Posts by David Hood
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Hard News: Environmental league tables…, in reply to Nathaniel Wilson,
If it’s an elephant, it’s a rather monstrous one.
Particularly as it has been pretty thoroughly demonstrated that if you have a society where the women are educated and there are relatively egalitarian outcomes (basically a society where parents are knowledgeable, confident of their children living to adulthood and being able establish themselves in society) the birthrate falls away. The solutions verging on eugenics tend to start with the assumptions that the privileged people proposing them are creating a world where they are at least as privileged as a present.
Regarding carbon raw amounts vs. per capita (and actually urban ~ rural). People in cities have a lower per capita emission of carbon as a baseline, because they are centralized and goods can be delivered on efficient mass basis (basically the smaller the delivery vehicle the worse it is (not a linear scale)). OTOH cities are also the main hubs of consumption, which is (in it's present throwaway culture form) carbon-bad.
As for me as an urban dweller- try to make the time to walk rather than drive, and choose not to travel far recreationally, try do buy things for the long term. By my own moral calculus, if I am in the quarter of the population using the 25% least carbon (in a small daily steps kind of way) I am moving in the right direction. I also tend to feel that the government's priorities are moving in the opposite direction, and the incentives to behavior their policymaking makes likewise at odds with my priorities. -
This is a sculpture at the University of Otago called Crown-Land-Crown by David McLeod (Marble and Bronze). When it was put in in 1995, it was fairly quickly graffitised with each of the sections having a word added in green crayon: Yours, Mine, Ours, Theirs.
The work was relocated in 2005, when the artist took the opportunity to permanently sandblast the words into the work, as he had enjoyed the addition. -
Dunedin. Northern motorway overbridge.
The story here is that the mural originally did not have the cat on the far right, But someone very carefully painted in a black pig in the same style. When the mural was repainted, it was repainted as another cat. -
Rose in Fern.
Last weekend I spotted a rose bloom that had grown up into the centre of the bowl of a fern, bud the bloom had not opened then. I went back this weekend and captured it with many angles and exposures. As the bloom is verging on being to large to be supported by the stem, this will have been my only chance. -
Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Farmer Green,
To say that ““The globally averaged surface temperature peaked in 1998, and has been on a slight downward trend since then”is not to deny that global warming continues.
But it is a red herring. It focuses on one specific thing that, cited in isolation, suggests criticism of the overall model. It is exactly like saying "My grandfather smoked all his life and never got cancer"- there are individual variations within the overall system, and if you look at the effects of adding 40% more CO2 to the atmosphere (and then hydrosphere) the mechanics of that are even better understood than the finer mechanics of how smoking causes cancer. It is just that as not every person is affected in a uniform way by smoking (but on average it is bad) not every bit of the planet is being affected in a uniform way (at the moment I would describe the oceans as being the worst affected).
Damnit, I tried to stay out of this one.
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Ibid
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My mother's garden, Dunedin
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A garden variety St. Francis.
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Capture: The Castle, in reply to JacksonP,
Um, caption competition?
Bobbing for toasted marshmellows
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And one more from Dunedin
