5 green questions, answered as accurately as I know how:

Question 1: Global warming isn’t real is it? I mean we keep reading reports that the planet hasn’t warmed up at all since 1999. Some say it’s cooling down and so on. It’s all a big hoax.

Answer: Scientifically speaking the planet doesn’t really have an “agreed average temperature”. However there are satellite readings, balloon readings and local temperature readings that do not support the assertion that “the average temperature of the planet is on the increase”, and there are even some that suggest the temperature might be cooling. However, let’s try to provide some perspective as to what this means:

1. The problem here is the focus on the word “warming”, which is misleading. Let’s consider the oceans as a single unit. Think of a glass of water on which a large piece of ice is floating. Do you expect the temperature of the surface of the water to increase, while there’s a big ice cube floating around? Not much perhaps (actually, in the Arctic, an increasing temperature of sea water has been observed since 1995, and recently in the region just north of the Chakchi Sea, waters have been 5° C above average.) The global average surface temperature may not increase. Nevertheless, notice that the ice sheet is shrinking dramatically. That means the ocean is absorbing a very large amount of heat, irrespective of the local temperature readings.
2. We see the same, but a lesser effect, on land. The permafrost is melting, the glaciers are melting and the snow line on mountains is receding. Heat is being absorbed. There’s also the effect that, where the atmospheric temperature increases, more water evapourates and that takes heat out of the atmosphere.
3. So the truth is that the planet is measurably absorbing a great deal more heat that it has been doing. This has changed the local climate in many places and the cause is green house gases.
   

Question 2: But you can’t ascribe these climate changes to human activity, can you? The earth goes through cycles where the temperature rises and then it falls back down again, doesn’t it? Isn’t what’s happening now just the natural order of things?

Answer: The scientific evidence suggests that there’s a roughly 100,000 year cycle of warming and cooling (much of the evidence has been gathered by the analysis of ice cores). The suggested and believable cause of this is that the earth’s orbit oscillates from more circular to more elliptical (the Milankovitch theory). When the orbit is more circular the Earth heats up, the sea level slowly rises and the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases. Right now we’re coming to the end of a period of rising temperature and sea level. The actual level of carbon dioxide is about 30% higher at these temperature peaks.

Question 3: But of those measurements, the carbon dioxide level is lagging, isn’t it. The carbon dioxide is the effect rather than the cause of the warming, isn’t it?

Answer: There you go, interrupting before I’ve completed the previous question. Never mind, let’s put the two questions together. The phenomenon of green house gases is real. The main green house gas is carbon dioxide, but also there’s methane and water vapor.  Shortwave radiation from the sun hits the earth and (depending on what it hits) some of it is reflected back into the atmosphere as long wave radiation. The green house gases absorb long wave radiation, trapping it in the same way that green house glass traps it. Every time you test a green house gas to see if it does this, it just does it. It never takes a day off.

Estimates suggest that the average global temperature of the Earth would be about -18° C if it weren’t for green house gases (rather than about 15° C). So there seems to be an amplification effect in operation. CO2 is both an effect and a cause of global warming. As the Earth heats up, you get more green house gases, which amplify the temperature rise until it reaches a peak. Currently the global average concentration of carbon dioxide is 387 parts per million and this is rising by an average of 2 ppm per year. This annual  rise is attributable primarily to the 6.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide that human beings release into the atmosphere each year.

Question 4. But the whole process will turn around and stop, just like it did over the past 100,000 year cycles, won’t it?

Answer. Unfortunately no-one knows if it will turn round this time, because this cycle is not the same as the previous cycles. This time we have human beings adding billions of extra tons of carbon dioxide and we have no idea whether the cycle will revert in the way that it did before. The worrying difference is that, according to the evidence, atmospheric carbon dioxide is now higher than it’s ever been in the past 500,000 years. The previous high was about 300 ppm, over 300,000 years ago. It’s now above 380 and rising at 2ppm each year. So, it is likely that the sea level rise and eventual temperature rise will be higher than before.

The Earth is too complex an ecosystem to model accurately. We are in new territory. Nobody knows whether there is a corrective mechanism that will kick in at some point.

Question 5. So we get a little more ice melt and a bit of coastline change, but otherwise what’s the big deal?

Answer. If only it were so. There is an attendant problem caused by the fact that the sea absorbs carbon dioxide. About half of the billions of tons of carbon dioxide we add to the atmosphere get absorbed by the sea. In some ways it’s a useful mechanism because it reduces the green house effect. Unfortunately it raises the Ph level of the sea. What’s happening is that the sea is becoming more and more acidic, as more carbon dioxide is absorbed.

Look at all the coastline of most countries in the world and what you see are sandy beaches. Those sandy beaches are formed from the shells of trillions and trillions of shellfish that have been crumbled up by the waves over millions of years. Well that particular process may come to a full stop. Here’s why:

If the sea continues to absorb carbon dioxide at the current rate then by 2075 all coral reefs will start to die, or have died. (We probably can’t stop this).

By 2300 the sea will be too acidic for shellfish to form shells.

It’s hard to believe, I know, but that’s what the scientific evidence is suggesting. If you want a detailed analysis get hold of the full article called The Darkening Seas from the New Yorker.

What would it mean if there were no shellfish?

Click here for all postings on Global Warming.

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From a technology perspective, we are in the most disruptive phase of Information Technology since the computer was born. It might not seem that way, but if you list the disruptive technologies currently in play, it paints an intriguing picture. So here’s a list:

1. Multicore Chips

Multicore chips have been around for a year or two. They were introduced as Moore’s Law ran out of steam. Each core is a distinct cpu and thus it is possible on PCs and laptops to simply split the workload in two and harness both cpus reasonably efficiently. However as you increase the number of cores on a chip, this strategy starts to fail and you need to specifically program for multiple cores using programming languages and models designed for the job. (A UK parallel programming consultancy, Concertant does an annual survey on multicore. If you’re interested in completing this, here’s the survey link.)

There has been talk of chips with hundreds of cores and, if general purpose uses can be found for them, they will likely be introduced in the coming 5 years or so. Multicore favors virtualization, so there is little doubt that multicore will persist both on the server and on the client at least up to 8 cores. However, the destiny of multicore may also be tied to the GPU.

2. The GPU Absorbs the CPU

This strongly relates to the previous multicore disruption. Nvidia believes that the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) will absorb the CPU in the coming years. Clearly, that would rain on Intel’s parade in no uncertain terms, and of course, the sun would shine like a diamond on Nvidia’s parade. Nvidia has a point though. As interfaces increase in sophistication it’s the GPU that does most of the work, the CPU having topped out quite a while ago. As far as I can see there’s no reason not to put a few x86 core onto a GPU and make the CPU disappear, as in a magic trick. For further details read What is a GPU and Why is it Important?

3. Memory Replacing Disk

I wrote about this in detail quite a while ago here. The point is that flash memory, which is non-volatile and provides much faster access than disk, is gradually replacing disk. Samsung’s recently announced 256GB solid state drive (SSD) is 2.4 times faster than disk. That doesn’t sound too revolutionary, but the point is that nearly all the business applications we run assume that we are pulling data from a spinning disk and soon that will not be the case. Hence there will likely be an opportunity to rethink database at the physical level.

4. The Network Infrastructure Absorbs the Servers

Recently introduced all-singing-all-dancing network switch products can deliver astonishing network speeds – in the terabyte per second area. For full details see The Server Vendors v Cisco: Is This A New Technology War? and Brocade: The Heart and Lungs of the Network. Note that this bandwidth is greater than the bandwidth between memory and the cpu on a server board. (If you are going to get this fact in perspective, you need to understand that the distance between memory and CPU is very small, so the latency of a single instruction is lower memory-to-cpu than over the network, but the network bandwidth is higher because it embodies huge parallelism on fiber). The point is that with networks this capable it is feasible to have an architecture that sends instructions and data anywhere to execute. It diminishes the need to keep the processing close to the data. The ultimate consequence from this is that if you want to manage workloads on a network, you need to do it from the network infrastructure, which, naturally, has an operating system of its own. This will inevitably happen in time.

5. The Network Becomes Real-Time (or near-as-dammit-realtime)

Communications has been converging with computing forever, but only recently have they met and shook hands. The upshot is that IP Addresses becomes the physical communications addresses, Unified Communications rule (see What Is Unified Communications?) and Presence becomes important (see What is Presence and Why Should I Care?.) You should be able to get an immediate understanding of how computer networks become realtime simply by looking at the diagram on this posting and asking yourself whether it needs 99.999% uptime (yes it does).

6. The Network Gets A Management Circuit

A recent, almost silent, trend has seen the installing of Service Processors in servers to improve up-time and provide a circuit by which a network can be better managed. The story is told in greater detail in What is a Service Processor? And Why Should I Care?

7. Virtualization: Everything goes Virtual

I’ve written about virtualization extensively. You can find a page full of Virtualization links here. You could say that it all began with the advent of SANs, which eventually created a common storage pool which you could think of as a “virtualized storage resource.” With the advent of multicore, virtualization just made more and more sense, and it now looks to be the fundamental pattern of how processing resource is allocated and workloads are managed. Naturally the desktop gets pulled in to the virtualization whirlpool and as time passes, we end up with a “common resource space” with end-devices providing access.

8. Cloud Computing

Finally we have cloud computing where pretty much every resource and capability, hard or soft, is provided as a service. For a full description read Everything as a Service: The Growth of Cloud Computing

Anything else?

I could add that everything mentioned so far (hard or soft) could feasibly be addressed using a single 64 bit addressing scheme. That would be game changing, given that we live in an age of 64 bit computing that doesn’t yet exploit 64 bit addressing.

I could also mention that graphene is very likely to replace silicon in chips in the coming 5-10 years, which means that Moore’s Law would get a new lease of life and that the heating problems in data centers would evaporate. (See Graphene: The New Silicon

The point of summarizing all of this, by the way, is to provide a global perspective on the blistering pace of change. If you have anything else you think should be included, please post comments.

If you scan the web for mashups using Google, you’ll possibly run into the following types of mashup:

• Mapping Mashups
• Video & Photo Mashups (using media metadata)
• Shopping Mashups (from Froogle, PriceGrabber, etc.)
• Themes (Adding a theme to a website, like Hahlo)
• News Mashups (like RSS feeds on steroids)
• Games Mashups
• Visualization Mashups

It’s worth doing just to see what’s out there, but I don’t believe it reveals much about the importance of mashups.

Technically, a mashup is “an integration of multi-sourced applications or content into a single offering.” This definition is broad enough to cover video and music mashups, as well as software mash ups, but it’s the software mashups I’m interested in – and I’m going to stretch the definition of mashup a little so that it includes everything anyone might use as a ready made software component.

What I’m try to do is reveal the extent to which software development has become a matter of assembling readily available components. So here is my list of mashup types:

1. The Mashable Web Site: Many web sites have opened up their APIs. ProgrammableWeb.com gives a current total of 784, but there may be more. They include, famously, Google Maps, which has spawned a plethora of free mapping services. Also includes; Amazon, AOL, BBC, del.icio.us, Dun & Bradstreet, Facebook, Fedex, and hundreds more. Naturally, usage conditions of various kinds are attached to such interfaces. A common restriction is that you can only provide a free service (to others) with any software you develop that uses the interface. Aside from such stipulations, the use of mashable web sites is usually free of charge.
2. Widgets: Technically a widget is a program that runs in a “dashboard location or layer”. Widgets are usually free to use. Some are self-contained, such as widgets that do nothing more than display a clock. Some provide information services, such as weather forecasts. Widgets fit in the dashboard on the Mac, and in the sidebar under Windows Vista or on the desktop in earlier versions of Windows. They can also be assembled in browsers. There are some websites; iGoogle and NetVibes in particular which allow users to assemble widgets to create their own in-browser dashboards. This kind of approach is spreading and portals are being superseded by “dashboard layers.” There is no evidence (I’m aware of) that this is improving productivity, only that users like to arrange their own environments.
3. Open Source Products: Quite a few Open Source products are used as components in larger development environments. This is particularly the case with products like Hibernate which do a very good job and fill an important role. We should not forget that the whole of the LAMP stack is a set of such components (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.)
4. Open Source as a Code Library: There are over 100,000 projects on SourceForge most of which happily publish the code they write under a license that allows reuse (within various constraints depending on license.) I know of programmers who freely treat some of this code as a convenient code library. After all code that works is code that works. Naturally there is a danger that some companies, completely unaware of the fact, are violating some open source license or other. Nevertheless this is a source of software components that gets utilized.
5. Plug-in Based Products and Plug-ins: The culture of plugins began (I believe) with Firefox. It was a brilliant idea that was well executed. It introduced browser users to the idea of adding functionality and allowed programmers to develop their own additions, which they could market as donationware. This proved to be a very effective way to build a highly functional software product with a relatively small development team. Firefox is now streets ahead of Internet Explorer because of this innovative approach. Many web site engines have followed this model, including WordPress (which I use), Joomla and Drupal
6. Embeddable Plug-ins: Adding code to a web page is about as hard as falling off a log. Many web sites (including this one) embed YouTube videos simply by cutting and pasting code into a PHP file that generates a web page or even directly into the web page source code. Adding PayPal payment is similar process. Indeed there are many things that can be added to a web site in this simple embeddable way.
7. Commercial Mashups: You may have noticed that nothing I’ve mentioned above (whether it works well or not) is actually supported in any meaningful way, unless you directly organize support yourself. There is a website, run by Strike Iron, which provides commercial mashups where support and payment for service is part of the deal. I’ve written about it in depth here.

Taking stock of all this, we can see that there are now many many sources of components that can be used in various ways to assemble a mashed-up environment that blends together capability from almost anywhere on the web. However, I also note that right now the capability is relatively primitive. Most mashups do little more than link to information sources and or provide simple functionality.

My belief is that the most promising capabilities are the web site engines (WordPress, Joomla et al), because they act as highly effective integration points. My expectation is that as richer interface components are developed (i.e. as Web 2.0 matures) the power of these environments will increase.

I’m watching this because I intend to exploit it myself.

IBM’s Cell Chip

You could pretty much declare IBM’s Cell chip a success when the news broke that it would power Sony’s Playstation 3. The Playstation 3 may not be the out-and-out success that Sony hoped for but it’s still a device that sells in the millions. News emerged today that Toshiba will use the Cell chip in a new laptop that goes on sale in Japan in July. To be precise Toshiba will use the SpursEngine, a multimedia co-processor derived from the Cell chip.

The victory here for IBM is that the SpursEngine will do the graphics work – and you may have noticed that the Playstation graphics are rather good if not awesome. So the Toshiba laptops will run an Intel Core 2 Duo chip for Windows, but the differentiating feature will be the graphics. High definition video will be possible on these machines. If all you ever do is watch YouTube videos on your laptop, this is not going to make any difference, but if you want to upscale standard def video to high def then the SpursEngine is your friend.

Holographs

I’ve noted many times that the IT industry invests more in the user interface than everything else put together. If you’re thinking “well we don’t have much to show for that” I think you’re on the money. Nevertheless, the Indian company Infosys may also be on the money with the holographic technology it is making a noise about. It has developed mobile handsets that can project, capture and send 3D images or holographs as we like to call them. Infosys claims that such devices will hit the market in 2010.

I’m not gonna hold my breath on that, but the simple fact is that most of the problems I’m aware of in holography are now solved. A holograph is a 3D representation and you can build one by using an algorithm or two on several 2D representations (photos). A holograph takes lots of space, but you can transmit differences between images to save bandwidth, which is what Infosys does.

Last year researchers at USC produced a holographic display with a 360 degree field of view. Holographic displays with smaller fields of view have been available for a while. There are many compelling applications for it too, like showing you how to take machines apart and fix broken parts. 3D images beat 2D images hands down for gaming too. In fact gaming will probably be the application that brings it all to market.

Obama and the Web

Barack Obama would like to know if you have any ideas on how to improve the competitiveness of the US economy. One way would be to ensure that US companies rather than Indian ones were the first to introduce the next generation interface (after OS X).

I have to be impressed that he asked though. He posed the question through Linked-in.com and so far over 1700 people have sent their ideas. Obama is truly an Internet phenomenon. He squashed his primary competitors (Clinton, Edwards et al) in use of the Internet with:

1. A better web site.
2. A better financial donations capability
3. Better use of Facebook and MySpace
4. Better use of YouTube
5. Better use of Twitter
6. Better use fo Linked-in

You have to feel sorry for John McCain. It’s such an unfair contest in respect of the web. It’s never been proven that John McCain knows that the Internet actually exists. Go to Twitter and you’ll notice that Obama has over 40,000 followers. McCain is invisible. He’s not even there, he’s represented by a few supporters. If the US elections were simply about the use of the Internet, Obama would win by a landslide in all 50 states.