More on the "halt" to global warming

An issue I discussed in my recent critiques of a speech by Nigel Lawson (here and here) has now surfaced elsewhere - initially in the Daily Mail and then ThinkProgress via SkepticalScience.

The issue is about whether global warming has ground to a halt. Lawson and the Daily Mail point out that there has been no warming trend over the past 15 years. I showed how the trend over one 15-year period is a spurious measure. ThinkProgress and SkepticalScience blogs do the same.

They do it much better than I did but it's nice to see my points validated by others.

Britannia Unchained - more for me to disagree with

The long train journey up to Aberdeenshire (see yesterday's post) gave me a chance to read the recent offering from five young Tory MPs, Kwasi Kwarteng et al, entitled Britannia Unchained, in which they set out a critique of the British economy, thoughts about the social and political sources of its weaknesses and suggestions of how experience in other countries could point the way to the sort of changes we need to make here if we are to recover our competitiveness in world markets.

Time off in Scotland

Click on this to view it properly.

I've just got back from a delightful couple of days in Aberdeenshire. I took this on Monday morning, which was clear and frosty. It shows a short stretch of the Dee, between Aboyne and Banchory.

I've never taken a really good landscape shot. This is about as close as I usually get. Apart from the beautiful light and the touch of remaining frost, I was helped by the glorious variations in colour between the recently-harvested crop fields and the green pasture, with the beginnings of autumn colours in some of the trees.

I took this with my long zoom lens set at 90mm, which I think would be the equivalent of 130mm on a 35mm camera. People seem to talk about a wide-angle lens as being ideal for landscapes but I'm  fascinated by the compressing effect of a long lens. A wide-angle lens can make molehills out of mountains.

We're not quite in the Highlands here. I think of this bit of Scotland as a scaled-up version of the Yorkshire Dales, with which I'm more familiar from my childhood in Bradford. My wife and I come here most years, mainly to visit friends but the landscape is a big draw too.

I've made it into print

The fox photo I took a couple of weeks ago has made it to this week's West Sussex County Times.  Click on the picture to make the caption legible.

Is unlimited growth a thing of the past?

This is the title of a recent article in the FT by Martin Wolf. In it he describes some work by the distinguished American economist, Robert J Gordon, in which he warns that the productivity gains we associate with the three main spurts of technological innovation - the original industrial revolution from around 1750, electricity, the internal combustion engine etc from around 1880 and the information revolution from about 1960 - were all one-off events. For instance, we don't travel much faster now than we did in the 1960s, by which time the there were plenty of Boeing 707s in the skies.

Foxy photo

I've been wanting to photograph a fox for a long time. Last Sunday I got my chance when two foxes appeared on our lawn. They seem to have taken a liking to our bullaces (wild plums) or perhaps, as the all too copious evidence suggests, taken to using them as a laxative.

It was a very gloomy and wet afternoon so the image isn't as bright and sharp as I would like - long lens (300mm on a DSLR), slow shutter speed (1/80 sec), photo taken through the glass of the window. One day I hope to get one with its whiskers glistening in the sun.

Political Prejudice

An interesting Analysis programme recently on BBC Radio4, available on iPlayer, entitled Political Prejudice - "Why do right-wingers tend to be sceptical about global warming, and why do left-wingers often doubt the value of IQ tests? Michael Blastland investigates our cognitive biases."

Highly relevant to my last three posts. Thanks to my friend who drew my attention to this.