Monday, September 23, 2013

EU membership - has Parliament buried the "smoking gun" letter from 1960?

Albert Burgess's second piece here on Broad Oak included a photocopy of a crucial letter from the Lord Chancellor to Edward Heath in 1960. Heath had been made Lord Privy Seal by the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and was tasked with negotiating the UK's entry into what was then known as the Common Market. When he himself became Prime Minister, Heath finally took us in. The importance of the letter is that it shows that Heath had been told of the constitutional implications almost a dozen years before.

As the copy I received was a little faint, I looked for another and found an edited-down transcript at www.freebritain.org.uk/articles (see first link above), listed as "Heath's Lie That There Would Be No Loss of Sovereignty".  It ended with a URL link to the House of Commons library website.

Trouble is, it's gone.

So I've emailed Parliament's webmaster as follows:
________________________
 
Date: 22 September 2013 19:52
Subject: Documents relating to the preparations for our entry into the Common Market etc

To: webmaster@parliament.uk

Dear Sir
I have come across a photostat of a letter written in December 1960 by Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, to Edward Heath, discussing the constitutional implications of EC membership.

 The document was titled

 "RESEARCH PAPER 10/79
Appendix 2 Letter to Edward Heath from Lord Kilmuir, December 1960"

and the URL was quoted as


but the document cannot be found there now.
 
1. Can you tell me where it is now to be found?

2. Please direct me to other letters, briefings, minutes etc that bear on the same issues as in Lord Kilmuir's letter.

3. If there is any material of this kind that has not yet been made publicly available, can you please tell me when it will be released?

4. If a Freedom of Information request is needed, to whom should it be addressed?

Yours sincerely
___________________

Correction: the document reference I gave you was assigned by the organisation at whose website I found the letter. However, the letter itself is from Lord Kilmuir to Edward Heath when the latter was Lord Privy Seal, in December 1960, and the early part of it includes these words:

"I have no doubt that if we do sign the Treaty, we shall suffer some loss of sovereignty [...] Adherence to the Treaty of Rome would, in my opinion, affect our sovereignty in three ways:-
 
“Parliament would be required to surrender some of its functions to the organs of the Community; The Crown would be called on to transfer part of its treaty-making power to those organs; Our courts of law would sacrifice some degree of independence by becoming subordinate in certain respects to the European Court of Justice...”

I hope this will help to locate the document.
__________________________
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

John Cook's Climate Change Mythbusters 3

This is part of a series reposting material from John Cook's Skeptical Science website. Although he is a physicist rather than a specialist in climate science, he is a convinced "global warmist" and tries to rebut frequently-raised objections to the theory. However, it is always possible to question the data (e.g. this valuable note about measuring temperature) and the line of argument. Please help advance the debate - with facts and logic.
_______________________________________________________

Positives and negatives of global warming

What The Science Says:
Negative impacts of global warming on agriculture, health & environment far outweigh any positives.
Climate Myth: It's not bad
"Two thousand years of published human histories say that warm periods were good for people. It was the harsh, unstable Dark Ages and Little Ice Age that brought bigger storms, untimely frost, widespread famine and plagues of disease." (Dennis Avery)
Here’s a list of cause and effect relationships, showing that most climate change impacts will confer few or no benefits, but may do great harm at considerable cost.

Agriculture

While CO2 is essential for plant growth, all agriculture depends also on steady water supplies, and climate change is likely to disrupt those supplies through floods and droughts. It has been suggested that higher latitudes – Siberia, for example – may become productive due to global warming, but the soil in Arctic and bordering territories is very poor, and the amount of sunlight reaching the ground in summer will not change because it is governed by the tilt of the earth. Agriculture can also be disrupted by wildfires and changes in seasonal periodicity, which is already taking place, and changes to grasslands and water supplies could impact grazing and welfare of domestic livestock. Increased warming may also have a greater effect on countries whose climate is already near or at a temperature limit over which yields reduce or crops fail – in the tropics or sub-Sahara, for example.

Health

Warmer winters would mean fewer deaths, particularly among vulnerable groups like the aged. However, the same groups are also vulnerable to additional heat, and deaths attributable to heatwaves are expected to be approximately five times as great as winter deaths prevented. It is widely believed that warmer climes will encourage migration of disease-bearing insects like mosquitoes and malaria is already appearing in places it hasn’t been seen before.

Polar Melting

While the opening of a year-round ice free Arctic passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans would confer some commercial benefits, these are considerably outweighed by the negatives. Detrimental effects include loss of polar bear habitat and increased mobile ice hazards to shipping. The loss of ice albedo (the reflection of heat), causing the ocean to absorb more heat, is also a positive feedback; the warming waters increase glacier and Greenland ice cap melt, as well as raising the temperature of Arctic tundra, which then releases methane, a very potent greenhouse gas (methane is also released from the sea-bed, where it is trapped in ice-crystals called clathrates). Melting of the Antarctic ice shelves is predicted to add further to sea-level rise with no benefits accruing.

Ocean Acidification

A cause for considerable concern, there appear to be no benefits to the change in pH of the oceans. This process is caused by additional CO2 being absorbed in the water, and may have severe destabilising effects on the entire oceanic food-chain.

Melting Glaciers

The effects of glaciers melting are largely detrimental, the principle impact being that many millions of people (one-sixth of the world’s population) depend on fresh water supplied each year by natural spring melt and regrowth cycles and those water supplies – drinking water, agriculture – may fail.

Sea Level Rise

Many parts of the world are low-lying and will be severely affected by modest sea rises. Rice paddies are being inundated with salt water, which destroys the crops. Seawater is contaminating rivers as it mixes with fresh water further upstream, and aquifers are becoming polluted. Given that the IPCC did not include melt-water from the Greenland and Antarctic ice-caps due to uncertainties at that time, estimates of sea-level rise are feared to considerably underestimate the scale of the problem. There are no proposed benefits to sea-level rise.

Environmental

Positive effects of climate change may include greener rainforests and enhanced plant growth in the Amazon, increased vegitation in northern latitudes and possible increases in plankton biomass in some parts of the ocean. Negative responses may include further growth of oxygen poor ocean zones, contamination or exhaustion of fresh water, increased incidence of natural fires, extensive vegetation die-off due to droughts, increased risk of coral extinction, decline in global photoplankton, changes in migration patterns of birds and animals, changes in seasonal periodicity, disruption to food chains and species loss.

Economic

The economic impacts of climate change may be catastrophic, while there have been very few benefits projected at all. The Stern report made clear the overall pattern of economic distress, and while the specific numbers may be contested, the costs of climate change were far in excess of the costs of preventing it. Certain scenarios projected in the IPCC AR4 report would witness massive migration as low-lying countries were flooded. Disruptions to global trade, transport, energy supplies and labour markets, banking and finance, investment and insurance, would all wreak havoc on the stability of both developed and developing nations. Markets would endure increased volatility and institutional investors such as pension funds and insurance companies would experience considerable difficulty.

Developing countries, some of which are already embroiled in military conflict, may be drawn into larger and more protracted disputes over water, energy supplies or food, all of which may disrupt economic growth at a time when developing countries are beset by more egregious manifestations of climate change. It is widely accepted that the detrimental effects of climate change will be visited largely on the countries least equipped to adapt, socially or economically.

Basic rebuttal written by GPWayne

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Weekend Reading (Heavy Division)

This, by Jonathan Franzen in Saturday week's Grauniad review, is the best essay I have read for several months.  Based on his translation and exegesis of the writings of an Austrian I'd never heard of - Karl 'The Great Hater' Kraus (1874-1936), a kind of proto-blogger - the piece is hard to summarise.  (The Graun's sub-editor has failed hopelessly in this task, so don't be offput by the rubric.)

So I've assembled a little set of extracts.  If you like them you'll read it ... 
"... rather live among the Germans. For although they've strapped art into the Procrustean Folding Bed of their commerce, they've also made life sober, and this is a blessing: fantasy thrives, and every man can put his own light in the barren windowframes. Just spare me the pretty ribbons! "
"Believe me, you color-happy people, in cultures where every blockhead has individuality, individuality becomes a thing for blockheads." You're not allowed to say things like this in America nowadays, no matter how much the billion (or is it 2 billion now?) "individualised" Facebook pages may make you want to say them. 
Vienna in 1910 was, thus, a special case. And yet you could argue that America in 2013 is a similarly special case: another weakened empire telling itself stories of its exceptionalism while it drifts towards apocalypse of some sort, fiscal or epidemiological, climatic-environmental or thermonuclear. 
For Kraus, the infernal thing about newspapers was their fraudulent coupling of Enlightenment ideals with a relentless pursuit of profit and power. With technoconsumerism, a humanist rhetoric of "empowerment" and "creativity" and "freedom" and "connection" and "democracy" abets the frank monopolism of the techno-titans; the new infernal machine seems increasingly to obey nothing but its own developmental logic, and it's far more enslavingly addictive, and far more pandering to people's worst impulses, than newspapers ever were. 
"An invention for shattering the Koh-i-noor to make its light accessible to everyone who doesn't have it. For fifty years now it's been running, the machine into which the Mind is put in the front to emerge at the rear as print, diluting, distributing, destroying. The giver loses, the recipients are impoverished, and the middlemen make a living"
Amazon is well on its way to making writers into the kind of prospectless workers whom its contractors employ in its warehouses 
... the next thing you know, you're translating The Last Days of Mankind as The Last Days of Privileging the Things I Personally Find Beautiful. And maybe this is not such a bad thing. Maybe apocalypse is, paradoxically, always individual, always personal. I have a brief tenure on Earth, bracketed by infinities of nothingness, and during the first part of this tenure I form an attachment to a particular set of human values that are shaped inevitably by my social circumstances. 
Kraus's signal complaint – that the nexus of technology and media has made people relentlessly focused on the present and forgetful of the past ... something that has become a fixture of modernity. The experience of each succeeding generation is so different from that of the previous one that there will always be people to whom it seems that any connection of the key values of the past have been lost. As long as modernity lasts, all days will feel to someone like the last days of humanity. 

You get the picture ...


This post first appeared on the Capitalists@Work blog
 

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

John Cook's Climate Change Mythbusters 2

This is part of a series reposting material from John Cook's Skeptical Science website. Although he is a physicist rather than a specialist in climate science, he is a convinced "global warmist" and tries to rebut frequently-raised objections to the theory. However, it is always possible to question the data (e.g. this valuable note about measuring temperature) and the line of argument. Please help advance the debate - with facts and logic.
_______________________________________________________

Solar activity & climate: is the sun causing global warming?
What The Science Says:
In the last 35 years of global warming, sun and climate have been going in opposite directions
Climate Myth: It's the sun
   "Over the past few hundred years, there has been a steady increase in the numbers of sunspots, at the time when the Earth has been getting warmer. The data suggests solar activity is influencing the global climate causing the world to get warmer." (BBC)
Over the last 35 years the sun has shown a slight cooling trend. However global temperatures have been increasing. Since the sun and climate are going in opposite directions scientists conclude the sun cannot be the cause of recent global warming.
The only way to blame the sun for the current rise in temperatures is by cherry picking the data. This is done by showing only past periods when sun and climate move together and ignoring the last few decades when the two are moving in opposite direction.
 

Figure 1: Global temperature (red, NASA GISS) and Total solar irradiance (blue, 1880 to 1978 from Solanki, 1979 to 2009 from PMOD).

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Defending savers: a letter to Mr Peter Hitchens

Mr Peter Hitchens
c/o Mail on Sunday
Associated Newspapers Limited
Northcliffe House
2 Derry Street
London W8 5TT


Monday, 16 September 2013


Dear Mr Hitchens


Inflation protection and government’s abandonment of its moral obligation to savers

I emailed you on 1st September in response to your Mail on Sunday article that day (the “Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Carney?” section on monetary inflation and savers). If you have seen it and are simply not responding, then that’s fine, because you must be very busy.

But in case the email has not been forwarded to you (and I also tried to follow up with a comment on your blog that may have been blocked), please find enclosed a copy of what I said.

In brief, it seems clear that when NS&I Index-Linked Savings Certificates were first introduced in 1975, both sides of the House in both Houses of Parliament accepted that protecting savers and pensioners from inflation was a social obligation.

Doesn’t this strengthen the case for restoration, and will you – with your high profile - help?


Yours sincerely

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Teacher is a fool

Not personally, but collectively.

Put yourself in the animal slippers of the girl below this Sunday morning:

From the Daily Mail (print edition), !9 September 2013

Now put yourself in the shoes of her partner.

Teachers' working hours have, very carefully, never been decided. Unlike social workers':


You'd think the divorce rate among teachers would be high, but although it's more than some it's less than others - about 1 in 8 marriages in the US. One reason is that in the UK, they tend to hook up during teacher training and after that have virtually no social life except on holiday, when they are either working to catch up on all the stuff they told their managers they'd already done, or crawling into GP surgeries to cash in all the health "brown points" they've accumulated during term time, or letting their hair down on some 18-30 jaunt like pit ponies brought up from the mine for their annual gallop round a green field. The divorced ones fantasise openly about meeting a rich man.

Teachers, said a landlord of mine when he went on the pull, are gullible. But think of the career path: before compulsory 16 - 18 education/training, they were the ones who had gone through their school careers working for pats on the head and gold stars; for symbolic and often deferred approval. The system has selected for obedience, diligence and emotional vulnerability; and now that women are the majority of workers not only in the primary but also in the secondary phase, anyone who joins the "profession" enters into a competition with manipulable workaholics. Merely hint that her display is not quite as vivid as her colleague's, or that her lessons could be just a tad more interesting, and she'll burn the midnight oil down to the desktop. With their abject fear of failure, they're fantastically easy to bully.

And the definition of success is not to be one. So if blessed with some nous and a benevolent line manager, the path is out and up: pastoral care, curriculum management, senior management, headship, adviser, Ofsted inspector.

Or, of course, to start a family and then come back part-time, or not at all. Or even to take one horrified look at what they've done and switch, fast: a fellow trainee went and joined the BBC straight after the post-grad teacher training course, a colleague did a couple of years and then left to be a rep for a chemical company, others became computer engineers, estate agents or bulk-sold for a plastic bag manufacturer, and so on.

Teachers are almost completely incapable of hard negotiation. Ignore the odd noisy activist you'll see on news clips of NUT conferences: the union path is another one out of the classroom. They're so bad at it that they wait for decades for someone else to do something for them. In 1974, the Houghton committee turned its attention to teachers' remuneration (as an afterthought: the original focus was nurses) and considered the demands and skills of the job in relation to similarly responsible work in the private sector. This was to sort out the perennial cyclical recruitment crisis, once and for all.

The result was a big bump in pay, and staff car parks filled up with new models to replace the bangers. But teachers, having been warned at the time not to let this slip, lost out almost immediately to the roaring inflation of the mid-70s, and very soon slid down the comparative pay ladder to their natural, humble and inoffensive niche.

The years rolled by and in came a Labour administration keen to show that it was succeeding in education; so pay got more generous and the exam grades got inflated. Now we have austerity, and exams are being changed, teachers' pay has been frozen for a couple of years, the retirement age has been put back by 5 years, and their conditions of service have just been officially weakened (all a bad manager needs is more power). Ofsted are going into schools in areas of social deprivation with an agenda to find them failing and so trigger "special measures" intervention and ultimately conversion to "academy" status. Schools are privatising, others are starting up as "free schools" using education budget money and venues in all sorts of weird places.

There have always been more votes among parents than teachers, so that determines political angle and media coverage. First hint of industrial action and Superwimp dashes into a phone booth and becomes Uncaring Teacher in the blink of an eye.

Similarly, the attitude to teachers' social contribution is bipolar: by turns they are either unable to teach a cat to drink cream, or commanded to teach manners, ICT, social skills for business, political correctness, ecological salvation and the virtues of the allegedly democratic system that governs us.

Not that the whole institution is necessarily about teaching. Its other role is to keep children off the streets, and Ed Miliband's lovely new idea is to turn schools into 8am - 6pm nurseries for 4 - 11 year olds. And the implications for the educational workforce? Socialism can only go so far, don't you know.

Nor has the examination system ever received a consistent, definitive brief. Half the time it's about meeting some minimum standard for all, the rest of the time it's an egghead-sorting machine to decide who has a small, medium, large or chickenbanger brain. In any case, the winners tend to be the organic free-range children from percheries in rural areas, market towns and treelined suburbs, who constitute the real middle class and supply most of the green benches in Westminster.

Fools. Clever, well-qualified, hard-working fools. Only teachers and horses.

Meanwhile...

Why teach dozens of young children when you could teach millions?
Pic source: Daily Mail
 
Being played till all hours by 10-year-olds I know this week.
Curriculum links: PSHE, SMSC, ICT
(Pic source)

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Political Climate Dictionary (1)

Fracking (gerund): Sexual activity between Minister and political adviser, as e.g. claimed by attack slug Damian McBride.

Wind farm (noun): 1. Public counterbriefing, e.g. between Climate Change and Environment Secretaries; 2. House of Commons Debating Chamber.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

The Archdruid and the new old religion

John Michael Greer is a fascinating writer and head of an American order of druids. In two recent linked pieces, he sketches a history of how religion has changed in the last few thousand years, and says, "I’ve come to believe that what’s going on is the emergence, for the first time in more than two thousand years, of a genuinely new religious sensibility in the western world."

I shall try to loosely summarise the first post, before reproducing the second in full.

In "A Sense Of Homecoming" (11 September) Greer looks at how religion was practised in classical times, in the Western Europe and the Mediterranean basin:
  • no congregations meeting inside buildings
  • not much interest in life after death
  • no waiting for "the end of the world"
  • few sacred scriptures
  • few claims that one god made the world
  • acceptance of the existence of other deities
The core institution was the temple (the god's house); the core ceremony a sacrifice to the god; the priests - elected or hereditary functionaries - were not the only ones who could sacrifice. The world of deities and humans was one: "Behind all the richness and diversity of the religious life of the time was a distinctive sensibility, one that saw the cosmos as a community to which gods and men both belonged."

Then (about 600 years before Christ) came Orphism and early Buddhism, with visions of escape from this world, for an elite, ascetic few. A few centuries later came those who would be the leaders to take us to salvation. Sex came to be seen as shameful, by Pagans as well as Christians.

Though these newer forms of religion might differ in some respects - authoritarian vs. democratic, centralized vs. collective - they all stressed individual belief and offered the hope of refuge in an alternative universe.

It is this style of thinking, says Greer, that underlies the modern "civil religion" of Progress. Instead of Heaven, there is another solar system or galaxy to travel to; instead of rebirth in a perfect body, the use of technology to delay ever longer the inevitability of sickness, old age and death.

Deluded by the temporary riches of fossil fuel consumption, we are degrading our environment in pursuit of an impossible, pseudo-religious dream: "The origins of our environmental crisis are deeply entangled with the religious sensibility of salvation and the beliefs and institutional forms that emerged from that sensibility." But people are beginning to wake up from that destructive sleep.

Life Preservers for Mermaids (18 September 2013)

The new religious sensibility I began to sketch out in last week’s Archdruid Report post is a subtle thing, and easy to misunderstand. It was thus inevitable that a number of commenters over the last week misunderstood it, or what I was saying about it. Typical of this response were those who thought that the new sensibility I was talking about was simply a matter of ecological concern, and pointed to a variety of existing religious and irreligious traditions that embody ecological concern as a way of suggesting that the new sensibility wasn’t anything new.
 
Just now, the state of the world being what it is, the presence of ecological concern in any tradition of human thought is something to celebrate. Still, the new religious sensibility I have in mind isn’t simply a matter of caring about the environment. It implies certain things about the relation between humanity and the rest of nature, to be sure, and some of these things are radically different from the implications of the older sensibility that’s shaped the religious thought of the western world for the last couple of millennia. Still, it’s possible to care profoundly about the environment from within the old sensibility, and it’s no doubt possible to ignore humanity’s dependence on the natural world from within the new one, though I admit I haven’t yet been able to figure out how.
 
To grasp what’s actually involved in the new religious sensibility, we can begin with Ugo Bardi’s thoughtful response to my post of two weeks ago, The Next Ten Billion Years. In his post, Bardi noted the difference between those visions of the future that see history as repeating endlessly—the eastern vision, in his phrasing—and those visions, more common in the western world, that see history as passing through a single arc from beginning to end. He pointed out, and correctly, that the distinction between these two visions rests on fundamental presuppositions about existence, and arguments between them end up circling endlessly without resolution because the common understandings that would allow agreement simply aren’t there.
 
It’s a valid point. Still, our visions don’t fall as cleanly on either side of that line as a casual reading of Bardi’s post might suggest. Both our portrayals of the future incorporate the inevitable death of the Earth’s biosphere due to the steadily increasing heat of the Sun—Bardi used an estimate of when this will take place that differs from the one that guided my narrative, but it’s not as though anyone alive today knows exactly when the thing will happen, and either story could be made to fit the other estimate with a modest change in dates. Both presuppose that the Earth will be changed profoundly by its history and the presence of intelligent life, and that these changes will affect whatever future civilizations may rise on this planet. Bardi’s “good future” ends, for that matter, with a far more dramatic circling around to the beginning than mine did, with his artificial intelligence taking on God’s role in Genesis 1:1 et seq. and saying “Let there be light” to a new creation.
 
Those parallels aren’t accidental. Partly, of course, they’re a product of the fact that both narratives are set in the same universe, governed by the same facts of stellar, planetary, and biological evolution, and partly they’re a product of the fact that I deliberately modeled my future history on Bardi’s. I could have done so even more exactly, avoiding all references to historical cycles, and my narrative would still have gotten the fascinating split response I fielded last week. The core issue that distinguishes my narrative from Bardi’s isn’t that mine is cyclical while his is linear. It’s that in his “good future,” history has a direction—the direction of cumulative technological progress toward cyber-godhood—while in his “bad future,” and in my narrative, it has none.
 
That’s the fault line that my narrative was intended to demonstrate—or, from the point of view of devout believers in the religion of progress, the sore toe on which it was designed to stomp. Certainly those of my readers who found the narrative infuriating, depressing, or both, zeroed in on that point with commendable precision. To borrow a turn of phrase from one of the more evidently anguished of my readers, if I’m right, we’re stuck on this rock—“this rock” meaning, of course, what those of a different sensibility would call the living Earth in all its vastness and wonder, the unimaginably rich and complex whole system of which Homo sapiens is one small and decidedly temporary part.
 
It’s interesting to note the wholly abstract nature of that that passionate desire to leave “this rock” somewhere back there in the interstellar dust. Neither the reader from whose comment I borrowed that phrase, nor any of the others who expressed similar sentiments, showed any particular concern about the fact that they themselves were unlikely ever to have the chance to board a starship and go zooming off toward infinity. In Bardi’s narrative, for that matter, no human being will ever get that chance. To believers in progress, none of that matters. What matters is that Man, or Life, or Mind, or some other capitalized abstraction—in the traditional folk mythology of progress, the initial capital is what tells you that an abstract concept has suddenly morphed into a mythic hero—is going to do the thing.
 
To the believer in progress, history must have a direction, and it has to make cumulative progress in that direction. That’s specifically the thing I went out of the way to exclude from my narrative, while including nearly everything else that the mythology of progress normally includes. My portrayal of the future, after all, allots to human civilizations of the future a time span around 2200 times the length of all recorded history to date; it assumes that future human societies will accomplish impressive things that we haven’t—the aerostat towns and floating cities of a million years from now were meant to whet that particular appetite; it even assumes that relics of one of our species’ proudest achievements, the Apollo moon landings, will still be around to impress the stuffing out of a future intelligent species a hundred million years from now. To believers in progress, though, long life, stupendous achievements, and a legacy reaching into the far future aren’t enough; there has to be something more.
 
We’ll get to the nature of that “something more” later on. For the moment, I want to refocus on just how much time and possibility my narrative allows for human beings. One of the subtle traps hidden in the extraordinary human invention of abstract number is the bad habit of thinking that because we can slap a number on something, we can understand it. We talk about millions of years as though we’re counting apples, and lose track of the fact that “a million years” is a symbolic label for a period that’s quite literally too huge for the human mind to begin to grasp.
 
A human generation is the average period between when a child is born and when it fathers or bears children of its own. Over the course of most of human history, that’s averaged around twenty years. Those of my readers who have had children, or who have reached or passed the age when having a first child is common, might want to take a moment to think back over that interval in their own lives. There have been just under twelve generations—twelve periods as long as it took you to grow from infancy to adulthood—since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, seventy-seven since the fall of Rome, around two hundred fifty since the beginning of recorded history, and 12,500 or so since Homo sapiensevolved out of its hominid ancestors. By contrast, over the period my narrative allots to the human future, there’s room for 550,000 more—that is, well over half a million further generations of humankind—and most of them will experience the cultural and practical benefits of one or another of the 8,638 global civilizations to come.
 
The point I’m hoping to make here can be sharpened even further if we imagine that my narrative had included, say, the successful human colonization of Mars, or even the establishment of human colonies on hypothetical Earthlike planets around Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, during the course of that eleven million year span. In that case, we would have gotten off this rock, and onto a few others, with a few orbital colonies or moonbases thrown in for good measure. Would that have satisfied those of my readers who were angered or depressed by the narrative? To judge by previous experiences, not if those colonies don’t spawn colonies in their turn, and so on out to infinity. To believers in the civil religion of progress, anything short of limitless cumulative extension just won’t cut it.
 
It’s in this context that the intrusion of religious imagery at the end of Bardi’s narrative is so revealing—yes, it was just as revealing in its original setting, in the Isaac Asimov short story from which Bardi borrowed it. Such things are astonishingly common in progress-centered visions of the future. I’ve talked more than once about the contemporary faith in the Singularity, that supposedly soon-to-arrive event—Ray Kurzweil’s prophecy puts it in 2045—when every detail of modern Protestant Rapture theology is supposed to appear in science-fiction drag, with superhuman artificial intelligences filling the role of Jesus, outer space that of heaven, robot bodies that of the glorified bodies of the elect, and so on through the list. More generally, from Olaf Stapledon right through to the present, attempts to project the curve of progress into the future reliably end up borrowing imagery and ideas from the mythic vocabulary of the western world’s theist religions, and the further they go into the future, the more extensive the borrowings become.
 
An earlier post in this sequence pointed out that civil religions like the modern faith in progress are derivative from, even parasitic on, the older theist religions that they replace. Partly that’s because theist religions inevitably get there first, and make extensive use of whatever superlatives their culture happens to prefer, so the civil religions that come afterwards end up borrowing images and ideas already shaped by centuries of theology. I suggest, though, that there’s more to it than that. Many of the people who dropped Christianity for a belief in the future triumph of science, progress, and human reason in a godless cosmos, for example, still had the emotional needs that were once met by Christianity, and inevitably sought fulfillment of those needs from their new belief system.
 
Those needs, in turn, aren’t universal to all human beings everywhere; they’re functions of a particular religious sensibility that began to emerge, as I described last week, in the western half of Eurasia around 600 BCE. That sensibility shaped a variety of older and newly minted religious traditions in at least as diverse a range of ways, but the core theme with which all of them contended was a profound distaste for nature, history, and the human condition, and the conviction that there had to be an escape hatch through which the chosen few could leap straight out of the “black iron prison” of the world, into the infinity and eternity that was supposed to be humankind’s true home.
 
Exactly where to find the escape hatch and how to get through it was a matter of fierce and constant disagreement. From one perspective, the hatch would only fit one person at a time, and could be passed through by rigorous spiritual discipline. From another, the unique qualities of a prophet or savior had opened the escape hatch wide, so that everyone who embraced the true faith wholeheartedly and kept some set of moral or behavioral precepts could expect to leap through at some point after physical death. From still another, the hatch would someday soon be opened so wide that the whole world and everyone on it would slip through, in an apocalyptic transformation that would abolish nature, history, time and change all at once. Much of the complexity of the last two thousand years or so of Eurasian religious history comes from the fact that devout believers in any faith you care to name embraced each of these options, and blended them together in a dizzying assortment of ways.
 
As western civilization moved through the same historical transformations as its predecessors, and the rise of rationalism drove the replacement of traditional theist religions with civil religions, the same quest for an escape hatch from nature, history, and the human condition expressed itself in different ways. The discussion of civil religions earlier in this sequence of posts explored some of the ways that civil religions borrowed the rhetoric and imagery of their theist predecessors.
 
The civil religion of progress was arguably the most successful of all in coopting the forms of older religions. It had an abundance of saints, martyrs, and heroes, and a willingness to twist history to manufacture others as needed; the development of technology, buoyed by a flood of cheap abundant energy from fossil fuels, allowed it to supplant the miracle stories of the older faiths with secular miracles of its own; the rise of scientific and engineering professions with their own passionate subcultures of commitment to the myth of progress gave it the equivalent of a priesthood, complete with ceremonial vestments in the form of the iconic white lab coat; the spread of materialist atheism as the default belief system among most scientists and engineers gave it a dogmatic creed that could be used, and in many circles is being used, as a litmus test for loyalty to the faith and a justification for warfare—so far, at least, merely verbal—against an assortment of unbelievers and heretics.
What the civil religion of progress didn’t have, at least in its early stages, was the escape hatch from nature, history, and the human condition that the religious sensibility of the age demanded. This may well be why belief in progress remained a minority faith for so long. The nationalist religions of the 18th century, of which Americanism is a survivor, and the social religions of the 19th, of which Communism was the last man standing, both managed the trick far earlier—nationalism by calling the faithful to ecstatic identification with the supposedly immortal spirit of the national community and the eternal ideals for which it was believed to stand, such as liberty and justice for all; social religions such as Communism by offering believers the promise of a Utopian world “come the revolution” hovering somewhere in the tantalizingly near future.
 
It was science fiction that finally provided the civil religion of progress with the necessary promise of salvation from the human condition. The conceptual sleight of hand with which this was done deserves a discussion of its own, and I intend to discuss it in next week’s post. Yet one consistent result of the way it was done has been a reliance on overtly theistic imagery far more open and direct than anything in the other civil religions we’ve discussed. From H.G. Wells’ Men Like Gods straight through to the latest geek-pope pontifications about the Singularity, the idea that humanity will attain some close approximation to godhood, or at least give metaphorical birth to artificial intelligences that will accomplish that feat, pervades the more imaginative end of the literature of progress—just as the less blatantly theological ambition to banish poverty, want, illness, and death from the realm of human experience has played a central role in the rhetoric of progress all along.
 
There are, as it happens, at least two serious problems with the project of perching humanity on some approximation of a divine throne in heaven. The first, as discussed here at length, is that the project isn’t exactly performing to spec at the moment. Three hundred years of accelerating drawdown of the Earth’s irreplaceable natural resources, and the three hundred years of accelerating damage to the Earth’s biosphere made inevitable by that process, have exempted a rather small fraction of our species from the more serious kinds of poverty and the more readily curable diseases, and handed out an assortment of technological toys that allow them to play at being demigods now and then, when circumstances permit. As nonrenewable resources run short and the impacts of ecological blowback mount, it’s becoming increasingly clear that only drastic efforts are likely to preserve any of these advantages into the future—and those drastic efforts are not happening.
 
Talk, as Zen masters are fond of saying, does not cook the rice, and enthusiastic chatter about artificial intelligence and space manufacturing does nothing to keep contemporary industrial society from stumbling down the same ragged trajectory toward history’s compost heap as all those dead civilizations that came before it. If anything, the easy assumption that the onward march of progress is unstoppable, and the artificial intelligences and orbital factories are therefore guaranteed to pop into being in due time, has become one of the major obstacles to constructive action at a time when constructive action is desperately needed. The use of emotionally appealing fantasies as a source of soothing mental pablum for those who, for good reason, are worried about the future is wildly popular these days, to be sure, but it’s hardly helpful.
 
Yet it’s at this point that the new religious sensibility I discussed in last week’s post throws a wild card into the game. It’s been my repeated experience that for those who already feel the new sensibility, the old promises haven’t just lost their plausibility; they’ve lost their emotional appeal. It’s one thing to proclaim salvation from nature, history, and the human condition to those who want that salvation but no longer believe that the ideology you’re offering can provide it. It’s quite another to do the same thing to people who no longer want the salvation you’re offering—people for whom nature, history, and the human condition aren’t a trap to escape, as they have been for most people in the western world for the last two millennia, but a reality to embrace in delight and wonder.

That’s the unexpected void that’s opening up beneath the feet of civil and theist religions alike at this turn of history’s wheel. In order to appeal to societies in which most people embraced the older religious sensibility, with its desperate craving for escape from the world of ordinary experience, religious traditions of both kinds have come to picture their role as that of lifeguards throwing life preservers to clumsy swimmers at risk of drowning in the waters of existence. What are they to do when a growing number of the swimmers in question ignore the flotation devices and, diving back into the depths of the water, show mermaid’s tails?

___________________________

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/a-sense-of-homecoming.html
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/life-preservers-for-mermaids.html

Both the above posts were accessed on 21 September 2013.

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German election: a question

Should Greek, Italian etc citizens not also have a vote in deciding who will be Germany's Chancellor?

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Doomster report: be prepared

Graph: Karl Denninger (2013)
Karl Denninger graphs the S&P share index against total public and private debt in the US and concludes that, volatility aside, they match.

If, for some reason, the ratio between debt and GDP reverted to that of 1980, the implication is that the S&P would approximately halve (which would be the third time since 2000, as I've said before). The consequences for pension funds etc would be dire, and this is the point at which, perhaps, the printing presses start to roll in earnest. Houses have inflated and popped, so have the banks, all that's left is the governments themselves - and the value of your savings.

As reported by Zero Hedge, Marc Faber predicts "a total collapse, but from a higher diving board", so he sees gold as an safeguard, not an investment in the usual profit-making sense: "I always buy gold and I own gold. I don't even value it. I regard it as an insurance policy. I think responsible citizens should own gold, period." Back in May, James Dines took much the same view: cash plus gold as a backstop.

But as I said last year, if "total collapse" means what it says, gold won't help either - otherwise we wouldn't have found the Lichfield Hoard buried in a Midlands field hundreds of years later. Which is why Investment Watch now reminds us of the need to prepare for truly serious emergencies.

I know some "preppers", but part of the preparation is not telling people who they are. It is going on.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Great news for dieters

 
From the UK's Daily Mail of Thursday, 19th September 2013 (print edition).
 
"The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language" - G.B. Shaw (allegedly).

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Education: where does the money really go?

"Paddington", a maths professor, writes to a local newspaper in Ohio:

Public higher education is under attack from all sides. Conservatives criticize the concept of spending money on it, and appear not to recognize that it is an investment in our future. Liberals decry the rising costs to the students. The reforms which are proposed all focus on ‘increasing efficiency’ by trying to cut the expense of teaching, apparently under the impression that this is the largest part of the budget.

How does this belief compare with the facts?

Locally, we have a recent news item which states that the full-time faculty at The University of Akron will be awarded a 2% raise pool, amounting to $1.3 million. This means that the salaries of full-time faculty total about $65 million per year, with perhaps another $15 million for fringe benefits, and $10 million for part-time faculty. That sounds like a lot, until one considers that the total University budget is $360 to $450 million.

In short, the people who do the teaching and research (which are the reasons for the existence of the institution) have direct costs which are at most 25% of the budget. Compare this to a typical local school district, where teaching salaries and benefits are at least 60% of the total.

It sounds quite efficient, doesn’t it?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Temperature trickery

During the late seventies and early eighties our lab looked after a small weather station on behalf of the Met Office. We logged rainfall, snow, temperature, sunshine hours and every now and then a chap from the Met Office would collect the data.

All data was hand written of course and ever since climate change came to be such a hot topic I’ve often wondered how reliable it was. In my view those far off days have something to tell us about historical data and the fact that it was collected and transcribed by people, not automated instruments. Historical protocols and historical behaviour – a minefield of unknowns.

To record daily maximum and minimum temperatures, we used a simple max/min thermometer housed in a wooden Stevenson screen. Every day someone from the lab would read the two temperatures, write them down and reset the thermometer.

If we missed a day, which happened occasionally for a variety of reasons, then the Met Office chap would nag us about it when he collected the data, look up a temperature record of the nearest station to ours and insert the readings into our record. He once told me that this was standard procedure – they didn’t accept incomplete data.

Yet at the time the data was fit for purpose, although that doesn’t mean it was fit for a far more tightly specified purpose dreamed up decades later.

In those days nobody knew that such temperature records would one day be used to justify global political decisions on energy policy. Nobody knew that long term temperature changes of less than one degree centigrade would acquire such dramatic significance.

Not that our station was ever likely to figure in these games I hasten to add. It closed some time ago. I’m merely dredging up some memories to highlight the tricky nature of historical temperature data. Stripping off some of the gloss you might say. There is a lot of that in climate science.

For example, our thermometer was never recalibrated. I’m sure it was checked before being installed, but even simple thermometers change over time and today it would be regularly calibrated against a certified standard. Ours wasn’t - ever.

Apart from the unknown condition of the thermometer, how many errors were made by people who took the readings and wrote them onto sheets of paper come wind, rain or snow?

In my experience, scientists are reluctant to take cognisance of human error even for highly uncertain factors such as historical and somewhat loosely defined protocols. Yet the historical global temperature record and our evidence of recent warming relies on such data.

Were the protocols and equipment used my lab capable of detecting a small temperature rise over a century?
One degree? No.
Two degrees? Doubtful.
Three degrees? Maybe.

Of course this is merely my opinion. I don’t actually know and neither does anyone else. Nobody can go back and calibrate our thermometer, review the protocol we followed and audit the way we followed it. There are some things we could do such as comparing our record to the record of nearby thermometers, but is that sufficient to detect small long term changes?

Taking the wider view, are we able to estimate such changes from long historical records based on protocols not designed for that purpose? Always assuming written protocols were used of course - and what about calibration facilities? How many were calibrated against the equivalent of NPL standards? Some? A few? None?

Yet in terms of time span, manual surface temperature records derived from a range of old and possibly dubious measurement protocols account for at least two thirds of our surface temperature record for the past century.

Note this post gives an excellent insight into the pitfalls of temperature measurement.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Albert Burgess: Loyalty vs. Treason 2

Winston Churchill said in 1938, "This country breeds a type of man who is very well educated and highly intelligent, who think they know best. They can't help themselves: they always commit treason."

Such a man was Edward Heath. He thought he knew what was best for this ancient Kingdom. He was wrong, of course. Traitors are never right. Heath as an Englishman and as Privy Councillor had an absolute duty of loyalty to this Kingdom.

So what did he do?

Edward Heath was tasked by McMillan to carry out negotiations for the United Kingdom to join the European Economic Community, for entirely the wrong reason De Gaulle said "non".

When he became Prime Minister Heath was determined to take us into the EEC at any cost. Sir Con O'Neil, our chief negotiator, was told not to negotiate but to accept whatever the French offered. Sir Con O'Neil coined the phrase "Swallow it whole, swallow it now".

The laws which prevented our membership of the EEC had already been removed: the Act of Provisors was repealed in the Criminal Law Revision Act 1948, and the Act of Praemunire was repealed in the Criminal Law Act 1967. The way was now clear for Heath to commit high treason.

But how did he go about it? The first thing he did was to contact a man named Norman Redaway who worked at the Foreign Office in a department called the Information Research Department, which during the Second World War was known as the Office of Strategic Services. Redaway was a spook. Heath asked him if he could change the mind of the British people and Redaway said he could do that. He needed help and he got it from a man named Anthony Royle.

Did Heath know what he was doing? The answer is yes, he sought advice from Lord Kilmuir the Lord Chancellor. His advice is in this letter*:
 
http://www.parliament.uk/briefingpapers/commons/lib/research/rp2010/RP10-079.pdf
 (N.B. This document is no longer on the Parliamentary website at that address!)

They set up a conspiracy designed to subvert the English Constitution, which is the major crime of sedition, and at this level of sedition an act of high treason. And to hand this Kingdom lock, stock and barrel to a foreign power the EEC was the major crime of high treason.

But how to do it? First, organized breakfast meetings at the Connaught Hotel in London; these meetings were attended by Government Ministers, MPs, the British Council for the European Movement and top people from ITV, the BBC and the national newspapers. At these meetings the media people were persuaded to remove all their front line anti-EEC reporters and to replace them with pro-EEC reporters.

They set up a department in a back room of Chatham House where five people wrote thousands of letters all purporting to come from people like you and me, every letter saying what a great idea this EEC was; but the IRD did not have a facility to distribute them, so they were distributed to the central offices of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties and the British Council for the European Movement. They got them signed and sent to the letters pages of the news outlets. By this method they completely skewed the public’s perception of what was best for the Kingdom and themselves and their families.

Heath also asked the Foreign office what effect joining the EEC would have on Britain. They told him it would mean surrendering powers to govern to a foreign power, and taking on foreign laws.

So both Lord Kilmuir and the foreign office knew it would mean surrendering powers to govern to a foreign power, Lord Kilmuir saying this had never been done. Of course it had not, because to do that is treason. The Foreign Office went so far as to say, "It is important for our politicians to get positions of authority in the European Parliament, ready for the day it takes over.”

The rest, as they say, is history, Heath is dead; others are not. Our job now must be to reverse this ongoing treason by putting on trial the surviving members of Heath’s machine. In order to do that, check our website: www.acasefortreason.org.uk.
________________________
* Slightly edited copy of the text - from here - is as follows (apologies for the odd line breaks, caused by pasting from pdf):

RESEARCH PAPER 10/79

Appendix 2 Letter to Edward Heath from Lord Kilmuir, December 1960

I have no doubt that if we do sign the Treaty, we shall suffer some loss of sovereignty [...]
Adherence to the Treaty of Rome would, in my opinion, affect our sovereignty in three
ways:-Parliament would be required to surrender some of its functions to the organs of the
Community; The Crown would be called on to transfer part of its treaty-making power to
those organs; Our courts of law would sacrifice some degree of independence by becoming
subordinate in certain respects to the European Court of Justice.


(a) The position of Parliament

It is clear from the memorandum prepared by your Legal Advisers that the Council of
Ministers could eventually (after the system of qualified majority voting had come into force)
make regulations which would be binding on use even against our wishes, and which would
in fact become for us part of the law of the land. There are two ways in which this
requirement of the Treaty could in practice be implemented:-Parliament could legislate ad hoc on each occasion that the Council made regulations requiring action by us. The difficulty would be that, since Parliament can bind neither itself nor its successors, we could only comply with our obligations under the Treaty if Parliament abandoned its right of passing independent judgment on the legislative proposals put before it. A parallel is the constitutional convention whereby Parliament passes British North America Bills without question at the request of the Parliament of Canada; in this respect
Parliament here has in substance, if not in form, abdicated its sovereign position, and it would
have, pro tanto, to do the same for the Community.


It would in theory be possible for Parliament to enact at the outset legislation which would
give automatic force of law to any existing or future regulations made by the appropriate
organs of the Community. For Parliament to do this would go far beyond the most extensive
delegation of powers, even in wartime, that we have experienced and I do not think there is
any likelihood of this being acceptable to the House of Commons.


Whichever course were adopted, Parliament would retain in theory the liberty to repeal the
relevant Act or Acts, but I would agree with you that we must act on the assumption that
entry into the Community would be irrevocable; we should have therefore to accept a
position where Parliament had no more power to repeal its own enactments than it has in
practice to abrogate the Statute of Westminster. In short, Parliament would have to transfer to
the Council, or other appropriate organ of the Community, its substantive powers of
legislating over the whole of a very important field.


(b) Treaty-making Powers

The proposition that every treaty entered into by the United Kingdom does to some extent
fetter our freedom of action is plainly true. Some treaties, such as GATT and O.E.E.C.,
restrict severely our liberty to make agreements with third parties and I should not regard it as
detrimental to our sovereignty that, by signing the Treaty of Rome, we undertook not to make
tariff or trade agreements without the Council’s approval. But to transfer to the Council or the
Commission the power to make such treaties on our behalf, and even against our will, is an
entirely different proposition. There seems to me to be a clear distinction between the
exercise of sovereignty involved in the conscious acceptance by use of obligations under our
treaty-making powers and the total or partial surrender of sovereignty involved in our cession
of these powers to some other body. To confer a sovereign state’s treaty-making powers on
an international organisation is the first step on the road which leads by way of confederation
to the fully federal state. I do not suggest that what is involved would necessarily carry us
very far in this direction, but it would be a most significant step and one for which there is no
precedent in our case. Moreover, a further surrender of Parliamentary supremacy would
necessarily be involved: as you know, although the treaty-making power is vested in the
Crown, Parliamentary sanction is required for any treaty which involves a change in the law
or the imposition of taxation (to take only two examples), and we cannot ratify such a treaty unless Parliament consents. But if binding treaties are to be entered into on our behalf, Parliament must surrender this function and either resign itself to becoming a rubber stamp or give the Community, in effect, the power to amend our domestic laws.


(c) Independence of the Courts

There is no precedent for our final appellate tribunal being required to refer questions of law
(even in a limited field) to another court and – as I assume to be the implication of ‘refer’ to
accept that court’s decision. You will remember that when a similar proposal was considered
in connection with the Council of Europe we felt strong objection to it. I have no doubt that
the whole of the legal profession in this country would share my dislike for such a proposal
which must inevitably detract from the independence and authority of our courts.


Of these three objections, the first two are by far the more important. I must emphasise that in
my view the surrenders of sovereignty involved are serious ones and I think that, as a matter
of practical politics, it will not be easy to persuade Parliament or the public to accept them. I
am sure that it would be a great mistake to under-estimate the force of the objections to them.
But those objections ought to be brought out into the open now because, if we attempt to
gloss over them at this stage, those who are opposed to the whole idea of our joining the
Community will certainly seize on them with more damaging effect later on. Having said
this, I would emphasise once again that, although these constitutional consideration must be
given their full weight when we come to balance the arguments on either side, I do not for
one moment wish to convey the impression that they must necessarily tip the scale. In the
long run we shall have to decide whether economic factors require us to make some sacrifice
of sovereignty: my concern is to ensure that we should see exactly what it is that we are being
called on to sacrifice, and how serious our loss would be.


http://www.parliament.uk/briefingpapers/commons/lib/research/rp2010/RP10-079.pdf

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Institutional warmism

Following yesterday's post about serialising some of John Cook's rebuttal pieces, the comments have persuaded me that I should continue putting them up in the shooting gallery.

But before I do, some other points and a request:

1. First, I need to make it clear that the comments I received privately were certainly not aimed at censoring Cook. But the depth of feeling in them clearly signalled that something has gone wrong in the academic debate on climate change.

2. As he himself says, Cook himself is not a climate scientist - his specialism is physics - and his site was set up pro bono by his lights as a convinced global warmist. Further, he says he "has no affiliations with any organisations or political groups." So he is not to be accused of having stymied anyone's career in climate science, or taking some rich man's shilling. When one glances around the internet he does seem to polarise (that wasn't intended as a pun) the participants, because of his (as some see it) excessive assertiveness;  but one has to remember that Skeptical Science is intended for the public and so oversimplification is bound to be a hazard. 

What gave me pause was the obvious - and surprising to me - strength of sentiment provoked by Cook, who appears to stand as a symbol of the triumphalism of the pro-warmist camp generally. And even in the comments to my related post yesterday, there are mutual insults and imputations of improper motive and so on. There is a level of tension that makes liberal suspension of judgement and bilateral respect very hard to sustain, and so I wondered whether it was worthwhile airing the discussion if all it achieved was to see the air thick with brickbats - "hooligan's confetti".

But this has led to another issue: what is causing this level of acrimony? There is smoke drifting over the hedge, and I'd like to see where the fire is.

I don't think it's just to do with disagreements over the truth. It's something to do with vested interests of various kinds, that's clear enough, and I'll be glad if anyone is willing to get down to specifics rather than generally tarring the other side as mercenary scoundrels.

That's my first request: specifics on conscious bias. While keeping an eye on libel laws, can anybody really show that someone has sold their integrity, instead of simply being funded for an opinion they had anyway?

And my second is about bullying and skulduggery. What evidence (if any) is there that people on either side have been leaned on or otherwise unfairly treated for not toeing the line? Is there any case where fervent revolutionaries or cold reactionaries have gone too far, and (in career terms) employed Stalin's maxim "no man, no problem"?

If you feel you can help, please contact me in confidence at wved@ymail.com. It will be very useful in getting the background - or the underlay - to this most contentious subject.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.