Two-Part Special Issue of Ergonomics in Design Highlights Climate Change
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Human factors/ergonomics (HF/E) experts, like professionals in many other scientific domains, have joined the fight against global warming and climate change. Their research and practice focus on finding ways to combat or minimize its serious effects.
A special two-part issue of Ergonomics in Design examines how HF/E professionals can continue working to mitigate this worldwide phenomenon.
Part 1 of the special issue, guest edited by Ken Nemire, is now available online and may be found at http://erg.sagepub.com/.
“With recent research indicating we stay close to a maximum global warming of 1°C (now at 0.8°C) to prevent the most disastrous consequences of global warming, the articles in this special issue point the way to immediate changes to research, standards, and regulations that may involve HF/E practitioners,” said Nemire.
The following is a sampling of articles from researchers in Canada, South Africa, and the United States that are included in Part 1 of the special issue:
• “Green Ergonomics and Green Buildings”
• “Feedback Design Heuristics for Energy Conservation: New Opportunities for the Human Factors Practitioner”
• “A Transdisciplinary Perspective on Hedonomic Sustainability”
• “Bicycle Promotion as a Response to Climate Change”
“Substantially more research and effort is needed to redesign our behavior, our products, and our cities to prevent the most disastrous consequences of global warming,” said Nemire. “It is clear that much more effort at corporate and governmental levels, such as stricter regulations and standards as well as greater funding for research and development of new technologies, is needed now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
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Looks like the Human factors/ergonomics (HF/E) experts have finally realized how to grease their palms with research funding by the rest of us.
Welcome to A Brave New World
Oh, great, now the design people have caught the virus. Can’t anybody just do their own job/research anymore without having to slobber all over the global warming nonsense? Personally, I immediately dismiss any study or paper or news report that drags in “climate change” or “carbon footprint” in the lead paragraph. Saves me from wasting my time.
Only took 6 seconds to find the “greater funding” reference.
Everyone knows that as the Earth (or World, if you will) warms, that object will expand. You need to take the expansion of desks, tables, chairs, saddles, fine braided leather whips, manacles, gimp masks, todger clamps, & other things that people commonly use into account when designing those items.
This comment was awarded the Mosher Seal of Good Physics™.
If you live long enough you begin to wonder why you lived long enough to have lived long enough.
That’s about all I can say about this. That’s about all I want to say about this. Except for one more thing: Aghfvdgfjngjuxxiiogfoficijccj
[The mods note that the writer has a typo in the third to the last i after the second j from the beginning. Mod]
Some may have seen posts of mine where I joke that these days psychologists, sociologists, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers are all making their contributions to the CAGW science. I was only joking but it seems that is what is actually happening. Wasn’t this predicted by post-normal destructor of science Ravetz?
“Serious effects…” “Worldwide phenomenon…” Impressive words for something that cannot be decerned and certainly isn’t happening at the moment. Perhaps they would better spend their time discussing the ergonomics and transdisciplinary perspective on hedonomic sustainability of unicorns. At least that would be a fantasy with a point!
“Bicycle Promotion as a Response to Climate Change”
—
I’ll pay attention to someone promoting bicycles when I see Al Gore commuting by bicycle instead of by private jet.
“Bicycle Promotion as a Response to Climate Change”
But won’t using a bicycle in a hotter environment lead to greater heat stress. harder breathing, greater CO2 emissions?
Or are they talking about promoting bicycles over scientists? Very cluey some of these bicycles.
I still feel ‘sorry for’ all those activists that are working to save the world. They have this dower look at the world and in 20 years, provided they have half a brain, should feel a great sense of regret for all the time they have wasted to achieve nothing. Every thing is terrible and getting worse, they are all are using their advocacy and article writing to feel better and garner grants. But the stream of their crude is starting to weigh my view on the world down.
I seem to live with a lot of deluded, savior complete individuals who
are rather ‘holy than thou’. See if I can find a beer.
Aghfvdgfjngjuxxieogfoficijccj
– Fixed
“A Transdisciplinary Perspective on Hedonomic Sustainability”
WTF
First thing I did was look at their reference links to see who’s work they build from:
IPCC.ch
earthSave.org
globalchange.gov
No need to waste time looking any further.
ergonomics for mass transportation devices: designing comfortable seats that simultaneously capture and sequester methane emissions. Even can ebank the carbon credits with a proper metering device and gluteus implanted RFID chip, in return for some level of discomfort,
“Bicycle Promotion as a Response to Climate Change”
This is a gang of bourgeois reactionaries trying to seduce the masses with wasteful capitalist excess. Monocycles can transport platoons of factory workers, peasants and guards just as efficiently.
re: “A Transdisciplinary Perspective on Hedonomic Sustainability”
I googled “Hedonomic”. It appears to be purely academic word. I was surprised to find it has a meaning:
“One way to increase happiness is to increase the objective levels of external outcomes; another is to improve the presentation and choices among external outcomes without increasing their objective levels. Economists focus on the first method. We advocate the second, which we call hedonomics.”
A worldwide replacement for economics? Supply & Demand replaced by smoke & mirrors?
Maybe I have got it wrong but “billions are going be poorer, we need to be able to con them so they don’t notice”?
So we are now doing what I did when I finished mechanical engineering at university 39 years ago – trying to improve energy efficiency in buildings. We’re getting somewhere now (sarc). Perhaps they should hand the whole problem, including the feasibility studies into all the possible solutions (not just the feel good touchy feely ones) over to engineers, and keep the rest of the rent seekers out of it; instead of precluding engineers from the debate. And while I am venting, how many climate scientists would have received the same in depth training in thermodynamics, heat and mass transfer and air/water vapor systems as your chemical and mechanical engineering graduates? Rant finished.
Filed in the “Now Beyond A Joke” department
“… to redesign our behavior, ”
It is possible to carefully open the ends of shotgun shells and replace the pellets with coarse salt. Applied with gusto to the posterior of an HF/E expert, this will redesign her/his behavior for several days to a couple of weeks.
As a corollary the “bicycle promotion” campaign may be delayed indefinitely.
Well I am seriously disappointed. I clicked on the article with eager anticipation, looking forward to a rollicking good read. With illustrations of course. But I was only going to read the article, I wasn’t going to look at the pictures.
Hmmmf. Hedonomics. Nothing to do with hedonism at all.
Maybe the AGW meme is like a stock market – when it seems everyone is jumping into a bull market, it’s a sure sign the the bull is getting weak in the knees and will soon become food for the bear. Can this HF/E special issue be a signal that AGW alarmism is coming to an end?
MSM’s fave today:
30 April: Bloomberg: Obama Power-Plant Pollution Rule Upheld by Top U.S. Court
By Greg Stohr and Mark Drajem
President Barack Obama garnered his second legal victory this month in his effort to clean up coal-fired power plants, as the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a rule designed to cut pollutants that cause smog and acid rain.
The justices, voting 6-2 to overturn a lower court, backed an Environmental Protection Agency rule targeting air pollution that crosses state lines. Advocates for utilities and coal producers argued that the EPA’s approach was too intrusive and would force plants to clean up more pollution than necessary to deliver clean air in downwind states…
The ruling may prompt utilities such as Southern Co. (SO), Energy Future Holdings Corp.’s Luminant and American Electric Power Co. (AEP) to shutter coal-fired power plants or invest billions of dollars in new pollution-control systems.
The Obama administration says the rule will prevent as many as 34,000 premature deaths a year…
***While the decision upholds the rule by the EPA, its practical implications are uncertain. That’s because the high court left open the ability of states to individually challenge whether they should still be part of the program, and if the mandated reductions are justified given improvements in air quality in downwind states.
“There are a lot of legal challenges for this rule that lay ahead,” said William Bumpers, a lawyer at Baker Botts LLP in Washington…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-29/obama-power-plant-pollution-rule-upheld-by-u-s-supreme-court.html
***will this bit be given prominence?
read all:
30 April: Bloomberg: Eric Roston: George Will Knocks Out Another Instant Climate Classic
The “whole point of global warming” is not, as Will would have it, to execute a liberal headlock on the American people. If global warming has a “whole point” of any kind, it is, it appears, to warm the globe, perhaps intolerably. That’s what progressives and conservatives of good will and common sense are seeking to stop.
No one has yet described any physical laws linking atmospheric heat retention with American liberal activism or right-wing special-interest media buys. Let’s worry about that one when it’s peer-reviewed and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Climate Change and Encroaching Progressive Czarism.
Watch the full interview. Some of his comments are standard, if scientifically questionable, policy considerations. However, they are devalued by his tendency to do things like conjure and attack anti-science straw men and then source his scientific thinking to newsmagazine stories published in the 1970s…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-29/george-will-knocks-out-another-instant-climate-classic.html
26 April: UK Daily Mail: Jon Rees: Britain STILL depends on coal for 40% of its electricity – but now it is making a Russian mine owner hugely rich, not us
Thirty years after Arthur Scargill led the miners out on strike – to be followed by the wholesale closure of the British coal industry – it is not a union leader from Yorkshire but a billionaire from Russia who has his finger on Britain’s light switch.
Britain now imports four times as much coal as it produces, and Russia, which is subject to international sanctions over Ukraine, is our biggest supplier, providing close to half of all the coal we bring in.
And the company responsible for the bulk of that is the Siberian Coal Energy Co, whose chairman and majority owner is Andrey Igorevich Melnichenko.
Our dependence on Russian coal has been thrown into sharp relief both by the rising tension between the West and Russia over Ukraine and by last week’s vote by miners to agree to the closure of two of Britain’s remaining three deep pit mines.
‘If the Prime Minister says he does not like what Russia’s doing in Ukraine, Putin can always turn round and say he’ll be sending Russian coal east not west this year,’ said Chris Kitchen, general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers…
Now, two of Britain’s last three deep mine pits will close within 18 months after the admission by UK Coal, Britain’s biggest coal producer, that it could no longer go on…
However, Britain missed out on a share of his riches. Kitchen said: ‘Selby was producing coal which was selling for £1.05 per gigajoule, which was only just break-even. Two years later, coal was selling for £2 a gigajoule, so if it was open now it would be making money.
‘The point is that the Government should have an energy policy for the long term, to smooth the peaks and troughs, and we do not have that now. If we did, Drax power station in North Yorkshire would still be using 70 per cent British coal….
***A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: ‘Coal is available from many regions, including America and Australia, so not just Russia. There is currently an abundant supply of coal on world markets.’
Kitchen said: ‘We are not climate change sceptics. But surely you just have to look at the National Grid website to see how little power was generated by wind last Friday to realise how much we still need coal?’ …
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2613948/Britain-STILL-depends-coal-40-electricity.html