New template

The chaps at Squarespace have released a new version of their content management system which has lead to a bit of a change in the template for this site.  If I had the time or the inclination I might change things more radically, but for the minute it's still pretty much the same.

The upgrade has brought some natty new changes. I particularly like the ability to manipulate images from within the WYSIWYG editor - resizing, captioning, changing the text wrapping and so on.

Duty of care

There was a story in the Herald the other day about a father whose daughter had not received any English tuition in the run up to her exams. Dad, a toolmaker, had employed a private tutor and having had to part with his hard-earned cash through no fault of his own had sued the council for compensation.

Rather than pay him off, as is normal in these kinds of thing, the council had turned up at the Sheriff Court and argued, apparently with a straight face, that they had no duty of care to the child.

This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. Connoisseurs may remember the attempts made by the Health & Safety Executive to argue that they had no duty of care to rail passengers. Likewise, the Inland Revenue have tried to absolve themselves for any responsibility for advice they give to taxpayers.

You have to just stand back in admiration at the sheer brazenness of the way in which the state can on the one hand bang you up in jail if you fail to send your children to school, while at the same time arguing that they don't actually have to do anything as menial as actually educating the little buggers once they're there.

Really, truly, the state is not your friend.

Blood of Eden

I used to listen to Peter Gabriel a lot when I was younger, but I've kind of lost touch with the world of popular music since getting a job and a family. Then I chanced upon this video on YouTube the other day, and I've listened to it roughly every two to three waking hours since. I'm still trying to work out if it's the song, the arrangement or the performers that sends shivers down my spine. The young lady singing the harmony, whose name is apparently Paula Cole, has a fine pair of lungs on her, I would say.

Self-defence

Brian Mickelthwait wonders if the government's recent announcement of a right to self-defence means that the tide of gun control has reversed and that we are soon going to be able to go out and buy six-shooters to our hearts' content. Actually, he doesn't say exactly that. He has taken on board that it may well just be a restatement of the common law and that's it's probably just spinning anyway, but he reckons that the very fact that the subject is being raised means that something has changed.

Having trawled around the interweb, I came across this posting from Tim Lambert's old site, in which he details a series of cases in which people used deadly force and then successfully argued that their actions constituted self-defence. Where they stabbed their attackers in the chest, they even seem not to have been prosecuted, which only seems proper. I can't therefore see how anyone can reasonably argue that self-defence was not allowed before the announcement last week. This does therefore seem to confirm the idea that what we are seeing is what the naysayers think - which is to say a restatement of the common law.  This may well be a disappointment for those on the other side of the pond, who have acclaimed the return of a right to self-defence. Sorry guys, but it never actually went away.

But all of this doesn't mean that there isn't a problem.

Let's imagine what happens when I'm awoken by the sounds of an intruder in my house. I go downstairs to investigate. I take a tool from the toolbox so that I'm not completely defenceless. I don't think this would be construed as unreasonable by a jury. I creep through to the living room where I see the burglar helping himself to valuables from a drawer. There's a crowbar by his side.

What next?

Imagine he hasn't seen me. I am not in fear of my life, because he doesn't know I'm there. What should I do? I can't, I think, bash him on the head or stab him in the back. That wouldn't be self-defence. The Telegraph article on the annoucement says that homeowners are able to "stab or shoot a burglar if confronted".(My emphasis). At the moment there is no confrontation, so I cannot use deadly force. I don't think any reasonable person would want to either.

I think it's instructive here to think what the situation would be if, instead of me, it was a policeman who caught the burglar in the act (and we should remember that the police have no special powers in these situations). Our officer of the law would first have to identify themselves and tell the burglar not to move. If the thief failed to do so, then the policeman would be justified in using his truncheon and other physical force to subdue him. The policeman (or more likely policemen) are fully dressed and as well as being armed with truncheons, they come equipped with mace sprays and stab-proof vests and the like.

Returning to our original scenario then, I have none of the arms and armour that the policemen have. Nevertheless, I wonder if the reasonableness test requires me to order the burglar to stop, or at least to advertise my presence in some way. I think it probably does. It seems fairly clear that my objective has to be to subdue him rather than kill him on the spot, and morally this seems correct.

However, we must notice that once I have told him to stop, or otherwise made my presence known, I have instantly given away what may be my only advantage over the burglar. He is almost certainly younger, stronger and fitter than me. So if he does decide on violence, I will almost certainly lose and I might even lose my life. I may still lose even if I am armed and he is not. The law gives me a bit of a consolation prize, in that I can die in the knowledge that I could use deadly force against him if only I was twenty years younger, but I'm not sure that I consider that to be adequate recompense for the loss of my life.

It seems pretty clear to me that the homeowner, unless young and strong, is placed in an impossible situation. If the burglar is violent, they will probably die. If not, then the thief will be able to make good their escape unmolested.

Actually, apart from the young and strong, there is one other category of people who avoid this unenviable situation. Those few who have shotguns are, of course, able to deal with this situation in the way expected by common law. They can (assuming they can retreive their guns from the gun cabinet in time) identify themselves and order the burglar to stop, with little risk to themselves. They can actually subdue the burglar until the police arrive. They cannot shoot the burglar in the back, any more than I can stab him in the back at the moment, but what they can do is prevent the crime and bring the criminal to justice without undue risk to themselves.

So the question we must ask of Jacqui Smith is, why the only people who can deal effectively with an intruder are young strong men and a few farmers. What about the rest of us?

Climate cuttings 19

The Paleoclimate Reconstruction Challenge is firing lots of interest. If reconstructions of past climate are going to be based on sound science in future, it will be a big step forward. A kick-off conference was held (behind closed doors) in Trieste but some of the papers presented have fortunately found their way onto the internet. One, by the CRU's Keith Briffa, was very candid about the problems of verification of tree ring regressions, describing them as "of limited rigour", and that they tell us "virtually nothing about the validity of long-timescale climate estimates". Strangely, while writing the paleoclimate chapter of the IPCC report, he rejected any such criticism out of hand. The IPCC's final report talked of "the general strength of many such calibrated relationships, and their significant verification using independent instrumental data."

Dr Briffa is also on the receiving end of an audit from Steve McIntyre. His 2008 paper in Phil Trans Roy Soc looks at a selection of Eurasian tree ring chronologies. The headlines in the abstract talk of unprecedented warming in recent years. The actual text of the paper says something rather different. As usual, there is no justification of the novel statistical procedures they've adopted, no data is archived and no explanation is given of why they've picked the particular chronologies they have.

The meme of refusing access to climatic data on the spurious grounds that it's subject to intellectual property restrictions is gaining favour among climate alarmists. Australia's national scientific body CSIRO is refusing access to data underlying a report forecasting disaster due to drought.

Roger Pielke Snr lists three important research findings that are ignored by the IPCC. 

• The effect of atmospheric particulates ("aerosols") is much, much greater than anything CO₂ might contribute
• About 30% of any rise in temperatures is due merely to the fact that temperatures are measured near the ground
• Rising temperatures near the poles have less of an effect on emission of radiation from the Earth than a similar rise near the equator. 

And the silly season must be upon us because vlimate change has been linked to an increased prevalence of kidney stones, a finding described by Time magazine as "compelling". It certainly makes me giggle, anyway.

This one may be equally kooky, but it's actually not the first time I've heard it - oil is not a fossil fuel, but is produced by the high temperature reaction of calcium carbonate and iron oxide in the Earth's core. Panic over then.

Lord Monckton, a journalist and politician, is given space by the American Physical Society to put forward the view that the sensititivity of the climate to input of CO2 has been vastly overstated. Observers note that the APS, which once proclaimed that global warming was irrefutable, is now saying that there is a considerable body of dissenting opinion.

Lucia took another look at the IPCC's 2^oC/century forecast, this time doing monte carlo methods. The forecast still falsifies against the actual trend. 

One of Anthony Watt's correspondents tells how technicians recording temperatures in the Canadian Arctic in the 1950s would regularly fabricate the readings rather than venture out into the cold. These are the same data which form part of the global temperature record today.

NGOs in Columbia

After the Betancourt rescue in Columbia, a few eyebrows were raised when it was revealed that the rescuers had claimed that they were from an NGO and were removing the hostages to another location on behalf of the kidnappers' organisation, FARC. What, they wondered, does the kidnappers' ready acceptance that an NGO was assisting them in this way tell us about the role of NGOs in the country?

The headline currently running on the BBC website is that the President of Columbia has apologised that one of the rescuers was wearing Red Cross insignia. Does this mean that the rescuers claimed to be from the Red Cross and that the kidnappers accepted this?

If true, the excrement could soon be hitting the airconditioning.

Climate cuttings 18

Interesting developments this week with the two sides of the debate finally engaging in some constructive dialogue. So without further ado....

Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate published the temperature record corrected for the ENSO index (A measure of El Niño/La Niña), in an attempt to rebut Lucia's falsification of the IPCC forecasts (although amusingly, he refuses to mention her by name or link to her work). Lucia reran her verification procedures and said that the IPCC forecasts of 2001 were still falsified to a high degree of confidence. She also wonders why Gavin chooses to use 1998 as his start point when she's using 2001, where his error bars are, and whether he thinks his corrected figures match the IPCC forecasts or not. Finally a little light is shed when Gavin starts posting comments at Lucia's. The upshot appears to be this:

• Gavin is saying that the models define a range of temperatures for the future. The actual observed temperatures fall within this range, giving us confidence in the ensemble of models.
• Lucia is saying that if you had models which gave both very high and very low projections, almost any observed temperatures would fall within the range of models. The question she is asking is "Does the actual observed temperature match the central trend of the range of models?", and the answer she gets is "No".
  
• Because of this we can probably reject many of the higher estimates of future temperature. 
  

"Earth begins to kill people for changing its climate" proclaimed Pravda. "Nonsense" was the general thrust of the response from economist Indur Goklany, who presented WHO figures showing a precipitous decline in deaths from extreme weather events. This didn't stop publication of another mathematical model saying that warming was going to cause more extreme weather events.

Click to enlargeArctic Sea ice continued to hold the attention of climate bloggers, with McIntyre reporting daily on the seasonal melt (at time of writing 2008 is more than half a million quare kilometers behind 2007). The Alfred Wegener Institute reckons the 2007 record minimum is unlikely to be beaten, which is odd because we were told that there was lots of first year ice (which should melt more easily) this year.

Of course, it's traditional for the MSM not to mention the very high levels of Antarctic Sea Ice. They prefer only to talk about the West Antarctic Peninsula where, unlike the rest of the continent, there has been a little warming. Another ice sheet there is in danger of breaking up. From this we are supposed to conclude that the Southern Hemisphere is warming, when in fact it's getting colder.

Gerbrand Komen, retired director of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, pointed out that the stated uncertainties in model predictions of future climate are subjective guesses rather than objective calculations. He wondered if everyone realises this.

After the hockey stick fiasco, nobody believes the results of paleoclimatologists any more. Because of this, a bunch of its chief practitioners are launching a "Paleoclimate reconstruction challenge" where teams will be given proxy data and calibrated instrumental data and they have to try to reconstuct the climate from them.  The idea is to justify the whole science of paleoclimatology rather than to find the best technique.

The world is still cold - rare snowstorms have hit New Zealand's North Island.

Photo credits under CC licence: Tornado - OAR/ERL/National Severe Storms

It's nice to be appreciated

My posting about gun control the other day has been nominated as post of the week by the Watcher's Council, a group of American blogs.

It's nice to be appreciated. Thanks guys!

Frank Fisher on civil liberties

An interesting post on CiF from Frank Fisher, with a really excellent comments thread. Look out for the contributions from commenter WheatFromChaff.

Basher for Liberty news 20

Polling day at last. The weather looks OK. As one DD supporter notes, "Whatever happens, history will record David Davis as the man who took a stand for British freedom".

Following hot on the heels of yesterday's polls showing support for Davis comes the Politics Home tracker which shows that his campaign has made no difference at all. Conservative Home asks "Was it worth it?" and gets taken to task for undermining the Davis campaign by Donal Blaney.

Longrider notes the introduction of curfews in Cornwall. Parents whose children are found out after the government prescribed hour will be punished.

Natalie Rothschild, writing at Spiked, wonders if we'd still be facing surveillance even if there was no terror threat. Sweden, which Mr bin Laden says will not be targeted by Al Qaeda has just instituted some of the most draconian anti-terror legislation in Europe.

Bob Geldof in the Telegraph calls for a big turnout in H&H.

The Guardian apologised for misleading its readers. Davis didn't say that the LibDems had 'funked' the H&H election. Funny that the apology was issued well after the polls were open, and too late for today's edition of the paper.

Our Kingdom thinks the debate has been too much about trivia and not enough about the trade off between liberty and security.