Nepal

The wall-to-wall news here in Oz today has been largely about two drug-traffickers who were Australian nationals and who have just been executed in Indonesia for their crimes.

Personally, I am more concerned for Nepal, which has lost maybe as many as 10,000 wholly innocent people to a devastating earthquake.  The dead are dead – but the living need help to reconstruct the huge damage done.

Nepal has provide great service the the Commonwealth through its Ghurkas. Quite rightly, Joanna Lumley has

L’ autour feint

Leaning carefully forward

            in a sunlit corner

unbinding the frozen dew

            that clings like ivy

Late Developers

I looked at my old school magazine last week, which arrived in the mail. They have obituaries, so you can check up to see if you are dead. Not yet in my case.

My eye caught this, a review of the autobiography of Lord Richards of Herstmonceux, with whom I shared a prep room and with whom I played rugby. But not a classroom – although a little older than me, he was academically in the year behind.

He was always an enthusiast, and has obviously

Down to Earth Claptrap

It was Earth Day last week. Their web site said

It’s our turn to lead – Earth Day’s 45th anniversary – could be the most exciting year in environmental history

 Well, it wasn’t. No big surprise there; ever since the first Earth Day in 1970, they have been coming up with the most sublime drivel. Courtesy of iHateTheMedia, here is a selection of the predictions these people made 45 years ago:

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

Pact Out

The 4% Queen in Waiting

The general election in the UK is only about a month away. There used to be two major parties and one minor party. There are now two major parties and three minor parties, not to mention the minnows. They all say that they are not going to do any deals with each other. Which is not surprising. By and large, they hate each other.

But if the Conservative party wants to stay in power, it might make sense for it to do a bit of a rethink. Here is the thing. All the predictions suggest that there is going to be a hung parliament. The Conservatives might just about get the largest share of the vote. And they might just get the largest number of seats. But not enough to form a majority. So a very likely scenario is that the Labour Party will get the support of the SNP, and will form a government. It will be uncomfortable, because

My Left Shoe

Jeanie used to think it bizarre that English men have so many different shoes for different occasions.

I suppose she was right.

Click here for

How Green is my Folly?

Nature Climate Change has just published the paper Recent reversal in loss of global terrestrial biomass[1]. The main drift is that the total amount of vegetation globally has increased by almost the equivalent of 4 billion tonnes of carbon since 2003. According to the University of New South Wales:

The main cause of this strong growth over the savannas came from higher rainfall, particularly in recent years, although higher levels of CO² in the atmosphere may have helped plants there to grow more vigorously.

So, let’s just recap. There is only a very small proportion of CO² in the atmosphere, but that little bit has gone up a bit, and is now some 400ppm. For the innumerate, that means a bit less than a twentieth of a percent (the other 99.96% is mostly oxygen and nitrogen[2]). Plants (the things that vegetarians eat) need CO² to grow. There is not much available