I despair when so much judicial time is wasted on process, instead on being devoted to seeing justice done.

In heard James Hansen being interviewed on the radio by a BBC journalist. She annoyed him (although he kept calm and polite) by picking on very small anomalies in climate change and making inaccurate summaries of climate change statistics and  science instead of concentrating on the big picture. Some people do not have the vision to see the whole picture or the imagination, depending on their point of view or lack of view. Perhaps we can invent the equivalent of spectacles for the intellect for those journalists who cannot see properly or prefer to report about the edges instead of reporting on the whole.

In the end Mr Hansen decided that answering questions about the colour of the deckchairs on the Titanic was not helpful and diverted the interviewer to point out that Canada is negotiating with the European Union to count the emissions produced from the oil mined in its tar sands as being the same emissions as those produced by oil that is drilled in traditional ways, even though the extraction of oil from tar sands produces in its overall emission content at least 20% more carbon dioxide. Presumably Mr Hansen agreed to be interviewed in order to talk about this problem.

The European Union rightly wants Canadian tar sand oil to be designated as “highly polluting” under the EU fuel quality directive, which is fair and logical. Canada, where money now matters more than the environment, wants no differentiation and it looks like that the United Kingdom, to its shame, will support he Canadian view.

Mr Hansen will be meeting Norman Baker, at the Department of Transport to discuss the designation of oil from the Canadian tar sands. Mr Baker is a committed environmentalist and I have a great deal of time for him, not least because he was kind enough to write some nice words about “the Energy Age”. I hope that he will see Mr Hansen’s point of view and come to the right decision.

Mr Baker has always, in my view, shown that he understands the big climate change picture.

The starting point when considering any new government project is to understand that governments like big projects, the bigger the better. They prefer to subsidise acres of photovoltaic panels in green fields that to subsidies two solar water heating panels on the roofs of thousands of homes. They prefer to subsidise hundreds of wind turbines than to subsidise tens of thousands of homes to have their lofts insulated and their cavity walls insulated. They like to build massive Olympic Parks and structures to celebrate the millennium, even though those buildings have limited after the event use and usually end up virtually being given away for free to commercial organisations rather than spend the money doing good in a million small ways. they prefer vanity projects.

This is the philosophy of all governments; that big is better and small is insignificant. That philosophy underpins the high speed rail project; let us all get to Birmingham faster (perhaps by as much as twenty minutes) at the cost of billions to the public purse because…it will be better and bring unspecified benefits.
Of course communications within any nation are important but it is the quality and reliability of those communications that matter, not necessarily the speed. I have travelled on trains in Switzerland; mostly the trains chunder along quite slowly but with great reliability. You can almost set your watch by them, whether there are leaves on the line or not or whether there is the wrong kind or the right kind of snow.

If the public purse is to be tapped by improving the railways then there are more ways to bring economic reliability than building a stretch of track at which trains can travel at very high speeds. Electrification of track has an environmental benefit, because electric engines are lighter and need less energy to pull them along. Building double decker trains also has an environmental benefit in that more people can be accommodated. Making the signalling system robust and less prone to breakdown and ensuring that leaves and snow never disrupt the trains also have obvious environmental and business benefits.

These are small measures; a politician will not be able to proudly boast that he has corrected a million small defects and injustices but he will be able to claim “I built that high speed railway that gets you from London to Birmingham twenty minutes in travel time earlier”.

I suppose that even that twenty minute claim will need revision; the time the train spends travelling may be reduced by twenty minutes or so, but no doubt some of that twenty minutes will be lost by adopting longer check in times. We can no longer run for a train and jump into it as it accelerates (as we could with steam trains) and no longer open the doors as the train pulls into a station and jump out quickly (as we could with suburban electric trains) and I wonder if the check in time for the high speed link to Birmingham will be more than the journey time saved by the link.

The only evidence that this is likely to be the case comes from the reasonably higher speed train that you can take from Kings Cross to Brussels or Paris; there the check in times are about forty five minutes as you have to go through security and passport control. The journeys are much longer than from London to Birmingham and there is a net saving of time. On the new high speed train line there will be no need for passport control, but there might be a need for more security than we have at present.

The National Audit Office is right to question this grandiose and probably unnecessary project. The project may bring jobs in the building of the railway, but any investment on that scale would bring jobs and investing in many small improvements and upgrades to the railways system will bring jobs that last and that will provide employment for many years, not just for a few short years.  When the Channel Tunnel was proposed it was claimed that it would bring great prosperity to the eastern parts of Kent. That never happened. It was a worthwhile project because it developed a new route of communication. Going from London to Birmingham on high speed trains simply enables you t get there faster; the time you save will no doubt be swallowed up in a traffic jam or a bus delay when you get to your destination.

Unusual weather is normal in the British Isles, which meet where three weather systems converge and compete for mastery. Long extended periods where the weather is abnormal changes the definition of what is normal weather. What is important to remember is that the British isles constitute a very small percentage of the surface of the earth and while the weather that we experience may lead us to believe that our climate is not warming, there are other places, including the seas and the places where no people live and where few weather measurements are taken. In the past ten years, as far as we know, global mean land temperatures have remained fairly constant but over the past a hundred years they have risen. During that hundred year period, there have been times when global mean temperatures have not risen; the graph shows a jagged rise.

During the past ten years global mean sea temperatures have risen, with an occasional fall.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/monitoring/climate/surface-temperature

The rest of the world faces choices; if it intervenes it runs the risk of letting go of nurse and finding something much, much worse. If it does not intervene it runs the risk of being a passive spectator watching carnage which it may have prevented. If a choice about saving lives is very difficult to make it probably does not make that much difference to the number of lives save which choice is made.

One thing is clear: every effort should be made to stop all arms reaching either side in the conflict and to put as many arms out of commission as possible. At least the death rate will slow down.

The likelihood of parts of the rest of the world intervening in Syria is high; the likelihood of the rest of the world preventing arms being shipped to Syria is almost none. 

Abraham Lincoln pointed out that you can fool some of the people some of the time and most of the people all of the time; he was wrong, however, in claiming that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. You can fool all of the people all of the time, but because there are people who will, through prejudice or sheer stubbornness maintain their disbelief out loud even though in their hearts they believe and know their disbelief is false.

Maintaining disbelief is an important human trait. It is a vice and a virtue. Even as the storms rage and the crops fail and the sun parches the land and the seas rise there will be those who maintain their disbelief. At the end of the day, it may well be the only relief they find.

Fiveways was a convergence of five streets and one of the corners of the convergence was a building that housed the London City Mission’s Poplar Sunday School. I do not remember (consciously at least) what I was taught at Sunday School; I do remember who taught us.
There were three people; at that time I thought them very old people. They were much older than my parents and were people who were dedicated to bring the gospel to the poor of Poplar. The poor of Poplar were not heathens and knew the gospel but it did them no harm to be reminded of it from time to time and it did no harm to provide a free babysitting service so that the parents could spend an hour alone together.
There were three people teaching Sunday School and they all worked together, like a team. The leader was Mr J Bonney. I remember his name only because he signed it on a prize I was given. The prize was a book – there were few books around in those days and those that were around were expensive. Rge book was a red covered small book that contained the words of 738 hymns for young people, under the name of “Golden Bells” published in 1925. Mr J Bonney certified that my book was awarded to me for “Regular Attendance and good conduct” and Mr J Bonney described himself as “missionary”. Sooner or later everyone was awarded “Golden Bells”. My older sister managed to get a Bible as well, no doubt for even more regular attendance and better conduct.
Mr Bonney was supported in his missionary work practised upon me by two sisters, the Misses Sweet. They seemed very old to me at the time, but they had a sense of the exotic. One of the Misses Sweet played an old battered harmonium to which we sang hymns from Golden Bells. Her feet would pump at the pedals which operated the bellows to push and pull air through the harmonium as Ms Sweet played the keyboard. The harmonium is an old instrument to find these days and the battered harmonium played by Ms Sweet seemed to have a life of its own. It was old – perhaps as old as the Misses Sweet or Mr Bonney – and I wondered if it could tell stories of its own. Of course children were not allowed to touch or play the harmonium; that would have been such pleasure.
I looked through my edition of “Golden Bells”. The pages are yellowed but the print is clear. The small book of so many hymns for young people fell open at page 75 and my eyes searched the page to see what hymn had been sung so often that opening the book would cause a preference for page 75 as opposed to any of the other 211 pages. In the top right hand corner of the page in the book’s very small print were the words, or some of the words that had inspired Mr Bonney and the Misses Sweet to do their work in Poplar.
“Rock of Ages, cleft for me
Let me hide myself in thee”

We are, as humans, moving into a new place.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo

These are clues, not solutions to the overwhelming problem.

We do not know if our thoughts ideas and feelings have energy or mass; our measuring devices are too crude. When ideas are running at speed through the brain, does it give the brain more mass? The brain certainly requires more energy to enable those thoughts to run through a mind. Where do our forgotten memories go to hide? Where do the memories of the dead reside? Memories and ideas transform into the words and actions that we have created and passed, by conduction or radiation as an inevitable inheritance to those around us that come into contact with us.

But when we die, where do our feelings go?

Two major companies explored Poland for fracking opportunities – Talisman Energy and Marathon. They have now pulled out of fracking in Poland; Marathon failed to find commercial volumes of hydrocarbon fuel. Last year Exxon pulled out but Chevron and ENI are still exploring.

The estimate of natural gas reserves in Poland by the US Energy Information Administration was 5.3 trillion cubic metres, which would supply Poland with gas for nearly 300 years, assuming that consumption does not increase. However it seems that those estimates have proved wildly wrong and although there may be some gas to find it seems likely that if it is hard to find the costs of tapping into it will be huge – and make commercial operations unviable.

The enthusiasm for fracking seems to be based as much on political enthusiasm for energy independence and hope, as on science and commercial analysis.

I expect that following the experience of what is happening in Poland firms exploring for fracking possibilities in the United Kingdom may well want some level of subsidy from the UK government in some form in order to undertake the exploration.

I have analysed the viability of producing natural gas from fracking elsewhere in these posts and the environmental risks. I would point out that the more expensive it is to find and frack gas, the more likely that the environmental safety procedures, yet to be fully put in place, will be breached.

I also rather expect that fracking in the USA will be a short lived enterprise, and that investment in fracking will prove a poor investment, unless the fracking companies can persuade the government to provide a taxpayer subsidy.