leslie dean brown

Carnivorous plants are fast becoming critically endangered!

March 27, 2016 — leslie dean brown

Carnivorous plants are in danger from poaching and habitat destruction

Illustration by Leslie Dean Brown. © 2015. All rights reserved.

We must assess them all for The IUCN Red List to guide vital conservation action. Thanks to your support, we’ve reached our initial USD 25,000 target, allowing us to bring together experts for the first assessment workshop in August 2016.

The next step will require fieldwork in remote locations to enable the assessment of poorly known species. Assessors will work unpaid but the expeditions need to be funded. Thus, we need to raise an additional USD 100,000 – will you help? Please see the IUCN website for more details.

Hope for the planet

March 26, 2016 — leslie dean brown

I went to David Suzuki’s “hope for the planet” talk last Tuesday and I am feeling inspired! I think it was worth going, if only too see so many like-minded individuals in the one place at the one time.

Towards the end of the discussion, one young attendee said that she saw the audience as “agents of change” and asked what the single biggest piece of advice that the speakers could give to the audience. And Naomi Oreskes answered that particular question; that she couldn’t give one generic answer, because it all depends on our field of expertise. I thought that was very wise. And so I am using the tools at my disposal:

I might as well use this opportunity to tell the whole world that like David Suzuki, I too find it COMPLETELY OUTRAGEOUS that people put the economy over and above the environment. Without the natural environment, there wouldn’t even *be* an economy!

I want people overseas to know that Gina Rinehart spent $22million on a campaign to destroy the carbon tax in Australia in 2010. She went on to invest $200million in network ten and another $280million in fairfax media to sway public opinion. Luckily she has sold most of her media investments in 2015 and has stopped trying to become one of the members of the board of directors…

I think that was a despicable attempt to control the media and thus sway public opinion the proposed carbon tax, which would have hit the mining industry hard. I see her attempt to buyy out the media as a form of environmental corruption. Inn fact last week I invented might have a new term called ‘EC’. EC is a term that originates from PC (which means politically correct). You probably already guessed it; EC means “environmentally correct”. So I think that Gina Rinehart may well be the richest person in Australia –or the richest woman in the world– but she is just not environmentally correct.

Oooh yes I think that the carbon tax should definitely be reinstated in Australia. Most definitely!

The trouble I see is that this: we know the extra carbon dixode we are putting into the air comes from burning the fossil fuels such as coal and crude oil. So if we have to reduce the amount of carbon going into the air to the level before the industrial age, not only will we have to put back all the forests as they were before all of the mining (to restore the original carbon cycle), but we’ll also have to find a way to offset billions upon billions of tonnes of of carbon that have been mined and essentially burned into the atmosphere. Hmmm

Recent research on global warming, sea level rise and super storms.

March 24, 2016 — leslie dean brown

If there’s one video I think you should watch today, it’s this one. I think climate scientists in particular have a special “duty of care” to humanity. I wholeheartedly suggest that all climate scientists boycott fossil-fuel powered cars in keeping with their discoveries and the changes we all must start to make on an individual basis. I think it may show the general public that they are prepared to make some sacrifices for what they believe in.

As I stated previously, I personally no longer own a car — but I do use (borrow) a car about once a week now. Since I sold my last vehicle, I am able to donate more money to environmental charities with the money I save on fuel, insurance, upkeep and everything else… I have actually donated more money to charity than I have spent on fuel so far in 2016. I think more people need to do that.

I really don’t think it’s wise to put all of our trust into current politicians. I firmly believe that most of the mainstream parties do not have our own long-term best interests at hand. I also think that the two very traits that have put us where we are today, namely, our anxiety and what I like to call our “social intertia”, may well be our undoing as a species.

What we can learn from North Korea.

March 23, 2016 — leslie dean brown

I’ve noticed lately that a lot of Western video productions are unfairly biased about North Korea.

So Western journalists have a big gripe about not being able to film certain parts of North Korea. But North Koreans, okay, like all nations, want to be portrayed in a good light. Because North Koreans are smart enough to know that some journalists are unscrupulous…

What if I made a video documentary about Sydney and filmed all the homeless people, the junkies, the graffiti, the rubbish, the wastage, the consumerism, the violence, the poor distribution of wealth, the relentless urbanisation, interviewed all the aboriginal people in our jails, filmed the chopping down of forrests in the Laird state forest to make way for a new coal mine? Well okay.

But what if the Tourism Industry Association of New Zealand came to Australia for example and then used that to infer that “New Zealand was better”? Maybe we’d be able to take it like a joke (even if it were all true).

But I am pretty darn sure that if our tourism industry was proven to have suffered economically because of that documentary, then we’d promptly ‘react’ by banning such films. I’m sure the Sydney council or tourism board would stop people filming the dirtier parts of town. And I wouldn’t really have a problem with that. It doesn’t make me ‘evil’. [Read more…]

The consequences of scale.

March 22, 2016 — leslie dean brown

One thing that I don’t think many people reaslise on a day-to-day basis is that changes happen at all scales and their effects can be felt across all scales. The macro scale affect the micro scale, and in turn, the micro scale can affect the macro scale.

For example, an entire field of wheat can be killed at the cellular or molecular level by spraying it with chemical toxins. This results in the disappearance of a visible thing on a bigger scale. The dead wheat then decomposes, a result which later manifests itself as changes in the soil chemistry. When wholey other different large-scale changes subsequently occur, replacing the field of wheat with something else, that again then affects the visible scale. These micro- and macro-scale responses and consequences can continue to alter themselves in this manner until reaching equilibrium. All events are related together and caused either directly or indirectly by each other.

These perterbations continually fluctuate and influence each other across vast differences in scale.

Although what I am saying is that things like gravity may well be a particle (I don’t even know, not my area). Atoms are composed of sub-atomic particles. So cause and effect always works both ways. ;-) large cause —> small effect small cause —> large effect I am not arguing for the butterfly here causing any significant observable phenomena. I’m just pointing it out that it’s not always “top down”.

Since understanding the Navier–Stokes equations is considered to be the first step to understanding the elusive phenomenon of turbulence, the Clay Mathematics Institute in May 2000 made this problem one of its seven Millennium Prize problems in mathematics. It offered a US$1,000,000 prize to the first person providing a solution for a specific statement of the problem:

Prove or give a counter-example of the following statement: In three space dimensions and time, given an initial velocity field, there exists a vector velocity and a scalar pressure field, which are both smooth and globally defined, that solve the Navier–Stokes equations.

Furthermore, I also think that large-scale effects are always caused initially by small perturbences. What I mean by that is that every event in history is caused by a smaller, prior event. Some of us like to think that this is not the case, and that only large-scale changes can only ever be the result of even larger scale effects. But I think if you have read about chaos theory and the term “sensitive dependence on initial conditions”, then you’d probably agree with me. Say I hit something with a hammer. You might think that the hammer causes large scale changes in whatever it is that I destroy. But what made me decide to strike the hammer in the first place? Wasn’t it really caused by some of my neurons? Perhaps if time went backwards, then it might be the other way around, but I’d rather not get into that, because the last time I read about about that, I thought the author was a bit loopy.