The problem with teachers is not that they are rebellious; on the contrary, they are conservative and conformist. As I said a few days ago ("Teacher is a fool", 22 September), the path to becoming a teacher selects for people who work for pats on the head.
This makes them perfect victims for lunatic dictators. When the National Socialists took over in Germany, all the teachers at my mother's school joined the Party (not to do so would screw your career) and obediently - for Germans are law-abiding to a fault, as Jerome K. Jerome noted in his pre-WWI book"Three Men on the Bummel" - they encouraged the children to do the same, and browbeat the reluctant. Grandfather, perhaps because he was a gentleman farmer, perhaps because he recognised the Nazis for the rabble they were - forbade Mother to join.
It only takes a small, active minority to promote each other into positions of authority, and they can make education the instrument of their revolution. It doesn't matter if it's book-burning Lefties (and we had some in the 70s), or business-serving privatisers, as now; the few will make their careers by change, and the many will sway in the breeze, first one way, then another.
For example, take something as simple (and, you would think, culturally unloaded) as learning your times tables.
When I was a child, we learned them by rote, chanting "four fours are six-teen, five fours are twen-ty" and so on. Silver star if you could recite your eleven times table, gold star for twelves.
Then, sometime later, rote learning was abolished. It was boring (I hadn't noticed). We should be learning by exploration. Anyhow, calculators could do all that stuff, couldn't they?
Turned out they couldn't. Because if you have no idea what the answer should look like even roughly, you don't notice when you've messed up on the calculator. And you're so easy to cheat in the shops when you buy three ice creams - I've seen that happen. And on a market stall. And in the duty-free shop of a cross-Channel ferry.
Well, they brought it back. But remember the Golden Rule of educational innovation: NEVER ADMIT YOU WERE WRONG. So when you restore something that should never have been thrown away, you have to do it differently - even if it's ten times worse.
So chanting has come back, with a difference. Ask a child what seven fours are and instead of zapping straight to the answer from memory, he'll begin to clamber up a long, wobbly ladder: "Four, eight, twelve, sixteen..." while you watch paint dry with more interest. And at some point, more often than not, you'll see he's switched to adding four to the previous number, because at age ten he still doesn't know this painfully slow sequence by heart. Which also means that if he gets one rung wrong ("twelve... fifteen... nineteen... twenty-two, no, twenty-three...") it all goes horribly skewiff.
If (sadist!) you ask him seven nines he'll fall silent, after a brief struggle.
Now I try to put this right, but when someone has laid down a foundation of horse manure it's hard to build a stable platform on top. At nine or ten, a youngster who is playing Grand Theft Auto 5 till two in the morning is just too cool to do sing-song chants. This should have been done when he was four or five, for rhythm and a singing tone is the natural language of infancy, and they thrive on repetition (God knows how many times I had to watch "Ewoks 4" with my niece). Now, too late.
Yes, good try, Kyle.
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.
Thursday, September 26, 2013
John Cook's Climate Change Mythbusters 9
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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Land, atmosphere, and ice heating (red), 0-700 meter ocean heat content (OHC) increase (light blue), 700-2,000 meter OHC increase (dark blue). From Nuccitelli et al. (2012).
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.
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What has global warming done since 1998?
What The Science Says:
For global records, 2010 is the hottest year on record, tied with 2005.
For global records, 2010 is the hottest year on record, tied with 2005.
Climate Myth: It hasn't warmed since 1998
For the years 1998-2005, temperature did not increase. This period coincides with society's continued pumping of more CO2 into the atmosphere. (Bob Carter)
For the years 1998-2005, temperature did not increase. This period coincides with society's continued pumping of more CO2 into the atmosphere. (Bob Carter)
No, it hasn't been cooling since 1998. Even if we ignore long term trends and just look at the record-breakers, that wasn't the hottest year ever. Different reports show that, overall, 2005 was hotter than 1998. What's more, globally, the hottest 12-month period ever recorded was from June 2009 to May 2010.
Though humans love record-breakers, they don't, on their own, tell us a much about trends -- and it's trends that matter when monitoring Climate Change. Trends only appear by looking at all the data, globally, and taking into account other variables -- like the effects of the El Nino ocean current or sunspot activity -- not by cherry-picking single points.
There's also a tendency for some people just to concentrate on air temperatures when there are other, more useful, indicators that can perhaps give us a better idea how rapidly the world is warming. Oceans for instance -- due to their immense size and heat storing capability (called 'thermal mass') -- tend to give a much more 'steady' indication of the warming that is happening. Here records show that the Earth has been warming at a steady rate before and since 1998 and there's no signs of it slowing any time soon.
Land, atmosphere, and ice heating (red), 0-700 meter ocean heat content (OHC) increase (light blue), 700-2,000 meter OHC increase (dark blue). From Nuccitelli et al. (2012).
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.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
John Cook's Climate Change Mythbusters 8
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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Humans are transforming the global environment. Great swathes of temperate forest in Europe, Asia and North America have been cleared over the past few centuries for agriculture, timber and urban development. Tropical forests are now on the front line. Human-assisted species invasions of pests, competitors and predators are rising exponentially, and over-exploitation of fisheries, and forest animals for bush meat, to the point of collapse, continues to be the rule rather than the exception.
Driving this has been a six-fold expansion of the human population since 1800 and a 50-fold increase in the size of the global economy. The great modern human enterprise was built on exploitation of the natural environment. Today, up to 83% of the Earth’s land area is under direct human influence and we entirely dominate 36% of the bioproductive surface. Up to half the world’s freshwater runoff is now captured for human use. More nitrogen is now converted into reactive forms by industry than all by all the planet’s natural processes and our industrial and agricultural processes are causing a continual build-up of long-lived greenhouse gases to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years and possibly much longer.
Clearly, this planet-wide domination by human society will have implications for biological diversity. Indeed, a recent review on the topic, the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report (an environmental report of similar scale to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports), drew some bleak conclusions – 60% of the world’s ecosystems are now degraded and the extinction rate is now 100 to 1000 times higher than the “background” rate of long spans of geological time. For instance, a study I conducted in 2003 showed that up to 42% of species in the Southeast Asian region could be consigned to extinction by the year 2100 due to deforestation and habitat fragmentation alone.
Figure 1: Southeast Asian extinctions projected due to habitat loss (source: Sodhi, N. S., Koh, L. P., Brook, B. W. & Ng, P. K. L. 2004)
Given these existing pressures and upheavals, it is a reasonable question to ask whether global warming will make any further meaningful contribution to this mess. Some, such as the sceptics S. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery, see no danger at all, maintaining that a warmer planet will be beneficial for mankind and other species on the planet and that “corals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate”. Also, although climate change is a concern for conservation biologists, it is not the focus for most researchers (at present), largely I think because of the severity and immediacy of the damage caused by other threats.
Global warming to date has certainly affected species’ geographical distributional ranges and the timing of breeding, migration, flowering, and so on. But extrapolating these observed impacts to predictions of future extinction risk is challenging. The most well known study to date, by a team from the UK, estimated that 18 and 35% of plant and animal species will be committed to extinction by 2050 due to climate change. This study, which used a simple approach of estimating changes in species geographical ranges after fitting to current bioclimatic conditions, caused a flurry of debate. Some argued that it was overly optimistic or too uncertain because it left out most ecological detail, while others said it was possibly overly pessimistic, based on what we know from species responses and apparent resilience to previous climate change in the fossil record – see below.
A large number of ancient mass extinction events have indeed been strongly linked to global climate change, including the most sweeping die-off that ended the Palaeozoic Era, 250 million years ago and the somewhat less cataclysmic, but still damaging, Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, 55 million years ago. Yet in the more recent past, during the Quaternary glacial cycles spanning the last million years, there were apparently few climate-related extinctions. This curious paradox of few ice age extinctions even has a name – it is called ‘the Quaternary Conundrum’.
Over that time, the globally averaged temperature difference between the depth of an ice age and a warm interglacial period was 4 to 6°C – comparable to that predicted for the coming century due to anthropogenic global warming under the fossil-fuel-intensive, business-as-usual scenario. Most species appear to have persisted across these multiple glacial–interglacial cycles. This can be inferred from the fossil record, and from genetic evidence in modern species. In Europe and North America, populations shifted ranges southwards as the great northern hemisphere ice sheets advanced, and reinvaded northern realms when the glaciers retreated. Some species may have also persisted in locally favourable regions that were otherwise isolated within the tundra and ice-strewn landscapes. In Australia, a recently discovered cave site has shown that large-bodied mammals (‘megafauna’) were able to persist even in the arid landscape of the Nullarbor in conditions similar to now.
However, although the geological record is essential for understanding how species respond to natural climate change, there are a number of reasons why future impacts on biodiversity will be particularly severe:
A) Human-induced warming is already rapid and is expected to further accelerate. The IPCC storyline scenarios such as A1FI and A2 imply a rate of warming of 0.2 to 0.6°C per decade. By comparison, the average change from 15 to 7 thousand years ago was ~0.005°C per decade, although this was occasionally punctuated by short-lived (and possibly regional-scale) abrupt climatic jolts, such as the Younger Dryas, Dansgaard-Oeschger and Heinrich events.
B) A low-range optimistic estimate of 2°C of 21st century warming will shift the Earth’s global mean surface temperature into conditions which have not existed since the middle Pliocene, 3 million years ago. More than 4°C of atmospheric heating will take the planet’s climate back, within a century, to the largely ice-free world that existed prior to about 35 million years ago. The average ‘species’ lifetime’ is only 1 to 3 million years. So it is quite possible that in the comparative geological instant of a century, planetary conditions will be transformed to a state unlike anything that most of the world’s modern species have encountered.
C) As noted above, it is critical to understand that ecosystems in the 21st century start from an already massively ‘shifted baseline’ and so have lost resilience. Most habitats are already degraded and their populations depleted, to a lesser or greater extent, by past human activities. For millennia our impacts have been localised although often severe, but during the last few centuries we have unleashed physical and biological transformations on a global scale. In this context, synergies (positive or self-reinforcing feedbacks) from global warming, ocean acidification, habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, chemical pollution (Figure 2) are likely lead to cascading extinctions. For instance, over-harvest, habitat loss and changed fire regimes will likely enhance the direct impacts of climate change and make it difficult for species to move to undamaged areas or to maintain a ‘buffer’ population size. One threat reinforces the other, or multiple impacts play off on each other, which makes the overall impact far greater than if each individual threats occurred in isolation (Brook et al 2008).
Figure 2: Figure from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
D) Past adaptation to climate change by species was mainly through shifting their geographic range to higher or lower latitudes (depending on whether the climate was warming or cooling), or up and down mountain slopes. There were also evolutionary responses – individuals that were most tolerant to new conditions survived and so made future generations more intrinsically resilient. Now, because of points A to C described above, this type of adaptation will, in most cases, simply not be possible or will be inadequate to cope. Global change is simply too pervasive and occurring too rapidly. Time’s up and there is nowhere for species to run or hide.
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.
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Can animals and plants adapt to global warming?
What The Science Says:
A large number of ancient mass extinction events have been strongly linked to global climate change. Because current climate change is so rapid, the way species typically adapt (eg - migration) is, in most cases, simply not be possible. Global change is simply too pervasive and occurring too rapidly.
A large number of ancient mass extinction events have been strongly linked to global climate change. Because current climate change is so rapid, the way species typically adapt (eg - migration) is, in most cases, simply not be possible. Global change is simply too pervasive and occurring too rapidly.
Climate Myth: Animals and plants can adapt
[C]orals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate." (source: Hudson Institute)
[C]orals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate." (source: Hudson Institute)
Driving this has been a six-fold expansion of the human population since 1800 and a 50-fold increase in the size of the global economy. The great modern human enterprise was built on exploitation of the natural environment. Today, up to 83% of the Earth’s land area is under direct human influence and we entirely dominate 36% of the bioproductive surface. Up to half the world’s freshwater runoff is now captured for human use. More nitrogen is now converted into reactive forms by industry than all by all the planet’s natural processes and our industrial and agricultural processes are causing a continual build-up of long-lived greenhouse gases to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years and possibly much longer.
Clearly, this planet-wide domination by human society will have implications for biological diversity. Indeed, a recent review on the topic, the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report (an environmental report of similar scale to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports), drew some bleak conclusions – 60% of the world’s ecosystems are now degraded and the extinction rate is now 100 to 1000 times higher than the “background” rate of long spans of geological time. For instance, a study I conducted in 2003 showed that up to 42% of species in the Southeast Asian region could be consigned to extinction by the year 2100 due to deforestation and habitat fragmentation alone.
Figure 1: Southeast Asian extinctions projected due to habitat loss (source: Sodhi, N. S., Koh, L. P., Brook, B. W. & Ng, P. K. L. 2004)
Given these existing pressures and upheavals, it is a reasonable question to ask whether global warming will make any further meaningful contribution to this mess. Some, such as the sceptics S. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery, see no danger at all, maintaining that a warmer planet will be beneficial for mankind and other species on the planet and that “corals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate”. Also, although climate change is a concern for conservation biologists, it is not the focus for most researchers (at present), largely I think because of the severity and immediacy of the damage caused by other threats.
Global warming to date has certainly affected species’ geographical distributional ranges and the timing of breeding, migration, flowering, and so on. But extrapolating these observed impacts to predictions of future extinction risk is challenging. The most well known study to date, by a team from the UK, estimated that 18 and 35% of plant and animal species will be committed to extinction by 2050 due to climate change. This study, which used a simple approach of estimating changes in species geographical ranges after fitting to current bioclimatic conditions, caused a flurry of debate. Some argued that it was overly optimistic or too uncertain because it left out most ecological detail, while others said it was possibly overly pessimistic, based on what we know from species responses and apparent resilience to previous climate change in the fossil record – see below.
A large number of ancient mass extinction events have indeed been strongly linked to global climate change, including the most sweeping die-off that ended the Palaeozoic Era, 250 million years ago and the somewhat less cataclysmic, but still damaging, Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, 55 million years ago. Yet in the more recent past, during the Quaternary glacial cycles spanning the last million years, there were apparently few climate-related extinctions. This curious paradox of few ice age extinctions even has a name – it is called ‘the Quaternary Conundrum’.
Over that time, the globally averaged temperature difference between the depth of an ice age and a warm interglacial period was 4 to 6°C – comparable to that predicted for the coming century due to anthropogenic global warming under the fossil-fuel-intensive, business-as-usual scenario. Most species appear to have persisted across these multiple glacial–interglacial cycles. This can be inferred from the fossil record, and from genetic evidence in modern species. In Europe and North America, populations shifted ranges southwards as the great northern hemisphere ice sheets advanced, and reinvaded northern realms when the glaciers retreated. Some species may have also persisted in locally favourable regions that were otherwise isolated within the tundra and ice-strewn landscapes. In Australia, a recently discovered cave site has shown that large-bodied mammals (‘megafauna’) were able to persist even in the arid landscape of the Nullarbor in conditions similar to now.
However, although the geological record is essential for understanding how species respond to natural climate change, there are a number of reasons why future impacts on biodiversity will be particularly severe:
A) Human-induced warming is already rapid and is expected to further accelerate. The IPCC storyline scenarios such as A1FI and A2 imply a rate of warming of 0.2 to 0.6°C per decade. By comparison, the average change from 15 to 7 thousand years ago was ~0.005°C per decade, although this was occasionally punctuated by short-lived (and possibly regional-scale) abrupt climatic jolts, such as the Younger Dryas, Dansgaard-Oeschger and Heinrich events.
B) A low-range optimistic estimate of 2°C of 21st century warming will shift the Earth’s global mean surface temperature into conditions which have not existed since the middle Pliocene, 3 million years ago. More than 4°C of atmospheric heating will take the planet’s climate back, within a century, to the largely ice-free world that existed prior to about 35 million years ago. The average ‘species’ lifetime’ is only 1 to 3 million years. So it is quite possible that in the comparative geological instant of a century, planetary conditions will be transformed to a state unlike anything that most of the world’s modern species have encountered.
C) As noted above, it is critical to understand that ecosystems in the 21st century start from an already massively ‘shifted baseline’ and so have lost resilience. Most habitats are already degraded and their populations depleted, to a lesser or greater extent, by past human activities. For millennia our impacts have been localised although often severe, but during the last few centuries we have unleashed physical and biological transformations on a global scale. In this context, synergies (positive or self-reinforcing feedbacks) from global warming, ocean acidification, habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, chemical pollution (Figure 2) are likely lead to cascading extinctions. For instance, over-harvest, habitat loss and changed fire regimes will likely enhance the direct impacts of climate change and make it difficult for species to move to undamaged areas or to maintain a ‘buffer’ population size. One threat reinforces the other, or multiple impacts play off on each other, which makes the overall impact far greater than if each individual threats occurred in isolation (Brook et al 2008).
Figure 2: Figure from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
D) Past adaptation to climate change by species was mainly through shifting their geographic range to higher or lower latitudes (depending on whether the climate was warming or cooling), or up and down mountain slopes. There were also evolutionary responses – individuals that were most tolerant to new conditions survived and so made future generations more intrinsically resilient. Now, because of points A to C described above, this type of adaptation will, in most cases, simply not be possible or will be inadequate to cope. Global change is simply too pervasive and occurring too rapidly. Time’s up and there is nowhere for species to run or hide.
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.
Loyalty vs. Treason 3
Albert Burgess argues that ceding sovereignty to the EU (or any foreign power) is ultra vires - beyond the legal capacity of the Monarch or her ministers - without the agreement of the "estates of England" as a whole. I'd welcome legal comment, for I can't see how his reasoning is faulty.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat
it,” said George Santayana, and he was right.
Queen Elizabeth II as Queen of England is first and foremost Queen of England. All her other titles, prerogatives, superiorities and supremacies stem from this one fact. Yet of all her titles only that of Queen of Scots is by dint of arms and only then because the Scots had a habit of raiding over the border into England. That was until King Edward III captured the Scots King David and released him to rule Scotland as a vassal King to Edward; he allowed David to keep Scots law but imposed the 1351 Treason Act on Scotland. Every other title Queen Elizabeth holds was obtained by trade.
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.
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Queen Elizabeth II as Queen of England is first and foremost Queen of England. All her other titles, prerogatives, superiorities and supremacies stem from this one fact. Yet of all her titles only that of Queen of Scots is by dint of arms and only then because the Scots had a habit of raiding over the border into England. That was until King Edward III captured the Scots King David and released him to rule Scotland as a vassal King to Edward; he allowed David to keep Scots law but imposed the 1351 Treason Act on Scotland. Every other title Queen Elizabeth holds was obtained by trade.
It is with Queen Elizabeth II as Queen of England that we
are dealing with the Treason at Maastricht.
The Act of Supremacy 1559 put on a formal basis the one true
and certain fact that the Kings of England are the supreme governors of
England, and a King of England takes second place to no other crowned head on
the planet. Not even the Pope, God’s representative on earth is over the King
of England. English Kings rule England as God’s Lieutenant and according to God’s
laws, and answer directly to God and the people of England.
Each and every English man woman and child has a duty of
loyalty to the King of England; every person who comes to England as an
immigrant, to trade or simply on holiday comes under the protection of the
Queen’s Law. So a Frenchman who comes here to sell wine has a duty of loyalty
to the Queen, whereas a Frenchman who comes here as a belligerent soldier does
not. In return the Queen, who is the
fount of all law, gives the people the protection of her law.
The Treaty of Maastricht purports to make not only England
We were not asked if we wanted to surrender our Queen or
ourselves to the dominion of a foreign power, and had we been asked the answer
would have been a resounding “OVER MY DEAD BODY!” - as so many of our
forefathers have proved with their dead bodies lying on many a stricken field.
So who gave John Major the prime minister the authority to
give Douglas Hurd and Francis Maude the authority to sell us all into slavery
to the European Union? The answer is no one. The rule is simple: no authority
to govern this Kingdom can be disposed of unless we have been defeated in war, and
the first, last and only war we have lost was in 1066 when King Harold died at
the Battle of Hastings.
I look on Parliament as the housewife of the nation: I go to
work and every week I hand my pay packet over to my wife, who pays all the
bills, buys food and clothes and puts a bit away to cover emergencies. But she
sure as hell does not have the right to give the house away whilst I am at
work. Parliament takes a part of our wages in tax to pay for the day to day
running of the Kingdom, to see we have a transport system that works, an
efficient NHS and a well-equipped and -trained armed forces so they can defend
the Kingdom against all comers. But they
sure as hell do not have our permission to give us away and that is exactly
what the Maastricht Treaty does.
So when did this refusal to accept foreign interference
start? It began with Alfred King of the English, when he inherited the Crown
and was elected King in 877. Alfred had a man he wanted to appoint as
Archbishop; the Pope thought otherwise, and sent his own man. Alfred sent him
back saying he had his own man; the Pope sent his man back to tell Alfred that
he, the Pope, appointed every King in the world, and if Alfred did not accept
his man he would appoint a new King to Alfred's Kingdom. Alfred returned the
Pope’s man saying, he was elected King by the English and would only ever do
what was in their best interests, he had appointed the best man for the job and
that is how it would stay. Several of our Kings up until King John also told
the Pope to get lost. In 1213 King John, a bad King, in an effort to save his
life surrendered England to Pope Innocent III and agreed to rent it back for
1000 Marks a year (700 for England, 300 for Ireland). In 1215 John was forced
to sign Magna Carta which was a simple restatement of the laws of Alfred; after
his death in 1216, his son Henry III wrote and told the Pope he, Henry, was
answerable directly to God and not the Pope.
In 1366 the then Pope Urban V wrote to King Edward III to
demand payment of the 1000 Marks a year for every year since Henry III had
refused to pay it. Edward knew nothing about this so he sought advice from the
Bishops and Barons; they discussed the matter with the Commons, and the
following day first the Bishops then the Barons and finally the Commons told
King Edward England did not belong to King John: it was not his to give away,
John only held England in trust for those who followed on. John had broken the
law and his action did not count, Edward was not a vassal King to the Pope, and
the monies were not to be paid. The Bishops, Barons and Commons meeting without
the King constitute the estates of England, the highest law-giving body in the
land, even above the King in Parliament. This major constitutional ruling only
confirmed the position taken by King Alfred. The last time the Estates met was
at Runnymede when John was forced by the
estates to reissue English law.
Henry VIII we know finally split with Rome
So when John Major sent Douglas Hurd and Francis Maude to
negotiate making Her Majesty and us citizens of Europe
he was going directly against the ruling given by the estates of England Runnymede . Ah,
you may say, that's a very old law which does not apply in this modern age. But
- and it’s a very big but - two things make that opinion just plain wrong.
The first is the 1366 ruling: it was not a law, it was and
is a constitutional statement made by the most powerful body in England, of the
most profound kind which lies at the very heart of what it is to be English;
this is doubly important because King Edward III was the first of our Norman
French Kings to think of himself as purely English.
The second point is that there is no principle of
obsolescence of English law. If the law does not work it is formally repealed;
as long as it works, it remains the law of England. So John Major was going
against everything which being English means, but he did more than that: he
made Her Majesty give the assent to what was and is a treasonable document, a
document English constitutional law refuses her permission to sign. A document
which every honest English man, woman and child will die before accepting.
Why would Her Majesty agree to such an infamous document? It
is my belief, backed up by considerable research, that Her Majesty has been
convinced by government that she has no authority, which instead lies entirely with
government ministers, and that she must obey her Ministers. It is to deal with these
evil and wicked councillors that we need to use the good English Law.
Help me to help you to fight back: go to
www.acasefortreason.org.uk and www.englishconstitutiongroup.org or email me at
albertburgess@hotmail.com.
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.
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 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:
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 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.
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.
_______________________________________________________
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.
_______________________________________________________
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.
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.
"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.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
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.
_______________________________________________________
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.
_______________________________________________________
How reliable are climate models?
What The Science Says:
Models successfully reproduce temperatures since 1900 globally, by land, in the air and the ocean.
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)
"[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 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.
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