Posts by linger
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Speaker: Rugby, Racing and Emotions, in reply to Danielle,
But ... just think how many flag referenda that money could have bought!
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The details of the cited articles (rather than just their headlines) tend to support my comments above.
18 out of 29 islands have actually grown
– i.e., more than a third in this (Tuvaluan) sample didn’t : hardly a reliable mechanism to stake your future on. Indeed, while team member Virginie Duvat is generally optimistic about the long-term survival of atolls, even she acknowledges that
"Where shoreline changes are rapid, islanders have already had, in some cases, to move to more stable places,” says Duvat.
And climate change could result in bigger, more frequent storms. These could be catastrophic in the short term even if they increase the area of atolls in the long term, says Tom Spencer from the University of Cambridge. […]
And meanwhile, team member Roger McLean
notes that the atoll-building sediment comes from productive coral reefs, which face a range of threats such as warming oceans and pollution.
—Sarchet, P. (2015) Sea level’s toll on atolls isn’t that bad. New Scientist 6/6/2015.
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Speaker: Misrepresenting Kiribati and…, in reply to Tinakori,
These are statistical processes, without memory. An island that has so far gained from the action of such processes may not continue to do so. You really don't want to be arguing, "hey, let's wait here for a tsunami to save us" ... because they tend not to do that very reliably.
It's very much like Wellington relying on earthquakes to raise the land level and save it from rising sea levels. Statistically, in the long term, that is what's expected to happen. You still don't want to be there while it's happening. And if the next big quake happens to be on the Wellington fault itself (or one to the west of that), the local land level could just as easily fall.
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Hard News: The positive option of Red Peak, in reply to Sacha,
If they're at all competent, they should have foreseen the main diversion would be during the time leading up to the referenda, so ... call me a suspicious bastard, but I can't help wondering, what new mess would they be attempting to divert attention from now?
You see, I'm not sure it's worth the effort just to get us to ignore the existing problems. In the absence of longer-term investigative journalism, those issues are not necessarily going to get media attention; and the rugby would be enough of a diversion by itself, you'd think. -
Speaker: Misrepresenting Kiribati and…, in reply to Sue,
At best, there will come times, in the not-too-distant future, when Kiribati becomes at least temporarily uninhabitable, through storms or tsunami. So the government’s land purchases and legal options sound like prudent explorations of possible escape plans.
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Hard News: The positive option of Red Peak, in reply to chris,
Which makes it easier to interpret the result as partly Red Pique
with the design signifying a middle digit, uplifted high -
Polity: Political strategy and Canada’s NDP, in reply to Ieuan,
But then, he was taking enough drugs to overcome all need for sleep...
(yeh, I suspect Rich was actually being a little facetious.)
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Speaker: Misrepresenting Kiribati and…, in reply to Tinakori,
Except that the mechanism that the study requires for atolls to be reshaped:
when waves wash over them during storms or tsunami, depositing sand in the process
is not consistent with continuous human habitation of low-lying islands, a fact the researcher somewhat coyly glosses over by suggesting
life on those islands may be very different to today.
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… and which argues for the residents of Kiribati as a community, and quite explicitly not for Mr. Teitiota as an individual.
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One other problem with “co-morbidity” (which if we unpack its evidential base, is a greater than expected probability of individuals diagnosed for one condition to meet diagnostic criteria for other conditions) is that observed non-independence of co-occurrence in diagnosed individuals still might not indicate any actual correlation (let alone causal connection) in the occurrence of those conditions.
Having another condition makes it harder to compensate for a condition, which means you’re more likely to present for diagnosis in the first place, and also means that a diagnosis of any one condition is more likely if someone is also affected by another condition. Even more so if those conditions have similar effects (so that their diagnostic criteria overlap).Which is a rather long-winded way of explaining why the term co-morbid is used instead of correlated.