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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I find it deeply therapeutic to begin the day by transferring a Medium story over here (and messing about with it). It sets me up nicely for the hours of real work. The trouble is they are more than likely to be versions of stories here that got transferred there. Also you run out of stories and start hunting round for more and more desperate rationales, of which this is the latest.
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“Another skylark, madam?” December 10, 2023
| Ambelopoulia is a controversial dish of grilled, fried, pickled or boiled songbirds Wikipedia |
Controversial because two million migratory songbirds using Cyprus as a stopover between Europe and Africa get slaughtered every year to satisfy the demand.
This is illegal under EU laws but every country is offered an exemption ‘for folk cruelty’ when they apply for membership (we got one for fox-hunting). Cyprus did not apply for an exemption for song-bird hunting — presumably for PR reasons — but the practice was made illegal under domestic legislation.
This has had only a limited effect because hunting and ambelopoulia are national passions in Cyprus, vide this exchange heard on a BBC Radio 4 environmental programme
BBC environmentalist: Does the Cyprus government have any intention of doing anything about the ambelopoulia trade?
Minister for Wildlife: No.
BBC environmentalist: Would this have anything to do with all those trophies of animal heads I can see on the wall behind you?
Minister for Wildlife: We do try but it’s a question of priorities.
Our BBC reporter informed us mournfully that it wasn’t too bad when the Cypriots used branches with glue to trap the birds but nowadays ‘mist nets’ are employed on a lavish scale and it has become a zillion dollar industry. If you want to have a go yourself
* erect a mist net in a likely spot
* disentangle any songbird caught
* bite it in the neck
* throw it in a bucket
* until you have enough for a nice bowl of ambelopoulia.
We weren’t told precisely what happens to the great many non-migratory, non-songbirds that get caught up in the nets but we were assured that, on Cyprus, the peewits and the cuckoos no longer peewit and cuckoo with their old gay abandon.
| But the BBC wouldn't be there if there wasn't a British angle... |
Many of the largest mist nets, the ones used year after year, are on British sovereign bases’ land because Cypriot environmentalists find it difficult to get access so they can blow the whistle. The British have problems of their own. “Mist nets are the devil of a job to see, even for trained pilots." “Look, wing commander, over there. Those men with buckets.”
Nor can much be done about Turkish Cyprus where they catch songbirds with parallel enthusiasm but only for the export ambelopoulia trade. You try killing a robin using halal methods. It’s not easy.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I always had difficulty working out a persona on Medium but settled eventually on Chief Jeremiah
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Is it to be Hell or the Handbasket? May 10, 2023
Let’s not kid ourselves. We’re not going to make it. Things are getting worse faster than we anticipated, the solutions are being applied slower than we had hoped. Time, maybe, for a change of strategy.
That may not be possible. Proposing such a thing would be swamped by accusations of climate change-denying (or worse) long before the proposals ever got a hearing.
Technically this is called ‘careful ignoral’, a sub-type of cognitive dissonance. Human beings much prefer not solving a problem with a familiar solution than re-ordering their brain circuitry in a search for the correct one. We prefer being burnt at the stake than recanting the beliefs that got us there.
As an applied epistemologist, I don’t have beliefs so I don’t suffer from this particular problem. Though I do suffer from the problem that nobody ever listens to applied epistemologists. That never stops us so here’s your way ahead.
For every solution there has to be a question.
| “Is global warming the problem and is the greenhouse effect causing the global warming?” |
Two questions for the price of one. There is a fair possibility — I cannot say more than that because nobody can — that the answers are (a) no and (b) no.
It is certainly the case that global warming has accompanied all the other weather changes that are happening so fast and so disastrously. There is the obvious — but never examined — possibility that global warming is one of the weather changes rather than the cause of the others.
| If so, we must look for the underlying reason for all of them. |
Otherwise we may end up solving the global warming problem — increasingly likely now that green energy is comparable in price to fossil fuel energy — but still in the mess. And another couple of decades will have ticked by.
That underlying reason is sort of known, sort of not known. A classic symptom of ‘careful ignoral’. In a nutshell, it’s the disappearing rain forests. In a wider carapace, it’s the disappearing everything. But the reason for the careful ignoral is that it is seldom a case of
| ‘Oh, we’ve done x, it’s caused y, we’d better stop doing x.’ |
That wouldn’t be ignored and would be fixed in a day. What happens in practice is one bunch of people do x but it is a different bunch of people that get y. To give a small example:
(a) the communists are ousted from power in Mongolia
(b) the browsing animals of the Mongolian steppe get out of control
(c) the Mongolian steppe turns into a near-Mongolian desert
(d) it is no longer sending water vapour into the west-bound jet stream
(e) it stops raining in California.
Californians don’t accept this because
(a) they believe they get their rain from the Pacific Ocean
(b) they therefore prefer to blame El Niño for their constant droughts
(c) they ignore the fact that El Niño has always been there
(d) so it cannot be the cause of a new phenomenon
(e) Californians won’t blame Mongolian herdsmen, not in a million years.
Unless they spend an hour watching the Applied Epistemology Library’s YouTube The Distribution of Deserts https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=5uNQIMcKNTM
(f) But they won’t do that in a million years.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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Have you seen my latest posts on Hyperborea?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I am girding my loins to dive in.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This earned me a certain amount of notoriety and remained a steady seller throughout my Medium career
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My To-Do List for Saving the World May 15, 2023
(in no particular order)
1. Outlaw recycling
2. Put all waste in landfill
3. Ban civil jet aircraft
4. Re-open, re-build, repair all existing nuclear power plants
5. Create a World Maritime Agency with a vast fleet of warships
6. End all sanctions
7. Watch my YouTube on Desertification and the Hydrological Cycle
Notes
1. Recycling has achieved a roughly 12% success rate, much the same as when it started several decades ago. It is perfectly clear that no matter what we do with the detritus of civilised living, recycling is not it. But why abolish this modest contribution? Because (a) it has meant in practice offloading the worst of it onto poor countries who in turn offload it into the environment (b) it has provided an alibi for everyone who wants ‘to make a contribution’ that they are doing so. Just stop recycling and force us all to confront the problem effectively. The small amount of useful recycling, i.e. not just producing rubber and plastic crumbs, can be left to commercial scrap metal merchants as has been done ever since the birth of civilised living.
2. Every time we come up with some solution or other to the waste problem — e.g. incineration, plastics that break down rapidly — we subsequently discover we have produced an even bigger problem — e.g. nasty particles in the atmosphere, nasty sherds in the ocean. Do what we do with radioactive waste, bury it with great care until we actually know what we’re doing.
3. We don’t exactly know what we’re doing to the upper atmosphere, nor what a changing upper atmosphere is doing to us, but until we do know a good start would be to stop injecting vast quantities of burnt aviation kerosene directly into it. A return to propeller-driven aircraft would part-solve this and part-solve a good many other problems connected to airmiles.
4. Nuclear power is presently the best method of generating base-load electricity. We may (or may not) decide that building new nuclear power stations is the way ahead, but using existing ones to their uttermost is not just sensible it is de rigueur.
5. It is obvious that the oceans are in trouble. It is also obvious that we don’t have the political tools to do anything about it since, while everyone has an interest in saving the ocean, everyone has an interest in exploiting their own bit of ocean or exploiting the common ocean. We pretty much know what needs doing, but only the supra-authority of a World Navy will force us to do it.
6. Humankind is addicted to conflict and there’s nothing to be done about that short of abolishing humankind. However, there are ways and means to ensure conflict is limited to A bashes B until B does what A wants it to, without upsetting wider applecarts. And right now we need all the applecarts to be going in roughly the same direction, even the ones you happen to believe are being driven by particularly evil applecart drivers. Sanctions have proved to be ineffective but pernicious, destabilising for the sanctioners but dangerously isolating for the sanctioned. Yet everyone loves them because they are cheap and give the illusion that ‘something is being done’. Sanctions should be treated like chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
7. The Distribution of Deserts https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=5uNQIMcKNTM. You should ignore the limited production values — applied epistemologists don’t get paid for their work. You should, however, pay special attention to the bits that prompt the thought, “That can’t be true, I learned all about it in school.” That’s the kind of thing applied epistemologists are not paid to tell you about.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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One of the more difficult problems to solve is that people confuse amenity with saving the planet. This was me trying to draw this to people's attention. Rather confusedly, reading it now, but this was early days.
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Britain’s answer to the sewage problem. The rivers. May 22, 2023
The big political issue in Britain at the moment is our dirty rivers. I don’t mean there’s a Clean Rivers party and a Dirty Rivers party, I mean there’s a ‘You Clean ’em Up’ party and a ‘No, You Clean ’em Up’ party.
This is odd because one thing all rivers in Britain have in common is that they are common. They don’t belong to anyone, they belong to everyone. It is the birthright of every free-born Briton to make them dirty, it is the job of every tax-borne Briton to clean them up. So what are our would-be governors saying? Let’s listen in:
“Nationalise the water companies,” say the left.
“That will cost an arm and a leg. We won’t have anything left in the kitty to clean up the rivers,” say the right.
“We could raise taxes,” says left and right.
“Raising taxes is no way to win an election,” agrees left and right.
“We’ll get the fat cat water companies to pay,” resumes the left. “They’ve been making billions in profits and it all goes abroad, they’re owned by sovereign wealth funds and whatnot.”
“You just added up all the water companies’ profits made over the last twenty years selling water to, and taking sewage from, sixty million customers,” rejoins the right. “It works out less than one per cent on turnover. Take away that profit and the water companies will go bust.”
“And we can nationalise them for a song,” says the left.
And so on and so forth. Back and forth. In politics everyone’s got a solution that requires someone else picking up the tab. What will happen, eventually, is they will attach a precept on every water bill and nobody will notice they’ve picked up the tab.
| And not a single tax was raised! |
They did it with electricity bills to get the power companies to go green. But there is a difference. Green energy is to do with saving the planet and we are happy(ish) to pay the difference. We’re all in it together. Cleaning up the rivers will do nothing for saving the planet so we might be unhappy(ish) paying the difference because we’re not necessarily all in it together. Let’s listen instead to what that watery master, M J Harper, has to say on the subject.
| There’s no such thing as a clean river. |
In any land occupied by tax-paying human beings you can have any sort of river you want — from limpid trout stream to fire hazard — but you can’t have clean rivers. Only cleaner rivers. What everyone is ignoring is one simple fact
| We don’t need rivers at all. |
The water we use doesn’t come from rivers, it comes from rainfall either direct or recycled and stored in reservoirs. True, the reservoirs are topped up from rivers but only way upstream where the water is so clean we can practically drink the stuff. This needs no direct intervention from the likes of us, it is clean by nature and available in God-given abundance, especially here in God’s own country. Other than that
| Rivers are just glorified sewers. |
They take all the rainfall that hasn’t been intercepted by plants or us and they dump it into the sea. That’s what sewers do as well, so what’s the difference, rivers vis à vis sewers?
| We don’t demand clean sewers, we do demand clean rivers. |
Sometimes. Some of us. In some places. For instance, here in London, we didn’t want the Thames stinking up the place, so we built the world’s first modern sewer system and got rid of the smell. That sufficed for a hundred years, then somebody wanted fish or cormorants or some damn thing so we cleaned up the Thames a bit more and got the country to pay for it. “Look, Madge, over there, it’s a cormorant.”
The word was out. Pandora’s box was open for business. Anyone can have the river of their dreams and they won’t have to pay for it
As long as they have the political muscle of course. Who has and who hasn’t is played out on our telly screens all the time:
* Large people in comfortable swimwear living in Godawful-on-Trent demanding they be able to ‘wild swim’ any time they feel the urge. (What’s wrong with the local swimming baths, mine’s pretty wild?)
* Medium-sized people in body-hugging swimwear demanding clean beaches. (What’s wrong with abroad?)
* Anglers complaining about the lack of fish. (What’s wrong with you, sticking hooks into the mouths of sentient creatures?)
* Birdwatchers complaining about the lack of nymphs. (You’ll have to ask them what that’s all about.)
* Vaguely familiar people in waders holding up phials of greyish water saying, “The pH is off the scale.” (You’ll have ask their agent.)
Because that’s what it’s really all about. Rivers are naturally clean unless water companies discharge raw sewage into them and they are allowed to do this by ‘special licence in an emergency’. In other word whenever it is raining so hard the sewage treatment works would overflow if they didn’t. Nobody wants an overflow at the other end, in the en suite. “Look, Madge, shit.”
In Britain, water companies are capitalist enterprises, black in tooth and claw, so of course they use this emergency power to skimp on treatment works and discharge raw sewage into our rivers every chance they get. These emergencies happen tens of thousands of times a year and it’s pointed out tens of thousand of times a year that they shouldn’t:
“It ought not to be allowed.”
“Set up a standing committee.”
“Heads will roll.”
“They’ll get taken into public ownership if they don’t look out.”
“I’m voting Lib Dem next time, you see if I don’t.”
“I’m voting Green, that’ll show ‘em.”
“It’s a scandal any way you look at it.”
No, it isn’t. If it is happening tens of thousands of times a year, it is not a scandal, it is what philosophers call the 'state of nature'. The default position. All that talk of ‘licencing’ and ‘emergencies’ is sheer persiflage.
* The companies don’t bother applying for them any more
* The government doesn’t prosecute them for not applying
* The Regulator, Ofwat (and you may well ask), will make regulation noises.
* Somebody will pay a fine — the water companies take it in turns
* Everyone will go back to being supplied with cheap water, having their sewage removed without any fuss, not having their taxes raised and bellyaching about dirty rivers.
So let’s have a new political party that says in its manifesto: We are going to send a questionnaire to every taxpayer:
1. In the box provided, write the number of pounds you are prepared to pay per annum for a clean up the rivers blitz.
2. In the box provided, indicate whether you want the British government or a consortium of foreign governments in charge of the clean-up blitz.
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Grant
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Very little of the water discharged by the evil water companies is shit. It's actually rainwater which flows through the sewage system. If not discharged into the rivers it would back up through your own toilets. This used to happen regularly in parts of London.
But I've never heard any reporter ever mention this.
If I was chief exec of a water company I'd tell my employees to stop using the rivers and let the customers' houses fill with shit. The middle-class wild swimming campaigners would soon disappear.
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Grant
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Another thing I've never heard any reporter mention is the Thames Tideway Tunnel. Strange because it costs 4 billion and when it's finished in October the Thames will be the cleanest river of any capital city.
Why is it never mentioned? My theory is that Sadiq Khan will open it and pretend he's personally solved the problem, even though they've been building it for ten years.
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Grant
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To end my water rant, it's a little known fact that many countries envy us our water system. Most independent reports - probably funded by water companies admittedly - show that we outperform France, Italy, Ireland and Spain on all the important measures.
The Irish system is a mess. The French have serious problems - remember the Paris Olympics when they had to delay triathlon events in the Seine.
There is no real evidence that our water system is underperforming.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Grant wrote: | | Very little of the water discharged by the evil water companies is shit. It's actually rainwater which flows through the sewage system. If not discharged into the rivers it would back up through your own toilets. This used to happen regularly in parts of London. But I've never heard any reporter ever mention this. |
I mentioned it. Mostly because people on the telly are always mentioning it.
| If I was chief exec of a water company I'd tell my employees to stop using the rivers and let the customers' houses fill with shit. The middle-class wild swimming campaigners would soon disappear. |
We all would.
| Another thing I've never heard any reporter mention is the Thames Tideway Tunnel. Strange because it costs 4 billion and when it's finished in October the Thames will be the cleanest river of any capital city. |
You're speaking as if four billion is more than spare change for Thames Water. They owe sixteen billion.
| To end my water rant, it's a little known fact that many countries envy us our water system. Most independent reports - probably funded by water companies admittedly - show that we outperform France, Italy, Ireland and Spain on all the important measures. There is no real evidence that our water system is underperforming. |
This is true.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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For some reason there is a year's hiatus between that last one and this one. Does it show how much I really care? I don't think so but it's still a poor show.
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World problems and how not to solve them. April 4, 2024
A problem only exists because we don’t know how to solve it. Since that is a problem in itself we tell ourselves ‘we’re solving it’. We hunt feverishly for a solution but, while that’s happening, we create temporary ‘workarounds’ and assume in the fullness of time we’ll find out what’s causing the problem, solve it and ensure it won’t happen again. Meanwhile the workaround does the job.
| In the fullness of time there is a tendency to assume the workaround was the solution. |
The technique, effective though it is, carries a grave danger. In applied epistemology it is called ‘careful ignoral’. Ignorance may be bliss but if ‘careful ignorance’ is necessary it could be storing up trouble.
Take the latest Big One to hit us, the COVID pandemic. We still don’t know what caused it but we’ve dealt with it. We worked around it. Are we busy looking for what caused COVID so it doesn’t happen again? Mmm…
| Having dealt with COVID, we’re not all that bothered about it or indeed pandemics in general. |
We weren’t much bothered about them before COVID, so pandemics are unlikely to hurtle up the world’s agenda now we’ve dealt with the one that was. We have tacitly adopted a policy of ‘next time it happens, we’ll know what to do’ even though we’re not sure what did happen or what we did.
| We’re not bothered about it, that’s the important thing. |
It is the benchmark for all ‘world problems’. We can be ludicrously complacent about ones that might polish us off but go into total meltdown about ones of almost-nil importance. (Don’t ask, one of them will be your pet peeve and I will have made an enemy for life if I dismiss it as relatively insignificant.)
| This is not necessarily a bad strategy. |
It may be a case of ‘what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger’, a nostrum that should otherwise be approached with extreme caution. Pandemics, for example, come and go and we ride them out. The human race, we have discovered, has plenty of spare capacity so even the worst one on record — the Black Death — was scarcely more than an actuarial blip in the relentless advance of humanity. To be honest, the Black Death helped rather than hindered the relentless advance.
| As long as you weren’t around at the time. |
By the by, we still don’t know what caused the Black Death. We have chosen to believe it was pathogens carried by fleas and spread by rats but is that true or is it just careful ignoral? Let’s ask the two contending authorities:
* The world’s leading expert on pandemics is on Mastermind and is asked, “What spread the pathogens that caused the Black Death?” He (or she) answers, “Rats,” and Magnus Magnusson says, “Correct.”
* The world’s leading applied epistemologist is on Mastermind. He (or she) answers the same question with, “We don’t know.” Magnus says, “You passed on the Black Death, the answer was ‘rats’.” The applied epistemologist says, “Rats.”
We reached our COVID position in much the same way, as can be illustrated using that applied epistemological standby, the ten-step programme (there is a technical reason why there are ten, which I’ll tell you about some other time):
1. COVID is being studied with great intensity by the best scientific minds all around the globe. Except what caused it. That is being carefully ignored. Or being blamed on Chinese intransigence since nobody likes to admit they’re not doing what they should be doing.
2. When we say ‘the best scientific minds’ we are referring to people trained and grown to eminence in western-style universities and research institutes. That means they have all been trained in the same way, using the same data sets and operating to the same paradigms and parameters.
3. They won’t necessarily all come to the same conclusion but the conclusions won’t vary much and gradually, thanks to the magic of peer review, they will coalesce into one ‘generally accepted explanation’.
4. Since academia operates by internal recruitment, has no external supervision and is the highest authority for these kinds of questions, this will become in due time the only explanation. Students are not typically taught more than one in the brief time available for COVID explanations, they are taught the generally accepted one.
5. When those students become in their turn academics they will teach it not as ‘the generally accepted explanation’ but as the ‘cause of COVID’. This is not dishonest, it is just the way universities, the human mind and old lecture notes operate. Suffice it to say, within a single generation there will not only be a single explanation, it will be the ‘known explanation’. If it is already known, there is no reason to consider alternatives. Only three sets of people will be interested in exploring these alternatives.
6. The first is dissident academics — yes, they do exist. And they are damned dangerous. They speak the language, they know where the bodies are buried, they might easily acquire a standing in the world beyond academia. Nor do they have to be right, the mere news that accredited academics are searching for alternatives undermines faith in the Standard Explanation. “If the experts are having doubts, why the hell should the rest of us give it the time of day?” That is why dissident academics are treated as heretics and cease to be academics ASAP.
7. The second set of alternative-seekers is a much larger group and wholly divorced from academia. From polite society in general. They are the crazies with their conspiracy theories, bad science and reluctance to use joined up thinking. Or rather join up any stray thought that happens to occur to one of them and off it flies on internet wings to take its place among the others. However, the looney-tunes are useful because of their tenaciousness in amassing data and their fecundity with off-the-wall theorising. Like spaghetti, one of them may stick.
8. The third group consists of what we might term ‘metathinkers’ (and includes applied epistemologists). People who are aware, for one reason or another, that ‘the known explanation’ is in reality a ‘best guess hypothesis’. They understand there is no guarantee a hypothesis will be the correct solution. Actually, they know from long experience it probably won’t be. Correct solutions tend to have quite dramatic effects as they cascade through the intellectual firmament; incorrect ones just sort of ‘hang around’, being taught and learned without much cognitive traction. It is not difficult recognising the difference.
9. But beware! Successful Best Guess Hypotheses have been arrived at not because they were nearest the truth given what was known at the time, but because they were best fitted to act as ‘workarounds’. For example, global warming being caused by the greenhouse effect is a Best Guess Hypothesis and that has produced immense traction. It has caused the whole world to change its ways. Whether that means it has mended its ways remains to be seen.
10. Yes, well, that’s why we use the ten-step technique. It’s always the tenth one that’s important. The one that leads to some real head scratching. I hope to God it isn’t fleas.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I don't have a thing about sewage, this is a year after the previous one and on a different subject: the difference between corporate sharp practice and flat out criminality.
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Public or Private? You Choose. April 29, 2024
It’s sewage in the rivers this time.
Me, I mostly choose private. This is not for ideological reasons (as an applied epistemologist, I’m not allowed that luxury) it’s just that a billion years of evolution have shown that, generally speaking, organisms are very good at looking after number one (together with their nearest and dearest) but not very good at looking after everyone else. You have a problem with that, take it up with God or Richard Dawkins. You choose.
But there are occasions when I go for public ownership over private enterprise. Especially where it’s a natural monopoly (like railways or the armed forces) or the product is not amenable to competitive improvement (like gas and electricity).
So when it comes to the removal of sewage — both a natural monopoly and a non-competitive service — I’m perfectly happy for Thames Water (who remove mine) to be owned by my government rather than, as it is at present, a consortium of the governments of Saudi Arabia, China and the Ontario Teachers’ pension fund. Especially since I read at the weekend
| By law, every wastewater treatment works must treat a minimum amount of sewage as stipulated in their environmental permits. Insiders say the amount of sewage reaching a works is being manipulated by “flow trimming”, which can be done a number of ways including manually setting penstocks to limit the flow, dropping weir levels and by tuning down pumps at pumping stations. The diverted raw sewage makes its way into ditches, rivers and seas. The Guardian |
I don’t know about you but this strikes me as a bit daft.
* For a start, it’s fraud. Taking pecuniary advantage by deception.
* Second of all, it’s criminal damage. I know it’s only ditches, rivers and seas but presumably someone finds these things useful and would rather not have human faeces and used condoms cluttering up the place.
* Thirdly, it’s conspiracy. You need a whole bunch of people in on it to manually set penstocks with any frequency.
* Which of course brings us to RICO. Since all the water companies are at it they must have their little meet’n’greets in Wassdale or wherever, turning up in their shades and Buicks pretending to be birdwatchers. (I don’t profess a working knowledge of organised crime.)
But however you look at it, it is actual people carrying out criminal acts and privatised British water companies lack the muscle, the connections and the secrecy to get away with it for any length of time.
When your capo is a Saudi sheikh and your consigliere is a Toronto math teacher, nobody working for ‘the organisation’ is going to be trimming flows for very long before they get their collar felt. To be weighed off for… what?… a ten to twenty stretch would be very optimistic. Not with several thousand other offences to be TICed.
I’m glad no child of mine works in the water industry. If the Guardian already knows about it, I would think the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) will get to hear about it fairly soon. Some of them may even read the Guardian though I wouldn’t myself bank on that.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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One of my more important interventions. It got 52 Views, 20 Reads and earned me $1.32
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Climate Change: The Early Years June 6, 2024
The Copernicus Climate Change Service is an official EU-funded body. Its latest report is just out
| The global average temperature for the last 12 months (June 2023 — May 2024) is the highest on record, at 0.75°C above the 1991–2020 average and 1.63°C above the 1850–1900 pre-industrial average. |
One thing they don’t tell you outside Statistics School is to watch out for people adopting arbitrary time frames:
* June 2023 to May 2024 is entirely acceptable on account of it being June 2024 right now.
* 1991–2020 is not quite so straightforward. Who ordained 1991 as being significant?
* Why stop at 2020? If last month’s figures are available, so are the last three years.
* 1850–1900 sounds a reasonable base period, no quibbles from me there.
* But I have a definite quibble about it being called ‘pre-industrial’.
It just isn’t. You could call that half-century by lots of names, some of them with industry in, but ‘pre-industrial’ is not one of them. If I was a suspicious person, and by God I am, I would think that industry is somehow being put in the frame.
What have we got so far? Not a lot. You might think nothing at all. But an applied epistemologist would say, “Enough to look at the accompanying graph with eyes sharp, hackles up, claws out.” That’s how we talk, in ascending triads.
Well now, what do we have here? It is hard to spot but there is an arrow pointing to ‘pre-industrial reference level’. That is '1850 to 1900' in their speak. They are using the graph’s baseline as…er… the baseline, which is unusual but not desperately so.
Another thing hard to spot is the graph starts at 1950. I do not mean hard to spot literally, it is right there plain as day, but you have to look carefully to note that it is more like 1940, that for some reason they have left out of '1900 to 1940'. This is a damned nuisance--we would love to have known the effect, in their words, of industrialisation on temperatures.
We would like to know why, for thirty odd years of industrialised temperatures, things seemed somewhat stable and then started shooting up around 1980. Wh-a-a-a? Nobody’s mentioned 1980 before. Not in my hearing anyway. They mentioned 1850, 1900, 1991, 2020, 2023 and 2024 in this very report...
| … but not 1980, the year something happened. |
In our line of work we call that ‘careful ignoral’. Nobody is being dishonest, nobody is trying to pull the wool over your eyes, nobody has an axe to grind.
| They have just carefully ignored something. |
* In our experience there is usually a good/bad reason for people ignoring things.
* In our experience it is often an important/vital reason.
* In our experience it needs a rising triad to convey the gravity of this finding to the outside world.
But I can tell, you are not impressed.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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It was about that time we all stopped littering.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I thank you for your insightful remark, Ishmael, I know how busy you are. But I would prefer your assistance with a live project, the Origins of Agriculture.
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