Sunday in London

£2 to park all day at Solihull station, 102 minutes to Marylebone, then half an hour to South Kensington Tube station, where there's a feast of museums, and, like a trip through Gringotts' vaults, you go straight from the ticket barrier into the tiled tunnel that connects them.

The Victoria & Albert's  tea room is a sensual, secular temple - more stained glass, ceramic workman's mottos and erotic goddess-like sculpture than you can take in at one go. Someday we'll do lunch there - the hot food looks top quality - but this time coffee and a scone were enough. Then up to Level 6, passing some absorbing interactive displays in the wood furniture section and a richly ornamented virginal, to arrive at the ceramics rooms. Some things were familiar - De Morgan tiles, Wedgwood, the 1957 design Homemaker plates (we have a well-used couple), some deceptively modern - a tiny, vigorous vase in the shape of a ram's head that looked postwar but was classical Greek (400 - 300 BC), and the one that astonished me this time was a huge blue alien - an ancient Egyptian "was-sceptre" seven feet high and 3,500 years old:

V&A link

You can't read a library, so we broke off and went to the Natural History Museum. Sunday being sprog day, the place was packed with children seeking dinosaurs, and they were rewarded from the off:

 

Pic source

The architecture alone is worth a visit, built as though it takes a delight in itself and the staircases could move about as in Hogwarts. Sit by the loos and look through an archway into the main hall, catching the slant of a stair and a brick-pilastered gallery hinting at more space beyond, in the way great buildings have that make them seem bigger than the open air.

The mammal collection was full of things that were safely stuffed, as I suppose we are these days. Standing by hippos and polar bears, I thought if it's them or me there's no question. And the blue whale made the neighbouring elephant look undersized and vulnerable: just a good mouthful.

Undraped, the walls echo so that on a busy day you can't really follow the talking displays, and for a venue so attractive to the young there doesn't seem to be enough to engage them actively - unlike at Bristol Zoo, which has put a great deal of thought and imagination into making things for children to poke their heads or fold their bodies in, clamber on, push, turn, squirt (there's a telltale puddle by the lion's-backside board, but kids don't anticipate) and so on. Still, they'll have enjoyed their dinos. We shoved a fiver into the perspex donation box and left.

And on up the Brompton Road, past the gloriously-interiored Oratory to turn right into Beauchamp Place for the Maroush Bakehouse, one of a chain of Lebanese restaurants.

Baker Street, the Edgware Road, Knightsbridge, the Temple area - Lebanese is popping up everywhere. Delicate spicing, deliciously fresh salads, mint tea, Mediterranean-style coffee and shisha pipes in many places, the odd piece of hot charcoal falling off the tinfoil and scorching the tablecloth as the girls suck and giggle. Organic-shaped pots, jugs and lamps, arabesque music, modern Dubai-style consumerist TV, all good for an hour's worth of playing the Oriental.

This Maroush didn't play up to the hokum smokum, but the food was excellent. We went for the set meal for two and could have fed at least another person, while an Australian couple in sports gear ("size matters" said the stripe on his sweatpants) talked business strategy on the next table and their neighbours examined kid pictures on granny's boasting-iPhone. Anyway, stuffed again, but in a good way this time. They do breakfast too, and the bakery section does takeaway; we like.

And so to walk it off, passing Harrod's (open till 6 on Sunday and the Food Hall is another place of worship, packed with Arabs and Japanese) and Knightsbridge Tube Station (which may well have been built specifically to exit smack by the store). We cut left a couple of times to enter Hyde Park and head north across its expanse, crossing an earthen ride and skirting the Serpentine (where Shelley's wife drowned herself) to pause at Speaker's Corner. There, a black man in a police sergeant's jacket and jackboots was using an England flag as a pointer as he listed races that he alleged "they don't like"; his patter palled with repetition, so we walked on past various Christian evangelists and the horse's head sculpture that I thought was a reference to the 1982 bombings, but not necessarily so, through Marble Arch and across the road island - where banner-holding Egyptians were protesting to the traffic against the military government - to Marylebone, and home.

 

Pic source

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

John Cook's Climate Change Mythbusters 14

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.
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Are we heading into a new Ice Age?

What The Science Says:
Worry about global warming impacts in the next 100 years, not an ice age in over 10,000 years.

Climate Myth: We're heading into an ice age
"One day you'll wake up - or you won't wake up, rather - buried beneath nine stories of snow. It's all part of a dependable, predictable cycle, a natural cycle that returns like clockwork every 11,500 years. And since the last ice age ended almost exactly 11,500 years ago…" (Ice Age Now)

According to ice cores from Antarctica, the past 400,000 years have been dominated by glacials, also known as ice ages, that last about 100,000. These glacials have been punctuated by interglacials, short warm periods which typically last 11,500 years. Figure 1 below shows how temperatures in Antarctica changed over this period. Because our current interglacial (the Holocene) has already lasted approximately 12,000 years, it has led some to claim that a new ice age is imminent. Is this a valid claim?



Figure 1: Temperature change at Vostok, Antarctica (Petit 2000). The timing of warmer interglacials is highlighted in green; our current interglacial, the Holocene, is the one on the far right of the graph.

To answer this question, it is necessary to understand what has caused the shifts between ice ages and interglacials during this period. The cycle appears to be a response to changes in the Earth’s orbit and tilt, which affect the amount of summer sunlight reaching the northern hemisphere. When this amount declines, the rate of summer melt declines and the ice sheets begin to grow. In turn, this increases the amount of sunlight reflected back into space, increasing (or amplifying) the cooling trend. Eventually a new ice age emerges and lasts for about 100,000 years.

So what are today’s conditions like? Changes in both the orbit and tilt of the Earth do indeed indicate that the Earth should be cooling. However, two reasons explain why an ice age is unlikely:

1. These two factors, orbit and tilt, are weak and are not acting within the same timescale – they are out of phase by about 10,000 years. This means that their combined effect would probably be too weak to trigger an ice age. You have to go back 430,000 years to find an interglacial with similar conditions, and this interglacial lasted about 30,000 years.
2. The warming effect from CO2 and other greenhouse gases is greater than the cooling effect expected from natural factors. Without human interference, the Earth’s orbit and tilt, a slight decline in solar output since the 1950s and volcanic activity would have led to global cooling. Yet global temperatures are definitely on the rise.

It can therefore be concluded that with CO2 concentrations set to continue to rise, a return to ice age conditions seems very unlikely. Instead, temperatures are increasing and this increase may come at a considerable cost with few or no benefits.

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 13

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 sensitive is our climate?

What The Science Says:
Net positive feedback is confirmed by many different lines of evidence.

Climate Myth: Climate sensitivity is low
"His [Dr Spencer's] latest research demonstrates that – in the short term, at any rate – the temperature feedbacks that the IPCC imagines will greatly amplify any initial warming caused by CO2 are net-negative, attenuating the warming they are supposed to enhance. His best estimate is that the warming in response to a doubling of CO2 concentration, which may happen this century unless the usual suspects get away with shutting down the economies of the West, will be a harmless 1 Fahrenheit degree, not the 6 F predicted by the IPCC." (Christopher Monckton)

 Climate sensitivity is the estimate of how much the earth's climate will warm in response to the increased greenhouse effect if we double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This includes feedbacks which can either amplify or dampen that warming. This is very important because if it is low, as some climate 'skeptics' argue, then the planet will warm slowly and we will have more time to react and adapt. If sensitivity is high, then we could be in for a very bad time indeed.

There are two ways of working out what climate sensitivity is. The first method is by modelling:

 

Climate models have predicted the least temperature rise would be on average 1.65°C (2.97°F) , but upper estimates vary a lot, averaging 5.2°C (9.36°F). Current best estimates are for a rise of around 3°C (5.4°F), with a likely maximum of 4.5°C (8.1°F).

 

The second method calculates climate sensitivity directly from physical evidence, by looking at climate changes in the distant past:

 

Various paleoclimate-based equilibrium climate sensitivity estimates from a range of geologic eras. Adapted from PALEOSENS (2012) Figure 3a by John Cook.

 

These calculations use data from sources like ice cores to work out how much additional heat the doubling of greenhouse gases will produce. These estimates are very consistent, finding between 2 and 4.5°C global surface warming in response to doubled carbon dioxide.

It’s all a matter of degree

All the models and evidence confirm a minimum warming close to 2°C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 with a most likely value of 3°C and the potential to warm 4.5°C or even more. Even such a small rise would signal many damaging and highly disruptive changes to the environment. In this light, the arguments against reducing greenhouse gas emissions because of climate sensitivity are a form of gambling. A minority claim the climate is less sensitive than we think, the implication being we don’t need to do anything much about it. Others suggest that because we can't tell for sure, we should wait and see.

 

In truth, nobody knows for sure quite how much the temperature will rise, but rise it will. Inaction or complacency heightens risk, gambling with the entire ecology of the planet, and the welfare of everyone on it.

 

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.

John Cook's Climate Change Mythbusters 12

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.
_______________________________________________________

CO2 lags temperature - what does it mean?

What The Science Says:
CO2 didn't initiate warming from past ice ages but it did amplify the warming. In fact, about 90% of the global warming followed the CO2 increase.

Climate Myth: CO2 lags temperature
"An article in Science magazine illustrated that a rise in carbon dioxide did not precede a rise in temperatures, but actually lagged behind temperature rises by 200 to 1000 years. A rise in carbon dioxide levels could not have caused a rise in temperature if it followed the temperature." (Joe Barton)

Earth’s climate has varied widely over its history, from ice ages characterised by large ice sheets covering many land areas, to warm periods with no ice at the poles. Several factors have affected past climate change, including solar variability, volcanic activity and changes in the composition of the atmosphere. Data from Antarctic ice cores reveals an interesting story for the past 400,000 years. During this period, CO2 and temperatures are closely correlated, which means they rise and fall together. However, based on Antarctic ice core data, changes in CO2 follow changes in temperatures by about 600 to 1000 years, as illustrated in Figure 1 below. This has led some to conclude that CO2 simply cannot be responsible for current global warming.

 

 

Figure 1: Vostok ice core records for carbon dioxide concentration and temperature change.

 

This statement does not tell the whole story. The initial changes in temperature during this period are explained by changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, which affects the amount of seasonal sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface. In the case of warming, the lag between temperature and CO2 is explained as follows: as ocean temperatures rise, oceans release CO2 into the atmosphere. In turn, this release amplifies the warming trend, leading to yet more CO2 being released. In other words, increasing CO2 levels become both the cause and effect of further warming. This positive feedback is necessary to trigger the shifts between glacials and interglacials as the effect of orbital changes is too weak to cause such variation. Additional positive feedbacks which play an important role in this process include other greenhouse gases, and changes in ice sheet cover and vegetation patterns.

 

A 2012 study by Shakun et al. looked at temperature changes 20,000 years ago (the last glacial-interglacial transition) from around the world and added more detail to our understanding of the CO2-temperature change relationship. They found that:

• The Earth's orbital cycles trigger the initial warming (starting approximately 19,000 years ago), which is first reflected in the the Arctic.

• This Arctic warming caused large amounts of ice to melt, causing large amounts of fresh water to flood into the oceans.

• This influx of fresh water then disrupted the Atlantic Ocean circulation, in turn causing a seesawing of heat between the hemispheres. The Southern Hemisphere and its oceans warmed first, starting about 18,000 years ago.

• The warming Southern Ocean then released CO2 into the atmosphere starting around 17,500 years ago, which in turn caused the entire planet to warm via the increased greenhouse effect.

Overall, about 90% of the global warming occurred after the CO2 increase (Figure 2).

 

Figure 2: Average global temperature (blue), Antarctic temperature (red), and atmospheric CO2 concentration (yellow dots). Source.

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

Errors in the field

Some years ago I investigated errors generated by people collecting environmental data while out in the field. In those days we had computers and databases back at the lab, but field data was collected manually.

I’d written a range of error-trapping routines to pick up errors during data input at the lab so all I had to do was link errors to people. The survey included several hundred field workers and hundreds of thousands of items of data. These were not major errors by the way, but they had to be corrected.

Findings

I suppose I was most surprised at how many errors were being made and how consistent each person’s error rates were.

Firstly, line managers working in the field to keep their hand in. They tended to generate more errors than anyone else. Many should have been locked in their offices and never allowed into the field under any circumstances.

Secondly, there were a few people who were extremely meticulous, making a very small number of errors day in day out, but there were not many like that – maybe five or six at most.

Thirdly, there were people at the other end of the spectrum who routinely made a large number of errors.

So – not particularly surprising really, but what did strike me was the difference between the best and the worst. The worst field workers regularly made at least twenty times as many errors as the best.

Yet that did not mean that the worst couldn’t care less about the work – far from it as far as I could see. People doing environmental field work tend to be interested and conscientious.

I don’t know what became of the survey in the longer term, because I moved on. My reports were greeted with surprise and not a great deal of enthusiasm, but I always remember just how consistent people are when it comes to making mistakes in largely routine work.

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.

Is democracy the answer to the EU?

Leaving the EU would not be the solution to our problems. It would expose the source of them, which is the news media and Parliament. If the former held up a reliable mirror to reality and the latter represented the views of the electorate, we would never have joined the Common Market in 1972.

As I said two years ago ("Voting reform: AV = First Past The Post", 11 April 2011), two-thirds of Members of Parliament got less than half the votes cast in their constituencies, in both the 2005 and 2010 General Elections. Once in Westminster, they have no binding obligation to represent our views and are subject to lobbying and appeals to personal ambition...

... and even less respectable forms of persuasion. For example, John Ward recently wrote how the Civil Service bends arms to serve The Machine:

The reason why there is no cross-Party consensus on the need to fire one bureaucrat in two remains as simple as ever. In the Tory Party, every Minister quickly realises that (often through mates in the security services) the Sir Humphrey with whom they’ve been blessed knows the location of every incriminating negative, and the nature of every peccadillo, related to that Minister of the Crown. When it comes to the Labour Party, Sir Humphrey’s underlings are all members of a trade union affiliated to the TUC. And in both Parties, senior civil servants know the Whips well enough to be able to gather further dirt on the Minister with whom they’ve been landed.

As to the media (who in the UK can be silenced by 'D' notices if they get too bothersome), Albert Burgess' essay on how we were persuaded to vote for entry into the Common Market shows who they work for:

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

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

 

The problem is not primarily the EU, and leaving it would only be the first of our challenges in setting up an open and wisely-run society.

 

Of these further challenges, one would be the people themselves, who under a democratic system are inclined to vote for more benefits than they have earned through work - or, in some cases, for more perceived good to others than can be realistically afforded. Harold Wilson saw Party advantage in youthful idealism and financial ignorance and reduced the voting age to 18; now, and for the same reasons, Ed Miliband proposes to lower it further, to 16.

 

I remember chairing a classroom debate on cruelty to animals. The 13-year-olds turned to the question of meat-eating, since it is not essential to human existence, and decided unanimously that it was wrong. When I asked how many of those present would now immediately cease to eat meat (even sausages, though whether they count is a moot question) the hands dropped.

 

And when the government is the demos, its undoing is the demagogue. The greatest orator of ancient times was Demosthenes, who swayed the voters of Athens to oppose Alexander, with bad results for many in the city and a completely disastrous one for its ally Thebes, which the conqueror razed to the ground. In our own time we've seen Britain make major mistakes thanks to the fey, guff-speaking fantasist Blair; mistakes that have killed hundreds of thousands of people in other countries.

 

Indeed, if we could correct these weaknesses in our politicians and our commentators and persuaders and in ourselves, we could probably remain in the EU without any problem.

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.

The destitute professor: how America treats professionals in education

Buckle down, study hard, get qualifications, work hard and you'll get... nothing.


(CNN) -- "She was a professor?"

That's what an astonished caseworker at Adult Protective Services asked about Margaret Mary Vojtko when informed of the 83-year-old woman's destitute situation, according to an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Vojtko died September 1 of a massive heart attack.

Yes, she was a professor. An adjunct professor of French at Duquesne University. Until she was not renewed this year, with neither due process nor severance pay.

She taught students for 25 years, with no health benefits, no retirement benefits, and low wages.

 

 

Read the rest here.

(htp: Paddington.)

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.