Subsidising al-Qaeda

There's an interesting article at Marginal Revolution looking at some of the unintended consequences of Pigou taxes as applied to the perceived need to keep fossil fuels underground. There seems to be a serious risk that the imposition of a Pigou tax will either simply redistribute oil to non-Pigou-taxing countries, or simply accelerate production as producers seek to avoid ever-rising tax levels.

The bottom line is this: paying countries to blow up their oil fields may be more effective than taxing the resource.

As Tyler Cowen notes, we know of several freelance groups who will do this kind of thing for free.

...which kind of makes you wonder how long will it be until the Greens call for al-Qaeda to receive state subsidies, in view of the selfless work they are doing in the fight to save us from global warming.

Bent Society?

This looks like it could be interesting - Bent Society? is a blog by a professional criminologist called Mike Sutton. There is a good piece here about government lead property marking schemes. Choice quote from one particular scrote interviewed by Dr Sutton:

Another interviewee said that he was never affected by property marking, saying that he stole it anyway:

“…the criminals is always one step ahead of them [police]. It doesn’t take long for someone to sit there with a bit of brain on ‘em and fuckin figure out how to fuckin decode it, get rid of markings or whatever. And you always know somebody like that. There is always going to be somebody like that [who could remove property marking or security features for the thief or fence]. When you’ve got a proper buyer [Commercial Fence] who spends money getting it sorted out he will.”

Gordon Brown's education

Gordon Brown has been holding forth on the subject of education.

We've moved our schools from being below average to being above average. We've now got to make them world class.

Whatever Gordon Brown studied at Edinburgh, I'm quite certain it wasn't mathematics because his understanding of the word "average" seems a little, shall we say, hazy. We know this because the BBC reports in the same article that the government has been stung into action by 

a controversial report earlier this year from Unicef, which put the UK at the bottom of a league table of children's well-being among 21 industrialised nations.

Climate cuttings 11

After the hectic pace of the last few weeks, things have quieted down a bit on the climate front, but there's still plenty to cause a bit of shock and awe for those whose scientific training was in fields where "post-modern science" is less the vogue.

IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth took pot shots at Syun-Ichi Akasofu of the International Arctic Research Centre. He tells us that the Hockey Stick has been confirmed (choosing not to discuss the findings of Professor Wegman which confirmed that it was broken).

Global warming sceptics are soon to be non-persons. The Wikipedia list of those opposing the hysterical outlook on the planet's climate has been flagged for deletion. Perhaps it was getting too long?

Robert Corell, a director of Mrs John Kerry's Heinz Centre in Washington, said that melting glaciers were causing earthquakes. Jose Rial, a professor of geophysics at the University of North Carolina said that this was scaremongering.

A group of Italian scientists compared 19 climate models used in the IPCC's 4th report. The outputs are apparently entirely inconsistent with each other, thus confirming the view that climate models are currently, and possibly inherently, unreliable. 

People are still chucking rocks in the direction of NASA's bungling AGW cheerleader, James Hansen. Lubos Motl says he was involved in the 1970s global cooling scare too. Meanwhile there was a brouhaha about the fact that he appears to have been receiving money from George Soros. This follows his being showered in cash by the aforementioned Mrs John Kerry - Teresa Heinz. Why are these left-wing luminaries so generous to a public servant? The Soros story has been brought up to date by Paul Biggs writing at Jennifer Marohasy's blog.

There was lots of interest in the climate history of Wellington, New Zealand. Hansen has managed to adjust his way from a gently cooling trend to a sharply warming one. Oh, and the city seems to have disappeared altogether after 1988. Only climate scientists can make major conurbations disappear before your very eyes, it seems. Climate Skeptic's take on the affair here. Climate Audit here. 

Those who follow the AGW debate know that in the ice core records, increases in temperature lead increases in CO2 by about 800 years, implying what we might call an inconvenient causality. The hysterics try to shrug it off by saying it's all to do with feedbacks. They were very excited by a new paper which claimed that the lag was less than the 800 years previously thought. Unfortunately another paper a few days later suggested a lag of 1300 years.

An online journal called Credibility Climate of the Past published a paper by prominent climate scientist (and Green party councillor) Martin Juckes, attacking McIntyre & McItrick's refutation of the hockey stick. They managed to do this despite this involving their breaching their own policies on review comments and having an editor who had a clear conflict of interest, again in breach of their stated policies. They also didn't seem to mind that the content of the paper was wrong. Cue much blustering from the bigwigs at the journal and claims that "it's very hard to find an unconflicted editor". Cue also McIntyre pointing out that almost any other member of their editorial board would not have been conflicted in the same way. Full story here. Do read the comments thread too.

One of the key reconstructions of the historical climate is that of Osborn and Briffa who say that the 20th Century was abnormally warm. Their work has been the subject of much attention from Climate Audit in recent years. Now another researcher, Gerd Berger of Berlin’s Institut für Meteorologie, has reported that Osborn & Briffa have not done their statistical tests correctly. This will not be a surprise to regular readers. Berger has gone on to recreate their work using the correct tests and says that doing this makes the 20th century temperatures look pretty normal.

Some interesting work has been published by a statistician/blogger called Jonathan Lowe. While the AGW community looks at daily max/min temperatures, JL has looked instead at temperatures throughout the day and finds that night time temperatures in Australia show no trend. It's only daytime temperatures that are rising - when the sun is out.

And that's it folks. As always, thanks to everyone who sent links, even if I didn't use them. Keep them coming.

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?