Often, in the moments between sleeping and waking, ideas become visceral, almost literally. This can include things like 'oh my God, Sarah Palin might be one heartbeat away from leader of the free world' or 'oh my Christ, we really are managing the fuck the one planet we have.' That last one is often accompanied by the 93 million miles between the Earth and sun shrinking so that the heavenly bodies are almost within mental grasp, almost in the same room. There really is a star blasting at us, churning our water and atmosphere.

More recently, there's been a few occasions when it's been more corporeal: yanked back from sleep and plopped into a vast dark room of consciousness, so I can have some stark fact about my physical form klaxoned at me. For some reason, my spine got that treatment (probably because of a bad back); a keen sense of bone and gristle holding my centre line together. More recently (probably after some film or other) my brain decided to get all 'aaargh' at the idea of a bullet going through it. Quite reasonable thing for it to do, one might think. The fact that usually it doesn't says something about our ability to just get on with what the world presents us with. But right then, my brain wasn't having any of it: so, here's a bullet, right? It goes through and me, this person - suddenly I'm goo, I'm all over the place.

A commenter over at Tamino's blog puts in a good word for economists:

How would you physicists like it if you had to survey a bunch of molecules to find out what they planned to do, only to have most of them change their minds anyway, and the government restructure the laws of physics because of some opinion poll?

I went to hear Nicholas Stern speak a couple of nights ago: the subject was 'after Copenhagen'. It was a great talk; the man has the gift of speaking in a way that, written down, would make excellent reading. (A skill many politicians learn early.) But I was struck most forcefully again by timescales we now now talk about: what will happen in a hundred years? Current emission rates, according to climateinteractive, give a mean of 3.9 degrees. (OK, that's 90 years...) The spread's wide: if we're lucky, closer to 3, if we're unlucky, closer to 5. It hasn't been 5 degrees above current temperatures for 55 million years. Stern had a nice turn of phrase: these are the kind of changes that move people, move deserts, and are already manifesting as season creep (discussed in this recent paper that attempts a robust framework for analysing the impacts. No model in sight there: 30 years of data.)

One hundred years. Very few humans last that long. A hundred years ago, no first world war. The Los Angeles International Air Meet showcases some crazy new designs. The first commercial air-freight flight takes place - and the first commercial dirigible flight. (Now, this many flights happen in a 24 hour period.) Albania rises up against the Ottoman empire. George V becomes king. Wow - the Vatican makes all its priests take a compulsory oath against modernism. Mark Twain dies; 1.75 billion people live on.

It turns out the past is a different planet. Let's make a prediction: a hundred years hence, it'll be a different planet again.

I'm starting this blog entry with no idea what I'm actually going to say. I've never really been sure what the purpose of this blog was. For a while it was meant to help form thoughts for what is rapidly becoming the Never-Ending PhD. Well, today, what I'll do instead is be self-indulgent. More than usual. It's my blog after all; if anyone's reading, apologies - some vaguely connected thoughts follow; they'll all loosely related by a thread of cold icy chill. One chill from telly, one from history, one from the interwebnets, and I guess there's some snow there at the end, as well as the sun being destroyed. Which is must have been, cos it's dark. No real narrative thread.

Interwebnets first: I'm on academia.edu, and it turns out that it emails you when you're googled. This is only slightly more passively narcissistic than googling oneself directly, but it's been quite alarming. It should, of course, have been obvious, but since I decided to use my own surname (rather than my old secret leftie name you'll never ever find), every blog comment or appearance I make is viewable. When someone googles 'dan olner climate change' what do they find? Having not done a thorough survey, I suspect they find someone with inconsistent views, and venting more in comments than I would consider civil. A recent google of my name + 'economics' reveals more than I knew myself about the various places I've been posting, and that my Transitionista sympathies are on clear display. This is stuff to make sociologists wet themselves; we're all seeing each other now, consensually. I don't really feel like I consented, though sticking to my own name seems an honest choice, but it does look like I've ceded privacy by default. I can't recant anything. Luckily there are no awful, drunken diatribes out there - I don't think. Who knows?

Mark Littlewood, director general of the Institute of Economic Affairs, talking to Raj Patel on the Today Programme:

The free market operates like a perfect rolling referendum, with the prices representing the outcome of millions of individual decisions.

The Adam Smith Institute said something similar a few years back:

Independent providers are nearer to public demand than public authorities can ever be. Their perpetual search for profitability stimulates them to discover and produce what the consumer wants. In that sense the market sector is more genuinely democratic than the public sector. It involves the decisions of many more individuals at much more frequent intervals.

Comment in response to Roger Pielke Jr. accusing Realclimate of becoming 'pathologically politicised':

If I may have a go at articulating why I think you're wrong? First-off, let me see if I've got your argument correct. You say Realclimate have politicised the science, and this is shown because they attack anyone who questions that the science of climate change is certain, like Sen. Inhofe, Fox News etc.

First point: there is probably scientific illiteracy right across the political spectrum - but the truth is, it tends to be right-leaning thinkers who question climate science. If you're interested, I've written about how this affectively hides most left-of-centre scientific illiteracy from climate arguments.

This means that one can imply Realclimate as 'taking a political position' by default. But I think you muddy the picture then: this most emphatically does not mean Realclimate writers are politicizing science. By your reasoning, the only way Realclimate could become politically neutral would be to "even themselves out" by arguing with left-of-centre climate skeptics. Obviously, that's ridiculous: Realclimate cannot be held responsible for who decides to question the science, and it's certainly false to assign them to a political position "by default" in the way you seem to be doing.

In all my banging on about good science yesterday, I realise on one thing I was being unscientific. A couple of links, to Next Left and Crooked Timber, wondered why there seemed to be such an anti-AGW consensus on the right. I speculated it may have something to do with a different assessment of the risks - but this is missing a basic question that could be asked. I'll ask it now, and then suggest that it doesn't matter anyway.

I believe that climate change is happening and that humans are mainly responsible because of greenhouse gases (GHGs) we're putting into the atmosphere. But the number of people who believe this has been going down, it seems - in the US, 20% less think the planet's warming than did so two years ago. (And that's before you've asked them whether they think it's natural variation.) Concern about climate change has, unsurprisingly, been affected by the economy, as the HSBC climate confidence monitor shows. (Opens PDF.) In this survey, people in the UK are the least concerned citizens anywhere in the world; we're second only to the US in thinking there are higher priorities for public spending - odd when you consider the level of state welfare we already have compared to other countries surveyed. There may be high scientific consensus - not so in public opinion.

Some facts are proverbial bolts of lightening on a dark night, fully illuminating an otherwise hidden landscape. Much chicken in the poultry industry is bulked up with water, increasing its apparent weight by up to 35-40%. The water is held in place with dried animal protein, often beef or pork since they're the cheapest. The illuminating fact is what happens when this practice comes under scrutiny. It's actually legal to water-inflate chicken, as long as the label makes it clear that's happened. But - as a Panorama programme from 2003 revealed - DNA can be tampered with to make its origin undetectable.

"Assuming the world doesn't end, will there come a day when all the music it's possible to write has been written? It's finite isn't it?" - Claire W, via Twitter.

Excellent question. Yes, there are a finite number of songs in the universe - with the one condition that no song can last forever. Let's make it more restrictive and say no song can last for more than 5 minutes (though we could choose 20 or 30 mins and come to the same conclusions.)

Given that, though, it turns out it might not make very much difference that its a finite number...