About Environment 2: Puritans, New Agers and Shouters

Followers of the BBC soap, The Archers, will be familiar with the posh yurt-building hippy traveler new age vegan protester-brat, Kate Archer. (She is boring on as I write in fact - something about how strawberry plants will yield better if they are happy and respected.) Another resident environmentalist on the programme is Linda, the politically correct, knows-nothing-about-rural-reality, home counties incomer. Such tropes lead us to the next obstacle in the way of rational thinking about environment.

I sometimes think that, when I say anything about the environment, a picture is projected on to me, overlaying my short hair with wispy dreadlocks and my smart casuals with a baggy species of home knitting - probably stained with green stuff from hugging trees - and my shoes with sandals. At least that's the kind of person the listeners seem to be talking to when they respond.

Stereotypes can have at their core a grain of truth. And one such is provided by certain active supporters of environmentalism. For years the issue has been regarded as their own turf by puritan, hippy and new-agey types. The claim is that we need to abandon our gross behaviour and return to a simpler life, growing our own stuff, making our own clothes and communing with earth spirits. Recently, someone told me, in all seriousness, that we 60 million or so inhabitants of the UK could support ourselves by growing our own organic food on allotments.

Go to a gathering of people concerned about the environment and, as well as interesting new technology and thoughtful discussion, you might find a 'Healing Area' peddling such stuff as aroma therapy and 'laughter yoga', and a 'circle of stones [providing] a focal point for mystics and imagineers' and where the 'first port of call for those in need of medical care is the Medical Herbalists caravan'. (These at the Newcastle Community Green Festival.) You'll be pleased to know that the witches at 'Sensory Solutions' are also trained herbal practitioners. There's an old oak which is pretty wise too. (Green Gathering publicity.)

Trouble is, this nuttiness is a gift to the shouters who regard opposition to 'greenness', in particular climate science, as their own turf. It provides the context into which Owen Patterson could feed his 'green blob' rant last year, enabling him to come up with the sentence 'Back to the stone age … but Glastonbury style.'  

 Here's Patterson:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10978678/Owen-Paterson-Im-proud-of-standing-up-to-the-green-lobby.html

And here's not-Patterson:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2014/jul/21/paterson-green-blog-right-climate-change

Oh - I've just thought: you won't have to read them. Look, the Patterson thing is in the Telegraph and the case against him is in the Guardian. Well, what would you expect from a bunch of old retired colonels/hippy Guardian readers? Circle according to tribal preference.

You see tribalists all over Facebook – shouting to each other, the already converted – reinforcing ideas already adopted, feeling a sense of community and righteousness. It's usual at this point to say that this is not rational argument, and I am not going to be an exception. But I want to put it more strongly – it's not an argument at all. It convinces no one who is not convinced already, and irritates the fuck out of the rest of us. It drives out getting properly to grips with the world (see earlier posts).

A sad consequence of all this stuff is that we, whose political and consumer choices need to be informed by reality, are prevented from getting sight of that reality. An example of this is the controversy some years ago about the use of GM crops. Both sides were avoiding the real point. GM foods may or may not be environmentally dodgy, may or may not improve food production – that’s to be found out. What was really dodgy back then was that one corporation, Monsanto, a herbicide manufacturer, wanted to use one of the many possible forms of GM, herbicide resistance, to control the markets. They dressed this up as a humanitarian mission to save the world; hapless Government, ill advised, ill informed and thinking on its feet, chose to buy that line. The opposition conformed to stereotype, indulging in vandalism and predicting Armageddon. So a realistic debate about the possible benefits or otherwise of this technique never got aired. The media, whose job should be to open up such issues for us and help us to understand them, gave us instead the soap opera they love, entitled 'Frankenstein Foods'.

When I am Dictator, I will make all the puritans hippies and new-agers drink Fosters lager while watching The Only Way is Essex for as long as I see fit. And I will make the shouty buffoons wear white-boy dreadlocks and listen to recordings of singing whales until I see fit. Or maybe I'll force them all to live together in one great compound where they can carry on their stupid tribal wars while the rest of us try to get to grips with the serious problems that we face. And there'll be a Medical Herbalist's caravan to treat the injured.

About Economics

Introduction

I want to live in, and play my part in, a society which enables people to have a life free from want, with help in times of illness and hardship and which allows everyone a shot at achieving some kind of fulfilment. I want the habitat which gives us life to remain healthy so that it continues to do so.

We need to acquire and share out the wherewithal to do those things, and lately we haven't been doing well at it. I'm not an economist. I did study history as part of my education and have continued to do so since, so I'm aware of at least some economic ideas and terminology. But in what follows I avoid using any of the familiar economics terms and avoid discussing this or that theory - because I don't want to pull in the preconceptions associated with them. I have tried to stick to plain language.

I do not set out some kind of theory or plan. I'm not smart enough. I'm more intent on clearing the decks (i.e. my head) for rational discussion. I'm happy for you to disagree with me and set out some other case – so long as it's rational and evidence based. (If you've read my environment stuff you'll know what I'm driving at here.) That's how we progress towards solutions.

Worker-Free Products

The economic circumstances which brought us to where we are today;

which made and spread around the wealth that gave us a better standard of living than ever before and

which formed much of our thinking about how society works, no longer exist.

For a couple of hundred years the wealth creating process needed us, 'the masses', in order to function. Now it doesn't.

Then, industries needed vast numbers of workers to make the products which brought in the wealth. The money all those workers received as their share in the proceeds spread out into the wider economy as they spent it, benefiting other people who worked to supply what they wanted.

The state was able to take its cut in tax and National Insurance contributions which provided for public services such as health care and welfare, police, local services, education and so on.

Now, the wealth creation process does not need all those workers. In car factories where thousands used to labour, robots have taken on much of the work. They do it well, so it's good for the shareholders, exports and balance of payments. But robots don't queue up for pay packets on a Friday, don't pay taxes and don't pay someone to cut their hair. Employment in the industry is growing as I write, but it's on a much different scale to what it was half a century ago.

(There's loads of Google-able stuff on this – for starters see

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-2548149/How-booming-British-car-manufacturing-helped-drive-economy-upwards.html

and

www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN00611.pdf )

Britain has a highly successful computer gaming industry. Again, good for balance of payments. But such a product is created by a small number of highly able people and needs no great labour force to make it. In the Guardian March 13 2011, Ray McGuire, chairman of BAFTA's games committee and head of Sony Computer Entertainment UK, said that, while the sale of boxed goods was declining,

'..the industry as a whole is growing – it is in good health in terms of revenue, and in terms of audience reach it's never been bigger.'

In a similar vein, Japanese manufacturers said, on the BBC's Today programme, (1/4/2013), that making devices was no longer a paying game. They said they had failed to move to digital products, which was where the new game was at. You only make a copper or two on a manufactured plastic thing, but it then becomes the vehicle for much more profitable digital online products. Plastic things and 'boxed goods' need people to make them and move them about; digital online products are non-labour intensive and, once created, are infinitely reproducible with the click of a mouse.

Our highly regarded and highly profitable animation industry is said to employ 4600 people (2012).

(http://creativeskillset.org/assets/0000/5070/2012_Employment_Census_of_the_Creative_Media_Industries.pdf )

In my town the Raleigh Cycle Company employed 12000 in 1963 (Grace’s Guide). And according to the BBC movie Made in Dagenham, in 1968 there were 55000 men and 187 women employed at the Ford plant there. We'd need a lot of gaming industries to keep that lot busy.

Of course, it has always been the case that increased productivity (i.e. using fewer people to make more stuff) makes people unemployed. The idea used to be that those who could not be kept on as a business grew would find work in new enterprises which were coming into being as the economy grew. That is precisely what doesn't happen now. The new enterprises - the computer gaming industry, the animation industry, the motor industry, and the rest - don't need to recruit large numbers of production workers. Small groups of highly trained and creative people make the product, assisted where necessary by automation (maintained by a small number of highly skilled engineers), and it is to these few, and their investors, that the profits return – without the need for them to pass any of it on to a large workforce.

Meanwhile, what are the ex-workers to do? Instead of being in organised industries getting negotiated pay and conditions they are increasingly offered zero hours contract (i.e. casual) work in service industries, deliveries etc. - all lower paying, all insecure and without opportunities for progression. The self employed sector is growing fast, and it appears that those who do it like it. But the earnings are relatively low and erratic. The tax take is lowered and there is the likelihood of people needing state support from time to time, between jobs or when earnings drop. That's not going to generate much to pay for public services.

 See for instance http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Documents/SEI2013.pdf

The fact that the wealth creating industries no longer have a great need for workers does not mean workers are not needed. The public services need them: health care, police, rescue, social care, community services such as waste disposal, street cleaning, care of the elderly, care of the environment, education, defence - the list is endless, all the stuff that keeps society going. But none of these things creates wealth: given an input of wealth they can spread it and amplify it, but there has to be some there in the first place - dug out of the ground as raw materials or brought in from outside by exports, say. In the absence of that, the people who could be doing the work are having to serve in coffee shops or wrap and deliver parcels for Amazon – and I suspect at least one of those jobs will be automated out of existence soon.

In the past the workforce was the means of transferring some of the proceeds of wealth creation across to the non-wealth-creating yet highly necessary sectors via spent and taxed wages. Without that means wealth will stop with the original entrepreneurs. 

Are there other ways of making that transfer? Can service industries, in providing for rich people, be a way of moving the wealth on? Only to a degree, because however lush their lifestyle, they are not going to keep all of us busy are they? Alarmingly, such people will be well able to afford to pay for private health care and education, so providers could become oriented to serving them, making education and health, once more, expensive privileges of the better off.

We should remember that service industries do not create new wealth. They circulate and amplify wealth which has already been generated, except when they bring money in from outside our economy, like tourism for example.

There are consequences for education too, and with it, motivation and ambition. Liam Beatty, a young graduate interviewed on BBC Radio 4's World At One, 30th March 2015, said that his experience of seeking work and internships in Brussels London and Edinburgh, and being offered only the usual low paid zero hours contract jobs,

 '...contradicted this ethos, instilled into you from a very young age, and repeated by the chancellor at the graduation ceremony, that if you work very hard you will get a very good job at the end of it'.

They misled him. He was told stuff that was true a couple of generations ago but is not true now.

Then, the great manufacturing industries at the core of the economy provided a ladder of advancement through merit and training. As well as top jobs for graduates there was in-house training, white collar jobs for A-level non-university school leavers and apprenticeships for others. They were structured to offer a kind of step by step upward mobility.

Now, with few such industries, doing well at uni and working hard will only qualify you to enter a competition with a lot of similar people for one of the few good jobs going. Or, if you're really good, to create the next world beating idea and be made for life. Otherwise, you become a well educated barista.

So why go to uni? Why land yourself with an enormous debt at the beginning of your adult life? Well, the public services need graduates and highly trained people don't they? One could work for and/or be trained by them. But no. The public services can't get enough money for that – see above. 

So, if we think there is a lot of work for people to do in things like education and public services, how do we get the funds to pay for them? Instead of the money coming into the economy indirectly via the pay packets of the masses, why not take an equivalent amount directly from the businesses that are making the money? This view gets a lot of approval whenever another tax dodging scam by a big corporation is revealed. But what about all the clever boys and girls at Silicone Roundabout, or the gifted people in the creative industries? Do we really want to cane them for being good at stuff, as well as being good for GB plc? Especially as there is a world out there waiting to offer deals to them?

A right wing economist might argue that public services should be privatised, market driven. But if what I say above is true, the market that drives them will be a small and exclusive one, consisting of the few who have enough money to pay. No-one will want to build a business serving the needs of a low-paid, erratically paid, population.

And finally, here's another thought: that last paragraph also blows out the get-rich chances of the entrepreneurs. For who's going to buy their products in such a population? People who don't earn can't buy. When people can't buy, the wealth creators can't function. J. K.Galbraith pointed this out in his book about the Great Crash of 1929 : industry and consumers, he says, were well able to carry on as before, 'given the income to spend'.[my emphasis]. (The Great Crash 1929 p191). But unfortunately the consumers had no income to spend - they were queuing up for free soup.

So the situation I describe above will in fact be short lived, an intermediate phase in the slowing down and seizing up of the economy – an economy designed to function in the era of the industrial masses. We need to accept that circumstances have altered and that we need to find a radically new way of going forward. 

Bonanza and Legacy

My family live in and around an area of awesome historical significance - a UN World Heritage Site in fact - and the chances are you've never heard of it. The American author Bill Bryson has said of it that 'Everything that is manufactured on Earth today traces its beginnings back to this tranquil corner of rural Derbyshire.’ (The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes From a Small Island, p. 277.) It is here that Richard Arkwright put together for the first time ever the power, the mechanisation, the transport infrastructure and the buildings full of wage earning workers, that go to form the modern industrial plant. Almost immediately he was being copied nation-wide. The industrial revolution had begun to roll.

Our mass-employing industries brought us a 250-year bonanza fueled by empire, exploitation of raw materials and our unique position in world markets due to being first on the scene with technological innovation.

Towards the end of the era the workers in those industries finally achieved, through the efforts of generations of trades unionists, reformers, activists and enlightened politicians, the chance of a fair share of the proceeds – just as the bonanza was running out of steam.

While the advantages of the bonanza era are no longer available, a huge beneficial legacy remains. We accumulated vast knowledge and expertise, and highly developed forms of organisation and education. These have already brought us the new industries mentioned above. They should also enable us to work out new forms of technology and social and economic organisation with which to provide a decent standard of living for our population and care for the habitat which gives us life.

Importantly, we should target our efforts at what we need for a good life, not at churning out crap we don't need which, we hope, might generate a bit of what we really do need as a tax by-product.This also provides us with a role in the world. Societies outside our own, which started on modernisation later, or not at all, need not go through all those clumsy, dirty stages of development our ancestors went through. We are the ones in a position to explore the way forward to cleaner, safer, more just ways of generating and circulating wealth. 

There’s no point in trying to claw our way back to an earlier time. By all means cry, ‘bring back manufacturing’ but, for all the reasons set out above, don’t expect it to bring back mass employment. The mill owners are gone, along with their factories dependent on toiling masses, so there's no point in shouting 'Everybody out!' The time has come to acknowledge that a mighty phase of history is over, and we, as the first society to enter and leave it, should concern ourselves with pioneering the next phase. 

___________________

Update, 12/12/1015:

Since I wrote that piece, I have come across a book on the subject. I've bought it, but haven't read it yet. Here it is:

Eric Brynjolfsson and Henry McAfee,

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy

Update, 12/12/2015:

Another employment opportunity bites the dust.

On 3^rd of December 2015, Antony Jenkins, ex-boss of Barclay's Bank, was interviewed for BBC Radio 4's In Business programme. He is about to start a job putting through a programme of automation in his industry. He predicts a

'… significant reduction in the number of people employed in the traditional [banking] sector … I estimate it to be somewhere between a 20 and 50 percent reduction over the next 10 years. You can already see this starting to happen. If you look at branch utilisation in the UK last year for example, it was down 6% on the prior year. So these are profound changes for the financial services industry.'

[Interviewer] A 50% reduction in jobs, employment, in branches – that's an absolute devastation of a very large UK industry.

'A very large UK industry and a very large global industry but there is, in my view, no escape from the forces of technology, which are automating all sorts of processes for customers. So getting a loan, making a payment, checking a balance – those of course are the obvious things you see, but if you look inside the operations of a large bank - regulatory compliance, analysis of companies, book keeping - all of those things the new technologies allow to be automated very very extensively, much more than they are today. And so in what banks call the middle and back office, we'll see very very significant reductions there as well.'

[Interviewer] There's going to be a huge storm through the financial services sector – it's almost equivalent to the storm we saw in the financial crisis.

'Well, I think it's a huge transformational force. I think it's going to end up being better for the customer. That's a good thing. Look at other areas of our lives. Look at how people buy music, look at how people buy books, look at how people buy goods online. All these industries have been transformed by technology as financial services really hasn't. So in my view it's entirely reasonable to expect that transformation to occur. It will have profound impacts and create winners and losers across the sector, and the winners will be the ones who can adapt and thrive in the new circumstances. The losers will just fall behind.'

[Interviewer] You talk about this 50% figure – that equates to hundreds of thousands of jobs in the UK alone. Is that the threat you see from this digital revolution?

'Absolutely.'

OK. But it will only be better for the customer 'given the income to spend' [Galbraith, see above]. And he's just told us that the income is about to be taken away from a large group of potential customers. 

I do not hold to a kind of religious faith that believes an equivalent income will appear from some at the moment unseen source. If that were ever true, it was in the mass industrial era. As I point out elsewhere, any available work opportunities are likely to be less well paid.

Neither he nor the interviewer seem aware there's an issue here at all. It could have been discussed when they talked about his chairmanship of

 'Business in the Community, which is about businesses really understanding the need for them to be players in the social and the economic life of their customers not just about the bottom line.' 

They just talked about customer convenience instead. But paying customers and employees are the same people. In the past when an industry folded, its employees were left to fend for themselves. The justification was that, with effort and motivation, they would find equivalent, or better, employment in new ones opening up - and be able to go on spending. If this is no longer tenable, there's a need to find a way of managing transitions like this, and, dare I say it, of providing people with the security of a stable income.

Update, 21/02/2016

Here's the UNESCO introduction to the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site, discussed above,

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1030

and a video:

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1030/video

Update 30/04/16

Even the usually very savvy Have I got News For You (BBC2 TV) panelists don't get it. On the programme of 29/04/16 at 10mins 35secs, the topic of Jeremy Corbyn's  talk with President Obama,  'Post industrial societies and the power of global corporations and the increasing use of technology around the world', was good for a laugh. I do have to say though, while I'll happily give Mr C full marks for content, I can't do the same for his style and communication.

Postal Vote: I Told You So

I find myself frightened by the careless naivete (or reckless opportunism) behind the recent promotion of the postal vote on demand. After receiving an invitation from my MP to apply, I wrote to him inviting him to comment on the following situations:

• A controlling parent sits his/her family round the kitchen table and directs them how to vote.

What will you advise an 18 year-old child of such a parent to do? Refuse?

• A Patriarch tells his extended family to apply for postal votes so that he can tell them who to vote for.

What will you say to members of the family who feel oppressed and want to elect more enlightened representatives?  Lecture them on their rights in a modern society?

• A resident on a housing estate wants to vote for an anti-crime candidate but the local gangster family have told him to apply for a postal vote and vote as directed.

What should he do – shout for a policeman?

• A tenant of a dodgy landlord wants to vote for an anti-corruption candidate but her landlord threatens her with eviction and stands over her while she fills in the form.

What should she do – go to another room?

The secret ballot was not invented in a time so primitive there wasn’t a postal system – on the contrary back in the 1870’s there was a far better one than we have today. They could have had a postal ballot if they had felt it safe.

They invented the secret ballot so as to move the voter to a place of safety where no one could overlook the way he [and eventually she] voted. It was necessary because of the power landlords and oppressive employers had to punish people they saw voting contrary to their wishes.

It enfranchised vulnerable people. It took them to a safe place and said ‘Say what you really want and no-one can know or interfere’.

The postal ballot provides a tool for those who wish to exercise power over voters. It places the responsibility for standing up to them onto their vulnerable victims. It puts them in a public place and says ‘Try to say what you really want and If anyone interferes it is up to you to resist them.'

All of the above is about legally used ballot papers. (There is obviously a whole other lot of scary stuff involving ‘fiddles’, and the secret ballot is not 100% foolproof – but that’s another discussion.)

So I will get off my butt and walk a few hundred metres to the polling station because I know it’s important. And I will leave postal or proxy systems of voting for people with genuine verified needs.

As I vote I will also take a view about the kind of political party which thinks it worth taking this kind of risk in the hope of drumming up a few extra votes.'

Then in May 2015 this appeared in Private Eye:

So there we are. We can now answer the questions I posed in my original letter. The children of the controlling parent, the family of the oppressive patriarch, the hard pressed residents of that crime ridden estate and the exploited tenant are to be told they

'...must not let anyone "watch you while you complete your postal ballot paper".'

That'll do it won't it?

About Environment 1: One Liners and the Off Switch

One Liners

I saw a cartoon strip in the journal of the Centre for Alternative Technology which struck a chord with me. I haven’t got it any more but, as I remember, it was on the theme of ‘Why I hate parties’. Circulating and chatting as you do, the author, once she says she works at CAT, has to listen to a succession of clueless one-liners from people eager to tell her why she’s wasting her time.

As an ordinary person actively concerned with environment I get the same thing. Happily gabbing about this and that in the pub, I’ll suddenly get hit with, ‘I’ll start to worry about man-made carbon emissions when cows stop farting’, or, ‘There’s no point in me limiting my carbon emissions because China’s are going through the roof’, or, ‘It’s snowing in April – are you still going to tell me the climate’s getting warmer?’ One guy recently inflicted on me that old chestnut of Clarkson’s about the long distance travels of the battery installed in the Prius. Recently I even heard, on the radio, the one about how all the people in the world would only take up a space the size of the Isle of Wight if they all stood together. The touching thing is that they give you that wise eye which says, ‘My dear self deluding tree-hugging fairyland friend, how can you still cling to your illusions in the face of such obvious common sense?

Rather than bring a light-hearted evening down by babbling on about environmental complexity I usually ask, ‘Anyone know any nob jokes?’

And maybe start to blog about it.

Why I Think It’s Important

I’m not going to set out a case for being ‘green’ here. I will try to say how I start to think about it. So:

It isn’t unusual for a species to change its habitat from one which gives it life into one which doesn’t. Deer in a lush woodland enthusiastically munch shoots until there are none left to grow into trees: the woodland declines and the deer population goes down with it. Silver birch trees spread over a heath, having a lovely time until their own leaf mould, shade, warmth and associated fungi change the area into something more suited to oak trees. It’s a familiar thing.

We humans are a species. There are a lot of us, so we should at least be open to the possibility that what happens to other species might happen to us too. Why should we be exempt? It makes sense for us to be on the lookout for signs that it might be happening. It’s risk management.

If cavemen ever wondered about these things I guess they would have thought their habitat so vast in comparison with their puny selves that their impact on it was negligible - before dismissing the matter from their thoughts. I suspect this comforting view has continued in many minds right up to the present. But with our vastly increasing numbers and our large ‘footprint’, I’m not banking on it being the case.

It’s not about saving the planet. The planet doesn’t need saving. It works the way it does and its constituent parts react to conditions as they alter. It’s not a thinking thing and it won’t do us any favours. It doesn’t have to be human-friendly – it hasn’t been for most of its existence. We can try to avoid hastening it on to a stage where it isn’t once more - or not. The planet won’t care either way.

Update, July 2015: See the Daily Mash for an important statement by Planet Earth itself on this very subject!

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/environment/ill-be-just-fine-says-planet-20080306774

Unlike the deer and the tree, we are able to visualise alternatives, choose between them, then plan accordingly. Sadly, we can choose to behave as if we don't have that ability and to think like a deer or a tree instead.

One Liners Revisited

The quality of discussion about environment is abysmal.

‘It’s snowing in April. Are you still going to tell me the climate’s getting warmer?’ People really do still try to make this ‘point’ from time to time, but I’m sure most of us by now understand the difference between local weather and long term climate trends. The thing is beautifully put to bed by Armstrong and Miller here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQlHaGhYoF0

A new version of it has been around during this year (2014). The claim is that global temperatures have not risen during the past 18 years and therefore global warming is not a genuine trend. I think it’s horse manure, but I’m not going to argue the point here. My concern is about getting a better quality of discussion rather than pushing a particular point of view. If you Google something like ‘climate not getting warmer 18 years’ you can find enough stuff to make your own mind up. And look out for some good examples of dodgy selection and presentation of data too - people choosing where to start and stop measurements so as to support what they want to believe.

‘I’ll start to worry about CO2 when cows stop farting’. This one has been around a long time, and I’ve had it said to me within the last 6 months. The gist is that the natural gaseous output from the innocent moo cow dwarfs any reduction we can bring about through regulating our own emissions. The implications being, I suppose, ‘So why bother?’, and, ‘It’s a natural thing, it’s been going on forever and has done us no harm’.

Before arguing that point, let's note that it’s not a point. It’s just telling us there’s another thing to worry about.

Anyway, are cattle emissions that great, and if so, why? Well, we aren’t talking about a few wild animals are we? If we do think cows are trumping us to oblivion then we should look at the vast prairies of mega-industrial scale beef and milk production in the Americas, Europe and elsewhere.

So are cows a major greenhouse gas emitter? Well as far as I can make out, they contribute about 20% of the world’s methane output, not just from trumps but also burping and breathing etc. And to this we should add the output of other ruminants such as sheep. There’s much less methane in the atmosphere than CO2, but it’s a way more powerful greenhouse gas. Then again, it breaks down more quickly. Once again the issue is well covered by internet sources. Here’s one.

http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=1734

The thought to hang on to, though, is that methane produced by cattle and livestock is a result of human activity so you can’t dismiss the need to control our emissions by pointing to it. Rather, you’ve just added another thing to the worry list: it is one of our emissions. Speaking personally, if dealing with it means going on a vast burger eating binge and not replacing the cows we eat in the process – I’m up for it.

And if you want something else to worry about, methane is also released by melting ice. Of course the warmer it gets, the more ice melts …

Here’s a succinct article about the composition of the atmosphere and its history:

http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/current/lectures/Perry_Samson_lectures/evolution_atm/

and also see:

http://zebu.uoregon.edu/2004/es399/lec02.html

Update, New Year 2015: Just before Christmas I heard a comedian (didn't catch his name) talking about how a new research has shown that beavers are putting loads more methane into the atmosphere than we previously thought. He went on to make exactly the kind of crappy non-point I'm moaning about - how stupid it is, he says, that we disfigure the landscape with wind turbines when these little mammals mock our efforts with megatons of global warming gas.

Well, here's an article about it in International Business News,which gives a link to take you through to the original report. Beavers' output is said to be 15% of 'bovine output'. So put that together with what has been said above on the subject and you get closer to the real, less dramatic picture.

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/climate-change-beavers-boost-emissions-800-million-kg-methane-every-year-1479809

Another chestnut of the CO2 debate is the one about volcanoes. This one suggests that our greenhouse emissions are minuscule compared to the immense volumes of the stuff pumped out around the planet by volcanoes. This being so, our efforts at control can have no noticeable effect. There’s no problem dealing with this one. It’s wrong. See:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming.htm

This link is to a website which challenges those climate deniers who, unable to accept the possibility that climate change might be happening, grab uncritically at any old stuff they think will support them. It deals with a whole list of what it calls myths, including some already mentioned here. The website makes it clear what its aims are and claims to give proper scientific evidence and sources. I’m sure you’ll want to check out its validity by following up those sources and looking at others as well, so you can make up your own mind. But please remember that a troll-type twerp peddling a conspiracy theory or a a tabloid journo knocking out a think piece doesn't necessarily qualify as 'another source'.

Please note I'm not trying to say 'Climate change is certain because these people are silly and their myths are wrong'. Just that, if you do want to disprove climate change, you need to do better than this.

The Off Switch

The Earth is a mix of materials and living things which interact with each other. At the present time all this interaction produces the conditions we humans need for life - gases to breathe, light and warmth at the right levels, atmospheric screening to keep us from harmful rays, stuff to eat and medicate with, and so on and so on. Those things aren't just 'there': they are being generated by that mix.

We know from experience that we can mess up this support system: at the local level for instance, in the 19th and 20th centuries, smog in British cities made the air unbreathable, killing many and making many more sick and miserable. At the global level we recently had the ozone hole, letting through radiation which was harmful to us, and which I understand is now on the mend because remedial action was taken - showing that we can take action to put things right when we want to.

These are not difficult ideas to think about and are not, as far as I'm aware, controversial. Yet at some point, many people start to bark. Those crappy one liners are uttered by otherwise rational people who insure their cars and wash their hands after using the lavatory.

Of course, it can be rational to question current thinking about CO2. For instance if interpretation of data can be shown as mistaken, or if newer, better research explains and invalidates the earlier stuff. This is scientific practice, where you take an idea, test it to see if it works, and put it out there to see if it works when other people do it. Those of us who are not scientists can follow these developments and try to form a view.

It's not rational to try to dismiss it out of hand by dishing up a one liner about cows, car batteries, beavers or volcanoes, as though it were gospel. That's barking; it's not a counter argument to the scientific consensus. In fact, it's something quite different: it's an off-switch. Thinking about global warming involves thinking about troubling things. Choosing to believe a simple one liner closes down the troubling thoughts and enables one to get a good night's sleep.

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