I have just finished watching the ABC documentary Crude about the origins and history of oil and the consequences of its use. The thought provoking video is available from the above linked website. By looking at the conditions that produced the major oil reserves the documentary ponders whether our burning of oil and other fossil fuels could once more trigger a global ocean anoxia event, only much more rapidly than in history.

Global warming as a product of humankind's large-scale release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is not a new concept for me. I can remember Earth Watch on television in the mid-80's warning of the greenhouse effect and was aware of literature pre-dating this. Change can be both wonderful and scary, but I fear for the consequences on world societies of climate change and the increased consumption of other resources by developed and developing nations. One of my excuses for travel is to see the world while I still can, before the Barrier Reef is gone, or social unrest destroys a country or even the cost of fuel makes air travel unaffordable once more. Will these things happen? I don't yet know, I hope not. And I am bad for flying so much, a highly polluting form of transport (well, I do catch trains and other public transport, where possible - except in China!).

It's amusing that, since I wrote the last post, I have been watching the movie The Day After Tomorrow on television. I've posted previously about the stupid science of the movie, although it's useful for stimulating some public thought about the unpredictable consequences of climate change. Most ironic is that the movie was produced by 20th Century Fox, owned by News Corp, publishers of the Daily Telegraph and MX. I guess I can't accuse News Corp of being entirely anti-climate change.

In the last few days I've noticed some vehement views against the existence of human caused climate change in a couple of arms of News Ltd owned newspapers. The highlighted letter of the day in one of this week's issues of MX was David of Cronulla stating strongly that climate change was a lie, followed up by a couple of other letters saying "everyone knows that water from melted ice takes up no extra space" and "it's all part of a natural cycle". My answer to these two statements is:

1. Whilst the melting of sea ice has little impact on sea levels, it's the melting ice that sits on top of land (such as the Antarctic and other glaciers) that can cause sea level rises. Furthermore, water has a lower albedo than ice, so reflects less sunlights back to space and further contributes to the heating. The differing density and temperature of fresh water compared with the salt water of the oceans can also impact ocean currents and climate (the El Nino cycle is related to ocean currents, for example).
2. Our understanding is that natural cycles tend to take longer. The climate appears to be changing very rapidly.

It wasn't just the arguments which were disappointing, it was the vehemence with which they were written. Who is influencing these letter writers?

I watched the documentary Google: Behind the Screens on SBS tonight. The privacy issues and the discussion on the monopolisation of information by one organisation were interesting, but I really got the impression from the Google interviewees that they were genuinely just engineers trying to solve interesting problems and provide "cool" services.

The issue is that Google is a private entity that must make a profit. Organisations, both public and private, usually end up under the control of "the suits". These people are not engineers or scientists (or artists) who live their lives for the creative challenge of their work. Instead they exist firmly in what I call the "Human Universe" (as opposed to the "Physical Universe" which obeys physical/mathematical laws). They live for the interactions with other people, of playing subtle and unsubtle dominance games (the acquisition of wealth, prestige and promotions are a form of this). Financial greed is a manifistation of these dominance game and it is a source of external interference in the operations of organisations. In the private sector (think stockmarkets here) you have investors who don't care what a company does, so long as they make a profit on selling the shares. In the public sector the governments are under constant pressure to "slash spending" and be seen to channel taxpayer dollars into whatever is popular with their consituents (or lobby groups) at a given time.

Tonight I attended a CHISIG presentation by Craig Errey, the managing director of PTGGlobal about their XPDesign &tm; design methodology and framework.

Basically, they have tried to come up with a rigourous and repeatable process for delivering the most usable design from the start. It's a very interesting goal, but unfortunately we didn't get to learning much about it due to the constant arguments from the audience.

PTGGlobal appear to have attempted to apply a scientific methodology, setting theoretical limits on the best achievable outcomes for the design and attempting to get as close as possible to those limits. This appared to offend the more design oriented of the audience who preferred to think of design as unquantifiable.

Definition of a problem.

Scientist: A problem is a challenge and should be solved.
PR Person: A problem is a failure and should be hidden.