Storms and man-made disaster

"We are apt to believe that today we experience more violent upheavals of Nature than in past generations, but this is not so. Heavy storms and exceptional weather phenomena occurred much the same in past years as now."

Reginald M. Lester, "The Observer's Book Of Weather", Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd (1955)

But we can make things worse, whether it be the EU-directed failure to dredge rivers that has exacerbated the flooding this year or the late-19th-century dredging of the pebble beach at Hallsands that led to the sea's destruction of the whole village in 1917.

We've been planning to revisit possibly the best fish and chip restaurant in England (the Start Bay Inn at Torcross in Devon's South Hams), but fear the worst after the recent weather:





Some think efforts to stop coastal erosion at Slapton Ley are ultimately doomed, anyway.

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I like ice cream

From Wikipedia

Back in the seventies when Big Questions were generally sorted out at the pub over a game of darts, a philosophically-minded friend said something to me I’ve always remembered.

“In the end you have to say I like ice cream.”

What he meant was obvious enough – we have our preferences and allegiances and in end we have to admit that’s all they are. We usually pad it out with reasoned argument, but may as well admit what’s behind it all – a liking for our own conclusions.

Most of us are not open to verbal persuasion and although the arts of argument can be good for the soul, it is worth remembering why we like ice cream. Or whatever else takes your fancy.

I like that cheap synthetic swirly stuff with a chocolate flake shoved in. I’m not so keen on proper ice cream full of genuine dairy products.

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

A piece of human soliloquy

A quote from Santayana on the systems framing our ideas.

No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right.

A system may contain an account of many things which, in detail, are true enough; but as a system, covering infinite possibilities that neither our experience nor our logic can prejudge, it must be a work of imagination and a piece of human soliloquy. It may be expressive of human experience, it may be poetical; but how should anyone who really coveted truth suppose that it was true?

George Santayana - Winds Of Doctrine Studies in Contemporary Opinion

My reading of this is that experience is one thing, but framing into some kind of congenial narrative is another, much more problematic matter.

On the whole I am a data man. The data of experience may not be entirely trustworthy, but generally it is often more trustworthy than data framed by some prior allegiance, especially those covert allegiances of self-interest.

Not only that, very often the art of life lies in allowing the data of experience to tell its story, especially where the subject is complex. Unfortunately, as complexity increases so does the commercial, institutional and political value of those framing narratives. Leviathans to which we hand over our allegiance without so much as a whipped whimper.

Yet there are many times when data does tell a story if we are prepared to listen. Many folk seem to know this instinctively. They live life from day to day, being wary of confusing the data of experience with airy speculations.

I can’t help thinking it’s a good policy, but then another airy speculation comes along and off I go a-framing.

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.

What is climate science?

One of my minor ambitions has been to settle on a promising area of climate science and study it in depth. Downloading papers, data, plotting my own graphs and calculating my own stats – that kind of depth. However a problem arose.

What to study?

The more I look at the climate sciences, the more convinced I become that we are not even close to articulating the main climate drivers with their timescales and uncertainties. Well maybe we are getting to know more and more about the uncertainties, but that's the problem.

Although we are accustomed to speak and write of climate science and climate scientist, there are no such beasts. We use the terms as established norms of verbal behaviour, but in my view they do more harm than good. Our global climate is far too complex to be studied within a single discipline and it's time we acknowledged it.

In much the same way we speak of chemistry and chemists when what we really have are specialist chemists working in related areas we place under the umbrella of chemical science.

Unfortunately, sticking with the chemistry analogy, climate science has yet to discover its periodic table. Without something of the kind, some overall theory to justify the term climate science, there is not enough coherence to stitch the various climate sciences together. It is also possible that some climate sciences such as dendroclimatology may become obsolete.

I think a good deal of confusion has arisen from a perception that the climate is a cluster of known scientific laws so the stitching together is already done by those laws. There seems to be a largely covert assumption that all will become clear if only climate scientists select the appropriate data and build models to encapsulate known scientific laws.

This is essentially philosophical assumption – that it must be possible to resolve climate behaviour into known physics. However, with numerous failed climate predictions and the current warming hiatus, it is obviously not so. The current state of the game is that climate behaviour cannot be resolved into known physical laws.

So I haven’t found an area promising enough to be worth studying in depth because so far there isn’t one. That may be one reason why the public domain is saturated with embarrassing falsehoods, emotional rhetoric and appeals to authority. For those who must persuade and those who must be persuaded, there is nothing else on which to base the arts of persuasion.

The climate is fiendishly complex on all timescales. We need much more data and a huge flash of inspiration, but in any event there are no experts with a grasp of the whole subject.

As yet there is no such thing as climate science.

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Plenty more fish in the sea - and they're storing carbon for us!

From The Conversation website, a report suggesting that we may have massively underestimated the quantity of sealife in the middle levels of the ocean. It may not be catchable, but it could be helping sequester carbon and so reduce the threat of global warming.

http://theconversation.com/fish-in-the-twilight-cast-new-light-on-ocean-ecosystem-22987

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

A letter to Mr Christopher Booker

Dear Mr Booker

I read your latest piece on the origins of the EU (“The 100-year plot”, 8 February) with interest and would like your opinion on the implications of the English Constitution for the UK’s membership.

Some months ago, I ran a series of posts by a man called Albert Burgess, who claims that Ted Heath and others (some still alive today) knowingly and surreptitiously committed treason in 1972 (and later acts) by surrendering our national sovereignty without the public’s informed consent. Burgess is therefore pursuing the matter using the criminal justice system, and he and his colleagues have reported the alleged crimes to police stations around the country, obtaining crime numbers and pressing the police to investigate further.

A vital element of his argument is that that in choosing to change how we are to be governed, the English people, as Commons, must give their assent with their own voice and not merely via elected representatives. Yet we have never had a referendum on the fundamental issue.

If Burgess’ reasoning is correct – and I find his logic and history persuasive – then since the appropriate consent has never been obtained, surely this must mean that all acts of the British Government and Parliament implying surrender of sovereignty in any degree, are in that respect ultra vires and so have no force or effect . So rather than arguing for exit from the EU, we should be saying that we are not in it now, and we are ready to listen – skeptically, but politely - to arguments for our joining.

What do you think?

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Booze and bloody murder

Does the demon drink make people more likely to kill each other? The answers are ambiguous to say the least.

I looked up tables of adult (age 15+) annual alcohol consumption per capita here, and intentional homicides per 100,000 population here. Sifting out countries where data was not available under both headings, I was left with 184 nations for the purposes of statistical correlation.

The range runs from 1.0 (perfect correlation, so that as one figure increases so does the other, in every case) to -1.0 (perfectly negative correlation, so that as one increases the other reduces).

Overall, the correlation between the two factors for this list of countries is, surprisingly, -0.1. That is, virtually no connection at all.

What if we are more selective in our survey?

Boozer countries

If we look at the top 30 countries by alcohol consumption, ranging from Moldova's 18.22 litres of pure acohol down to Spain's 11.62 litres (UK: 13.37 litres), there is a significantly negative correlation with homicide: -0.29.

Yet when we narrow down further to the top 10 toping nations, there appears to be a positive correlation: 0.48. Having said that, within those ten countries the level of alcohol intake is pretty similar: 18.22 to 15.11 litres; whereas the murder rate varies widely, from 0.7 to 7.5. Perhaps all this shows is that with too small a sample you get erratic results.

Killer countries

The list of the 30 most homicidal countries starts with Honduras (91.6 murders per 100,000) and finishes with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (21.7 murders per 100,000). The annual alcohol intake ranges from Guinea's 0.36 litres of pure alcohol up to Uganda's 11.93 litres. In this violent subset of countries, the relationship between drink and killing is pretty much random: 0.09.

But narrowing down further to the top 10 most homicidal nations, starting with Honduras again but finishing at the Bahamas (36.6 murders per 100,000), we see that their range of alcohol consumption(3.61 - 9.43 litres) is about the same as the variance in the murder rate (i.e. max = about 2.5 * min), yet the two factors are negatively correlated: -0.39. (Too small a sample, again?)

Conclusion

The conclusion is that there is no definite conclusion, though we can suspect that other (perhaps political-economic and social) factors may have a more direct influence on the propensity to kill, than the average quantity of alcohol consumed.

If you had a "session" last night, you can at least endure your thick head today with a fairly clear conscience on that score.

If you want to know a bit more, here are the four lists, followed by the long list of 184 countries. Compare the UK with the USA, for example!

 

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Cameron's "Cauld Fecht" speech

From The Encyclopedia Europeana (2083 edition):

When the Prime Minister returned to the Velodrome in January 2020, the audience had been expecting a speech oriented towards the coming General Election, but Cameron had a surprise for them.

After graceful compliments to his hosts and the assembled dignitaries, he turned unexpectedly to consider developments in Scotland, now fully independent as a result of the Scottish Nationalists' resounding referendum victory five years earlier. In an electrifying oration, he warned of the centralisation of power north of the Border:

From Wallsend in the North Sea to Bowness in the Irish, a tartan curtain has descended across the British mainland. Behind that line lie all the ancient dukedoms of Scotland. Lennoxlove, Inveraray, Drumlanrig, Blair, Auchmar, Floors, Mertoun and Gordon, all these famous seats and the populations around them lie in what I must call the lairdish sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to lairdish influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Holyrood.

The address has since become universally known as the "Cauld Fecht" speech.

Opinion is divided as to its long-term merits. One the one hand, it served to alert the world to the dangers in many countries of intensifying nationalism, insularity and political repression and corruption; on the other, by isolating the Scottish leadership, it can be said to have accelerated Scotland's descent into full-blown tyranny.

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Poor Tim – deselected by the web

When I’m chatting with my better half over a glass of port with the log-burner flickering away and the wind whistling round the chimney, she often has to look up bits and pieces of information on her phone.

Nothing unusual in that, but this tiny gadget gives us access to more information than we could ever have imagined just a couple of decades ago. What difference is it making to our lives?

A few centuries ago there were chained libraries and books with locks because books were expensive and not for the common people.

Today, the ancestors of the common people are able to access anything they please from an unimaginably vast repository of information, news, comment and entertainment. Most of it dross of course, but how many of us would care to read the contents of a chained library anyway?

It changes the balance of power in subtle and not so subtle ways.

We assess the capabilities of our political leaders more easily and don’t have to rely on establishment media to do it. We bypass the genteelly selective BBC and look around for sources we trust and visit them as often as we choose.

Social status is far less important as a route to sound information. A good example is how far behind the curve our leaders are on fracking. Many of us knew about the benefits long before they did, just as we have known for years that climate science is an unholy mess.

It’s impossible to be completely sure of all this, with our political class being so untrustworthy, but their mendacity is something we are aware of too. We don’t suspect – we know.

We know some of them are thick, some dishonest, some personally unreliable, some sexually deviant, some arrogantly aggressive and a few may be good eggs but the good eggs don’t usually get anywhere. We may know all this in some detail, where years ago it was all glossed over by compliant pundits.

Is it likely to make a difference though? I don’t see how it can fail. Narratives are multiplying and for every item of establishment pap there is a more reliable, less ameliorative source of information readily available.

We have reached a stage where no intelligent person takes the BBC as reliable on any subject with an establishment narrative. This is new and unless the BBC changes, its authority has gone for good.

The deselection of Tim Yeo may have had a number of causes, but one of them was surely the persistent wash of negative information telling us about the man, the games he plays and how effective he is as an MP.

It isn’t merely that the negative information on Yeo exists, but it is far more pervasive than it ever could have been in the comparatively recent past. The web seems to keep issues alive in a way which in pre-web days was rare.

Pressure could be brought on newspaper editors and stories would disappear if indeed they ever appeared in the first place. Now anyone may launch a story and if it spreads there is little others can do. Even court injunctions have been circumvented.

The world has changed and I’m sure we have yet to see the full consequences. Although Tim has had a taster.

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Oh, what a surprise!

When things go wrong, the modern meme is to blame the “Law of Unintended Consequences”, which is the modern way of saying “it’s just God’s will”. However, in all too many instances, the “unintended” consequences could be easily predicted.

 Case 1: Most stocks are now owned by mutual funds. The fund managers are interested in fees, which means waiting for price increases, and selling the stocks. Their sole interest is short-term price gains. The CEO’s are hired with bonuses for price increases, and the only oversight is the Board of Directors (consisting of CEO’s of other companies), and the annual stockholder meeting (dominated by the fund managers). Then there is general surprise that many companies are managed for short-term stock price increases, and not for long-term performance!

 Case 2: Most US school systems have curricula which are dominated by methods courses, and very light on the content that they will teach. We put those ill-educated teachers into the field, and give them the message that any failure of a student means that the teacher is incompetent (I was told this by an education professor recently). We then test students and blame the teachers for every bad result. Why are we surprised at grade inflation and cheating on tests?

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Electric cars - a long gestation

Arnold Bennett clearly liked electric cars. They must have been the coming thing and maybe they were also seen as a hint that the machine age could produce more than dark satanic mills. Here are a few quotes.

Advantages.

Richard’s car ran through the cutting — it was electrical, odourless, and almost noiseless.

Mounting

He crept back to his own car, found it unharmed in the deep shadow where he had left it, and mounted.

Dismounting

Richard directed the car gently through the gate and then stopped; they dismounted, and crossed the great field on foot.

Range

This vehicle, new and in beautiful order, and charged for a journey of a hundred and twenty miles, travelled in the most unexceptionable manner. The two and a half miles to the North-Western station at Dunstable were traversed in precisely five minutes, in spite of the fact that the distance included a full mile of climbing. 

Teresa of Watling Street (1904)

Intimacy

The electric brougham was waiting. I gathered up my skirt and sprang in.

 Oh, the exquisite dark intimacy of the interior of that smooth-rolling brougham! 

Sacred and Profane Love (1905)

Notice the reference to a range of a hundred and twenty miles. There are a number of explanations as to why electric cars were ousted by the internal combustion engine after an auspicious start, but are any of them satisfactory?

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The Condom Mission

Sex education, Danish-style...

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Bombing Man Friday

Over at the New Zealand-based Cafe Pacific blog, a story about a documentary film that has been kept off-air for two years so far:

"Nuclear Savage is a recent documentary film that explores American nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands, 1946-1958 - and particularly the secret Project 4.1: an American experiment in exposing Pacific Islanders to overdoses of radiation – deliberate human radiation poisoning – just to get better data on this method of maiming and killing people." (My emphasis.)

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Wi-Fi sky-spy eye on you - all the time!

Not only does your car spy on you and constantly report your whereabouts, so (if you've ever used free Wi-Fi) does your smartphone or portable computer - and the tattletale goes back in time to when you bought the thing.

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.

Did Lloyds Bank have a heart attack last week?

Last Sunday, "hundreds of thousands of customers were left unable to use debit cards and 7,000 cashpoints" (Daily Mail).

 

The BBC News website said the cause was "a hardware failure" but - perhaps in an attempt to reassure us - the bank told them "the faults were not caused by any external upgrade work or cyber attack."

Funnily enough, Sunday was also the day that Lloyds borrowed an extra c. £766 million, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Source: WSJ

Just in time - or very nearly so, anyway?

As it happens, our current account is with Lloyds and earns 0% interest. This Harvard economist has just withdrawn $1 million from Bank of America for exactly that reason: the odds against a collapse, though presumably small, are not zero, so the risk to a depositor is underpriced.

Weekends seem to be bad for banks: on Saturday, September 13, 2008 the Federal Reserve was in talks with Lehman Brothers, Barclays backed away from making an offer (as reported in the NYT next day, Sunday) and the bankruptcy filing came on the Monday - at 1.45 in the morning. Not much chance for the likes of you and me to queue up at the counter.

Shoebox or bank account, bank account or shoebox? So hard to decide.

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Total control zone

From Google Earth - Kaechon Gulag No 14 - School for Child Prisoners

Asahi Shimbun has a piece on Shin Dong-hyuk, a North Korean defector who was born in Camp 14, a political prison in Kaechon, 80 kilometers north of Pyongyang.

He said the camp was like a town. It had a population of several tens of thousands of prisoners who worked on a farm, a coal mine, a cement factory, a sewing factory and other facilities there.

Camp 14 is also a “total control zone” prison, the harshest category for such facilities in North Korea. Inmates of these prisons are not allowed out of the camp for their entire lives.

His story is horrendous and quite impossible for most of us living our comfortable lives to imagine. In particular, indoctrination can do the vilest things to people.

When he was 13, something happened to his brother that prompted him and his mother to plan to break out of the camp. Shin happened to overhear their plot, and he knew that he would be shot if he did not alert the prison wardens. So he did.

His mother and brother were executed in front of Shin and his father.

“Back then, I believed that tipping them off was the right thing to do,” Shin said. “Otherwise, I would have been killed.”

After escaping from North Korea, however, he fully realized the consequences of his action. He says he is still in agony over the decision.

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Imitation

The child looked about him, watching with keen impressionable eyes what the grown-ups were doing and how they were spending the morning. Not a single detail escaped the child’s searching attention: the picture of his home life was being indelibly stamped on his memory; his pliable mind was nurtured on the examples before him, unconsciously planning his own life after the pattern of the life around him.

Ivan Goncharov – Oblamov (1859)

The greater part of life is imitation. We have other names for it such as learning, reasoning and intelligence, but at the core of it all lies imitation. Sometimes we are almost original but the opportunity is given to us only rarely. Free will may be real enough, but is far from being the norm.

How could things possibly be otherwise? Life would be chaotic...

Hmm...

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27 June 2003

At the height of the row between the BBC and Downing Street over the "sexed-up" briefing that served as a pretext for UK involvement in the invasion of Iraq, there was an incident which made me feel as though the scales had fallen from my eyes.

Jon Snow was anchoring Channel 4 News and five minutes into his programme, in strode the Prime Minister's communications manager and simply took over. I saw this live and can't forget it - I can give you a Youtube recording (below) and Channel 4's own clip, but none of these shows him striding in masterfully, in seeming rage and indignation; nor the grateful, fraternal handshake Snow gave him at the conclusion of the interview. That was the moment when I thought, "They're all in it together."



Yes, questions were asked - but not ones that Campbell couldn't have been expected to prepare for. What really mattered was the man's exhibition of raw power, instantly subverting a national news schedule to serve his own agenda of red-faced, blustering self-justification, drilling the messages into the newsman's desk with his long and bony finger, interrupting Snow with a raised palm as the latter (or a Paxman) might do to a lesser interviewee. And then - away into the night goes The Shadow! What a man!

Channel 4 may have congratulated themselves on a coup - look at the excitement behind the scenes! - but to me, as an appalled viewer, the coup wasn't theirs. If Snow had ordered him out of the studio immediately (oh Lord, if only!), I could have believed in journalistic independence; as it was, he surrendered the dance floor and let Campbell do Night Fever all over it.

According to the Guardian article the next day, Channel 4 had actually asked Campbell for an interview and been refused 15 minutes before transmission. So did Blair's enforcer change his mind, or had he wrong-footed the programme-makers in order to make an extra-dramatic, swishy entrance?

³⁵Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning:

³⁶Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping.

And a decade later, we're still waiting to find out the whole, the real, truth about the events leading to the tragedy we helped foment in Iraq.

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What to do about the poor?

John Ward has an appalled look at the underclass and, though naturally a humane man, is leaning in the direction of abortion and sterilisation. I say:

I teach their children. Your observations - and I share your worries - raise philosophical and econo-political questions.

1. Before advocating abortion and sterilisation, consider whether we are nothing more than temporary forms of matter with the capacity for pleasure and pain. If a grain of sand is a nothing then there are no Arabian sands, since a zillion times nothing is nothing. This kind of thinking allowed Stalin to murder millions of people for the good of... er...

2. Peter Hitchens (who makes a living by stating what fifty years ago would have been unpublishable because it would have been thought too bleedin' obvious) is quite right that the middle class, by giving themselves ever-greater license in terms of substance abuse and sexual mores, have ruined the working class who do not have the same resources to recover from the concomitant pitfalls.

3. Much of the moral decay is also owing to a deteriorating economy and the shockingly cynical callousness shown towards the working class even by the Labour Party. What happened to the Rover works at Longbridge, Birmingham in the runup to the 2000 General Election is a damning reason why I can never see the modern LP as the friend of the workers.

4. As John Mortimer has Rumpole observe, the woes of the underclass provide much lucrative employment for their superiors, so the rot has spread much further than is immediately visible.The political class has signally failed the country as a whole.

5. The temporary beneficiaries of this state of affairs are the upper strata, who have created (as in e.g. the EU) a transnational governing class that is suborning the news media and any other form of supervision and governance that might restrict their endless self-enrichment. Their intermarriage (or interfornication) is, I suggest, leading to the surreptitious re-creation of a full-blown aristocracy - Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube (“Let others wage wars: you, fortunate Austria, marry”). The TV commentators dine with the ministers and money-men, but neglected to bring a long spoon. Soon they will wear the livery of their true masters, and the more attractive or better-connected among their children shall refresh the bloodline of the new global ruling class. "Notting Hill and Islington, you have stolen my land away."

6. Part of the process is economic globalisation. Sir James Goldsmith warned us all in 1983 at the time of GATT, and now that the talks have stalled, see (those who matter in) the US pushing on via the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

7. And to distract (one of the central themes of your blog) from this dreadful scheme we are encouraged to click our tongues at what is now the benefit class, people who once were the hewers of wood and drawers of water and have been abandoned and exploited at every turn, latterly to scare the lower middle class into submission (in the vain hope that they will not be next). We are enjoined to moralise at the unfortunate victims of our own actions:

“If it were indeed the case that bad nourishment, little education, lack of air and sunshine, unhealthy housing conditions, and overwork produce better people than are produced by good nourishment, open air, adequate education and housing, and a reasonable amount of leisure, the whole case for economic reconstruction would collapse, and we could rejoice that such a large percentage of the population enjoys the conditions that make for virtue.” - Bertrand Russell, "Unpopular Essays"

8. A heavy reckoning is coming, and not just for the current poor.

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.

Central England Temperatures

As we all know, the Central England Temperature (CET) record is the world's oldest continuous surface temperature record, going back to 1659, although to put it mildly the early data has a number of defects. It can be downloaded from the Met Office here.

In an idle moment and as I live in central England, I downloaded the data  aiming to play around with various ways of presenting it. For example, the Met Office shows each monthly mean temperature as a difference from the 1961-1990 mean (fig 1) which brings out the recent warm spell very well.

fig 1

Only data from 1772 is used by the Met Office, as in Parker et al. (1992). By the way, the Parker paper highlights rather well the complexities and the adjustments made in compiling a long historical temperature record. It certainly isn't a list of thermometer readings.

However, if you simply plot the temperatures rather than the 1961-1990 differences (fig 2), the graph is rather more innocuous. After all, it's worth remembering that we experience daily and seasonal temperature changes far larger than those we are supposed to be alarmed about. 

fig 2

I see nothing wrong with either format. I'd use the Met Office approach if I had a reason to emphasise the recent warming spell. However, if I was wondering whether to move north to escape catastrophic warming, then I might use the simple temperature graph in fig 2.

fig 3

The graph above (fig 3) is the CET data from 1979 - the satellite era. Just for fun I've fitted a second order polynomial which appears to show that the CET temperature has peaked, albeit a very shallow peak. I don't yet see it as a trend though, but it is worth noting how easy it is to present the data in many different ways depending at least in part on your agenda. 

fig 4

For example,  the temperature record from 2006 plotted the Met Office way (fig 4) seems to show a rapid cooling trend. Maybe so, but as nobody knows where it will go in 2014, let alone the longer term, what conclusion do we draw from that? Don't try to build an agenda on temporary trends in cyclic phenomena is my conclusion - at the moment.

Finally, the month of June from 1659 to 2013 (fig 5) shows a flat linear trend over the entire three and a half centuries - h/t to sunshinehours for that oddity.

fig 5

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.