“Hansen’s “Desperation 350″ - And Still They Travel”

An insightful post from Maurizio Morabito’s blog. A recommended read to anyone questioning the AGW dogma, as is Anthony Watts’ blog.

26 06 2008

Full-page ad on the IHT on June 23 by the Taellberg Forum:

<350

Remember this number for the rest of your life

It is left to the reader’s imagination to hear music like in an old Bela Lugosi movie…

Anyway: such an effort is apparently linked to the 20th anniversary of Hansen’s warning to the US Congress about global warming.

We are told, CO2 concentration at the time was 350 ppm, and now it’s 385. We are also told that “Science says” the worst effects happen above the level of 450ppm.

Looks like it’s not too much of a worry then? Don’t even think about it.

For unfathomable reasons (=otherwise a lot of people would become inconsequential), the ad says that we have to go back to levels lower than 350ppm anyway (and yes, there is no scientific basis at all for choosing the value “350″) “peacefully and deliberately, with all possible speed” (rather ominous words if you ask me…): because “<350 is essential to maintain human and planetary well-being“

(planetary???)

Why then “350″? Perhaps as a celebratory level for Hansen’s true guidance. But with planetary temperatures refusing to go up, I do expect lots more of this stuff in the near future

I have a small question though: if they believe in what the ad says then…why are they still travelling so much? For example, to the Taellberg Forum, june 26-29 in Sweden.

Licensed to hug

‘The formalisation of intergenerational contact contributes to the deskilling of adulthood. If adults are not expected to respond to problems in accordance with their experience and intuition they will have little incentive to develop the kind of skills required to manage children and young people.’ (p.ix)

Or anything else for that matter. Trust the State, distrust one another. Love Big Brother.

The dramatic escalation of child protection measures has succeeded in poisoning the relationship between the generations and creating an atmosphere of suspicion that actually increases the risks to children, according to a new study released today by Civitas.

In Licensed to Hug Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, argues that children need to have contact with a range of adult members of the community for their education and socialisation, but ‘this form of collaboration, which has traditionally underpinned intergenerational relationships, is now threatened by a regime that insists that adult/child encounters must be mediated through a security check’ (p.xii).
The scope of child protection has become immense. Since its formation in 2002 the Criminal Records Bureau has issued 15 million disclosures, but the whole operation has now been ratcheted up several notches by the passage of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006. This has led to the creation of the Independent Safeguarding Authority which, when it is rolled out in October 2009, will require CRB checks of 11.3 million people - over one quarter of the adult population of England.

Whereas adults would once routinely have rebuked children who were misbehaving, or helped children in distress, they now think twice about the consequences of interacting with other people’s children. One of the contributors to Licensed to Hug describes the culture of fear that pervades what should be ordinary relationships:

‘My daughter is allowed to play out in the street with kids from the neighbourhood. She said she was going to Semih’s house and I said OK. Ten minutes later Semih’s mom knocked at my door and said, ‘I must introduce myself as we haven’t met.’ I thought she was going to tell me her name, have a chat, but she said she was CRB checked and her husband was CRB checked and then went away. I still don’t know her name!’

As Frank Furedi comments: ‘When parents feel in need of official reassurance that other parents have passed the paedophile test before they even start on the pleasantries, this indicates that something has gone badly wrong in our communities.’ (p.xi)

In an atmosphere of mistrust, in which adults suspect other adults and children are taught to suspect anyone other than their parents, there is a feeling that it is best not to become involved. At the inquest of a two-year-old girl who had wandered into a pond and drowned, a man who had driven past and saw her obviously lost said that he did not go to help ‘because I thought someone would see me and think I was trying to abduct her’ (p.48). This terrible story has acquired the status of an urban legend, because so many people wonder what they would have done in similar circumstances. In an almost equally distressing story, one of the respondents to a survey carried out for this book explained the problems her partner experiences when he takes their two-year-old son swimming:

‘… the mothers in the cafe he was waiting in were giving him filthy looks (apparently when he walked in it was like a scene from a Western when the room goes silent and tumbleweed blows across the foreground). This happens whenever he goes out with our son on his own, especially if he takes him into a joint changing/feeding room. Now, there is nothing strange looking about him, he’s a perfectly normal guy, so I was just wondering if any other dads out there have the same experience? He’s considering stapling his police check to his forehead every time he goes out!’ (p.53)

As Furedi says: ‘We should question whether there is anything healthy … in a response where communities look at children’s own fathers with suspicion, but would balk at helping a lost child find their way home’ (p.54).

The effect on the voluntary sector

Anyone working for a voluntary organisation who comes into contact with children in any way has to take the paedophile test.

‘From Girl Guiders to football coaches, from Christmas-time Santas to parents helping out in schools, volunteers—once regarded as pillars of the community —have been transformed in the regulatory and public imagination into potential child abusers, barred from any contact with children until the database gives them the green light.’ (p.x)

The effect of this treatment is to put some people off volunteering altogether. The Volunteer Survey 2007 found that 13 per cent of men would not volunteer because they were worried people would think they were child abusers (p.16) and 28 per cent of those who responded to an online survey carried out for Licensed to Hug said they knew someone who had been put off volunteering by the CRB process (p.18). The Children’s Commissioner, Sir Al Aynsley Green, has said that nearly 50,000 girls are waiting to join the Guides because of a shortage of adult volunteers, partly caused by the red tape of the CRB process.

Perhaps the worst thing about all this is that the vetting procedure does not provide anything like a cast-iron guarantee that children will be safe with a particular adult. All it tells us is that the person has not been convicted of an offence in the past. What happens after the vetting procedure is unpredictable, so the process ‘works as a form of impression management. It provides a ritual of security rather than effective protection.’ (p.viii). It would be much better if adults could use their discretion and professional judgement – skills that are now becoming redundant:

‘The formalisation of intergenerational contact contri¬butes to the deskilling of adulthood. If adults are not expected to respond to problems in accordance with their experience and intuition they will have little incentive to develop the kind of skills required to manage children and young people.’ (p.ix)

Halt the juggernaut

Instead of creating an atmosphere of fear and suspicion, Licensed to Hug suggests that we need to ‘halt the juggernaut of regulation’ (p.55) and, instead, behave as if the majority of adults have no predatory attitudes towards children but, on the contrary, can be relied on to help them. If we could encourage greater openness and more frequent contact between the generations, we would all benefit.

‘The adult qualities of spontaneous compassion and commitment are, we argue, far more effective safeguarding methods than pieces of paper that promote the messages “Keep Out” and “Watch Your Back”.’ (p.40)

George Carlin

Sadly George died today. He will be greatly missed as a comedian and a voice of reason.

My favourite 3 clips from the many available on YouTube:

Here is a fitting tribute from The Nation:

George Carlin: American Radical

posted by John Nichols on 06/23/2008 @ 10:29am

I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately. — George Carlin,

The last vote that George Carlin said he cast in a presidential race was for George McGovern in 1972.

When Richard Nixon, who Carlin described as a member of a sub-species of humanity, overwhelmingly defeated McGovern, the comedian gave up on the political process.

“Now, there’s one thing you might have noticed I don’t complain about: politicians,” he explained in a routine that challenged all the premises of today’s half-a-loaf reformers. “Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain’t going to do any good; you’re just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here… like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There’s a nice campaign slogan for somebody: ‘The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.’”

Needless to say, George Carlin was not on message for 2008’s “change we can believe in” election season.

His was a darker and more serious take on the crisis – and the change of consciousness, sweeping in scope and revolutionary in character, that was required to address it.

Carlin may have stopped voting in 1972. But America’s most consistently savage social commentator for the best part of a half century, who has died at age 71, did not give up on politics.

In recent years, in front of audiences that were not always liberal, he tore apart the neo-conservative assault on liberty with a clarity rarely evidenced in the popular culture.

Recalling George Bush’s ranting about how the endless “war on terror” is a battle for freedom, Carlin echoed James Madison’s thinking with a simple question: “Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?”

Carlin gave the Christian right – and the Christian left – no quarter. “I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State,” Carlin said. “My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.”

Carlin’s take on the Ronald Reagan administration is the best antidote to the counterfactual romanticization of the former president – in which even Barack Obama has engaged – remains the single finest assessment of Reagan and his inner circle. While Carlin did not complain much about politicians, he made an exception with regard to the great communicator. Recorded in 1988 at the Park Theater in Union City, New Jersey, and later released as an album — What Am I Doing in New Jersey? – his savage recollection of the then-concluding Reagan-Bush years opened with the line: “I really haven’t seen this many people in one place since they took the group photograph of all the criminals and lawbreakers in the Ronald Reagan administration.”

But there was no nostalgia for past fights, no resting on laurels, for this topical comedian. He read the papers, he followed the news, he asked questions – the interviews I did with Carlin over the years were more conversations than traditional Q & A’s – and he turned it all into a running commentary that focused not so much on politics as on the ugly intersection of power and economics.

No one, not Obama, not Hillary Clinton and certainly not John McCain, caught the zeitgeist of the vanishing American dream so well as Carlin. “The owners of this country know the truth: It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Not just aware of but steeped in the traditions of American populism – more William Jennings Bryan and Eugene Victor Debs than Bill Clinton or John Kerry – Carlin preached against the consolidation of wealth and power with a fire-and-brimstone rage that betrayed a deep moral sense that could never quite be cloaked with four-letter words.

“The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying – lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else,” ranted the comedian whose routines were studied in graduate schools.

“But I’ll tell you what they don’t want,” Carlin continued. “They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.“

Carlin did not want Americans to get involved with the system.

He wanted citizens to get angry enough to remake the system.

Carlin was a leveler of the old, old school. And no one who had so public a platform – as the first host of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” a regular on broadcast and cable televisions shows, a best-selling author and a favorite character actor in films (he was even the narrator of the American version of he provided the narrative voice for the American version of the children’s show “Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends”) – did more to challenge accepted wisdom regarding our political economy.

“Let’s suppose we all just materialized on Earth and there was a bunch of potatoes on the ground, okay? There’s just six of us. Only six humans. We come into a clearing and there’s potatoes on the ground. Now, my instinct would be, let’s everybody get some potatoes. “Everybody got a potato? Joey didn’t get a potato! He’s small, he can’t hold as many potatoes. Give Joey some of your potatoes.” “No, these are my potatoes!” That’s the Republicans. “I collected more of them, I got a bigger pile of potatoes, they’re mine. If you want some of them, you’re going to have to give me something.” “But look at Joey, he’s only got a couple, they won’t last two days.” That’s the fuckin’ difference! And I’m more inclined to want to share and even out,” he explained in an interview several years ago with the Onion.

“I understand the marketplace, but government is supposed to be here to redress the inequities of the marketplace,” Carlin continued. “That’s one of its functions. Not just to protect the nation, secure our security and all that shit. And not just to take care of great problems that are trans-state problems, that are national, but also to make sure that the inequalities of the marketplace are redressed by the acts of government. That’s what welfare was about. There are people who really just don’t have the tools, for whatever reason. Yes, there are lazy people. Yes, there are slackers. Yes, there’s all of that. But there are also people who can’t cut it, for any given reason, whether it’s racism, or an educational opportunity, or poverty, or a fuckin’ horrible home life, or a history of a horrible family life going back three generations, or whatever it is. They’re crippled and they can’t make it, and they deserve to rest at the commonweal. That’s where my fuckin’ passion lies.”

Like the radicals of the early years of the 20th century, whose politics he knew and respected, Carlin understood that free-speech fights had to come first. And always pushed the limit – happily choosing an offensive word when a more polite one might have sufficed. By 1972, the year he won the first of four Grammys for best comedy album, he had developed his most famous routine: “Seven Words (You Can’t Say on Television).”

That summer, at a huge outdoor show in Milwaukee, he uttered all seven of them in public – and was promptly arrested for disturbing the peace.

When a version of the routine was aired in 1973 on WBAI, the Pacifica Foundation radio station in New York,. Pacifica received a citation from the FCC. Pacifica was ordered to pay a fine for violating federal regulations prohibiting the broadcast of “obscene” language. The ensuing free-speech fight made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rile 5-4 against the First Amendment to the Constitution, Pacifica and Carlin.

Amusingly, especially to the comedian, a full transcript of the routine ended up in court documents associated with the case, F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978).

“So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of,” recalled Carlin. Proud enough that you can find the court records on the comedian’s website: www.georgecarlin.com

There will, of course, be those who dismiss Carlin as a remnant of the sixties who introduced obscenity to the public discourse – just as there will be those who misread his critique of the American political and economic systems as little more than verbal nihilism. In fact, George Carlin was, like the radicals of an earlier age, an idealist – and a patriot –of a deeper sort than is encountered very often these days.

Carlin explained himself best in one of his last interviews. “There is a certain amount of righteous indignation I hold for this culture, because to get back to the real root of it, to get broader about it, my opinion that is my species–and my culture in America specifically–have let me down and betrayed me. I think this species had great, great promise, with this great upper brain that we have, and I think we squandered it on God and Mammon. And I think this culture of ours has such promise, with the promise of real, true freedom, and then everyone has been shackled by ownership and possessions and acquisition and status and power,” he said. “And perhaps it’s just a human weakness and an inevitable human story that these things happen. But there’s disillusionment and some discontent in me about it. I don’t consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist. But I understand the word ‘cynic’ has more than one meaning, and I see how I could be seen as cynical. ‘George, you’re cynical.’ Well, you know, they say if you scratch a cynic you find a disappointed idealist. And perhaps the flame still flickers a little, you know?”

Rondo

I’ve just had a message through Friends Reunited from someone I used to meet at The Blues Club at Langford nr. Biggleswade almost 40 years ago. Thanks John, this is for you

Time’s up for AGW?

I have to admit that this man is rapidly becoming a hero of mine.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, climate alarmism

THE IPCC: ON THE RUN AT LAST

By OnTheWeb: Bob Carter Tuesday, March 25, 2008

UN climate body in panic mode as satellite temperatures turn down and a hard winter lashes both hemispheres

A soprano thrillingly hits her top-A, sighs with relief at achieving the desired effect, and moves on. But not the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) whose climate alarmism started to crescendo in 2001 in the Third Assessment Report (3AR) with the statement that “most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely (>66% probable) to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations”.

Recently, in their Fourth Assessment Report (4AR), and faced with their failure to convince the public that the sky is falling, the IPCC delivers even more preposterous advice in ever shriller tones, saying that “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely (>90% probable) due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations”. The wobble around top-A is clearly discernible.

The press, most of whom have firmly identified with the alarmist cause, continues to appease the Green gods by faithfully running IPCC’s now unrealistic scientific propaganda, thereby stoking public alarm; the science is a done deal, they say, and the time has come to stop talking. According to UK journalist, Geoffrey Lean, all that is lacking to solve the global warming “crisis” is political will from governments.

Well, thank the Lord for that lack. For the IPCC’s 2007 final Summary for Policymakers shows that the climate alarmists are at last on the run. Their evidence for dangerous, human-caused global warming, always slim, now lies exposed in tatters for all to see.
In contrast, the alternative, persuasive and non-alarmist view of climate change is well summarized in two recently issued and readily available documents. The first is a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations, which was released at the UN’s Bali conference last December, supported by the signatures of 103 eminent professional persons. The second is the Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change, the release of which coincided with the launch of the International Climate Science Coalition at a major climate rationalist conference in New York in early March.

The evidence for dangerous global warming adduced by the IPCC has never been strong on empirical science. Endless circumstantial scare campaigns have been run about melting glaciers, more droughts and storms and floods, sea-level rise and polar bears, but all founder on one inescapable problem – as does Mr. Al Gore’s over-hyped science fiction film. And that is that we live on a naturally variable planet. Change is what planet Earth does on all scales, and so far not one of the alleged effects of human-caused global warming has been shown to lie outside normal planetary variation. Sea-level rising? Sure, it happens. And the appropriate response is adaptation, as the Dutch have known for centuries.

Stuck with the absence of empirical evidence for dangerous warming or abnormal change, in 2001 the IPCC turned to graphmanship, giving prominence in its 3AR to the so-called “hockey-stick” record of temperature over the last 1000 years. The hockey-stick graphic, which appeared to show dramatic increases of temperature during the 20th century compared with earlier times, has now been exposed as statistical chicanery and, thankfully, is nowhere to be seen in the 4AR.

No hockey-stick and no empirical evidence, what is a man to do? Well, obviously, turn to virtual reality rather than real reality: PlayStation 4 here we come.

The IPCC’s expensive and complex computer models can be programmed to produce any desired result, and it is therefore not surprising that they uniformly predict warming since 1990. Meanwhile, the real-world global average temperature has stubbornly refused to obey this stricture. It exhibits no significant increase since 1998, and the preliminary 2007 year-end temperature confirms the continuation of a temperature plateau since 1998 to which is now appended a cooling trend over the last 3 years.

Is global cooling next?

“Best fit” of yearly average temperature

Lower atmosphere global temperature differences (0C) from 1979 – 1998 average

“Global warming theory indicates that temperature rise due to increasing carbon dioxide emissions should be most prominent at heights of 5-10 km in the lower atmosphere; instead, more warming is occurring at the surface. For the lower atmosphere, the satellite data indicate that, since the 1998 El Nino when temperatures spiked 1C due to a rise in water vapour emissions (the principal “greenhouse gas”), global temperatures dropped sharply, then stabilized and now show signs of continuing down - is global cooling next? (data courtesy of Professors John Christy and Roy Spencer, University of Alabama, Huntsville; a best-fitted spline curve represents longer term temperature trends).”

That there is a mismatch between model prediction and 2007 climate reality is again unsurprising. For as IPCC senior scientist Kevin Trenberth noted recently: “. . . there are no (climate) predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been”; instead there are only “what if” projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios. Trenberth continues, “None of the models used by IPCC is initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models corresponds even remotely to the current observed climate”.

Knowing that their models are non-predictive and that despite their exhortations world temperature isn’t currently increasing, the IPCC has the effrontery to argue in 4AR that a decline in the sun’s activity and increased eruptions from volcanoes would “likely have produced cooling” of the planet were it not for offsetting human-caused warming. And this when there have been no recent volcanic eruptions of global import, and after 15 years during which the warming alarmists have consistently denied that solar activity is a significant cause of recent climate change. The self-serving nature of these arguments is breathtaking, and transparently the alarmists are now positioning themselves to explain away any continuation of the downturn in temperature that is now underway short-term.

Such stunts deny scientific method, because they fly in the face of Occam’s Razor, or the principle of parsimony. Of course volcanic dust or other aerosols might have affected the global temperature over the last few years. But only persons who are searching desperately to save a favourite hypothesis make such assertions in the absence of reliable evidence.

To avoid acknowledging the recent flat-lining of global temperature, IPCC alarmists have another favourite pea and thimble - or is it elephant and circus tent – trick, which is to assert some variation on the statement that “eleven of the last twelve years (1995-2006) rank among the twelve warmest years in the instrumental record”. Given the cyclicity of the climate record, and that the planet is probably now poised near the peak of an ascending temperature cycle, this statement is no more useful than observing that over an annual cycle the hottest days each year cluster around midsummer’s day.

Having failed to convince the world that human-caused warming of the atmosphere is dangerous, IPCC has been casting around for new causes to espouse. A Royal Society of London report in 2005 on “Ocean acidification due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide” has proved to be good feedstock, because of its claim that the average pH of the oceans will fall by 0.5 units by 2100 if global emissions keep rising at their current rate. That this estimate is known to be exaggerated by a factor of about 3 has not prevented the IPCC and others from recently publicizing the ocean acidification legend. Clearly, they now seek to move the epicentre of the climate scare from the atmosphere, which stubbornly refuses to warm, to the ocean, whose depths doubtless still contain many scientific surprises.

The roughly 50 computer experts and scientists who form the core advisory group for the IPCC’s stance must have realized for several years now that the game was up. There is indeed copious evidence that climate is changing, as it always has; and that natural biological and physico-chemical systems - again as always - are changing in response. But as to human causation – the evidential cupboard is bare.

For the last three years, satellite-measured average global temperature has been declining. Given the occurrence also of record low winter temperatures and massive snowfalls across both hemispheres this year, IPCC members have now entered panic mode, the whites of their eyes being clearly visible as they seek to defend their now unsustainable hypothesis of dangerous, human-caused global warming.

To try to top “The Ring of the Niebelung”, composers after Wagner abandoned classical key structures and turned to the apparent aural chaos of atonalism. Similarly, to pursue the higher cause of saving the planet, the IPCC has now largely abandoned classical (empirical) science and adopted the sophistry of deterministic computer modelling. The result is neither melodious nor meaningful, let alone useful for sensible environmental planning. The time has surely arrived for the New Zealand government to commission an independent reassessment of the UN’s hysterical global warming scare.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Bob Carter is a Research Professor at James Cook University, Queensland, Australia, who studies ancient environments and climate, and whose website is at http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/new_page_1.htm

Posted 03/25 at 07:08 AM Email (Permalink)

Cheriton

(Still a work in progress! )

Fred Singer

Maurizio Morabito at The Unbearable Nakedness of CLIMATE CHANGE has some pertinent words to say about the hounding of climate change realists. I agree with him completely!

84-Year-Old Accused of Future Deaths, Extinctions and Economic Damage

29 03 2008

Goebbelism has hit ABC News where AGW skeptic Fred Singer has been accused of being able to delay “government action on global warming by a decade or more by convincing the public through a disinformation campaign that there was an ongoing debate among scientists about global warming”. Well, for one, I wish I’ll be able to do a tenth of that, when I am 84.Seriously, NewsBusters is reporting Dr Singer has requested an apology. Let’s see. But ABC’s shameful portrait of the “grandfather of the global warming skeptics” is just the umpteenth confirmation that the whole Global Warming struggle is not about science, or the environment. It is about freedom, the freedom AGWers are trying to stifle in all sorts of ways.

LOL 3

This appealed to my surreal sense of humour

see more crazy cat pics

Iraq

Sometimes I feel I live a charmed life. I live where I want to, on a smallholding in the countryside, in a comfortable house surrounded by fields, with all the amenities connected and working. My children are healthy, intelligent, well educated, and free to go where they wish. Best of all, no one is dropping bombs on us.

Although not the official reason given for invading Iraq five years ago (WMD), we were, and still are, told that it was to liberate the people of Iraq from Saddam Hussein (regime change is in fact illegal). The ‘liberation’ was, you may recall, kicked off with several nights of Shock and Awe, which liberated several thousand Iraqis permanently, many of them children.

If I recall correctly Iraq is the first ‘war’ to be blogged about, including bloggers from Iraq on the receiving end of our bombs. The most famous of course is Salam Pax with his Where is Raed? blog. Some time later Raed himself started his own blog Raed in the Middle which continues to this day, More interesting to me has been Raed’s mother Faiza’s blog A Family in Baghdad. Middle aged, outspoken, and political, Faiza has always says what she means, just like most middle aged women. When her youngest son was arrested (because of comments left by others on his blog), and disappeared into a notorious Baghdad prison (fortunately to emerge safely) she decided to leave Iraq and now lives in Jordan. She still blogs about Iraq.

Then there is Baghdad Burning. ‘Riverbend’ chronicled the trials and tribulations of her family. The bombing, the lack of water and electricity, the growing restrictions for girls and women. Eventually the lack of security and growing physical danger of living in Baghdad forced the family to flee to Syria (like millions of others). There has been no news of the family since October 2007.

These blogs told the stories of Iraqis that don’t make the mainstream media. The ordinary lives turned upside down. The hardships wrought by the invasion. The milieu of daily life and concerns about children and families. Families like ours. What right had we to bring these horrors and hardships to them in the name of ‘liberation’.

To go back to the early days of the invasion Riverbend tells us how it affected those our governments chose to ‘liberate’:

Monday, September 08, 2003

Under the Palm Leaves

The water was off and on again today. We filled all the bottles and containers. The water pressure was really low and evidently, our super-low garden faucet is one of the only ones in the area dribbling water at intervals. The neighbors have all sent buckets, pots and messages of love and gratitude… perhaps I have found a job.

The sun was just beginning to set and the sky was a combination of blue, orange and gray. I was standing, in the warm, dry grass, waiting for a pot to fill with water, when I heard someone knocking the garden gate. It was Ihsan, our ten-year-old neighbor across the street. He was holding freshly made ‘khubz’ (something like whole-wheat pita bread) and squinting across the street at his next-door-neighbor’s house.

Ihsan: They found Abu Ra’ad…
Me: What?! Did they? Is he…
Ihsan: He’s dead. Ra’ad and his sisters are at my house.

I looked at the house across the street and saw that three cars were lined up in front of it, as if in a funeral procession. Ihsan followed my gaze and shook his head solemnly, “They didn’t bring him home- they’ll bury him tomorrow at dawn.” He handed me the bread and turned to run back home. As he darted away to cross the street, he lost a flip-flop. He squealed as his foot hit the hot asphalt and hopped around on one leg like some bizarre stork.

I continued watching the late Abu Ra’ad’s beige, stucco house with sadness and relief. The once green creeper all along the sides was yellow and decaying. The curtains were drawn on dusty windows and the whole house looked almost abandoned. The only signs of life were the shiny tiles of the driveway, washed daily by well-meaning neighbors.

They had finally found Abu Ra’ad.

Abu Ra’ad (meaning ‘father of Ra’ad’) was a lawyer with his own private practice… if it could be called that. It was an office in a crowded, mercantile area in Baghdad large enough for three desks: one secretary and a partner.

On April 10, in the middle of the chaos, Abu Ra’ad left his house, his wife and three children to go check on his parents, whom he had lost contact with a week earlier. At 10 am, he got into an old Toyota, said a prayer and headed out to seek his family. He never came back.

For 3 days, Umm Ra’ad (mother of ‘Ra’ad’) thought he was held up at his parents’ house for some reason. Perhaps her husband had found his family hurt? Maybe he had found a parent dead- after all, his father was very sick and old… Maybe the fighting was so heavy, he couldn’t make it out of their area? The possibilities were endless. Finally, one of the other neighbors delivered a note to Umm Ra’ad’s brother asking him to please visit Abu Ra’ad’s family and find out if he was okay. After a long day, Umm Ra’ad’s brother visited her home, grim- Abu Ra’ad wasn’t at his parents’ home. He never made it and no one knew where he was.

For 7 days, everyone thought he was being detained by the Americans. We heard that hundreds of civilians were taken prisoner simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Abu Ra’ad’s younger brother, and his brother-in-law, visited authorities every day. They went to the various hotels, they visited the two or three remaining hospitals, and went over endless lists of detainees and POWs in search of Abu Ra’ad.

By the end of April, his family had resigned themselves to Abu Ra’ad’s death. His 35-year-old wife was wearing black from head-to-toe in anticipation of the news she knew she was bound, sooner or later, to receive.

I remember visiting her for the first time in early May. It was an awkward visit because we wanted to hold out hope, yet we knew there was none to give. She sat, very small and dark, on a couch in the living room, shredding tissues listlessly and listening vaguely to the words of commiseration and sympathy that, obviously, brought little or no comfort. Her 3 children, aged 1, 4 and 10 sat near her, unbearably quiet and calm. They sat gauging the situation by their mother’s expression. She knew he was dead, but she couldn’t bring herself to cry.

And still, they didn’t give up the search. They traced his route from his home to Al-Jami’a Quarter, where his parents lived, pausing at every burnt vehicle to examine it and asking the people in the surrounding areas whether they had seen a white 1985 Toyota being driven by a 40-year-old man? Maybe it had been fired at by a tank? Maybe it was hit by an Apache? People were sympathetic, but helpless. No white Toyota- a blue Kia with 6 passengers, a red Volkswagen with a mother, father and two kids… but no white Toyota. Every single time, they were referred to the makeshift graves along the main roads and highways. The temporary graves, for several weeks, lined the main roads of Baghdad.

As the tanks and Apaches invaded the city, they shot left and right at any vehicle in their path. The areas that got it worst were Al-Dawra and Al-A’adhamia. People in residential areas didn’t know what to do with the corpses in the burnt vehicles that had come from other parts of the city. They were the corpses of people and families who were trying to get away from the heavy fighting in their own areas, some of them had been officially evacuated.

The corpses sat decomposing in the heat, beyond identification. Some people tried asking the troops to help deal with them, but the reaction was mainly, “That’s not my job.” Of course not, how silly… your job is to burn the cars, we bury the corpses.

Finally, the people began to bury the corpses along the roadside- near the burnt vehicles so that family members looking for the car would find their loved ones not very far off.

For several weeks, you could see little piles of dirt all over Baghdad, and along the highways leading outside of the city, marked with bricks, or stones, or signs and, always, with palm leaves. The drying, wilting palm leaves were buried, standing up, to mark the graves. Some of the graves had little cardboard placards stuck carefully under a pile of stones to help family members: Adult male, adult female, 2 children in black Mercedes. Adult male, small boy in a white pick-up.

Sometimes the graves were marked by the license plate of the car the victims were in. But most of them were marked with the palm leaves.

For several weeks, there would be people stooping, all along the way, trying to decide if they knew, or recognized, any of the dead. That’s what Abu Ra’ad’s family did, all through May, June, July and August.

Finally, 3 days ago, an old man in his Abu Ra’ad’s parents’ neighborhood told them how the roads were blocked to their area for a couple of days, and people coming from the other end of the city had had to detour. There were several burnt cars in an area on the suburbs, in their own makeshift graveyard. They should look there; maybe they would find their son.

They finally found him, this morning, in an area outside his expected course. One of the several burnt cars, dragged into a dusty field, was a white 1985 Toyota with the skeleton of a car-seat in the back. Not far off were the graves. They located the ‘adult male in the white Toyota’ and with the help of some sympathetic men in the neighborhood, unearthed Abu Ra’ad for identification.

We went to give our condolences to Umm Ra’ad. The children were at Ihsan’s house and she was surrounded by relatives and family members, grieving. Kerosene lamps and candles were lit in the darkened living room; they threw light all over the drawn, grief-stricken faces. She was finally crying.

Tomorrow, at dawn, he will be exhumed by his family and officially buried in the over-crowded family graveyard, under one of the dozens of palm trees, in the place reserved for his father.

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This post is brought to you as part of the March 19 Iraq War Blogswarm.

Blair Climate Project

Excuse me while I wet myself laughing

“He is backed by the Climate Group, a not-for-profit organisation supported by business.” I bet he is. I wonder how much money he, and they, stand to make out of it.

Blair to lead campaign on climate change

Act urgently or global warming will be irreversible, former PM warns

• Patrick Wintour
• The Guardian,
• Friday March 14 2008

This article appeared in the Guardian on Friday March 14 2008 on p1 of the Top stories section. It was last updated at 11:45 on March 14 2008.

Tony Blair in front of the American flag on November 27 2007. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Tony Blair is to lead a new international team to tackle the intractable problem of securing a global deal on climate change which would have the backing of China and America.

The former prime minister believes he can help prepare a blueprint for an agreement to cut carbon emissions by 50% by 2050, and has the backing of the White House, the UN and Europe, including Gordon Brown.

He told the Guardian he has been working on the project with a group of climate change experts since he left office last summer, and will publish an interim report to the G8 group of industrialised nations this summer.

“This is extremely urgent. A 50% cut by 2050 has to be a central component of this. We have to try this year to get that agreed, because the moment you do agree that, then you have something for everyone to focus upon. We need a true and proper global deal, and that needs to include America and China,” Blair said.

He is due to reveal the initiative this weekend at a meeting of the G20 in Japan, before travelling to discuss the plans with the Chinese and Indian governments. “There is a deadlock. Everyone is agreed where we want to get to, but unless you agree on the framework for getting there, you are left with a process and not a result,” he said.

He said the world had less than two years to secure a deal, or accept that global warming is irreversible.

“The fact of the matter is that if we do not take substantial action over the next two years, then by 2020 we will thinking seriously about adaptation rather than prevention.”

Blair played a key role in putting climate change on to the international agenda, and in trying to persuade the Bush administration that it could play a part in a global deal to cut carbon emissions.

He will formally launch the initiative at a meeting in Tokyo following talks with Yasuo Fukuda, the prime minister of Japan, the current president of the G8. “People often say to me there are a lot of climate change plans out there, and I say ‘how many of them are politically doable? So the experts are providing technical knowledge, and specialist insight, but what I am trying to do is guide it politically,” Blair said.

He is backed by the Climate Group, a not-for-profit organisation supported by business. He is drawing together a team of international experts, including Sir Nicholas Stern, the author of the groundbreaking report on the costs of climate change, and specialists from China, Japan, the US and Europe.

The UN needs to agree a new climate change deal by the end of the year to replace the Kyoto treaty that expires in 2012. Talks in Bali in December nearly collapsed with US insisting it will not join a deal that does not include the world’s second largest total emitter China.

The Chinese insist that their emissions are dwarfed by the US, and America must make the main contribution. The UN conference in Bali agreed there had to be contributions by all countries, but no agreement exists on what this means.

Blair said: “Essentially what everyone has agreed is that climate change is a serious problem, it is man-made, we require a global deal, that there should be a substantial cut in emissions at the heart of it, and this global deal should involve everyone, including in particular America on the one hand and China on the other, so it is the developed and developing world.

“The question is what is the framework that gets everyone in the deal?”

Following an interim report in June, his team intends to set out the continuing differences between the big countries next summer, then produce economic models to show that fears over the sacrifices required can be overcome.

“The one thing I am absolutely sure of is that we are not going to get the action necessary by telling people not to consume. The Chinese and Indian governments are determined to grow their economies. They have hundreds of millions of very poor people - they are going to industrialise, they are going to raise their living standards, and quite right too.”

The initiative was disclosed yesterday as the prime minister, Gordon Brown, launched a campaign to get Europe to slash taxes on “green goods” such as environmentally friendly fridges, telling government leaders the move would be a powerful lever in the fight against global warming.

The Brussels summit of 27 government leaders last night grappled with a timetable for an ambitious action plan to slash greenhouse gases by 20% by 2020.

· This article was amended on Friday March 14 2008. The not-for-profit organisation backing Tony Blair’s project to develop a blueprint for tackling climate change is the Climate Group, not the Climate Change Group. This has been corrected.

Dolphin

Last Updated: Wednesday, 12 March 2008, 11:31 GMT

NZ dolphin rescues beached whales

Moko is well known locally for playing with swimmers in the bay Moko the dolphin

A dolphin has come to the rescue of two whales which had become stranded on a beach in New Zealand. Conservation officer Malcolm Smith told the BBC that he and a group of other people had tried in vain for an hour and a half to get the whales to sea.

The pygmy sperm whales had repeatedly beached, and both they and the humans were tired and set to give up, he said.

But then the dolphin appeared, communicated with the whales, and led them to safety.

The bottlenose dolphin, called Moko by local residents, is well known for playing with swimmers off Mahia beach on the east coast of the North Island.

Mr Smith said he gave the dolphin a pat to say thank you

Mr Smith said that just when his team was flagging, the dolphin showed up and made straight for them.

“I don’t speak whale and I don’t speak dolphin,” Mr Smith told the BBC, “but there was obviously something that went on because the two whales changed their attitude from being quite distressed to following the dolphin quite willingly and directly along the beach and straight out to sea.”

He added: “The dolphin did what we had failed to do. It was all over in a matter of minutes.”

Back at play

Mr Smith said he felt fortunate to have witnessed the extraordinary event, and was delighted for the whales, as in the past he has had to put down animals which have become beached.

He said that the whales have not been seen since, but that the dolphin had returned to its usual practice of playing with swimmers in the bay.

“I shouldn’t do this I know, we are meant to remain scientific,” Mr Smith said, “but I actually went into the water with the dolphin and gave it a pat afterwards because she really did save the day.”

E. Gary Gygax

Although a geek I never got around to playing DnD. However, my youngest does and has a great time with his mates. My other two spend far too much time playing other role playing games that owe their existence to DnD. So thanks Mr Gygax for giving the sun adverse something to do with their time, and the chance make friends while still being a geek.

From my favourite web comic Order of the Stick, ‘Roy’ (three months dead and still waiting for the half of the team that has his decomposing body, to reconnect with the other half of the team that has the power the resurrect him; he isn’t waiting patiently!) pays tribute for us all:

(click on thumbnail)

Beeswax

Sewing with linen thread can be troublesome, even with the best 80/2 lace thread as I’ve found out. I also sew with DMC linen embroidery thread which is fairly loosely spun. The problem is that as you sew the thread starts to become very soft with wear, and can eventually break. This happens particularly quickly with the DMC thread. The answer is to wax the thread, as they did in the seventeenth century. The best, and most authentic, wax to use (if my vegan friends will forgive me) is beeswax.

Up until now I’ve been using the 1 lb block I’d bought for a, yet to be started, candle making project. As you can imagine this is a little unwieldy. So, as I couldn’t be bothered to melt some down to make a smaller block, I turned to my favourite internet site and bought these:

Aren’t they yummy. It’s lovely clean wax, and smells divine too. Almost good enough to eat! (They come from a chap in Hertfordshire who uses solar power to process his wax. He takes great pride in his product, and it is well worth the very few extra pennies (compared with the commercial beeswax available). He also sends an information sheet about how beeswax is made by the bees, how it is refined and some recipes for beeswax polish. See: http://search.ebay.co.uk/_W0QQsassZjimw1735 ).

Coating thread with wax, by drawing it over the block of beeswax, stiffens and strengthens it. The thread is thus protected from the wear it gets from being drawn through fabric.

As you can see here (the unwaxed thread is in the foreground) :

I’ve almost finished a hand sewn smock for myself (just the sleeve cuffs to finish). Pictures later on the 17c Costume page. I’ve now another smock to make, for my sister, but she isn’t as anal as I am and is happy for it to be machine sewn. Which is just as well; I’m running out of time!

Linen

Today I have mostly been ironing linen. I generally hate ironing, but ironing linen is a supreme pleasure! I bought some roll ends of white handkerchief weight linen off eBay, which I have washed to pre-shrink it, along with some raw unbleached linen to take off the 21st century optic whiteness. It’s still slightly too white but it will have to do*.

Linen has to be ironed ‘damp’; ironing over wrinkles when dry will damage the threads in the fabric. Nowadays damp to us means only just not dry, this is too dry. Linen needs to be almost as wet as after a good spinning! Get it right and it’s a pleasure to iron, too dry and you land up having to spray it with water. Guess who left it hanging too long today…

Anyway, I’ve been singing along as I iron

*Update: After ironing and thorough drying it now looks much better; a nice milky off white. A successful experiment. I shall have to keep an eye out for further supplies of unbleached linen.