Law on self-defence

So the law on self-defence is going to be clarified (again), says the BBC. "Have a go" Jack Straw reckons that citizens need to know that the law is on their side, and that they can use "reasonable force". Nick Clegg for the Lib Dems says everyone knows that "proportionate, reasonable force" can be used.

I wonder if either of these two gentlemen would care to let us all know what force it would be "proportionate" and "reasonable" for a pensioner to use when confronted with a drug-crazed twenty-something in the dark in the middle of the night?

Also could they let us know if such pensioners can keep weapons by their beds for purposes of self-defence?

And must these aged homeowners ascertain the identity and/or intentions of the intruder before acting, or can they strike first and ask questions later?  

Or must we consider the aged as dispensable? 

Jane Garvey

The BBC is asking listeners to send in their favourite Jane Garvey moment to mark the presenter's departure from her Radio 5 Live show. Mine is probably a bit too rude for them to accept so I'm posting it here. I remember a truly awe-inspiring cock-up which I think was one of JG's. It went something like:

JG: "And now we're just going to get the latest results from the English Cunty Cricket matches.....oh, I'm most dreadfully sorry...er..and ...er moving swiftly on....".

Never show regret. Never apologise.

Ozone hole - conviction unsafe

Nature has reported that there is now strong evidence that the current understanding of how the hole in the ozone layer comes into being is wrong.

Markus Rex, an atmosphere scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, did a double-take when he saw new data for the break-down rate of a crucial molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2). The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere — almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate. "This must have far-reaching consequences," Rex says. "If the measurements are correct we can basically no longer say we understand how ozone holes come into being."

Dodgy thing, scientific consensus, wouldn't you say?

(Via Jennifer Marohasy) 

Lib Dems and internationalism

The Nameless One, guestblogging at the Devil's Kitchen has fired off a few rounds at the Liberal Democrats by way of wishing them well at the end of their annual conference.

The Liberal Democrats are little more than a debating society for those who want to appear worthy and want to appear “right on”. The party is a talking shop for those who don’t want to make hard, realistic policy choices.

Tristan Mills in the comments shoots back:

I agree, there's a lot wrong with LibDem policy, but at least they start from a decent posistion of individualism and liberty unlike Labour - collectivism and the state, or the Tories - collectivism in service of the state and other vested interests.

Most people who visit this site will find themselves nodding in agreement with the criticisms of the Tories and Labour, but will still be struggling to reconcile themselves with the idea that the Liberal Democrats are interested in individualism, which is the mark of a liberal party - something the Liberal Democrats are not (yet?).

Here's an example. The Lib Dems call themselves an internationalist party. - as Stephen Tall puts it:

We are, by collective instinct, an internationalist party, perhaps the only one left in the British political mainstream.

It's worth asking ourselves exactly what is meant by "internationalist". The Wikipedia definition is this:

Internationalism is a political movement which advocates a greater economic and political cooperation among nations for the theoretical benefit of all.

 and goes on to say

Internationalists advocate the presence of a United Nations type organization, and often support a stronger version of a world government.

This appears to me to be just about as far away from Tristan's professed position of "individualism and liberty" as it's possible to get. Hard as it is to believe, internationalism embodies a belief that we need more government. That if we can just come up with some political structure to agree the correct course of action, out problems will be over. No matter that some of us might disagree with the chosen course - in a world of superstates it's hard or sometimes impossible to vote with your feet. We will be forced to go along with what our political masters decree.

It's not that internationalism is hard to reconcile with individualism. Internationalism is individualism's antithesis.

Redeeming features

Having been offline for a day or so, I seem to have missed all the excitement, with lots of UK bloggers being threatened with writs by a large and greasy Uzbek - a man who actually seems to have no redeeming features whatsoever. I think we can take it for granted that anyone who manages to completely unite the UK blogosphere is a pretty nasty piece of work.

If anyone by any chance has missed it, the full story is here.

Climate cuttings 10

Welcome to the tenth edition of Climate Cuttings in which I round up the goings-on in the crazy world of climate science (and believe me, "crazy" is the word). There has been no let up in the pace since last week, so without further ado.....

First up is the ongoing trail of devastation and disaster wrought by NASA's climate guru James Hansen. Having been humiliated by the revelations about his "Y2K" error, having had his bizarre method of combining station records revealed, and having been forced to release his code after years of refusals (see Climate Cuttings 9), he has now actually managed to make things worse. This time he has chosen to make unannounced adjustments to the basis of the NASA temperature record - presumably in a bid to raise the temperatures of recent years relative to earlier ones. Professor John Brignell says that "whatever it actually is, [it] smells remarkably like Fraud".

There has been a great deal of excitement over the extent of sea ice. All the usual suspects trumpeted the record minimum extent of Arctic Sea ice and the apparent opening of a North Western Passage. The BBC, for example. Freeborn John noted that the Beeb had also reported the North-West Passage has being open in 2000. Power and Control blog gave an embarrassingly long list of all the previous traversings of the North-West Passage. Lubos Motl noted the economic benefits that would flow from this shorter route to the Pacific, and wondered why it was considered to be a bad thing. Stoat said probably the wisest thing which was "Don't get too carried away".

Fewer people were inclined to mention the record maximum recorded for Antarctic ice. In some ways this is probably just as well, because shortly after this started to be widely pointed out, Cryosphere Today, who maintain the sea ice record discovered "a glitch" in their software and adjusted the figure downwards - result: no more record. Surprise, surprise. Attentive readers may remember another extraordinary adjustment made by Cryosphere some months ago. What a lot of errors there seem to be in their output.

Also writing about Antarctica was David Bromwich of the Byrd Polar Research Center who said "It's hard to see a global-warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now."

Meanwhile the results of Anthony Watts survey of surface stations are being analysed. Steve McIntyre posted about his first cut here. A commenter at Climate Audit called John V did another version which suggested that the trend in the best stations was in line with the overall figures published by NASA. Cue lots of jumping to conclusions at, for example, Deltoid,
Big City Liberal, etc. The survey has covered one third of the network so far, so as Stoat would say - don't get too carried away.

John V has set up a new site to create an open source global temperature record. This may be significant because, being open source, it will be authoritative. That is to say, if NASA's figures don't agree, Hansen would be left in the position of having to explain why they differ.

Everyone who follows climate knows that temperature leads CO2 in the paleoclimate records. Al Gore associate Laurie David has mislabelled a graph intended for US schoolchildren to show the opposite. Another researcher who has evidence that CO2 can't be a major driver of climate change is Jan Veizer. In his latest paper, he has apparently amended the wording of his conclusions slightly to suggest that they were in accordance with AGW orthodoxy.

Argument over the Schwartz paper on climate sensitivity (it's less than previously thought) continues. There's a good summary here.

The hurricane season is upon us and appears quiet. The Adam Smith Institute notes that hurricane insurance premiums have dropped sharply. 

And lastly, Freakonomic authors Dubner and Levitt reveal the real cause of global warming - Jane Fonda. 

Dave Hill on education

Dave Hill has an interesting piece up at Comment in Free which picks up on some of the ideas he gained from an earlier visit to a home educating family. It's remarkable how many commenters on the posting think that vouchers might be a good idea.

Another sceptic

Jennifer Marohasy points us to another climate sceptic- Anton Uriarte of the University of the Basque Country, who is a geographer and climatologist and the author of a book on paleoclimate. He also has a blog if you happen to speak Spanish.

By way of finding out a bit more about him, I've translated an interview he gave to a Spanish newspaper. I've reproduced this below for anyone who is interested. (This comes with the major caveat that my Spanish is very ropy, but between me and Babelfish, I think the gist of it is there. If you can help with the bits I've not been able to translate, or if you see anthing wrong, do let me know.)

ANTÓN URIARTE, Geographer and climatologist: Earth is not becoming desertified, it’s greener all the time

Luis Alfonso Gámez

URL: http://www.diario-elcorreo.es/vizcaya/pg050323/prensa/noticias/Sociedad/200503/23/VIZ-SOC-054.html

(Interview originally published in the newspaper El Correo)

Luis Alfonso Gámez / Bilbao

Antón Uriarte has studied the climate for more than a quarter of a century and believes that it has not been demonstrated that human activity has been the cause of global warming. Tomorrow, he will take part in a scientific conference on climate change in Bilbao.

A few days ago we were all wrapped up, and now we’re in shirtsleeves. Has the weather gone crazy?

We’re not talking about any madness. There’s a logical explanation.

Which is?

For the planet as a whole, February was a warmer month than normal. We received masses of cold polar air, but the Arctic wasn’t left empty. Warm air from Greenland filled the Arctic. Greenland has had one of the warmest Februaries in its history. The air moves, the Earth is round and continually interchanges air masses between the tropics and the poles.

Here it’s cold, but in other parts of the world it’s hot; and vice versa.

Yes. In August 2003 we suffered a heat wave because of the arrival of air from Africa; but in the Atlantic and Russia they were quite a lot colder than normal.

Is the climate changing ?

The climate has always been changing. It’s in imbalance.

It’s unforeseeable.

The Earth being spherical, the tropics always receive more heat than the poles and the imbalance has to be continually rectified. They changes places because of the tilt of the earth’s axis. And, moreover, the planet isn’t smooth, but rough, which produces perturbations in the interchange of air masses. We know the history of the climate very well and it has changed continuously.

Yes, but now it’s said that the main cause is man

The discussion is about to what extent the climatic change is the product of human activity. There are 6 billion human beings on earth, and that’s well known.

Enough to show how we’ve changed the landscape.

Yes. And this also has repercussions for the climate, not just industry. It’s evident that the Earth is a human planet, and that being so, it’s quite normal that we influence the atmosphere. It’s something else altogether to say that things will get worse. I believe that a little more heat will be very good for us. The epochs of vegetational exuberance coincided with those of more heat.

On a geological scale, the last glaciation ended not long ago.

About 11,500 years ago.

And now we’re in a warm interglacial period.

Yes. Since then, there have been changes in the climate but they have been less pronounced. This is another thing which people are not clear about: in warm periods, when there are more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – more CO2 and water vapour – climate variability is less. In these periods greenhouse gases, which act as a blanket, cushion the differences between the tropics and the poles. There is less interchange of air masses, less (temporales???) storms. We’re talking about a climate which is much less variable. There is another (malentendido??) misunderstanding: they augment the extremes, the waves of cold and heat

Isn’t it so ?

Let’s take the monsoons. The data that we have, which go back about 120 years, show that there is no tendency to increase or decrease. For tropical cyclones, if anything, there is a slight tendency to a decrease. The fact that this year has been a major one for cyclones doesn’t impact this tendency.

Glaciers and deserts

There is alarming news, such as the disappearance of the perpetual ice of Kilimanjaro

The ice of Kilimanjaro occupies two square kilometres. It’s not much. It’s minute, compared to the 16 million square kilometres of snow spread among the continents. It’s been calculated that in 1912, there were 12 million square kilometres, which is still quite a lot. And we know that it has diminished over the twentieth century. But it’s not certain that it’s due to a rise in temperatures. Satellite measurements in fact indicate a cooling. Some believe that humidity might have diminished, others that solar radiation has increased. At planetary scales, it appears that glaciers have retreated, but with some exceptions.

And what about desertification ?

To believe that the Earth is desertifying is totally erroneous. Satellite images show the opposite to be true: the Earth is becoming greener. Firstly, because there is more CO2 and this has augmented photosynthesis. Secondly there is nothing to say that warming should be accompanied by drought. At the moment we are suffering a major drought in Spain because winter has been affected by the situation in the North, by the cold. In Spain it rains more in warm weather than in cold; and in the situation of the planet too. In climate history the warmest epochs have always been the most rainy.

But there are islands and coasts condemned to disappear under the sea.

Not so. The sea is not flat, nor is its level the same everywhere. Changes in salinity mean that in some places, sea level is higher than in others: the north Baltic, with fresher water, is 40cm higher than the south. In the Atlantic, there are differences of metres. With phenomena like El Niño, it will rise in some places and fall in others. The south pole is at -40^oC. With a warming of two degrees, very little is going to change. Moreover, in Antarctica, the tendency is towards cooling.

Can we relax then ?

Yes, there’s no need to be worried. It’s very interesting to study it, but there’s no need to be worried. There are a minority of scientists, among them myself, who believe that to say that man is causing a climatic change is a fairy tale.

Original spanish text here. 

Updated 17/9/07 with a couple of answers to missing Spanish words. For these, thanks to Ex-pat Alfie in the comments. 

Full and final perfection.

There is an epic profile of the children's author and poet, Michael Rosen in the Times today in which he sets out his vision for schools. My children have read some of his books, but the photo accompanying the article is, to my knowledge, the first time I've ever set eyes on him.

 

What was it about him which made me say to myself, "Lefty"? Perhaps it's because he has a face like something you might see around the nether regions of Glasgow on a weekday afternoon.

Either way, a gentle googling shows that he is in fact a magna cum laude among lefty intellectuals, having been thrown out of the BBC in the seventies when the vetting procedures suggested that employing him might not be a good idea. This doesn't seem to have affected his prospects much though. Apart from his books, he has also managed to write for the Socialist Review and Socialist Worker and has stood as a candidate for Respect. Of course with a background that dodgy he is a "must" at the BBC for whom he makes regular appearances.

So what has the good comrade got to say on the subject of education? Well, he's not exactly a fan of the way things are at the moment:

There had been “this extraordinary shift in the past ten years: you don’t talk about teaching and learning, you talk about management”, he said.

“The Government thinks it terribly important that you set up these weird incentive schemes in classes, so you get ticks, smiley faces and certificates. This is about competitive stigmatising. They think it’s rewarding the children; in fact, it ends up punishing most of them.”

He is angry at the rigorous testing regime which has reduced his passion, literature, to a series of tick-box exercises. Take SATs, the exams now given to every child aged 7 and again at 11, forcing children to think like Gradgrind, solely about facts.

And I'm sure he's right about the problems, but you have to wonder don't you? Here's a man who went to a grammar school, but who is vociferous in condemning any form of selection; a man who loathes private schools, faith schools and single-sex schools. The bog standard comp is the pinnacle of his educational universe, the summation of all his deepest thinking on children and their education. It is his philosophical apogee.

So why is the half-witted moron whinging? He has got exactly what he bloody well wants. He wants the state to run schools. He wants decisions made by the wise man in Whitehall. How the hell can you campaign for education to be run by the bureaucratic apparatus of the state and then start bitching when it turns into a bureaucracy? This slack-jawed numpty demands that educational outcomes be decided by the democratic process, and then can only belly-ache when it delivers what politicians rather than consumers want - just as it always does. Why don't you get involved in the democratic process yourself Michael? Oh yes, you did, and it made no difference at all did it? Well how about putting your children into a different school? What? They're all the same? You don't say. Still, it's been decided democratically that smiley faces and lots of testing is the way it's going to be. And that's the way you wanted it isn't it Michael?

What an idiot.

You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection.

Silly greens

Luboš Motl has a very funny piece about a university professor who has voiced his concerns that Greenlanders are now growing their own potatoes.

A Greenland's brainy son, Professor Minik Rosing, argues that this cultural tradition - the country's inability to grow anything - is priceless and can't be compensated by any economical benefits. The priceless character of the cold weather in Greenland is a likely reason why Professor Rosing chose to live in Copenhagen.

Read the whole thing. 

Relevant skills

The Adam Smith Institute has a report on Terry Leahy's speech, in which he said that there was a growing problem schools failing to equip children with the skills they need to operate in the workforce.

From my perspective the chief skills, if you can call them that, which my children's state school tries to teach are recycling, greenery and a correct attitude to the environment. I don't feel that these are likely to be highly saleable attributes once they reach the workforce.

Having just been elected to the Board of Governors (or whatever it is they call it these days) I hope to do my bit to remedy this - watch this space. My straw polls of parental opinion suggest that I'm not alone in my concerns. It is rather surprising just how many parents have said to me that they view the emphasis on recycling as more akin to brainwashing than education. But despite this I'm rather dubious as to whether I will actually be able to remedy the situation.  It's a state school, after all, so why should anyone at the school or at the council give a stuff about what I, or even the whole of the parent body think?

Climate cuttings 9

It's been ten days or so since the last edition of Climate Cuttings, but what a ten days it's been!

The action has all been taking place over at Climate Audit, where Steve McIntyre has relented not a jot on the pummelling he has been dishing out to NASA's warmer-in-chief, James Hansen. Having had his faulty work exposed (as outlined in Climate Cuttings 8), Hansen responded with a snarky email to his colleagues saying that it was a storm in a teacup and that perhaps the "lights were not on upstairs" with his critics. He followed up with another, dismissing his critics as "court jesters".

While the (allegedly) real scientists were engaging in ad-hominems, the amateurs at Climate Audit followed up with further revelations of faulty work from Hansen. The latest batch of errors were found when the site started to raise questions about the way that Hansen combines different versions of the temperature record for a particular station. This appeared peculiar because Hansen was combining records and ending up with an average lower than any of the individual temperatures in the series. Because Hansen has not adhered to the basic scientific standards and released his code, it was necessary to derive what he had done by trial and error - guessing the procedure from the limited explanation in his publications. Eventually it was suggested by a commenter that the solution lay in understanding what Hansen did where the temperature for a particular date was missing from one of the versions. If you and I had this problem we would take the temperature from the other version. It was thought, however, that Hansen was "estimating" it somehow. This obviously represents a corruption of the temperature record, but this is climate science where pretty much anything goes.

All this speculation clearly made NASA rather nervous, coming so soon after Hansen's earlier error was made public. Out of the blue, Hansen released the code associated with the temperature record, along with the now-customary snark at his critics. The code was quickly found to be something of a shambles (amongst other things it's written in now-obsolete Fortran). A full scale wiki project is planned to get it working and fully understood.

With the code in place a full summary of the way Hansen's methodology works (at least as far as it is currently understood) was posted by John Goetz, the CA commenter who discovered the importance of the missing records. This makes it clear that, while the effect on the trend for the station could be up or down, it appears that more often than not the effect is to lower earlier temperatures - ie to make the warming trend look artificially high.

The latest headline about the integrity (or lack of it) of Hansen's work is the revelation today that, unannounced, he has made large changes to the temperature records for the US. This has happened in the last few weeks - since the Y2K errors were revealed last month. From the outside this might be mistaken for an attempt to get the temperature of recent decades up again.

Either way, it's pretty clear that Hansen's credibility is shot. Can NASA really tolerate this sort of junk science from one of its leading officials any longer? 

And the rest?

Well, Anthony Watts has now surveyed 33% of the US surface stations and has released preliminary results. Only 13% (yes, you read that correctly) of the network is of a standard suitable for climate monitoring according to the standards set out by CRN - the new high standard network currently being developed. 

A new paper in the Journal of Remote Sensing claims that there is an order of magnitude uncertainty in forecasts of temperature due to our lack of knowledge of clouds. 

The BBC cancelled a proposed global warming day, claiming, apparently in all seriousness, that it didn't have a "line" on the issue. Nature Climate Feedback reported that the BBC had commented that the alleged consensus on global warming is "increasingly strong (but not overwhelming)" - a massive downgrading of their previous position of "We're all going to fry!!".

Also on the consensus front, there was a complete lack of consensus over whether there is, in fact a consensus or not. That is to say that the bickering over Oreskes and Shulte's papers continues apace. This is probably all rather futile.

There was much talk of record lows in the extent of Arctic sea ice. Nature Climate Feedback, never knowingly understated on the subject of global warming, reported that polar bears are all going to die. AGW enthusiast William Connelly said the report was a load of bunk. Nature Climate Feedback admitted that actually, it probably was.

Meanwhile all those reporting the disappearance of the Arctic ice and the opening of the North East passage managed somehow to overlook that Antarctic sea ice has reached record latitudes, a fact which was reported here, here and here.

A British sailor, perhaps putting too much faith in these stories of disappearing sea ice got trapped by, erm, sea ice.

According to AGW enthusiasts pretty much everything bad, and pretty much nothing good, can be ascribed to a warming globe. Nice then to see Nature Newsblog reporting that Neanderthals were not in fact killed off by climate change. 

Bjorn Lomborg (of Skeptical Environmentalist fame) has a new book about global warming out. Many commenters say that he should be ignored because he's a bad man (or words to that effect).

And that's it folks. Suggestions for inclusion in the next edition are always welcome. Hope you've found it useful.

Irony alive and well at the BBC

On the BBC's climate change portal at the moment, the main stories include

• Calls to strengthen the EU emissions trading scheme for airlines
• Calls to encourage homes to go green
• A report that the British are addicted to cheap flights
• A report that the risk of flooding due to climate change has been underestimated
• A conference to discuss tackling climate change
• Increases in forest fires due to climate change
• A report that APEC has muddied the climate change waters
• A way to track your carbon emissions through your phone
• A report that winter sports threaten mountain ecosystems

and lastly, and surely with tongue firmly in cheek, an entry from the Editors blog in which Head of TV news, Peter Horrocks says that the BBC has no line on climate change.

You couldn't make it up. 

An insider's view on EU environment policy

Bacon Butty is a blog written by a British civil servant working in environmental policy which I read occasionally. There's a very interesting posting up at the moment about the folly of the EU's renewable energy policy. Bureaucrats usually only stir themselves to a little gentle concern after a disaster has struck - when their jobs, perks and administrative empires are under threat in the glare of public attention. That they are concerned about EU policy already would seem to suggest that things have gone very badly awry.

The delicate balance hypothesis

Anyone who claims that a "delicate balance" is under threat doesn't know what they are talking about.