Tag Archives: climate-change

Googling your carbon footprint

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I decided to have a cup of coffee rather than randomly searching Google for a few minutes. For the good of the planet.

The Sunday Times reported that 2 Google searches have the the same carbon footprint as boiling water for a cup of tea. (I am hoping the same applies to coffee but I’m erring on the side of caution by forsaking half a dozen notional searches.)

These statistics aren’t completely convincing, being generated, as they were, by a guy who’s set up a website to sell a clean conscience to websites.

People want websites they visit to be eco-friendly. CO2Stats helps you attract and retain those visitors.
CO2Stats is the only service that automatically calculates your website’s total energy consumption, helps to make it more energy efficient, and then purchases audited renewable energy from wind and solar farms to neutralize its carbon footprint – all for a flat, affordable monthly fee. (from co2stats)

The estimated carbon footprint of your search varies wildly between

[Wissner-Gross’s] research indicates that viewing a simple web page generates about 0.02g of CO2 per second. This rises tenfold to about 0.2g of CO2 a second when viewing a website with complex images, animations or videos. (from the Sunday Times)

So, “stick to really dull webpages and don’t visit YouTube or sites that use Flash” sounds more immediately effective advice than buying spurious energy credits.

In any case, this turns out to be at the low-end of the carbon footprint estimates:

….. carbonfootprint.com, a British environmental consultancy, puts the CO2 emissions of a Google search at between 1g and 10g, depending on whether you have to start your PC or not. Simply running a PC generates between 40g and 80g per hour, he says. Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, estimates the carbon emissions of a Google search at 7g to 10g (assuming 15 minutes’ computer use).
Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, has calculated that maintaining a character (known as an avatar) in the Second Life virtual reality game, requires 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. That is almost as much used by the average Brazilian.

Wait, if using a PC at all emits ~60g an hour, ie, 1g a minute, doesn’t that mean you are saving 0.8g a minute by looking at complex websites?

And that bit about “depending on whether you have to switch your PC on” is really confusing. (When I work out how to use my PC without switching it on, I’ll post the information here.)

I am sure that computer use is mostly a waste of energy. I am sure that big powerful servers are even greedier than my PC.

However, I’m not convinced by the idea that you can buy your way out of responsibility for ecological damage. Paying to generate some less-polluting-energy doesn’t mean that the more-polluting-energy you used before suddenly disappears.

Congestion charges, aviation carbon taxes and so on. They all suggest that you won’t cause ecological damage if you can afford to pay for it. It’s like buying and selling medieval indulgences.

This would be great if the Earth was susceptible to bribery. I think these schemes are usually just ways for us to avoid taking any real steps to stop destroying the Earth. In some ways, they are worse than doing nothing, because they give us the illusion that we are taking serious steps to save the environment and that we can do this without any major inconveniences.

And they give the climate-change deniers some pretty obvious strawmen to direct their denying at. For example, here are some of the comments on the Times article:

When does this global warming hysteria end. It seems like all these die-hard environmentalists would like us all living in huts with no electricity, comforts, or heating. Especially considering this freezing winter (against all predictions), I’d like to see them go first.

Like a mouse climbing up the leg of an elephant with rape on its mind. Global warming at/isn’t going to happen

I call for a moratorium on publishing articles like this one. The amount of CO2 generated when my head starts to steam is much higher than a Google search. Multiply that by the millions of sane people who agree with me that GW is a crock and GW might actually come true.

(Replace the misused “sane people” with a more accurate “Americans” and you get the flavour of a lot of these comments. What is it about living the USA that makes some people unable to see beyond their own carports?)

The calculations are ridiculous and blatantly misleading.
But no surprise, it appears that this will be another cold year and the “environmentalists” are running up and down in a total panic that they failed to fully socialize the world while for a few years was a bit warmer.

And why should we care how much energy Google uses…because of the myth of Global Warming that is being forced down our throats.
2007 was the warmest year on record, no wait, we were wrong about that, the warmest year was 1945. Artic sea ice will be gone soon, no wait, we were wrong about that

It looks as if even people who are too monumentally stupid to see that a cold year doesn’t in itself invalidate climate change are still bright enough to see that these figures are a bit bogus.

Why give them ammunition? The idea of a “carbon footprint” as an individual moral issue, susceptible to individual guilt and contrition is just mistaken. It’s obviously good to do whatever we can as individuals, but it’s a social and political issue, which needs serious social and political solutions.
(end opinionated rant.)

Getting climate change and asbestos wrong

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You’d think that there had been enough pop science articles about climate change for even the thickest journalists to have grasped that “global warming” is

  • short-hand for complicated climatic processes, more accurately referred to as anthropogenic climate change, which don’t necessarily involve warming in any given place. (For instance, the diversion of the Gulf Stream could make the UK colder.)
  • not specifically identifiable in any given day’s or year’s temperatures in any particular place. Climate is not necessarily the same as weather

I assume that Christopher Booker is not a complete fool. He’s expensively educated, and he studied at Cambridge. So, it’s hard to see why he’s spreading ideas as confused as those in his Telegraph article, where seems imply that climate change is pretty well only “global warming” and the fact that some Russian measurements are wrong makes it all false anyway. (I paraphrase)

The world has never seen such freezing heat
A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.(from the Telegraph)

Oh dear, Christopher, the point really isn’t whether a given month is “hot”.

How can you explain this to someone who believes that it is somehow discrediting Al Gore’s arguments to mention Al Gore’s name in the context that someone he knows has been misled by being supplied with a handful of duff numbers?

The science is too difficult for me to understand, but I’m pretty confident that it rests on millions of different types of observations, over many years and all parts of the world. And the work has been analysed and peer-reviewed by legions of climate scientists.

So, it’s not actually proven. (And, granted that my own assessment that the climate has changed dramatically over my lifetime, let alone Christopher Booker’s, is anecdotal.) But there seems to be such a serious weight of evidence to support it, it would be pretty dumb to imagine it is contradicted by one month’s error figures.

Pretty well as dumb as this complete misunderstanding of the evidence on asbestosis, for example, on the basis of some spuriously-qualified scientist :

Booker’s articles in The Daily Telegraph on asbestos and also on global warming have been challenged by George Monbiot in an article in The Guardian newspaper
Booker’s scientific claims, which include the false assertion that white asbestos (chrysotile) is “chemically identical to talcum powder” were analysed in detail by Richard Wilson in his book Don’t Get Fooled Again (2008).
Wilson also highlighted Christopher Booker’s repeated endorsement of the alleged scientific expertise of John Bridle, who has claimed to be “the world’s foremost authority on asbestos science”, but who in 2005 was convicted under the UK’s Trade Descriptions Act of making false claims about his qualifications, and who the BBC has accused of basing his reputation on “lies about his credentials, unaccredited tests, and self aggrandisement”.(from the Criticism section of Brooker’s Wikipedia entry)

Smug and Selfish

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I often wonder about terms like “left” and “right wing” and how well they actually describe people. When you look at different nations the terms mean even less. For example in the US “Left of centre” is still reasonably “right wing” by (traditional) UK standards and weirdly we have a left wing government which is implementing more right wing policy than any in living memory. So I wonder, do the terms still mean anything?

It gets even more confusing when I apply them to myself. Personally, I exhibit left and right wing traits. More than that, I mix wanting to be filthy rich with wanting the general standards of society to be improved. Are these reconcilable? I have no problems with government taxation (I actually think tax is a GOODTHING™®) but the thought of government interference with my life is abhorrent. One area where I was concerned that I had strong left-wing tendencies was in the newspapers. Out of habit, I read the Guardian newspaper each Saturday, which is certainly a “leftie” newspaper. Fortunately, today I find myself seriously add odds with some of its other readership. Maybe I am still a “right winger..”

In the “Money” Supplement, there is a section where people write in with a problem and others give advice on how to solve it. It is normally pretty cheesy stuff about which fair trade presents they should buy for some wedding. Today it was about some one who was struggling to cope with the increased petrol costs and was asking for advice as to how others cope.

As you may have imagined (if you’ve ever read the Guardian), the responses were nearly all along the lines of “it serves you right for driving a gas guzzler” and “Stop whining, there are people worse off in Nigeria” (or where ever). One even suggested the questioner doesn’t “have to live 25 miles from [their] place of work.”

What self satisfying, smug, arrogant nonsense the answers are.

Infuriatingly, this is typical of a certain group of the UK society, most of whom are Guardian readers… They appear to be of the opinion that the massive fuel price rises are a GOODTHING™®© because it will combat climate change and (as most are well off enough to not actually be affected by the increased prices) any side effects are easily tolerable. This is not a “socialist” view point as the whole set up massively disadvantages the poor over the wealthy. Like most things, there is the assumption that a some of money which one person feels is insignificant must be insignificant for everyone else – yet at the same time it carries the idea that the increase will make other change their lifestyle to one the first person feels is “better.” It really annoys me.

Take an example of some one I know very well. This person is very hard working but, to be honest, not very well off. Earning low end of the average wage, this person has to pretty much accept any job offered to them. At the moment, they work 32 miles from where they live. The area is not well enough serviced by public transport to make that viable and, like most people, they own a car that is a few years old (and is used for family tasks at the weekend). Now, with today’s prices they are paying £1.19 per litre of fuel. The round trip journey is 64 miles, and is a mix of traffic. Their car is reasonably economical but, because of the nature of the journey, they rarely get better than 30mpg from it. As a result, each day they are using 10 litres of fuel per day. The simple journey to and from work is costing them nearly £3000 per year. Shocking. This is a only a £600 a year rise over last year, but when you live close to the margins, £600 means an AWFUL lot.

Now everyone has choices. My friend has choices. They could change jobs, but there aren’t any closer. They could move house, but being poor they cant afford one closer to work, they could cycle but it would take hours and they’d have no where to change at work, they could change cars to a more efficient one but (again) they are poor and cant afford a new car.

Switch the example to me. I am not rich (far from it, sadly), however I am better off than my friend. I drive a much more un-economical car to work (albeit a much shorter distance). I live a less environmentally friendly life and, to be honest, if you try to change me through taxation you will leave people like my friend destitute on the streets before it has any effect on me.

How, in the real world, do things like increase fuel prices have any real effect on changing people’s destruction of the environment?

In a similar manner to increasing alcohol tax, forcing shops to up the price of “party drinks” and the like, it has no real effect on the people clamouring for it. All it does is massively disproportionately punish the poor. You don’t even have to be rich to ignore these measures, because the poor will break before the middle classes begin to suffer.

Back to my rant about the Guardian. It is nice to think there is a whole swathe of supposedly “Left wing” Guardian readers who are happy to see poor people suffer even more because it massages their “climate change guilt.” No wonder the Labour party have become right wing neo-Nazis.

Deny this

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Climate change denialists have yet another serious piece of evidence to  ignore.

The work was produced through a collaboration of the Global Carbon Project, University of East Anglia and British Antarctic Survey. Studies of ice cores found that levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were rising at a rate that is about a third higher than was predicted only half a dozen years ago.

This increasing rate is not seen as due to an increase in emissions but to an apparently failing planetary capacity to soak up the excess. This is a very depressing finding, suggesting that it might soon be too late to do anything to solve the problem.

The study suggests that

….18% came from a decline in the natural ability of land and oceans to soak up CO2 from the atmosphere.
About half of emissions from human activity are absorbed by natural “sinks” but the efficiency of these sinks has fallen, the study suggests. (From the BBC report of the study)

If you can understand it, the dry pre-publication abstract is available at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences website

Baseless Creationist Arguments Find a New Home

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Blimey, yesterday, Heather wrote about some empty nonsense being spouted by a blog on the atheist blogroll. In a nutshell, Tom Stelene, writing on the Al-Kafir Akbar blog, has spent a few days recently, ranting about how environmentalism is a “secular religion,” how global warming is a scam, how people who care about about the environment are dirt worshippers and so on. Over the last few days, Heather, Blacksun Journal and Salient have drawn attention to the nonsense he spouts.

Sunrise in AutumnTom Stelene has tried a comeback blast with a post titled “Deniers” (Blog Action Day Continues), and it is well worth reading if only to see the logical holes presented as “argument” and the good rebuttals from BlackSun and Salient. They have both done an excellent job of taking his nonsense to task.

Not being grown up enough to be bothered engaging in reasoned debate, I am simply going to point out some of the more obvious bits of nonsense Tom has turned into bits on the internet. Fisking is fun. If we start with the opening paragraph:

Amidst the latest politically-correct trend of environmentalists to throw out the smear, “global warming deniers,” I sense that by and large they probably have little familiarity with the science and reasoning as to why some deny “global warming” – as most narrow-minded religionists are unfamiliar with the reasons and arguments of atheists – or, better still: “God-deniers.”

Sunrise in Autumn 2By Toutatis, that is a difficult sentence to read. It is completely meaningless but it is still difficult to read. It makes a single attempt at a real claim and, personally, I doubt that this (basic) claim is true. If he is saying, as it seems to read, that his detractors have little understanding as to the science about why the detractors deny global warming. After the headache (caused by trying to resolve this tortured line of attribution) cleared, I decided he must be talking about the psychological reasoning as to why some people will pathologically deny the evidence which is presented to them and disproportionately give value to the minority evidence which can be interpreted as arguing against the mainstream. I am sure that there is a term for people who evince this weird behavioural trait, but I am not a psychologist so I have no idea. Generally, most of the people who do this seem to be arguing for the creationist brand of woo.

After I realised where I had seen this idiotic type of “argument” before, it suddenly became clear that pretty much all of Tom’s “arguments” against AGW fall from the Intelligent Design is Science school of idiocy. Blimey. Loki must have been having a field day letting this one out into humanity.

Tom claims his area of expertise is philosophy, so we can look at the first type of argument he uses and critique it with a philosophical point of view attached.

Swan in flight - Vignette addedOne of his oft-repeated claims is that those who advocate action to combat human-influenced climate change are following a “secular religion” – he uses such entertaining terms as “dirt worshippers” and so on. All very clever. This is the same as the ID / Creationist claims that “Darwinism” is a religion. The reality however is different.

Religion, in its normal use of the term, tends to mean people are holding to a belief either without any evidence or will hold to the belief in the face of evidence to the contrary. In keeping with the creationists, Tom holds to his beliefs without any evidence and retains the belief in the face of contrary evidence. Yet he still claims it is his detractors who are holding to a religion. Yeah, seems odd to me as well.

The next issue I have with his claims is, still in keeping with the creationist ideal, the idea that the isolated – often badly interpreted – data which may be interpreted as contradicting Anthropogenic Global Warming is so significant and Earth shattering it means more than the mountains of data which support AGW. Here Tom shows he doesn’t understand science – something he freely admits – and really should try to learn some more before demonstrating his ignorance. The fact of the matter is there is nearly always some data published which can be interpreted as contradicting a scientific theory.

Little Burrowing MammalMost of the time this data is the result of experimental issues – poorly designed experiments, mistaken conclusions, equipment issues and so on – but some times the data is valid and does pose a contradiction. What happens next is part of the broader scientific method – something Tom seems to neglect – the data is double checked, additional experiments are conducted and, if it is verified and repeated, the theory is adjusted to account for the new information. Despite the greatest wishes (and prayers) of the creationists, isolated findings do not count as evidential falsification. Likewise, Tom has fallen into the layperson’s trap of finding isolated contrary reports and attributing to these much greater weight than they deserve.

Here is a quick quiz question: If 99 reports conclude humans are responsible for climate change and one doesn’t, which should you go with?

The most blatant example of Creationist-Inspired woo-nonsense comes in this little gem:

Precisely because science is not my area (that being philosophy) I have to carefully consider both sides, and for some twenty years as a curious observer (if man causes global environmental problems I obviously want to know) I have read and listened to environmentalist claims – which get plenty of publicity – yet the science that challenges them gets ignored.

Chimpanzee on a TreeThis is seriously worthy of some further examination. It reeks of the same lack of understanding which tries to push ID into the classroom. There are not “two sides” to the argument (if anything there are dozens), so considering “both sides” is meaningless. In the past, I have commented on the debate problem which creates the illusion there are “both sides” regarding evolutionary theory. It seems the same fallacy applies with regards to AGW.

The idea that some one completely ignorant of the methodology and theories of climate science can accurately assess the validity of any competing theories (and there are dozens) is interesting – strictly speaking the layperson can go through the published data and draw their own conclusions, but the chances of that conclusion being a valid expression of the reality are not great. It would be better for Tom to say that, because science is not his area he would be better off listening to the scientific consensus.

For my, cynical, mindset, the reason why he has not gone down this route is borne out by the last part of that sentence. It reeks of the conspiracy-theories pushed by all kinds of deviant scientists.

“…yet the science that challenges them gets ignored.”

Utter nonsense. The “science” that challenges the various AGW theories is not “ignored” by any stretch of the imagination. Where science does challenge the theory it is investigated – sadly most of the claims of “science” which challenges turn out to be bad science at best. This, as with most of Tom’s arguments, is straight from the ID School of non-science. When people from wildly unrelated scientific disciplines (at best, often it is complete non-scientists) write a pile of nonsense about Evolution / AGW, it is quite rightly ignored. The pro-ID / Anti-AGW crowd then pick on this nonsense and scream about some hidden cabal who are suppressing the “alternative theories.” Total nonsense.

If some one can prove AGW is false they will be in line for the Nobel, along with all the people who can invent perpetual motion machines, prove ID, falsify GR, falsify SR etc., etc.,

Until then, science is science. You can rail against the findings all you want, but remember it is akin to shouting at the sun that your “research” shows it should be dark…

Phat city?

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In an enthusiastic, if last-minute bid for a Nobel-prize, the UK Health secretary claims that fatness is as great a threat as climate change.

Must try harder, Alan Johnson.

Unless of course, Mr Johnson is implying that all the fat people in the UK will do something along the lines of knocking the Earth out of its normal orbital path, plunging it into months of unbearable heat, followed by months of intolerable cold.

To be honest, I doubt this is likely. I think that Alan Johnson is just trying to get some media attention by slinging empty soundbites around, if he gets to re-direct some public funds then it is just a bonus for him… Am I too cynical?

New Party?

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Surprisingly-wealthy parent and school governor sues UK government about whether Al Gore’s video can be shown in schools. Partly wins. (Abstract of previous post. Continued here)

This story might sound familiar to you in Kentucky but it must be a first in a British court. The suing “parent” is “school governor Stewart Dimmock, from Dover, a father of two, who is a member of the New Party” (quoting the BBC) I couldn’t cast aside all thought of the cost. Over £200,000, (ca. $400,000 at the current rate of exchange) according to the BBC.

Odd that a man who apparently sends his offspring to a state school can afford to blow the cost of a bloody expensive education on a court case about a video. Hmm.

(Rich English people don’t send their kids to state schools. If they are in a job where it would be politically inadvisable for their kids to attend private school, they send them to a top “faith school.”)

Hmm. “The New Party?” A New one on me, anyway. Sounds Orwellian. (No, stupid. That’s everything, now. ) Who are in this amazingly rich party?

They have a website. With a manifesto and everything. It appears to be a “real” party in Scotland. At least one of its members is a member of the Scottish parliament.

I look at the pictures and biogs of the National and the Scottish committee. They offer two “celeb” supporters: an ex-businessman tv “expert” and a woman who was a golf coach. (There’s a bit of a golf theme in the resumes) Its committee seems to be made up of small businessmen. Their pictures and mini-cvs cover a range of backgrounds. Most have worked and then taken up self-employment. Others own small/medium-firms. There is an Indian businessman. A young mother. A sportswoman. There is a representative from every broad industrial grouping.

How surprisingly unrandom a distribution of backgrounds. It begins to seem so much like a tokenised marketing exercise that I am getting confused.

There are people with interests in haulage, oil and so on. These don’t look like businesses that are going to be overkeen on any action to impede the rate of climate change. But we aren’t talking Exxon here. These are not multinationals. I doubt that many people have heard of them, even in Scotland, let alone in the UK as a whole.

If I was a cartoon character, several light bulbs would be popping into life above my head by now. But then, if I was a sci-fi computer, I’d be the one that was saying “Does not compute” when faced with two confusing instructions.

Because, the bit of my brain that’s saying “Hang on, these are visibly not billionaires. They must have access to the untold wealth of an anti-Al Gore slush fund.” is crashing up against the bit of my brain that’s saying “No. I suspect they have no more money than a few small businessmen could drum up for a risky gamble. They can’t afford to spend loads on adverts and publicity. They could gamble their £200K on a high profile court case. It won’t even count against election expenses. And, in any case, the state had to pay a good part of their costs, following the court ruling.“.)

Well, they’ve got their money’s worth. Some obscure party is now in the political public domain. Their manifesto and policies are such a disturbing mixture of crowd-pleasing, repellent and vacuous that, even with my overly-free linking capacity, I can’t bring myself to put a link.

Is this going to set a precedent for what will happen when any interest group has a problem with something in the media? In which case, I think I’ll become a “school governor” and sue the government for not banning the Daily Mail, say, from being discussed in schools.

Gore, Nobel Prize and the BBC…

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On the BBC editors’ blog, Craig Oliver discussed Al Gore’s Nobel prize, in the context of the BBC’s decision to lead Wednesday’s night’s news with a judge’s ruling that there were 9 errors of fact in “An inconvenient truth.”

Oliver says the Nobel prize is “controversial” as the award raises the question “What does climate change have to do with world peace?”

Well Craig, there’s this little thing called an ecosystem. All our lives depend on it. When it gets too damaged to support life, we are going to have to fight over the dwindling store of global life -supporting goodness.

I’m not a judge or a scientist, so I would have thought that 9 “errors” was about normal for a documentary. It’s a truism that, if you know about any topic, you will always find any media reports about that topic to be full of gaping holes.

I would have thought, in this context, that a more suitable topic for the BBC News to consider would be why would anyone spend the enormous sums required to take such a case to the High Court to stop schools showing a documentary? Hadn’t they thought of contacting the school or the local education committee, if they were that stressed about it?

How much did this little exercise cost “school governor Stewart Dimmock, from Dover, a father of two, who is a member of the New Party.”?

The judge awarded Mr Dimmock two-thirds of his estimated legal costs of more than £200,000, against the government.

Are there many parents/school governors out there who are so rich beyond the dreams of avarice that they will spend a sum that would take about 15 years to earn at a minimum wage rate on telling teachers what documentaries they can show in schools?

The New Party? Who are these legally minded philanthropists? Given the sums of money at their disposal, cosying up to them looks like almost as canny a financial move as a brief marriage to a former Beatle.

Shock, horror

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Stop reading now if you are easily offended. I mean really, really, easily offended.
There was a page on the BBC website yesterday about a man

spotted wearing a T-shirt bearing an “offensive” slogan in a city centre has been warned he risks an £80 fine if he is caught again.
Forklift driver David Pratt was told by street wardens in Peterborough he could cause offence or incite violence.

OK, what caused a potential £80 worth of offence to Peterborough’s genteel street wardens?
“Don’t piss me off. I’m running out of places to hide the bodies.”

I did say you have to be really really easily offended.

Street wardens, and cctv were both brought into play in this incident, according to the debate on the BBC Radio 2 Jeremy Vine show between the man’s wife and a representative of Peterborough Council. I am just staggered that Peterborough is so apparently social problem-free that the words on someone’s t-shirt can cause such a fuss. And that these Big Brother cameras are just there to make sure that any semantic debates sparked by clothing are properly recorded.

As an aside, the almost venomous responses of several people on the same show to the Heathrow climate change protestors were truly shocking. Don’t listen to this if you are easily depressed either by interminable MOR rock or by the short-sightedness of human nature.

Biblical rain and Gods

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As a mild, but boring – hence homeopathic – antidote to boredom, you can look in Wikipedia to find out what saints are attributed to any given day. (Today there is a preponderance of German saints, for example. Plus, it was Haile Selassie’s birthday.)

Somewhat appropriately, given the recent Biblical-style rain and floods – nay, Floods – experienced in parts of the UK, China and USA, today also appears to be the date of the Roman Nepturnalia – celebrations for Neptune (the Roman sea god, do keep up.)

While we are increasingly being brought to face the reality of climate instability, there are enough people willing to try to influence the weather by ritual means that the devotees of Neptune could fit right in unnoticed.

This was a really great news item and photo. As an inspired publicity stunt for the new Simpsons movie, a giant cartoon Homer, holding aloft a doughnut, was drawn next to the Cerne Abbas giant.

Rent-a-pagans were quick to get in on the story, for the sidestream publicity benefits. (They’ve got a district manager. They must need a serious revenue stream.)

Ann Bryn-Evans, joint Wessex district manager for The Pagan Federation, said: “We were hoping for some dry weather but I think I have changed my mind.
“We’ll be doing some rain magic to bring the rain and wash it away.”
She added: “I’m amazed they got permission to do something so ridiculous. It’s an area of scientific interest.”

(Yes, people who claim to believe that they can influence the weather by their magical actions are saying that the giant Homer is ridiculous.)

Well I think they can claim overkill success on this one. Although praying for rain in the current UK is like praying for continuing war in Iraq. I.e. your prayers are answered before you’ve got the first words out.

Most people who aren’t Native Americans might feel that conducting communal rituals to influence the movement of clouds and air and water is just an example of doing something/anything to feel less pathetically weak against forces that are more powerful than us by several orders of magnitude. It’s not likely that massive air masses are going to be swayed by a good ululation. It might make you feel better, but only if you suspend rationality.

(It’s obviously still more rational than praying for interference by the creator of the universe though. If there were such a being, and s/he shared human thinking processes about guilt or innocence, we’d be pretty far down the deserving-a-miracle list, having brought this on ourselves, despite having the Free Will gift. There must be beings in Alpha Centauri facing going down a galactic plughole to worry about first.)

The rational response to climate chaos is to change our lifestyles, en masse, at a social level and hope it’s not too late. Well, that doesn’t appear to be going to happen does it?

Well, Plan A, then. Pay loads of lipservice to the issue. Come up with “ecological” solutions that create new products for us to consume and new waste mountains. Devise carbon crediting ideas that noone can understand and that actually reward countries with ancient forests for ripping them down and replacing them with fresh young trees. Solutions that monetise everything then treat money as the key to the solution, so that the poor end up paying the most anyway.

This will let our societies carry on spending our resources like a drunken sailor in a new port, with 6 month’s pay and a terminal illness. As if none of us really expect to have any great-grandchildren. Bit of a short-term solution though.

In the meantime, better put either or both of Plans B and C into operation then. You start believing there’s a needy and insecure but easily-pissed off human being that’s bigger and stronger than the earth’s atmosphere who can smite it into submission or will beam us all up to heaven if you are just adequately sycophantic. I’ll start knocking up a really big boat and collecting a couple of samples of any life that come within my reach. It’s worked before, allegedly.

I dont like rain

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Not wishing to rub it in to all the people who are discovering that “Global Warming” is a misnomer that only survived because it is more “catchy” than Human Influenced Climate Change and certainly not wishing to disparage the suffering and loss people are sustaining as a result of the widespread floods in the UK, I thought it would be nice to share a holiday snap taken today:

Holiday Snapshot

You see there are places in the world where it is not raining! [tags]Photos, Photographs, Holiday, Sun, Climate Change, Global Warming, Seaside, Nikon, D80[/tags]

Petitions work then?

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That magical tiny number of people who can change government policy (see the post about the government bowing to “pressure” to allow the creation of human-animal hybrids) obviously didn’t sign the road-pricing petition. Millions of people took the time and effort to sign it but they weren’t the right people, obviously.

The government just ignored the whole thing, except for adding insult to injury by sending everyone emails with Blair’s name on it to say in effect “Thanks for participating but f*** off. Now I will tell you why you were wrong…” (Well, that’s what the anti-ID petition got)

On a personal note, I would never have signed the no road-pricing petition. I don’t have a vehicle. I am against cars. Well, against cars as much as anyone can reasonably be who sometimes gladly takes advantage of riding in other people’s and who takes the occasional taxi. I do object to breathing in secondhand vehicle emissions all day. I don’t like fearing death from some metallic monster every time I go out of the house. I don’t like living in a world so dependent on oil that any amount of evil seems OK, if it will secure it. And so on.

BUT, I am not so divorced from reality as to think that car journeys are the luxury jaunts of the privileged. Even ignoring the fact that people who live outside a few city centres have basically no alternative but to use a car to earn a living, get food or get their kids to school, I don’t think road pricing will cut urban car journeys by more than a miniscule amount. Bloody hell, people spend hours every day on the M25. Would anyone choose to do that if they had an alternative?

The UK has a rubbish public transport system. I live in a city. It normally takes me about eight times as long to get to work (2 buses) as it does when I have been lucky enough to get a lift. (It takes me an hour and a half to walk, on the days when I can still face the walk after a day’s work. The bus journey takes an hour a best – two at worst.) I could replace part of one bus journey with a train but this wouldn’t cut the time by more than a minute or two and would cost more.

My recent experiences of travelling by train have involved unbelievable expense with appalling service standards. It is cheaper to buy a used car and throw it away than to pay the train fare for 3 or 4 people to get to London from the North of England. (And you could breathe in less germs, have the certainty of getting a seat, smoke if you choose, stop when you choose and not have to listen to incomprehensible welcoming speeches every few minutes nor use toilets that would be considered below par in a hurricane refugees’ camp.)

With regards to the quality of service, last year, I made at least two train journeys that were a net loss to the train company. I.e. the service was so bad that they had to pay for me to use it. Both arrived hours after any possible connections were running and, on each occasion, I had to be taken by taxi for close to 50 miles. And was given a refund 🙂

Basically, there are currently no feasible alternatives to using a car for most journeys.

So this road pricing idea is just going to be another tax. Unlike direct taxation, the ability to pay will be irrelevant. What will affect how much you pay will be how close you live to workplaces, public services, schools and shops. So, also unlike direct taxation, there will be an impact on a wide range of apparently unrelated things like house prices.

So, the rich will be able to carry on driving at will, just getting irritated by the attendant bureaucracy of it. Other people will just get more and more stressed trying to stretch their wages far enough to cover the cost of the journey to earning them.

We all know the alternatives, if there really were any serious concern to cut the number of cars on the road:

  • An efficient and cheap public transport system
  • Encourage working from home
  • Planning decisions to stop cities and services from sprawling out endlessly
  • Stop closing down locally based services like post offices and schools

Too much trouble, hey? Don’t bother then, just get another source of revenue from drivers.

Sunny Easter

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Thanks to the wonders of Global Warming, the rainy, miserable (obviously offset by Chocolate) Easter weekends of my childhood really are a thing of the past. On Saturday I went out to Stourhead (National Trust property) and the weather was fantastic. Just so you don’t think I am lying, here are some photos:

Stourhead - 7 Apr 07 - Pic 1Stourhead - 7 Apr 07 - Pic 2Stourhead - 7 Apr 07 - Pic 3

As you can see the weather was brilliant. Shame about the polar bears though.

On a more serious note, it amazes me that anyone can deny climate change. Just goes to show how much people can cling to a belief… One of the other reasons to make this post was to try out a geocode plugin I have recently installed. Let me know what you think.