Lobbying and ethics

June 3, 2013

The UK is once again facing the unedifying view of Parliamentarians who offer their services for payment. It causes no shock any more. It has almost become the behaviour to be expected.

BBC:

Three peers have been accused of agreeing to carry out Parliamentary work for payment.

Undercover Sunday Times reporters filmed the men appearing to offer to help a fake solar energy company.

Ulster Unionist Lord Laird and Labour’s Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate and Lord Cunningham deny wrongdoing.

The two Labour peers have been suspended from the party and Lord Laird has resigned the party whip pending an investigation.

In a separate investigation by the BBC’s Panorama programme in conjunction with the Daily Telegraph, Lord Laird was also secretly filmed discussing a retainer to ask parliamentary questions.

But it is not lobbying or the Rules of Parliament which are the fundamental problem. It is the ethics of Parliamentarians which is.

Not much has changed since I wrote this back in 2010.

…….  While the range of all possible human behaviour is generated by the individual’s values, it is subject to:

  • Law, which defines what a person may not do.
  • Morals, which define what a person ought not to do whether or not it is lawful.
  • Ethics, which describe what is correct and desirable for a person to do; which will always be moral and will usually be lawful.

…

There are probably many politicians who do have admirable intentions and who do not get involved with the murkier side of political funding. But politicians whether in the US or Europe or in Asia do sell “access” into the world of regulations and approvals. MP’s and even Ministers in the UK are not shy in offering their paid services from time to time. Ministers in India have their performance ranked according to how much they raised for the party coffers. Japanese politicians approve roads and highways in their constituencies that nobody needs, except the civil contractors, their employees and their shareholders. Parliamentarians across the world offer their services to raise questions in parliament or in parliamentary committees. The skimming off of funds, misuse of subsidies and regulatory scams such as the Carbon Trading scam are legendary in the European Union. All over the world many politicians propose the “pork belly” projects in their own constituencies, sometimes with little competition, to add to appropriations legislation. Just in the US alone there has been between 13 and 27 Billion US$ of appropriations for “pork” projects for each year between 2005 and 2009. Assuming that these projects just followed US or OECD guidelines on corruption, but made use of all the loopholes available, the contract awards could have legitimised between 400 M US$ and 800 M US $ every year which could have – and probably has – ended up in the funds of political parties and their lobbyists. A large number of the people involved in these channels have rather “sticky fingers” which allows the amassing of individual wealth as it flows. …….

….. In my experience, which is limited to contracting in the power generation industry, the reverse sequence, where corporations initiate the whole process while seeking competitive advantage and offer  pay-offs to politicians or contributions to their party funds, is not unknown but probably not as prevalent. …….

……. There is a pervasive atmosphere within the business world today taking the view that ethics is not a matter for corporations. Milton Friedman, Peter Drucker and others must bear their share of the responsibility for having propagated the view that corporations should only be concerned with the profit they deliver to shareholders. They have – maybe inadvertently – supported the view that humans in a corporate setting can and should abdicate their own ethical codes. The Wall Street Journal has declared from on high that ethics cannot be learned and ethics courses are irrelevant to business. Utter rubbish of course, but even the “newspapers of record” such as the New York Times or The Times or Der Spiegel or the Wall Street Journal have lost their famed objectivity and have become political advocacy channels. It is such high-profile and basically amoral views which have been greatly responsible for providing a cloak of respectability for the attitude that:

         i.            Corporations have no business to concern themselves with ethics, and

       ii.            Even if ethics is important then compliance with law is a sufficient substitute for having a code of ethics, and

    iii.            If an action is seen to be compliant with laws then this is sufficient.

………

The fundamental reason for behaviour to be ethical is not because of some collateral benefit it may bring but simply because it is the right and proper thing to do. The right and correct thing to do is sufficient in itself, and does not need excuses or justification. In spite of the Wall Street Journal’s opinion, ethics can be taught and can be developed.

from Essence of a Manager 

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Three decades of needless “green” energy has cost some 15 million jobs in Europe

June 2, 2013

It has been a pointless waste. Just to pander to the superstition that controlling carbon dioxide emissions can control global temperature.

Temperatures have been flat since 1997 while human emissions of carbon dioxide have risen around 30%. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have also increased but have had little impact on global temperature – if any at all.

graphic Bert Rutan via WUWT

graphic Bert Rutan via WUWT

graphic source: WUWT

The last three decades have seen the vilification of carbon dioxide and the combustion of fossil fuels but it has been a pointless and expensive exercise. The profligate subsidies in favour of renewable energy and the shameless taxation of fossil fuel use and the consequent increase of energy prices have made their contributions to the economic slowdown and loss of jobs – particularly in Europe. The cowardly adoption of political correctness and of “green” energy is proving expensive – and has been quite needless.

Today electricity prices in Europe are at least 50% higher and perhaps twice as high as they need to be. The curbing of fossil fuel use and the hysteria about nuclear power together with the renewable profligacy are responsible for that. The cost of electricity is a fundamental parameter in our economies which feeds its way into every aspect of economic activity. It is the availability of affordable electricity which has been the driver of growth for over 100 years. A simple estimate of the growth that has been prevented by having unnecessarily high electricity prices gives the cost as being about 15 million jobs within the European Union.

Gerald Warner writes in The Scotsman: (my emphasis)

…. As the bottom falls out of the man-made climate change industry, those who were among its most bullish investors at the height of the scam are now covering their positions in a bear market.

Great damage was done to this much-hyped imposture by Climategate (“Hide the decline!”), by the discredited “hockey stick”, by the farce over “melting” Himalayan glaciers and the “decrease” in the polar bear population from 5,000 in 1970 to 25,000 today. Yet what has chiefly discredited the climate change superstition is the basic, inescapable fact that there has been no global warming since 1997.

The official face-saving response is that this is a “pause” in an otherwise menacing trend – a pause of a decade and a half. The warmist fanatics will freeze to death in their solar bunkers before they will admit defeat; but the more worldly wise, especially scientists anxious to preserve a vestige of academic credibility, are now striving to effect a withdrawal in good order.

Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change began to ratchet down its more extravagant predictions as early as 2007. In 2010 the Royal Society reviewed its stance on the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory and assumed a more neutral position. Since then, it has been like the retreat from Moscow: last month Oxford scientists, albeit in Delphic language, moderated forecasts of climate disaster. …..

….. The global warming hysteria began in the 1880s but was discredited when its prediction that CO2 would increase the mean global temperature by more than 1C by 1940 was not borne out. What gave it fresh life over the past two decades was the realisation by governments that it could provide a pretext for taxing citizens to unprecedented levels and by private entrepreneurs that government subsidies could supply a dripping roast. Of all the damage that politicians have inflicted on the public, the “green” scam has been among the most extreme.

The Renewables Obligation, introduced in Scotland in 2002, was scheduled to end in 2027, by which time UK energy customers will have been robbed of £32 billion. It has now been extended to 2037 for new projects. By 2011 Ofgem confirmed that 10 per cent of every electricity bill went towards “renewables”. Proliferating wind turbines are blighting the landscape despite being a wholly inefficient source of energy. Turbines operate at just 24 per cent of capacity – for more than a third of the time at only 10 per cent – and conventional power stations have to remain in service as backup: two energy systems pointlessly working in tandem. ……

…… South of the Border a modicum of sanity has entered government thinking since UK energy minister John Hayes’ “Enough is enough” remarks. In England and Wales turbines are falling out of favour. 

Not so in Scotland. ……. 

Local objections to wind farms are routinely overruled by central government (that would be the listening, accountable Scottish Nationalist government). At the end of last year only ten out of Scotland’s 32 local authorities admitted to knowing how many wind turbines were sited in their areas.

They could cover every inch of Scottish soil with Martian whirligigs and the lights will still go out, due to the SNP’s refusal to replace Hunterston B, due to close in 2016, and Torness, closing in 2023. All this to satisfy a superstition: if all mankind stopped producing CO2 (try selling that idea in China and India), 96.5 per cent would remain. The climate Anabaptists will never recant, but their mad creed is doomed all the same.

Wind turbines and solar energy have their place in the energy mix we should use.  But not at the expense of fossil fuel and nuclear use.

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Algebraic Art

June 1, 2013

Found this while browsing:

Zitrus: x2 + z2 = y3 . (1-y)3

zitrus

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The next 100,000 years

June 1, 2013

In my other blog I try to address the life and times of the last 6,000 generations but trying to look forward to the next 6,000 is a fascinating thought experiment.

I was looking at the history of glacials and interglacials and just thinking that it was was terribly “unfair” that while I could imagine the future to my mind’s content, I could never know it. At least for even the distant past, we can look at surviving clues and by the logic that the past must have led to the present we can fill in the gaps and imagine what must have happened. The present constrains the past and helps to keep the imagination within narrow bounds. But for the future, the present  provides a starting point  and natural laws must also constrain any development of an unfolding future. But there are more natural laws we don’t know about than we do. And we haven’t a clue about all that we don’t know that we don’t know.

But I am still free to imagine what the next 100,000 years may bring.

As best we can judge, interglacials (defined as being when temperatures are higher than or equal to those at present)  have lasted upto 28,000 years and some seem to have been as short as 4,000 years. However most seem to last around 13,000 years. This interglacial period will surely end – whether within a 1000 years or in 10,000 – and a new glacial period will ensue.

http://roperld.com/science/sealevelvstemperature.htm

interglacials

But the next glacial will be different for humans and primarily because we have access to “abundant energy” (mainly based on fossil fuels and nuclear energy).

Read the rest of this entry »

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Back from UK’s coldest spring for 50 years

May 31, 2013

It was a grand holiday for 15 days in the UK.

The warmth of meeting old friends more than compensated for the lack of warmth in the weather. Every day we were in England, the weather we had left behind in Sweden was warmer by a couple of degrees. We had two  reasonably warm and – relatively – dry weekends but it was wet and chilly for the rest of the time.

And now I find that it was the coldest Spring (March – May) in the UK for 50 years.

The average temperature over the period came in at 6.0C, which is 1.8C, or nearly 25 per cent, lower than is typical for the time of year, according to the Met Office.

This makes it the fifth coldest spring since records began in 1910 and the chilliest for 51 years.

A Met Office spokesman said: “The colder than average conditions have been caused by difference patterns at certain times, but generally this season has seen frequent easterly and northerly winds which have brought cold air to the UK from polar and northern European regions.”

Rainfall was lower than normal in March and April but May has been wetter than usual, the Met Office added. As a result, spring has been slightly drier than average, but not as dry as the springs of 2010 and 2011.

So much for global warming! And so much for the utterly negligible impact of  carbon dioxide increase over the last 50 years!!

We stayed with friends during our vacation and everywhere we went we found a current of discontent about energy prices and the manner in which utility bills had increased. Utility bills are never popular at whatever level they may be pitched but the cost of energy is fundamental to our economies. To have a cost of electricity which is some 50 – 70% higher than it needs to be is irresponsible. I reckon that in W Europe the subsidies provided for non-commercial energy production has provided windfalls for about 500,000 owners/developers of wind farms and solar plants but has cost the jobs of about 15 million.

There is little doubt in my mind that it has been the idiot pursuit of “low carbon dioxide emissions” which is now contributing to the lack of growth and lack of jobs in Europe. The common-sense goal of pursuing the most economic sources of energy has given way to the pursuit of the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. To be politically correct but impoverished seems a poor – and rather immature – bargain to settle for.

So much for the idiots who have wasted three generations chasing the mirage of green political correctness but have allowed common sense to wither.

It is time to go back to basics.

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A glass half full…..

May 24, 2013

Half our UK vacation is over but half is still to come.

Spring is late but the English countryside is lush and green.

Birmingham airport was rather inefficient but everybody was cheerily friendly.

Traffic was heavy but surprisingly non-aggressive.

It has not been very warm but the warmth of meeting old friends is palpable.

We have not seen much sunshine but we haven’t been drenched.

It is raining today but that allows me to write this post.

It is going to rain all day today but we will be in the British Museum.

Nothing is ever half-empty without also being half-full.

 

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Language is a means to an end – not an end in itself

May 22, 2013

I was reading about the new grammar and spelling tests for 11-year-olds in England. I was a little surprised though at the apparent incoherence of politicians, teachers, teachers unions and even academics about the tests, why they were necessary and what they might help achieve. For the unions, of course, testing of any kind smacks of elitism and becomes an ideological issue. Even among the language professionals there seemed to be a fundamental lack of understanding of the importance – or otherwise – of grammar and punctuation and spelling. Ideology on the one hand versus muddled “keepers of the language” on the other.

Grammar and vocabulary are dynamic – in any living language. “Correct” grammar is a consensual thing – it is subservient to what is considered “acceptable”. What is acceptable grammar is subject to change; with time and subsequent to usage. There is no such thing as an absolute “correctness” of language. Whatever is acceptable is “correct”. No rule of grammar survives if it is continuously violated. Words are continuously absorbed into a language (from science or from other languages or from changes of behaviour or of technology). Words are invented and sometimes reach a critical mass of users and survive while other invented words disappear into oblivion. Some change their meanings over time by changed usage and some die through disuse. In fact it is the fact that a language is changing which defines that it is alive.

It is only for a “dead” language – no longer subject to change by usage – where the vocabulary and grammar are fixed and sterile.

Every language seems to have its share of “keepers of the language” who try and define “correct” grammar and dictionaries of “acceptable words”, their spelling and their meaning. Grammarians and lexicologists tend to overlook the fact that they are – for a living language always – and of necessity – behind the times. They have to be. Some finite time is always needed for the compilation of  their “Grammars” and their “Dictionaries” and – for a living language – the language will have moved on. What they actually achieve is a snapshot at a particular moment time of a living and moving thing. And by the time the snapshot is available, it is already out of date.

But I do believe grammarians and lexicologists are of great value even if language itself is only a tool for communication (no doubt the primary tool for humans – but a tool nevertheless and not an end in itself). But their value lies not (as they might think) in being arbiters of what is “correct” or “incorrect” but in establishing a reference point which then allows for the proper communication of meaning by language.

The purpose of vocabulary and grammar is clarity of what is expressed by language. And this clarity depends upon the commonality of meanings ascribed to words and the rules – the grammar and punctuation –  by which they are strung together. They become important only because an unknown recipient of the language may well have to assume the meaning of the words and their structure. But they are certainly not relevant for the judging of any intrinsic “rightness” or “wrongness”.

To take liberties with grammar and with vocabulary from some established norm is always available to a user of language. But he does need to know what the norm is to be able to take such liberties in the pursuit of an improved communication. The testing then – in my view – becomes simply a tool to ensure that 11-year-olds know what the current established norms are.

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How “Retrospective Prediction” works

May 14, 2013

I have posted earlier about Climate Science being reduced to “Retrospective Predictions”.

This is how it works:

I missed a flight today. I had predicted that I would arrive  30 minutes before check-in closed. But I was wrong. I arrived 37 minutes after check-in had closed. My prediction model was just not good enough.

My prediction model assumed a certain average velocity for my car, an empirically determined period for parking the car and getting to the check-in desk, an allowance of 15 minutes to stop for coffee along the way and an allowance of 10 minutes for inaccuracy of calculation. This gave me my starting time which – in the event – led to my being 37 minutes late for check-in.

I now applied “Retrospection” to my “Prediction”. Effectively this meant choosing which of my assumptions was wrong and where I would apply a “fudge factor”. I realised that I had not accounted for road works along the way. I therefore added in a period for “delays due to road-works” such that my total transit time was increased by precisely 67 minutes.

I then redid my calculation. Lo and Behold! My “Retrospective Prediction” was now spot on. It confirmed for me that I had been late for check-in.

(My addition of time for “delays due to road works” is a very simple but powerful factor and is given by the following equation:

delays due to road works (minutes) = 0.5 x number of days elapsed from 1st January to day of travel

In the present case, today being 14th of May it is the 134th day of the year and it is obvious that

delays due to road works = 0.5 x 134 = 67 minutes).

I am travelling tomorrow. So I shall be testing my new “Retrospective Prediction” in retrospect the day-after-tomorrow.

Tomorrow I will also try not to use the wrong departure time.

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Merrie England

May 13, 2013

We are travelling to England for a few days looking up old friends and visiting old haunts.

But it is May, and it is England and there shall be rain.

Shrewsbury, Birmingham, Coventry, Stratford, and around London are the main ports of call.

Meeting up with old friends is always great fun but meeting some for the first time since graduation in 1972 should be especially fascinating.

Blogging will necessarily be light and may be even lighter depending upon

  1. the goodness of the weather, and
  2. the level of the revelries

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Carbon dioxide concentration was at 500+ ppm already in 1860

May 13, 2013

This has been around for some time, but I have only just come across it.

It could be that GS Callendar’s 1957 paper about Global warming  cherry picked supportive data points and ignored inconvenient data.

Reblogged from JunkScience

Did one of the fathers of manmade global warming cherry-pick his data for a 1957 study?

Here’s the original data.

Source: Slocum, G., Has the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere changed significantly since the beginning of the twentieth century? Month. Weather Rev., 1955(October): p. 225-231.

Source: Slocum, G., Has the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere changed significantly since the beginning of the twentieth century? Month. Weather Rev., 1955(October): p. 225-231. 

Here’s the cherry-picked version.

Callendar graph

Read the full story at Tallbloke’s blog.

Related:

slocum 1955 carbon dioxide Slocum, G., Has the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere changed significantly since the beginning of the twentieth century? Month. Weather Rev., 1955(October): p. 225-231. 

Climate Change: Incorrect information on pre-industrial CO2

CO2: The Greatest Scientific Scandal of Our Time

 

 

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