Keaveney defection: Irish politics gets interesting

On Thursday night, despite days of agonising about the austerity budget amongst backbenchers, only one coalition TD voted against it, and has been expelled from the Labour Parliamentary Party.   But it wasn’t any old backbench TD.  It was Colm Keaveney, Labour Party chair. According to party leader and deputy leader Eamon Gilmore and Pat Rabbitte, being outside the Parliamentary Party is incompatible with being party chairman, and Keaveney should resign from his position.

Left, Colm Keaveney. Right, Labour leader and deputy prime minister Eamon Gilmore.  The Keaveney photo is outside the Dáil Thursday night after he had voted against the Social Welfare Bill. Irish Times correspondent Miriam Lord said he looked shell-shocked. (Credit: Brenda Fitzsimons)

But this is where it gets interesting. Keaveney was elected by Conference, and is challenging Gilmore to call a special conference to unseat him.  The Irish Times quotes him:

“The graceful thing to do is to honour the mandate I was given by the grassroots of the Labour Party and I said I would honour Labour values. It is a gift of the members of the Labour Party and not of the leader. I will put myself in front of a conference if Eamon Gilmore believes that we need an early conference to talk about the chair. I think we need an early conference on the direction of the Labour Party.”

The specific clause Keaveney voted against seems to have been the reduction in respite care grants.

A selection of tweets during the past few hours:-

> I'm ordinary member who is not normally rebellious but any attempt to force out Colm Keaveney as Chair would lead to members revolt

> After shamelessly lying to the electorate, Pat Rabbitte has some nerve to be abusing and belittling Colm Keaveney over his stance

> Colm Keaveney SHOULD NOT RESIGN Emmet Stag of ALL ppl has a nerve talking about ANYONE embarrassing Labour Party! (Emmet Stag is Labour Party whip, but sorry I don't know his particular misdeeds)

> Absolutely absurd suggestion that Colm Keaveney might not stay on as labour party chairperson. He is democratically elected by the members (this from Patrick Nulty, a left Labour TD who is one of 5 now excluded from the whip)

So ... special conference yes or no?
 
One thing you can be sure of, Gilmore won't be calling a special conference if he can help it. The question is, will Colm Keaveney? Or will his supporters?

Read: Keaveney “determined” to remain Labour party chairman in TheJournal.ie, and Row breaks out over Colm Keaveney's future as Labour Party chairman (RTÉ)

Life thrives in one of Earth's most extreme environments

Lake Vida in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, in East Antarctica

Here's another story about an ice-entombed Antarctic lake, which I found in New Scientist, 26 November.

It's Lake Vida in East Antarctica, which has been buried for 2,800 years under 20 metres of ice.  (But no snow ... weird ... I never knew Antarctica looked like this.)  Those figures are negligible compared to much older, deeper lakes under investigation in Antarctica, most notably lakes Vostok and Ellsworth, which I wrote about a couple of days ago.  Those are 3 kilometres down and may have been isolated for millions rather than thousands of years. 

But here's the interesting bit. Lake Vida is one of the most extreme environments on Earth. It's seven times as salty as the sea, pitch dark, and 13 degrees below freezing, yet despite all this it teems with life.

We were pondering the chance that extraterrestrial life might exist on planets such as Mars, or icy moons such as Jupiter's Europa. The discovery of strange, abundant bacteria in a completely sealed, sunless, salty, icebound lake must strengthen this possibility.

New Scientist quotes Peter Doran of the University of Illinois saying "Lake Vida is a model of what happens when you try to freeze a lake solid, and this is the same fate that any lakes on Mars would have gone through as the planet turned colder from a watery past.  Any Martian water bodies that did form would have gone through this Vida stage before freezing solid, entombing the evidence of the past ecosystem."  Doran is co-leader of a team working in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica where Vida is situated.

Energy from chemicals not sunlight?

The Vida bacteria belong to previously unknown species. It's thought they probably survive by metabolising the abundant hydrogen and oxides of nitrogen that Vida's salty, oxygen-free water has been found to contain. It seems researchers were surprised to find such high concentrations of hydrogen, nitrous oxide and carbon in the water. They speculate that these chemicals might originate from reactions between salt and nitrogen-containing minerals in the surrounding rock. Over the centuries, bacteria denied sunlight may have evolved to be completely reliant on these chemicals for energy.

Some of the extracted cells are being grown in a lab, in order to better understand the physical or chemical extremes they can tolerate.  

Here's how the researchers think the lake got so salty. As the top and edges of the lake progressively froze, all the salt became concentrated in the remaining water, which as a result can stay liquid below -13 °C.

More on US Antarctic Programme website.

There are other extreme environments on Earth where life thrives. Beside hot deep ocean vents, for example. But more of them another day perhaps.

I find an optimistic comment about pharao Morsi

President Morsi - “pharaonic” decree

Haven't said anything abut the Arab Spring recently because I'm a bit down in the mouth about the whole thing. But for a dose of optimism, read Mehdi Hasan in the New Statesman, on 29 November.  

Hasan says we should ignore the neocons, he refuses to give up on Egypt, or the Arab spring.  Despite the murmurs about Morsi’s “pharaonic” decree and the Syrian bloodbath, he refuses to lose faith in the people of the Arab world.  For a start, we should all be celebrating the backlash against Morsi’s decree and how instant it was.

One point I need to take issue with him though.

Pointing out that revolutions are measured in years and decades, not weeks and months, he quotes Chinese premier Zhou Enlai’s remark “It is too soon to say” made in 1971, when asked for his view on the success of the French Revolution of 1789.

That one, sad to say, has been nailed.

Manhattan Project: Celebrating? Or commemorating?

A Quonset hut on the grounds of the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico where "Fat Man" (atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945) was assembled. The hut would be part of a new Manhattan Project National Park.
Historical photograph courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory. I'm not sure if this caption means this was the actual hut, or just one like it.

A US congressman has condemned a bill to make a national park out of three top-secret sites which housed the Manhattan Project.
 
"We're talking about the devastation of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — hundreds of thousands killed, $10 trillion Cold War between the U.S. and Russia, tens of thousands of nuclear weapons which today threaten the existence of the world — and this is something we should celebrate?"
 
The words of Democrat congressman Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), reported by NPR.
 
The contrary position is put by director of the Los Alamos Historical Society, Heather McClenahan. A park would be a commemoration, not a celebration. And the US already has national parks commemorating slavery, Civil War battles and American Indian massacres.
 
"It's a chance to say, 'Why did we do this? What were the good things that happened? What were the bad? How do we learn lessons from the past? How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?' "
 
That’s history.
 
Read it on the NPR website where you can also download an audio clip, 3 min 38 sec.

The congressman and the history woman are both right of course.  But of the two, the history woman is the righter.

Extraterrestrial life? Keep your eye on Lake Ellsworth

The sun is shining night and day in the Antarctic right now, but the temperatures remain far below freezing. Photograph: British Antarctic Survey

A search for life is beginning in a lake entombed under Antarctic ice. Lake Ellsworth is buried under three kilometres of solid ice, and is the size of Lake Windermere. Keep an eye on this story. A drilling operation is now reaching its climax and the actual lake water ought to be reached between 12th and 15th December. 

Here's why it's important. Should life be found lurking in the depths, it will have evolved in isolation for at least 100,000 years, but probably much longer. I've seen millions mentioned. Scientists want to know whether life can endure such harsh environments. If it can, the next question is how. Any organisms that live here are cut off from the air above, and must contend with subzero conditions, few nutrients, complete darkness, and intense pressure.

The answers will further our understanding of life on Earth, and inform searches for life elsewhere in the solar system, such as in the ice-capped ocean of Jupiter's moon Europa.

Mike Bentley, a geologist, was quoted in yesterday’s Guardian: "Extreme environments tell you what constraints there are on life. If we find a particular set of environments where life can't exist, that creates some bookends: it tells you about the limits of life."

Another buried Antarctic lake, Lake Vostok, is being probed by Russian scientists. It's even deeper and more challenging, and the project has been criticised due to concerns that the Russians may contaminate the lake with microbes from the surface that would nullify any discovery of life there. The British team will use a sterile hot water drill to bore down. According to Nature,  this method would be impractical at Lake Vostok due to the thicker glacier.

New Scientist reported in October that no sign of life has been discovered in the first Lake Vostok samples but microbes may lurk deeper in the lake.

The more life is found in buried Antarctic lakes the better the prospects for life on Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

Beneath Europa's icy shell, it is thought a liquid ocean exists, potentially supporting complex organisms

I need to check what missions are planned to Europa and Jupiter's other icy moons.  ESA has or had a project known as JUICE - the Jupiter Icy moons Explorer, to be launched in 2022. And NASA has the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM). But I have a feeling one or other of these has been cancelled or they have been merged or something. Who knows what damage austerity will do between now and 2022. 

For more see this Guardian link: British Antarctic Survey in pictures

Isolated for millions of years

One thing puzzles me in all the commentary on these Antarctic lakes. That’s the emphasis on their being isolated from all other life for perhaps millions of years. Even if this turns out to be so, millions of years doesn't strike me as long enough to be interesting. Some comments on this theme in a post I wrote about Lake Vostok in February 2011.

Climate change comes to Glenduff

22 Nov 2012. Top, our drive torn up by the flood. Bottom Cork County Council fixing it.

We woke 3 o’clock on Thursday morning to find water cascading into the yard with such force that it completely broke up our yard and driveway, exposing electric cables. Only a little came into the house thankfully.

Before and after the repairs.  Exposed electric cable in foreground of left hand picture.

Full praise to Cork County Council who sent a gang to fix everything up again, all done within less than 12 hours of the flood.  They had to attend to a lot of other local damage as well.

This sort of thing has never happened before, and the talk is, is this climate change in action? You can't point to a single event of course, floods in Glenduff or Hurricane Sandy, and say “that’s climate change”. But it's the second time in 6 weeks our drive and the nearby borheen (mountain road) have been torn up; and the best way to describe what's going on is that climate change loads the dice in favour of extreme events such as this.  More on the way I fear. 

Fracking: this issue is huge. I didn't realise how huge

Here's a story that’s crept up on me unawares. Fracking for shale gas.  Until a Guardian feature last Thursday I thought this was just the latest get rich quick scheme for oil companies, and that a few well aimed protests about ground water pollution would hopefully see it off. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I've clearly not been paying close enough attention.

An attack on a pipeline during the Iraq war. Photograph: Jamal Nasrallah/EPA

It seems the US is predicted to become the world's largest oil producer by 2035. Cheap energy from shale oil and gas is being touted as the dawn of a new US golden age. I had no idea. With all that at stake, deep pessimism beckons. The photo of an attack on a pipeline during the Iraq war is used by The Guardian to illustrate its argument that shale oil will end a 30-year preoccupation with ensuring enough energy to meet the US economy's needs. 
 
"Gazprom feels the chill as its dominance is weakened" tells that shale oil and shale gas are so plentiful in North America, that they offer the US self-sufficiency in energy which could end American reliance on despotic Gulf regimes and pull the rug from under Russia’s Gazprom.  This is a massive prize.

The point is that not only is the extraction process environmentally destructive in itself, but the burning of all this shale gas and oil entails greenhouse gas emissions that will far outstrip our ability to adapt to the climate change they will cause. See Friends of the Earth briefing “Shale gas: energy solution or fracking hell?” and another Guardian feature Shale offers freedom and security – but it could be a trap.
 
In his victory speech Barack Obama used the expression "the destructive power of a warming planet" and thereby raised expectations of climate change action in his second term.  But other indicators all point the other way. In his first term he made a strategic decision to downplay climate change; he avoided the issue during the recent campaign; and the Republicans continue to control the House of Representatives.  

If the prize for shale oil extraction is as massive as the Guardian article says it is, then it's going to be like a gale blowing on a reed.