Plimer versus Monbiot: Points victory to Monbiot.

So the big match has finally occurred, live on Aussie TV.

Climate change denier, spokesperson for an Exxon funded think tank and Spectator cover boy Ian Plimer appears to have finally met his Waterloo.

Having wimped out of an earlier debate by refusing to answer some basic questions on his book, he has finally found himself face to face with his nemesis in a televised debate.

Straight questions from our George, evasion and random facts from Plimer. In particular he failed to answer the question as to why, as a geologist, he doesn't seem to know how much CO2 volcanoes admit. Actuallyhis failure to stand by his claim suggests he does know how much CO2 they emit, but that he also knows that to say so will leave his credibility lower than the submarine volcanoes he erroneously claimed weren't in the US Geological Survey figures.

He also ducked, dodged and weaved over his claim that global warming stopped in 1998, a claim he makes no less than 16 times in one chapter. This is simply a bit of legerdemaine: 1998 remains the hottest year ever recorded, but 8 of the 10 hottest years ever recorded have occurred since then and this is the hottest decade ever recorded. Again, Plimer's evasion would suggest he knows this.

Plimer also rather amusingly called Monbiot, who is descended from French aristocracy, "ill bred". I guess that may be an Aussie thing. He also waved his book to the camera a suspicously large number of times.

No knockout blow, but the shows emails appear to give Monbiot a clear victory, with Plimer seen as the fact dodger he clearly is. Nice one George.

One person who really should watch this debate and hang his head in shame though is the new presenter of Radio 4's flagship Today program. Webb had Plimer in the studio last month and gave him the lightest grilling anyone on the program has ever had. Webb, an LSE educated economist, clearly doesn't do science.

But then, neither does Plimer.

Saving Swallows Wood: The Indirect Approach

I've tried to avoid putting up trivia about my life on this blog, but as a certain amount of useless personal tit tat is almost compulsory in the blogosphere I would like to mention that last night I had a very pleasant evening in the Bulls Head in Tintwistle with our local anti-road activists, The Campaign to Save Swallows Wood.

Possibly this will be the last festive gathering of this fine body of people as they seem to have done what very few such campaigners have managed and actually won. After a two year public enquiry it seems that there is no money for the road and if any bypass is ever built it will be somewhat reduced in size and will go nowhere near the titular forest. Bravo and all that.

When I first considered moving to Glossop nearly ten years ago it had a number of points going for it: work, Kinder Scout on the doorstep, live music, a haunted valley, and most importantly it wasn't in Yorkshire. It also offered the possibility of a real live road protest right on my doorstep. No more burning up fossil fuels running up and down the country to lie down in front of bulldozers, when they come to build the A57/A628 bypass I would be able to D-lock myself to a JCB and still be home for tea.

Alas it wasn't to be. Thanks in small part to the campaigners the money has been spent on something less controversial and Swallows Wood appears safe. How a disparate, and frequently feuding, group of campaigners stopped a road that had the support of the Department of Transport, Tameside Council and the local MP, not to mention overwhelming, in the beginning at least, local support is an interesting study.

They lobbied and protested, wrote letters and made Freedom of Information requests. They received help from the Campaign to Preserve Rural England, who took time out from opposing wind farms to actually do something useful. However possibly the most important thing they did was adopt, unknowingly, what the military strategist Basil Liddell Hart called The Indirect Approach.

Liddell Hart had studied the slaughter of the First World War to see if there were better ways to do things. He had also read the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu and his conclusion was|

"In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there; a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance."

Unfortunately for Liddell Hart the only people who read his work were the Germans, who used his ideas to bypass the Maginot Line and knock France out of the Second World War.

The Campaign to Save Swallows Wood didn't have any tanks, but they did have considerable lobbying power and following Basil's strategy they briefly turned their fire away from the DoT and its backers and, like Romell sending his tanks to attack neutral Belgium, they set upon the previously uncommitted Peak District National Park Authority.

The National Park weren't in favour of the road, but they'd agreed not to oppose it when the DoT promised in return to drop other plans for road building elsewhere in the Peak District. However faced by some vigorous lobbying form the campaigners they were forced to shake off their neutrality and step in to oppose a road that would mostly be built through open country in the National Park and which would increase lorry traffic.

The result was that when the Public Enquiry opened, the Department of Transport wasn't just faced by a bunch of amateur activists, but by a fully constituted legal body in full war cry. We'll never know exactly which way the chairman of the enquiry was really leaning, but in the bits of the enquiry I personally endured he certainly seemed to be taking the National Park seriously.

All campaigns are different, and like Generals constantly re-fighting the last war it doesn't pay to copy previous successes too faithfully, but any campaigners out their tackiling a seemingly invincible foe could do worse than try to find their own way of following Liddell Hart's doctrine.

Just keep your tanks out of Belgium.

Bhopal Plus 25

I wrote this five years ago.

Tragically very little has changed.

Bhopal: Still Waiting for Justice

Pagans are not on the whole the sort of people who care much for large organisations. Although it’s not an easy thing to say who or what a typical Pagan is, they are rather more likely to be found out on their own repairing dry stone walls or plying their trade as alternative therapists rather than being chained to a desk in a large corporation. When two or three Pagans gather together to discuss the Pagan Federation, its size and omnipotence are not generally considered to be amongst the organisation’s virtues. Indeed one suspects that should ever a McCrystals plc emerge to buy up all the New Age shops in Britain, most Pagans would then choose to look elsewhere for their herbs and incense.

However, like it or not, we live in a corporate world. Multinational corporations account for about a

quarter of world trade and many have a turnover equivalent to a medium sized country. For many environmentalists and social justice campaigners, as well as the ragged assortment of people who the media call ‘anti-Capitalists’, the increasing globalisation of financial markets and world trade is a cause for concern. Demonstrations, peaceful and otherwise, now accompany any large international gathering of ministers from rich nations.

There is a counter argument that Globalisation doesn’t actually exist, and all we have is the old problem of the rich West and an impoverished rest-of-the-world. Working in a Nike factory in Indonesia may be pretty grim, the argument goes, but it’s better than being an Indonesian farmer or working in a local factory. Whilst campaigners get angry when factories and jobs move south in order to pay less and pollute more, the corporations claim they actually help the locals more than they harm them. Whilst working in a call centre in Britain is for unemployed northern ex-steel workers who don’t want to take up stripping, in India it’s a prestige job for graduates.

At the core of many of these arguments is whether or not these big corporations can be held to account for their actions. It’s something of a truism that all governments in power like to suck up to the rich and powerful whilst having a go at the weakest in society. We may not ever see the day when the Prime Minister makes a speech blaming the nation’s ills on rich white men whilst inviting social workers and asylum seekers round for tea at number 10, but is that just politics or are the corporations now more powerful than national governments?

Perhaps the most graphic story of big business getting away literally with murder is the continuing tragedy of Bhopal. If terrorists were ever to release a deadly gas in a built up area in Britain they would be hunted down and brought to justice. If a foreign country were to shelter them then the very least we could probably expect would be a cruise missile or two directed their way.

However nineteen years after a toxic gas release in the central Indian city of Bhopal killed 4,000 people the victims are not just still waiting for justice, but also still drinking contaminated water. Some estimates are that four times as many people have died since the accident as died on the fateful night, and up to 500,000 may have become ill.

The factory responsible was owned and run by the Indian branch of the US multinational chemical company Union Carbide. They may not have deliberately released the gas, but the accident was the result of serious errors by the company. A faulty valve allowed water to enter a chemical storage tank where a corroded stainless steel wall provided the catalyst for a reaction that produced 40 tons of a deadly cyanide compound. The plant lacked the basic safety features that could have contained the gas and so the deadly chemical escaped into the crowded slums of Bhopal. The sleeping residents could not be warned as the alarms had been switched off.

Pretty damning stuff, but Union Carbide’s HQ still claimed it was nothing to do with them. First they said the disaster was the result of sabotage and then they added that the plant was wholly designed and operated by their Indian subsidiary. No evidence of sabotage has ever been produced, and even if it were this would not excuse the lack of safety devices at the site. Their second point has also looked a little weak after a New Scientist investigation last year turned up leaked documents showing how Union Carbide in the USA not only approved all designs for the plant, but knowingly cut costs in building it.

Despite the clear trail of evidence leading to Union Carbide’s US offices, the US legal system refused to hear a case brought by the victims and their families. Instead a settlement was reached in the Indian courts where they received compensation amounting to about $500 per victim. Seeing as how you can get a small fortune for scalding yourself on hot coffee in the US, this seems a little miserly.

The Indian authorities for their part tried a more direct approach, and in 1991 they charged Union Carbide’s boss Warren Anderson with 14,000 cases of murder. But Mr Anderson failed to appear in court to answer the charges, and the Indians were told that the US government didn’t know where he was. That appeared to be that, he’d done a Bin Laden and no-one could find him.

But Mr Anderson, it turned out, was not hiding in a cave on some disputed frontier, and in August last year, right in the middle of the Johannesburg Earth Summit, he was found. Casey Harrell, toxics campaigner for Greenpeace USA, tracked him down to his country club in Hampton, Long Island, New York state. He was shown a copy of the warrant for his arrest, but he decided not to turn himself in. The local police don’t seem too keen on popping round to arrest him, and so far no cruise missiles have been seen heading towards the Hampton Country Club.

So justice has proved frustratingly elusive for the victims of Bhopal. Should we be under any illusions that this is purely an American problem, four years ago a British court threw out a case against Cape plc, a British mining country. They had used children to mine asbestos in apartheid South Africa with scant concern for Health and Safety, but the court decided that there was no case to answer in this country. Multinationals, it seems, are not liable under international law, but local courts do not have the jurisdiction to pursue claims across international borders.

What can be done to about this sorry state of affairs? Well the first thing is for us not to forget those who died, and who continue to die, in Bhopal. The survivors of Bhopal and the families of the victims continue to press for justice. Dow chemicals now own Union Carbide, and they are being told quite clearly that they have inherited Union Carbides liabilities. To drive home the message their website has been the target of a virtual sit-in.

Such actions may not be about to bring Dow to their knees, but it all helps. If you’re well off enough to have a pension plan and a bank account with a positive balance, you can wield some measure of power over the corporations by investing your money ethically, the new growth financial market. If you’re someone who has more time than money you could invest in a single share in a dodgy company, as it allows you to go to their AGM and annoy them in person. I personally can vouch for the hospitality you receive from the road and pipeline builders AMEC and the arctic oil drillers BP. And if we do nothing else we can always remember Dow and Union Carbide in our own rituals. As James Pengelly and others have said, Pagans don’t do nearly as much cursing as they should these days.

But real change will only take place when international justice accompanies international trade. Friends of the Earth are campaigning locally and internationally for governments to pass laws to make companies accountable for their actions. Many other organisations are doing so too. Big business is still accountable to government, and governments are accountable to the people. If enough people make enough of a fuss we might be able to offer the people of Bhopal justice. Better late than never.

The International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal has a website.

Did Piers Morgan do for Dubai?

“I came to Dubai to find out if it really is all it’s cracked up to be, and the answer, if you like sun and fun, glitz and glamour is a resounding ‘yes’. As for the credit crunch, everyone I have met here says the same thing, Dubai won’t just survive, it will thrive and that’s because it’s bursting with ambition and drive all lead by one man’s extraordinary vision and utter determination to turn this place into the biggest and most successful city in the world.”

In January this year the Britain's Got Talent judge Piers Morgan produced a program where instead of interviewing rich but vacuous celebs he went off to meet the rich and vacuous non-celebs of Dubai.

Dubai resembles what Albert Speer might have come up with had he teamed up with Walt Disney to make a New Berlin in the Persian Gulf. Its architecture and interior design is of such monstrous bad taste that it does a lot to reinvigorate the notion of art having a moral dimension.

Piers though gushed about the seven star luxury hotels, he gawped at the huge skyscraper, he marvelled at the artificial archipelago called The World. He missed completely the slave labour camps where the indentured Indian migrant workers lived in squalor. He also missed the censorship of the press, a bit bizarre for a former editor of a couple of British tabloids. Whether or not he also missed the equally dubious sex industry that thrives amongst the pleasure domes we don't know, but it didn't appear in the program anyway. However what's all that when you're having fun in the sun with a lot of ex-pats looking to rake it in tax free.

Well, now the wheels appear to have well and truly come off this bandwagon. It's been quite a week for crashes. We've had Tiger Woods and an Italian Police Lamborghini, but biggest of all has been the Dubai stock exchange, which has just closed after its worst ever day's trading.

All the signs are that this is the start of an economic shock that will echo around the world. The recently bailed out British banks are trembling at the thought of having even more of their assets wiped out. Other small countries with economic troubles are terrified of what this might mean for them. If the fall of Lehman Brothers showed that no company was too big to fail, Dubai might be about to tell us that even countries can go bankrupt. Other small countries with dreams of wealth above their means must be worried. Ireland must be very scared.

Piers Morgan's views on this are not known, but shortly after Dubai he was gushing over Jordan. Ms Price has just quit the I'm A Former Celebrity jungle after the public voted to make her eat half the bugs in Australia. Piers is apparently back with a new series soon, so anywhere else he lands should perhaps be worried.

Nothing is inevitable until it happens, but with Dubai it always seemed like it was going to be a race to see whether the ecological crunch or credit crunch got them first. Here the neo-liberal dream tried its hardest to defy reality. Artificial islands like The World were build a few inches above sea level as if Climate Change wasn't happening and the ice caps weren't melting. Skyscrapers were built on the never-never as if the economic bubble was going to keep on expanding forever. Each citizen now effectively owes the rest of the world over $400,000. It's going to be hard to see how they can afford to carry on importing fresh water, let alone avoid inundation by the ocean.

Perhaps in years to come an alternative to a tour of the pyramids will be a cruise round the drowned metropolis of Dubai. Inevitably the tour guides, like Simon Jenkins, will be quoting Lord Byron:

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,

Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws

The only shadow that the Desert knows:

"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,

"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows

"The wonders of my hand." The City's gone,

Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose

The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder, and some Hunter may express

Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness

Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,

He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess

What powerful but unrecorded race

Once dwelt in that annihilated place

Climategate - Nothing To See Here

Nothing lights up the Climate Change denial blogosphere more than the whiff of righteous indignation when they feel they're on to a scandal, and it was no surprise that the hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit set fingers twitching in darkened rooms across the English speaking world.

The concrete jungle of UEA seems a strange place for a global conspiracy to have its HQ. It's probably full of lovely people, but looking at it you imagine that after dark Alex and his fellow droogs from Clockwork Orange run riot in its concrete passageways. Blofeld for sure would have had something rather better. However just such a conspiracy is what the deniers believe they've found.

It's still early days for figuring out what exactly was in the emails, but it does appear that material was hacked for several weeks in a sophisticated operation and that what has been published is a selective and partial version of several conversations, some a decade or more old.

Some of the allegations of conspiracy are derived from single words int he messages; "trick", "fudge" etc, whilst others relate to alleged professional misconduct; the suppression of controversial papers, the displaying of data in misleading way and the subversion of Freedom of Information requests. As well as the emails computer code used to make climate models was hacked and this too is the subject of controversy.

Interesting though is what is not in the emails. Had anyone hacked the account of my old physics department I suspect they'd have found that 90% of the messages were about Dungeons and Dragons and most of the rest would have revolved around futile attempts to get laid. There's none of that ere. There's also no references to One World Governments, gravy trains of government funding or Shape Shifting Reptiles from outer space.

What is also missing is any context for these messages, and this is very important. An important strand of the allegations is the alleged nobbling of professional publications and scientific papers by Climate Change sceptics. Specifically this refers to the journal Climate Research , which is alleged to "encourage the publication of crap science". Seeing as how the editor and half the board subsequently resigned after the publication of one such paper, the CRU people may well have had a point.

Not that everything in the emails can be discussed quite so lightly. If a Freedom of Information request has been dodged that may actually be illegal and if relationships between warmist and sceptical scientists are as bad as they seem then maybe some of them shouldn't be involved in the peer review process. Also the computer code, whilst not shown to be fixed, is certainly complicate and opaque. There is an argument for suggesting that scientists should standardise their software and put code up for review when papers are published.

A conspiracy though there is not, and neither has the basic science of Climate Change been dented. The tea cup is currently experiencing a Force Ten gale, but that's all.

The denier blogosphere is still buzzing, but increasingly the deniers are now asking why the mainstream media has dropped the story. The leaks have become like Desdemona's handkerchief; conclusive proof of infidelity to those already maddened by paranoia. Just a handkerchief to everyone else.

How Sex Set The Date For Easter

Oswy

For a notoriously prudish nation sex seems to crop up quite a lot in British history.

How different things might have been if Edward the Confessor had been a bit less pious and spent a bit more time making babies with his Queen; possibly no crisis of succession on his death and no Norman invasion. Then there was Edward II whose preference for young men over his French wife led to an unfortunate encounter with a red hot poker. The illegitimacy of another Edward, Edward IV, may well have been covered up. If it hadn't been our King today might be an Australian republican.

The Georgians were a notoriously randy lot, and sometimes even elevated the offspring of their mistresses to the aristocracy. The current leader of the Conservatives owes his poshness to being the descendant of an Irish actress who was the mistress of the young William IV.

In more modern times Edward VIII's amour for the American divorcee Mrs Simpson led to an abdication which fortunately meant we went through the Second World War with a Head of State who was willing to eat spam off his gold plates, and defend Buckingham Palace to the death with his trusty revolver, rather than a Hitler admirer who preferred to spend the war in the Bahamas laundering money.

Sex too, it seems, may have been the main reason why we ended up with the Church of Rome in these islands and not our own home grown Celtic Christianity. The Celtic Church has almost become a mythical entity amongst modern druids and the like. Professor Ronald Hutton may claim it never actually existed as a coherent entity, but we certainly did have a Christianity, based on the teachings of Patrick and Columba, that appeared rather closer to Nature and rather less likely to go off and commit genocide. Certainly pagans feel more at home in places like Iona than amongst the columns of Rome, and have rather more sympathy for Saints like Kevin of Glendalough, who charmed wild boars and turned water into beer, than Cyril of Alexandria, who murdered Jews, pagans and Hypatia, head of the city's great library.

Whitby Abbey

The demise of the Celtic Church came at the Synod of Whitby in 664 and the casus belli was the innocuous subject of the dating of Easter. The patron of the synod was King Oswy of Northumberia.

The death of Penda of Mercia a few years earlier had left Oswy the most powerful king in England, so what he did mattered. The conflict between two Churches may have had its origins in Oswy's domestic arrangements.

Oswy spoke Irish and was of the Celtic Church, who celebrated Easter on the date of the Jewish Passover. However he'd married Eanfled who, coming from Kent, was of the Roman Church and used the new Augustan calendar. The result was, according to the Venerable Bede "that Easter was kept twice in one year, so that when the King had ended Lent and was keeping Easter, the Queen and her attendants were still fasting and keeping Palm Sunday"

To us this would just be a good laugh and a chance to eat twice as many Easter eggs, but for devout Christians like Oswy and Eanfled it could be very frustrating. This was because the Church forbade carnal relations during Lent.

High Cross at Jarrow

Saxon Kings were expected to be fight like demons on the battlefield, drink like fish in the mead hall and perform like stallions in the marital bed and Oswy appears to have been no exception. So every Easter when, after 40 day of abstinence, the King was hoping for what the Celts euphemistically called "the friendship of the thighs" it must have been a tad frustrating for him to find the Queen's legs still locked together for up to another four weeks.

As ever when a man has this sort of problem, he turns to a woman to sort it out. That woman was Hilda, the Abbess of Whitby, who convened a Synod to sort out once and for all when the King could have his oats, although that wasn't given as the reason publicly. As we know, the Church of Rome won the argument. Marital harmony was restored in Bamburgh Castle and the representatives of the Celtic Church went off back to their islands in a huff.

England became part of the Church of Rome and so we stayed for another 869 years, until another king with marital problems came along, but that is another story.

That it was sex that set the date for a festival which Bede tells us is named after the pagan deity Eostre, who was almost certainly a goddess of fertility, is though extremely apt. So perhaps this Easter you might celebrate, in addition to the chocolate eggs of course, in the way Oswy and Eanfled did. 

Druids: Deluded but loving it

Type "Druids delusions" into Google Scholar and you'll find a link to a 1999 paper by a gaggle of psychologists from University College London. 

The paper is the result of their experiment to find out if the sort of wacky ideas that could get you banged up in a psychiatric hospital are common in the general public. 

Using four groups of people; ordinary punters, Christians, Hare Kishnas and Druids, they assessed them all on how happy they were and how wacky their views were. The results were quite interesting. 

Ordinary folk were, as you might imagine, reasonably happy but not deluded. The Christians, interestingly, were mildly deluded but also mildly less happy than the ordinary bods. The Hare Krishnas and the Druids meanwhile turned out to be both deluded enough to be diagnosed as schizophrenic but happy enough to pass as normal. 

The Druids and the Hare Krishnas scored pretty much the same on all points, except that the psychologists reported the Druids as having "higher levels of self reported delusional idealation". In other words the difference between a Druid and a Hare Krishna is that the Druid knows he's mad! 

So there we go. Ordinary folks may poor scorn, the Christians may say we're going to hell, but we can look them both in the eye and carry merrily on our way - until they cart us off to the funny farm.

Delusional ideation in religious and psychotic populations, Dr Emmanuelle Peters, Samantha Day, Jacqueline Mckenna, Gilli Orbach