The Australian has a great article by Martin Wolf on why climate change is such a difficult issue. Some highlights:

• It’s a perfect example of negative public good: nobody can have less of them because someone else has more; and nobody can be excluded from their malign consequences or the efforts of others to ameliorate them.
• There are intractable distributional questions: between the countries that emitted most in the past and those who will emit more in future; between relatively invulnerable rich countries and the most vulnerable poor ones; and between those who are alive today and their descendants.
• The issue has enormous proportions, there are huge uncertainities (“unknown unknowns”), extremely complex (chaotic) systems and Politicians will be pressured to grant exemptions where they are least desirable.

Yet, there is hope:

• There is quite wide awarness of the problems
• Quite few countries are really needed: some top-20 emmitters account some 80% of the CO2 emissions.
• Some measures are politically easy, as they promote energy security or need to conserve oil and gas.

Wolf lists out some steps we ought to take:

1. Create a suitable world price for carbon
2. Invest in and then spread new technologies across the world, especially carbon capture technology.
3. Use regulatory standards to stimulate change
4. Compensate poor countries for their part in solving a problem they have played little part in causing
5. Create enough long-term certainty to stimulate the necessary investments in plant and technology.

I really recommend the article, it’s one of the more insightful, sound and realistic I have read.

Drying Down Under?

Looking at the map, most of Australia seems to be desert. However, most of the people live on the east cost, which is quite green. Except when it doesn’t rain. Australia is not that different: when it doesn’t rain, there is drought.

One peculiarity about Australia, and especially about the eastern part, is that it is affected by ENSO – El Ninõ Southern Oscillation. The effects of El Nino phase in that area include drought. (La Nina brings rains.) The current state of ENSO is early stages of El Nino. It seems that the effects have already been noticed Down Under. Or at least they are having the the worst drought in liviing memory, or a “thousand year event”.

On the other hand, the long term trend in the ENSO events shows light bias towards the El Nino type of conditions. But you know the weather: you just can’t predict it

Chimeras in UK?

Chimera is an organism that contains at least two genetically different groups of cells originating from different organisms. There are some rare natural occurances of these, even humans, where two non-identical twins have merged into one as embryos.

There are srtificial chimeras as well. For example geep, a sheep-goat chimaira. This is different from sheep-goat hybrid, which may result when sheep and goat mate: in geep there are groups of cells with entirely sheep and others with entirely goat DNA, while in hybrid the DNA is homogenous throughout the body.

Recently BBC has reported that some researchers in UK have applied for a licence to use cow egg cells as a replacement for human egg cells – mainly because of the high demand and short supply of human egg cells. The nucleus of the egg cells would of course first be be emptied.

BBC points some ethical considerations on this. “It would, though, technically be a chimera – a mixing of two distinct species into one.” I don’t see how. Even if there were traces of DNA in that cell outside the nucleus, I think it should be classified as a hybrid.

Another BBC article tells more about this and some more chimera type experiments. To quote:

One of the latest chimeras to hit the headlines was created by scientists in Korea. They sparked controversy when they injected human embryonic stem cells into developing mouse embryos.

The finding that these the cells were then distributed throughout the mouse’s body, including the brain, caused public outrage, and the scientists later abandoned the experiments as the protests increased.

I wonder when they start asking questions, how ethical it is to

1. do this type of superexpensive research at all, due to it’s ultimately relatively small use, considering the prospects of civilization as a whole?
2. develope and practise medicine that increases the expected lietime of masses, given the strain it sets on the capability of civilization to survive?
3. ask questions like this in the first place?