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Today Carolynne unearthed (yes, literally) our first crop of potatoes grown at our new home in Rammy 7 months to the day after moving.

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Today Ramsay had a visit to the vets to have a few rotten teeth removed. After an afternoon bounding around high on painkillers they're beginning to wear off now.

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Taken during last winters white out after a climbing Harcles hill to the peel monument. Below zero temps. 80mph wind. Faces frozen. Carolynne wasn't impressed, but did see the funny side. Holly can be seen darting about like a maniac!

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Nice sunny day in Rochdale. Unplugged myself from the corporate metabrain for lunch in the office Japanese garden. Only me here today, as usual.

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Andrew’s talk was informative and reasonably comprehensive. He discussed a range of different attacks that climate change sceptics pull out of their hats such as the gradual modifications of historical data caused by improvements in scientific methods and greater cross-referencing etc etc. On the 3rd slide a heckler shouted out “where’s your time axis!? where’s the continuum!?” in response to a graph combining 30 years of data, before immediately responding to herself “you can’t explain it, because it’s all bollocks!”,  quickly walking out. The illustration was so perfect you could’ve been forgiven for assuming she was a prop. I spotted her on entry shortly before the talk, she was sporting that classic bag-lady look with a bright luminous hat and large rimmed glasses; she was a picture of the streets, someone I don’t doubt many a street-photographer has approached and she contrasted well with the academic intellectuals that surrounded me (It’s not for me to comment on my ability to integrate with this crowd..). One of the attendees, Marc from the Manchester Climate Fortnightly, was able to identify her as Carol Batton who is a highly respected street poet on the Manchester scene, so you shouldn’t read too far into appearances.

Following on unperturbed Andrew continued through the different published works including the IPCC reports that are regularly churned out for mass public dissection and how one paragraph half-way through this 1,000+ page volume was promoted by the sceptical camp to be dubbed “glacier-gate” highlighting it’s relative insignificance but without giving it much discussion of itself, which would’ve been nice. He also ranted about his dislike of zombie-arguments which I’ve come across before applied to many other scientific subjects, these being easily dispelled arguments that keep coming back again and again and again, seemingly this is a symptom of deeply ingrained doctrine held by bigoted individuals that you unfortunately cannot shoot with a 12-bore as you would a real zombie.

The focus of the talk was on the topics raised by sceptics but it would have been good to hear more on the current scientific thinking however this was thin on the ground. There was a QA session following on where a few of the attendees raised a few uncertainties, Marc from the MCF got quite involved and displayed a deep knowledge of this subject and it felt like he should also have been up on stage as I’m sure he had a lot to offer, maybe another time.

In summary it was a good talk but it wasn’t what I was hoping for. There is a huge amount of information out there about climate change and to me the best way to combat scepticism is with hard facts and to fight ignorance with ignorance. It still got me thinking however about how serious the climate change problem could potentially lead to be. My personal feelings are that the impact will either be almost unnoticeable or they will be extreme and more importantly how likely is it that we can avert this disaster? Green lifestyles and recycling are all well and good but it often seems like a sticky plaster on a broken leg, if what it really takes is a return to mud huts and moving around on foot but that clearly isn’t going to happen. Then perhaps the focus should not be so much on prevention of a disaster but contingency planning, taking into account peak oil and a highly shifted political environment for the next 50 years what are we to do to survive? But I haven’t seen much discussion in this direction, maybe it’s all too unbearable to think about..

Skepticism is a life philosophy that adopts a questioning attitude and judges ideas not on face value but on merit and how they stand up to scrutiny. Naturally I found myself drawn to people who think like this because I do this myself. There is a strong correlation with people who think in this way and people, like myself, who are interested in Science being that Good Science is one of critical examination of the facts and conclusions, it’s a trained way of thinking but also one which many people are born with.

I had recently been exploring topics on religion and there’s also a strong link between skepticism and Atheism and Humanism. Many skeptics reject religious doctrine as it does not stand up to reasoned scrutiny and consequently take a Atheist stance. Not long after questioning my own perspectives on creation theory I found I could not agree with the religious “truth” and quickly subscribed to an Atheist stand-point attributing creation to natural processes like evolution for which there is a mountain of corroborating evidence, and consequently I found a whole network of people who have taken this journey with me, all over the free world, I say “free” because there are still unfortunately many places where you are not allow to ask yourself this question.

But that’s not the subject of this post, so…somewhere back at the point.

It turned out the skeptics were also gathering, some years ago some bright spark decided to hold meetings in pubs where people of the skeptical mind-set can meet, drink and talk about topics relevant to their interests. They coined it cleverly “Skeptics in the Pub”, it started in London but is now a global phenomenon where often hundreds of people can be found lining the bars in major cities across the world. As it happened Manchester had only recently joined this network with the formation of “Greater Manchester Skeptics in the Pub” who I discovered during the 10:23 campaign whereby skeptics across the world “overdosed” on homeopathic remedies in protest at them being dispensed as genuine alternatives to real medicine, even so much as to be provided by the NHS at great tax-payer cost.

Homeopathy is only one target of the skeptics, there are many examples of pseudo-science and falsehoods that they counter, most prominently the anti-vaccination movement who promote the abstention of vaccination resulting in the recent rises in curable diseases through the drop in herd immunity, that has directly caused the deaths of many young children making them a very serious threat. Another target and the topic of a meeting I attended last night was Climate Change Scepticism, looking at the arguments against man-made climate change and what the scientific community is doing to combat them. It was an interesting talk and gave me food-for-thought, and some of which I will discuss in another post.

To Be Continued…

I know that when the financial crash happened I was one of those who were least affected by it. I have been fortunate enough to maintain employment so far through these times and at the start I had no investments, all of my assets were in cash which is the best position to be in apart from sitting on a large stack of gold, but I don’t know any people who do. As it happened the financial crisis has allowed me to catch the housing market which has somewhat helped to compensate for 13 years of Labour rule that have progressively stacked the odds of success against me. Now the tables have turned, it’s now in my interest that the market recovers and it recovers well and quickly but how do we go about doing this?

So far the answer seems to be about borrowing against the future but as a 26 year old working citizen with potentially 39 more years until retirement this policy is only going to hurt me, it’ll hurt my friends and with every new born’s share of the national debt being at over £22,000 it will hurt any future children who will still be paying for it when they grow up; it will not so much hurt those near the ends of their careers with hundreds of thousands in a personal equity retirement fund, like many of those in government on funds gained through their capital property investments paid for my the tax payer, also me.

It’s a complex situation and no-one has a crystal ball telling us the way but I now believe the recent handling of this crisis to be reckless which is a final kick in the teeth after Blair’s complete ignorance of domestic affairs throughout his premiership. Labour have been utter shit, but the one thing they did have was the strongest political leader since Adolf Hitler in Tony Blair and they don’t even have that any more so there’s no way I could vote Labour tomorrow. Economically the Conservatives have a mixed history, before my time but still not forgotten by the country, they are a big gamble. On the other hand LibDem have some popular policies, they would benefit me but they can’t gain a majority and could only provide a hung parliament and democracies are only strong with real direction, coalition governments are possible but there’s little indication of how this might work and it’s too late now.

Basically we’re screwed, I may just take my masking tape into the booth with me, pop it over Labour and BNP (I won’t even bother wasting words on them) and close my eyes and put pen to paper, for what I know now it’s the best I can do, at least then I can’t kick myself for making a bad decision. It was fate.