You Guys Give up Yet? Or are you Thirsty for More?

There's been a bit of a stir in the military-political world this week. Somebody has been briefing against General Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff in the UK. It would appear that General Dannatt has made the mistake of telling the truth about what the armed forces really need and someone, presumably in government, didn't really like it or the implied criticism. So they started a campaign of rumours against General Dannatt.

A blogger called Guido Fawkes identified the origin of the smear campaign as Kevan Jones. An awful lot of people are very supportive of our armed forces, and the revelation of the presumed source of the smear led to a torrent of anger in Guido's blog.

Now comes the interesting bit. Kevan has an entry on Wikipedia. And at this point, someone decided it needed updating. Some of the updates weren't complimentary. Wikipedia has an army of editors to "correct" such matters and they can even lock an entry to prevent "vandalism". However, they leave a trail of what was previously there. It makes interesting reading in Kevan's case.

The title of this blog entry is, by the way, from Kevin in the 1980s film Home Alone. Kevan would do well to think about it.

Sunday Photo of the Week

Yes, I know it's Tuesday. I spent Sunday making cookies.

Anyway, back to the photo. About 30 minutes south of Cape Town is the town of Fish Hoek. It has a gorgeous sandy beach which is extremely safe for swimming. The water in the bay is shallow and only gradually gets deeper, with gentle tides so it's a favourite with families.

There are also some fishermen who scrape a living by pulling their boats out into False Bay. In the olden days, fishing here was pretty much a hit-or-miss affair but since the coming of cheap mobile phones things have changed. They have a "spotter" who sits with binoculars on the rocky hill overlooking the bay. As soon as he spots a shoal of fish he phones the fishermen who are resting in the dunes and within a couple of minutes with a flurry of activity they have launched their rowing boat, just as they are doing in this photo.

Later in the day, you can eat their catch at the pleasant Beachcomber or Gallery restaurants a few hundred yards down the beach.

Sunday Photo Of the Week (SPOW)

I visited Las Vegas last year and, having flown in from London, was pretty jet-lagged. So on the first morning I woke very early. As I walked out of my hotel, I saw this view of New York.

The pre-dawn sky was exactly this gorgeous shade of deep blue and it looked as though the hotel had been built to look its best when viewed from an inconspicuous entry to the MGM Grand.

This being Vegas, there were still plenty of people around at 5am although to be fair a good number of them were joggers. It made me decide to take up early-morning jogging and I only gave up on this resolution once I'd actually tried it.

Power to the People

By 2015, Britain will run out of electrical power.

This is a statement of fact, based on our expected power consumption and the way power stations will gradually be shut down. We take it for granted today that when we turn on a light switch or plug in an electrical device it will work. Over the next few years that will start changing.

On May 27th, 2008, hundreds of thousands of houses in England lost power when two power stations failed by coincidence within minutes of each other. This was a shock, mainly because Britain's power grid has been so reliable in the past. However, it will become more common, not by accident but by inaction unless we act fast (and even then it may be too late.)

The problem is that ... well the problem comes from a number of causes.

• Power requirements keep increasing as we get wealthier and as use of technology increases. Newspapers and books cost very little electrical power to produce; the Internet is a lot more power-hungry.
  
• Britain is running out of natural gas. Production peaked in the last decade and is rapidly decreasing. The biggest alternative source of gas, Russia, has shown itself to be unreliable.
  
• Nuclear power plants have a limited life. Although the radiation is kept within the plant, it slowly causes the plant to decay which is why after a few decades, plants have to be retired. Four of Britain's ten nuclear power plants will close in the next decade, with no current plan to replace them.
  
• EU regulations on carbon emissions mean that Britain's coal-fired plants will not meet standards, without expensive and uneconomic modifications.
  
• Planning regulations, local opposition and the inefficiency of wind-power have limited its adoption.
  

So take a moment to think about this.

How would you manage without your early morning cuppa? No street lights? No lifts or escalators? No power for your computer? (Yes, you may have a battery in your laptop, but I bet your broadband connection is plugged into a power socket). No lights. Or hot water - even if you have a gas boiler, chances are it's controlled by an electrical timer. And that's before we get to the important stuff, like hospitals, factories, banks (want to draw cash from a powered-down autobank?), shops, schools and many, many more.

The next election will see Brown out. Unless we act fast, brown-outs will become common in the economy too.

Keep Them Honest with Evidence

"Politicians! They're so transparent and cynical! They never do the right thing - they do what's best for them!"

Ever felt like that?

Then here's a chance to change things, just a bit.

The Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee is looking for suggestions of areas of government policy that require an ‘evidence check’. In theory as a result of the hearings the government will be more likely to make sensible decisions, based on evidence.

So if you'd like them to investigate an area of government policy which you believe does not have a good basis in fact, read here and write to them.

And let's start making government better.

Sunday Photo Of the Week (SPOW)

Old Potbridge Road lies between Hook and Hartley Wintney in North East Hampshire. It's a very quiet country road, with just four or five homes built along it and it comes to a dead end in real life long before the map shows this.

However, it's a high point relative to the land to the west and so when we had a lovely sunset in the spring, I set off for the Old Potbridge Road to take some photos. I took several dozen, but most weren't keepers. One of the survivors is shown above; the remaining half dozen are in my online album.

Fine Weather We're Having

It's said that people are divided into three groups: those that can count and those that can't.

Similarly, when it comes to climate change, people seem to fall into one of three categories: the evangelists, who believe that man made climate change will do hard-to-imagine harm; the atheists who deny that mankind's activities have any significant impact on our climate; and the agnostics who can't make up their minds, despite all the evidence.

I'm an agnostic.

However, today I'd like to introduce an atheist, the Australian Professor Ian Plimer, who has just written Heaven And Earth: Global Warming - The Missing Science.

We've all heard to a greater or lesser extent about why man is causing global warming. Here' is an extract from The Spectator's review of Professor Plimer's book.

What Heaven And Earth sets out to do is restore a sense of scientific perspective to a debate which has been hijacked by ‘politicians, environmental activists and opportunists’. It points out, for example, that polar ice has been present on earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time; that extinctions of life are normal; that climate changes are cyclical and random; that the CO2 in the atmosphere — to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction — is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, air, soils and life; that CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food; that the earth’s warmer periods — such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian’s Wall — were times of wealth and plenty.

In September, Colleen and I are off for a week's peace and quiet somewhere. I've put Heaven and Earth on my reading list for that week, together with an overdue read of the IPCC reports. (I'll have to squeeze in something lighter as well - perhaps re-reading of one of PG Wodehouse's Jeeves books).

Maybe, just maybe, I'll be converted. One way or the other.