Things I don't understand >

2012: Why are we so afraid of the future?

Posted on August, 6 at 2:07 pm

It’s a truism that films about the future are more about people’s current attitudes and fears projected into the future than real predictions.

And the next, greatest disaster movie 2012 by Roland Emmerich is no exception. It’s really the message of extreme environmentalism that we humans are sinning against nature and Mother Earth and one day there will be a Day of Judgment – or is that Christianity or Islam?

Anyway, I don’t wish to try and recapitulate all of the arguments as to why this is nonsense, because the late Michael Crichton got there before me:

Let’s think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?

But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport. And in 2000, France was getting 80% its power from an energy source that was unknown in 1900. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan were getting more than 30% from this source, unknown in 1900. Remember, people in 1900 didn’t know what an atom was. They didn’t know its structure. They also didn’t know what a radio was, or an airport, or a movie, or a television, or a computer, or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI, ICU, IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet. interferon, instant replay, remote sensing, remote control, speed dialing, gene therapy, gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking, bipolar, prozac, leotards, lap dancing, email, tape recorder, CDs, airbags, plastic explosive, plastic, robots, cars, liposuction, transduction, superconduction, dish antennas, step aerobics, smoothies, twelve-step, ultrasound, nylon, rayon, teflon, fiber optics, carpal tunnel, laser surgery, laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney transplant, AIDS… None of this would have meant anything to a person in the year 1900. They wouldn’t know what you are talking about.

Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it’s even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They’re bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment’s thought knows it.

I remind you that in the lifetime of most scientists now living, we have already had an example of dire predictions set aside by new technology. I refer to the green revolution. In 1960, Paul Ehrlich said, “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ten years later, he predicted four billion people would die during the 1980s, including 65 million Americans. The mass starvation that was predicted never occurred, and it now seems it isn’t ever going to happen. Nor is the population explosion going to reach the numbers predicted even ten years ago. In 1990, climate modelers anticipated a world population of 11 billion by 2100. Today, some people think the correct number will be 7 billion and falling. But nobody knows for sure.

But in the spirit of the times, here is something to enjoy:

Sit back and enjoy the apocalypse! And to think, we once only worried about nuclear war…

Posted in Michael Crichton, Skepticism, Viewpoint, environmentalism | No Comments »

Greenpeace protests and Fijian sea levels

Posted on August, 4 at 5:08 pm

This was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Greenpeace activists have scaled a 50-metre high coal loader and have halted coal loading at a Queensland export terminal as part of a campaign for action on climate change.

The activists, from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, the Solomon Islands and the Cook Islands, among other countries, are locked on to the structure.

Hay Point Coal Terminal in Mackay, now undergoing a major expansion from 112 to 190 million tonnes a year, is already one of the largest in the world.

As Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd meets Pacific Island leaders in Cairns this morning, Greenpeace is ramping up demands that he back Pacific calls to cut emissions drastically.

“Our people are facing the worst effects of climate change every day,” Fijian campaigner Lagi Toribau said from on board Greenpeace vessel the Esperanza.

“We are taking action to tell Kevin Rudd that Pacific Islanders will not accept more empty pledges.”

Now that’s interesting, because Fiji is not itself threatened by climate change or sea level rise in particular because Fiji is mostly volcanic rather than a set of coral atolls a few centimetres above sea level.

And besides which, researchers at the University of the South Pacific in Suva have found that sea levels have been much higher in the past than they are today:

The most precise yet model of sea-level changes for the southwest Pacific

Category: Geography News

By: Camari Koto

Nunn, P.D. and Peltier, W.R. 2001. Far-field test of the ICE-4G (VM2) model of global isostatic response to deglaciation: empirical and theoretical Holocene sea-level reconstructions for the Fiji Islands, Southwest Pacific. Quaternary Research, 55, 203-214.

Abstract

Holocene paleosea-level data for Fiji, represented by 77 dates and emergence magnitudes, are presented, screened and adjusted.  Most data are from coral microatolls, potentially the most precise paleosea-level indicators in this region. Holocene sea-level changes are reconstructed for five areas within Fiji known to have had different late Quaternary tectonic histories. Resulting analysis suggests that postglacial sea level in Fiji reached its present level more than 6900 ¹⁴C yr B.P.  It also suggests that either a single maximum 5650-3200 ¹⁴C yr B.P. (perhaps +2.19 m but more likely +1.35-1.50 m) occurred or that two maxima occurred 6100-4550 ¹⁴C yr B.P. (+0.75-1.85 m) and 3590-2800 ¹⁴C yr B.P. (+0.90-2.46 m).  Broad agreement exists between these empirical sea-level reconstructions and those derived theoretically using the ICE-4G model (predicted maximum ~4000 ¹⁴C yr B.P.; ~+2.1 m). This suggests that both methods of reconstructing Holocene sea-level changes are valid, as are the assumptions underpinning the ICE-4G model.  The most important of these, that eustatic sea level had effectively stopped rising by late middle-Holocene time (5000-4000 yr B.P.), is confirmed by observations from Fiji.

So no effective sea level rise for 5000 years but there have been movements up and down in the intervening period.

The following is the reconstructed sea level for Queensland, Australia

Note how the peaks in the curve correspond with the report from Fiji.

What has this got to do with coal? Or Fiji? Or anything? I’m still baffled.

Posted in climate science, environmentalism | No Comments »

Ocean Acidification: A significant change or just noise?

Posted on July, 30 at 10:29 am

Are the oceans acidifying? Compare and contrast the claim with people who actually know the limitations of measurement.

First, the claim from Chemical & Engineering News [with my emphasis] published by the American Chemical Society:

Clarion Call For Marine Life

Global CO2 emissions must be cut enough to halt ocean acidification, science panel warns
Cheryl Hogue

The new climate-change treaty being negotiated this year must cut carbon dioxide emissions enough to protect oceans from increasing acidity, says the Interacademy Panel on International Issues, a global network of scientific academies.

The panel, which includes the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, says the only practical way to limit the increasing acidity of oceans is to curb atmospheric CO2, a key greenhouse gas. The panel is calling for global CO2 emissions to be lowered to at least 50% of 1990 levels by 2050 and continued reductions thereafter.

The cuts the panel is advocating are close to what some industrialized countries have proposed. For instance, President Barack Obama wants to lower U.S. emissions to approximately 83% below 2005 levels by 2050.

Oceans absorb about a quarter of the CO2 produced by human activity. Rising CO2 emissions since the Industrial Revolution have lowered the pH of the world’s oceans from about 8.2 to 8.1. The falling pH, the panel says, can have profound consequences for marine life, especially those that need calcium carbonate to grow—such as coral and mollusks—and species that feed on them, including fish.

Computer models suggest that the world’s coral reefs and polar ecosystems will be seriously harmed by ocean acidification by 2050 if CO2 emissions are not curtailed, the panel says.

Now there are several parts to the claim:

1. That the oceans are well-mixed and that a single variable for the entire body of the oceans can be physically and mathematically derived.
2. That there are no other significant inputs to alter the pH of seawater or that those inputs are fully accounted for
3. That the oceans have a naturally occurring electrochemical balance in the past that is only now being disturbed
4. That carbon dioxide, which is currently being released into the atmosphere faster than it is being reabsorbed because of warming, can somehow “acidify” (actually make slightly less basic) the oceans by doing so.
5. That life in the oceans is so extremely finely tuned to a particular seawater pH that a small change will cause “serious harm”.
6. That instrumentation and analysis of pH samples has a smaller error in them than the measured change.

Now I could start an argument very easily to show that none of the first five statements are true or even likely to be true.

But lets turn to the sixth proposition: is the measured change significant? Here’s the response to the story from an analytical chemist [with my emphasis]:

I have been an analytical chemist in pharmaceutical and cosmetic laboratories for more than 32 years. I have tested the deionized and distilled water daily in these plants. The water cleaning equipment is the best in industry and instruments are controlled for accuracy, including the testing equipment (i.e., pH meters, electrodes, buffers, and temperature).

It is extremely rare for the pH of the purified water from these highly controlled systems to deviate by less than 0.1 on a daily basis. Even the accuracy of the pH meter and electrode is no better than +/- 0.02%. To expect the pH of a body of water as large as the oceans with the extreme variables and constantly changing mineral content thus pH interfering ion activity to have a more consistent pH than a controlled system is very unscientific, especially over many decades with constant volcanic activity, huge red tides, and hurricanes, for example.

As a scientist and analytical chemist, the data and results presented by this article tell me that the pH of the oceans is extremely constant and has not changed since pH testing started (C&EN, June 8, page 9). It also tells me that CO2 has not affected oceanic pH of either. When dealing with these very small variations on a global basis, some common sense and realistic evaluation of the data is required before predicting gloom and doom.

M. Sherwood Thoele
Roanoke, Va.

Now if anyone knows why a claimed change of pH of 0.1 is significant or can be uniquely ascribed to carbon dioxide, can they let me know?

Once again we have a claimed catastrophic change involving some superheroic assumptions of equilibrium and constancy to measure an effect which is below the normal noise level of measurement even in highly controlled and calibrated laboratory conditions.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Scientists Urge Governments to Stem Ocean Acidification (takepart.com)
• Global Warming endangers the Oceans (timesunion.com)
• Science academies: ocean acidification must be on CO2 agenda (arstechnica.com)
• Science Academies Unite to Save Oceans (scientificamerican.com)
• Oysters in deep trouble: Is Pacific Ocean’s chemistry killing sea life? (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Posted in Science, Skepticism, climate science | No Comments »

“We choose to go to the Moon”

Posted on July, 17 at 5:59 pm

Its now almost 40 years since Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in the Sea of Tranquillity. But before we go to that place, let me remind you of what John Fitzgerald Kennedy, that flawed and charismatic President of the United States, said in a 1962 speech given at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

Do recent Presidents ever set hearts on fire with speeches like this anymore?

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? …

And then a famous quotation which became the rallying cry for the Apollo program:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.

Unfortunately for him, he never saw the wonderful day that he had set in motion.

Now 40 years after Apollo 11, the manned space program is stranded in low Earth orbit and our greatest voyages are made by robot pioneers. But here we can see the evidence from recent reconnaisance photographs, the evidence left that men had indeed been to the Moon.

And I am still in awe.

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“Just unspoilt landscapes and the opportunity to consider the threat of climate change”

Posted on July, 14 at 7:44 pm

From The Australian:

LIBERTY, ecology, gastronomy! If only all revolutions were this pleasant.

A Michelin-starred chef, an international adventurer and a veritable UN of diners – French, Swiss, Russian, South African, Singaporean, Australian, plus a Korean celebrity and his film crew – gathered for lunch on a remote sandbank on the Great Barrier Reef.

Surely this was not what Marie Antoinette had in mind when she allegedly decreed of the starving French peasantry, “let them eat cake”.

But 220 years after the storming of the Bastille, the House of G.H. Mumm, one of the world’s largest champagne houses, had an entirely different revolution in mind when it convened its third Explorer Experience on Undine Cay, about 100km north of Cairns yesterday.

You’re not going to believe this, but I think I’ve seen the future of environmentalism. Eco-tours done French-style.

Partnering with South African explorer Mike Horn, Mumm devised the concept of the Explorer Experience to extol the virtues of protecting the environment, while enjoying it in some of the most opulent and extreme ways possible.

“It is another philosophy of luxury,” said Yann Soenen, Mumm’s regional director in the Asia-Pacific, aboard Horn’s 35m ketch Pangaea.

“We believe that you can enjoy luxury, but you can enjoy it with a consciousness, with knowledge and appreciation of craftsmanship, skill and ability.”

Well my consciousness has definitely been raised. If anyone is reading this, please tell me where I can sign up for an Explorer Experience? G-d only knows I deserve it.

Experience 1:

…the first Experience involved Michelin two-star chef Sylvestre Wahid preparing dinner on an iceberg drifting in the Sermilik Fjord in Greenland.

Now this is more like it. There’s no hair shirt involved in these expeditions. This is green hedonism that I believe we can all embrace. At least the Mumm Champagne was kept at the optimum temperature.

Speaking of optimum temperature, Experience 2:

Horn and his crew then set sail for Antarctica, for a second repaste prepared by Michelin three-star chef Gerard Boyer, convened at the spot where French explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot famously celebrated his arrival on the ice floe in 1904 by opening a bottle of Mumm champagne.

This is definitely more my style of “green consciousness raising”. I’m amazed that Al Gore wasn’t on this trip, because the portion size seems perfect.

After suffering for environmentalism at both poles, where next? Experience 3 has just arrived:

Not surprisingly, the Mumm team felt it was time for warmer climes. And Horn, whose remarkable, custom-built boat has become a flagship for environmental causes as well as a training ground for his Young Explorers (interns from around the world, aged 16 to 20) in destinations as disparate as the Amazon and the Arctic, agreed a pristine atoll on the Great Barrier Reef would be entirely appropriate.

“The impossible only exists until we find a way of making it possible,” Horn said. “Today, real luxury is the freedom of making your dreams come true.”

It seems to me that real luxury has always been the freedom of making your dreams come true. But, from two Michelin stars  to three Michelin stars, the intrepid explorers has nowhere to go but down to just one Michelin star:

To continue the tradition of “extreme gastronomy”, Mumm threw down the gauntlet to 33-year-old Italo-Argentinean tyro Mauro Colagreco, who was awarded his first Michelin star within a year of opening Mirazur, overlooking the French Mediterranean, in 2006.

This year, the restaurant stormed the hotly anticipated S.Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, entering at No35.

and of course, because these people are roughing it for the sake of the environment, they set a “Masterchef”-style conundrum to keep the chef on his toes.

Colagreco’s challenge was to prepare a five-course gourmet meal for 20 people using local produce, some of which he had never tasted before visiting the Cairns markets on the weekend – finger limes were, apparently, a revelation to him.

He also had a portable kitchen comprising just two hobs and one sink with limited running water, on a remote sandbank.

“Here, he is alone with his stove and delivering what musicians would call an unplugged live performance,” Soenen said.

Yes, its a tough challenge alright. Hopefully they managed to keep the Mumm champagne at just the right temperature.

Here is the highlight of the article – the “pièce de résistance” of eco-gastronomy:

“There are no special effects. Just unspoilt landscapes and the opportunity to consider the threat of climate change. The gastronomic challenge is to celebrate the original purity that these spots have kept untouched.”

Well I’m convinced this is definitely the way forward for me. Where do I sign up? Please?

Highlights of the meal, freshly caught and plucked from the reef and coastal ridges beyond, included individual shots of eschallot cream, granny smith apples and seaweed foam; grilled abalone with sesame sauce and tomato compote; and wild barramundi with paw-paw, green mango and citrus sauce. All accompanied, of course, by sand-encrusted bottles of the finest Mumm vintages.

I wonder if Gordon Ramsey’s available for the next intrepid location? Never mind “Hell’s Kitchen” Gordon, this is surely a winner.

Surely only the French could dream up a way of fighting to save the planet that also involves fine champagne and Michelin-starred chefs?

Leave it to the French to be either a) geniuses or b) unwitting buffoons at showing us what environmentalism is all about. I lean towards the former, out of sheer generosity of spirit.

I can’t consider any more “the threat of climate change” because frankly my mouth is watering into the keyboard.

Posted in Al Gore, Viewpoint, environmentalism | 1 Comment »

Greenwash explained

Posted on July, 13 at 10:24 pm

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Want to see State control of the environment?

Posted on July, 12 at 11:46 pm

This is what happens when you have State control of all parts of the economy – environmental disaster:

The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth largest inland body of water, but Soviet central planning has reduced the Aral to a fraction of its area and sent an entire culture based on the shores of the lake to near extinction.

This is what the Aral used to look like in 1985 from space:

Even then it has been shrinking since the 1960s when Soviet engineers rerouted its major feeder river to allow cotton to be grown far away.

The local people of the area suffer lung disease from the alkaline dust swept up by brutal winds, the dust coming from the old floor of the lake now exposed.

Watch the sea shrink before your eyes.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Twenty years ago the cry across Europe was “Freedom”

Posted on July, 11 at 11:22 pm

This is about as forthright and personal as I am ever likely to get on the Internet, but here goes…

This from the BBC:

Dissidents in Eastern Europe had a bitter joke about the communist approach to compromise. “What do you do when you’ve made someone 99% communist,” it went. Answer: “Beat the other 1% out.”

It was the approach adopted across the entire Eastern bloc.

Communism wanted to control not just politics but the entirety of daily life. It dictated how people should behave and think. It wanted to run industry, set university syllabuses, and decide what they could read.

Those who questioned the state could lose their jobs, and their homes. Everyday life could be made a misery by denying them the right to buy furniture or travel to another town. Their children’s education could suffer.

How quickly times have changed. Now politicians are out-manoevering each other to put large parts of their economies back under state control in the name of saving the environment. It makes no sense to me.

I visited Czechoslovakia in 1993, when western tourism was still very new, Prague was cheap to stay in (although tourist pricing was starting to rise inexorably), but the pall of 50 years of totalitarianism and official neglect was still very strong.

I went to visit a Czech friend and I stayed with an old Grandmother who spoke no English (and I had no Czech) who nonetheless was very friendly and kind.

I remember going to Wenceslas Square (not really a square, more like a wide boulevard which is closed at one end where it meets the medieval city). I stood at the simple memorial to Jan Palach, a man who died at almost the same age I was, who I’d read about before I’d arrived.

And I cried.

My friend thought I was a little crazy. Maybe I was.

There is a fundamental difference in my mind between learning history and encountering history for yourself. I visited a former concentration camp now called Terezin and I carry with me the indelible evidence of the witness of my own eyes of the slaughter of innocent people in the Holocaust. It was a painful experience but I don’t regret seeing it for myself.

The Internet does not convey meaning to me in the way that a personal visit does.

Jan Urban, a leading figure in the 1989 Velvet Revolution, took me along to the secret police archives to show how it was done.

Here was a ghost world that was never meant to see the light of day – 25km of shelving filled with fading files documenting how the StB , the Czechoslovak secret police, went about harassing and intimidating the handful of souls brave enough to stand up against them.

Mr Urban paid for his defiance. His pregnant wife was interrogated and lost their child. Local authorities questioned them about child neglect. He received death threats over his tapped telephone. And once he was sent a coffin with his name on it.

All of this happened in a country where nothing could happen without the authorities say-so.

The files show how the dissidents were watched by up to a dozen secret agents at a time – with a minute-by-minute log of what trams they caught and what they were wearing.

There are snatched photographs of people they encountered in the street – all in the hope of finding something that could be used against them.

There was a middle aged woman who helped me get accommodation and took me to and from the airport. I think she was doing her own entrepreneurial thing of getting residents to put up Western tourists in rooms in their houses. She wore a fur coat and drove a large Mercedes Benz car, which was then still pretty rare in Czechoslovakia.

She asked me if I’d enjoyed her country and I said that I’d found it very interesting and would love to come again and see more.

Then she told me something that stopped me cold. She told me that no more than three years ago she would not have been allowed to speak to me or help me find accommodation. The secret police, the State apparatus would have arrested her for speaking to a Westerner without permission.

Can you imagine what life was like beyond the “Iron Curtain“? I struggle with the bravery and tenacity of people like Jan Urban or Vaclav Havel, the playwright who became the first Czechoslovak President? I cannot help but admire them.

This is the first time that Jan Urban has looked at the records and at first he was amused at how many people were deployed to follow and analyse his movements.

But when he remembers the microphones plastered into his bedroom and his children’s room, his equanimity snaps.

“They were filth,” he says, “a criminal organisation. What was the point, except intimidation.”

But intimidation was the point. Dissent was the one thing that communism could not tolerate. Simply by existing – by holding different views – the dissidents were challenging the state.

They circulated poetry and plays without permission. They organised underground theatre with banned actors and actresses.

One performance of Macbeth was raided by the police, and so many of the audience were followed that the street outside resembled a secret policeman’s convention.

Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who was to become president, argued that it was important to behave as though they were not oppressed.

The more the state tried to occupy all public space, the more it would be undermined by those who carried out normal activities outside it.

Mr Havel was an influential voice in a debate that shaped the way dissidents behaved across the whole Soviet bloc.

So was Adam Michnik, who had told Poles that a society in captivity must produce an illegal literature if it was to know the truth about itself.

Another was Andrey Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear physicist, who would not be silenced by rewards or punishment.

The common concept was that mental resistance could in time bring down even a totalitarian state.

Incidentally, the Czechs had an explanation for why the police were always patrolling in groups of three: one to write the warrant, one to read the warrant, one to monitor the two intellectuals.

The difference in those three years was a change in the world called freedom, that I had, as a Westerner, always known. But then it was new and fresh in Prague and no-one knew where it would lead, nor even if the Soviet empire would somehow reform and be back on the streets of Prague.

Freedom is not a marketing slogan. It is not a rallying cry at the end of a right wing politician’s speech. It is an attitude of a mind that will not be dictated to by any State, nor any Religion, nor any popular ideology that seeks to impose its tenets over people’s minds.

Jan Palach knew it. Vaclav Havel and Jan Urban knows it.

How quickly people forget what freedom really is all about.

Posted in Politics, Viewpoint | No Comments »

“Climate change shrinking sheep”

Posted on July, 4 at 6:34 pm

Yes, just when you thought the whole climate change panic couldn’t get any sillier, the BBC comes along to push back the boundaries of scientific journalism (or is it down?)

Climate change is causing a breed of wild sheep in Scotland to shrink, according to research.

Scientists say milder winters help smaller sheep to survive, resulting in this “paradoxical decrease in size”.

Classic evolutionary theory would predict that wild sheep gradually get bigger, as the stronger, larger animals survive into adulthood and reproduce.

Reporting in Science journal, the team says this shows the “subtle interplay” between evolution and the environment.

Scientists first began studying Soay sheep, on the island of Hirta in the St Kilda archipelago, in 1985.

Since then, the sheep have decreased in size by 5% – their legs getting steadily shorter and their body weight decreasing.

This strange phenomenon was first reported in 2007, but the reason for it remained under debate.

Yes, ’tis absolutely baffling that milder winters might allow the smaller sheep to survive thus causing the average size of the sheep to decline. This climate change thing must be stopped at all costs, for….

As for the future of the sheep, the team believes that they are still shrinking.

“The next step is to extend our description of past change into a predictive model,” said Professor Coulson.

“But it’s too early to say if, in 100 years, we will have chihuahuas herding pocket-sized sheep.”

That’s the key advantage of putting linear extrapolations through non-stationary, autocorrelated time series – there’s no lower limit on how stupid are the predictions of the model in the hands of overqualified idiots nor how gullible are the people who fork out taxpayers money so that Professor Coulson may “extend our description of past change into a predictive model”.

So let’s see some data. Although there’s a military base at St Kilda, I haven’t found any temperature series for the island, so we’ll have to use the nearest station: Stornoway.

Yes, its a complete mystery how when you start a study near the beginning of a warming trend how the size of sheep vary in response to environmental pressures. I’m sure Charles Darwin would be baffled.

Posted in BBC, Politics, Religion, climate science | No Comments »

C’était un rendezvous

Posted on July, 4 at 4:21 pm

From Youtube:

Director Claude Lelouch mounts a camera to the front bumper of a sports car, and films it howling through the streets of Paris very early one summer’s morning.

For years rumours circulated that the car used was Lelouch’s own Ferrari 275GTB, one of the most stunning cars of all time and the driver a Formula 1 star of the time. The film, just nine minutes long, certainly demonstrates his exemplary car control at speeds calculated to be as high as 135mph as he races for his rendezvous with a mystery blonde.

Lelouch, who was arrested after the release of the film, has claimed it was in fact a Mercedes 450SEL with a monstrous 6.9-litre V8 engine, which was then overdubbed with the noise from the Ferrari and that Lelouch himself did the driving.

Whatever the truth, it is an astonishing sequence, filmed in one take as the driver runs red lights, mounts kerbs, drifts round tight corners, and narrowly avoids pedestrians and will certainly have you on the edge of your seat, if not hiding behind it.

You don’t believe me? Try watching it and try not to wince as the car goes racing through stop lights at high speed.

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