Shooting the Empire

This was meant to be a review of Avatar but as I can't be bothered to actually go and see the film it's going to be something else.

As a film Avatar's probably all right, but whilst I enjoyed FernGully and Aliens I'm not sure I want to see them both at the same time. As a teenager I had to endure watching the Ewoks destroy what credibility the Star Wars franchise ever had, so I don't want to go risk going through that again.

In reading the reviews I was interested to see the US Christian Post write

"If you can get a theater full of people in Kentucky to stand and applaud the defeat of their country in war, then you've got some amazing special effects."

No doubt they write that about ever film that doesn't have John Wayne in it, but it's an interesting comment.

The American Empire does get a regular thrashing in American cinemas for a variety of reasons, mainly though because they refuse to recognise that they actually are an empire.

300 was very popular amongst the sort of people who read Christian Post because it depicted macho Caucasian Spartans fighting off the vast multiracial Persian Empire. The invading Persians are portrayed as effeminate and materialistic whilst the stay-at-home Athenians are ribbed for being shirt lifting philosophers. When you consider all your country's virtues as vices are you really still a patriot?

It's more Hulk Hogan than Herodotus and it would be interesting to know what the Taliban made of it: clean living macho warriors taking on a wealthy, diverse and promiscuous empire? Hmm, I wonder which side they'd identify with?

We too had an Empire once though, and it survived long enough to make it into the age of cinema. Movies about Britain' colonial wars though were only ever second rate westerns, and never really managed the mythic quality that John Ford and Sergio Leone were eventually to bring to that genre. Many of them were actually made by the Americans, including Lives of a Bengal Lancer, apparently Hitler's favourite film. The best of the pre-war crop though is British through and through. The 1939 version of The Four Feathers (the third of five versions of the film) has Ralph Richardson invading the Sudan to depose a Muslim fundamentalist regime. However the film is keen not to make too many political points and just portrays the Brits as trying to nick someone else's country for the sake of it.

The most famous film of Britain's colonial wars though is undoubtedly Zulu. It's director probably wouldn't be too popular with the Christian Post either. Cy Endfield was a Yank who was called a Communist by the House Un-American Activities Committee and ended up living in Warwickshire.

The film features clean cut young soldiers in smart uniforms, led by a dashing young Michael Cane, driving off clean limbed young Zulus by singing Men of Harlech ("For God sake sing something they know" Max Wall once quipped).

In reality the Brits were a scruffy lot, only seven of whom were Welsh, who'd been in South Africa for long enough to grow considerable beards and to shed most of their regulation uniform. Cane's character wasn't young either and was still only a Lieutenant mainly on account of not being very clever. Being regarded as thick by the Victorian British Army must have been quite an achievement.

But if the Brits were rather more mature than portrayed the Zulus were positively ancient. The battle was fought by a veteran regiment made up of warriors who must have all been in their 40s or 50s. Considering the battle lasted 24 hours and the Zulus had to leap a 9 foot wall to get at the British they must have been tough old codgers.

Zulu came out though in 1963, by which time the British Empire was pretty much over bar the shouting. The next year a rather different version of Britain's Imperial situation could be seen in The Guns of Batasi. Set in an African nation on the cusp of independence it features a group of tough British NCOs beseiged by African rebels. The Brits, led by an utterly believable Richard Attenborough, invoke the Rorke's Drift spirit and prepare for an epic battle, but things are now more complicated. Everyone, African and British, is confused about their role and courage seems as misplaced as loyalty.

And so ended the British Empire on screen. Four years later Carry On...Up The Kyber came out and nobody could take it seriously ever again.

Climate Change Denier 'Proves' Climate Change.

Well I never thought I'd say it, but well done Anthony Watts.

For those who don't know of him, this great pundit for our time is a former US TV weatherman who in a divine flash of inspiration saw that the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming was so much hot air and so set up the sceptical blog Watts Up With That (witty, heh?).

If you've been on a discussion board and had someone turn up and most some super new 'hot off the press' proof that AGW is a con, then the chances are that they lifted it from his blog.

Of course the main problem Climate Change deniers have is the fact that it really is getting warmer. With 2010 looking like it might be a scorcher despite the cold start we might soon be able to say that the ten hottest years ever recorded have all occurred since 1995.

This irritating truth hasn't put Mr Watts off though and, with the help of some other sceptics and their computers he set out to prove that this temperature record was wrong. The result is surfacestation.org, a systematic review of all the US weather stations. The team rated each station by how good it was, with top marks going to those in virgin countryside and bottom marks to those in KFC car parks, at the end of runways or next to air conditioning ducts (I'm not making this up - that's where some of them were).

This herculean task has proved very useful to climate scientists. The data can now be split into 'good' and 'bad' sites and the two sets compared to see if there is any bias. This, so Mr Watts and his army of volunteers hoped, would show that the rise in recorded temperature was down to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect and other such bias and that with the 'bad' data removed the 'good' data would prove once and for all that Global Warming was a myth.

Unfortunately it didn't quite work out like that.

It turned out that climate scientists already knew about UHI effect and had been taking it into account, as they do various other changes in recording practise such as the weather station moving or the time of observations changing.

Not only did the 'bad' weather stations show the same warming trend as the 'good' ones, it seems there may have been an over correction of the UHI effect and that the temperature record should be adjusted upwards not downwards.

Alas if you look for Mr Watt's response on his blog you look in vain but never mind, you can read it here first.

So it's not really good news, we are heading for Armageddon and are probably going to get there a little sooner than we thought, but we can at least enjoy a little schadenfreude at the expense of Mr Watts, who now has to explain to his volunteers that they have just helped their deadly enemies in the AGW camp.

2009 - Why didn't we fix the banks...or the climate?

2009 was a year of global recession and job losses. But what did we do about it?

Not a lot.

First we blamed individuals rather than the system but then we forgot about even that. Remember Fred Goodwin and his £700,000 a year pension? Probably vaguely. Remember the duck house, Gordon Brown's cleaning bill and the house flipping?

A scandal, admittedly one of fairly epic proportions, paralysed politics and we all forgot about the people who wrecked our economy, filled their pockets and laughed all the way back to the bank.

Like the English weather, fat cat bankers and regular recessions are taken as facts of life, not symptoms of a system that has created a new class of super rich who holiday in Albert Speer inspired pleasure domes in Dubai. So it has always been, we are told, and so it will always be we believe.

However even the English weather is not unchangeable, and thanks to the fiasco of Copenhagen it will be changing quite a lot over the coming years. In year that has seen climate scientists emails hacked, Ian Plimer grace the front cover of The Spectator and the Daily Express print "One Hundred Reasons Climate Change is Natural" on its front page (a list so vacuous even New Scientist could only be bothered to refute the first 50 points.) failure was not a big surprise.

So what of the new decade?

Well, don't expect people to take any of this lying down. There are a lot of angry people leaving college and university with high ideals and no prospect of a decent job. Last time this happened was in the early 90s they took to the trees. Who what they're going to do next - but expect a golden decade for activism.

We ain't seen nothin' yet.

Parnell: The Empire Strikes Back

Inspired by Geoffrey Wheatcroft's article on Gladstone in The Guardian today, here is a little story of sex and unintentional revenge.

The story begins on the morning of the 28th February 1881 on a hilltop in South Africa. A British Army led by one of the best and brightest of its Generals has been defeated by a bunch of farmers. General Colley and 91 of his men lie dead and 59 bewildered survivors are marched off into captivity. The Boers have only lost one man dead on the field.

Back in the British camp, General Sir Evelyn Wood, an experienced and successful commander in many of the Empire's small wars, is plotting how to extract revenge using the large army that is even now marching to his aid. Wood is a veteran of the Empire's small wars, who had turned the course of the Zulu War with his victory at Khambula. However, before he can put his plan into action, word comes from the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, that he is to seek peace instead.

When Wood met the Boer leaders though, most of the talking was done by one Alfred Aylyard. An Irishman qualified as a solicitor and a surgeon, the talented Mr Aylyard was officially there as a war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, but he was really engaging in his primary occupation, that of professional revolutionary, and taking great delight in humiliating the British.

Aylyard wasn't the only Irish Nationalist jubilant at the Boer triumph. The Irish World declared, "Give thanks to God, ye starving Irish...the Boers and Basutos (referring to the recent revolt of Sekukini) of South Africa are fighting the battle of Ireland, although they don't know it."

Wood signed the peace treaty and his mentor, Sir Garnet Wolseley - the very model of a major general - was so incensed it was effectively the end of Wood's career.

As the 1880s wore on it seemed that Ireland would indeed finally get Home Rule. but without any fighting at all. O'Connell having won them the vote, Irish Catholics then used their votes to elect Charles Stuart Parnell to Parliament and to give his Irish Party enough seats to make them kingmakers in Westminister.


Unfortunately for Aylyard, Parnell and the Nationalists, the Wood family were to have their revenge, for the unfortunate General Wood had a sister, Katharine.

Known as Kitty, she had married one of Parnell's supporters, a Major O'Shea and it is as Kitty O'Shea that she enters history.

Like O'Connell before him Parnell fancied a bit on the side, and Kitty was his mistress. The Major was not impressed and when he sued for divorce Parnell was exposed and fell from power.

The Empire had stuck back.

After Copenhagen: Have We A Prayer?

The protesters protested - and got nicked for their trouble.

The NGOs lobbied - and many of them were nicked too, or barred from the conference like Friends of the Earth.

Lazy people like me blogged and emailed.

But all to no avail. COP15 was a disaster and a damp squib at the same time (if that's possible).

So what do we do now?

We can lobby for another meeting next year, we can boycott goods from the two countries most responsible for the impasse: China and the USA, we can.......

Can anyone think of anything that we can do that will actually work??

Perhaps divine intervention is what we need. But which deity should we invoke?

As far as I can see there is one glimmer of hope in the science of climate change, one factor which may slow, if not halt, the rise in global temperatures that appears to spell the end of civilised life as we know it. It's a bit of a long shot, but here it is.

When I was an undergraduate Astrophysics student my final year project was observing the sun and measuring solar flares. I didn't see many. The telescope was positioned in such a way that after midday the sun was obscured behind the Social Sciences building and what student worth his Newcastle Brown is up and about before midday? However I can't blame the sun for not doing its bit as the late 1980s were a bit of a high for solar activity.

Since then though it's all been downhill for our nearest star. Solar activity has steadily reduced and sun spots are disappearing. This variation in solar output is tiny really, and hardly likely on its own to counteract the effect of pumping millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. However there is some evidence (well, not much more than speculation really) that there might be an additional mechanism that multiplies the effects of solar activity on climate.

Reduced solar wind from a less active sun allows more cosmic rays to get through to the earth. Cosmic rays are high energy particles formed in the heart of distant exploding stars. The hunch is that when they hit our atmosphere they in some way 'seed' clouds. More clouds mean more sunlight reflected back into space and a cooler climate. The reduction in solar activity since I graduated is small at the moment, but the disappearance of sun spots over the last few years has led some astronomers to speculate that we may be at the start of a big downturn in solar output.

This possible link is currently being examined by the CLOUD project at CERN, next to the Large Hadron Collider. The latter hopes to unlock the secrets of the Higgs Boson, the so called 'God particle' which defines mass. The Higgs particle may be a funny sort of god, but our dear old sun is a deity that pagans can identify with.

To the Ancient Egyptian the sun was Aten, and was revered with the song we know as the Great Hymn to Aten. The Christians borrowed this an it became Psalm 104.

On Monday its the longest night of the year, the day the sun is reborn. and so as a sun worshipping Druid I feel it is only my duty to call upon our nearest star to do its duty and give us a bit of a break so that humanity can get its collective act together and kick its carbon addiction.

Well, I said it was a long shot!

My message to Jonathan Pershing, US Climate Negotiator

Dear Mr Pershing

Many environmentalists blame the USA for the current crisis. They say that it is the 'frontier spirit' of old that is the problem, America's view that the natural world is there to be exploited and used.

However my view is that it is a lack of such spirit that is the problem. For the first time in its history America is afraid of a new frontier. The 'can do' optimism that has seen your nation rise to be the world's only superpower has gone. Your nation would rather cling feebly to old certainties than embrace a brave new world.

Please, show me I am wrong. Just as your namesake led his brave soldiers to Europe's rescue in 1917, please save these climate talks with a magnanimous offer. America may think it has much to loose in leaving behind the carbon economy, but is there any other nation with the scientists, the business people and the drive to better exploit the new world of renewable energies?

Yours sincerely

Martin Porter
Glossop
Derbyshire
England

Send your own message to a climate negotiator.

Lond Monckton helps the BNP

It's been a bad week for Climate Change activists, with several hundred banged up by the Danish police, but it's been a worse one for Climate Change deniers.

The shy and retiring, not to mention barking mad, aristo Lord Monckton was ambushed by rather polite climate activists whilst in Copenhagen. He responded by branding them all Hitler Youth.

The brunt of his attack calmly explained to the peer that as a Jew whose grandparents had had to escape Hitler he didn't know quite how to take this.

Well it turns out the one with the Nazi connections may actually be Monckton himself.

The evidence is in the British National Party's 40 page anti-Global Warming rant.

That it's a load on denier b*llocks is no surprise - it would be embarrassing for eco-warriors if it wasn't. But what does raise one's eyebrows is on page 36. It seems the BNP haven't just done a cut and paste job from Monckton's website, but that the peer has been in correspondence with them.

Monckton was an advisor to Mrs. Thatcher and has recently joined UKIP. Flirting with the nasty end of the hard right is clearly the next stage in his reverse political evolution.

They say politics makes strange bed fellows, but perhaps we shouldn't linger too long on the image of Monckton and Nick Griffin disappearing under the climate change denial duvet with Sarah Palin, Ian Plimer and the rest of the sad circle of right wing nutters.

Hmm, I think that's just put me off my tea.