Month: January 2023

Essay by Eric Worrall

Invade houses and mess with people’s heads, Guardian style.

Can video games change people’s minds about the climate crisis?

A new wave of game makers is trying to influence a generation of environmentally conscious gamers. Is that possible and is it enough?

Lewis Gordon Thu 26 Jan 2023 20.30 AEDT

It was scary. It made you realize how, despite all the sophistication of modern society, we still depend on water falling from the sky.” Sam Alfred, lead designer at Cape Town-based video game studio Free Lives, vividly recalls that his city almost the water would have run out. In 2018, the area around South Africa’s second-largest city suffered from declining rainfall for months. Dams have not been able to refill at the rate required by their occupants. Water was rationed. Stores closed. The situation even called for its own grim version of the Doomsday Clock: Hour by hour, the city ticked closer and closer to Day Zero, which marked the end of its fresh water supply.

Terra Nile, the video game that Alfred has been developing since 2019, is a response to these terrible events. Billed as “a city builder in reverse,” it eschews the consumption and expansion of genre classics like Civilization and SimCity to paint a picture of environmental restoration. Starting with the arid desert, it’s up to the player to overgrow a landscape using various technologies such as a toxin scrubber or a beehive. At the speed of light and with eye massages in emerald green and azure blue, the surroundings are transformed into lush vegetation. Terra Nile’s simplicity is as beautiful as its looks, offering the satisfaction of a coloring book while dishing out a perceptive critique of environmentally destructive extraction.

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Whether it changes minds or behavior, there is a desire among game makers and gamers alike to address the ongoing threat of global warming. Games like ABZÛ and Alba: A Wildlife Adventure – ecological fables set in the ocean and on land – are among many that show us a way of seeing the world that doesn’t go through crosshairs.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/jan/26/can-video-games-change-peoples-minds-about-the-climate-crisis

Back in the real world, even The Conversation admitted that the 2017-18 Cape Town water crisis was caused in large part by corruption and incompetence, not climate change like most of South Africa’s other problems.

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The cause of the crisis

The civil society group South African Water Caucus reveals that the national government’s reluctance to release funds to help drought relief is due to rising debt, mismanagement and corruption at the national department for water and sanitation.

This claim is supported by the Auditor General, who credits the department with “irregular and fruitless and wasteful spending” exceeding its 2016-2017 budget by R110.8 million.

The department has not allocated funds for next year’s drought relief in the Western Cape. Here, too, the state government has to foot the bill.

Had systems in the national government functioned smoothly, Cape Town’s water crisis could have been alleviated. Adequate water allocations would have made more water available to Cape Town. And with timely responses to disaster reports, the water supply infrastructure could have been up and running by now.

Cape Town teaches us that water crises are rarely a matter of rain. Understanding disasters like droughts requires looking at the problem from many different perspectives, including politics.

Read more: https://theconversation.com/cape-towns-water-crisis-driven-by-politics-more-than-drought-88191

As for the Guardian’s advocacy of using computer games to raise concerns about the climate, it’s hard to think of anything more reprehensible.

Many computer gamers are young people. Young people are already so scared of climate change that they are self-destructing with hard drugs because they cannot face their fear.

The following is a statement from Dr. Alex Wodak, a top Australian drug rehabilitation expert, on an ice supplementation survey in NSW in

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First, the threshold step is to redefine drugs as primarily a health and social problem and not primarily a law enforcement problem. Second, drug treatment needs to be expanded and improved until it reaches the same level as other health services. Third, all penalties for personal drug use and possession must be abolished.

Fourth, as much of the drug market as possible needs to be regulated, recognizing that some of the drug market is already regulated, such as B. methadone treatment, needle and syringe programs, medically supervised injection centers. Of course, it will never be possible to regulate the entire drug market. We previously regulated parts of the drug market. Edible opium was taxed and regulated in Australia until 1906 and in the United States Coca-Cola contained cocaine until 1903.

Fifth, efforts to reduce demand for strong psychoactive drugs in Australia have had limited benefit and require a new focus. Unless and Until young Australians are optimistic about their future, demand for medicines will remain strong. Young people understandably want more certainty about their future prospects, including climate, education, jobs and affordable housing. Change will be slow and gradual, like all social policy reforms.

As Herb Stein said while advising President Nixon:
Things that can’t go on forever don’t.

Drug prohibition cannot last forever and is being replaced by libertarian paternalism. Thank you.

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Source: Wayback Machine

I am not a proponent of censorship of computer games, but in my opinion there is nothing commendable about measures aimed at increasing concerns about the climate. I believe games that focus on climate change could plunge even more people, particularly vulnerable young people, into a crisis from which they may not recover. The climate concern, especially among young people, has already been boosted so much that some of the kids are breaking down.

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The discovery of exoplanets was frontier science not so long ago. But now we’ve found over 5,000 of them, and we expect to find them around almost every star. The next step is to more fully characterize these planets in hopes of finding those that might support life. Your direct mapping will be part of this effort.

But to do that, astronomers have to block out the light from the planet’s stars. This is a challenge in binary star systems.

When astronomers need to block starlight to study a nearby planet, they use a telescope attachment called a coronagraph. The Hubble Space Telescope has one, and so do many other telescopes. They are very effective.

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This Hubble image shows the star AB Aurigae and the exoplanet AB Aurigae b. Hubble’s coronagraph (black circle) blocked the star’s light, making the exoplanet visible. The exoplanet is the bright spot under the coronagraph. The white star icon marks the position of AB Aurigae. Image Credits: NASA, ESA, T. Currie (Subaru Telescope, Eureka Scientific Inc.), A. Pagan (STScI); CC BY 4.0

Coronagraph effectiveness is well established in one star systems. But what about binary stars and multiple star systems? Binaries are common in the Milky Way, and up to 85% of the stars in the Milky Way may be in binary systems. They are also plentiful in our neighborhood. ESA’s Gaia spacecraft has found 1.3 million binary stars within 1,000 light years of Earth.

We don’t have to look far to find a multiple star system with exoplanets. Our nearest stellar neighbor, the Alpha Centauri system, is a triple star system. Alpha Centauri A and B are both bright, sun-like stars. The third star in the system, Proxima Centauri, is a small red dwarf only slightly larger than Jupiter. Proxima Centauri is so faint that Alpha Centauri effectively resembles more of a binary star. Alpha Centauri A and B are also close together, while Proxima Centauri is in a much wider orbit around the main pair.

This image shows how Alpha Centauri A and B appear as one bright star, while Proxima Centauri is a faint, distant companion.

The Alpha Centauri system is an instructive example of the challenge astronomers face when trying to image exoplanets. Alpha Centauri A and B are only about 40 astronomical units apart. The combined light from two Sun-like stars so close together can easily drown out their much fainter exoplanets. But a new technology shows promise. It’s called Multi-Star Wavefront Control (MSWC).

The challenge of blocking the light from binary stars is cross-contamination. Current coronagraphs can suppress the light from a single star, but cannot handle cross-contamination from a separate star. Eliminating the polluting light is crucial for imaging exoplanets. This is where MSWC comes in.

Multi-Star Wavefront Control is at the heart of an upcoming mission. NASA hopes to launch its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (NGRST) in 2027. It will carry a technology demonstration coronagraph called CGI (CoronaGraphic Instrument) based on MSWC. Deformable Mirrors (DM) are a critical part of the system.

Deformable mirrors are not brand new technology. The upcoming Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope both use deformable mirrors. They are part of the adaptive optics.

The DM system works for single stars or for double stars that overlap. But something else is needed to counteract cross-contamination from non-overlapping binaries. This is the second part of the Roman’s coronagraph and is called “Super Nyquist Wavefront Control”.

The problem in binary systems is that DMs have a limited field of view (FoV). A DM can adjust to the light of a single star, but a binary companion is outside the FoV. The Nyquist system gets around this by using hardware and software to expand the FoV. The system basically creates a grid of proxy stars for the secondary star in the binary and each proxy has a corrected DM region. This creates dark zones outside the DM’s FoV. The beauty of the system is that it can be adapted to any telescope with deformable mirrors. (A more detailed description of how it works can be found here.)

This image helps explain how the system creates dark zones outside the DM’s FoV. The DM grating diffracts an attenuated replica of star B into a sub-Nyquist region of star A. (The solar Nyquist region is the region where the deformable mirror coronagraph is effective.) The system treats the replica as another star. In this image, a coronagraph is blocking the light emanating from Star A. A side effect seen on the diagram is the replicating of A in the controllable region of B. This allows us to search for planets around A in the box labeled DZ (Dark Zone.) Photo credit: Thomas et al. 2015

Typically, adaptive optics are not required in space telescopes. They are used on ground-based telescopes to counteract the effect of the atmosphere on telescopes. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be the first space telescope to use deformable mirrors. And if things go well, a system based on the NGRST system will become part of NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). The HWO is a combination of two previous telescope ideas: the Habitable Exoplanet Observatory (HabEx) and the Large UV/Optical/IR Verifier (LUVOIR).

But before that can happen, the instrument must be thoroughly tested. This is done at the Ames Coronagraph Experiment Laboratory and at the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) instrument on the Subaru Telescope. The team behind MWSC is also testing it at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s High Contrast Imaging Testbed (HCIT).

These images show MSWC being tested at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s High Contrast Imaging Testbed (HCIT). MSWC team members Eduardo Bendek, Ruslan Belikov, Dan Sirbu and David Marx are pictured left to right. Photo credit: NASA.

The astronomy community is aware that our search for exoplanets is hampered by starlight in binary star systems. We could miss many of them.

A 2021 paper examined the problem and concluded that not only do we not detect exoplanets lost in the glare of binary stars, but we may also not detect what everyone is hoping to find: Earth-like planets in habitable zones .

The paper is Speckle Observations of TESS Exoplanet Host Stars: Understanding the Binary Exoplanet Host Star Orbital Period Distribution. It was published in the Astronomical Journal and the lead author is Steve Howell of NASA’s Ames Research Center.

In their article, the authors point out that there is an “established binary rate of 46% among exoplanet host stars.” The team used the Gemini Observatory’s telescopes to study stars found by TESS that harbor planets. They found that it’s easy to miss spotting Earth-sized planets in binary systems. TESS relies on planets passing in front of her star to identify them by starlight bursts. But the other star’s glare is easily masked.

They examined hundreds of these TESS stars and found that 73 of them are actually binary stars, a detail that TESS missed. Is Earth 2.0 or something similar hidden somewhere around these stars? How many planets do we miss, drowned out by the light of two stars?

“Imagine – if you go outside and look at a star in the night sky, you might see a planet like Earth hidden in the star’s brilliance,” said Ruslan Belikov, project leader for MSWC. “Also, there’s a chance the star you’re looking at is a multiple star system. I can’t wait until we unravel veils of starlight to unravel the mysteries that lie upon the planets within.”

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Essay by Eric Worrall

Is Australia’s increasing shunning by climate activists a blessing or a curse?

The British star teenager does not fly to Australia because of climate problems

from Rob Harris
Jan 26, 2023 – 8:27 am

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16-year-old runner Innes FitzGerald is a rising star in British athletics. He set a national U17 record in the 3000m and finished fourth in the 4000m against athletes three years his senior at the U20 European Cross Country Championships in Turin last month.

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The teenager, dubbed “the Greta Thunberg of sport” by the British press, wrote to the sporting director this week that she would not be available for selection because she could not in good conscience make the journey to the Championships in Bathurst, NSW. in February.

“To have the opportunity to represent Britain in Australia is a privilege,” she wrote. “When I started running, the prospect of competing in the World Cross Country Championships was just a dream. However, the reality of the trip fills me with deep concern.

“I was just nine years old when the COP21 Paris climate agreement was signed. Now, eight years later, global emissions are steadily increasing, putting us on the path to climate catastrophe.”

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Read more: https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/star-teenage-british-athlete-won-t-fly-to-australia-over-climate-concerns-20230126-p5cfk8.html

Despite the lack of in-person visits from leading climate influencers, their message still resonates. We have our own homemade batch of wannabe Gretas.

June 1, 20215:40 GMT+1

“Australia’s Greta Thunberg” boosts climate protection activism

SYDNEY, June 1 (Reuters) – Leading thousands of protest marchers through central Sydney and joining a landmark class action lawsuit are not usual activities for most 14-year-olds.

But Australian student Izzy Raj-Seppings has abandoned more frivolous extracurricular activities to increase pressure on the country’s leadership in the fight against climate change.

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Read more: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/australias-greta-thunberg-steps-up-climate-change-activism-2021-06-01/

All in all, I think isolation is damaging to Australia’s political health.

There was a time when Australia’s isolation helped mute contact with the 20th-century madness that afflicted much of the northern hemisphere. Sure we had native communists and fascists and our contribution to WWI and WWII had a significant impact on Australia, many Australian heroes lost their lives fighting Japan and Germany. My great-uncle once used some very Australian slang phrases when speaking to the nurses on an Allied medical ship – they had not tended his wounds because they thought he was German. The Australian city of Darwin in the far north was bombed by Japan during World War II.

But the most exciting thing that happened to my family during the wars and upheavals of the 20th century, apart from those who served, was when a light aircraft appeared to come too close to an American warship docked in Melbourne. My grandfather often told me how he dragged my grandmother and the children into their bomb shelter when pieces of flak rained down over Melbourne, blasting holes through people’s roofs.

Those days of isolation and relative safety are long gone. Today, for better or for worse, the internet is inviting global influencers and all the world’s issues into homes and schools everywhere.

With internet access, does it make a difference if foreign climate fanatics come to Australia in person to spread their poison?

I think the lack of face-to-face contact probably makes things worse. If Australia’s Greens could see their climate heroes up close, they would have a better chance of realizing that they don’t walk on water, that they are people with human foibles.

I believe Australians’ obsession with climate activism is likely to be compounded because our native Gretas and Innes FitzGeralds seek to live up to mythical ideals rather than interacting with flawed human leaders they have met personally.

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