The Economic Geography of a Data Centre Location

Why did Facebook locate its new data centre in central Oregon? Babbage tries to explain.

The reason, the centre's boss Ken Patchett explains, is the weather. At first blush, this seems odd. Temperatures in Prineville routinely drop to -5°C (22°F) in the winter and climb to 32°C (90°F) in the summer. And the desert clime means that drops of 28°C (50°F) between day and night are not unheard of around this time of year. That ought to make keeping the servers at a steady 20–25°C (68–77°F) and 40–55% relative humidity an arduous task.

In fact, the Prineville plant is a leading exponent of a new style of data-centre management. It does away with expensive air-conditioning "chillers". Instead, air is brought in from outside. For this approach to work, however, the desert is key. For much of the year outside air is actually cool enough to keep the servers from overheating. At the lowest temperatures, just the gentlest of breezes needs to be brought inside at all. And, this being the desert, nights are chilly irrespective of the season, so even in the summer additional cooling is only needed during the hottest times of day.

Freeman Dyson profile

Among Dyson’s gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do. His thoughts about how science works appear in a series of lucid, elegant books for nonspecialists that have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond physics. Dyson has written more than a dozen books, including “Origins of Life” (1999), which synthesizes recent discoveries by biologists and geologists into an evaluation of the double-origin hypothesis, the possibility that life began twice; “Disturbing the Universe” (1979) tries among other things to reconcile science and humanity. “Weapons and Hope” (1984) is his meditation on the meaning and danger of nuclear weapons that won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Dyson’s books display such masterly control of complex matters that smart young people read him and want to be scientists; older citizens finish his books and feel smart.

Yet even while probing and sifting, Dyson is always whimsically gazing into the beyond. As a boy he sketched plans for English rocket ships that could explore the stars, and then, in midlife, he helped design an American spacecraft to be powered by exploding atomic bombs — a secret Air Force project known as Orion. Dyson remains an armchair astronaut who speculates with glee about the coming of cheap space travel, when families can leave an overcrowded earth to homestead on asteroids and comets, swooping around the universe via solar sail craft. Dyson is convinced that our current “age of computers” will soon give way to “the age of domesticated biotechnology.” Bio-tech, he writes in his book, “Infinite in All Directions” (1988), “offers us the chance to imitate nature’s speed and flexibility,” and he imagines the furniture and art that people will “grow” for themselves, the pet dinosaurs they will “grow” for their children, along with an idiosyncratic menagerie of genetically engineered cousins of the carbon-eating tree: termites to consume derelict automobiles, a potato capable of flourishing on the dry red surfaces of Mars, a collision-avoiding car.

These ideas attract derision similar to Dyson’s essays on climate change, but he is an undeterred octogenarian futurist. “I don’t think of myself predicting things,” he says. “I’m expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it’s a question of how badly people want them to. The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people’s hopes.” Formed in a heretical and broad-thinking tradition of British public intellectuals, Dyson left behind a brooding England still stricken by two bloody world wars to become an optimistic American immigrant with tremendous faith in the creative imagination’s ability to invent technologies that would overcome any predicament. And according to the physicist and former Caltech president Marvin Goldberger, Dyson is himself the living embodiment of that kind of ingenuity. “You point Freeman at a problem and he’ll solve it,” Goldberger says. “He’s extraordinarily powerful.” Dyson seems to see the world as an interdisciplinary set of problems out there for him to evaluate. Climate change is the big scientific issue of our time, so naturally he finds it irresistible. But to Dyson this is really only one more charged conundrum attracting his interest just as nuclear weapons and rural poverty have. That is to say, he is a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great problem.

Dyson is well aware that “most consider me wrong about global warming.” That educated Americans tend to agree with the conclusion about global warming reached earlier this month at the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen (“inaction is inexcusable”) only increases Dyson’s resistance. Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus. The Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg admires Dyson’s physics — he says he thinks the Nobel committee fleeced him by not awarding his work on quantum electrodynamics with the prize — but Weinberg parts ways with his sensibility: “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”

Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.

-The Civil Heretic

Volcanic Rocks can save us from Global warming?

A group of scientists at Columbia has used deep ocean-floor drilling and experiments to show that volcanic rocks off the West Coast and elsewhere might be used to securely sequester huge amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, captured from power plants or other sources. In particular, they say that natural chemical reactions under 78,000 square kilometers (30,000 square miles) of ocean floor off California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia could lock in as much as 150 years of U.S. carbon dioxide production.

Econ Talk of the Day- Kenneth Arrow

Kenneth Arrow at World Bank;

Arrow’s discussion focused predominantly on the question of futurity and the uncertainty associated with it. To highlight this, Arrow commented that the same issues and questions that were unknown and of which society was uncertain in 1979 remain so today. He cited the demand for nuclear energy, safety of containment, and even the possibilities of alternative technologies as examples. On the subject of nuclear waste disposal, Arrow underscored the very real possibility of poisoning and killing people due to the accumulation of nuclear waste. But in the practice of burying nuclear waste, today’s society can enjoy reduced energy costs. He questioned the trade off, this discounting of the future and whether it was worth the cost.

Another example Arrow gave regarding the current mode of thinking about the future centered on the emission controls. While it results in increased expenses in manufacturing costs, or what it costs to run one’s car, etc., the payoff is that in the future there will be lower emissions, lower CO2 content, etc. The final product then, said Arrow, is that future generations benefit. He emphasized that this should, be viewed as a permanent cost. The caveat is that if a mistake is made, it’s not correctible. Society’s actions are basically irreversible and the consequences are unknown. The question, he said, is like any other investment. One invests in something and expects something back in the future. That’s positive discounting in the economy, but the real question, Arrow said, is why the future is discounted at a positive rate. What’s the trade off? Citing the theories of various economists and philosophers, Arrow noted the most morally controversial issue is that which extends to future generations. It is the belief that anything in the future is worth less than it is today.

Schelling opened by disagreeing with Arrow’s premise that all future generations to come after us are not morally equal to us, and that nowhere in the world are future generations morally equal to us. Schelling proposed to take the argument a step further, adding that that nowhere in the world are other contemporary people equal to us. He stated that if today’s approach to foreign aid paralleled the way Arrow approaches climate change, the world would be looking at levels of income, marginal utilities of consumption in Bangladesh and Zambia and Nigeria and Ecuador. Yet, he offered, no one ever proposes we deal with Ecuadorians or Bangladeshi’s. Americans, Schelling said, deal with the people of these countries as morally equal to themselves in terms of the claims they make on their wealth. On the subject of climate change, Schelling stated that the dangers of climate change for Americans are exaggerated, arguing that it may be necessary simply to motivate action. Aside from possible catastrophes, Schelling stated that he does not believe the standards of living in the U.S. will be affected by climate change due to the country’s level of productivity, income, and infrastructure.

During the question and answer period questions were asked about policy change, consumption and the possibility of global consensus. Arrow ended the session by stating that the biggest question at hand and which remains unanswered is what caused the great depression. If we don’t know what caused the depression, Arrow said, we cannot be sure that we have control over the future.

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Climate Change- a human rights or a foreign aid problem?

The island nation of the Maldives said it made a big step forward Friday toward protecting its very existence, which it fears is threatened by global warming.

The Indian Ocean archipelago, which says it risks loosing its entire territory to rising sea levels, leaving its 360,000 inhabitants with no place to go, drummed up enough support in a key U.N. body to request a study on the impact of climate change on human rights.

"We feel it is very important that the Human Rights Council start addressing the issue of climate change," said the Maldives Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid.

"If we look at the consequences of climate change, it is the individual human rights of every person on the planet which is going to be violated, including the right to life," he told The Associated Press by telephone from the Maldives.

Some countries were unhappy to link climate change to human rights. Russia said the United Nations already has enough agencies tackling the problem.

But Shahid said the Maldives wants the council's work to be complementary to other U.N. organizations dealing with climate change, such as the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The 47-nation council said in the document adopted by consensus that it is "concerned that climate change poses an immediate and far-reaching threat to people and communities around the world and has implications for the full enjoyment of human rights."

The Maldives, which consist of 1,200 islands, were joined by other small island countries such as the Fiji Islands and Tuvalu in offering the resolution. They have said they risk disappearing altogether if global warming continues unabated and that the world would see hundreds of thousands of stateless people who have nowhere to go, no government to protect them or to deliver basic services.

The 3,000 inhabitants of Papua New Guinea's Carteret Islands, in the far western Pacific, are already preparing to be among the world's first "climate refugees."

As seas expand from warming and from the runoff of melting land ice, higher and higher tides are eating away at tiny places like the Carterets, a sandy atoll of a half-dozen islands. Its people are getting ready to abandon the islands over the next several years, resettling on designated land on nearby Bougainville island.

Shahid said the inhabitants of the Maldives "don't intend to go anywhere."

If significant measures are taken now, the tiny island nation can be saved, he said. "It's not too late, but time is ticking."

-Maldives gets UN top human rights body to study climate change

Related;
What Development Economists Need to Know About Climate Change ;

Schelling started his presentation by characterizing the climate change issue as a bargaining between developed countries, leaving the developing countries with a limited role. Yet it is the developing countries that are truly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, he said. This is largely because in developing countries so many people live on agriculture. Additionally, Schelling explained, this is where the bulk of the population resides, and will increasingly reside in the next few decades. Other reasons for developing countries’ vulnerability that Schelling cited included weaker health care systems and less access to crucial nutrients, clean water, and sewage systems. Additionally, he pointed out that as climates become warmer, vectors that carry pathogens (mosquitoes, flies) become more numerous and also more virulent. These will all be key factors in offsetting the effects of climate change, Schelling said, and as such the best defense of developing countries against climate change will be their own development. This will allow them to become less dependent on agriculture and become sufficiently wealthy to afford a decent public health infra-structure.

Another moronic move by the U.N. Human Rights Council

Mr. Armstrong vs Mr. Gore

Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School challenges Al Gore $20,000 that he will be able to make more accurate forecasts of annual mean temperatures than those that can be produced by climate models. Scott Armstrong’s forecasts will be based on the naive (no-change) model; that is, the forecasts would be the same as the most recent year prior to the forecasts.

Related;
Environmental Forecasting and the Policy Process

There are many weaknesses in current climate models. Current models do not provide forecasts; they provide the modeler's own speculations or scenarios. Given the complexity and uncertainty involved, it is unlikely that these models will prove to be a useful guide. Scientific forecasts are derived from evidence-based models. To create a scientific forecast, several principles apply: it is important to avoid complex models and unaided expert judgment and to be conservative when uncertainty is high. In order to have an accurate forecast for global warming, there are several contingencies. First of all, there must be accurate forecasts in long-term temperature change, the effects of that change, and the effects of feasible policy changes. Climate modelers claim that their models are scenarios, not forecasts, but continue to refer to them as forecasts or predictions. Climate "experts" use models to present their own opinions and make adjustments to suit their assumptions. When making forecasts for complex and uncertain future events, experts have no advantage over nonexperts. Processing facts is most important.

After auditing the current climate change models, most of the forecasting principles were contravened, and there is not a single scientific forecast to support global warming. Forecasts by climate experts are of little value. Climate may change in the future, but because of the uncertainties that exist, the most sensible forecast right now is no change. To produce accurate results, modelers need to use scientific approaches to climate forecasts, avoid alternative sources of bias, consider alternative explanations, examine empirical evidence, use valid empirically based methods, provide full disclosure, present findings clearly, and obtain peer review.

Al Gore refuses to gamble on the environment

How many economics books have acknowledgments like the following

"I'm also grateful to world-leading artists and humanitarians including Bono, Angelina Jolie, Quincy Jones, John Legend, Madonna, and Roger Walters for their unstinting commitment, generosity, leadership, and outreach to millions of fans."

I'll leave up to the readers to guess the author and book.

Jeffrey Sachs on The Daily Show

Jeffrey Sachs's new book

Coming out tomorrow-
Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Fish can get lost in sea

Reef fish get lost as climate changes

CLIMATE change might be causing reef fish to get lost, unable to return to breeding grounds from the open ocean, which could have profound implications for the survival of reef ecosystems, Australian scientists say.

Climate change-induced environmental stress, including warmer and more acidic seawater, could be hindering the development of the ear bones in young reef fish, which rely on sound for navigation, the marine experts said on Friday.

The scientists from the James Cook University and the Australian Institute of Marine Science found that fish with asymmetrical ear bones struggle to return to their home reef.

'In our opinion, ear bone asymmetry in the early life stages of reef fish interferes with their capacity to find and settle on coral reefs,' fish ecologist Monica Gagliano said in a statement.

Fish at the end of their 'ocean stage' after hatching navigate by homing-in on reef-associated sounds, such as the gurgling of fish and the snapping of crustaceans, said the scientists, whose study was published on Friday in the British scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Vertebrate animals make sense of sounds by comparing differences in the acoustic signal between their two ears. To do this well, ear structures must be relatively symmetrical.

Asymmetrical ear bones do not appear to make the fish deaf, but might interfere with the ability of the fish to hear effectively.

The scientists said ear bone asymmetry could be closely linked to rising sea surface temperature and acidity, caused by high atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, as well as localised stresses. Oceans absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, acting as a giant sink for the greenhouse gas.

Fish ear bones, like fish skeletons and reef-building corals, are made from calcium carbonate. When seawater becomes more acidic, there is less calcium carbonate available for building calcium-based structures, including fish ear bones.

The scientists studied damselfish, which are abundant on Australia's Great Barrier Reef and western Australia's Ningaloo Reef, and found that at hatching, 41 per cent of a sample group of fish had symmetrical ear bones and 59 per cent asymmetrical.

When the scientists examined the ear bones of fish returning from open ocean to settle on the reef a few weeks later, far fewer asymmetrical fish made their way back to the reef.

The scientists also found that those with asymmetrical ear bones that did make it to the reef took longer to do so than their symmetrical counterparts.

Peter Gallagher not convinced by the Garnaut report

The Garnaut Climate Review Interim Report—I’m not convinced (Australia's equivalent of the Stern Report)

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Tea with Musharraf

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Assorted Climate Change

Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these “green” fuels are taken into account, two studies being published Thursday have concluded.

The benefits of biofuels have come under increasing attack in recent months, as scientists took a closer look at the global environmental cost of their production. These latest studies, published in the prestigious journal Science, are likely to add to the controversy.

These studies for the first time take a detailed, comprehensive look at the emissions effects of the huge amount of natural land that is being converted to cropland globally to support biofuels development.

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Australia's Productivity Commission critiques Stern Report

The Productivity Commission today released a staff working paper titled The Stern Review: an assessment of its methodology. This technical paper contains a detailed examination of key elements of the Review’s analytical approach. Originally prepared as an internal research memorandum following release of the Stern Review’s report, the paper is being made more widely available given its ongoing relevance in light of Australia’s Garnaut Review.

The staff paper finds that the Stern Review made some important analytical advances. The Review sought to move beyond analysis based on the mean expected outcome to one that incorporates low probability, but potentially catastrophic, events at the tail of probability distributions. The Review also attempted a more comprehensive coverage of damage costs than most previous studies.

The paper also finds that value judgements and ethical perspectives in key parts of the Stern Review’s analysis led to estimates of future economic damages being substantially higher, and abatement costs lower, than most previous studies. The paper notes that the report could usefully have included more sensitivity analysis to highlight to decisionmakers the consequences of alternative assumptions or judgements.

All things Climate Change

Climate Policy Map

Econ Talks and other podcasts

John Taylor of Stanford Says Next Recession Would Be `Mild'

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The Fisher King

In the world of medieval romance there are many weird and wonderful creatures – there are golden dragons and green knights, sinister enchantresses and tragic kings, strange magicians and spears that bleed and talk. And yet, in all this panoply of wonder, few figures are more mysterious than the Fisher King. Entrusted as the keeper of the Holy Grail itself, he resides in a castle made of magic where he lies blighted by a wound that does not heal.

He is a complex and poetic figure and has meant many things to many people. From the age of chivalry to that of psychoanalysis and beyond, he has been Christian and pagan, tragic and enduring, a sinner, a fertility god and a symbol of sexual fear and desire.

MUST CLIMATE CHANGE END THE PLATINUM AGE?
Professor Ross Garnaut

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Saving Nemo
The speakers in today's forum describe how the changing climate is affecting coral. We'll hear about the effect of green zones where fish are protected. There's the latest research on sharks and concerns for their future. And do fish larvae stay close to home or do fish protected in one region actually influence the populations of the same species in other neighbouring regions.

Alfred Deakin Innovation Lecture
Are we missing out on the full benefits of science and technology because of outdated ideas about copyright and patenting? Could the key to feeding the world be locked up in a company fridge somewhere? Open-source software has transformed the internet, underpinning the phenomenal growth of Google, Ebay and YouTube. What can science learn from this revolution? In our rush to protect intellectual property, have we damaged our capacity to deliver solutions for the critical issues of the 21st century?

The 'thrifty gene' hypothesis and indigenous health

Science curriculum in British schools


Philosophy in schools

Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

The Encounter of Islam with Europe
Europe's 'favorite expert on Islam' Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Timothy Garton Ash

Social Entrepreneurship: J.B. Schramm

The Global State of Influenza Pandemic Preparedness

Social Science and the Middle East: myths, pitfalls and opportunities

Human Rights in the 21st century: problems and prospects

Why is it Always 'Us' and 'Them': on the natural history of thinking through groups

Joseph Stiglitz on Fostering an Independent Media

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
A discussion with Daniel Franklin, Executive Editor of The Economist

Quote of the Day

The temperature has risen about 10 degrees since this morning. If you extrapolate that, we will all be burned to a crisp before the end of the month.

- Thomas Sowell


Related;
2007 Was Earth's Second Warmest Year in a Century

Climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University have found that 2007 tied with 1998 for Earth's second warmest year in a century...

A minor data processing error found in the GISS temperature analysis in early 2007 does not affect the present analysis. The data processing flaw was the result of a failure to apply NOAA adjustments to U. S. Historical Climatology Network stations in 2000-2006, as the records for those years were taken from a different database (Global Historical Climatology Network). This flaw affected only 1.6% of the Earth's surface (the contiguous 48 states) and only the last several years in the 21st century. The data processing flaw did not alter the ordering of the warmest years on record and the global ranks were unaffected. In the contiguous 48 states, the statistical tie among 1934, 1998 and 2005 as the warmest year(s) was unchanged. In the current analysis, in the flawed analysis, and in the published GISS analysis, 1934 is the warmest year in the contiguous states (but not globally) by an amount (magnitude on the order of 0.01°C) that is an order of magnitude smaller than the certainty.

You Tube Lecture- Stern Warning