Carsons Post

what would cause me to change my mind. No matter what your position on this issue, I think everyone can agree that people who are unwilling to change their mind, no matter what, are irrational. It is for that reason that from now on, anyone who wishes to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change here on this blog MUST clearly state:

1. Why they don’t accept the conclusions arrived at by the overwhelming majority of scientists.
2. Why they think the vast majority of scientists are wrong.
3. What would change their mind and make them accept anthropogenic global warming and why they chose those criteria.

It seems only fair that I also answer these questions.

I think this is an astute observation, and I have also decided to show that my ideas are not rigid, and I could be swayed to re-evaluate my position on climate change. If we all do this, maybe it will be easier to find consensus.

I'm not a scientist, nor do I have any business dabbling in science. I know enough about climate to know that as systems go it is insanely complex. So complex that decades of intense study by very, very smart people, and weather forecasts are still often incorrect. That is how complex the matter is. We can't even predict if it will rain today and get it right 99% of the time.

Anything this sophisticated has to be handled with caution. There has to be wide risk tolerances that if things go wrong we can recover. So if there is a chance that we might be messing with the climate and causing some adverse affects, we need to think about how this can be mitigated. That is risk management. This would be important if there was an outside chance that climate change is real.

However, there is more than an outside chance that climate change is real. If your doctor said you had cancer, you'd go for a second opinion. If you went to 100 doctors and ninety-nine of them said you had cancer, then you're going to have to go with the prognosis. That is risk management. If 99 engineers in 100 tell you not to cross the bridge, risk management says: "don't cross the bridge".

However, I am not inflexible. My mind might be changed. If someone could convince me that our world wasn't actually real, and that it was a manifestation of ideas, as in the philosophical school of idealism, then I might be more playful with the importance of the state of this risk. After all, it is a deferred risk, and presumably my idealised children's futures are not at stake here anymore. If fact the notion of climate change then becomes an arbitrary concept to explore within the realm of ideas. However, as yet I don't believe this to be true, and doubt that it will be Vaclav Klaus, Fred Perry or the brain trust behind Fox News who are going to provide this revelation.

The eLibrary at a glance

• Free eBooks and eAudiobooks can be downloaded 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
• If you live in Surrey and you're not already a library member you can join the library online
• Choose from popular best sellers and non-fiction including biography, travel, humour and computing
• You can download up to three eBooks and eAudiobooks and have them for two weeks, after which they will just disappear from the device to which you have downloaded them
• There is no need to return the eBooks to a library and no late fines to pay. You can borrow the same books again after this period if no one else wants to borrow them
• Books can be downloaded to PCs, Apple Macs, e-readers and some mobile phones, and there are plenty of titles to choose from
• Now all you have to do is sit back and enjoy the titles that we have on offer.

Last night I went to the library and checked out Ian McEwan's Solar, a book which I am really enjoying. What was interesting was that I was taking advantage of Surrey Library's new ebook service, so the whole trip to the library and back with book, the arduous part of the trip, was done on the couch with my iPad.

While the actual library is a UX mess, and browsing a complete nightmare, the actual process was okay. I found the book accidentally through the popular listing, thankfully, as I was about to give up. The best way to go about using this service might be to think of a book you want to read, then search for it to find it directly. I'm going to feed-back the awful mess that is the browsing function, as this could be a much more pleasant experience.

Note that Surrey Library is one of many UK libraries taking part in this project, so it is likely that if you live in the UK, your local library also has ebooks on offer, with the same mess of an organisation system.

To solve the DRM mess that electronic library books is obviously going to be, UK libraries are using Overdrive Media Center. This is an App which uses some kind of Adobe ePub DRM service - not sure what happens, all I know is that the Overdrive App is required for viewing, but you can also take out audiobooks as well. There are Overdrive apps for iPhone and Android as well.

The Overdrive app is okay. Much better than the library experience. I was able to read the whole first chapter of the book with relative ease, which I understood to be about 60 pages, according to a message on the status bar. However, it is difficult to know if this was 60 pages as I was viewing them, or 60 pages in the actual book form.

The annoying thing about the Overdrive App is the text density. There are clear examples on other apps of what a well researched, pleasurable reading experience looks like. Text density is so important, as is the font. Unfortunately, its all serifs or nothing, and you must read the book in Times New Roman (or something like that), single spaced, unjustified. Switching back to a quality reading App like Kindle, Read it Later or Instapaper shows how much more pleasant this experience can be. Honestly, it is such a simple thing to get right.

To it's credit, the Overdrive app does allow a sepia background and font scaling, so I was able to bump up the text size to make it easier to read. It has a built in rotation lock, which is handy. I had five pages left in the chapter when my wife came to bed, and the Overdrive App allowed me to dim the screen and switch to "night mode" so I could sacrifice future vision to finish the chapter.

All in all, an experience that is satisfactory, and probably better than I was expecting. It is great being able to use the library, and to expand my reading selection. I was looking forward to reading McEwan's novel, so I am very pleased that I could read it here. I'm most likely to check back with the library if there is a popular book I see on Amazon that I would like to read. However, for classic books, I'll download a copy from the Gutenberg Project to read in Readmill, my favourite reading app. I still can't see myself kicking Kindle any time soon either.