On Sept 9th 1513 King James IV’th of Scotland invaded England with his horde of Pagan cattle rustling savages and got his arse well and truly handed to him on plate.
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Knotted prop Blog 
If you don’t know Scots or pretend-English or whatever, it reads like Lewis Carroll gimbolling in the wabe. :^o
P. S. Did you get my e-mail of the other day? If you got it, why haven’t you responded? I want a four-part answer with your personal coat of arms affixed and a notary public to provide the stamp. In triplicate. In gold frames. Gold, not that ‘gold-tone’ or ‘gold-filled’ rubbish, either. I have a nest to feather!
Okay i have extended the time comments are open.
I am afraid Breibart and Matt Ridley are not entirely reliable sources on the impacts of climate change. There has been no significant change in estimates of ECS because the short term behaviour of the present climate, the transient climate sensitivity, gives no indication of the ECS which is dependent on the rate and amount of ice melt and vegetation shifts.
Without any feedbacks, positive or negative, a doubling of CO2 causes 1.2degC of warming. That is the unavoidable amount of warming before any of the complexity of the climate acts. But past climate change {LIA, Minoan warm period} indicates that there are positive feedbacks that amplify that to around double. The most powerful of these is the rise in water vapour in the atmosphere because of that inherent 1.2degC warming.
That increase in water vapour is already a measured fact. The recent spate of extreme flooding events in Asia, Russia, China Mexico and the US are also the result of this rising water vapour content as a result of the warming caused by the fosil fueled CO2 rise.
The Colorado floods and extreme storm Sandy are just one part of the real externalities that have been causing the massive rise in insurance costs from climate causes over the last few decades. A rise not matched by insurance claims from non-climate disasters. It is possible to find benefits from the present change in climate, the increased plant growth has helped in increasing crop yields, although the increase in weed growth can compromise that. And the extreme droughts also seen as rainfall patterns are disrupted by AGW are another negative externality of fossil fuel use.
Your example of hill sheep farmers subsidised by taxpayers to maintain the ‘beauty’ of the landscape is rather odd. I suspect it is an excuse to subsidise hill sheep farming because it is the cheapest way to maintain the ecology of the hills. If the land was abandoned it would be much more expensive to prevent it returning to forest and scrub. And even more costly to reclaim it if required later. This is a landscape with several thousand years of human intervention shaping it by pastoral use, stopping that now because of short term market variations only makes economic sense.
The more usual example of externalities that require market intervention is where the economic actions of an enterprise trespass on the amenities of others. The mining industry is notorious for trying to avoid the requirements imposed upon it to avoid polluting the local air and water and too restore the land after it has extracted its target product. Even now there are many mining companies that are designed to go bust when the resources are extracted to avoid the cleanup costs of externalities.
I agree, taxes and subsidies applied to externalities are nuttier than squirrel shite, however that is the way that the current lamestream of economics believes that externalities should be handled – by .guv intervention. and that is actually one of the excuses used for subsidizing agriculture (to my mind a truer reason is to keep the 16 or so bureautwats that are employed to scruitinize each farmer – employed and making a nuissance of themselves).
The whole problem of externalities disappears where private property rights are fully respected, amnd it is the state, (often in the name of “progress”) which is to blame for the abridgement of private property rights.
google “Bagus, Rothbard Memorial Lecture” (actually about monetary externalities, but the same principals apply) and also “libertarian environmentalism” for the Libertarian take,
ther refs for the lamestream are Pigou, and also Coase and I can never spell the guy’s name, Demsetz or something, he’s part of the Chicago cult school of economics – they’re just badge engineered Keynesians
I was not passing any judgement on the way externalities are handled by gov-reg, taxes and subsides. Just trying to accurately describe actually happens with the most obvious examples of externalities.
In practical terms you get government regulation, tax and subsidies as soon as you get cities. Check into the history of Elizabethan London or any large renaissance city durng the transition from feudalism to commerce. There were mountains of regulations, tithes and benefits to control the pollution from tanners, butchers and brewers. All to manage external cost of their trades. They were not the only targets of central control. Medieval society was a mass of zoning regulations and property demarcation and infringement disputes. Shakespeare does not have one of Watt Tyler’s rebels suggest “first hang the lawyers” by accident.
Farm subsidies most recently arose after the failure of the market in the 1930s. Agriculture requires long term investment and commodity price stability. Something unregulated markets are not prone to exhibit on historical precedent. WW2 prompted most advanced nations to consider how to be self-supporting in basic foods. The US and the UK adopted extensive farm subsidy, set commodity prices at the farm gate and directed investment on easy terms towards farms. Governments also put funds into research. That led to food mountains a few decades later, a consequence of agricultural productivity more than doubling in many nations.
As usual government interference in the market had distorted the demand – supply balance, generating far more food than was required.
Or at least required by people able to pay the price it cost to produce.
I see no real world example of a city based society that avoids regulation, taxes and subsidies to manage the problem of externalities. Are there any extant or historical examples of a functioning society where property rights are fully respected rendering govintervention superfluous? I reluctantly suspect that administrative control is an inherent feature of any society other than a monoculture.
One problem that also seems inseparable from governance, whether civic or entrepreneurial is that sooner or later you get what I recently learned can be described as Cargo Cult Administration. This is a management style that goes through all the motions, but actually produces nothing of value while degrading the very system/society/business they are meant to be administrating. This guy obviously has a very specific example in mind, (see the comments!) but the wider applicability is obvious. Especially the point about –
“The leaders emphasize policies which on examination are seen to have a common core purpose of protecting the leaders from legal action, with the emphasis on process rather than results.”
http://scienceblogs.com/catdynamics/2013/08/15/cargo-cult-administration/
Hi Izen
I’ll try to give you a fuller and more considdered reply later
I’ll leave you with this little bit about cargo cult admins (and the Chicago cult economists who all to often act as apologists for them).
The administration may not be doing what it says on the tin, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t achieving its intended ends, and perhaps achieving them very successfully – those ends are somewhat different to what it says on the tin.
Robert Higgs (author of Crisis and the leviathan, and the man who came up with the idea of applying the “precautionary principal” to the state, long before I thought I’d discovered the idea) explains it very well here:
http://bastiat.mises.org/2013/09/all-government-policies-succeed-in-the-long-run/
Izen the missus is from Colorado they get cyclical heavy flooding on average every 35 years, the reason for the increased damage is the large influx of Californians who will have stopped any flood control work being carried out the last 25 years. These are the same people who ban cutting down trees and then wonder why they get massive forest fires now.
There is also the general influx of people. Which means more who’ll bleat about a heavier than usual monsoon (I gather that this year’s is about twice the mean annual rainfall for the past ten years).
There is also the question of where the incomers have built their houses. have they seen a nice flat or gently sloping bit of land and then discovered that it is a wash/wadi or a debris fan? even if it is only active once in ten or twenty years.
It is very easy to forget or to remain ignorant of some of the nasties which can come along every once in a while.
The first of my examples is dear to my heart, I got a job on the back of it, and one or two more bits of work when other wind farm developments fecked up on blanket bog. The bog bursts and subsequent flows aren’t limited to sloping ground, archaeological digs show them taking place thousands of years ago as well as more recently in the flat lying Irish Mid-lands.
to avoid running foul of your moderation settings, here’s the first of the parts of a USGS study into debris flows http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpGP1uoCHr4
and a sweet little flow, meandering through the Village of Virgen in the Austrian Tyrol
It’s well worth watching a few times (turn the annoying music off first) to see it leaping the bridges, and the flow characteristics, like turbulent flow, then laminar bingham plastic flow, standing waves, tension cracking in the upper surface of standing waves,
and things like the density – big boulders floating on it
And a less friendly debris flow, which happened in our lifetimes, in britain.
I used to use another photo of this when introducing quarry managers and foremen to the process of quarry tip appraisal
I don’t know what speed that one travelled at, only that it was fast enough to be dangerous.
I gather that the Aberfan flow is one of the (or perhaps the) case studies in a book entitled “Government and disasters”
somewhat fitting, as the mine heap which collapsed then liquified, and the site of the greatest number of fatalities were both under direct control of the state, and the greatest number of the dead, were all being held together in that place under threat of state retribution.
how the view of the world changes when you stop viewing it through the distortions of the statist paradigm.
I’d forgotten about that one, wasn’t it somethig like 200mm of rainfall in the small catchment in a few hours – and Cornwall is hardly a monsoon climate, nor is it particularly prone to thunder – it just doesn’t have the land area, the sunshine, the temperature range, nor the height of troposphere for monsoon thunder cells to develop. There was another one about helston sometime in the 80s or 90s with about 150mm of rain and a few pints of Spingo, but not much dramatic damage, and of course Boscastle back about 2004.
It was Devon and having seen the valley it would not not take much to destroy the place, looking at the beach it has happened multiple times before the beach is all boulders.
Where is the ‘like’ button for this?
leaving aside the poison well and ad hom reasoning in that, the claim which the linked piece made, was that the IPCC is scaling back its scare story for its next exciting report
not that it is exactly news, as a look at the probability density functions for the runs of the various models give only a tiny percentage of runs ending with the much trumpeted 4 to 6 degree warming (I’m too lazy to look the figure numbers for the prob dens function graphs and the name of the model)
So, even if we take the models as being realistic, then we really are looking at a rank outsider on only one of the models for any more than a couple of degrees of warming, which is equivalent to me moving a thousand or so feet down the hill (in terms of temperature anyway, I’d still get the wind and the high rainfall because of the topography).
So it’s hardly a Mediterranean future for my old age, nor even retirement in a climate like Brighton’s or Torquay’s, more like Berwick, Whitley Bay, Whitby, or heaven forbid, that curse-ed place where the monkey hangers live.
Unfortunately it is already clear that AGW has effects on the weather that are likely to be somewhat worse even than moving to Hartlepool. The small rise in global average temperatures is merely a defined metric for the amount of change. The local impact of that on weather is another matter entirely
The flood disasters mention all involve extreme rainfall overwhelming any possible defences or adaptions. Those extreme events can happen without AGW with an incidence that is inversely related to severity. But as the data from the insurance industry already makes clear the increased hydrological cycle {rising water vapour content etc} makes such extreme events both more extreme and more frequent.
Think of it as like everyone driving ten miles an hour faster. There are crashes now, but if all speeds were slightly higher then there would both be slightly more accidents, and they would all be somewhat more damaging.
Cargo cult management is of course a consistent feature of corporate businesses and financial market enterprises. The failure of the banking system in 2007 is rather obviously down to administration and management more concerned with process than actual risk avoidance, and protecting the top of the system from culpability while loading responsibility, and impact onto the general population.
Bring on the global warming, it might make Scotland worth colonizing
IPCC 5, looks set to reduce the estimates of warming (I wish some warming would come back, it’s cold wet and blowing a gale here, winter already, and it’ll be here ’til May next year) to about one degree celcius.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/14/New-Report-Scales-Back-Global-Warming
If that were to come true, that’s the equivalent of me moving five hundred feet lower down the hill, and getting probably a three week longer growing season (about ten days earlier start to the grass growing in the spring and ten days later for it to stop growing in the autumn)
I don’t think it will happen, no one’s demonstrated the positive feedbacks necessary for whole number degree celcius changes rather than the 0.1 to 0.3 degrees that CO2 would give without positive feedbacks, but
Let’s get to the interesting bit
According to lamestream economics, where there is an externality, government should act, imposing taxes or subsidies, so that the economic cost is made equal to the “social cost”.
So for example, traditional upland sheep farming produced a landscape which people like to look at and walk around on, the “social value” of the externality is not reflected in the price the farmers get for their sheep, so according to the lamestream ( the economists who came up with this shite are Pigou and later; Coase – who just died a couple of weeks back aged well over 100) government should step in and tax the population and subsidise the farmers, so that the externality (of beautiful landscape) is “internalized”.
This of course raises all sorts of questions, like why should externalities have to be internalized? (there is an unstated normative assumption in there that it is “good” to internalize externalities) and as all economic values and all costs are subjective, how can the costs or benefits even be measured? There is no market for “beautiful landscape” so by deffinition no price arises.
In the case of carbon taxes, carbon caps, climate change levies etc, the principal is the same (fallacious crap). That the externality of future cAGW should be internalized by the users of carbon paying government.
(of course once government is extorting money – any connection with reality goes out of the window, down the toilet or up the arse – choose your metaphor for armed robbery in the name of “helping us”)
of course the measurement of the social cost of carbon becomes highly dependant on the interest rates which are used, as even the cAGW doom mongers admit that a little warming would bring benefits (out to about the year 2060)
When considering early benefits and later costs, a low interest (discount) rate will emphasise the later costs, while a high interest rate will emphasise the early benefits. In the case of the United state calculations the higher (seven percent) interest rates which should have been modelled weren’t
Bob Murphy explains here
Now the really interesting bit
With only one degree C of warming, there are only net benefits, not costs
So if we follow the mainstream thinking which we’ve been subjected to so far, we should be receiving carbon subsidies!
but unfortunately, globular warming might make Scotland worth farming.
The last time Scotland was habitable was during the Minoan Warm Period, this means unfortunately that civilization has had no chance to develop among the natives north of the Tweed. A strange cult has developed among the savages whereby they erect giant white totems to the wind Gods.
If you will forgive, and allow the historical pedantry, there is a good scientific reason for the rise of the Neolithic culture In Scotland that erected all those stone circles and barrow mounds. It may not have been a civilisation as we know it. There were no cities, just villages, clans and herding, but they were building more stone and earthwork megastructures in Scotland, the Orkneys and Ireland than anywhere else in Europe before Stonehenge or the pyramids were thought of.
It is all to do with orbital changes. The Earth tilts and the date of perihelion changes over thousands of years. Around ten thousand years ago the poles got more sunlight than the equator compared to now, and the northern hemisphere got much more sunlight in the spring/summer. That triggered the melting of the Northern glaciers and ended the last ice age. Around five thousand years ago is just about the optimum point where the northern summer was still warmer, getting around 20W/m2 more in June and the winter sun was just about the same as today.
That was the peak time of the Neolithic cultures north of the Tweed!
Since that time the date of perihelion and the angle of precession have caused the difference between northern summers and winters to decrease, and the lower latitudes to gain sunlight at the expense of the high latitudes.
There are some rather neat graphs showing the change in solar energy over the Earth during the last ~11,000 years at this link about halfway down the page.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/paleoclimate-the-end-of-the-holocene/#more-15665
I think it explains how stone age communities lived in that now harsh climate when the summers would have been much milder than today. It doesn’t explain why they constructed henges and barrows requiring the communal work of hundreds, carefully lined up on astronomically defined seasonal events.
Quite alright,
It was a small Scotsman who introduced Kitler and I to Milankovich cycles and orbital forcing, somewhat over quarter of a century ago. Back in the days when global cooling was still popular with the lamestream.
I doubt that any amount of flood control would have made any difference given the massive and extreme rainfall that occurred in just a few days.
Five of the past 7 days set daily rainfall records.
The 9.08 inches that fell on Sept. 12 was an all-time single-day record, nearly doubling the previous record of 4.80 inches set on July 31, 1919.
As of 7 a.m. on Monday, Boulder’s monthly rainfall during September stood at 17.17 inches, all but 0.02 inches of which fell during the past week. The previous all-time monthly record was 9.59 inches in May of 1995.
The reason for the abnormal weather is a blocking pattern in the jetstream. That in turn is the result of the polar amplification of global warming reducing the temperature difference across high latitudes.
It is a classic example of the weather on steroids that results from climate change.
apart from the short time period over which records exist, and the small matter that a once in say a thousand or a once in ten thousand years (magnitude/frequency) event can happen at any time, and, though statistically unlikely to, could occur again within days, weeks, months…
What was the 1919 record attributed to?
Izen actually they have dams upstream to capture such events but the “Californians” will have interfered with this and have already altered the natural vegetation cover. If any group of people can make a natural disaster much much worse than it needs to have been these are the people who can do it.
They probably opened up the release valves on the dams at the same time of the flooding. I believe that is what happened in the Queensland flooding except that was their home grown version of Californians in charge..
Where is the ‘yuk yuk’ like button for this?
For the sake of completeness, much as I enjoy gloating over one of the leadership from north of that de-militarized zone, collecting a Darwin
the success at Flodden does make useful whitewash for those who portray henry the eighth as anything other than a complete disaster.
the French crown took the Cinq Ports, the final English crown posessions on the European mainland.
Actually the Cinque ports are on the English side all Henry inherited was Calais the last of the mainland French possessions from the hundred years war. It was Mary that lost it to the French in 1558.
Really? I thought her husband was Spanish.
Scottish monarchs had a habit of trying to invade England on behalf of their supposed friends,
and of coming second
http://www.battlefieldstrust.com/resource-centre/medieval/battleview.asp?BattleFieldId=28
The Scot’s parasitic politicians (I know, loads of redundancy in that) still ape their French counterparts – wanting to centrally plan everything, and have the rest of europe fund it for them.
Scottish independence will be a laugh a minute, can you imagine the squabbles there’ll be between Glasgow and Edinburgh over prestige projects in particular and OPM (other people’s money) in general.
far better the place gets divvied up into independent city states.
It’s why when the Scottish line of Kings governed England and Scotland and Ireland that we ended up with a civil war over the divine right of Kings.