We are all suspects now.

Via the New Scientist:

IT WAS a dramatic declaration: glaciers across much of the Himalayas may be gone by 2035. When New Scientist heard this comment from a leading Indian glaciologist, we reported it. That was in 1999. The claim later appeared in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report – and it turns out that our article is the primary published source.

The science deserves to be taken more seriously than this.

Snapped en route to collect the Christmas groceries by foot. It was a long way back up the hill!

So here I am,  back online in our new High Wycombe home, just in time for this revolt against reason:

Following the ‘climategate scandal’, Mr Blair said the science may not be “as certain as its proponents allege”.

But he said the world should act as a precaution against floods, droughts and mass extinction caused by climate change, in fact it would be “grossly irresponsible” not to.

If I understand Blair correctly, he is following up his recent assertion of the form ‘we were right to go to war, irrespective of the facts’ with an assertion that ‘we should intervene heavily in the operation of society, irrespective of the facts’. This is sheer ideology: why not extend this philosophy to every social problem? I suspect he would answer, “Why not indeed?”

I am put in mind of my favourite philosopher, Karl Popper, who lived through mankind’s greatest period of social planning, with all the misery it entailed:

I see now more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous — from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows.

And:

We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can make security more secure.

Not forgetting:

It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.

Popper began of course, like Hayek, as a socialist. He simply came to his senses when he saw what it entailed.

A week or so ago, my wife and I had lunch in High Wycombe’s noodle bar. I struck up a conversation with the young waiter – I forget how it began – and found myself answering his complaint that he didn’t know what politics was about with, “It’s about whether we should have a planned or a free society.” He answered, “I know what I want, but I don’t know who will give it to me.” I explained that a vote for me is a vote for a free society, which lifted his spirits.

What a pass we have come to if the young think there is no hope for a free society. What would our grandparents say, after all they went through?

This week, The Spectator writes Meet the man who has exposed the great climate change con trick:

James Delingpole talks to Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, whose new book shows that ‘anthropogenic global warming’ is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a ‘first-world luxury’ with no basis in scientific fact. Shame on the publishers who rejected the book.

…

‘The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology,’ says Plimer, and while his thesis is not new, you’re unlikely to have heard it expressed with quite such vigour, certitude or wide-ranging scientific authority. Where fellow sceptics like Bjorn Lomborg or Lord Lawson of Blaby are prepared cautiously to endorse the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) more modest predictions, Plimer will cede no ground whatsoever. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory, he argues, is the biggest, most dangerous and ruinously expensive con trick in history.

And as it happens, I just finished Nigel Lawson’s An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming. From the Afterword:

Much has happened over the year that has elapsed since this book was first published, and all of it has served only to reinforce its main thesis. That thesis, in a nutshell, was and remains the proposition that, even if the current majority view of the science of global warming is correct, the policy response we are told we must urgently adopt, of drastic curbs on global carbon dioxide emissions, makes no sense: it is both economically damaging and politically unattainable.

Lawson explains that, far from denying the science, he thinks it prudent to act as if it were correct, planning for adaptation. He does, however, touch on the science, showing that:

• The science is neither certain nor settled.
• Global warming is not happening right now.
• Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

Now, I am not ready to take a position on climate science, nor to condemn climate alarmism as the new anti-capitalistic religion (as Lawson does), but it seems that a person concerned with the prosperity and well-being of humanity should take a critically rational look at the science and the suggested policy response. Lawson refers to a survey of climate scientists, two thirds of whom agreed that anthropogenic global warming is supported by the science, in which only 8% thought ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ was ‘the most pressing issue facing humanity today’. Whether we should accept the present policy response must therefore be a question worthy of debate, even among mainstream climate scientists.

For a critique of the science, I suggest Jo Nova’s The Skeptics Handbook and The Manhattan Declaration. For alternative perspectives on the associated environmental question of resource depletion, I recommend these videos on the arithmetic of growth and this essay on Oil and the Doomers’ Dire Predictions. You may also enjoy this Climate Quiz.

If we are serious about human progress, about promoting prosperity for the world’s poor, we must be rational. Reason shows that the route to social progress is unhampered cooperation between independent, interdependent people. It would be better if governments got out of the way, if poor nations industrialized and if we anticipated spontaneous adaptation if and when necessary.

Interesting comment at the Guardian, but people are taking this very seriously:

We appear to have lost all ability to judge risk. The cause may lie in the national curriculum, the decline of “news” or the rise of blogs and concomitant, unmediated hysteria, but people seem helpless in navigating the gulf that separates public information from their daily round. They cannot set a statistic in context. They cannot relate bad news from Mexico to the risk that inevitably surrounds their lives. The risk of catching swine flu must be millions to one.

…

Meanwhile a real pestilence, MRSA and C difficile, was taking hold in hospitals. It was suppressed by the medical profession because it appeared that they themselves might be to blame. These diseases have played a role in thousands of deaths in British hospitals – the former a reported 1,652 and the latter 8,324 in 2007 alone. Like deaths from alcoholism, we have come to regard hospital-induced infection as an accident of life, a hazard to which we have subconsciously adjusted.

MRSA and C difficile are not like swine flu, an opportunity for public figures to scare and posture and spend money. They are diseases for which the government is to blame. They claim no headlines and no Cobra priority. Their sufferers must crawl away and die in silence.

via Simon Jenkins: Swine flu? A panic stoked in order to posture and spend | Comment is free | The Guardian .

Hugin is a panorama photo stitcher. Given a number of overlapping photographs, preferably of the same exposure, Hugin:

• Finds the control points which tie the images,
• Optimizes the images for stitching by distorting them to fit,
• Stitches them together,
• Blends the joins.

Thankfully, it has a wizard which takes care of all this. Contrary to the otherwise excellent notes on Wee Planets, Hugin now embeds autopano-sift for automatic control point creation and Enblend for sleek stitching and blending. Hugin is the one program you need.

This image of the east side of the promontory  at Durdle Door was assembled by Hugin from eighteen shots. If you are not too fussy, these don’t take as long to shoot as you would think, but then it really needed 20 to fill in those bottom corners:

Inspired by the documentation for Wee Planets, I created this panorama with Hugin, an outstanding tool for aligning, joining, blending and correcting images. I simply followed the installation instructions and threw six relatively carelessly-taken photos at it to obtain this result. It was reported as a “very bad fit” by Hugin, which may indicate the quality that can be achieved with care. The original size is available here.

Hugin includes everything needed to quickly create panoramas: I did not have to use separately autopano-sift or Enblend.

Great fun and highly recommended.