Global Warming and Car Insurance

To commemorate the opening of An Inconvenient Truth (hopefully coming to a theatre near you), here's a little something for you to consider, especially if you are a bit uncertain about climate change.

People buy car insurance. Sometimes they get it because the government says they have to have it. Sometimes it’s because the bank won't give them a car loan if they don't have it. But mostly it's because they recognise that life has a way of being unpredictable and they want to be sure that they can get things repaired when life decides that what you really need it a new tail light.

That’s fine, you say, but what does it have to do with global warming. Well, people buy car insurance on the chance that there will be a problem; an accident, a fire, a theft, a reckless 15 year-old son in a gravel carpark. They don’t know if they are going to actually have a problem, but they believe that there is a good chance they will and they know that the consequences if they don’t have coverage could be pretty serious – loss of car, loss of job and in the case of personal injury and the resulting liability, loss of house. So they get coverage. Which is called sanity.

It’s time that we applied some similar common sense to climate change. Evidence continues to mount that the Earth’s average temperature is rising, some would even say that there is irrefutable evidence not only that this is happening, but that humanity has a very strong hand in making it happen. And we have a pretty good idea that the outcome will not be pleasant if it continues unabated.

Some issues are so important, in that they have terrible and far-reaching consequences that you have to treat them with much more caution than other more mundane thing. That’s also common sense. Climate change is one of these issues.

So it’s time to look at getting some global warming insurance. If you think that a possible car accident is worth a little caution, surely the potential devastation that climate change could wreak on the entire planet is worth considerably more prudence. It might not be as bad as we fear, it might be worse than can possibly imagine, but with the stakes this high, the sane approach is to err of the side of too much caution.

So buy a solar hot water heater, change your light globes to fluorescent ones and send a letter to you local duly elected representative to suggest that they go and see An Inconvenient Truth. It about time to buy yourself some global warming insurance.

Return to sender....aborted

So I was supposed to be going back to Oz for a week before the long haul of the plant shutdown begins. But shore-leave has been cancelled. The boss is leaving for the first half of next week, which means I'm nominally in charge. Not that this really means much of course, but its nice to be afforded that level of confidence. Anyway the job continues to progressively speed up, another handful of expensively-well-travelled mineral separation equipment floats into position, aloft on steel rope wings. Yes, I know, you find this all deeply fascinating. I need some photos to spice it up. Well, a little bit anyway. They're coming.

The rains seemed to have arrived early. Not strictly monsoonal yet, you understand, since I can see across the road during a downpour, but it speaks of ominous clouds of precipitation lurking over the horizon; of weather gods arriving for their annual Indian holiday a little ahead of schedule and deciding that, no, they definitely aren't going to wait around for the porters to arrive like they did last year, they're just going to drop their load where they stand and to hell with the consequences.

We are going to get very wet. Not the best prognosis for a project already late which includes so many high voltage machines and so few completed roofs. At least I can swim. The locals either don't know how to or, more likely, just don't want to. I guess it's a balance between instinct and knowledge: they want to cool off by jumping in the nearest body of water, but they know that there are other things in the water besides fish, weeds and algae. Plus your average Indian is very much more modest than your average Australian.

On the plus side the rains will clean the streets and cool things down. On the downside, the rain hasn't improved driving conditions and Indian drivers are as reckless as ever. Maybe moreso.

Just my luck

So while I'm grabbing up addesses for blogs I read to add to the nav bar (hey I gotta fill it with something, right?), I went to Neil Gaiman's Journal, only to find that he's currently touring Australia. Bugger. (The clever ones of you will be thinking "If you read the Journal, why didn't know that he was going to be in Australia?", to which I can only reply, "I've been busy".)

If you don't know Neil Gaiman and you read books, you need to go and grab something of his from you nearest bookstore or Amazon, or by whatever method you usually employ for getting a softcover to the space between you nose and your palm. He's great. That's all there is to say about it. If pressed to recommend a book for neophytes, I'd recommend Good Omens or Neverwhere, if only because that's where I started and it will give you a good indication of what to expect his other stuff. Mostly.

If you prefer movies, go and rent Mirrormask. Slightly more off the wall that his other stuff perhaps, but then he was mostly involved with the writing, the visuals are primarily the work of the director and visionary visual artist, Dave McKean.

And if that wasn't enough, it appears from reading the letters to Neil that one of my favourite bands, They Might Be Giants, will be writing music for an upcoming movie adaptation of Niel's book Coraline.

Goodness with a side order of full-strength geek rock. Nice.

Sometimes things aren't so bad

I had never really intended to do this kind of thing, but then how often to you get to travel to exotic new locales and experience a alien culture firsthand. And after one of my friends suggested that I probably should keep a record of this stuff, I figured a blog is as good as anything else. Plus it'll mean I need to write fewer emails to keep my friends updated.

And for all of those people who've had me kvetching about the slowness of the job - for the uninitiated who care, I'm here for work - things have been good this week. We dropped about 20 tonnes of shiny, new equipment into place with ease in the last two days. Machines which should have, on previous luck, been just 'that much' too big for the gap through which were supposed fit, slipped past all obstructions like a greased eel in a teflon leotard. Julibation ensued. So work is good.

Well...for me anyway.

One of my colleagues has followed a dose of Delhi Belly (or as a Englishman I met in Karnataka put it, Bangalore Bottom) with a case of flu. So spare a thought for casualties.