Metrication, the EU and treason

Jack Lewis, of the anti-rule-by-EU "We Want Our Country Back" group, argues that the UK's switch to metric measurements was unconstitutional and therefore another example of sedition by British politicians. He also argues that the Imperial system has certain technical advantages over decimal measures:

The enforced, as opposed to voluntary acceptance of the metrification of Britain by the EEC (EU) was an illegal and treasonable act committed by the Government. This was because allowing a foreign power to interfere in our affairs was contrary to English Common Law. The British people were never consulted on this issue. Surveys repeatedly showed that 90% of British people refused to adopt the metric system. 

Metrification, in itself, had already been allowed by an Act passed in 1897. This gave the people the choice of using it. However the British people chose not to accept it and continued with the Imperial System until the advent of the EEC. The law, as it has stood since 1897 allows the free use of either of the Imperial or Metric systems. The Government’s inspired mantra, “The UK took the decision to adopt the metric system in 1965” is a deliberate lie and is known as the “Myth of 1965”. 

The Imperial Weights and Measures System was a world leading system and even the ‘mile’ was used to name the nautical system for measuring distance at sea, hence ‘nautical mile’. The Imperial system units for measuring length could easily be divided by two. The 12 inch (in) ‘Foot’ could be sub-divided easily into 1/2 = 6ins, 1/4 = 3ins, 1/8 = 1 ½ ins all of which were convenient sub-units. When the inch is divided progressively by 2 into smaller divisions the sub-units become known as nominal units 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 and 1/64. These sub-divisions commonly appear on virtually all rules especially engineer’s rules. The reason why dividing by 2 is so useful is when measuring something, in many cases, the midpoint is often required e.g. determining the radius of a circle from measuring its diameter or centralising something. It also meant that a draughtsman could draw to 1/2 or 1/4 or even 1/8 scale using an ordinary 12 inch rule although special scale rules are made for convenience. However this kind of scale drawing is not possible using an ordinary metric rule. Only special scale rules make it possible. For more accurate measuring in the Imperial System these nominal sizes are converted to decimals. Engineering apprentices soon learned these conversions without having to refer to charts. Misplaced decimal points are a frequent curse that could have dangerous and disastrous consequences. The metric system is not as user–friendly as the Imperial System.

 

Teaching children the Imperial System of Weights and Measures had a bonus in that it taught them how to mentally calculate using different numerical bases, e.g. when adding columns of money in the old ‘£, s d’ system. Children soon learnt that two halfpennies made a penny, 12 pennies made a shilling and 20 shillings made a £. The divisibility of the old shilling and pound were an advantage when people were paid in pence per day - only the high inflation of the 20th century has rendered this fairly irrelevant. It was even more interesting using Imperial Weights! 16 ounces (oz) make a pound (lb), 14lbs made a stone (st), 2 st (28lb) made a quarter (qtr), 4 qtrs (112lbs) made a hundredweight (cwt) and 20cwt (2240lbs) made a ton (t). Similarly this applied to the 2 pints (pts) = 1 quart (qrt), 4 qrts = 1 gallon (gal). Primary children brought up using the Imperial System could probably out-calculate any modern-day child or student. There were no electronic calculators in those days and calculations had to be done mentally or on paper!

The Imperial System has been used successfully for centuries – if something is not broken then there’s no need to fix it!  By comparison, the metric system is workable only in multiples of 10. Prior to electronic calculators, it would have been very difficult to do metric calculations. Dividing a metre by anything other than 2 (50cm) and 4 (25cm) created decimal points. The Imperial System can be used without the need for a calculator.

The established non-use of the Metric System in the UK (legalised in 1897) remained until we were illegally taken into the EEC when metrication was imposed on the people by the Government. However the EU have since back-tracked and said that we could still use the Imperial System. Unfortunately Public Authorities still retain the power to prosecute anyone using the Imperial System e.g. selling bananas by the lb and not by the kilo. This is a paradox that must be dealt with as Public Authorities are not a power unto themselves or above the law.

ADDENDUM (6 October 2013):

Jack's fellow campaigner "Rex" comments:

If I could add one other thing that I meant to mention earlier, you’ll know that except for Russia (odd one out), it is the world wide convention to use imperial measurements in all air and sea matters. Except for in Russia, distances are universally given in nautical miles, yards, feet or inches and depths in feet, yards or fathoms. Weights are given in pounds (for example, aviation fuel content or aircraft weight) or tons and quantities are in gallons though perhaps generally, US gallons are used. Here, the difference between English and US gallons is slight so using “gallons” in speech conveys a generally understood universal volume.

Just as an aside, another thing that has occurred to me is the insidious manner in which we are coerced to use metric units. People use millimetres unthinkingly because the subtle presentation on measuring tapes and rulers is so often the first side to be read. The metric compulsion then continues as these “fine” graduations are incompatible with imperial units thus obliging all-metric measurement. While society strives for accuracy, only the millimetre is offered for use; we are not permitted the more comprehensive range of imperial fine graduation. Many people still do not realise that metrication insidiously brings not just outlawing of our traditional measures, but criminalisation, imprisonment and a denial of our right to use parts of our own language.

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 7

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.
_______________________________________________________

Are surface temperature records reliable?

What The Science Says:
The warming trend is the same in rural and urban areas, measured by thermometers and satellites, and by natural thermometers.

Climate Myth: Temp record is unreliable
"We found [U.S. weather] stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.

In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source." (Watts 2009)

Surveys of weather stations in the USA have indicated that some of them are not sited as well as they could be. This calls into question the quality of their readings.

 

However, when processing their data, the organisations which collect the readings take into account any local heating or cooling effects, such as might be caused by a weather station being located near buildings or large areas of tarmac. This is done, for instance, by weighting (adjusting) readings after comparing them against those from more rural weather stations nearby.

 

More importantly, for the purpose of establishing a temperature trend, the relative level of single readings is less important than whether the pattern of all readings from all stations taken together is increasing, decreasing or staying the same from year to year. Furthermore, since this question was first raised, research has established that any error that can be attributed to poor siting of weather stations is not enough to produce a significant variation in the overall warming trend being observed.

It's also vital to realise that warnings of a warming trend -- and hence Climate Change -- are not based simply on ground level temperature records. Other completely independent temperature data compiled from weather balloons, satellite measurements, and from sea and ocean temperature records, also tell a remarkably similar warming story.

 

For example, a study by Anderson et al. (2012) created a new global surface temperature record reconstruction using 173 records with some type of physical or biological link to global surface temperatures (corals, ice cores, speleothems, lake and ocean sediments, and historical documents). The study compared their reconstruction to the instrumental temperature record and found a strong correlation between the two:

 

 

Temperature reconstruction based on natural physical and biological measurements (Paleo, solid) and the instrumental temperature record (MLOST, dashed) relative to 1901-2000. The range of the paleo trends index values is coincidentally nearly the same as the GST although the quantities are different (index values versus temperature anomalies °C).

 

Confidence in climate science depends on the correlation of many sets of these data from many different sources in order to produce conclusive evidence of a global trend.

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 6

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.
_______________________________________________________

How reliable are climate models?

What The Science Says:
Models successfully reproduce temperatures since 1900 globally, by land, in the air and the ocean.

Climate Myth: Models are unreliable
"[Models] are full of fudge factors that are fitted to the existing climate, so the models more or less agree with the observed data. But there is no reason to believe that the same fudge factors would give the right behaviour in a world with different chemistry, for example in a world with increased CO2 in the atmosphere." (Freeman Dyson)

Climate models are mathematical representations of the interactions between the atmosphere, oceans, land surface, ice – and the sun. This is clearly a very complex task, so models are built to estimate trends rather than events. For example, a climate model can tell you it will be cold in winter, but it can’t tell you what the temperature will be on a specific day – that’s weather forecasting. Climate trends are weather, averaged out over time - usually 30 years. Trends are important because they eliminate - or "smooth out" - single events that may be extreme, but quite rare.

Climate models have to be tested to find out if they work. We can’t wait for 30 years to see if a model is any good or not; models are tested against the past, against what we know happened. If a model can correctly predict trends from a starting point somewhere in the past, we could expect it to predict with reasonable certainty what might happen in the future.

So all models are first tested in a process called Hindcasting. The models used to predict future global warming can accurately map past climate changes. If they get the past right, there is no reason to think their predictions would be wrong. Testing models against the existing instrumental record suggested CO2 must cause global warming, because the models could not simulate what had already happened unless the extra CO2 was added to the model. All other known forcings are adequate in explaining temperature variations prior to the rise in temperature over the last thirty years, while none of them are capable of explaining the rise in the past thirty years. CO₂ does explain that rise, and explains it completely without any need for additional, as yet unknown forcings.

Where models have been running for sufficient time, they have also been proved to make accurate predictions. For example, the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo allowed modellers to test the accuracy of models by feeding in the data about the eruption. The models successfully predicted the climatic response after the eruption. Models also correctly predicted other effects subsequently confirmed by observation, including greater warming in the Arctic and over land, greater warming at night, and stratospheric cooling.

The climate models, far from being melodramatic, may be conservative in the predictions they produce. For example, here’s a graph of sea level rise:



Sea level change. Tide gauge data are indicated in red and satellite data in blue. The grey band shows the projections of the IPCC Third Assessment report (Copenhagen Diagnosis 2009).

Here, the models have understated the problem. In reality the events are all within the upper range of the model’s predictions. There are other examples of models being too conservative, rather than alarmist as some portray them. All models have limits - uncertainties - for they are modelling chaotic systems. However, all models improve over time, and with increasing sources of real-world information such as satellites, the output of climate models can be constantly refined to increase their power and usefulness.

Climate models have already predicted many of the phenomena for which we now have empirical evidence. Climate models form a reliable guide to potential climate change.

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.

A letter to Swampy

... only he's not called that any more...

Saturday, 14 September 2013

Dear Mr Hooper

I was very interested to read today’s Daily Mail article about you ... and also I admire the fact that you have stuck to your principles. I wonder if you would consider writing something for Broad Oak Magazine? It’s a non-commercial internet site but although I’m not all that well-breeched I’d be willing to pay something for your time if you were willing to take part.

I started BOM in 2007 under the title “Bearwatch” because I was trying to warn about the crash that came a year later, and carried on afterwards because I thought we might be able to do something about the banks. Sadly it’s clear that that’s not going to happen and those who have the power are in league with moneyed interests. Now I’ve widened the coverage to include matters of general interest and longer-term relevance – energy, climate, agriculture, environment etc – you’ll see if you log on. But unlike the mainstream media I’d far prefer people to speak with their own voices and it’d be great to hear from someone who is aligning his daily life with his ideals.

I do hope you’ll at least think about it, and I give below various ways you can get in touch. In case you’re “deep green”, I include paper and SAE if you’ll be kind enough to reply. If you are online and know something about blogging I could send you a Blogger invitation so that you can post directly to the site and edit to your satisfaction.

Anyhow, very best wishes –

 

... I hope he replies.

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 5

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.
_______________________________________________________

Global cooling - Is global warming still happening?

What The Science Says:
All the indicators show that global warming is still happening.

Climate Myth: It's cooling
"In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable." (source: Henrik Svensmark)

When looking for evidence of global warming, there are many different indicators that we should look for. Whilst it's natural to start with air temperatures, a more thorough examination should be as inclusive as possible; snow cover, ice melt, air temperatures over land and sea, even the sea temperatures themselves. A 2010 study included 10 key indicators, and as shown below, every one of them is moving in the direction expected of a warming globe.



 The question of global warming stopping is often raised in the light of a recent weather event - a big snowfall or drought breaking rain. Global warming is entirely compatible with these events; after all they are just weather. For climate change, it is the long term trends that are important; measured over decades or more, and those long term trends show that the globe is still, unfortunately, warming.

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 4

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.
_______________________________________________________

Is there a scientific consensus on global warming?

What The Science Says:
97% of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming.

Climate Myth: There is no consensus
The Petition Project features over 31,000 scientists signing the petition stating "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide will, in the forseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere ...". (Petition Project)

Science achieves a consensus when scientists stop arguing. When a question is first asked – like ‘what would happen if we put a load more CO2 in the atmosphere?’ – there may be many hypotheses about cause and effect. Over a period of time, each idea is tested and retested – the processes of the scientific method – because all scientists know that reputation and kudos go to those who find the right answer (and everyone else becomes an irrelevant footnote in the history of science). Nearly all hypotheses will fall by the wayside during this testing period, because only one is going to answer the question properly, without leaving all kinds of odd dangling bits that don’t quite add up. Bad theories are usually rather untidy.

 

But the testing period must come to an end. Gradually, the focus of investigation narrows down to those avenues that continue to make sense, that still add up, and quite often a good theory will reveal additional answers, or make powerful predictions, that add substance to the theory.

 

So a consensus in science is different from a political one. There is no vote. Scientists just give up arguing because the sheer weight of consistent evidence is too compelling, the tide too strong to swim against any longer. Scientists change their minds on the basis of the evidence, and a consensus emerges over time. Not only do scientists stop arguing, they also start relying on each other's work. All science depends on that which precedes it, and when one scientist builds on the work of another, he acknowledges the work of others through citations. The work that forms the foundation of climate change science is cited with great frequency by many other scientists, demonstrating that the theory is widely accepted - and relied upon.

 

In the scientific field of climate studies – which is informed by many different disciplines – the consensus is demonstrated by the number of scientists who have stopped arguing about what is causing climate change – and that’s nearly all of them. A survey of 928 peer-reviewed abstracts on the subject 'global climate change' published between 1993 and 2003 shows that not a single paper rejected the consensus position that global warming is man caused (Oreskes 2004).

 

A follow-up study by the Skeptical Science team of over 12,000 peer-reviewed abstracts on the subjects of 'global warming' and 'global climate change' published between 1991 and 2011 found that of the papers taking a position on the cause of global warming, over 97% agreed that humans are causing it (Cook 2013). The scientific authors of the papers were also contacted and asked to rate their own papers, and again over 97% whose papers took a position on the cause said humans are causing global warming.

 

 

Lead author John Cook created a short video abstract summarizing the study:

Several studies have confirmed that “...the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes”. (Doran 2009). In other words, more than 97% of scientists working in the disciplines contributing to studies of our climate, accept that climate change is almost certainly being caused by human activities.

 

We should also consider official scientific bodies and what they think about climate change. There are no national or major scientific institutions anywhere in the world that dispute the theory of anthropogenic climate change. Not one.

 

In the field of climate science, the consensus is unequivocal: human activities are causing climate change.

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.

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

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

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.