I enjoyed this

I'm not desperately inspired at the moment. So instead of writing something useful here's some things that other people have written. I enjoyed this post from Brian Micklethwait's Education Blog

I am more than ever convinced that if the entire state education system were to drop dead tomorrow morning, that would be a great improvement for some people immediately, for many people in a few weeks, for most people in a few months, and for almost everyone in a few years.  After a decade, the results would be miraculous.

And also this rather amusing primer on the US Sub-prime mortgage debacle, which I found on the Volokh Conspiracy. You need to click the screen to go through the slides.

One side of the story

The BBC is trumpeting a UN report on the loss of ice from glaciers.

The rate at which some of the world's glaciers are melting has more than doubled, new data says.

Which begs the question of what has happened to the others. Has the rate more than halved? Or are they in fact growing. Helpfully, Biased BBC points out that Arctic Sea ice is back to normal and the world has endured its coldest winter for decades, so it's probably fair to say that global catastrophe is not yet upon us.

Ah, but the UN are talking about glaciers, not icecaps, I hear you say. Well, take a look at this report from the Washington Post back in 1922 (H/T Anthony Watts).

 

Here's the text in more legible form:

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

 Perspective is a wonderful thing.

Your tax money at work

It's probably too much to hope that heads might roll over this.

(Via Samizdata). 

Coal

Thought for the day:

Greens are calling for a moratorium on new coal fired power stations. Would they have still been making these demands if we still had a mining industry? 

Homework is rubbish

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers, a trade union, has called for homework to be scrapped.

The cynics among us would probably assume that they just didn't want to do the marking. The extremely cynical might point out that they don't anyway. 

I'm cynical on many things, but actually this is not such a bad idea. Certainly the baby Bishops are knackered when they get home from school and we tend to have great crises over getting anything done. I'd rather they were out playing in the garden.

Interestingly, one book I've seen on helping children with their studies said quite plainly that homework was a waste of time and that you should just do it for them. I certainly can't see much point in "make up a sentence including the word "today" (or "yesterday" or "birthday"). Is this useful?

The downside I would see in the plan would be that I would have absolutely no way of gauging my children's progress. Seeing their homework is as much information as I get. But I'd certainly be willing to trade regular reports for no homework. 

Great blogging career moves

One of the great blogging career moves of all time must be Lucia Liljegren's switch from writing about knitting to a site devoted to statistical analysis of climate science.

Her most recent posts were a piece about the application of the Cochrane-Orcutt method to monthly global temperature data and a short article about a stuffed elephant.

This makes me feel rather inadequate.

(Since you ask, Cochrane-Orcutt "adjusts a linear model for serial correlation in the error term", at least according to Wikipedia. Lucia's article actually looks rather exciting since it appears to show that the IPCC's projections for global temperature are too high. Only the mathematically inclined need read though).

More statistical analysis of MPs' expenses

Following my recent post on the lack of correlation between MPs' staff costs and the amount they spent on office costs, I thought of another interesting test I could do.

TheyWorkForYou publishes figures detailing what proportion of letters sent via their website are actually responded to within a reasonable time. We would expect that MPs with large staff costs should be able to get prompt replies more often than their understaffed colleagues, wouldn't we? (Actually, given we think they're paying their wives and families to do nothing, we wouldn't expect this at all, but let's play along with the hypothesis, shall we?)

Here's the graph:

Again, I've plotted a best fit line so we can understand what's going on a little better.

This time, there is a microscopic correlation, but even so, it's still not good news for our friends in Westminster. The slight downslope to the graph actually seems to show that an MP with low staff costs is more likely to answer his correspondence on time than his high claiming counterpart.

What possible explanation can there be for this anomoly?

I just can't imagine.... 

Civil Serf is down

The Sunday Times has a story speculating about the identity of Civil Serf, the anonymous Whitehall blogger.

The Civil Serf - as she calls herself - claims to be a 33-year-old fast-stream civil servant ready to expose the daily chaos of the Labour government machine while lampooning ministers and highlighting the idiocy of mandarin colleagues. There are also moans about drunken advances from the opposite sex.

It's a great blog - she writes beautifully, or at least she did, because as of this moment the whole site appears to have been deleted.  It's a shame, but it was certainly good to have a light shone on the inner workings of the mandarinate for a while.

Michael Martin in trouble again

Michael Martin has been caught at it again. Following hot on the heels of the revelations about his dodgy expenses come allegations that he's colluding with the government to suppress a FoI request into the costs of the ID cards scheme.

SpyBlog has the truly scandalous details. 

Hutton on telly

Will Hutton writes in the Observer: the best telly is coming from commercial outfits in the US. State-owned BBC and Channel 4 are moribund and won't take risks.

And his conclusion?

Don't even think about privatising it. 

Numpty. 

Any lawyers out there?

Via here, I found this article in the Guardian by Dr Simon Lewis, who is a geographer working in the field of biodiversity.

In April last year a group of environmentalists shut down E.ON's coalfired power station in Ratcliffe-on-Soar. The goal: to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and, in their words, "save lives". Yesterday judge Morris Cooper presented a 20-page judgment accepting there was an "urgent need for drastic action", but convicted them of aggravated trespass, saying their defence, that their crime was necessary to save lives, could not be substantiated.

In the trial, for which I was an expert witness, crucial questions were how many people does climate change kill, and what proportion is the UK responsible for? I was surprised to discover that nobody knows.

This is a surprising thing to say, firstly because it's patently obvious that nobody knows - how could they? But secondly, if he had to go away and find out the answers to these questions it rather suggests that he's not actually an expert at all. Dr Lewis, as I've mentioned is an ecologist, not an epidemiologist. It makes the court system look rather silly to call someone as an expert on one thing whose expertise is in something completely different. 

So my first question for lawyers is this: do UK expert witnesses actually have to demonstrate some expertise in the relevant field? Or can the defence just put up some random green with letters after their name?

There's more about the trial here - this appears to be a site run by one of the defendants or perhaps one of their supporters. What intrigued me were the notes of Dr Lewis's testimony, and in particular this:

defence lawyer:  IPCC reports, how are they viewed in the scientific community?

 [Dr Lewis] IPCC - a consensus document, made up of thousands of scientists' reviews of the literature. That no scientist holding a position in an academic university who disagrees with on record.

Now this statement, as set out here, is manifestly untrue. Richard Lindzen, anyone? Professor of Meteorology at MIT? From his Wikipedia page:

Lindzen stated that "there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them" and "I cannot stress this enough -- we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions, agreement with the three basic statements tells us almost nothing relevant to policy discussions."

So my second question for any lawyers reading is this: if Dr Lewis gave evidence along the lines of the statements attributed to him above, has he committed perjury?

And question three is this: can anyone lay their hands on a copy of the trial transcript?.   

Food security

Food security is a subject that's enjoyed a little splurge of interest in the last couple of days. The government's new science adviser, Professor John Beddington, is reported as saying that the food shortages are likely to affect us long before climate change.

This is interesting, because one of the main factors behind the increase in food prices has been the diversion of farming land to biofuels production, ostensibly as a contribution to the "fight against global warming". So here's a classic case of the cure being worse than the affliction. Thank-you, greens.

Of course, no government scientific adviser is allowed out in public without a genuflection before the global warming goddess, and Beddington is no exception. His comments include the obligatory reference to climate change which is (obviously) going to make things much worse. It always does, doesn't it?

Now, there is a bit of evidence that warming will reduce crop yields, but these claims are not generally accepted, not least because historically warming has lead to times of plenty while colder climate has lead to shortage. There is much more certainty over the fertilising effect of more CO2 in the atmosphere. With CO2 levels continuing to go up, and temperatures steady for the last ten years, we should actually be expecting higher yields. And that's before you factor in the impact of genetic modification which is now pretty widespread, outside backward places like Europe.

It's certainly true to say that crop yields have been rising dramatically in recent years, at least in the US:

If you look at the chart, it's clear that in the last fifty years yields have nearly quadrupled. Given that agriculture in much of the rest of the world is nowhere near this productive, there would appear to be enormous scope to increase production.

All we need to happen is for governments to stop interfering, to stop putting up barriers to trade, so that surpluses find their way to places of shortage, to stop the roll out of GM crops so that the benefits can be enjoyed by farmers and consumers everywhere, and for government chief scientists to stop playing the Cassandra and stick to the facts.  

A new logical fallacy?

Via In the Green, this quote from the Baltimore Sun on the subject of the recent global warming sceptics conference in New York.

How many scientists doubt global warming? It's looking like it could be about 20 -- compared to the more than 2,500 globally who have reached the conclusion that climate change is really happening. That's pretty strong evidence of a scientific consensus. "The meeting was largely framed around science, but after the luncheon, when an organizer made an announcement asking all of the scientists in the large hall to move to the front for a group picture, 19 men did so," 

This is clearly a nonsense. They are claiming that the sample is also the total of the population! I'm sure there must be a posh latin name for this fallacy, but having leafed through Madsen Pirie's "How to win every argument", I can't find it. Have I discovered a fallacy so daft that nobody has actually ever tried it before? Has the Baltimore Sun just plumbed a new depth in the annals of silliness?

We need to know. 

MEP's expenses

Tim Worstall points us to a summary of the EU auditor's report into MEP's expenses. This has been viewed in camera by a few people, but it's the first time any info beyond rumours of malfeasance have made it into the public arena. The rumours turn out to have been right.

The auditor has focused on payments to MEPs' staff.

[T]here is often no proportionality between the tasks performed and the remuneration received by a parliamentary assistant.

The audit report gives a number of examples to what situations this leads:
1. Payment of full allowance to a service provider with only one accredited assistant (1 case),
2. Payment of full allowance to a service provider with no accredited assistants (2 cases),
3. Payment of allowance to a company with no activity shown in annual accounts (1 case),
4. Payment of allowance to service provider with irrelevant activities (2 cases).

In the first case the service provider's area of business was the provision of child care. In the second case, the business appeared to be the trading of wood.

We can be quite sure that the beneficiaries of all this activity are the MEPs' friends and family. How so? Because they have said there's nothing they can do about it:

The Parliament Administration said in reply to the auditor that retroactive correction and clarification was not possible as a legal basis was lacking in the rules.

And there's more: the auditor has also looked at redundancy handouts to assistants of MEPs who were not re-elected. Of his sample of 42:

• Ten of these payments were made in breach of the PEAM rules as they continued to be under contract of an MEP who was still in office.
• One assistant received during the lay-off period of 3 months an accumulated monthly salary of [EUR]8,890. He accumulated lay-off payments from 5 MEPs, continuing payments from 3 re-elected MEPs and payments from 4 newly elected MEPs, thus receiving at the same time part-time payments from 12 (former) MEPs during three months.
• In two other cases the MEPs raised the salary oftwo assistants with 71% and 117% duringthe lay-off period, in order to exhaust the balance available.
  

The sheer corruption of the political class is almost unimaginable. Labour, Conservative, LibDem. You can see why they keep voting for "ever-closer union" - it's the opportunity it gives them for "ever-greater graft".

The original report is here.

Update:

If you think I'm wrong about this, MEPs have voted not to publish their expenses. 

Terminating the contract.

Richard North of EU Referendum fame may know as much about the EU as anyone alive, so his thoughts on Parliament's refusal to ask the people about the Lisbon treaty are worth noting. He also has something to say about where we go from here.

[T]he effect of what they have done is to destroy the contract between us, the people and our representatives. By this contract they rule us, with our consent.

That consent has now been withdrawn. This is no longer our parliament. In any meaningful sense, it is no longer a parliament. Be done with it.

Read the whole thing.