Albert Burgess: reporting treason

In December 2006 I was given a CD-ROM with over 200 pages of documents retrieved from the Public Records Office by David Barnby, each page headed Secret, Classified, or Restricted. I was told these were of historical interest, so I sat down to read them with my historian’s hat on.

After ten minutes my historian’s hat had been kicked into touch and I was wearing my constable’s hat as I exclaimed to myself, “My God, this is sedition!” I hit the print button and printed off all the pages. I then sat down pencil in hand to make notes. Once I had satisfied myself that crimes of sedition and treason had been disclosed, I took the papers to St Aldate's Police Station in Oxford, a 15-mile drive from my home in Thame.

On arrival I was greeted by a civilian counter clerk. I asked if he could get me a police officer. He said, "Why?" I said, "I want to report a crime." He said, "You don't report crime here, you phone this number," and he chucked an 0845 number at me. I pirouetted around in the police station front office and said "This is a police station, is it"? He said, "Yes." I said, "Then get me a policeman.” He said, "Perhaps if you tell me what it’s about?”

My first thought was to tell him to mind his own business and get me a police officer, but I said, "Yes, well, it’s about the fact that Edward Heath, one-time Prime Minister, set up a conspiracy to subvert the Constitution, the major crime of Sedition at Common Law, and at this level of sedition an act of high treason against the Constitution and people of England. And his conspiracy planned to hand over this Kingdom to a foreign power, the EEC, the major crime of high treason. Are you any the wiser?” He said, "No." I said, "Then get me a policeman!”

He vanished out the back and came back with the tallest police sergeant I have ever seen, who I now know to be Sgt Thomas. Sgt Thomas walked up the counter, placed his hands on it and in a very I've-got-a-lunatic-here tone of voice said, "YES SIR, AND WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU"?

I said, "Well, Sergeant, the first thing you can do for me is open up one of these interview rooms so we can sit at a table and discuss this in relative comfort." The look in his eyes was one of utter confusion: after all, no-one walks into a police station and tells the duty sergeant what to do, but I had done just that. He stood for a moment, not sure what to do, then he walked away and opened the interview room and my journey had begun.

I explained to him how Edward Heath had set up a conspiracy using a Foreign Office civil servant by the name of Norman Redaway (now deceased) who worked in the information research department (IRD), which used to be known as the Special Operations Executive, which trained (SOE) agents to be dropped into occupied Europe to work with the Resistance. Redaway was a spook. The SOE was disbanded in 1946 and IRD was born.

Sergeant Thomas said, "But Heath is dead!” I said, "I know, but some of his people are still alive." After about 45 minutes talking Sgt Thomas said he couldn't deal with this, he would have to take it upstairs. I agreed and giving him a full print out of the documents retrieved from the Public Records Office, I left.   

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.

Russian carbon sequestration: bigger picture needed?

Writing for the green website Grist, John Upton quotes Russian research released in August that claims abandoned farmland there has taken up large amounts of CO2 since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Reporting on the same, New Scientist says this equates to 10 per cent of Russia's carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels (although the study's abstract says "... ~10% of the annual C sink in all Russian forests", so not having access to the full text I don't know whether the NS has misread).

However it seems to me that there is a limit to how much the wild vegetation will absorb, as it will reach maturity (presumably in the form of reforestation).

Also, even though many Russians have given up farming, they haven't stopped eating. So someone somewhere else is farming for them, and if that's in foreign countries there is an energy and emission implication in getting the food to market. So per capita, I suspect CO2 emissions relating to food have increased.

To some extent there may be some offsetting for demographic change - the Russian population shrank in the post-collapse years - but the population has begun to grow again.

I'd think it's more important to look at Russian industry and the extent to which emission reductions have been achieved because of more efficient plant, as opposed to being caused by the loss of productive capacity to (for example) coal-burning China.

If you're a global warmist, can we have a global picture, please?

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 No-Fail Tipster does it again!

Another stunning 16-1 betting coup by Broad Oak's The Punter's Friend left the bookies drowning their sorrows at Ascot this afternoon, as Intibaah romped home in the 3.05.

Right every time, as always!

Too good to be true? Doubt our infallible racing pundit? See the evidence for yourself in this morning's posting (last updated 7 p.m. today).

Read The Punter's Friend every day in your soaraway Broad Oak Magazine!

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 Daily Mail's memory hole and David Rose's Arctic ice

UPDATE (19:00): My tip for Intibaah to win the 3.05 at Ascot today was, as usual, completely correct.

Those who have read Orwell's "1984" will remember the 'memory hole' down which Winston Smith would lose historical evidence that was inconvenient to the current official narrative.

Spot the differences in this modern example:

Daily Mail online, 8 September 2013

- and 20 days later...

Daily Mail online, 28 September 2013

Perhaps the rewriting of history was in response to this video (htp: Paddington), from which the first image above was taken (at 24 seconds in):



As it happens, I am a Daily Mail reader (or skimmer), and this paper makes many people gibber (see this site); but as I said to someone who posted the latter link to his Facebook page,

"The Mail is hated by groupthinking Lefties, esp. R4 comedians who expect sycophantic laughs for their own prejudices instead of wit. It's successful because it cast its net wide - look at the funnies page (always the soul of a newspaper) to see how disparate and mutually antipathetic its subsets of readers. I read it to get the gist of the national agenda, not to share its point of view - when it has one, instead of blowing hot and cold, which is what it usually does."

Clearly even David Rose has recognised that he had blown too cool on this occasion - though retrospectively rewriting the original piece instead of issuing a correction illustrates the exuberant self-granted journalistic license that made me for a time suspect that he was really Johann Hari come in from the cold.

And now my infallible, solid-gold tip for the winner of the 3.05 pm at Ascot this afternoon: #1 - Intibaah - odds forecast 16/1. Fill yer boots! (Important note: this post updated at 19:00 on 04.10.2013).

Read The Punter's Friend every day in your soaraway Broad Oak Magazine!

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.

Leather

An old German anecdote:

As he was accompanying a duchess into the dining-hall, a German general remarked on the long leather gloves she wore, as was then the fashion, and asked her why. "They keep my arms and hands soft and supple," she replied.

"That's odd," said the general, "for I wear lederhosen and my arse is as rough as a rasp (so rauh wie ein Reibeisen)."




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The future of climate change

Environmental science tends to be carried out within a regulatory regime which why it attracts funding. Once established, the regulatory regime is in the driving seat, not the science.

This is a fact of life for environmental scientists. The science is mostly about monitoring regulatory compliance and providing evidence for prosecution where such things as discharge licences, emission licences or environmental laws have been broken.

I must have signed many hundreds of witness statements in my role as an expert witness in cases of water pollution, although I hardly ever had to attend court as scientific evidence was challenged only rarely. The witness statement was almost always sufficient.

What we refer to climate change with its associated treaties and laws is merely another regulatory regime but on a global scale. Climate science has a similar support role to other regulatory regimes, but the science is significantly less mature and dependable.

As well as having an enforcement role, the environmental scientist’s job may be to provide a scientific basis for new regulations. For example the quantification and regulation of dioxins and dioxin like substances in the environment.

It requires spending on advanced analytical technology and the development of reliable methods for the sampling and analysis of soil samples. This means reliable enough to go to court and give evidence about scientific results under oath.

Provision of funding and expertise for new environmental investigations is the positive side of regulatory regimes. Another example has been the identification and quantification of endocrine disruptors in the environment.

In this respect, climate change is a fairly typical if wildly controversial and ambitious regulatory regime. It has facilitated funding and expertise for the investigation of an alleged environmental problem due to human emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere supposedly causing a rise in global temperature.

As I see it, the problem with the regulatory regime for the global climate is a clumsy desire by UNEP to regulate combustion processes before the scientific rationale devised by the IPCC was known to be sound.

For me this has been one of the most startling aspects of climate change – the science is horrible and nowhere near reliable enough for regulatory purposes. I suppose one advantage of a carbon market is that m’learned friends are given no opportunity to pick apart the science in an enforcement process based on prosecution.

So what does the future have in store?

To my mind, the most interesting aspect is the future direction of global temperatures. The climate is in charge here, not UNEP or the IPCC. It’s as if Defra had no idea what the Thames might do next.

If a global warming trend sets in, then it will probably be business as usual and the regulatory regime will require climate scientists to carry on as if nothing untoward happened. They won’t spend much time on explaining the warming hiatus either.

If the warming hiatus continues or a global cooling trend sets in, then it may still be business as usual, but how they intend to carry it off I have no idea. There may be contingency plans spoken of in private, but you or I will never hear of them until the press releases pop up.

A much bigger problem is the obvious damage done to national energy policies as they become more and more absurd. Somehow the climate regime may have to compromise on this one.

Don’t bet on it though – regulatory regimes don’t care about a few thousand extra deaths each winter.

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John Cook's Climate Change Mythbusters 16

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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What evidence is there for the hockey stick?

What The Science Says:
Since the hockey stick paper in 1998, there have been a number of proxy studies analysing a variety of different sources including corals, stalagmites, tree rings, boreholes and ice cores. They all confirm the original hockey stick conclusion: the 20th century is the warmest in the last 1000 years and that warming was most dramatic after 1920.

Climate Myth: Hockey stick is broken
“In 2003 Professor McKitrick teamed with a Canadian engineer, Steve McIntyre, in attempting to replicate the chart and finally debunked it as statistical nonsense. They revealed how the chart was derived from "collation errors, unjustified truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, incorrect principal component calculations, geographical mislocations and other serious defects" -- substantially affecting the temperature index.” (John McLaughlin)

The "hockey stick" describes a reconstruction of past temperature over the past 1000 to 2000 years using tree-rings, ice cores, coral and other records that act as proxies for temperature (Mann 1999). The reconstruction found that global temperature gradually cooled over the last 1000 years with a sharp upturn in the 20th Century. The principal result from the hockey stick is that global temperatures over the last few decades are the warmest in the last 1000 years.


Figure 1: Northern Hemisphere temperature changes estimated from various proxy records shown in blue (Mann 1999). Instrumental data shown in red. Note the large uncertainty (grey area) as you go further back in time.

A critique of the hockey stick was published in 2004 (McIntyre 2004), claiming the hockey stick shape was the inevitable result of the statistical method used (principal components analysis). They also claimed temperatures over the 15th Century were derived from one bristlecone pine proxy record. They concluded that the hockey stick shape was not statistically significant.

An independent assessment of Mann's hockey stick was conducted by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (Wahl 2007). They reconstructed temperatures employing a variety of statistical techniques (with and without principal components analysis). Their results found slightly different temperatures in the early 15th Century. However, they confirmed the principal results of the original hockey stick - that the warming trend and temperatures over the last few decades are unprecedented over at least the last 600 years.


Figure 2: Original hockey stick graph (blue - MBH1998) compared to Wahl & Ammann reconstruction (red). Instrumental record in black (Wahl 2007).

While many continue to fixate on Mann's early work on proxy records, the science of paleoclimatology has moved on. Since 1999, there have been many independent reconstructions of past temperatures, using a variety of proxy data and a number of different methodologies. All find the same result - that the last few decades are the hottest in the last 500 to 2000 years (depending on how far back the reconstruction goes). What are some of the proxies that are used to determine past temperature?

Changes in surface temperature send thermal waves underground, cooling or warming the subterranean rock. To track these changes, underground temperature measurements were examined from over 350 bore holes in North America, Europe, Southern Africa and Australia (Huang 2000). Borehole reconstructions aren't able to give short term variation, yielding only century-scale trends. What they find is that the 20th century is the warmest of the past five centuries with the strongest warming trend in 500 years.


Figure 3: Global surface temperature change over the last five centuries from boreholes (thick red line). Shading represents uncertainty. Blue line is a five year running average of HadCRUT global surface air temperature (Huang 2000).

Stalagmites (or speleothems) are formed from groundwater within underground caverns. As they're annually banded, the thickness of the layers can be used as climate proxies. A reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperature from stalagmites shows that while the uncertainty range (grey area) is significant, the temperature in the latter 20th Century exceeds the maximum estimate over the past 500 years (Smith 2006).


Figure 4: Northern Hemisphere annual temperature reconstruction from speleothem reconstructions shown with 2 standard error (shaded area) (Smith 2006).

Historical records of glacier length can be used as a proxy for temperature. As the number of monitored glaciers diminishes in the past, the uncertainty grows accordingly. Nevertheless, temperatures in recent decades exceed the uncertainty range over the past 400 years (Oerlemans 2005).

Figure 5: Global mean temperature calculated form glaciers. The red vertical lines indicate uncertainty.

Of course, these examples only go back around 500 years - this doesn't even cover the Medieval Warm Period. When you combine all the various proxies, including ice cores, coral, lake sediments, glaciers, boreholes & stalagmites, it's possible to reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperatures without tree-ring proxies going back 1,300 years (Mann 2008). The result is that temperatures in recent decades exceed the maximum proxy estimate (including uncertainty range) for the past 1,300 years. When you include tree-ring data, the same result holds for the past 1,700 years.


Figure 6: Composite Northern Hemisphere land and land plus ocean temperature reconstructions and estimated 95% confidence intervals. Shown for comparison are published Northern Hemisphere reconstructions (Mann 2008).

Paleoclimatology draws upon a range of proxies and methodologies to calculate past temperatures. This allows independent confirmation of the basic hockey stick result: that the past few decades are the hottest in the past 1,300 years.

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.