Democracy: It’s a Pagan Thing

I don’t suppose politics is something that bothers Pagans too much.

Too individualistic to be Labour, too weird to be Tory, I doubt there are many paid up party members amongst us. We might show some interest at the possibility of telling the boss you’re taking Samhain as a religious holiday, or worry about the ban on carrying athames, but generally I suspect we are fairly agnostic about the machinations of Westminister.

Perhaps though it’s about time we reclaimed parliamentary democracy as our own as it’s a pagan idea through and through. The democracy bit came from those pagan Greeks. Then there was the tradition of the pagan Irish electing their kings, and the pagan Anglo-Saxons had something similar with their Witan as well as their moots for local politics.

The parliament bit though was added in 930AD when those still unashamedly pagan Icelanders had their first thing. It possibly wasn’t the romantic scene imagined by W.G. Collingwood, but it was the origins of modern democracy. Whilst the Christians preferred the ‘Divine Right of Kings’, the Icelanders, and their fellow followers of the Northern Tradition, sent their representatives to meet as equals and to thrash things out according to the law.

The Danes brought their thing to Britain and this is remembered in place names such as Thingwall in the Wirral. These things were no idle talking shop either. In 1018, for example, the King of Sweden was told in no uncertain terms by his thing that they were in charge and not him. In Britain it took another 600 years and a civil war before we reached the same happy situation.

For the Icelanders though, colonists of one of the most fragile eco-systems on the planet, the thing was also a vital survival tool. Life on Iceland’s thin soils meant living within the limits nature set and it was at the thing that the vital decisions that ensured the colony’s survival were made.

Yes, Minister

Like the Icelandic colonists, we too live in a fragile eco-system that we have the power to destroy, most immediately by Climate Change. However we are a millennium behind the Icelanders. You’re more likely to hear a debate about global warming down the pub than in Westminster. But there are some hopeful indications that things are changing.

A sign of this new mood is that job of Environment Minister is now actually of some importance. Previously the job was given to ageing politicians who had become an embarrassment to their parties. John Gummer was given the job by John Major after he failed to persuade his daughter to eat a BSE beef burger, and Tony Blair gave the job to Michael Meacher, a veteran who was too unreformably Old Labour to be given a better job. To be fair to both men they gave it a good go. John Gummer, a very devout Christian, even seems to have had a sort of ‘road to Damascus’ conversion whilst in the post, and continued turn up at green conferences after the Tories had been booted out of office, sometimes having to sit with the Greenpeace delegation because his old department wouldn’t speak to him.

The last two environment ministers, by contrast, have been of the ‘up and coming’ variety. As luck would have it I’ve met them both - a perk of living in a marginal constituency.

First we had David Miliband, one of Labour’s bright young things who was earlier in the year being tipped as a rival to Gordon Brown for the job of PM. He resisted the temptation and was ‘rewarded’ by being made Foreign Minister, where he‘ll have to go round being nice to foreigners, which is never popular with the voters and so should permanently scupper his plans for the top job.

His brief sojourn as Environment Minister though was enlightening. By his own admission he’d not taken a detailed interest in the Climate Change debate. When he got to see the reports from the scientists he was apparently genuinely shocked. His personal bugbear appeared to be the number of green energy schemes currently stuck in the planning system - enough to meet a quarter of the UK’s base load. In particular he appeared to have little time for ‘Nimby’ anti-wind farm protests.

He was in my neck of the woods in 2007 to celebrate 75 years since the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, an event compared by folky comedian Mike Harding. I may have happened to mention to Mr Miliband that Mr Harding had said some harsh words about wind farms recently, and indeed his speech featured a little ad lib directed at his host about the need for more renewable energy in the countryside.

When Miliband left shortly afterwards for the FO his place was taken by Hilary Benn, the International Development secretary who was so desperate for votes in the Labour Party Deputy Leadership election that he even canvassed me, clearly mistaking me for someone who cared. In the past he has expressed support for Contraction and Convergence, a mechanism for both reducing global CO2 emissions and levelling out the inequality between first world and developing world. Whether or not he remembers he said this now he’s a minister though is uncertain at present.

The person who tells him what to remember is our new Prime Minister. His record on green issues is somewhat patchy; some token green taxes but a steady rise in private car and aeroplane use. The government has set a target of a 60% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050, by which time the Prime Minister will then be pushing a 100. Until the recession lent a hand the country was nowhere near meeting its short term targets on CO2 emissions, so perhaps Brown is hoping his successor will sort the problem out.

The other lot

And who might that successor be? Well the man who hopes to get the job is the Old Etonian sat on the benches opposite, a place where there have been some strange things going on recently. The party that in the early 1990s promised ‘the biggest road building program since the Romans’ is now led by a man who cycles to work. Okay, so a car follows behind with his shoes, but it‘s still a big change for the party of the Iron Lady who used to boast she‘s never been on a bus.

Whilst there was no doubt about Mrs Thatcher’s scepticism of all things green, David Cameron has so far left everyone confused about which way he’s really leaning. The various policy reviews he’s commissioned haven’t helped much.

On the one hand there’s the Quality of Life Group which is chaired by John Gummer (him again) and Zac Goldsmith, heir to James Goldsmith‘s billions and former editor of The Ecologist magazine. Anti-European, pro-foxhunting and until recently an non-dom tax dodger, Zac’s politics are more Countryside Alliance than Socialist Alliance and he seems to have found a spiritual home within the strand of the Conservative party that regards the Industrial Revolution as the time when it went wrong. The Quality of Life Group had some intersting ideas and called for an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050, which is more ambitious than Labour’s target, but you'll be hard pressed today to meet a Tory who admits it even exists.

In the way of balance we also had the report from John Redwood’s economic competitiveness group which called for more roads, more nuclear power and bigger airports. When discussing the Tories these days it’s hard to believe we’re talking about one party.

As for the other political parties, apart from the loony right wing fringe they’re all a lot greener than either Labour or Conservatives. Unfortunately our electoral system doesn’t give them a chance of forming a government. The Green Party hasn’t even got an MP, although they do get a bit closer every time in Brighton.

Political theatre

However the purpose of writing this wasn’t to tell you how to vote, but how to influence those who we elect. What would it take to push Climate Change in particular, an the environment in general, up the political agenda?

David Miliband’s answer was that it would take something like the Make Poverty History campaign that accompanied the G8 conference in Gleneagles five years ago. I’ve no reason to believe he wasn’t being honest, after all a quarter of a million people marching through the streets isn’t something any politician can ignore. However it may also be that Make Poverty History was the sort of fluffy campaign, with fairly vague objectives, that politicians don’t really mind being targeted by.

However the anniversary that Mr Miliband was in Derbyshire to celebrate showed that this isn’t the only way to get things done. The original 1932 trespassers probably had more in common with the G20 protestors than the Make Poverty History brigade. There were only a few hundred of them, and whilst the moderate, aristocratically patronised rambling groups patiently negotiated rights of voluntary access to the hills, these mainly communist ramblers decided to take direct action to get things done. Some were beaten up by gamekeepers and several were imprisoned, but the public rallied behind the ramblers. That did the trick. Once the small matter of the Second World War was out of the way, parliament passed the legislation that brought in our National Parks.

So vote away please, it’s a pagan thing, but once the formality of the election is over lets get back to some serious protesting.

Beethoven's Revolutionary Symphony

Beethoven's Sixth Symphony is, on the face of it a nice, non-political piece about the countryside and the simple peasants that dwell in it.

However for Beethoven to compose about the simple peasants of Europe in 1808 was about as politically neutral as John Lennon writing a song about the simple peasants of the Mekong Delta in 1968.

The French Revolutionary Wars had kicked off 14 years earlier and the world had been stunned when the professional armies of Prussia had been beaten hollow by a bunch of farmers hastily issued with muskets. The shock to the orderly system of European monarchies can hardly be underestimated and suddenly every absolute monarch was looking at their peasants in a very different light.

Lets put this into some sort of perspective. In 1791 Prussia was the undisputed military master of Europe. Frederick the Great's army had won the Seven Years War against the odds and now everyone looked to the Germans to see how a real army should be run. Military technology was pretty much the same everywhere, so what made the krauts different was their rigid discipline.

Freddy once said that “If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the ranks” and he was probably right. His army was 'professional' in so far as it was paid, but his soldiers were the dregs of society. In his manual on how to fight a campaign he spends rather more time dishing out advice on how to stop your soldiers running away (such as 'don't camp near a forest') as on how to beat the enemy in battle.

Revolutionary France by contrast relied on a levee en mass. A type of early conscription it simply shovelled up a large chunk of the male population and deposited them on the battlefield. With no time for rigid Prussian-style discipline to knock the individuality out of them this should by the usual rules of war have just produce a rabble, but instead the French fought and won. And won again. And again.

The world was aghast and agog. Helped by decent artillery, and a young General called Bonaparte, revolutionary fervour had beaten iron discipline. Worse, these former peasants had not been fighting for their King, but for their cause and a nebulous concept called their 'country'. This was a new and terrifying weapon, now called Nationalism, and like most of the good ideas in the world it also had the effect of making wars longer and bloodier.

And if the King of France couldn't control his peasants, what monarch could? Europe's aristocrats started to notice their peasants, possibly for the first time, and worried.

And so into all this wanders Mr Ludvig van, with his additively simple riffs and serene vision of a rural idyll. What's going on?

Well, there does appear to be a townies vision of the countryside here; a nice place for a walk or picnic with no hint of the hard work, rigid social structure and constant fear of starvation that mark the life of the real peasant.

On the other hand the sheer naivety of the music suggests that Beethoven is trying to invoke something of the 'noble savage' in his subject, the innate wisdom of country folk. A bit cliched perhaps, but Beethoven, a man of the Enlightenment if ever their was one, is probably thinking of a bit more than ways of forecasting the weather and making nice cheese. Perhaps he saw in the country folk a real equality, a true Brotherhood of Man.

And then we come to the fifth movement, the faster bit. Normally interpreted as a thunderstorm, perhaps this is where the peasants really are revolting? The movement begins with a bit of bang all right, but then builds to a swinging and magnificent climax before settling down again into the tranquil last movement. It's beautiful, it's moving, it could even inspire you to take up your pitchfork and stick it into the backside of the nearest toff.

Perhaps.

Or maybe Beethoven just liked walking in the fresh air. Who knows?

Climate Change Deniers in the Institute of Physics

Has the Institute of Physics hatched a cuckoo-in-the-nest in the form of it's Energy Sub-Group?

The other day I named a Peter F Gill as one of the contributors to the submission to the Climategate enquiry who mouths denier propaganda. Another name that has now popped up Terri Jackson (pictured).

Terri was on the Energy Group of the IoP. Like the Judean People's Front and People's Front of Judea, the Energy Group and the Energy Sub-Group are not the same. However Mr Gill, at least, has served on both. Terri though appears to have left the Energy Group under a bit of a cloud. Here's a letter she wrote to the denier blog Climate Realists which gives a flavour of Jackson's views and perhaps explains the problem.

In it we find the standard denier arguments; "the earth has been warmer in the past", "it's water vapour", "humans only contribute 3% of CO2", "Mars is getting warmer" and "it's the sun". In the Skeptical Science catalogue that's a 1, a 2, a 16, a 24 and a 27. In typical denier fashion these are thrown out like machine gun bullets. The intention is clearly to confuse and create the illusion of scientific controversy - the classic tactics of denial whether we are talking about the link between cigarettes and lung cancer or fossil fuels and climate change.

In a recent interview for The Irish News Jackson throws out some more factoids; the alleged removal of the Medieval Warm Period from the Hockey Stick graph, and the old ones about the Vikings in Greenland, sea ice not changed in 30 years and warming observed on other planets - thus adding a 22, a 23, a 25 and a 26. (She seems to be more less doing them in the right order, doesn't she?.

She also refers to barking mad climate change denier Lord Monckton (the chap who gave free advice to the BNP and refused to apologise for calling a Jewish activist a Nazi) as "my colleague".

This is where it gets interesting. Monckton is currently on tour in Austraia and according to Donald Oats, who bravely sat through his garbage in the name of science, some of Monckton's ad libs referred to respectable academic bodies making some "very interesting submissions" to the inquiry. The IoP's contribution is the only evidence that really fits the bill.

Did Monckton know about the evidence in advance? If so, who told him?

The IoP's Energy Group is now free of deniers like Jackson, but Gill remains on the Energy Sub-Group. Whether he is in good company there will not be know until the IoP tells us who makes up this secret committee.

However for a bit of light relief it's amusing to read, given the criticism levelled at the CRU for deleting emails, that the IoP's own electronic correspondence includes the following disclaimer

This email (and attachments) are confidential and intended for the addressee(s) only. If you are not the intended recipient please notify the sender, delete any copies and do not take action in reliance on it…

Pots and kettles?

Have Climate Change deniers infiltrated the Institute of Physics?

Twenty years ago I was a hard working physics undergraduate.

Okay, well, maybe not. As I type this at 9PM on a Friday evening it would probably be more accurate to say that 20 years ago I would now be on my fourth bottle of Newcastle Brown in some some seedy student bar, quenching a thirst generated by having been out of bed for almost eight hours. However I was doing this whilst enrolled on a course entitled Physics with Astrophysics. And I did eventually sober up enough to get my degree. Just.

It was never cool to admit to being a physicist. I did once met a woman who thought that at a pinch 'astrophysics' could be interpreted as 'rocket scientist' and that I would make an interesting addition to the notches on her bedpost, but that was pretty much the exception that proved the rule.

However now even I am starting to have doubts about admitting to which branch of the sciences I studied, and the reason is the House of Commons inquiry into Climategate.

Embattled University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit Professor Phil Jones was given a luke warm grilling by MPs on Tuesday, but the hot news on the denier blogosphere wasn't this but the submission to the inquiry from the Institute of Physics.

In what could charitably be referred to as a 'robust' submission, the IoP repeated most of the more lurid accusations against Jones and the CRU but also, for good measure, stuck in the assertion that

The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions

Ouch.

So why did an organisation whose official line on Climate Change is

"The institutes's position on climate change is clear: the basic science is well enough understood to be sure that our climate is changing, and that we need to take action now to mitigate that change."

push Prof Jones under the metaphorical bus?

The answer is proving rather illusive. Despite their submission criticising the UEA for lack of transparency, nobody has been able to find out who actually wrote the submission. The IoP website has changed several times over the last 36 hours, but it now appears that the statement was the work of the Energy Sub-group.

This is where it gets interesting.

On that subcommittee is, and former chair of it, is a chap by the name of Peter F Gill. Mr Gill is the head of a company called Crestport Services who do consultancy work for

"oil and gas production companies including Shell, British Gas, and Petroleum Development Oman"

In other words, he's in the pay of the oil companies.

Mr Gill pops up every now and again with his own views on Climate Change, and interesting they are too. Especially interesting is his little piece in the April 2008 newsletter of the IoP South Central branch. Under the disclaimer "The opinions in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the IOP Energy Group" he reels off in quick succession a number of what are known in the trade as 'zombie arguments' - discredited attacks on Climate Change science that continue to be repeated by deniers ad nausium irrespective of how many times they have been disproved.

In quick succession Mr Gill gives us

While the focus is on carbon dioxide, it is well known that water vapour is far more important

carbon dioxide content follows temperature changes rather than causing them

and

If mechanisms exist that can cause runaway greenhouse effects, then we are bound to ask why such mechanisms have not shown up in the geological record?

Those of us having to deal with these arguments on discussion boards are indebted to the Sceptical Science blog for their easy-to-use guide to zombie arguments. Mr Gill's article could be summarised as a 2, a 24 and a 41.

Comments like these pop up all over the internet, defying all attempts to slay them, but to find them on a publiction from the Institute of Physics is like finding a recipe for home brew in an Alcoholics Anonymous leaflet.

However Mr Gill is not done yet, for he ends the piece

Readers may like to know that the Energy Group of the Institute has invited glaciologist Prof. Zbigniew Jaworowski to speak to us in October. .... the speaker has decided to title his lecture "CO2: the greatest scientific scandal of our time".

Professor Jaworowski is a fellow who, for reasons known only to himself, believes the Antarctic ice cores that show how CO2 has risen steadily since the Industrial Revolution are wrong.

Save to say he is not widely respected. But then as Mr Gill ends his contribution

for many people the subject has become a religion, so facts and analysis have become largely irrelevant.

If (and it's still an if at the moment) Mr Gill was primarily responsible for putting together the submission to the committee, then the implications for science are scarcely less serious than if Prof Jones had confessed to all things the deniers accused him of.

The Institute of Physics, one of the most respected science bodies in the country, may have submitted evidence to parliament written by an oil industry funded Climate Change denier.

There are worse sins in the world of science than skipping morning lectures, and selling out your integrity is definately one of them. Watch this space - and mine's a Newcastle Brown.

Daily Express lies about Climate Change (again)

Please ignored (if you can) the picture of Charlotte Church in a bikini, this is serious.

The beleaguered Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia is once again on the front pages, this time being trotted out by the Daily Express as a climate change denier.


This is what Prof Jones actually said

Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

C - Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?
No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.

So the Proffessor has said it's getting warmer, not colder, but then said that as he wasn't 95% sure it was getting warmer he'd say nowt. He was also only referring to the data of his own department, not the more complete records of bodies such as the GISS which the IPCC use. So much though for the denier allegation that the CRU aren't suitably rigorous in their predictions.

Now I know "5% Chance Climate Change Isn't Happening" is not going to be a great headline for a paper, and I don't expect the same level of peer review in science writing for the Express as for, say, in Nature, but you'd at least hope they wouldn't publish lies that are too blatant.

Are the rightwing rags so in league with the deniers they'll print any old bollocks to get readers?

Or are they all edited by the type of Arts/Classics/Humanities graduates who regard all scientists as Geeky swots and who wouldn't understand a Baysian probability calculation if it was tattooed on Charlotte Church's bare midrife?

Answers on a postcard please.

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.