods again occupying many of us here in the UK, those living on the floodplain are searching increasingly for an insurance policy that will cover them for any water-related inundation. Recently the chief executive of the Thames Gateway London Partnership said of the river:

“There will be at some stage a massive catastrophic event that will finally goad us into doing something.” His advice? “Everybody should get a boat.”

However, other less sensationalist solutions are being thought about if our country is starting to go through a wet patch. Many of these solutions originate in Holland, two thirds of which is below sea level. Architect Koen Olthuis’s houses that float on hollow concrete bases that move up and down with the water level are an innovative way to have a normal home-like existence whilst working with the water instead of trying to stop it. There are two good interviews with the architect at Inhabitat and Washington Technology.

Also in the guardian today – architects are designing a city in the United Arab Emirates that is 99% waste efficient and uses 100% renewable power, in a quest to create a completely sustainable city.

[story and image via the Guardian]

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The monsters at the bottom of black holes!

BlackHole No, it’s not the title of some best-forgotten B-movie, but some high-brow astrophysics that – in all honesty – I can’t say I fully understand. But it’s something to do with quantum physics, entropy and super-massive black holes:

“Although Hawking radiation implies that black holes contain all this disorder, scientists have been puzzled as to where it all comes from. The collapsing stars that turn into black holes do not start out with nearly enough. How does the matter become so scrambled?

Frampton’s team argues that the extra entropy is generated by the random nature of quantum physics. This should sometimes allow a collapsing ball of matter to spontaneously transform into something called a “monster” – an arrangement of matter that has maximum disorder, with particles travelling at high speed in random directions.”

These “monsters” could help explain our way to a quantum theory of gravity, apparently. It’s times like this I wish I’d stuck with science instead of engineering. [Image courtesy NASA]

[tags]space, black holes, monsters, physics[/tags]
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Futurismic hosting hiccups

Hello, boys and girls. You may or may not have noticed that Futurismic had a bit of downtime today.

Our hosting company informs us that this is due to the site hogging CPU resources – which means there’s either a lot more of you reading than we thought, that something’s broken, or that someone somewhere is playing a game we Brits refer to as “silly buggers”.

However, until we can accurately determine the source of the problem, we need to take measures to make sure it doesn’t happen again. So if you notice anything odd or untoward here in the next week or so, please bear with us.

It may be that we’re forced to deactivate the comments at some point, but this will not be a permanent change by any means.

And please also rest assured we’re working hard on a long term solution to the problems, which we hope to be able to make an announcement about very soon.

Thanks for reading!

[tags]Futurismic, blog, hosting, problems[/tags]
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Friday Free Fiction for 18th January

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Hi folks – your Free Fiction was somewhat delayed this week thanks to some hosting-related downtime. But better late than never, eh?

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They’re keeping it old-school at Manybooks.net, as is traditional:

 

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David Barr Kirtley has the give-away bug; you can read “Save me Plz” and “Blood of Virgins” on his website, both of which appeared originally in Realms of Fantasy.

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From the folks at Orbit:

It’s only a …er… matter of weeks before [the new Iain M. Banks novel] Matter arrives in bookstores. The first Culture novel since Look to Windward, Matter is one of the most anticipated science fiction novels coming out this year. We’re thrilled to be publishing it, and thrilled to offer a first look at the stunning prologue.

At the risk of sounding boastful, I’ll tell you that I was lucky enough to be sent an ARC of Matter, and I can assure you it’s a book you’ll want to read if you have even the slightest fondness for space opera with a twist. Go check out that prologue if you don’t believe me – Iain M. Banks isn’t my authorial hero for nothing, you know..

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Free fiction in audio format!

How’s about John Wyndham‘s classic cosy catastrophe Day of the Triffids?

And over at Podiobooks you can download a free audiobook version of Grey by Jon Armstrong, a book originally published by Night Shade Books in February 2007.

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From my good web-buddy Doctor James “Big Dumb Object” Bloomer:

The new issue of Spacesuits and Sixguns Magazine is online and it includes my story “A Letter Of Complaint“. If you’ve ever done your grocery shopping online (as is increasingly common in the UK) – and have been left baffled at the produce that actually turns up – then this one is for you.

Get your shopping delivered? You lazy bum, James – I walk to the shops and hence lower my carbon footprint! 🙂 Well done on the story, man.

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You’d have to have been very busy (or very cynical) not to have noticed it’s Nebula season.

In addition to all their other hard work (without some of which these posts would be almost impossible) the SF Signal gang are keeping a list of Nebula nominated fiction complete with links to freely readable online versions where available.

So if you like your free fiction fresh, up-to-date and award nominated, that’s probably your best first port of call right now.

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It looks like the Friday Flash Fictioneers are up to nearly full complement this week. Let’s see what we have:

Neil Beynon has “The Cloud“, Dan Pawley is “Adrift“, Gareth L Powell is at “The Highest Point“, and Martin McGrath is “Leaving The World” – a definite thematic drift upwards, wouldn’t you say?

Down here on the ground, though, Gareth D Jones has a “Prequel“, Shaun C Green has a “Human Interest Story“, and yours truly takes on “Sturgeon’s Law” (hopefully without falling foul of it).

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Flash fiction bonus: more flash to read, and a market to submit to! Go take a look at the aptly named FlashFictionOnline.com.

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And a non-fiction bonus, via BoingBoing:

Julian Dibbell has released the text of his ground-breaking “My Tiny Life” as a free download through Lulu.com.

Part memoir and part ethnography, My Tiny Life is about the social life of the online, text-based virtual world LambdaMOO and my own brief encounter with it in the early ’90s. Andrew Leonard, in Salon, called it “the best book yet on the meaning of online life.”

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OK folks, that’s your lot for this week.

Don’t forget, we’re always wanting your tips, recommendations and shameless self-plugs. Even if your work turns up in one of the sites in the sidebar, we’ll still give it a mention here if you just let us know about it! Just drop me a line via the Staff page.

Have a great weekend!

[tags]free, fiction, stories, online[/tags]

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