I'm starting this blog entry with no idea what I'm actually going to say. I've never really been sure what the purpose of this blog was. For a while it was meant to help form thoughts for what is rapidly becoming the Never-Ending PhD. Well, today, what I'll do instead is be self-indulgent. More than usual. It's my blog after all; if anyone's reading, apologies - some vaguely connected thoughts follow; they'll all loosely related by a thread of cold icy chill. One chill from telly, one from history, one from the interwebnets, and I guess there's some snow there at the end, as well as the sun being destroyed. Which is must have been, cos it's dark. No real narrative thread.

Interwebnets first: I'm on academia.edu, and it turns out that it emails you when you're googled. This is only slightly more passively narcissistic than googling oneself directly, but it's been quite alarming. It should, of course, have been obvious, but since I decided to use my own surname (rather than my old secret leftie name you'll never ever find), every blog comment or appearance I make is viewable. When someone googles 'dan olner climate change' what do they find? Having not done a thorough survey, I suspect they find someone with inconsistent views, and venting more in comments than I would consider civil. A recent google of my name + 'economics' reveals more than I knew myself about the various places I've been posting, and that my Transitionista sympathies are on clear display. This is stuff to make sociologists wet themselves; we're all seeing each other now, consensually. I don't really feel like I consented, though sticking to my own name seems an honest choice, but it does look like I've ceded privacy by default. I can't recant anything. Luckily there are no awful, drunken diatribes out there - I don't think. Who knows?

Comment in response to Roger Pielke Jr. accusing Realclimate of becoming 'pathologically politicised':

If I may have a go at articulating why I think you're wrong? First-off, let me see if I've got your argument correct. You say Realclimate have politicised the science, and this is shown because they attack anyone who questions that the science of climate change is certain, like Sen. Inhofe, Fox News etc.

First point: there is probably scientific illiteracy right across the political spectrum - but the truth is, it tends to be right-leaning thinkers who question climate science. If you're interested, I've written about how this affectively hides most left-of-centre scientific illiteracy from climate arguments.

This means that one can imply Realclimate as 'taking a political position' by default. But I think you muddy the picture then: this most emphatically does not mean Realclimate writers are politicizing science. By your reasoning, the only way Realclimate could become politically neutral would be to "even themselves out" by arguing with left-of-centre climate skeptics. Obviously, that's ridiculous: Realclimate cannot be held responsible for who decides to question the science, and it's certainly false to assign them to a political position "by default" in the way you seem to be doing.

In all my banging on about good science yesterday, I realise on one thing I was being unscientific. A couple of links, to Next Left and Crooked Timber, wondered why there seemed to be such an anti-AGW consensus on the right. I speculated it may have something to do with a different assessment of the risks - but this is missing a basic question that could be asked. I'll ask it now, and then suggest that it doesn't matter anyway.

I believe that climate change is happening and that humans are mainly responsible because of greenhouse gases (GHGs) we're putting into the atmosphere. But the number of people who believe this has been going down, it seems - in the US, 20% less think the planet's warming than did so two years ago. (And that's before you've asked them whether they think it's natural variation.) Concern about climate change has, unsurprisingly, been affected by the economy, as the HSBC climate confidence monitor shows. (Opens PDF.) In this survey, people in the UK are the least concerned citizens anywhere in the world; we're second only to the US in thinking there are higher priorities for public spending - odd when you consider the level of state welfare we already have compared to other countries surveyed. There may be high scientific consensus - not so in public opinion.

Note: this is a long, rambling entry that swings from naval gazing to some interesting stuff on global energy futures.

Houmous

There's a gymball in my bedroom: silver, 800mm wide. Having stared at it for a while, I started to wonder - if the sun were that gymball, how big would the Earth be? A few sums later I got 7mm. Some frantic measuring of dried pulses followed, and a chickpea emerged as the perfect - if slightly lumpy - candidate for sitting on the floor next to the gymball. There it sits still, so every night I can stare at it and mutter to myself, 'that's just stupid.' I include a photo of chickpea on gymball. But photos, this description - they don't do it justice. Find a gymball of equal size, get a chickpea: hold it between thumb and forefinger, having made sure to watch a video of the sun first. (Some would argue 'blue marble' better captures the wonder of it; each to their own.)

Incidentally, you can scale to anything you like at this website. At the scale above, chickpea would be 85 metres away from gymball.

I've also been trying to wrap my noggin around our place on Chickpea Earth. This has included an alarming assault on my sense of Earthly security, such as a list of all the ways in which we might never have existed. Some of these were covered in rather sensationalist tone by Tony Robinson's channel 4 series, 'Catastrophe Earth'. This quote sums up the general approach:

85000 years ago, humans were just heading out of Africa; the meteoric rise of our species makes us feel indestructible. Yet we are more vulnerable than we might care to imagine. We live on a thin crust that floats on a sea of pressurised molten rock and we rely on the proximity of a star to keep temperatures optimal for life. Meanwhile our planet moves through space, which is populated by numerous flying objects.

If you need a story to keep the impact of global warming close to your heart, read this every day. (Here's a copied version in case the Indy's one goes behind a paywall.)

My, er, 'favourite' quotes:

From now on, we need to have a system where for every 10,000 tons of carbon you emit, you have to take a Bangladeshi family to live with you. It is your responsibility.

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Bangladesh's Noah:

In the middle of Bangladesh, in the middle of my road trip, I tracked down Abul Hasanat Mohammed Rezwan. He was sitting under a parasol by the banks of a river, scribbling frenetically into his notebook.

"The catastrophe in Bangladesh has begun," he said. "The warnings [by the IPCC] are unfolding much faster than anyone anticipated." Until a few years ago, Rezwan was an architect, designing buildings for rich people – "but I thought, is this what I want to do while my country drowns? Create buildings that will be under water soon anyway?"

He considered dedicating his life to building schools and hospitals, "but then I realised they would be under water soon as well. I was hopeless. But then I thought of boats!"

He has turned himself into Bangladesh's Noah, urging his people to move on to boats as the Great Flood comes. Rezwan built a charity – Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, which means self-reliance – that is building the only schools and hospitals and homes that can last now: ones that float.

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The crowd says this mosque – like most fundamentalist mosques on earth – is funded by Saudi Arabia, with the money you and I pay at the petrol pump. As I looked up at its green minaret jutting into the sky, it occurs to me that our oil purchases are simultaneously drowning Bangladesh, and paying for the victims to be fundamentalised.

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So if we carry on as we are, Bangladesh will enter its endgame. "All the people who strain at this country's seams will drown with it," Anam says, "or be blown away to distant shores – casualties and refugees by the millions." The headstone would read, Bangladesh, 1971-2071: born in blood, died in water.