Seize the Day: High Hills Lament

Seize the Day are a vibrant, melodic, harmonious, original, uncompromising, and tough  folk band from Somerset. I believe some of their songs will enter the canon of English folk, and that future fold historians will shake their heads at the massive way they were underestimated by the Musick Industry. This is one of their slower songs, but I put it here because I am learning the words to sing to myself on solitary walks on Mendip.


You can hear it by clicking here. (Can't get the video to upload)

High Hills Lament


I dreamed I was going where tall trees are growing

Where nine rivers flowing roll down to the sea,

When I woke to hear crying lamenting and sighing,

Men in yellow arriving to fell the last tree.




High hills of our fathers, round hills of our mothers,

Green hills of my people that used to be free,

Scraped away to make room for some global consumer,

Whose growth like a tumour eats England and me.




I'm a lover of England, her wildlife and wisdom,

I have walked the land o'er and I've seen what's been done,

On those roads I have followed, through a land that's been swallowed,

Land tortured and hollowed for three pounds a ton.




And I'll hear no excuses for those whose abuses

Have put to such uses the land of their birth,

Till there's nothing grows off it but slag-heaps of profit

For some high-flyer not fit to live on this Earth.




Let their slaves justify it, they cannot deny it

- Though nightly they try it, and seem to succeed -

That our world has been wasted, skinned, skewered and basted

For a dream which, once tasted, consumed us with greed.




Are my people half dead then from a lie that's been fed them,

- Those bribes which have bled them of courage and power?

While our last open spaces, all those sweet special places,

Are forgotten like faces that used to be ours.




And I dreamed I was going where tall trees are growing,

Where nine rivers flowing roll down to the sea.

Tis the Isle of the Blessed there, but I'll never rest there,

Till there's no life oppressed there and my land is free!

Lindzen and Choi 2011: have they torpedoed AGW alarmism? Or not?

I have been arguing that Climate Sensitivity is the key to resolving the controversy over global warming.

Climate Sensitivity (CS) is the degree to which the earth's climate changes to a given change, conventionally taken as a doubling of CO2. The CO2 which we have already added to the atmosphere will push the heat up by ~1*C. Multiple lines of evidence (modelling, palaeoclimate, observations of volcano effects, solar cycles, ocean changes, and probabilistic)  all point to an additional 3*C (+or- 1.5*C)  increase due to positive feedbacks.

Note that the models underestimate CS if anything, because they do not take into account long-term feedbacks such as loss of ice and vegetation.

There is a detailed treatment of CS here.

The convergence on the 3*C value from six different approaches to the problem is remarkable, and very robust.

Climate skeptics must try to find evidence that CS is less than 1*C in order to prevent any damage to the profit lines of oil and coal companies.

I have mentioned Singer's attempt to do this here.

Spencer and Braswell tried and failed this year.

One other attempt of the sceptics to support their hypothesis is Lindzen and Choi 2009.  Their paper was strongly criticised , even from their own side, so they came up with a revision which they claim addresses the criticisms. It is published as Lindzen and Choi 2011.

Their paper estimates CS by comparing monthly 1985-2009 tropical sea surface temperatures with those at the top of the atmosphere. They conclude that climate models are exaggerating climate sensitivity. This conclusion was triumphantly seized on and amplified by the warming skeptic  blogosphere and mainstream press.

I have been waiting for an expert systematic refutation to turn up. John Cook of the excellent Skeptical Science site is about to put one up, but yesterday I found the peer reviews of LC11 from when they (unsuccessfully) submitted the paper to the Proceeding of the National Academy of Science - the US equivalent of our Royal Society.

Here I summarise the criticisms made by the reviewers:

1. The paper gives insufficient detail of the methods to allow other workers to reproduce them. This is a grade A, fundamental scientific error.
2. The paper does not address criticisms of LC09 by Trenberth et al 2010, nor Dessler 2010.
3. The paper studies only tropical processes, (a term that it fails to define) and unsafely assumes that this can be extended to the whole globe.
4. They ignore changes that occur over land.
5. They confuse forcing and feedback. In other words, they assume clouds to be causes, and not effects, of surface changes, and make no attempt to justify this assumption.
6. Month-to-month variability of the tropics may have nothing to do with climate feedback processes.
7. Detailed analysis of the "lagged regressions" (which are beyond my ken) show deficiencies.
8. The authors chose time periods for the lags that suit their conclusions.
9. The claim to deal with equilibrium climate sensitivity is not substantiated.

These are damning criticisms.

I cannot say whether any of these peer review criticisms were turned into amendments of the paper. PNAS rejected it, and Lindzen took it to the Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, who published.

The overall point is that this flawed paper gets published, is reported as the end to AGW in the blogosphere and conservative papers, and when the scientific community gets its act together, it will receive next to no coverage, leaving the public with the mistaken impression that AGW is "controversial".

It is not. All valid evidence points to Climate Sensitivity being in the region of 3*C - a value that merits serious decarbonisation of the world economy.

In future blog posts, I will deal with Idso 1998 and Shaviv 2005, which are the only other attempts to establish low sensitivity that I am aware of.

More on this from the excellent skeptical Science site.

Citizen's Income, Land Value Tax, and Green Party Policy

Dole Moors (in the distance) from Dolberrow

A green party member has been asking about the connection between ecological sustainability and Green Party policies like Citizen's Income (CI) and Land Value Tax (LVT).

CI can be developed from the idea that every human being has a right to eat.
In subsistence societies this translates into a share of the results of the communal hunting and gathering.
In pastoral societies, it translates into each family being given access to a section of land for growing food.

I live in Dolebury, near the Dole Moors, which take their name from the practice where sections of land were parceled out to the people.

Quick Google of Dole Moors yields:

There is a strange account in the Every Day Book of the annual apportion- ment of some commons, called Dole Moors, belonging to the parishes of Puxton, Wick St. Lawrence and Congresbury in Somersetshire.http://www.archive.org/stream/englandundernorm00morguoft/englandundernorm00morguoft_djvu.txt

1 The question as to the dimensions of the " hide " has been a fruitful subject of controversy. It was originally that measure of land which was considered to be sufficient for the support of one family, and its extent varied in every district according to the local custom and according to the qualit)'- 
of the soil. Bede (Hist. Eccl. i. 15) estimated the contents of the Isle of Thanet at 600 hides, which were afterwards found to contain nearly 70 " sulings," or Kentish ploughlands, each containing 210 acres according to the measure used in Thanet. In this instance the " hide " is shown to have contained less than 25 acres. In a poorer district it would contain much more. There was a later use of the word which made it equivalent to a "ploughland," or as much arable as a team of oxen could plough in a 
year: in this case the "hide" represents quantities varying, according to the district, from 100 acres to 210 acres, or even more. 


...in some cases been annual, and in others having originally been held once in three years but afterwards at longer intervals. It is true that there is hardly any documentary evidence to show that the arable in England was ever divided in this way. But the pastures, and notably the lot-meadows and dole-moors, were treated as common property : a primitive usage determined the division of 
the common-fields into strips and blocks, the rotation of  the crops, the erection of fences, and the use of the land after harvest bv the cattle of the whole community ; we see that the same usages prevailed in the German districts where the ownership was certainly collective ; and we are 
thus led to believe that the English farmers were at first joint-owners of all the arable land as well as of the pastures and waste-grounds in the township." 

There are many popular customs of which the origin must be attributed to a time when the villagers were united by the sentiment of partnership and the tradition of a common descent.

http://www.ebooksread.com/authors-eng/charles-isaac-elton/origins-of-english-history-otl/page-33-origins-of-english-history-otl.shtml 

In our post-pastoral times, the wealth of the land is represented in terms of money, and this can be represented as Citizens Income. 

At the same time, this line of approach gives validity to the LVT - we rent the land which is our "personal property" from the community. 

The perceived problem with CI is that it is perceived as impossibly expensive, and that it is nothing but a Ligger's Charter. 

In spite of the best efforts of the Basic Income Earth Network, and the support of various economic thinkers, it has rarely surfaced in the UK public debate, (though Comhaontas Glas (?sp)the Irish Greens, did get a report on CI out of the Government which they participated in) and if it did it would undoubtedly be immediately rubbished on by conservatives in all the main parties as being prohibitively expensive, especially in these times of austerity.

Which is why I developed the Green Wage Subsidy proposal (presented to the DWP consultation process as Work Stimulus Scheme.
This has the merit of sidestepping the cost and Ligger's Charter objections. 

It also converts benefits like JSA etc from being an administratively complex, dead, grudging dole given on condition that the recipient does no work (aside from a tiny Earnings Disregard) into a meaningful stimulus to the Green sector of the economy. 

It is therefore of help in dealing with the coming recession, and when/if we emerge from recession, will enable a mature public debate on CI to take place, with a good chance of seeing it rolled out in its full form.

It is not full CI, but is a practical effective and attractive transition policy. 

Defend the NHS or lose the NHS

This below is from 38 Degrees, campaigning to keep the NHS.


Joni Mitchell said it: "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?"


I feel it is very much up to NHS users to defend it, not me. I did my bit, providing the service. 


My vision is of a mass lobbying of MP surgeries, lobbies that spill out onto the streets, and escalate into Arab Spring type protests, only without the live ammunition provided by the Army...you get the idea. 


As a retired GP, I am waiting for the patients to do it. It is probably the result of repressed resentment at thoughtless abuse of the NHS' free treatment. I was a kind, humane, friendly GP, but there is a degree of fecklessness, thoughtlessness and entitlement that goes on, and that produces resentment deep down in even the kindest health service worker. 


So basically my repressed shadow self is saying, "If you whingeing sickly bastards want a free NHS, you've got to demonstrate in the streets. If you don't demonstrate, you're going to have to do without, the rich are going to have to pay, and the poor are going to have to die. Your bloody choice".


Irrational, I know. But humans are irrational beings. And if my anger prompts people to demonstrate, it will have been worth while.






38 Degrees members now have something our MPs don't - thorough, independent legal advice about what these changes really mean.

Our expert legal advice is sobering. Despite the "listening exercise", the government's changes to the NHS plans could still pave the way for a shift towards a US-style health system, where private companies profit at the expense of patient care.

Conservative MPs like yours are being told by their bosses these changes fit with party ideology. But many would be horrified to know that the NHS would be subject to European competition laws and front-line services could be held up with procurement red tape. Let's work together to show them the evidence right now!

If enough of us email now, it could tip the balance:
https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/email-your-conservative-mp

Our independent lawyers identified two major problems in the new legislation:

1 - The Secretary of State's legal duty to provide a health service will be scrapped. On top of that, a new "hands-off clause" removes the government's powers to oversee local consortia and guarantee the level of service wherever we live. We can expect increases in postcode lotteries - and less ways to hold the government to account if the service deteriorates.

2 - The NHS will almost certainly be subject to UK and EU competition law and the reach of procurement law rules will extend across all NHS commissioners. Private health companies will be able to take new NHS commissioning groups to court if they don't win contracts. Scarce public money could be tied up in legal wrangles instead of hospital beds. Meanwhile, the legislation lifts the cap on NHS hospitals filling beds with private patients.

So who are MPs going to listen to when casting their vote - you, or lobbyists from private health companies? This is our NHS, and it's up to us to defend it. Email your MP now:
https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/email-your-conservative-mp

It's pretty extraordinary what we've managed to achieve together already. Nearly half a million of us have signed the petition to save the NHS. And after Andrew Lansley announced the last round of changes, thousands of 38 Degrees members immediately chipped in to get top independent legal advice on the new plans.

Barrister Rebecca Haynes found that the government's plans could pave the way for private healthcare companies and their lawyers to benefit most from changes, not patients. Another barrister, Stephen Cragg, found that we were right to be worried that Andrew Lansley was planning to remove his duty to provide our NHS.

This is the conclusion of a top legal team paid to have no other interest at heart but yours.

MPs vote in just seven days. Seven days to not only get the evidence, but be convinced there's way too much public concern to ignore it. The good news is, with over 800,000 of us now armed with expert legal advice, we are just the people to speak up. Our message is clear: we have the facts, so politicians can't hide behind spin. Let's give MPs from all parties the mandate they need to think again and vote against these changes to the NHS.
https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/email-your-conservative-mp


More:

Dr Ron Singer: "Andrew Lansley is wrong - GPs do not support this NHS bill"
Dr Clare Gerada: "The health bill should be amended again or withdrawn"
Sir Roger Boyle: "It is horrific that the NHS's future is threatened"
Max Pemberton: "The day they signed the death warrant for the NHS"
UNISON: "Five reasons to scrap the Health and Social Care Bill"