The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing.

• JOHN REILLY,
• of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, on global output of carbon dioxide jumping by the biggest amount on record in 2010.

WASHINGTON) — The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.

The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.

"The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing," said John Reilly, co-director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.

The world pumped about 564 million more tons (512 million metric tons) of carbon into the air in 2010 than it did in 2009. That's an increase of 6 percent. That amount of extra pollution eclipses the individual emissions of all but three countries — China, the United States and India, the world's top producers of greenhouse gases.

It is a "monster" increase that is unheard of, said Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate Department of Energy figures in the past.

Extra pollution in China and the U.S. account for more than half the increase in emissions last year, Marland said.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2098671,00.html#ixzz1cjFwjRL5

I was surprised.

I guess Penn and Teller "got fooled" by this well-known memory trick, the last act, Morgan and West, on the Pommy show "Penn And Teller — Fool Us", episode 5... I could be wrong though...

My memory is like a sieve... I need prompts and pegs in order to remember where to find information. I triple check if I have locked the car or the house and sometimes I still don't remember what I was doing on the third go... Information in my brain is like a curry paste but I can sort it out in a cogent way with some massive time delay and twist of the computer keyboard and its gigabytes... I could not, for example, be like a pianist who has learned every notes and precise fingering for the entire performance of a Rachmaninov concerto number 3 and perform it brilliantly... I'd loose the plot on the third note...

Compared to such an act of musical memorisation, many a simple magic trick is child's play... The one with the silhouettes fooled Penn and Teller enough to first make them wrongly guess. They realised too late how "they were fooled"... My feeling is that they were too focused on the deck of cards.

As kids, one was always amazed to see these itinerant magicians perform in Europe's towns... One of the most dazzling trick was performed by a duo of magicians, one blindfolded at a desk and the other walking amongst the crowd... The one amongst the crowd would ask a discreet question to an audience member — say, write or whisper one's profession or ambition or whatever, and then loudly ask the masked magician to guess the word written or whispered...
10 out of ten, one hundred out of 100... The masked person was never wrong. Yet there was no way in the world he/she could have heard or seen what was going on... The crowds were impressed...

My dad — my mentor and a fantastic polymath, who taught me how to try to become a polymath myself (I am still trying) — explained the trick to me when I was five years old, between teaching me logarithms and how to paint in three dimensions with oils. It's as ancient as Rome. Magic never looked the same again.

The trick, and I suppose that of the act of Morgan And West that fooled Penn and Teller, is a simple/complex memorisation of word permutations. One needs a solid memory like that of a professional pianist. Words in the questions from one magician to the other are specific to the answer required, and the vernacular is like a code. "And now who do we have here?' "And this one?" "What about this one" "what do you think this one is?" the way the question is set contains most of the answer, the intonation of the question often contains the other part.  Sometimes when the second magician at the desk, away from the action, is not blindfolded, further indication of the answers are contained in the fingers of the magician working the room. A discreet show of hand with various numbers of fingers showing can give the precise answers to the other magician. The guess is not a guess nor a divination.

With this simple trick, complexed by the 'atmosphere" of jovialities, a whole question could be allocated for each silhouette. For example "who is this one?" could mean "Abraham Lincoln"... Piece of cake.

At the end of the show, Penn and Teller did a clever act with a nail gun... Spectacular! They showed how in a nail gun cartridge, some nails can be removed and then the order of nail versus spaces memorised then placed back inside the machine... The demonstration was about to show how magicians use their memory to the hilt — even reverse counting the nails versus the blanks fired into body parts when in doubt, as if danger was ever present should the memory miss the sequence... In fact, the simple trick is to have a hidden secret button on the machine that will release the air as if it was firing a nail but is only pushing air through the nozzle... The illusion here is to act in a way that let the audience believe that one has memorised the nail sequence and that there is an ever present danger.

Code-breakers, have this in common with magicians. They know or guess the structure of messages in order to decipher the messages. While code breaking is complex work since one at first does not know the grammar of communication being used, the magicians create their own vernacular for the trick — and they are extremely good at it. Memorisation of meaning — double/single secret meanings is the key. It can be several ways for example a question starting by "do you..." might mean the answer starts with an "e". And so on... But the next question starting with "do you" might mean the answers starts with an "f"... This demands a lot of training, like learning a separate language within a language...

All this to harp about the importance of memory and knowledge manipulation in what we do... This is why I'm far more creative than performance oriented. I was in a school play only once (I was "sacked" by age six) and I even could not play a quiet mushroom that was supposed to stay still during the performance. This is why I let the computer do the repeat stuff... I never perform the same thing twice. My memory fights against repeat. A concert pianist and a magician are both all about precision and repeat. Science is about letting nature repeat itself so we can confirm a result, while economy and politics is about pulling levers — like artists place brush to canvas with the hope it will work, may be or not...

On the scientific levels, there are some clever charlatans out there who use the garb of scientific knowledge and at one stage of the trick will pull a discreet swifty in line with a quick switch of the card deck from a magician...

At this level when one studies the various information channels about climate change, there are some magicians that could make us believe that global warming is baloney... They are very clever and can suck you in as you get dazzled and loose the plot for a mini-second. These are not the boorish Lord Monckton's heavy boots and ridiculous exposés... No, these charlatans cleverly make sense apart from a tiny flaw that could appear plausible unless one studies it very carefully and sees a devious sophism. By now they have dislocated the relationship between CO2 and global warming in an apparent seamless switcheroo.

I will bring example of such deceit to the fore in the near future in this line of blogs... Beware. Be careful, be aware of the clever fools... if you see what I mean as part of these word tricks...

Global warming is real and is induced by human activities — via the emission of CO2 and methane, principally... No magic here just a complex set of scientific analysis.

Britain's carbon emissions grew faster than the economy last year for the first time since 1996, as a cash-strapped population relegated the environment down its league of concerns and spent more money keeping warm, according to a new report.

The rise in Britain's so-called carbon intensity increases the danger that the country will miss legally binding targets on reducing emissions, warns PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the consultancy behind the report.

Furthermore, it found that Britain's rising carbon intensity is part of a worldwide trend which threatens to push global warming above a two-degree Celsius increase on pre-industrial levels.

This is the temperature that the G8 group of leading economies has pledged not to breach in the hope of avoiding the worst consequences of climate change.

Leo Johnson, partner for sustainability and climate change at PwC, said: "Our analysis points unambiguously towards one conclusion, that we are at the limits of what is achievable in terms of carbon reduction.

"The G20 economies have moved from travelling too slowly in the right direction to travelling in the wrong direction. The results call into question the likelihood of global decarbonisation ever happening rapidly enough to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius," Mr Johnson added.

Experts calculate that limiting global warming to 2 degrees would require a 4.8 per cent decrease in carbon intensity every year until 2050 – meaning that emissions need to grow by 4.8 per cent less than the economy every year over that period.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/hardup-uk-puts-climate-change-on-back-burner-6258246.html?printService=print

In the end, we'll all pay for this... The bill will be sent to us via more violent storms, flash floods and crop devastating droughts... Insurance premiums, of course, will go through the roof while bankers will holiday in the Bahamas in the non-hurricane season. Fair's fair...

The Federal Government's carbon pricing legislation has been passed by the Senate, clearing the way for the plan to take effect from the middle of next year.

After two failed attempts, months of negotiations, and many hours of parliamentary debate, the Government and Greens used their numbers in the Senate to force a final vote today.

Supporters of the plan packed the public galleries to see the bills pass at the end of what Finance Minister Penny Wong said had been a "long path to this day".

"It's a 'green letter day' but one which will echo down the ages ... there's a celebration going on in this nation today," Greens leader Bob Brown said.

"People 50 or 500 years from now will thank us for the passage of this legislation."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-08/carbon-tax-passes-senate/3652438

On the basics, the science of climate change is pretty straightforward. Carbon dioxide released into the air—whether through the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation or other natural causes—adds to the greenhouse effect, which traps more solar energy in the atmosphere and warms the planet. But just how this will happen—how fast and exactly how the planet and the climate will respond to more carbon and more warming—gets very complicated very quickly. There are wild cards in the climate system, some of which—if they flip the wrong way—could vastly accelerate global warming well beyond anything most climate models predict.

One of those wild cards is the 1,672 billion tonnes of carbon equivalent trapped in the form of methane in the Arctic permafrost, the soils kept frozen by the far North's extreme temperatures. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas—it has 20 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide—and the total amount of carbon equivalent in the Arctic permafrost is 250 times greater than annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. As the Arctic warms—which it's doing rather rapidly—there's a risk that the permafrost could become less than permanent, releasing some of that trapped methane into the air, which would then accelerate warming, leading to more Arctic melt, more methane emissions...so on and so on. Climate scientists call this a "feedback loop"—and if it happens soon, you could just call us screwed.

http://regmorrison.edublogs.org/