THE
SPANISH ECONOMY: Wonderful at the macro level, crap at the micro
level. I read an advert yesterday for an admin job at €400 a
month. Or €20 a day/€1.50 an hour. But the company does pay bus
fares to its out-of-town location. Against that, they'll only employ
you as an autonomo, for which privilege you'll have to pay c.€300 a
month in social security taxes. Assuming you tell the tax office.
This tells you all you need to know as to why people are seriously
sceptical about President Rajoy's insistence that Spain is now the
envy of Europe. Only in the same way, I suspect, as the UK's NHS is
the envy of the world.
SPANISH
NEWSPAPERS: These face serious competition at the national, regional
and local levels. So, sensational headlines are essential.
Fortunately for them - if you see what I mean - men keep killing
their partners. Though not, I think, at a incidence worse than elsewhere
in Europe. Nonetheless, as I've said before, this is the Spanish
equivalent of the UK obsession with pedophilia. As things stand at
the end of November, deaths are down on last year and well down, I
think, on a few years ago. Something that seems to get overlooked in
the reports.
THE
POPE: It was interesting to hear him speaking out against corruption
during his brief visit to Africa. Let's hope he's made the same
speech within the Vatican. And that more heed will be given to it
there than among Africa's leaders. One thing you can say about the
residents of that city state is that they share the Pope's antipathy
to poverty.
GLOBAL
WARMING: It's a safe guess that the consensus at the Paris jamboree
is that (undeniable) global warming is (deniably)man-made. Assuming
targets are set and abided by, it's interesting to speculate on what
might happen if the world continues to heat up despite the vast expenditure to contain it. I guess it's always
going to be possible to argue that there's a lag of x years. Though,
in a Times article printed at the end of this post, it's noted that
Today’s gentle warming [is] progressing much more slowly than
expected.
FINALLY
. . . OUR SUNDAY FLEA MARKET: Our council is not famed for acting
quickly. It took them years to address the problem of the vomiting,
urinating kids of the weekly binge-drinking in the old quarter. So,
I'm surprised they moved quickly to transfer this from Veggie Square
to the street down by the (covered) market. Even better, they've
banned both the selling of old clothes and shoes and the trading from
a sheet on the ground. What next? A verdict of Not Guilty in the
pending case of town-hall corruption? Query: Will we get a law suit
from either the Rumanians or the local gypsies alleging racial
discrimination? Probably not. This ain't the UK.
GLOBAL
WARMING
The
doom-mongers should look at the science
Those at the Paris
climate-change summit fear nasty weather later this century, but the
evidence is against them
Today in Paris, 147
heads of government will give speeches on what they agree is the
world’s most pressing problem: climate change. Today is expected to
be comparatively mild in Paris but cold and snowy in Scotland.
Nothing especially unusual for November 30 over the past few
centuries.
So, the problem they
are discussing — not warming, but dangerous warming — has not yet
manifested itself. It lies in the future. The climate has changed,
for sure, as it always does, but not yet in a way that is harmful or
unprecedented. As far as we can tell from satellites, global average
temperatures are less than half a degree warmer than they were in
1979, when satellite data became available, though surface
thermometers suggest a bit more warming.
This year looks likely
to be a lot warmer than last, though still not as warm in both
standard satellite data sets as 1998, the last time that a strong El
Niño in the Pacific Ocean boosted the global air temperature a lot
(surface thermometers say it will be warmer than 1998, once adjusted
in various ways). The average trend over the past 35 years is 0.1
degrees of warming per decade according to the satellite data, less
than 0.2 per decade according to the surface thermometers. Neither
trend is fast enough to produce significantly dangerous climate
change even by the latter part of this century.
The warming has been
much slower than was predicted when the scare began. Nor is it evenly
spread. The Antarctic continent has warmed hardly at all, and the
entire southern hemisphere has warmed about half as fast as the
northern. The Arctic has warmed more than the tropics, night has
warmed more than day and winter has warmed more than summer. Cities
have warmed faster than the countryside, but that’s because of
local warming factors, not global ones: buildings, vehicles,
industry, pavements and people trap warmth.
How unusual is today’s
temperature? As I did this weekend, you have no doubt had
conversations along the following lines recently: “Hasn’t it been
mild? End of November and we’ve hardly had a frost yet!” All
true. But then be honest: can you not recall such conversations
throughout your life? I can. And here’s what the Met Office had to
say about November 1938, long before I was born: “The weather of
the month was distinguished by exceptional mildness: at numerous
places it was the mildest November on record.” In 1953 November was
even milder and there was no air frost recorded in Oxford in the last
four months of the year at all.
I am not saying it has
not generally become warmer, but that the variation dwarfs the trend.
Let’s go back a little further, to the Middle Ages. It used to be
argued by some that the “medieval warm period” of about a
thousand years ago, when mountain glaciers retreated, vines grew
further north and Iceland was widely cultivated, was confined to
Europe. We now know from multiple sources of evidence that it was
global. Tree lines were higher than today in many mountain ranges,
for example. Both North Pacific and Antarctic Ocean water
temperatures were 0.65C warmer than today.
Go back yet further,
still within the current interglacial period, to the so-called
Holocene Optimum of 6,000-9,000 years ago. Ocean temperatures were up
to two degrees warmer than today, the Arctic Ocean was nearly or
completely ice-free at the end of summer in many years, and the
boreal forest in Siberia extended 150 miles further north than today.
July temperatures were up to six degrees warmer than today in the
Siberian Arctic.
Was this Holocene
Optimum a horrible time of droughts, storms, disease and famine? Not
especially. It was the period in which agriculture spread rapidly
across the globe from five or seven centres of invention. Abundant
rainfall in Africa led to lakes in the Sahara with crocodiles and
hippos in them, surrounded by green vegetation in the monsoon season.
Today’s gentle
warming, progressing much more slowly than expected, is also
accompanied by generally improving conditions. Globally, droughts are
declining very slightly. Storms are not increasing in frequency or
intensity: this year has been one of the quietest hurricane seasons.
Floods are worse in some places but usually because of land-use
changes, not more rainfall. Death rates from floods, storms and
droughts have plummeted and are now far lower than they were a
century ago. Today, arid areas such as western Australia or the Sahel
region of Africa are getting generally greener, thanks to the effect
of more carbon dioxide in the air, which makes plants grow faster and
resist drought better.
Besides, we have to
make allowance for a human tendency to read far too much into
short-term weather changes — and to assume that all change is bad.
Consider this newspaper cutting: “The Arctic ocean is warming up,
icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding
the water too hot. [There are] hitherto unheard-of temperatures in
the Arctic zone.” It’s not from recent decades at all, but from
1922. Or this one: “The ice of the Arctic Ocean is melting so
rapidly that more than one third of it has disappeared in fifty
years”. From 1940.
In fact, the Arctic,
and the world as a whole then cooled between 1950 and 1970, which
then led to these headlines, all from 1970: “Scientists See Ice Age
in the Future” (The Washington Post), “Is Mankind Manufacturing a
New Ice Age for Itself?” (Los Angeles Times), “Scientist predicts
a new ice age by 21st century” (The Boston Globe), “US and Soviet
Press Studies of a Colder Arctic” (The New York Times) and (my
favourite) “Dirt Will Bring New Ice Age” (The Sydney Morning
Herald).
The 40,000 people
meeting in Paris over the next 12 days are committed to the view that
the weather is certain to do something nasty towards the end of this
century unless we cut emissions. In this, they are out of line with
scientists. A survey of the members of the American Meteorological
Society in 2012 found that only 52 per cent agree that climate change
is mostly man-made, and as to its being very harmful if unchecked,
only 34 per cent of AMS members agree. The rest said they think it
will be either not harmful or not very harmful.
Are we certain we are
not overreacting?