Saturday, September 07, 2013

Global warming continues



A new videopost this week revisits the contention that global warming has stopped (htp: Paddington).

Not so, it seems: there are many different measures being used to assess climate change and one of them is the temperature of the upper levels of the oceans, which is rising. The seas are acting as the reservoir for most of the heat gain so far -

(Image from above video)
- and the heat is expanding their volume (a point I hadn't thought of). So it's not just ice melt that will affect sea level rise.

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Spain: "What is 'the crisis?'" - by Brett Hetherington

Brett Hetherington's latest article in Catalonia Today magazine (reproduced with the kind permission of the author):

(Photo: Javier)

This so-called crisis, which would more accurately be called a“depression” is a thousand varied things that need never have happened.

Despite the occasional sensation that life is just continuing on very much as before, the crisis here is certainly the more obvious things that many of us see when we care to look: more beggars on the streets, long queues in shoe repair shops, the recent appearance of solitary men selling tissues or cigarette lighters on the trains and Metro, a greater number of empty shops for sale or rent (or replaced by cheapo-import Chinese shops) and it is also reading more socio-political graffiti on walls.
 
The crisis is a European-wide failure of institutions like the financial system and the pathetic political response to it, but it is also a very immediate, local phenomenon.

In the small town where I live, three years ago there was both a bank and a restaurant – now there is neither.
As well, there are the abstract statistics that simply cannot put a human face to this tragedy - day after day of grim, sullen economic news.
 
Three months ago, a newspaper headline stated that “60% of Andalusian children live in poverty.”
 
This sounds remote and abstract until we learn that there were children in Catalonia who were still going to school in July just to eat lunch, and they had to do this because it is next to impossible for their parents to provide daily meals at home.
But the crisis is about work too.
 
It is hearing that another man has lost his job, or finding that your wife's job has been cut in half and therefore her income has also been halved.

It is thousands of workers still lucky enough to have a job but not being “lucky” enough to get paid for their labour...for yet another month.
 
And it is the insult of "mini-jobs" - (the underpaid mileurista is seeming like the one who is well-off) or it is listening to people at a café talking about the benefits of learning Chinese or German, ahead of English.

As well, the crisis is the news media being full of corrupt, cowardly politicians talking about everything except what could end the crisis.
 
For thousands of people not in the aptly-termed “political class”, it is a rapid or a gradual descent into poverty – what George Orwell called “the crust-wiping,” - that constant search for ways to save money but still ending up unsatisfied after you eat.
 
On top of all this, the crisis is that all-day sensation of being unpleasantly squeezed by the invisible forces of debt, a permanent unconscious burden that is carried by the unemployed and under-employed when a family has no genuine bread-winner.
But what is it that has saved this country from violence, riots and social disturbance on a grand scale?

The family.

The extended family, acting as helpers, carers and givers of money, love, and as many kinds of assistance that you can think of.
 
Without this blood-linked stability across Mediterranean Europe, things would surely be even worse.

Sometimes, when I have thought about the crisis I have been reminded of a Bob Dylan line about how the sun starts to shine on him.
 
But then (in a single phrase that could speak for millions of Europe's economic victims) he sadly sings “but it's not like the sun that used to be.”
 
[A version of the above text was first published as an opinion piece in Catalonia Today magazine, September 2013.]
 
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All most offsetting – land developers and nature conservation

Environment Secretary Owen Paterson posted a cheery piece on biodiversity offsetting on the BusinessGreen website this week[1].  It’s a masterclass in positive propaganda - teachers, get your students to highlight all the whoopee phrases.

Essentially, if some developer can’t unleash his yellow bulldozers because Gussie Fink-Nottle has identified a rare newt on the site, then shift the dem’ thing. “Biodiversity offsetting can ensure that they recreate the same or even a better environmental site somewhere else.”
There’s a tiny tinkle of worry about that “can”. A more balanced and informative briefing is on the Parliamentary website[2], which recognizes that “badly planned offsets could result in a loss of biodiversity by allowing inappropriate development to proceed, or by compensating inadequately” and makes reference to the Business and Biodiversity Offsets Programme, whose Advisory Group includes a number of respected conservation organisations[3].  Friends of the Earth are against, the Woodland Trust is wary, as Thursday’s Guardian’s “licence to trash nature” piece shows[4].

Paterson says the Environment Bank supports the scheme. It would, as becomes clear when you look at their site[5]: “The Environment Bank Ltd (EBL) is the leading trader in the UK in environmental assets (natural capital stocks), enabling and brokering deals between buyers (developers, corporate, investors) and sellers (landowners, farmers, conservation bodies, land management companies), thereby facilitating new markets to substantially increase investment in the natural environment.” Ultimately, the EU’s behind it, as the passage goes on to say: “At EU level, the European Commission is currently developing policy for a ‘no net loss initiative’ scheduled for 2015.”
The Environment Secretary paints a rosy picture of compensation with (possibly) bigger or better alternative land. “Bigger” is easy to understand, but it’s not obvious what “better” will mean in every case – microclimates and local ecosystems are very subtle; even “similar” could be a challenge.

DEFRA is consulting us until 7 November[6]. Naturally, to hear is not the same as to obey, but silence betokeneth consent, as Sir Thomas More reminded the court.



[1] http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/opinion/2293143/biodiversity-offsetting-a-chance-to-improve-the-environment-and-grow-the-economy
[2] http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn_369-biodiversity-offsetting.pdf
[3] http://bbop.forest-trends.org/pages/advisory_group
[4] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/sep/05/biodiversity-offsetting-proposals-licence-to-trash
[5] http://www.openness-project.eu/node/7
[6] https://consult.defra.gov.uk/biodiversity/biodiversity_offsetting

 
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Friday, September 06, 2013

Syria: yet another pipeline, yet another enemy

David Malone looks at Qatar's interest in extending the Arab Pipeline (not to be confused with the TransArabian Pipeline) through Syria into Turkey.

What a curse oil and gas have been. US, Israel, Russia, Egypt, Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood vs.  other Islamic sects and political parties... how could anyone keep on his feet in a boat everyone is rocking?

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US complicity in Syrian chemical attack?

"Yossef Bodansky [...] was, for more than a decade, the Director of the US House of Representatives Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare," says the bio on OilPrice.com. His 28 August article states that US intelligence was involved in meetings with Syrian opposition forces before the 21 August chemical weapon detonation that has been blamed on the Syrian government.

"Initial meetings between senior opposition military commanders and representatives of Qatari, Turkish, and US Intelligence [“Mukhabarat Amriki”] took place at the converted Turkish military garrison in Antakya, Hatay Province, used as the command center and headquarters of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and their foreign sponsors. Very senior opposition commanders who had arrived from Istanbul briefed the regional commanders of an imminent escalation in the fighting due to “a war-changing development” which would, in turn, lead to a US-led bombing of Syria."

The link to the OilPrice.com article comes via the August Corbett Report video, republished on The Tap blog.

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Oil, gas and Syria

Mike Shedlock repeats his strong suspicion that the impending incursion into Syria is to do with oil. He illustrates this with a German map of the Transarabian Pipeline which also appears on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Arabian_Pipeline

Apparently written in 2008, the Wiki article says that the line ceased operation in 1990 and "Today, the entire line is unfit for oil transport."
 
But things may have moved on since then. There is another line to note, the Kirkuk-Banias Pipeline:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkuk%E2%80%93Baniyas_pipeline

This too has been out of service for some time, but in 2010 Iraq and Syria "agreed to build two new Kirkuk–Baniyas pipelines" for heavy and light oil." It has been said that President Assad saw this as part of a "Four Seas" strategy to become a key link between the East and the Mediterranean.

Martin Armstrong says that Assad has been blocking the Nabucco gas pipeline, the West's counter to Gazprom's tendrils in Europe:
 
http://www.economist.com/node/14041672

But there's also the question of not putting all your eggs in one basket. The proposed Nabucco pipeline route in the above 2009 Economist Magazine map runs from Kurdish areas via a semicircle though Erzerum and on to Ankara and Europe, giving Turkey control of additional vital energy supplies.

It's possible that the West has seen Syria not so much a threat, or obstacle, as an opportunity to diversify supply lines.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. 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 05, 2013

Belief in experience

I’m not a close follower of Santayana’s philosophy, not making much use of his ideas on modes of being for example. Yet I greatly admire his wisdom, his elegant insights into the human situation.

Take this quote for example:-

Belief in experience is the beginning of that bold instinctive art, more plastic than the instinct of most animals, by which man has raised himself to his earthly eminence : it opens the gates of nature to him, both within him and without, and enables him to transmute his apprehension, at first merely æsthetic, into mathematical science.

This is so great a step that most minds cannot take it. They stumble, and remain entangled in poetry and in gnomic wisdom.

Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood. Although they bring freedom in the end, the approach to them seems sacrificial, and many prefer to live in the glamour of intuition, not having the courage to believe in experience.

For me, a key phrase here is not having the courage to believe in experience. Surely it does require courage to believe in experience – often considerable courage.

What Santayana does so extraordinarily well is draw our attention to it without the need to illustrate his meaning. He writes as if he is fully aware that there will be those who know just what he means and those who don’t. He isn’t writing for the latter group.

Maybe we experience told him there was no point and he had the courage to write on that basis. After all, the courage to believe in experience isn’t something easily instilled in others merely by words. Santayana knew he wasn’t likely to stiffen the rational backbone of anyone lacking this most necessary brand of intellectual courage.

Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood.

Indeed - they still are.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. 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.