Robin's Room

Today, Tony Blair announced that he would be resigning as Prime Minister... in a month and a bits time.

 

I guess we shouldn't be surprised that they are announcing things in advance - after all Gordon Brown famously announced that he'd be selling off a large amount of our gold reserve. I'm no economist, but even I could see that announcing that in advance would surely cause the market to fall - and it did.

 

Anyway, to return to Blairs triumphal exit. Apparently Mr Blair is supposed to have told the Cabinet that he didn't want Ministers paying tribute to him, adding "that can be left to another day." Can you feel the humility?

 

He then stood up, safely in front of a crown of specially chosen labour party members, and encouraged us all to look back at how far the country had come in 10 years, and how much better life is now then it was back then. Are we living in the same country?

 

Some figures, courtesy of todays Telegraph:

 

Average House Price: 1997=£68,525. 2007=£205,102

Cars on the road: 1997=26,974,000. 2007=33,522,106

Price per Litre of Unleaded Petrol: 1997=61.7p (of which 13.9p tax) 2007=93.6 (of which 23.2p tax)

Average household debt: 1997=£16,155. 2007=£54,318

Prison Population: 1997=61,114 (3,721 'lifers'). 2007=80,153 (8,759 'indeterminate sentences')

Average price of a pint of draught lager: 1997=£1.83. 2007=£2.60

Cost of a flight to New York: 1997=£329 (of which £24 tax). 2007=£348 (of which £208 tax)

 

Maybe I'm just an old cynic, but surely those aren't that good? Then again, it seems I'm not the only person to have been put off by what New Labour promised and has delivered...

 

Labour Party Membership: 1997=405,000. 2007=198,500

 

How about some other figures? MRSA cases per year in the NHS? Or even more damning, MRSA cases per year per pound of funding? Number of service personnel killed per year?

 

I don't have these figures, but I'd love to know them...

 

A couple of weeks back, Channel 4 showed a documentary called "The Great Global Warming Swindle". It was a really watchable, interesting programme, that I commend to everyone. It made various claims, all of which have annoyed 'conventional' climate change scientists. These basically boil down to the claim that global warming isn't caused by greenhouse gases, but actually by solar effects.

 

I am not qualified to make a definitive judgement on the claims made in the programme (and let's face it, who amoungst us is? Getting data you can trust is all but impossible), but there was one claim that stood out for me, and I find incredibly compelling. Even if you disagree with everything else the program said, then this single claim deserves, in my view, to be examined.

 

The conventional "climate change is caused by manmade carbon emissions" argument (as espoused in "An Inconvenient Truth") goes like this: "If you look back in the past using ice core data, you'll see that times of high atmospheric heat always correspond to times of high CO2 content. Therefore high CO2 causes atmospheric heating."

 

Seems fairly convincing. But TGGWS says that if you look more carefully at the graphs of temperature and CO2 you'll see that there is a consistent lag between the two, namely that the CO2 graph lags 800 years behind the temperature graph.

 

If this is true (and while I've seen various people attacking the data used on the program, I've not seen anyone attacking this particular piece of data) it turns the logic used by climate change scientists on its head. CO2 doesn't cause heating, it is caused by heating.

 

When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. If the atmosphere of the earth heats up (for whatever reason - TGGWS claims it's because of cycles in the solar activity, and I think I'm inclined to believe them, but that's beside the point) then it will take a long time for that heat to 'soak' into the oceans.

 

As the oceans slowly heat up, Le Chataliers Principle of Dynamic Equilibrium (yeah, OK, I'm showing off that I can remember anything from A level chemistry) means that more of the CO2 that is dissolved in the oceans will be released into the air, causing the CO2 levels to rise.

 

Thus heating drives atmospheric CO2 levels.

 

(I've been pondering on this for a while, and the best analogy I can come up with for their argument is: "If you look back in the past at times when it was raining, you'll see that lots of umbrellas were in use. Therefore umbrella use causes rainstorms.")

 

I read this article on the BBC website this morning: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6502239.stm

 

That feeds into this idea too - as the world heats up, peat bogs (and more generally the vast amount of biological material in the permafrost) defrosts too, causing more CO2 to be released, further exacerbating the effect.

 

Now this has been pointed out to me, it seems really surprisingly obvious, and a very compelling argument.

 

So what does this mean? Well, it doesn't mean that Climate Change isn't happening - it just means we need to be honest about why it's happening and to recognise what is and isn't in our control. No amount of 'turning off your TVs at night' and 'using energy saving lightbulbs' is going to stop the water rising, and Oxfordshire becoming beachfront property.

 

This doesn't even mean that being energy efficient is pointless - far from it. Our 'cheap' energy supplies drying up in the face of exponentially increasing demand is something we should all be aware of and fight against - but let's do it for valid reasons.

 

What it *does* mean is that Carbon Offsetting is bollocks - (well, certain forms at least). Planting trees isn't going to help (and may in fact harm the problem - trees in non-tropical regions can exacerbate global warming by reducing the amount of heat energy that gets reflected straight back into space). Buying energy saving lightbulbs for places which wouldn't tend to use them might help the energy crisis, but it's not going to help fight global warming.

 

I've even seen claims that airplanes contribute to reducing atmospheric heating. Their contrails leave water droplets in the air that cause incoming solar energy to be reflected back out of the atmosphere, thus reducing the overall heating effect. This is a very hard effect to measure, because to do so you'd need a couple of days in which no (or very few) planes flew over a large part of the world. The mass groundings of September 11th 2001 gave exactly the chance that scientists needed to measure these results, and supposedly the prediction based on that (admittedly small) sample is that the earth might be several degrees hotter were it not for the flights.

 

It can be argued that none of this evidence is conclusive of course - and I don't expect this blog entry to change anyones minds. I do hope that it might cause people to treat the claims of climate change scientists with a little more scepticism in future though - certainly the situation is not as black and white as people claim...

 

 

 

Please God, tell that this won... http://tinyurl.com/jjmdd

 

I heard this morning that they are doing "Strictly Come Pole-Dancing" for charidee - haha.

 

http://tinyurl.com/oogrf - if that's what you get in countries with no license fee, then here's my 120 quid...