2012 – Page 50 – Wis[s]e Words

More proof that climate change is real — as if any was needed

Published on April 9, 2012Leave a comment

Found via Alex, here are two Dutch climate researchers at Realclimate, who found a 1981 climate prediction by denialist bogeyman James Hansen:

To conclude, a projection from 1981 for rising temperatures in a major science journal, at a time that the temperature rise was not yet obvious in the observations, has been found to agree well with the observations since then, underestimating the observed trend by about 30%, and easily beating naive predictions of no-change or a linear continuation of trends. It is also a nice example of a statement based on theory that could be falsified and up to now has withstood the test. The “global warming hypothesis” has been developed according to the principles of sound science.

Which is another indication that even more than thirty years ago the implications for climate change were known or at least suspected. That we’re still talking about the climate change “controversy” is purely due to political machinations by economic interests who have a financial interest in denying climate change. Thirty years onwards the evidence is now undeniable, yet the same well funded “skeptics” are still obstructing progress towards mediating climate change. Unlike with the destruction of the ozone layer, where we did manage –barely– to start reversing the damage just in time (and it will still take decades to completely restore the ozone layer) climate change is too far to be stopped or reversed easily and the best we can do now is just migitate the consequences.

Most of the blame for that has to lie with the skeptics: there was a worldwide consensus at the end of the eighties that climate change was real and needed to be combatted. Yet effective measures have remained rare, due to the lobbying efforts of the industries that would be most affected by such measures. They took the lobying infrastructure set up earlier to help out the tobacco industry and used it to discredit climate change as a concept. The end result is thirty years of wasted time as we had to wait until climate change was undeniably real, even for (some) Republicans. Climate change was in any case unavoidable, as it was already ongoing when we first started to suspect it, but we could’ve used those three decades to make the end point less bad.

Five months

Published on April 8, 20121 Comment

At Easter last year Sandra was home, things were looking up, the weather was nice and we had my parents over, having lunch in the garden. This year not so much. Yesterday was exactly five months since Sandra died: in one way it feels much longer, in another only yesterday that she died. I’ve only begun to miss her more as the months go by, dream of her a lot too. That’s the worst, because even in a dream I know she’s dead, but within the dream she’s still there.

It’s not all doom and gloom of course, but Sandra is always in the back of my mind and doesn’t show any signs of moving out…

Silence or rape threats

Published on April 7, 2012Leave a comment

Catherynne M. Valente explains why what Christopher Priest did could not have been done by a woman:

I couldn’t, of course, even if I wanted to. But neither could almost any other woman writer or blogger I can think of. Go after popular SF writers and a respected award? She’d have gotten death threats, rape threats, comments telling her everything from shut up and make [unnamed internet male] a sandwich to wishing she’d be raped to death because that would shut her right up.

[…]

That’s the line I walk, and most female authors and commentators walk. On one side of it is a silence which we can’t afford and on the other are the blowback and threats, which come quietly and secretly through email or boldly and baldly in comments.

This is a reality you don’t have to face as a bloke; one of the greatest advantages/privileges of being a straight, white male is that if people dislike me or disagree with me, it’s purely because of what I say or do, not what I present as. Which means that voices like mine or Priest’s are both overrepresented and overvalued, both because we are listened to more and because other voices are dismissed; even worse is that some voices aren’t just ignored but actively chased away. With rape threats even!

Apart from anything else, this impovers the dialogue we’re all having with each other about science fiction, if you can only be taken serious if you’re a straight white bloke and if you’re not, you get sexist or racist slurs (or both) aimed at you. It’s not good for fandom and it’s obviously incredibly bad for those who are subjected to it.

For those of us who don’t run this risk, there’s the obligation to do something about it, to speak out against such attacks whenever we see them, obviously not participate in them ourselves and most importantly, not blame the victims for something they supposedly done to “provoke” these attacks.

Forsa Pro Vercelli

Published on April 6, 20121 Comment

When I first started to get serious about watching football a few years back, Sandra warned me about getting into Football Manager, because she knew that with my tendency to get somewhat …obsessive… about my current interest I could get addicted to this fast. I’ve always liked simulation games, from Sim City to Civilisation and Football Manager certainly is a hardcore football management simulation game, up to the point where Everton uses it in real life to scout players with; this may say more about Everton than the game itself though.

But it does show the nerdy side of football, as for a certain kind of fan it satisfiess both the itch to get really deep into the statistics and the desire to build up grand narratives around their favourite teams. That metanarrative which transforms a loose collective of mercenary multimillionaires into “your team” is what makes football spectators into football fans, who wouldn’t dream over supporting Arsenal over Spurs, or Feijenoord over Ajax, through good times and bad. And nowhere is this desire better shown than in Brian Phillips’ series of posts about Pro Vercelli and how he guided them from the lowest rung of Italian professional football to be the best team in the world.

Pro Vercelli does actually exist, one of those football clubs who did well in the early days of the game, winning the Italian championships seven times between 1908 and 1922, only to slowly slide down as football professionalised and the big city teams got all the money and talent. It’s the ideal choice to use in the game if you want to produce a heroic tale of epic proportions and that’s just what Phillips did. In the process he nailed down just what attracts people to the game and football both:

What the game is astonishingly good at is creating the feeling of realism, dropping you into a world that behaves both consistently and surprisingly, that’s small enough that it’s roughly comprehensible but large enough that it always seems to be vanishing at the edges. And within that world, if you pay attention and play with a little imagination, there is an endlessly unfolding narrative which you are capable of influencing but not of controlling, a story whose fantastic twists and high-stakes conflicts are more engrossing because the outcome hasn’t been planned in advance. And that, I suspect, more than the fact that it gets all of Tottenham’s roster moves down right, is why this series is so beloved. That probably tells us something about the appeal of football, too, though in another sense, the appeal of the game really isn’t about football at all.

Star Hunter — Andre Norton

Published on April 5, 2012Leave a comment

Star Hunter
Andre Norton
96 pages
published in 1961

For a lot of American science fiction fans my age or older, Andre Norton was the first “real” sf writer they ever read, largely because she was hugely prolific and specialised in what we’d now call young adult novels. For some reason however she was never all that popular in the Netherlands so I’ve read little of her work so far. But that’s changing, thanks to Project Gutenberg, who have a fair few of her books available, those on which the original US copyrights had not been renewed. Star Hunter is one of them, originally published as an Ace Double. I read it during a couple of lunch breaks at work.

Ras Hume is a pilot for the Out-Hunters Guild who on a trip to the newly discovered planet of Jumala has made a discovery that could make him incredibly rich, but to exploit it he needs to make a deal with Wass, the biggest crime boss on Nahuatl. What he found was the lifeboat from the Largo Drift, a space ship which disappeared six years ago, taking with it the heir to the Kogan estate. He also has a plausible candidate to play the part of Rynch Brodie, the teenage heir. What he needs Wazz for is to condition this boy to actually believe he is this heir, then he will be let lose on Jumala for Hume to discover him when he brings over the safari party he’s scheduled to pilot there. It’s an almost foolproof plan, surely nothing can go wrong.

Or can it?