juha riissanen's List: Technology and Environment

• An ice bridge tethering the Wilkins ice shelf to Antarctica has shattered as a  new report warns up to a third of all Antarctic sea ice is likely to melt by the  end of this century.

• sectoral aid does not address the underlying cause of the crisis—a fall in  demand, not just for manufactured goods, but for everything. Because there is  too much capacity (far too much in the car industry), some businesses must close  however much aid the government pumps in
• As a rule, suppliers with several customers, and customers with several  suppliers, should be more resilient than if they were a dependent captive of a  large group. The evidence from China is that today’s lack of demand creates the  spare capacity that allows customers to find a new supplier quickly if theirs  goes out of business. When that is hard, because a parts supplier is highly  specialised, say, good management is likely to be more effective than state aid
• saving the banks, no matter how undeserving they are, is supposed to keep  finance flowing to all firms

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• People across Europe awoke on 6 January 1709 to find the temperature had  plummeted. A three-week freeze was followed by a brief thaw - and then the  mercury plunged again and stayed there. From Scandinavia in the north to Italy  in the south, and from Czechoslovakia in the east to the west coast of France,  everything turned to ice. The sea froze. Lakes and rivers froze, and the soil  froze to a depth of a metre or more. Livestock died from cold in their barns,  chicken's combs froze and fell off, trees exploded and travellers froze to death  on the roads. It was the coldest winter in 500 years.
• Derham was the Rector of Upminster, a short ride north-east of London. He had  been checking his thermometer and barometer three times a day since 1697.  Similarly dedicated observers scattered across Europe did much the same and  their records tally remarkably closely. On the night of 5 January, the  temperature fell dramatically and kept on falling. On 10 January, Derham logged  -12 °C, the lowest temperature he had ever measured. In France, the temperature  dipped lower still. In Paris, it sank to -15 °C on 14 January and stayed there  for 11 days. After a brief thaw at the end of that month the cold returned with  a vengeance and stayed until mid-March.
• n 2004, Jürg  Luterbacher, a climatologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland,  produced a month-by-month reconstruction of Europe's climate since 1500, using a  combination of direct measurements, proxy indicators of temperature such as tree  rings and ice cores, and data gleaned from historical documents (Science,  vol 303, p 1499). The winter of 1708-1709 was the coldest. Across large parts of  Europe the temperature was as much as 7 °C below the average for 20th-century  Europe.

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• Consider it a sign of the times that governments in South Korea and Taiwan  are now quietly encouraging brokers to accentuate only the positive.

   

  The methods may differ, but if you have something critical to say and it  somehow becomes public knowledge, you should brace yourself for unpleasant  consequences. In December the Taiwan Securities Association, a trade body,  reminded brokers, on behalf of the government, that the press must receive the  firm’s approval before quoting research.
• When critical brokers’ opinions are cited in newspapers, regulators now want  “explanations”.

• Feb. 4, 2009 -- An ancient killer is hiding in the remote  forests of Siberia. Scientists are starting to uncover the remnants of a supervolcano, that was walled off from western eyes during the  Soviet era and that rained Hell on Earth 250 million years ago, killing 90  percent of all life.

   

  Researchers have known about the volcano -- the Siberian Traps, for years.  And they've speculated that the volcanic rocks, which cover an area about the  size of Alaska, played a role in runaway global warming that led to the end --  Permian mass extinction, the worst dying  the planet has ever seen.