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I hadn't written up our trip to South Korea (in March 2016) but Google Pictures gratuitously put an album together from my Cloud library so I was motivated to add a few words and put it up on my Website. Normally I would use selected images to illustrate observations about a place visited. This is the other way about, with a lot of images that I may not have otherwise chosen. It requires you to go to the link below if you want to see pictures. You may find some of the images interesting and want to by-pass others quickly. Your choice. In addition to the album, Google generated a short movie in an 8mm style - complete with dust flecks. You can see this by clicking the last frame, at the bottom of the album.
A few days in Seoul were followed by travels around the country, helpfully illustrated in the album by Google generated maps: a picture is worth a thousand words; ending back in Seoul before spending a few days in China on the way home to OZ.
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It's with much optimism that I wish you all a happy festive season and a prosperous 2023, after a 'bit of a rough spell'.
To echo the late Queen, 2020 was an annus horribilis: Terrible bushfires; then Covid-19 struck; followed by floods. 2021 was not a lot better, with repeated lock-downs and no international travel. Thankfully, 2022 was much brighter in Australia (unless one lived or did business on a floodplain). It was the northern hemisphere's turn to have fires and to suffer drought.
And as I predicted at the outset, Covid-19 ceased to be a major issue - people are either dead; vaccinated; and/or have had the virus and survived. It's not quite Herd Immunity but the virus is no longer a worrying cause of death, even among those nearing the end of life.
When the virus first hit in Australia, following a mismanaged Cruise ship arrival, I was moved to speculate on how it might end.
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Love in the time of Coronavirus Published 26 March 2020 "In the meantime I've been drawn into several Facebook discussions about the 1918-20 Spanish Influenza pandemic. After a little consideration I've concluded that it's a bad time to be a National or State leader as they will soon be forced to make the unenviable choice between the Scylla and Charybdis that I end this essay with. On a brighter note, I've discovered that the economy can be expected to bounce back invigorated. We have all heard of the Roaring Twenties. So the cruise industry, can take heart, because the most remarkable thing about Spanish Influenza pandemic was just how quickly people got over it after it passed. The history books tell us that the Roaring Twenties were a reaction to the end of the Great War. Yet the War was but one of the hurdles that had to be overcome. The Spanish Influenza pandemic was, more briefly, an enormous burden on post-war society - shutting down commerce, in the same way we are now becoming familiar with, and killing tens of thousands. Although historians disagree over the numbers all agree that the Spanish Influenza pandemic killed a great number. The lowest estimate is 17 million worldwide while another puts it at between 24.7 and 39.3 million. Most, including the National Museum of Australia and Wikipedia, tell us that over 50 million people died worldwide. Globally, this is many more than died in the Great War (WW1). For example, the United States lost less than 120 thousand to the War - then over half a million to the pandemic..." "So in the shadow of the dreadful losses in World War I, that are memorialised in our streets and parks and still remembered reverently at least twice a year, the pandemic that took many young women too, has been almost scrubbed clean from collective memory." |
The best thing this year was our ability to travel overseas again and to visit Berlin and my daughter Emily, her partner Guido and their children, Leander and Tilda. I'm pleased to report that both grandchildren have very good English, in addition to their native German (Berlin style).
Those of you who read last year's message will find what follows familiar. I've barely changed a word.
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| The following abbreviated paper is extracted from a longer, wider-ranging, paper with reference to energy policy in New South Wales and Australia, that was written in 2008. This extract relates solely to CCS. The original paper that is critical of some 2008 policy initiatives intended to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions can still be read in full on this website: Read here... |
Carbon Sequestration Source: Wikimedia Commons
This illustration shows the two principal categories of Carbon Capture and Storage (Carbon Sequestration) - methods of disposing of carbon dioxide (CO2) so that it doesn't enter the atmosphere. Sequestering it underground is known as Geosequestration while artificially accelerating natural biological absorption is Biosequestration.
There is a third alternative of deep ocean sequestration but this is highly problematic as one of the adverse impacts of rising CO2 is ocean acidification - already impacting fisheries.
This paper examines both Geosequestration and Biosequestration and concludes that while Biosequestration has longer term potential Geosequestration on sufficient scale to make a difference is impractical.
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