Today is Epiphany, the day on which Christians in the west celebrate the arrival of the "Magi" described in Mathew's Gospel account of the Nativity and the revealing of the Christ Child to the world outside Israel. It is no accident that the revealing of this special child was first to the shepherds and then to the Gentile "kings" - then, as now, faith threatened the authority of the ruling classes and their lucrative businesses. So the Child is revealed, not to the high born and powerful of Israel, but to the lowest caste of all in that society, the shepherds. The visiting "Magi" must have come as a bit of a shock to the Holy Family who had obviously gone to some trouble to keep a low profile.
Those who have taken the trouble to study Jewish custom and culture in this period will have realised that Joseph was not exactly living in "poverty." The fact he owned an ass, could afford to travel and was evidently pretty well connected are all suggestive of someone with a much higher place in his society. The Law required Mary be stoned to death for her "sin" of getting pregnant before marriage - yet Joseph could evidently "buy off" the authorities, hardly the action of a man in poverty. Likewise, his "work," which in English is "carpenter" does not quite convey the 1st Century reality, which would be better described as Property Developer and Builder Inc.
We can also be pretty sure the Hellenic Maccabean rulers - Herod was a usurper - were keen to make use of any "Messiah" child or no - to regain their power. So the visit of the Magi would have worried Joseph, but it was a major part of God's plan precisely because it presaged Christ's being revealed in the Gospels to the rest of the world. Kings they may not have been, sages they may well be, but they represented the rest of humanity when they visited Bethlehem sometime after the birth.
The Orthodox Churches celebrate "Christmas" today as a result. So, to all my Orthodox friends, I wish you a very blessed Epiphany and Christmas.
Thursday, 6 January 2011
Wednesday, 5 January 2011
Footprints in the snow...
Evidence we have a Pine Marten scouting - his footprints are all over our roof, now we just have to make sure the little devil doesn't find a way inside...
Tuesday, 4 January 2011
Between a rock and a hard place ...
Two new articles got me thinking this morning as I watched the mist frustratingly hiding the partial eclipse I had hoped to observe. The first, at An Englishman's Castle, covers the news that the UK Meteorological Office, privately told the Cabinet that we were in for a severe start to Winter - but at the same time published an item on their website in September suggesting a mild winter. It seems that the Met Office, run by a Greenpeace/Fiends of the Earth activist, is now afraid to make its prediction public because their computer has been wrong for the last three summers and winters... Or, as An Englishman's Castle suggests, they didn't want to upset their friends holding their annual bunfight in Cancun. After all, you can hardly demand that the Western world gives up their cars, their jobs and their central heating, not to mention travel to warmer climates and food imports on the back of screaming "Run-away Global Warming" if they are simultaneously facing blizzards and a big freeze.
The second article has certainly got me thinking - and it should get everyone thinking. I found it - with the most useful explanatory diagram I have yet seen - on Watt's up With That. Under the title, "An unexpected limit to climate sensitivity," it analyses the mathematical equation used by the IPCC et al, to 'model' the amount of heat gained in the atmosphere due to 'Greenhouse' gas. It is worth knowing that the Blog is run by a scientist, a climate scientist to boot, who does not subscribe to the Anthropomorphic Global Warming "settled science" and with very good reason. This article is by Willis Eschenbach, an amateur scientist with a good grasp of mathematics. He is a Construction Manager by profession, an engineer, so has a very practical approach when analysing something, so it makes a lot of sense. Once again we find that the 'models' used to make all these sweeping statements actually contain 'constants' that seem to produce the desired result by actually suppressing variability and 'smoothing' data so that it shows a particular result.
Having a little experience with some of the early 'smoke control' models myself I have always been all too aware of the pitfalls and pratfalls built into them. As with all such 'models' they have a number of assumptions built in and these are often represented by 'constants' - numbers which 'make the formula work' as one of my mentors put it. While the models I worked with were often quite good at confirming what I thought had happened in an event/incident I was looking at, they were as often adrift from what had physically been observed. In the end I found they were, at best, useful for confirming one or two aspects of an unusual event, but they are generally not good at predicting. That is my experience and my opinion, I know its not shared by many of my colleagues who have invested a lot of time and energy in making them. Mr Eschenbach's graphic is the best representation I have ever seen covering what a model is really trying to predict - and as you can see, there are a lot of interactions and reactions simply 'smoothed' over...
All I can say is that some of the IPCC 'scientists' must have been taking lessons from Whitehall, the only other body I have come across that can write the conclusions to a study and then send out an "Enquiry Team" to find the 'proof' for the conclusions they want.
The second article has certainly got me thinking - and it should get everyone thinking. I found it - with the most useful explanatory diagram I have yet seen - on Watt's up With That. Under the title, "An unexpected limit to climate sensitivity," it analyses the mathematical equation used by the IPCC et al, to 'model' the amount of heat gained in the atmosphere due to 'Greenhouse' gas. It is worth knowing that the Blog is run by a scientist, a climate scientist to boot, who does not subscribe to the Anthropomorphic Global Warming "settled science" and with very good reason. This article is by Willis Eschenbach, an amateur scientist with a good grasp of mathematics. He is a Construction Manager by profession, an engineer, so has a very practical approach when analysing something, so it makes a lot of sense. Once again we find that the 'models' used to make all these sweeping statements actually contain 'constants' that seem to produce the desired result by actually suppressing variability and 'smoothing' data so that it shows a particular result.
Having a little experience with some of the early 'smoke control' models myself I have always been all too aware of the pitfalls and pratfalls built into them. As with all such 'models' they have a number of assumptions built in and these are often represented by 'constants' - numbers which 'make the formula work' as one of my mentors put it. While the models I worked with were often quite good at confirming what I thought had happened in an event/incident I was looking at, they were as often adrift from what had physically been observed. In the end I found they were, at best, useful for confirming one or two aspects of an unusual event, but they are generally not good at predicting. That is my experience and my opinion, I know its not shared by many of my colleagues who have invested a lot of time and energy in making them. Mr Eschenbach's graphic is the best representation I have ever seen covering what a model is really trying to predict - and as you can see, there are a lot of interactions and reactions simply 'smoothed' over...
All I can say is that some of the IPCC 'scientists' must have been taking lessons from Whitehall, the only other body I have come across that can write the conclusions to a study and then send out an "Enquiry Team" to find the 'proof' for the conclusions they want.
Monday, 3 January 2011
Australia under water?
Watching the news here, we note that a large chunk of Queensland is under water, the culprit apparently being a combination of the monsoon, La Nina and a tropical storm. This is reportedly the worst such event for fifty years to hit that area and the film footage we are seeing certainly makes that point.
One thing that struck me though, and I'd very much like to see town maps and plans for the area from 1960, is that the affected areas have been built up and over since then. I was also struck by the fact that older properties are built on stilts and they aren't standing in depresssions or next to the river. The newer properties aren't on stilts and they are much closer to the rivers and also in the low-lying areas. From this I would surmise that someone, somewhere, decided that Queensland's known annual flooding wasn't going to happen anymore...
Having been flooded out back in 1968 in the city of Port Elizabeth, I have every sympathy with those hit by this, but now, what needs to happen if it is to be avoided on the next cycle, is a thorough going review of the "environmental" practices that have contributed to this - such as not clearing gullies of encroaching bush, not enforcing the practical regulations for building on stilts which I understand were relaxed in the last ten years, and, finally, not maintaining the large watercourses in a 'navigable' condition. That means dredging them, clearing 'snags' which build sand and shingle banks, and maintaining the clear channels for drainage.
I won't hold my breath for any of that though - it's much easier to blame "Anthropomorphic Gobal Warming" and demand more swinging restrictions on transport (personal of course), travel and energy use. The ecologically minded out there won't be happy until they have everyone 'going walkabout' and living off the land as they imagine the Aboriginal peoples did...
One thing that struck me though, and I'd very much like to see town maps and plans for the area from 1960, is that the affected areas have been built up and over since then. I was also struck by the fact that older properties are built on stilts and they aren't standing in depresssions or next to the river. The newer properties aren't on stilts and they are much closer to the rivers and also in the low-lying areas. From this I would surmise that someone, somewhere, decided that Queensland's known annual flooding wasn't going to happen anymore...
Having been flooded out back in 1968 in the city of Port Elizabeth, I have every sympathy with those hit by this, but now, what needs to happen if it is to be avoided on the next cycle, is a thorough going review of the "environmental" practices that have contributed to this - such as not clearing gullies of encroaching bush, not enforcing the practical regulations for building on stilts which I understand were relaxed in the last ten years, and, finally, not maintaining the large watercourses in a 'navigable' condition. That means dredging them, clearing 'snags' which build sand and shingle banks, and maintaining the clear channels for drainage.
I won't hold my breath for any of that though - it's much easier to blame "Anthropomorphic Gobal Warming" and demand more swinging restrictions on transport (personal of course), travel and energy use. The ecologically minded out there won't be happy until they have everyone 'going walkabout' and living off the land as they imagine the Aboriginal peoples did...
Sunday, 2 January 2011
Snow more snow ....
S'no fun now, it turned to slush, then ice, then slush again, then we got some more snow... Now we have huge banks of the stuff which has compacted and solidified, just in our little corner of the Taunus we could probably rebuild one or two galciers.
I suppose I have an inconvenient memory in many ways. Just three years ago, I recall reading in a supposedly 'learned' journal, that snow in winter was becoming a very rare event and would have vanished from memory with my lifetime. All the fault of Anthropomorphic Global Warming - read "Western Industry and Greedy Capitalists" - and now the same journal is publishing articles telling me that, as a result of AGW, I should expect colder winters, wetter summers and more snow and ice. The reason, they say, is that more warmth means more evaporation and that means more clouds and more precipitation ...
I'm afraid I got cross as I started to read the comments section and came across one which said that more snow would increase the heat trapped in the ground and therefore speed up the melting of the glaciers and Ice Caps ensuring that everyone drowned by the end of this century. From Autralia I hear too that the Greens/AGW mob there are already claiming that the floods and snow on the Snowy Mountains is AGW related... The farmers take a different view of course, but then they are only farmers and have singularly failed to ensure that they infest Canberra to present only their blinkered view.
For me, the ultimate insult to intelligence is to constantly be told that the year just past is the "warmist on record" when for quite a bit of it I was wearing thermals! The revelation that this claim is based on averaging the fifteen HIGHEST temperatures in any given three month period tells you how the AGW mob maintain their illusions. I find myself resigned to the idea that somewhere down the line of 2011 we will again start to hear how the US, Europe and the West must make huge and disasterously expensive and impossibly large cuts in our CO2 emissions as "2011 has become the hottest year on record, surpassing 2010."
Here's my prediction as I watch snow waft slowly past my window yet again, it will be like last summer, a warm period, followed by cooler wetter weather for most of us and another cold wet or snowy winter.
I suppose I have an inconvenient memory in many ways. Just three years ago, I recall reading in a supposedly 'learned' journal, that snow in winter was becoming a very rare event and would have vanished from memory with my lifetime. All the fault of Anthropomorphic Global Warming - read "Western Industry and Greedy Capitalists" - and now the same journal is publishing articles telling me that, as a result of AGW, I should expect colder winters, wetter summers and more snow and ice. The reason, they say, is that more warmth means more evaporation and that means more clouds and more precipitation ...
I'm afraid I got cross as I started to read the comments section and came across one which said that more snow would increase the heat trapped in the ground and therefore speed up the melting of the glaciers and Ice Caps ensuring that everyone drowned by the end of this century. From Autralia I hear too that the Greens/AGW mob there are already claiming that the floods and snow on the Snowy Mountains is AGW related... The farmers take a different view of course, but then they are only farmers and have singularly failed to ensure that they infest Canberra to present only their blinkered view.
For me, the ultimate insult to intelligence is to constantly be told that the year just past is the "warmist on record" when for quite a bit of it I was wearing thermals! The revelation that this claim is based on averaging the fifteen HIGHEST temperatures in any given three month period tells you how the AGW mob maintain their illusions. I find myself resigned to the idea that somewhere down the line of 2011 we will again start to hear how the US, Europe and the West must make huge and disasterously expensive and impossibly large cuts in our CO2 emissions as "2011 has become the hottest year on record, surpassing 2010."
Here's my prediction as I watch snow waft slowly past my window yet again, it will be like last summer, a warm period, followed by cooler wetter weather for most of us and another cold wet or snowy winter.
Experiment
I'd appreciate some feedback on this one - I have a web page on Amazon at their Author Central. What I'd like to know is -
- Could you access it?
- Was it useful?
- How can I get more marketting mileage out of it?
Answers will be greatly appreciated!
- Could you access it?
- Was it useful?
- How can I get more marketting mileage out of it?
Answers will be greatly appreciated!
Saturday, 1 January 2011
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