A response to "James Hansen's many and varied furphies" by John Happs

The following is a critique of the article "James Hansen's many and varied furphies" by John Happs as published in Quadrant on 26 August 2013 from a Critical Thinking perspective. I will state at the outset that I regard Quadrant to be a reich-wing rag that barely deserves the title "magazine". It is produced as propaganda for extreme right wing political viewpoints and openly states its position as "sceptical of 'unthinking Leftism, or political correctness, and its "smelly little orthodoxies"'. The original article may be found here.

Rather than tackle the issues of climate change, Happs has chosen a time-honored practice of avoiding a discussion of facts and engaging in a smear campaign against a respected scientist. 

"Hansen has given numerous public talks about what he sees as an urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by stopping the mining and burning of coal. He also wants oil exploration stopped, as well as the further exploitation of tar sands." 

Without discussing the merits here, the statement is factually incorrect. The impression is given that Hansen is a radical that wants to completely ban oil and gas exploration. Hansen's opposition has very focused at environmentally sensitive areas such as the Amazonian rainforests and Arctic exploration. His similar concerns about the tar sands in Canada are based on the readily available evidence of the damage to the local environment. 

Happs is attempting to create a straw-man argument: painting a picture that is simply not realistic, unless of course Happs thinks that anyone who doesn't approve of the obliteration of Amazonian rainforests is a loony radical. 

"He unashamedly promotes alarmism about the trivial levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide" 

This is the fallacy of "Conclusion entered as evidence".  

The way you identify propaganda from a well-argued position is the former starts with the conclusion. The latter reports facts, makes inferences based upon syllogistic arguments which lead to a conclusion. From there it is simply a matter of establishing if the facts are true and if the argument is sound. A sound argument is such that if the facts or true then the conclusion must also be true. A strong (or cogent) argument is such that if the facts are true then the conclusion is probably true. 

In this article you see none of these things, as I will demonstrate. 

The adjective "unashamedly" is judgemental. It assumes the person has something to be ashamed of. 

"Promotes" denigrates the fact that Hansen is an expert (and conversely that Hall isn't). 

"Alarmism" is another judgement. Used together we have a fallacy known as a "thought stopping cliche". It means nothing and serves only to create a negative impression. 

Also in the same sentence "trivial levels of carbon dioxide". This is "facts not entered into evidence". This hasn't been demonstrated, and in fact, cannot be as this is one of the most provable evidences demonstrating the reality of climate change. 

"In 2012 Robert Bryce quoted Hansen in the Dallas News: “The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal fired power plants are factories of death.” " 

This one is truly brilliant! Notice that he doesn't say that Hansen said this, he says that "Robert Bryce quoted Hansen". Interesting! Why did he do this rather than simply quote Hansen and provide a reference? 

The original words were written in this article from the Guardian. Of course, if Happs had referred to the original article - and someone checked it out - they might actually read him in context: 

"The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death. When I testified against the proposed Kingsnorth power plant, I estimated that in its lifetime it would be responsible for the extermination of about 400 species - its proportionate contribution to the number that would be committed to extinction if carbon dioxide rose another 100 ppm."  

Puts that a little more in perspective here, doesn't it? Read the full article here to see how it all fits in contextually.

Again, the purpose here is to smear Hansen and make him look like an activist first and a scientist second - leading us up to the fallacious sucker punch of them all: 

"Hansen sees himself as an activist and a scientist, but he can’t be both and remain credible." 

This of course, is a ridiculous statement. History is full of activists that were professionals in their field. In fact, most of them are activists precisely because they know they are talking about. According to Happs, a "good" scientist is not allowed to have an opinion. "Good" scientists stay in their boxes and report their findings to their vastly more intelligent "masters" who are permitted to have opinions.  

"Any scientist with a pet hypothesis who selects only data which support that hypothesis, whilst ignoring conflicting data, must lose the respect of their scientific colleagues." 

Happs is assuming here that any scientist with an opinion cannot be objective and will of course commit scientific fraud. Happs offers no evidence that Hansen has EVER done this, he is simply saying it is ipso facto. In other words, Hansen's scientific results are a direct result of his prejudiced opinions rather than the other way around. Presumably as well, Happs places all climate scientists in this box, as almost to a person, they agree with Hansen's results. 

"Real science actually looks for refutation whereas pseudoscience is intolerant of dissent." 

Well, yes, this true. However the pseudoscience is with the deniers. That's because the "scientists" say that climate change is real. The deniers are not scientists and therefore - by definition - "pseudoscientists", and Happs is one of them.  

The article is quite long and continues to cherry-pick results and apply statements that were never intended to be applied to those statements. Happs is not looking at the holistic science, he is picking and choosing and committing every single sin he subscribes to Hansen: He isn't looking for facts, he is starting from his prejudiced conclusion and working backwards from there. This is called "conclusion shopping". 

This article is an A1 demonstration of yellow journalism in action. Happs' dishonest portrayal of Hansen and the science of Climate Change is staggering in its tenacious mendacity. Godwin's Law precludes me from making the obvious comparisons that scream from the pages of Quadrant. I'd say that the article was a discredit to the journal it was published in, but that would only serve to elevate Quadrant to a level it doesn't deserve.

How SORBS ruined my life (old blog)

When this blog entry was written, Open Relay blockers like SORBS were considered the primary defence mechanism against spam email. They are still often used, but not as much as they used to be - for many of the reasons discussed in this article. SPF, DKIM & DMARC have largely taken their place.

 

 

I've had a helluva week so far, and I've got SORBS to thank for it.

SORBS (Spam and Open Relay Blocking System) is an email server reputation service. It (along with other reputation services) collect data on servers that are are either poorly configured (and open to abuse) or actively send spam. Reputation services are an excellent way of protecting against spam. They have very high hit rates and (generally) very low false positives. They also have a very low performance overhead compared with heuristic and bayesian filtering techniques. The mail servers I admister are configured to quarantine all email that is listed by either SORBS, SpamHaus or SpamCop (two other reputation services).

However, sometime last week (when I was off work sick), SORBS listed pretty much all of the hotmail, windows live, yahoo, bigpond, optusnet and myplace servers. There may have been others listed as well.

Responding to a few complaints that came in on Monday about email not being received, I began checking. Then began the sinking feeling that goes along with knowing that I'd have to change the email filtering rules, do some regression tests and then resubmit a week's work of spam through the email filters. SORBS is a very aggressive filter and I've been quite reliant on it for some time.

Less fun was trying to explain the problem to the CEO.

The first part of the quick fix was to move the SORBS check to the end of the anti-SPAM rules of the DMZ mail filter and set it to monitor only - not block. The DMZ mail server is exposed to the Internet and performs basic/quick checks only and does not look at the content of the email messages. It is highly robust and is meant as the front line of defence. It experiences an average of 90 security attacks per hour. It filters about 75% of the email traffic as inappropriate before passing the "possibly okay" messages to the second filter.

The second part was to add a check for zero day threats on the DMZ server and tag messages accordingly.

The third part was to tighten the screws a bit on the second mail filter. This meant decreasing the tolerance limits a little and added a few more checks which included looking for the tags on the email messages placed there by the DMZ mail filter. Usually, this server intercepts about 8% of messages pass to it. Messages quarantined by this server may result in a quarantine message and even a self-release option depending upon the spam score the email receives.

Now that these changes were made, I resubmitted 2143 spam quarantined messages. With the new rules in place, 1963 messages were blocked and 180 passed through to the second filter which blocked a further 68 messages leaving 112 messages sailing through to the mail server. I don't know how what the spam:ham ratio of the 112 messages was but the count seemed to be manageable so I released the remaining 14,000 quarantined messages and sent an email instructing people to forward any received spam to the spam submit mailbox for heuristic analysis. So far, I have 35 spam messages submitted by users which (if accurate) we now have a spam hit rate of 99.75% with (hopefully) a close to zero false positive rate. The hit rate has dropped to 59.4% for the DMZ server and risen to 12.5% for the second filter. Time and monitoring will determine how successful the changes have been.

Moving forward, I have written replacement rules that will no longer quarantine email based upon failed reputation. The new rules will look at SPF (Send Policy Framework - RFC4088) in addition to reputation. If the SPF check passes, the email will be accepted. If SPF fails, it will be dropped. If SPF is 'softfail' or 'none' then it will be subject to a reputation check. Any failure will drop then connection with a 46x error - Temporary Failure, with details as to why sending failed. The sending MTA will then notify the recipient that the email failed to send. The sending server then has the option of implementing SPF. I'd like at some point to add a DKIM check, but that's a reasonably difficult task.

BTW, I am heavily influenced by Ming Weng Wong's whitepaper on Messaging Anti-Abuse:

http://www.openspf.org/blobs/sender-authentication-whitepaper.pdf

 

 

I have too much stuff!

I have come to the conclusion that I have way too much stuff. I need to simplify my life - basically because I simply can't find anything when I look for it. Oh, I eventually do find it... six months later when I'm looking for something else.

I've been in Melbourne for over 12 years now and I still have stuff in boxes. It can't be that important. In fact, I have one box that wasn't unpacked from the previous move. I'm still healing from the emotional scars from the move from Queensland, I certainly don't want to go through that again: 75 cubic metres of stuff loaded onto a truck in the middle of summer in Queensland. Drive 1700km, unload and then go straight to work.

I was almost postal.

I'm slowly organising my life back in boxes - permanent ones. I bought 50 sturdy plastic boxes from Ikea and aside from furniture, white/brown goods, kitchen stuff, clothing, books, toiletries and personal items; everything gets a box. Each box gets a lable and an inventory. I have a box called "cables" with every single cable I have; "Power" has double adapters, powerboards, lightbulbs, extension cords etc; "stationery"; "camping"; "games"; "components"; "hardware"; "gardening" etc. I also have crates for the garage for the messy stuff. In the process I am throwing out or giving away heaps of "stuff" that I really don't need.

Okay, so I probably won't get to the point where I can fit everything I own into a box trailer, however I figure that if I manage to get every single thing thing I don't use everyday into a box, then moving won't be as stressful next time and will be much, much cheaper - especially if I sell or give away the white and brown goods. I even dream of buying a 20ft container and storing these boxes in there. I mean, I don't use the stuff that often. Then when it comes time to move, well, the container is already half packed, I just fill it with furniture, kitchen stuff and books (I have a lot of books) and move the container.

A "Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit" or TEU is 39 cubic metres - that should about do it. You can buy one second hand for about AUD2000. They are cheap to move. Interstate in Australia for about AUD1500. That's about $39/cu m. My move to Melbourne cost $100/cu m. Internationally (door to door) for about AUD5000 or $128/cu m. It doesn't cost much more to move a 40ft container, however where do you put it is the ever present problem.

You know, if I could modify it with a bit of plumbing and electricity, I could probably make it livable and save on housing costs:

 

Hmmm. Maybe I should get two?

Old Blog: RIP - The "Beast"

 (Originally written in 2011)

The Beast coming back from QLD during the move to Melbourne. We did 1600km in 23 hours. The temperature was 47C during this stop.

Alas! The venerable 1989 model Ford Maverick (rebadged Nissan Patrol) is no more. After 488,000 km (a decent number of them off-road) it could do no more. The number of expensive jobs on the to-do list kept increasing, and with the LPG tank now out of date (and condemned) it simply wasn't worth it. I sold it to a mechanic in Sunshine for $650, but not before I removed the dual battery system and the CB radio.

I knew the sale had to be to a mechanic - most of the work that needed to be done was labour intensive:

• Front brake master cylinder frozen
• Steering bushes needed replacing
• Broken engine mount
• LPG out of date
• Fuel pump leaking oil
• Carburettor overhaul required
• High beam micro switch broken
• Windscreen washer motors shorted and fused
  

To get all this done would cost me about $3k to make a 21YO vehicle roadworthy. It was a tough call as over the last two years I've spent close to $7k keeping it on the road. If I had known what it would cost, I wouldn't have started down that road. However, one of the things that still nags me is the prospect that if I did spent the $3k, then there really wouldn't be anything else to go wrong. The Beast would be like the axe my grandfather had for fifty years: He only had to replace the head twice and the handle three times.

Work done over the past couple of years includes:

• New head (that was 3k alone)
• Rear axle and diff rebuild (also very expensive)
• Clutch master and slave cylinder replaced and relined. New clutch plate.
• Complete overhaul of disk and drum brakes. New Master cylinder.
• New radiator and several hoses replaced.
• Installed new calcium battery with 850CCA (a very expensive battery)
• Aircon re-gassed, hoses and compressor replaced.
• Power steering hoses replaced.
• Upgraded headlights from sealed to high luminance modular.
• New muffler.
  

This is the Beast crossing Coca Cola Creek on the Cooloola Coast near Noosa

To keep the costs down I did as much work as I can. The problem with that is five of my hours are worth about one of my mechanics - and I simply don't have that much time. Also, sometimes it is counterproductive. For example, I tried to do the power steering myself and ended up doing damage because I misread the Hane's manual on how to overhaul the power steering.

This comes to why I called the Maverick "The Beast". Working on it is a religious experience - actually, it's a taste of hell. I'm sure if Dante were to to do a rewrite, there would be a special section of hell where people would be forced to carry out repairs on the Beast for eternity.

In fact, whilst some people dream about their cars, I used to have nightmares over mine. Even replacing the spark plugs was difficult (not all of them, just plugs 3 & 4). It used a whopping 7.8 litres of oil - just try finding an oil pan big enough. And reaching the oil filter? I swear, the engineers who designed that engine must assume that people have five joints in their arms and eyes on the ends of their fingertips. There's a mixture of metric and imperial bolts and nuts in place and lots of little plastic "screwlets" that cannot be replaced and love to break if you look at them wrong way. There are replacement pipes and hoses that do not fit unless you either bend them or move something else.

Driving the beast is also an experience. It is seriously underpowered and felt more like a truck than anything else. It had Auntie Jack steering (it'll rip yer bloody arms off). The synchromesh stank so double-shuffling and pumping the clutch became a way of life, however if you held revs at exactly 1800 at the right speed for the gear you wanted you could pop it into gear smoothly without any clutch at all. I drove it around for a week without a clutch that way. On a dirt road it drifted like a rally car. The more you loaded it up, the better it handled. Driving back from QLD with the trailer on I was 4 tonne all up. It handled beautifully unless I had to brake quickly.
 

Warrego Highway coming out of Toowoomba at the top of the Toowoomba Range

This lead to one of my big scares and highlights a big problem with vehicles with rear-wheel drum brakes. Coming down the Toowoomba range with the four tonne load, I thought second gear would be sufficient. I was wrong. Unknown to me, the heavy load had blown the diff seals and saturated the rear drums with diff fluid. This made the rear drums useless. The trailer also had no brakes. I had brake fade by the third corner and had no option but to ride it out until the half-way flat. With the engine screaming at over 80km/h in second I hit the flat and stood on the brakes. I managed to slow it down to about 30km/h before they failed and pulled on the hand brake - which on the Beast is connected to a fifth brake attached on the diff. The hand brake pulled me up just 30m short of the next descent - smoke was pouring out of the front disks pads, the discs were glowing red and I was shaking like a leaf.

The gearing of the beast was also poor. The huge ratio gap between second and third was such that driving uphill with any decent load meant you either were going too fast or too slow. Fuel consumption was close to 20L/100km - hence the need for LPG.

In fact, the Beast never really seemed to be happy unless you were off road with a heavy load. The diff lock was manual and on low range you could really do some wonderful things with it. Once I told some Japanese students I would take them on a 4WD track, so I took them up Mt Kooralbyn. However it had been over a year since I'd driven the track and it had not been maintained. Also (presumably) no one else had been up there in that time. I was white-knuckled all they way up (and down). There were three-foot deep cracks in the track big enough to claim a wheel. On the ridge, the grass had overgrown the track to a height of four-feet and a sapling had grown in the middle of it. The kids loved the drive; but it scared the crap out of me.

Trying to get through the 2008 floods in the Beast

I once went on a youth camp with the boys in a state park outside of Bacchus Marsh. It rained considerably during the camp and the windy dirt roads became considerably soggy on the way back. This brought the drift speed all the way down to 30km/h. After about the fifth corner with a 45 degree drift and an idiotic smile on my face, the kids started saying "Dad! Really! You're embarrassing us!"

After I moved to Melbourne, I took a load of rubbish to the tip, but took a wrong turn with only a few minutes before closing time. As a result I had to take the dirt service road to the tip entrance. It was a good (but windy) dirt road with no corrugations, so I took the corners at speed and used the full width of the road including the verge. Kylie was with me and after the first corner she said "Did you just slide around that corner?"

I replied "It's called drifting."

"Should you be drifting in a 4wd?"

"That's not a problem. A 4WD is really like any other vehicle. Same basic rules apply."

"Should you drifting with a trailer on the back?"

(pause) "Probably not." I replied, and backed off the speed a littlle.

The worst gaf I made with the Beast was on the Cooloola Coast. Coming back, I mistimed the tides and had to drive with two wheels on wet and two on dry sand for a while. I pulled over at a good wide stretch and waited for the tide to turn. When it did, I drove back, but forgot to release the hand brake. By the time I realised, the damage was done and the brake began to seize. Fortunately, I made it back to the bitumen where I cooled my heels for a few hours until the tow truck turned up.

The Beast has now been replaced by a shiny Honda Odyssey. A 4WD it is not (which is disappointing), however it will sit large teenagers in the back row in comfort - something the Beast won't do. It should also be cheaper to run and (hopefully) maintain. Now I have to work out what to do with the CB and the dual battery system. I also need to fit a tow bar.

At the very least I will no longer have to constantly steer in one direction whilst driving and then steer in the opposite direction when braking.

How I spent my day (Old Blog)

This article is one I wrote nearly ten years ago for my old blog. It was originally written in three parts and explains the origin of may adage "I'd rather work on a ten minute job than a five minute one. A ten minute jobs only takes ten minutes to complete. A five minute job takes a least two hours."

It's interesting to note how terminology and technology have changed in ten years. Flash drives were commonly referred to as "pen drives" and dial-up modems are almost unheard of now. Most of the issues discussed with installing Linux are now non existent - back then you really had to know what you were doing to work with Linux, now Linux is so easy even an MCSE can work with it.