Marketing

A commenter on the posting on packaging informs me that environmentalists are protesting about "the large amount of packaging used for marketing purposes". This distinction had entirely passed my by, and was certainly not mentioned by Jeanette Winterson in her whinge on Question Time. It's also not clear to me just how large this alleged problem is - what proportion of packaging is used solely for marketing purposes. Still, let's examine the case.

We first need to ask what is the problem with packaging used for marketing purposes. It is clearly not the fact that it is packaging per se, since, according to my commenter, environmentalists have no problem with packaging used to protect goods. This can only mean that the objection is, in fact, to use of resources for marketing.

This being the case, we must ask why they are directing their fire against marketing through the medium of packaging. Why not other forms of advertising and promotion? Do billboards not use resources? Does a TV commercials not involve flying film crews to exotic locations with a vast and ugly carbon footprint to match? What is it about packaging which is so uniquely wicked?

We need to know. 

Direct action

I'm not sure if I've ever come across an example of a corporate bigwig engaging in direct action on behalf of their company. Richard Charkin, the CEO of Macmillan Nature, was understandably annoyed at Google's approach to digitisation of publishers' intellectual property.  Rather than engage some lawyers or write a letter of protest, Mr Charkin seized the bull by the horns and took a visit to Google's stand at Bookexpo America where he and a colleague half-inched a couple of laptops.

I confess that a colleague and I simply picked up two computers from the Google stand and waited in close proximity until someone noticed. This took more than an hour.

Our justification for this appalling piece of criminal behaviour? The owner of the computer had not specifically told us not to steal it. If s/he had, we would not have done so. When s/he asked for its return, we did so. It is exactly what Google expects publishers to expect and accept in respect to intellectual property.

'If you don't tell us we may not digitise something, we shall do so. But we do no evil. So if you tell us to desist we shall.'

I felt rather shabby playing this trick on Google. They should feel the same playing the same trick on authors and publishers.

Two wrongs don't make a right, of course, but one can't help but have a sneaking admiration for Mr Charkin. We might even quietly wish Macmillan well in its unlikely role as the David to Google's Goliath.

Packaging

I was listening to "Any Questions" the other day, and was trying to stop my toes curling  - an involuntary spasm caused by the foolish inanities of Jeanette Winterson who is apparently a famous writer. Ms Winterson was telling us about protests which various environmentalist bodies had organised in order to protest at what they saw as the excessive volume of packaging produced by supermarkets. However, it can't be true that the packaging is unnecessary. Here's why.

The green argument takes two premises:

1. The level of packaging found in supermarkets is unnecessary.
2. This is annoying to customers
   

They reason therefore that supermarkets should not use so much packaging in future.

Let us observe however that supermarkets are greedy capitalist organisations. I don't think that anyone, least of all Ms Winterson, would disagree with this. We should also observe that supermarkets spend huge sums of money on packaging - which has become a multi-billion pound industry on the back of supermarkets' custom.

The question we therefore need to ask (and which Ms Winterson and her ilk need to supply an answer to) is: "Why are these greedy capitalists spending such large sums of money on something which is (a) unnecessary and (b)pisses their customers off?" Could it be that the packaging is, in fact, necessary after all? Could it be that it is actually protecting valuable products from damage or decay? Could it be that the supermarkets are actually the good environmentalists, and the Wintersons are in fact pushing us down a road that will see us wasting huge amounts of food, as happens in the third world?

Perish the thought.

 

Another climate station

Following on from the previous post, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at a UK climate station on Google Earth. The idea was really just to see if I could find the "Stephenson Screen" - the small box of tricks used for recording climate data rather than to do any surveying as such. . My nearest stations are Edinburgh Airport and the Royal Observatory. Taking the view that the Observatory would be smaller I zoomed in on Blackford Hill, and was pretty astonished to find what appeared to be the climate station straight away.

As you can see, the station (marked) is surrounded by a circle of grass. By the miracles of Google Earth I was able to measure this as having a minimum radius of 9m which is the bare minimum permitted by the guidelines. The surrounding roads are a no-no though, and the buildings around the perimeter are too close to the station which should be at least a distance of four times the height of the buildings away. Since we can measure the distance to the nearest building as being 18m this implies a maximum height of the building of 4.5m. This seems implausible.

All in all, it looks as though there may be problems with data quality in the UK too - if it can't be got right at a major scientific institution it's unlikely that the stations in agricultural colleges and so on are going to be much better. It's a pity that the Google's hi-res images of the UK cover such a small fraction of the country.

Climate station spotting

Fancy becoming a climate station spotter? 

There's a very interesting new climate research site being set up by Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That? He's been investigating the quality of the land-based temperature records used by climate scientists and is setting up the new site to encourage others to help him out. The idea is that people will go to an automated weather stations, take a few photographs so as to document its exact siting and surroundings, and make a few other observations of the procedures used.

He's already done a few stations around his California base himself with some pretty jaw-dropping results. One of these was Forest Grove, and Anthony's photo of the station is shown below. He has helpfully marked the distance between the temperature gauge and the exhaust outlet of the airconditioning unit which is installed in the adjacent window. It's possible that some UK readers may be unfamiliar with these strange contraptions which are used in foreign climes to make rooms cooler. You may also not be aware that these outlets give off a lot of heat. A lot of heat!

 

Anthony also shows the historic temperature plot for the Forest Grove station, which I've inset in the corner of the picture. It's no surprise that this shows things warming up quite remarkably in recent decades. I wonder if attentive readers can work out why this is?  A clue - it's nothing to do with global warming.

Now this is an single instance of a problem and could easily be written off as a one-off. But fear not! Anthony has also documented Marysville, which comes equipped with an asphalt carpark, an aircon outlet, a barbeque and a sharply rising temperature plot.....

 

---and Redding which comes equipped with a lightbulb!!

 

Even if you have no scientific background whatsoever this is clearly wrong. Any observed increase in temperature at these stations must surely be due to the local, man-made heat sources rather than any purported change in the climate. It is extraordinary that these stations have found their way into the IPCC's temperature records without being noticed corrected.

Now this sample represents only a small percentage of the stations in the global network, but it does look as if there is a possibility of a serious data quality problem. As in any good audit, if you find errors the first thing to do is to extend your sample.

So if you have a camera (and an anorak, no doubt) you might well like to get involved with surveying stations in your locale. Just think of how you could annoy every greenie and leftie you know.  Details of how to sign up here.

Comment from a climate scientist

I've just had a very interesting comment from someone signing themselves "Climate researcher" in response to my piece on the witholding of research data. I reproduce it here in full:

The data used by the overwhelming number of studies is freely available online from government sources. Same with model outputs. I always try to reproduce the results of previous studies to test my algorithms and have yet to find a problem. Climate science is not junk, as you say. The climate system is difficult to model, to observe and to predict. Most climate scientists are trying to understand the system in order to make season ahead predictions so that we may optimize agriculture or water resources systems to support a growing population or to make better flood predictions. Most researchers aren't involved with IPCC. I invite all people who are hostile to climate science to go back to school. You'll find out how fascinating and challenging the field really is. Thanks.

My response was this (again in full)

From the general tone of your comment I'm guessing that you accept the examples I've given, but you are saying that they are not representative of climate science as a whole. That seems credible and it would be hard for anyone to claim otherwise.

I don't mean to be hostile to climate scientists as a whole - only those guilty of withholding data and code and manipulating their results. But you as (presumably) one of the good guys needs to recognise that your professional reputation is being put on the line by the bad guys in your midst.

A professional body can't risk its brand being damaged by allowing miscreants to  get away with unprofessional behaviour. The honest majority are going to have to stand up and condemn the bad guys in no uncertain terms. If they don't, then they risk some of the mud which is being flung around sticking to them instead of its intended target.

(I should add that this article might be misconstrued as some kind of threat. It isn't, and I will be trying to ensure that I make clear who I am criticising in future). 

Leadership

Chris Dillow writes an incisive piece on why centralised heirarchies don't work over at the Times. Just a few pages further on (not online) and with a beautiful sense of timing, Nicola Sturgeon, the new health minister in Scotland, is reported as having

ordered the NHS to deliver cancer treatment targets by the end of the year.

Dillow quotes Kenneth Boulding:

The larger and more authoritarian the organisation, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds

Ms Sturgeon seems to have got into the swing of leading a large, authoritarian organisation in no time at all. Quite what difference she thinks that shouting at clinicians from the sidelines is going to make is anyone's guess. It didn't work for the last lot, did it? 

I like this

House of Dumb has coined (I think) a lovely expression for right-wing blogs - the "dextrosphere". The beauty of it is, of course, that places like this are now "the sinistersphere".

Good education due around 2050...perhaps

David Willett's speech to the CBI on the subject of education is set out in full in the Telegraph today. It's a good source for a more detailed discussion of some of the issues I raised in my post on the self-flagellation over grammar schools which is besotting and consuming the Conservatives at the moment.

A few stand-out points:

We already have more per capita funding than in the past and we officially have a system of school choice. But it hasn't transformed educational standards as we hoped. This is because there are no mechanisms in place to enable successful schools to expand, to take over failing schools or for new schools to be created.

So why don't you privatise them, you silly billy?

It is the failure to open up the supply side which is the reason why, despite years of ambitious attempts at education reform, Britain now lags behind many other advanced western countries.

Correct. So what have your two brains decided to do about it?

We must make it easier for people, including parents themselves, to set up new schools. New school providers must be able to enter the maintained sector, responding to what parents want. This is not how the system works at the moment.

Why do you want a maintained sector? You are trying to set schools free, aren't you? If they are in the maintained sector then governments can tie them up in red tape. You are playing into the hands of Whitehall and the teaching unions, Mr Two Brains.

[Blair] proposed, for example, that no new schools should be created by local authorities - a powerful device for bringing new providers incrementally into the maintained sector.

And you support this why, exactly? Do you think I want incremental change? What you are saying is that, for the majority of people, you are offering a good education to their grandchildren. And then only if a future Labour government doesn't reverse it all and hand the schools back to the teaching unions. It will be Railtrack all over again. 

At the heart of our education reforms is creating, in Tony Blair's words, 'self-governing independent state schools'. 

Oxymoron. Moron. Two brains, and both demented.

Bloody hell.

Cherry picking

Right now there's quite a few readers being referred here from Devil's Kitchen (thanks for the link!) and also a comment I left at Iain Dale's place. Everyone's very welcome.

I hope you find the articles linked interesting. You might also want to refer to the article I wrote about cherry-picking of data. If anything this is even more scandalous than the others.

As ever, the full story is at Climate Audit. I'm just pointing you to the guy who's actually doing the work and breaking the stories.

A bunch of monkeys

Having found myself in the odd position of praising Labour Home for its response to David McLean's Freedom of Information Act, I was almost relieved to read a real howler of an article up there today.

The author of the piece, who goes under the nom-de-blog of Howlermonkey (you couldn't make this up, could you?), writes about the antics of an evangelical christian called Richard Turnbull, who has apparently been telling us that we're all going to hell. This doesn't actually strike me as very interesting in itself - I thought this was what evangelical christians did - but there you are. However, Mr Howlermonkey goes on to make a gobsmackingly pathetic attempt to link Mr Turnbull to the Conservative Party. The article is called "The Tory Taliban in Oxford" and includes this little nugget:

[Turnbull] Also suggested that Torie party donate 10% of it’s income to conservative evangelical Collages such as Wycliffe.

If you refer back to some of the original sources for Mr Monkey's article - the Guardian and the Indy as far as I can tell - the facts were reported thus:

In [his speech], Dr Turnbull also warns against the danger of liberalism in the church, talks of ‘the strategic nature’ of evangelical control of training colleges and calls on conservatives to siphon off 10% of their financial contributions to the Church of England to help pay the costs of like-minded colleges.

So in fact Mr Monkey is, either dishonestly or foolishly, conflating "conservatives" with "The Conservative Party". To judge from his writing, I am relieved to say that it appears to be the latter.

Labour Home is much improved since its relaunch, to the extent that I'm now a regular reader. But I do wonder if they are just going to get themselves into trouble with their relatively open editorial policy. If they allow writers of this quality to infest their site, they will end up looking like, well, a bunch of monkeys. 

Gove on Cameron

Listening to Any Questions just now, Michael Gove was asked whether his ability to speak freely was restricted by David Cameron. Gove replied that Cameron doesn't believe in any restrictions at all.

Given that Cameron has said that no frontbench spokesman may call for withdrawl from the EU, this was a lie. 

The unbearable statism of Tories

The catfight by the Conservatives over the issue of grammar schools has been mildly diverting, if only to confirm my belief that the majority of Tories are now so statist as to be hardly worth saving.

In an op-ed piece in the Times last week, David Cameron set out his vision, such as it is, for the future of education in England and Wales.   In his usual vapid, sub-Blairesque style he praises American charter schools and Labour's city academies (which are basically the same thing) and the voucher systems in Sweden, Holland and parts of the US. He tells us that he wants to open up the supply of education so that something called "social enterprises" can open schools too. He also says that money should follow the pupil. What he appears to be saying is that he will retain the model of a city academy - which is to say a school which is independent of local government - but he hints that he will try to increase the number of them by introducing a voucher system, and by making it easier for people to start their own schools. He is clear though that the freedoms he claims to want for these new schools will not extend to deciding their own admissions policies.

Is this enough to deliver a reasonably functioning education system? I think not. What Cameron proposes is not a market - at best it's one of those ersatz monstrosities so beloved of the Westminster village - the internal market. There are so many things wrong with the proposal it's hard to know where to start. For example, city academies are companies limited by guarantee. They are non-profits to all extents and purposes.  So we can expect education to move from the crazy dynamic of a bureaucracy to the much saner, but hardly earth-shattering dynamic of the Sue Ryder shop. This will be an improvement, no doubt, but we don't look to Oxfam to radically change the face of high street retail and so we shouldn't expect a non-profit schooling system to bring home the educational bacon. The education system needs entrepreneurialism and it needs hard-nosed shareholders breathing down the necks of managers. It needs managers losing sleep at night over whether they are losing pupils to a neighbouring school. It needs risk-taking and it needs investment. This is just not what non-profits do. So why, we ask, are the Conservatives - the party of the free market - proposing such a  statist halfway house. Why will they not just privatise it all?

Also, it is sadly indicative of an unreconstructed statist that Cameron will forbid selection. What does he know about it? Can't people try if they want to? And who the hell does he think he is to forbid it anyway?  I would have thought an applicant for a post on the below-stairs staff would have a better chance of getting the post if he told us how he would scrub the bogs so they shone, rather than giving us a lecture on what brand of bleach he's going to let us use.

There is going to be a great deal of devil in the detail too. After all, we know he will not allow selection, but the question is, what other requirements is he going to force upon the new schools. They will presumably still all be subject to inspection by the HMIs, who are, as is often acknowledged, a huge part of the problem because they insist on the use of antediluvian trendy teaching methods.  Again, it comes down to whether you believe that the best results will be delivered by a bottom-up market-led system, or a top-down experts 'n' inspectors system. Given that the latter has failed for the last thirty years, we are justified in asking why the Conservatives are not proposing to scrap it in favour of the system which allegedly forms part of their key beliefs. Why are they choosing statism?

Discipline is another mantra repeated by David Cameron, perhaps in the belief that by doing so he will appease the tweed-clad grassroots. The Conservatives will apparently legislate to allow headteachers to expel unruly pupils without fear of being overruled. Why, we wonder, does he feel the need to legislate? Wouldn't a free, private school be perfectly within its rights to expel anyone it wanted to? Wouldn't this be simpler to manage and simpler to implement? Why statism? Why not the free market?

Cameron is right about one thing; the argument about grammars is stale and irrelevant. He doesn't know whether they are better than the alternatives and neither does anyone else. The question is whether he has the maturity to stand back and let the market discover the answer. Unfortunately, on the basis of his column in the Times, he is still a long way from learning that lesson.  

For an example of a non-statist Tory approach to this issue, try this. 

The five ages of political life

Childhood

Who runs the country?

Adolescence

I want to run the country

Adulthood

I want my party to run the country

Maturity

I makes no difference who runs the country

Second childhood

Who's running the country these days? 

Still more cackhanded greenery

The greens have got it wrong again!

Kevin Vranes, writing on the Nature Climate Feedback blog recounts the sad tale of some more perverse results of the Kyoto Protocol. It's like this. Rich countries that can't meet their Kyoto obligations pay poor countries to reduce their emissions instead. While this might be doneby means of something obvious like building biomass incinerators or windfarms, one outlet that has proved very lucrative for the third world has been the burning of a chemical called HFC-23.

Now, HFC-23 is the by-product of the manufacture of a refrigerant with the equally romantic moniker of HCFC-22. Both of these substances are chlorofluorocarbons and therefore can damage the ozone layer. Despite this their manufacture is still allowed, under a developing country exemption from the Montreal Protocol.  When Kyoto was put in place however, the developing countries discovered that as well as depleting the ozone layer, both chemicals were also greenhouse gases. In particular HFC-23, the by-product, turned out to have a very long lifetime in the atmosphere. Because of this Kyoto was going to reward them, and reward them big-time, for burning it rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. As Vranes puts it:

[P]roducers of HCFC-22 now make more money burning HFC-23 than they do selling HCFC-22. Imagine what being paid handsomely to burn your waste does to your incentive to reduce your waste. If your waste stream costs you to dispose of it, you might try to improve your production to reduce waste and thus save money. And even if you did get paid to burn your waste, it might make financial sense to reduce waste anyway if your efficiency improvements paid more in reduced operating expenses than burning waste generated in income. But neither is the case for HCFC-22 factories. For them a double financial incentive now exists: keep making HCFC-22 in copious amounts at a profit, which will produce HFC-23 as a now-valuable waste product. And since HCFC-22 producers need not even lift a finger to burn their HFC-23 (those funding the CDM project fund the capture and burn device), any incentive for switching away from the ozone-depleting HCFC-22 as a refrigerant is also destroyed.

 The great law of unintended consequences strikes again. Now just explain to me again why Mr Bush was so wicked for not signing Kyoto?