Freedom of Speech - YES, we did screw up!

How ironic that we live in a society that prides itself on 'Free Speech' and yet irrationally undermines the very idea by allowing the Police or a courtroom to decide, if I or someone else might feel insulted. There is a growing number of extremists who are prepared to maim or murder on the basis that they feel victimised and downtrodden by someone, who is expressing an opinion.

I plead for a REFORM of SECTION 5 of the Public Order Act or as a consequence suffer the loss of a most basic but essential HUMAN RIGHT: believing, thinking and expressing your thoughts - freely!
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See Rowan Atkinson's speech, if you haven't already, as it has gone viral long ago:
http://reformsection5.org.uk/2012/10/rowan-atkinson-rs5-video-goes-viral/

Freedom of speech - did we screw up?

Before he was executed by the Germans on 29 June 1944, Niels Fiil from the Danish resistance organisation, the "Hvidsten Group", said:

"I know Denmark will go towards brighter and happier times, where everyone freely can speak, believe and think - - - .


Is that so?   Ask Firoozeh Bazrafkhan, Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean), Salman Rushdie and the courageous Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Shame on those who let Niels Fiil down - in Denmark and England and USA and Holland and - - - -

Freedom of speech and thought

On the relativity of perception and change in society 1930-2012


During the summer of 2004 the Danes celebrated the silly period by having a heated discussion whether Ole Wivel and Knud W. Jensen, both pillars on the art and literary scene, ought to have confessed their Nazi-sympathies in the 1930s and 1940s.

It is clear that perception relativism often is ignored by people who should know better. Historians such as Barbara Tuchman (‘The March of Folly’) and Anne Appelbaum (‘Gulag’) have emphasised, that it takes very little time from the actual events till we either forget what happened or simply change our opinion or perception about them. This is not only because new information has become available or because it is physically impossible to ’think’ using the mind of the past, but it is also driven by a changed political and cultural situation, or in short: fashionable correctness.
One just need to look at how we now evaluate events in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Ukraine and how dramatical Western European Societies have changed in the past 20 years.

It is possible that with the passing of time we obtain a better understanding, but simultaneously we distance ourselves from the realities of the day and thereby the conditions that formed the background for the opinions, perceptions and decision processes. Seen in the rear mirror it becomes easier to criticise, even though our understanding has diminished; we blissfully ignore this fact.

What if we actually had found WMDs in Iraq? (Perhaps we did – only, it was people, not bombs!). Or if Chamberlain had been proven right? How about the Ukrainians, who offered their welcome to the invading German troops in 1941 with the traditional bread and salt. Were they traitors? Tolerance, indifference and ignorance are closely related concepts, which, in the different world of the information constrained 1930s, muddied people’s understanding – just as it happens today with perhaps too much information; important decisions are still taken based on 20% knowledge and 80% gut feel – both in politics and in business.

No wonder that the assessment of events, 50 years later, risk bearing no resemblance to what actually happened. This is the historian’s eternal dilemma. The change in perception will always be coloured by the swings in political reality. Our perception will always be formed by our present knowledge and not with the mind of the past. Knowledge doesn’t transmit automatically and once lost, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to recreate later.

In 1932 a large majority of the Germans considered Hitler to be a rather laughable person, who was bound to disappear shortly. Very few had a more clear vision, like Hindenburg, who said: “This man will lead us over the precipice”. The perception changed just 1-2 years later, but to many people the question was still whether Nazism was a little evil with a lot of good, or a blessing with a few drawbacks. The Germans – and surely the Danes – disagreed amongst themselves about which side of the scales weighed most.

If one leaned to the ‘good’ side, society had moved from chaos to order, economic growth after WWI and the 1920 and 1930 recessions, work after unemployment, prosperity, motorways, Volkswagens and a path to regain national pride.

Perhaps the dark side was a little more difficult to define in the beginning, although the Kristall-nacht ought to have been a wake-up call with a fire poker.

The negative picture disappeared in a flood of prosperity and a feeling of national greatness, which was anything but wasted on the Danes of the day. One should not forget that Denmark and Germany were rather closely connected through culture, education and business. A large part of the Danish industrial machine was a traditional supplier to the Germans. It was Danish engineers who built the German submarine base in St Nazaire, strategic bridges in Croatia and many traders became rich selling food supplies and manufactured goods to the Germans well into the war. However, before blaming the Danes this was a picture repeated across Europe.

In 1975, when I worked in Holland, people often asked me what language was spoken in Denmark and even exactly where Denmark was. Is it such a mental high-jump to realise, that people were less well informed in 1935 and had their mind set on different issues? We tend to forget, that the last 60 years of information distribution, political innovation and global development were still to come. Dad worked, Mum was a hausfrau, divorce was immoral, children grew up being beaten into discipline, colour TV and mobile phones were science fiction if even that, the toilet was often in the courtyard and shared by many, and Jews were “ not really it”. These were the social realities in the 1930s in Denmark, where the characteristic ‘where few have too much and fewer too little’ was about to be invented.

The Social Democrats and their programme of worker power and emancipation of women had changed the political, social and cultural scene and more was to come. But there was also a growing feeling amongst many that we had to be careful not to go all the way towards communism. Nevertheless, a new balance had to be found, as communists were growing in numbers as well.

This fact, together with the leaning towards a powerful Germany and the memory of the recent winter war in Finland, where many Scandinavians had volunteered on the Finnish side, were some of the major reasons for a strong anti-communist feeling. It therefore felt natural for many Danes (and other Europeans!) to join the Germans and continue the battle against the Russians (i.e. communists) forming the SS Viking division.

So, how do we judge this today?

We know too much! Socialism was a way forward at the time. Perhaps Communism and Nazism were as well? Who in the 1930s could tell for sure after the wars in the 19th Century and after WWI? At this time Stalin was creating ’Paradise’, building a state based on collectivism, but did we realise how many eggs he was cracking while making the omelette? Did we know that this process made Hitler’s approach look like play in a sandbox?
Both sides had their protagonists, often leading intellectuals and culture celebrities.

What we forget, when judging today, is to eliminate our 21st Century knowledge and think ‘1930’!

When we say ‘Nazism’ today, it evokes images of suppression, persecution, concentration camps and war. That was not the reaction in the 1930s.

But what do we say in 2012 about Stalin’s extermination of more than 20mill. People – in peace time!! – and deportation of whole populations, such as the Kalmyks and Tartars? How about the collectivisation in Ukraine, that in 1933-34 cost over 6mill. people their lives as one of the largest human-created hunger events ever bar Mao’s murderous acts? Or being shot for possessing food in this period? Gulags? Systematic removal – back to Russia – in the 1950s of all industrial production assets from East Germany, Poland, Czekoslovakia and Hungary, maintaining suppressed agrarian nations as a buffer zone towards the West? And how about Hungary 1956, Czekoslovakia 1968, Stasi, Ulbricht, and Honecker?

Hang on a second! Did we know all this in the 1970s, while the cultural elite in Denmark was as red as tomatoes? After all, this was only 35 years after Walter Duranty, New York Times, had reported ‘no problems’ during his Soviet sponsored travels in Ukraine, in the middle of the hunger disaster.
A report for which he got the Pulitzer prize.

Why has no one insisted and told the Danish left: “You owe us an answer?”
Perhaps it is easier to sling such questions at the now deceased Wivel and Jensen?
How many of the extreme left in Denmark have not said “we didn’t know”?

Obviously, people find it difficult to admit errors, and in the political climate after the war neither Wivel nor Jensen found the motivation to express remorse publicly. Who knows, perhaps their feelings hadn’t changed. Self perception, survival instinct and adjusted knowledge and information could be determining factors. No one wants to stand out as a social pariah. It must be remembered that many people, who had been too close to the Nazis, had been executed after the war. So in short: with an adjusted outlook, one has to consider the consequences and the lie becomes an invisible friend.
Clintons ‘I did NOT have sex with this woman’ is a good example.

Despite the realisation that Stalin was nothing less than a monster, probably worse than Hitler, and despite the collapse of both communism and the Soviet Union, it has still not become fashionable to attack the communists for their misbehaviour. Perhaps we still haven’t completely digested the information in the KGB and Stasi archives, where evidence of a planned East German led invasion of Denmark during the cold war came to light. Perhaps there are still too many old extreme leftists in power or opinion creating positions? A minister in the present Danish government (2012) is the ex chairman of the Danish Communist party and under investigation for having received personal funds from KGB.

Then it was much easier and more politic to accuse the asylum seeking Ukrainian Kravchenko for being a CIA spy than to expose Duranty and his nonsense.

In the 1970s I was mentioned in an extreme left anthology as an ‘enemy of the State’ – “Vrag Naroda”, a terminology with a very dark notion from Soviet times – due to the fact that I had worked in the Ministry of Defence. What would have happened, if Denmark suddenly had an extreme left government?

It won’t happen, you say - - - .

Then consider Malmoe in Sweden, where terror against Jews by Muslim immigrants has become a daily event, or Denmark, where the Police and Politicians are afraid of entering the immigrant Ghettos that have sprung up since 1983 (the implementation year of the “free for all immigration laws”?

Nazism? Communism?
Plus ca change!

In open and transparent societies we have a tradition of speaking up and to protest, based on our development during the last 200 years and our cultural roots in a humanistic outlook after the French and American revolutions. We therefore have the right to say to Ole Wivel and Knud Jensen and to many people still alive: “You owe us an answer”, but not to attack them from a position in a glass-house.

However, it is not just in Denmark that our (mis)concept of tolerance has led to a complete imbalance of what we accept and what not in terms of extreme opinions. A good example is represented by the Hizb-ut Tahir group. In England the jihadist and Imam Abu Hamza (finally extradited to the USA in 2012) has publicly encouraged extermination of Jews with a call to continue where Hitler stopped. It took the authorities several years to have him arrested, only made possible when the terror laws changed after 9/11.

The Imam Abu Quatada is another example. In 2004 he travelled up and down the country preaching jihad and repetition of 9/11. England is still trying to get rid of him (2012), prevented by the Strassbourg Court, that extradition to Jordan would hurt his human rights due to possible torture or execution.

On the other hand, the swell of resistance against medieval cultures, in particular hate-preaching religions, tend to be met with silence by the media or even laws prohibiting critique.
This does not make sense any more, as recently stated in public by Rowan Atkinson, (Mr. Bean).

The question is, whether our tolerance, normally a strong pillar in a democracy, will be criticised in the future. Is it possible, that in 30 years from now people will reproach us and say that we didn’t do enough? Or will they say: “You really managed that well”?

Personally I am afraid, that we will be considered a failure, as our democratic states slowly are abandoning the right to free speech. Without criticism, there will be no dialogue and the increasing undermining of our right to speak up will hit us hard in the end.

The right to speak up, think and express one self freely must necessarily be followed by the duty to defend it. It is inevitable that we sometimes exceed this right, but it is a necessary element in the exercise of democracy. The Americans manage this concept through their 1st amendment, but both they and Western Europe are slowly putting a clamp on this important issue. Consider the attempts to muzzle the free Internet; or an English person dragged into court for claiming Scientology to be a "Cult" (the case eventually thrown out of court); or a Danish/Iranian blogger critizising certain factual Islamic behaviours and facing arrest.

It took a little too long, during the WWII, before the Danes began to protest. They made good money on the Germans! Today other dangerous issues seem to find people in the West completely asleep. In particular religious criticism is considered racist or political incorrect. This loss of dialogue stifles our society, inevitably leading to a repeat of the Stalin and Honecker states if no one speaks up.
But perhaps it is understandable as we have not even come to terms with the past, the communist atrocities and Lenin’s omelette statement. 20-30mill. Russian and Ukrainian eggs. Cracked in time of peace.
And Europe still carries a huge guilt luggage over past colonial activities, colouring our behaviour.
In order to understand our thoughts and ideas today we have to go ”back to the future”. This future has been clear for some time concerning Nazism, but it hasn’t arrived yet in respect of our assessment of communism and certainly not in our understanding of the dramatic social upheavals that are going on in Western societies at the moment.

On 20 July 2004 the Germans had arranged a 60 year memorial day for the assassination attempt on Hitler’s life. There were many speeches and a solid attempt to unravel the built-in conflict: were the would be assassins traitors or heroes? The tendency went in the direction of heroes. After all, it was now 60 years later. But Schroeder avoided the use of the word ‘hero’, even though his speech clearly indicated this direction.
This shows how difficult it often is to change our stance and self perception.

In respect of communism, there are many who owe us an answer.
How long must we wait?

One also wonders what went through Kim Philby’s brain, when he sat lonely, isolated and under constant KGB supervision and censorship in his Moscow apartment, devoid of all human dignity. The sausages and sour cucumbers that he served for the last BBC journalist, who visited him before he died, were a far cry from the Steak and Yorkshire Pudding in his local pub back in England.
If his pitiful existence had managed to bring about a level of regret, he didn’t show it.

Our species is a master of self-deception!

How could we ever expect two pillars of society as Ole Wivel and Knud Jensen to show regret?
Perhaps we should wait until our own communist top-dogs are dead. It will be much easier to attack them then.

The many immigrants, who now express anger and hate against our Western societies and who left countries devoid of the concept of freedom, countries they didn’t like either, can now enjoy our benefits, order, security and social support – until they have re-created the societies they disliked so much!
People want freedom, but most have no idea what it means. And it is the first value to be suppressed - just watch the "free" Egyptians after the Arabian uprising in 2011-12 and how they treat the Christian Koptic population.

Long live the freedom of speech - the sharpest and only weapon we have left!
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Triomphe d'Alsace Sept. 2012

The miserable summer of 2012 almost did my vine in.
Pollination half failed and 3 months of cold and rain made sure the remaining grape bunches had little chance of proper development.


Triomphe d'Alsace grapes in front of the house 16 Sept 2012.
It is clear to see which bunch has been thinned for unwanted green grapes



The result was tragic to watch.

I might have been able to support grape development through the recommended artificial "bee-action", i.e. fondling all the flower-bunches with the hand, but decided to let nature take it's course. That's something I shall definitely remember in the future.

As bees are not involved in the pollination of vine flowers, grape bunch development is totally dependant on the weather - probably equal amounts of sun and wind - but no one says you can't help it on the way. This is good to know when it concerns Triomphe d'Alsace, as this varietal otherwise tends to produce lots of  underdeveloped green grapes.

By the way, the bees - or those that are left of a dwindling population - were out late as well and we had no wasps at all this year, which saved me the usual production of wasp-traps.

Nature seems to keep everything in balance.

Having now thinned the leaves to allow the sun caressing the grapes for just a few more days and removed a good portion of the green and useless grapes, the final crop doesn't look as bad as I feared.

There could probably have been at least 50% more, but such is life for us 'viticulteurs'!!

My Brant vine decided to give it a rest this year. Virtually no grape bunches developed and the few that survived are small, un-ripe and utterly useless.

That's the end of the Brant vine as far as I am concerned!!

Vusschh - as we say in the family (even the cats understand what it means).




Triomphe d'Alsace 'roof' in the patio.

 

The two other Triomphe d'Alsace winegrowers in the street are also complaining. For one it is a total failure - almost no grapes at all. The other has decided to wait and see.

I have checked the weather forecast and decided to harvest Thursday 20 Sept., 3 weeks later than last year, as they promise it will remain dry and half sunny till then. Checkpoint Wednesday!

 

Once the grapes are picked, de-stemmed and lightly hand crushed, I shall verify the sugar content with my refractometer and determine the level of chaptalisation. Until then I will let it remain a surprise - or perhaps it is the same as receiving a letter from the bank: until you have opened and read it, the information is at least not bad!  

I have also decided to crush the grapes less than last year, allowing carbonic maceration like in Beaujolais and leave the juice and pulp in the maceration vat for 6-7 days instead of 3-4.

This should extract maximum fruit from the grapes, although there is a danger in doing so, as the chance of developing unwanted molds increases. Pressing down the cap of grapes and shells regular will hopefully keep this under control.

  Once all grapes are in the maceration vat and sugar has been added (if required), a layer of proper wine-yeast will be sprayed on top, left to develop for 15-25 min and then stirred into the fruit. This way the mostly unwanted natural yeasts will be suppressed and the wine will get a chance to develop the way I want it.   .

The CO2 mistake: Climatic theory and an eco-political disaster

In Danish popular story telling, there’s a collection of tales about a special group of people in the eastern part of Jutland (Jylland). Ostensibly they hadn’t invented neither the wheel nor the deep plate, i.e. they were intellectually challenged - in modern parlance. One of them once had a problem with a stork trampling the growth in a wheat field and didn’t know how to chase it out. As he couldn’t walk in there himself without destroying even more, he asked 4 of his friends to carry him into the field to take care of matters.
The stork went away.
Case solved.

This story reminds me of the CO2 explanation to the climate change these days.
Why? Because CO2 is not the direct problem and in the meantime we are trampling our wheat fields into pieces.

Here’s another important graph, in addition to the information I provided in my blog before:

CO2 increase vs Global Temperature variation: falling, rising, falling, and - - - - ?

It can be seen, that from 1958 to 1977 the avg. global temperature decreased, while CO2 increased, bar small variations.
But then from 1977 to 2002 the average global temp. increased, at the same time as the CO2 content of the atmosphere increased.
OK, so there is a delayed effect, you say?
How about the general decrease in the avg. global temperature from 2003 till now then, while the CO2 level continues to rise?

Anyone with a little brain should begin to ask serious questions about CO2 by now.

The terrible fact, however, is, that the UN, the IPCC and most governments have signed up to the completely unscientific conclusion: it’s the CO2 that does it.
And now it is difficult to erase the signature without losing face.

Greenhouse Gasses (GHG - CO2, Methane, etc.) are major players in the Earth’s calorific accounts, no doubt.
Water (vapour), however, is one of them and by far the most voluminous and variable GHG we have.
This is important to understand, as we know relatively little about the details of how clouds are formed, the sun’s radiation effects and the multiple other parameters (aerosols, dust, cosmic rays, etc.) that make up the parameters of the physics of the atmosphere.

New research shows that there may be a direct correlation between the Sun’s activity, its radiation and the cloud formation and that this has a direct impact on our climate, both short and long term via amplifying effects, where CO2 very well could play a secondary role.
But not a primary one.

The Danish researcher, Henrik Svensmark from Denmark’s Technical University, has developed a series of theories that are as simple as they are revolutionary: cosmic rays over the past 500 mill years, e.g. from supernovae (and the Sun), hitting the earth and being primary agents of cloud formation, have, together with the tectonic movements and changing sea-levels, had a major impact on life on Earth.

And on the climate!!!

The impact of the Sun is not surprising. It is after all the key supplier of energy to the Earth, to the tune of 170.000 TW p.a.
But there’s is clearly much more going on than caused by a little CO2 released by Aussie BBQs in the summer time.

When it was proved, that the Sun had a major effect on aerosols, the very germs of cloud formation, IPCC retracted with some excuse, that laboratory experiments and real atmospheric processes could not be compared.
But even this excuse has been deflated, as it has been proven (and accepted) that a decrease in cosmic radiation causes less cloud formation and less water content in the clouds.
More clouds, lower temperature - less clouds: warming of the surface.
That simple.

This therefore has a major impact on the Earth’s heat-accounts, eliminating the conclusions drawn by IPCC in their 2007 report.

it seems clear to me that the Sun – and cosmic rays – have a major impact on the Earth’s climate and this is something that sits very badly with the IPCC.
The enormous role of the oceans (and Henry's law) also seem dramatically underplayed.

It is now fair to conclude, that CO2 must come way down on the list of active agents.

So there we stand!
Major political decisions are being made based on a probably totally wrong basis.
This has severe economic, social and cultural implications that we can’t even begin to contemplate.

It does now look like:
1) There is absolutely NO correlation between the atmospheric CO2 at present and in the immediate past and the global temperature development.

2) The climate models used by IPCC are numeric, use too many assumed factors and do not even predict the present status, if data from the past are entered. Using such models to predict the future is close to religion, certainly not to science.

It is now a political – and probably deeply psychological – problem, how we turn this situation around and declare: “we were wrong”, before major damage has been done.
Perhaps it is already too late.

Both the Danish and the British government (and likely others) have chosen an expensive, faulty and deeply disastrous route to green energy production: Windmills.
They are expensive, only work intermittently, energy cannot normally be stored and they will not cover more than a few % of our energy need at about 10 times the cost of e.g. gas or nuclear power stations. In the UK it means installing 10 windmills pr day for the next 30 years - and not achieving our target from COP 2009.
£120bill for the UK -- DKK 120bill for DK - - it will cripple us with no benefit.

I shall probably come back to the socio-economic consequences shortly.
The psychological factors determining group thinking and opinion manipulation also deserve my pen at a later time, but frankly, the present situation makes me feel tired – and who am I to hope, that politicians one day will exhibit some genuine brain function rather than just producing hollow cavity noises directed at vote collection?

Until then, here's a little home-work for the thinking population: if I am right in the above statements, what does it mean, economically, that we invest in everything "green"? How sensible is it to buy our right to CO2 production, e.g. when we fly or on a larger scale when our industries produce CO2? Haven't we sacrificed our competitive advantage on a guilt-altar to a CO2 god, that doesn't exist? Are we not throwing away the child with the bath-water?

Energy professors Ian Fells and Gordon Hughes have warned the British Government.
You'd do well in googling their opinions.

AGW nonsense, IPCC swindle, CO2 rubbish and Global Climate Change

The graph shows the temperature at the Ice Cap of Greenland as a function of time

On 5 Dec. 2009 I wrote in this blog about my reasons for calling the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW)  a load of humbug.
Al Gore, David Cameron, Kofi Anan and most journalists apparently don't understand scientific method at all. They have all jumped the popular band wagon of claiming human responsibility for the change of climate in recent years.
I warned in 2009 against the political implications of accepting a theory based on very thin arguments, while refusing to listen to the many people, who had competent reasons to field serious objections to the idea about AGW.

When it is said that 100s of scientists, if not 1000s, support the theory, the first comment should be: who exactly are they?
Myrmecologists?
Why not people in the field of Physical Geography?

In fact, I found one, who has the courage to speak up and say that “the emperor has no clothes on”, Professor Ole Humlum at Oslo University. The following is based on his observations – unfortunately his book is in Danish, but it deserves a wider readership.

The second comment, I have, is the classical Aristotle statement, repeated by Einstein: Majority never decided the value of a theory; 1 person, who can put a spanner in a theory, is enough to eliminate every other argument. This is entirely in line with Karl Popper’s ideas of Scientific Falsification – to which I subscribe 100%.

The third comment must be to express the shock I got, when I read through the goings on at the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I first heard about IPCC during the Climate Conference in Copenhagen, COP-15, in 2009.
The conference was basically a disaster, as a) only IPCC’s AGW-positive opinion was presented (not exactly a scientific approach) and b) no decisions were taken – or at least only a set of pseudo-decisions that are unlikely to have any bearing on the assumed problem: human action causing warming of the globe.

So why is there such an adherence to IPCC’s beliefs (OBS, NOT proof, as their conclusions are a forgone matter) and often times public ridicule of people who have a different opinion?
Could it be that IPCC has been established under UN, that UN has a level of credibility and that states that follow IPCC’s recommendations and findings therefore seem credible and also add to both IPCC’s and UN’s credibility – repeating the circle?

The graph above, constructed according to isotopic analyses (GISP2) after drilling into the Greenland ice cap, tells an interesting story without using many words: throughout the last 11000 years, from the “Big Freeze” during Younger Dryas, the reasons for which remains enigmatic, and once again in 6000 BC and until today, there have been rather large climatic changes going on – none of which can be allocated with any reason to human activity in the form of excessive man-generated CO2 output. In fact CO2 levels were almost constant in the period 600-1850. (The well known Hockey Stick graph, see below).
As Prof. Humlum points out, periods with warming correlate to positive heavy human cultural activity, while cooling off periods are synchronous with problems, even disasters, such as the black death and the "Little Ice Age."

One of the problems with the CO2 theory is, that we actually know much to little about the origins of the climatic mechanisms, the impact of the oceans, atmospheric distribution and the proportion of Human CO2 to geological CO2 (volcanoes and other).

There are many good reasons to focus on water vapour, ozone, cloud cover, dust, sun activity, tilting variations of the Earth’s axis and – in particular – Henry’s law of CO2 absorption in water. Most of the CO2/water interaction happen in the upper 3m of the oceans’ surface! It is not rocket science to realise, that at various pressures and temperatures there is some dramatic chemical reactions going on.

Here are some really important facts that help understand the speed with which CO2 distribution over the two hemispheres takes place.

Ashes from a volcano eruption well to the north or the south of equator will take a long time to become evenly distributed in the atmosphere – probably several years. In contrast, the ashes from an equatorial volcano are distributed rather quickly. After the nuclear tests in 1950-70, that all took place on the northern hemisphere, CO2 with a C14 signature (i.e. humanly generated) took several years to become evenly distributed.

This contrasts with the observations from Mauna Loa, Hawaii, since 1958, that the variation in atmospheric CO2, i.e. bang in the middle of a highly industrial period, happens synchronously on the northern and southern hemisphere! As most human CO2 is produced north of the 30th latitude, we should have seen a clear difference between the northern and southern hemisphere.
BUT WE DON’T!!!!

This means that the majority of CO2, although increasing at various rates, is NOT humanly generated.
Something, therefore is afoot.

When Mount Pinatubo blew up in 1992, there was only a very minor increase in atmospheric CO2 despite million of tonnes of CO2 being released. As IPCC is of the opinion that the oceans only slowly absorb CO2, something is clearly wrong with their assumptions.

IPCC – and thereby the politicians – have jumped to conclusions they should have been too clever to adapt. It helps nobody to form a final opinion and implement policies based on erroneous models, unless this opinion has a political value for the people in charge. Perhaps this is where “der Hund liegt begraben”?

The result is that professional scientists with diverging opinions find it difficult to join the discussion. It is also a fact that funding and budgets favour those who fall in line!
Another buried dog, perhaps.

When we have excessively warm summers, it is taken as a confirmation of the theory.
When we have rain and chill (like 2011 in the UK, it is "just a seasonal variation" that confirms the theory.
Ehh?
It was the Hockey-stick curve from the GISP2 measurements in Greenland that caused the furore about the correlation between humanly generated CO2 and climate change. It showed an ostensible increase of atmospheric CO2 from a stable 280 ppm in the period 600-1850 to the rapid "industrial increase" of 380 ppm today.

The Hockey Stick graph - deflated

This model has since been discredited to a certain extent, but the important conclusion people forget to draw is, that if the CO2 level previously was stable, why do we then see the rather dramatic climatic changes that made it possible for the Vikings to grow barley on Greenland (ca. 1000-1100) and that later made the Thames freeze over in the winter (the Little ice Age in 15-1700)?

The real conclusion, although not a solution to the issue, is,
a) that the climate has changed considerably in the past, without any relation to the change in CO2 level!! and
b) that the concept "global warming" must be seen in context - we are actually a good deal colder than experienced by the Romans and the Minoans!!
and
c) the graph has been used as an indication that we are on the way to a new ice age.
Well, that one I shall leave uncommented, avoiding predicting the future, as I otherwise would have made the same mistakes as the IPCC.

Our politicians are leading the train down the wrong track with totally misunderstood investments, that prevent us from allocating money to a much more balanced research situation.

Worse: our scarce resources are being spent on solving a problem over which we have no impact whatsoever!

Here's an ominous example:
In the UK all energy companies are increasing their prices way faster than inflation would predict.
The average family now pays £1300/year for gas/electricity.
This is double the amount of 3 years ago.
The prediction is, that in 2018 they will pay £2800/year.
Why?
Because all companies are falling over each other's feet to become "green", i.e. investing in renewable energy supply - despite a) no solid direction of what that means (= ineffective and haphazard investment with little predictable ROI) and b) developing solutions to a non existing problem (= the totally absent correlation between a global warming, that actually is not happening, and the humanly generated CO2 output.)

In England there are 6mill families that have to choose between heating and food during the winter months. This number will more than double by 2018.

If this is not madness, what is??

Consultant limerick

My colleague and friend Eddie Obeng from Pentacle, The Virtual Business School, has on his web-site posted this cartoon, which inspired me to the following Limerick *):

There once was a client in trouble

whose earnings had started to wobble

He called for support
and received a cohort
of consultants who swarmed on the double









*) Limerick: a 5-line verse following strict rules;
Line 1-2-5 have 3 beats and rhyme
Line 3-4 have 2 beats and rhyme

England and Europe in turmoil

Europe, the world perhaps, and definitely England are in turmoil.
11 state leaders have been toppled recently because of the financial crisis and more will fall. At the moment even the Coalition Government in the UK cannot come to grips with their responsibilities as a government.
Why?
Simply because they don’t listen, don’t understand their responsibilities as representatives of the people – and quite frankly are totally consumed by one thing only: being in power.

The kind of politicians we elect (or who put themselves forward) are incompetent money-grabbers and because power corrupts, they have created a chasm between themselves and the general population. Despite 200 years of economic theories (Keynes, Adams, Marx, et al.) we still don’t possess the ideal recipe for responsible governance.

The post war years with hope and signs of a peaceful future (1950s-1990s) have ended in global chaos. The very moment we had economic prosperity, human greed and lust for power took over and new incumbents joined the fray.

In the relatively well regulated world – normally called the West – it has slowly but surely begun to create the same socially divisive borders as we saw in past centuries.
This is paradoxically driven by an unheard of technological development (communication, electronics, computers) and the social, economical and cultural differences in the world in the wake of the second World War, creating the opportunity for asset rich states to “suck” the underdeveloped world.

It was initially a slow process, as we in the West do have some sort of a magnifying glass aimed at the politicians, making outright corruption difficult.
But as I have always maintained: “if they can, they will” – and as it proved: they could and they would.

The paradox is that the fast technological development also created a fertile ground for our demise, while the “sucker states” learnt and copied the rich countries.
The “poorer states” took over production and assets – or we even handed it to them on a silver tray - and the “rich states”, who had become specialists in the juggling of credit to pay for our exorbitant lifestyles, discovered they couldn’t pay themselves top salaries any more. So, while selling our crown jewels, the credits dried up – and everyone started to look around for a rich uncle.

There was none – but there was a lot of 3rd world countries with resources, willing to take over, work for less and using their new found power.

Are we surprised? We only have to look at what happened at the time of the Black Death in the 14-15 Century. With the Lords of the Manor in trouble and fewer labourers willing to do the slave-jobs, workers could begin to demand their share of life’s rewards.

Our learning is all in the history, if we care to look.

In other (shorter!) words: in the West – certainly in England - the good life has come to an abrupt halt, as the income to pay for a credit based lifestyle dried up, asset distribution has become unrealistic and the opportunity to “suck” others has vanished.

So – if we can’t “suck” other countries, as they have also collapsed, where do the politicians, i.e. the powers that be and who want to continue to be, turn?
Simple!
The answer is: Inwards.
We see it in various degrees in all European countries.

As human beings, as a species, we have hardly left the African Savannah, mentally spoken.
With the mentality of hunters and gatherers our behaviour has not changed much from the daily fight for survival.
We are still tribal, i.e. grouping into political parties and nurturing superstitious tendencies to form religious factions. We also naturally divide ourselves into “chiefs and Indians” and we still consider “the others” our enemies.
This is not new – just read “Lord of the Flies” by Golding or “1984” by Orwell.

It is said that you can tell a nation by the way it treats its elderly.
Coming from a country (Denmark) that praised itself of “few have too much and fewer too little”, I am watching the English Tories (Cameron/Osborne) in awe.
The 28th annual British Social Attitudes report from the National Centre for Social Research's is stomach churning reading.
It confirms, that my observations from 30 years ago concerning this island’s anachronistic class society, were correct – and that it has become worse.

Lord this and Lady that?
Who cares.
This school or that school?
Who cares.

Well – obviously a small group cares: Lord and Lady this and that care.
And they are the ones running society these days!
They have created a divide between ‘the haves and the have-nots’.
For the socially conscious of us this is hard to stomach.
The result is a growing disinterest in politics by us, the ordinary people.

We have entered a period of class war, as witnessed during the London riots and the fact that child poverty is more rampant than ever, elderly people die of hypothermia and pensioners are being robbed through a tax system that favours the rich.

Privatisation and greed has created a system with extortionate property and rental prices, the latter in particular, as the English have never understood the rental market other than as a source of extracting even more money from those who don’t own a home – in contrast to the rest of Europe, where rented quality apartments are considered normal, affordable and a must.

Energy and fuel prices are crippling and the banks, owned by the tax-payers, are allowed to stop lending and focus on own profit and bonuses, rather than on the banking objectives that are a vital part of the economic process.

While support of problem ridden parts of the world is a virtue, paying £bill to Pakistan and India and ignoring the old and the poor in our own country is disgusting.

Everything the present Tory government has done points in the direction of a deplorable attitude towards the less well off in society: granny tax, tax on state pensions, forcing people with just a little money in the bank to sell their houses in order to pay for old age nursing, relief of tax on the rich, hypocritical statements like “we are all in it together”, moving the venerable NHS from a social “serve all” towards a private money-spinner – every single item and the many mistakes that Cameron/Osborne have made, illustrate their lack of listening ears and total disinterest in what the population wants.

The statement that “we will continue to make unpopular decisions for the best of the country” is a smack in the face of the constituents,

England is doggedly tied to it’s class structure,.
Where once there were three main classes: working, middle and upper class, we now have an underclass and an upper-upper class and the disparity has never been sharper or more breath-taking in its extreme.
It is these divisive structures, captured in the British Social Attitudes report, which hold that poor and unemployed people are ‘lazy’ and the architects of their own impoverished misfortune.

To top it all, our politicians have allowed an unchecked huge influx of non-producing immigrants, who demand the implementation of their own culture and legal system while many of them “suck” us for benefits and threaten us with death and revenge once they have the majority.

We need immigrants to keep the wheels turning, but why not demand the simple things even the Romans 2000 years ago applied: speak our language, work - and respect our laws.

It is hardly rocket science and it kept the Romans in the black for 700 years – so why not for us?
Instead we have created a user and benefit society with surreal contrasts, such as a man, who is good at kicking a leather bag full of hot air around on a grass field, can become a multi-millionaire, while a woman who takes care of the sick and dying can barely make ends meet.

Will Cameron/Osborne listen?

Will Labour do much better?
The track record from 1997-2010 makes me wonder.

The creation of the Euro was a HUGE mistake.
Two major proponents, Kohl and Mitterand in the 1990s, were ostensibly unable to spell the word "economics" and yet they pushed ahead with an illusionary political idea that had the heading "Failure" written across it from the start.
Economic union without fiscal union?
Even a 6th former could see it was wrong for 3rd rank economies like Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal to have access to credit on a par with Germany. It opened the ball for a spending spree never seen before - and now the boomerang has returned.
In England Blair sanctioned the Euro idea based on the thought, that it would make business transactions much easier. Fortunately there was massive resistance to swap the £ with the Euro.
The joke is, that the UK has fared considerably better than the Euro-countries, but how Blair/Brown managed to lead the UK into a position as Europe's most indebted country (way over £1.4trill) is beyond me - and perhaps most other people.

So what now?
Alternatives, anyone?

We need a paradigm shift, but who will lead?
Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps ;-) !!!!

.

Triomphe d'Alsace, 2011 vintage, bottled today



From this: Grape bunch 3 Sept. 2011

Having picked and fermented my grapes (T. d'Alsace and Brant) on 4 Sept 2011, fermented and racked the juice in January 2012  and left the last demijohn with 100% T.d'Alsace in peace and quiet until today to ensure completion of a potential malolactic fermentation process, I was excited to see if it would prove any better than the 50-50 Brant/T.d'Alsace mix that I bottled in March 2012.

It does.

To the result: Triomphe d'Alsace, bottled 26 April 2012

There's nothing of the aggressive and slightly "brown" taste introduced by the Brant grape.



T.d'Alsace is clean, fruity and pleasant.

The colour is a deep ruby red, almost port colour with a slightly violet tone, which is no wonder, considering the grape's character as a "teinturier", and of course being very young.

The glycerine curtain draws a track down the side of the glass and the taste is one of fresh, young, well behaved plonk - - -  oops - did I say that?
OK - it is not a Mouton Rotschild nor a Corton - it is a Triomphe d'Alsace, but it carries its name with pride.

My problem now is whether I should leave it to rest in the bottles (a miserly 6 + 3 glasses for today!) or just enjoy the 5 and keep one for later (a number of years perhaps, as suggested by my friend and wine specialist Evy Halling).

That problem will be resolved when 3 or 4 bottles have gone the way wine usually goes: let temptation, decision making and discipline commence the battle in a couple of weeks!

But I am now, in my own mind, a fulfilled and content wine maker.
Wolf Blass, eat humble pie.
As Spielberg said: I made this!!!
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New Paintings April 2012



Jorgen Faxholm: Branches in Green Park, London
Oil on 35x55cm canvas

  I have long wanted to try something different, so here goes.
The branches in the wintery Green Park of London was inspired by a photo by my friend Adam.
While painting, my daughter Iryna said: "STOP. That's it. Can I have it as it is?"
Who can resist a compliment like that?

She was right. The Japanese impression of naked branches, overlaid on a background in Lemony/Ochre Yellow (and a little Titanium White), divided into a couple of minimalistic Rothko squares was enough.

Hmm - well, I shall try another composition, including some unique 'needle-flowers', omitted from this picture.
Let's see what it brings.
But I am happy with the colours!




Jorgen Faxholm: Reflections, Chiswick House Lake
Oil on 50x70cm canvas

 During a walk to Chiswick House Park I took a couple of photos of the ripples on the surface of the lake, just using my little Panasonic Lumix camera. Using PSP7 and changing the colours to B/W, while increasing the contrast, some rather unique swirls and patterns appeared.
The strange thing was, that you couldn't see them with the naked eye.
I turned this into a painting, as shown here.

This is definitely an avenue with which I want to experiment - next time using just B/W and perhaps one background colour (Sunshine yellow or red).

The Angler; Danish island. Oil on canvas, 50x70 cm; 2012



Jorgen Faxholm: coastal landscape of a small Danish island, 2012

 If one waits long enough, little Danish islands like this one will disappear into the sea.
The southern part of Denmark already represents a partly drowned landscape, sinking steadily since the end of the last ice-age, fastest since 7000 BC.
In the shallow waters south of Funen (Fyn) one can observe submerged stone barrows and find drowned stone-age settlements. The deepest settlement is found at -47m in the waters between Funen and Sjaelland.
Thoughts about present climate change?

Danish Farm in Summer Dress; oil on canvas 50x70 cm - 2012.

Jorgen Faxholm: Late summer, a field of barley, beets and green, juicy grass

Here's a summer-view of the same old farm I painted in the mid of winter.
In Denmark even a summer's day can be rather chilly - something I have tried to indicate with the colour-palette.

There's little more to say about this landscape.
Let the painting talk.

Bottling Triomphe d'Alsace and Brant wine 11-4-2012

Finally
Having waited patiently for the malolactic fermentation, one of my 2 demi-Johns has now been emptied into 6 bottles - and a bit.


6  1/2 bottles Triomphe d'Alsace + Brant 11/4/2012


I racked the wine in December 2011, discarding the 'depot' and have observed progress with excitement.
Not a huge harvest, but the sugar content was promising and alcohol is around 12%.
Not a bad result - if I may say so?

The other demi-John still shows sign of life, so I have to wait until there is balance in the u-tube, proving fermentation has stopped.

The reason for the difference is probably, that the now bottled one was a 50-50 mix of Brant and Triomphe d'Alsace, while the last demi-John is a pure Tr. d'Alsace.
It is interesting to watch the difference.

And taste?
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.!!!!

One bottle wil be put away for some years.
It was my friend and wine buff Evy Halling, who suggested that I take a bottle every year and store it.

When I bottled the 2010 harvest last year, Simon (friend and neighbour) knocked on the door at exactly the right time. It became an unforgettable bottling session, still talked about - but so were all meetings with Simon, who passed away October 2011.
I have used previously emptied bottles, cleaned them, stuck them in the oven at 220 C for 1/2 hour - filled them and corked them without worrying about branding. It is a pain in the proverbial to remove commercial ettiquettes - I think they use araldite these days, so I didn't worry!
With one exception: the bottle without label will be artistically embellished by "the wine grower cum artist" himself to be put away for some years.

Meanwhile, the vines in front of the house and in the patio are now producing leaves and the first sign of what will be flowers and grapes are showing. 3 Chardonnay have been added to the portfolio, but it will take a couple of years before they produce grapes.
The wonders of nature - - -

No-Knead Bread

In 2008 the NY Times brought an article about how to make “no knead bread”.I found it fascinating for 2 reasons: My inherent laziness and the reasoning behind the concept, namely a natural chemical process that completely replaces the knuckle work otherwise required.

And then I discovered the real benefit: The resulting bread is absolutely delicious, looks and feels professional, something I have never been able to produce in a normal oven, and is so easy to make that it defies description.

I promise you, anyone between the age of 5 and 95 can make it, and you cannot buy any bread in town better than this. Forget about buying the £5000 steam-injection oven you always wanted – your old Ford-T gas or el-oven will do – and forget about the useless tricks that advise you to install a brick bottom in the oven or adding a pot of water while baking. It DOESN’T WORK!!!

First of all: Here’s the result:

Professionally home baked bread!

Does it look fine or does it look fine?
And here’s the recipe and process:

6 cups bread flour, strong or plain, plus some for dusting
1/2 teaspoon instant yeast (true – only ½ tea spoon) 2 ½ teaspoons salt
3 cups of water (or slightly less according to experience - you will know after the first bread!)
Extra flour or wheat bran for more dusting of a towel.

A. Combine flour, yeast and salt. Add the water, and stir with a wooden spoon – or the hand; the dough will be sticky and of a consistency like thick syrup. Cover the dough lightly and let it rest for 18 hours at room temperature. (Yes – 18 hours; time and chemistry does what kneading otherwise would have done)

B. Have patience and let it rest all 18 hours. You should be able to see a surface dotted with small bubbles by then. If you prepare at noon the day before, you are ready for an early morning baking session at 6am and delicious, crusty bread by 9 am! Work?? Well, how about Saturday/ Sunday?

So, 18 hours later, scrape the dough with a spatula onto a lightly floured surface. Remember: it will be sticky and quite different from what you are used to – like slow moving lava from a volcanic eruption! Sprinkle the dough with a little flour (or use wet hands to prevent sticking) and fold it over on itself a couple of times. Not critical.

C. Shape dough into a ball. Coat a cotton towel well with flour or wheat bran and put the dough, seam side down, on the towel. Cover and let it rise for 2 hours. When ready, the dough will be ca. double in size.

D. Heat the oven to maximum bread baking temperature (450F/ 200C in a hot air oven) and put a heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel or ceramic) in the oven as it heats. Le Creuset pots are excellent for this; just make sure your pot can stand the heat. I recommend lining the pot with baking parchment. At my first attempt, I couldn’t get the bread out!! When hot, remove the pot from the oven and turn the dough into the pot. Cover with a lid and bake for 30 minutes. Remove the lid and bake for another 20 minutes, until the bread is golden brown. It will look like the gourmet baker’s expensive bread – and taste like it.

Remove from pot and cool on a rack.

The secret of this bread-success is the high water content of the dough and the chemical process that aligns the yeast and all the little flour molecules over the 18 hours. You can, of course, experiment with timing, nuts and different kinds of flour.

Trust me – you will never buy an expensive loaf again, when it is so easy to make your own: 2 min. mixing and putting away; 2 min. forming the bread to let it rise and letting the oven do the rest. 10 sec. to remove it from the oven.

I call this a 4 min. luxury bread!!!

Jeremy Clarkson, wind turbines and mental methane.

Why is it that celebrities always feel they have to add their penny’s worth to discussion topics they have absolutely no understanding of?
Jeremy Clarkson, probably best known from the TV series Top Gear has done it again.
This time his contribution ranges below farthing level.

Why again?

Because a few years ago he was paid handsomely to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the invention of the jet engine. He clearly didn’t know anything about that either and spent BBC’s money yawning himself on an 80 hour global roundtrip, boring the socks off his viewers and contributing nothing with even a remote reference to neither the jet engine nor the cultural and geographical marvels he happened to pass on the way.
And hey presto: now he is onto an eruption through his elbows (or from a worse source, talking about methane) about wind turbines.

According to an article, committed by guru Clarkson in the Sunday Times on 17 March 2012, wind mills should be dead and buried with the exception of the few that could be left for future generations to see at select museums around the world.

In one fell swoop this self-confessed know-it-all has judged climate change to be AGW and wind turbines to be a waste of land, money, time and energy – literally.
And I am sure the fans (sorry another pun) are drooling.

According to Clarkson, in particular the Danes, whom he recognises have a lot of experience and probably some sort of a leading role in this industry, have

- “ built wind farms that don’t work” and that
- “ haven’t caused one single conventional power station to be shut down” and
- “ caused their normal power stations to produce even more CO2 than they did in the past”.

Quite a mouthful from a person, whose main contribution to the life of couch-potatoes seems to be to demonstrate colourful use of the English language when determining which car is the fastest when driven nowhere by other TV celebs and the injection of satirical comments at a level that would make a 6th former proud.

Clarkson’s objective in life seems to be ridicule, self projection and cheap laughs.
Well, there’s the UK entertainment industry for you, when it is worst.
Then I, for one, prefer Freddy Starr.

Could it be, that in our attempt to create progress for the human species, while searching for welfare and pursuit of happiness (1776), we have stumbled upon the single most important invention ever: electricity?

And that this, as Clarkson correctly says pulled the descendants of both Henry VIII and his stable boy out of comparably dirty lifestyles?

Would it also be worth mentioning, that the electricity that drives the human circus , doesn’t come for free – neither in money nor the punishment called pollution?
And perhaps, that sitting on one’s bum doesn’t bring us anywhere?

The wind turbine story is a complex one.
It has its success chapters and its failures, but it deserves better than the Clarkson celebrity treatment and having come as far as we have, understanding the issues, wouldn't have been possible without research, risk taking - and the construction of windmills.

In some awesome way, the major arguments we humans are able to produce, always seem to come in waves of 3.
So, here are my 3 points, concentrated  for the sake of readability:

- Political issues

- Technical issues

- Philosophical/Aesthetical issues – also called emotional issues.

That should cover most.

Political.
From the wood burning stove, over coal and gas-fired power plants and nuclear power stations we have ended up in a situation, where there is not enough energy to go around for the (un)foreseeable future.

The energy sourcing is unevenly distributed. It is increasingly expensive or dangerous to extract, the energy product has political power and a state’s obligation and ability to provide for its citizens happiness is dependent on its economic ability, power position in the world and growth ambitions.

Without electricity you don’t even need to be bothered.
In short!

Changing that situation is not trivial, bar the option of returning to Henry VIII and his stable boy’s comparable life styles.
Therefore, a quick scan of the options makes wind, sun, water, thermo (both –nuclear and –ground) easy choices for our undivided attention. The problem is, that to learn how to harness one or more of these options efficiently costs a lot of money, but in the short term our know-how is encapsulated in the mentioned areas.

This is where “lift your bum” comes into the picture.
We will no doubt make many mistakes during our search for new energy supply – as the required technology develops with every new attempt to solve the inherent technical problems.
The combustion engine is a good example – one that Clarkson should understand.
Just compare the Alvis, that I saw outside the pub yesterday, with a modern Lexus Hybrid car.

But if there were no political will or power to help find out, we would never know.

Does the presenting problem mean that we shouldn’t research the fusion option either? We have no idea how to go about it, so research is hugely expensive and the outcome is far from certain, but it would solve our energy quest once and for all.
The answer is political, i.e. a belief or stance - and that's why we continue to pump money into this (perhaps) black hole.

Does the fact, that there’s overproduction of electricity at night and that inter-state pricing is a hot potato, depending sometimes on demand, sometimes on supply and most of the times on differences in local politics, mean that wind turbines are “out”?
How about solving the problem, where the problem arises – and it is not in the wind.

Therefore, Mr. Tax-payer, suck your thumbs, think about future generations and stop paying £6-800mill. to e.g. India in "3rd world support"; they even say they don't want it and they are perfectly able to manage their  nuclear programme themselves, thank you.
That should pay the cost of a few wind turbines on UK's Atlantic coast - if this is the solution.

Technical.
The arguments go in circles, based on no wind, too much wind, maintenance, cost of construction, difficulties concerning storage of energy, variation in current phase, steady supply to the grid and potential impact on more or less stable networks.
A lot of this has been solved, much needs attention – but it is a fact that we have learned a lot in the last 30 years - because we lifted our bums and because funds were made available.
Without the wind farms this learning would have blown in the wind.
Danish wind technology has helped us to reach a situation where we can speak from a base of knowledge.

The bottom line in terms of supply is, that there are no more big problems with wind energy generation and supply issues than with other forms of energy sources.
Just different problems.
Granted, they may be big, but doing nothing doesn't get us any further.
Example: if the energy storage problem were solved and/or oil prices went totally through the roof and/or political instability closed the oil and gas pipe lines, what then?

But how would a TV celebrity know this?
The difference is that his opinion reaches a larger public and it helps promote attitudes based on ignorance.

A good example is the three wind mills supplying the World Trade Centre in Bahrain with all its energy. No one wants to take responsibility for selling the inevitable excess energy to the Bahrain grid, e.g. at night time, claiming that a weak network couldn't handle the variation in supply.

If there is a reader out there, who wants to know why we today know much more about the stability of wind turbine replacement energy, then here’s a sample argument that shows how far we have come on the issue of stabilising variations in wind generated energy supply:

"The typical wind turbine has a twin supplied asynchronous generator that has the ability to control the frequency on the stator side through slip rings on the rotor side. Through forcing a frequency on the rotor you eliminate frequency interference, and through this control you can generate an active or reactive result, according to what the network requires. Mind you, modern wind turbines are actually helping stabilize weak networks."

Perhaps they don’t trust this fact in Bahrain, as the prophet Muhammad didn’t foresee this situation in the Hadith.

Success stories of how wind energy has replaced, and added to, conventional energy generation exist – even in Denmark, where you claim the situation is less than successful. Perhaps the failure to close down any of the conventional power stations, as stated by Mr. Clarkson, is owed to the fact that wind turbines take care of some of the growth in energy supply.
It could also be because political issues have clouded the situation and caused total confusion of the pricing structure.

In short, Mr. Clarkson – there’s no reason to spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) about wind turbines for your private political or self aggrandizing reasons, in particular as you have no idea what you are talking about.

As the research moves forward, we may find that there are lots of ways to store energy from wind turbines or to use them for an extended variety of purposes: Export of energy though links to international grids, electric car charging, storing of energy in water reservoirs, in hydrogen cells and a plethora of  other possibilities not yet thought of.

I will agree with you, Jeremy, in one area: the moment we find that there are better (cheaper, safer, faster, more efficient) ways of producing energy, we should probably drop the wind mill project!
There is in fact one area popping up already - Thorium reactors, THE NEXT LEVEL DOWN FROM U238-235-230.
Both China and India have planned new plants and apparently they are safe, efficient and CO2-free. And there is no chance of a melt down like in Chernobyl and Fukushima.
It sounds too good to be true.

As always there is an additional aber dabei: it looks increasingly like global warming is NOT created by humans!!!
There's not eggs enough in the world to cover the politicians' faces, so we can't see them blush in shame.
The CO2 elimination chase has made us bark up the wrong tree, missing the required investments in preventing the CONSEQUENCES of climate change.
But that's another discussion that I will cover in this blog later on.

Aesthetic and Emotional issues
It is so easy to criticise and ridicule other people – they did that with Copernicus and Galilei too – but one day, when food supply is expensive or short because we grow sugar cane for car fuel instead, because there’s little or only expensive oil and gas available to run our TV sets, or when the Chinese, Indians and Brazilians use "our" oil, perhaps we’d wish we had pushed the use of various alternative energy supplies  before the problem came crawling up from behind..

There is a large index in the book of energy arguments:Windmills may in some people’s eyes be ugly; the desert should concentrate on exhibiting its beautiful sand dunes and not be covered in solar cells; the Severn Estuary should not be blocked by a tidal flow generator; and the Americans should start paying their share of the Earth’s energy consumption.

Right now, 2012, humans account for ca. 20 TW energy output.
That's nothing compared to the 120,000 TW from the Sun that the Earth has to manage.
But what about it when it becomes 5000 TW in, perhaps, 2-300 years?

There are lots of both good and bad arguments - but we need to start now to prepare ourselves for the future - or aptly: having the wind in the back, not from the front.

We need to prepare for a better "energy future" than the one represented by Clarkson's irony.
.

Windmill politics and renewable energy arguments - pro et con

The windmill debate rages back and forth. Heated discussions on AGW and carbon foot prints move mountains and yet we don't seem closer to a reasonable conclusion about this : is all the money that goes into research of renewable energy through windfarms well spent - or a complete waste?

I have an opinion, and as a non-professional (on renewable energy production) average citizen, whose tax money contributes to the fray, I thought the following might open some sort of debate - - or end up in the usual Cyber-space black hole far beyond the Event Horizon!

Let's take the arguments one by one and perhaps catch all clauses by saying, that if anyone has good supporting or contra-arguments, I am more than willing to listen and change tack!

- Windmills are ugly? Invalid argument. Pylons, nuclear/coal/gas/oil power generators are ugly too. And so are cars. We learn to live with them. This doesn't add to a serious debate. The most windswept areas in the UK are around the coast with a steady supply, off people's "radar". People don't like change - a lot of the debate therefore focusses on emotional facts, caused by our failure to have a proper plan for "least annoyance", thereby irritating the wrong (=influential) people.

- Windmills are inefficient. This surely depends on which level of development and sophistication we have achieved. All new technology goes through phases, usually from rough, tough and expensive to smooth and cheap. Car engines, walkman players, Jet engines, iPads, PCs, mobile phones, etc. all did it.
If we don't undertake a concerted development while the pressure is low, we may find it exceedingly difficult when and if the house catches fire, i.e. war or lack of traditional energy supply in case of political unrest.
A free market with healthy competition, initially backed by a political will to seek alternative renewable energy sources, are in my opinion a prerequisite to find out, whether windmills are the way forward.
 If we don't try, we will never know and in my opinion we must look 100 or 200 years ahead, not 20.

- Windmills can't store electricity/ are useless when no wind/ stopped when storming. When the wind blows, we should be able to use less conventional fuel (gas/ oil/ coal) despite a need to run conventional power plants on empty. One way would be to export the surplus into a larger grid, e.g. European. This principle has long been used in Scandinavia in respect of hydro-energy plants.
This amounts to a storage of fuel, i.e. NOT USED fuel somewhere in the grid, i.e. energy storage.
And the Storm-argument? How often do we have this situation? (Actually quite rarely, as I can see).
Windmills can also be used to store energy  by e.g. pumping water into reservoirs, from where it can be released to drive turbines, when there is no wind or when the need arises.
As late as Sunday 18 March 2012 a UK researcher wrote a major article in the Sunday Times about this principle, presenting it as a novel thought. It is neither rocket science nor new!
The problem for the UK is that there are no suitable mountains in England and often wind still, so Scotland would have to carry the burden - and in Scotland the wind is almost always present.
But then the pumped up water could be used alternatively to supply an increasingly drought ridden South during the summer - a project that has been discussed with no end in sight for the last 40 years.
The combined need for water and energy could perhaps bring implementation a step closer.

- Cost/Pricing: The inefficiency (if any) is to a large degree due to political pricing and inter-country agreements, artificial support (which tends to generate either no research or just make producers rich) and not referring to the actual relationship between building cost and utilization benefit. Moreover, the initial costs (actual) will always be higher, when changing to a new system due to lower volume, learning curve and supply issues, etc.
Simplistically, compare the price of HD-TVs today to 5 years ago and you see what I mean.

The price tag will always be relative - when oil was $3/barrel (1970) and supply expected to last forever, only silly farmers or Dutch canal builders thought about their private windmills as water pumps.
But now that oil has broken the $100 mark and seems sure to hit $150-200 over the next decade, what then?
We want to begin preparation and thinking now and not in 10 years time.

At the moment the installation and maintenance cost of windmills, in particular sea-bound wind farms, are exceedingly high due to the extraordiniary requirements to steel and concrete and complicated grid connections. I am not aware what the life expectancy of these windmills is, but the price and complexity is probably one of the reasons why various governments  have to put an enormous amount of money into the scheme. Tax-payers' money! And that is bound to create friction.

- Experience: There are plenty of succcess stories concerning wind-energy, both when implemented land-bound and in coastal areas. e.g. The Danish island of Samso, which is almost 100%  energy supplied through windmills with traditional supply as back-up through a connection to the general grid.
A couple of German towns likewise.
So experience shows that it works!! Why are the English so negative about European innovation, only believing it works if invented here? If you do a bit of investigative research into the success stories you'd see what I mean.
We are ideally positioned with vast coastal stretches.
- Political bargaining power of Oil and Gas suppliers. This is totally uncontrollable and actually unacceptable: Russia and an increasingly volatile group of states in Africa and Asia are slowly tightening the noose.
What if Israel bombs Iran and all hell breaks loose in the part of the world that supplies Europe with 85% of its oil and gas?
It is easy to imagine other, comparable situations. Ukraine showed it in 2009 and the Baltic gas-pipe could rupture during a frosty winter.
This implies a serious threat to Western Europe, incl. the UK, even if our shale deposits of gas in principle may take us through the next 75 years.
As I said, we need a 100-200 years planning process.

- A longer term assessment of our energy use is long overdue. With an exponential increase in the Earth's population, wealth and energy demand, we will over the next 100 years create a major disaster for the planet, totally irrespective of the greenhouse gas effect (if there is any). This is only a slightly longer time horizon than the estimated guess-work concerning CO2.
Even with a stagnating population on Earth there will be a huge problem, as the BRIC countries demand their share. At present, India and China add 10mill cars/year to their parking lot!

An important consideration here is of course: why do we think traditionally? Why do we need an increased energy supply at all? How about fewer people? Spending the money on population control would perhaps be more effective?
Question-1: Is this a good idea? Absolutely.
Question-2: Is this realistic? I think not - unfortunately.

- Other (simultaneous/ non carbon) approaches. Tidal water and wave power stations have huge potential in many parts of the world - but it is still an emerging technology. I hate to consider the maintenance/repair effort due to mud-blocked turbines in the Severn estuary, where the UK could build enough generators to supply most of the country. Sun panels on every single house in the UK? Surely a possibility and lots of people are already doing it. Surplus energy could be channelled into the public grid.

Nuclear Power stations are an obvious option and I believe development should be accelerated immediately.

There is an immense scope for building a UK power industry, earning money for the GDP many years ahead off loading the reliance on an immoral weapons industry.

- Political short sightedness. 100 MPs have started a rather farcical protest against the "windmill drive". I find it scientifically and socially myopic and defeating most objectives required for a proper and fact oriented discussion. This action is only topped by German politicians, who in panic have decided to close down the german Nuclear Power Plants in the next 8 years. Are they mad? It is a sad illustration of the incompetence demonstrated by our politicians (Labour, Lib. Dems or Tory - all of them), comparable to investing Billions of £££s in the High Speed train line (HS2 London-Manchester) when our communication society's technology could solve the presenting problem at only a fraction of the investment without physically moving the fragile human body around. But perhaps Virtual Office solutions are less attractive than a 1st class, bar-supported train ride for our leaders?
The 100 complaining MPs will really find something to complain about when their fridge-freezers stop working or when they can't afford to run them or their cars any more.

- Stopping unwanted money squandering to India and other countries. The UK sends in excess of $1Bill to India every year in 3rd world support. This to a country that spends loads of money on a nuclear industry. India has even said they don't want the money. The UK continues. This would pay for hundreds of Windmill  installations along our coast - and provide work for a lot of people. Or heating for hypothermia suffering pensioners.

Hello!!!! Anyone home?

- A Massive change in life-style is required - whatever else we do - Home insulation, more efficient car-engines, fewer holidays - the list is longer than this article.
But we probably won't adapt before it is too late!!!

Comments are welcome.

On Nazism, Communism and the relativity of perception.

(Danish text of this article can be found on my blog for 28 Feb 2012)

During the summer of 2004 the Danes celebrated the silly period by having a heated discussion whether Ole Wivel and Knud W. Jensen, both pillars on the art and literary scene, ought to have confessed their Nazi-sympathies in the 1930s and 1940s.

It is clear that perception relativism often is ignored by people who should know better. Historians such as Barbara Tuchman (‘The March of Folly’) and Anne Appelbaum (‘Gulag’) have emphasised, that it takes very little time from the actual events till we either forget what happened or simply change our opinion or perception about them. This is not only because new information has become available or because it is physically impossible to ’think’ using the mind of the past, but it is also driven by a changed political and cultural situation, or in short: fashionable correctness. One just need to look at how we now evaluate events in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Ukraine.

It is possible that with the passing of time we obtain a better understanding, but simultaneously we distance ourselves from the realities of the day and thereby the conditions that formed the background for the opinions, perceptions and decision processes. Seen in the rear mirror it becomes easier to criticise, even though our understanding has diminished; we blissfully ignore this fact.

What if we actually had found WMDs in Iraq? (Perhaps we did – only, it was people, not bombs!). Or if Chamberlain had been proven right? How about the Ukrainians, who offered their welcome to the invading German troops in 1941 with the traditional bread and salt. Were they traitors? Tolerance, indifference and ignorance are closely related concepts, which, in the different world of the information constrained 1930s, muddied people’s understanding – just as it happens today with perhaps too much information; important decisions are still taken based on 20% knowledge and 80% gut feel – both in politics and in business.

No wonder that the assessment of events, 50 years later, risks bearing no resemblance to what actually happened. This is the historian’s eternal dilemma. The change in perception will always be coloured by the swings in political reality. Our perception will always be formed by our present knowledge and not with the mind of the past. Knowledge doesn’t transmit automatically and once lost, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to recreate later.

In 1932 a large majority of the Germans considered Hitler to be a rather laughable person, who was bound to disappear shortly. Very few had a more clear vision, like Hindenburg, who said: “This man will lead us over the precipice”. The perception changed just 1-2 years later, but to many people the question was still whether Nazism was a little evil with a lot of good, or a disaster with only few benefits. The Germans – and surely the Danes – disagreed amongst themselves about which side of the scales weighed most.

If one leaned to the ‘good’ side, society had moved from chaos to order, economic growth after WWI and the 1920 and 1930 recessions, work after unemployment, prosperity, motorways, Volkswagens and a path to regain national pride.

Perhaps the dark side was a little more difficult to define in the beginning, although the Kristall-nacht ought to have been a wake-up call with a tow bar.

The negative picture disappeared in a flood of prosperity and a feeling of national greatness, which was anything but wasted on the Danes of the day. One should not forget that Denmark and Germany were rather closely connected through culture, education and business. A large part of the Danish industrial machine was either a traditional supplier or a customer to the Germans, a fact that continued well into the war. It was Danish engineers who built the German submarine base in St Nazaire and strategic bridges in Croatia.

In 1975, when I worked in Holland, people often asked me what language was spoken in Denmark and even exactly where Denmark was. Is it such a mental high-jump to realise, that people were less well informed in 1935 and had their mind set on different issues? We tend to forget, that the last 80 years of information distribution, political innovation and global development were still to come. Dad worked, Mum was a hausfrau, divorce was immoral, children grew up being beaten into discipline, TV and mobile phones were science fiction if even that, the toilet was often in the courtyard and shared by many, and Jews were “ not really it”. These were the social realities in the 1930s in Denmark, where the characteristic ‘where few have too much and fewer too little’ was about to be invented.

The Social Democrats and their programme of worker power and emancipation of women had changed the political, social and cultural scene and more was to come. But there was also a growing feeling amongst many that we had to be careful not to go all the way towards communism. Nevertheless, a new balance had to be found, as communists were growing in numbers.

This fact, together with the leaning towards a powerful Germany and the memory of the recent winter war in Finland, where many Scandinavians had volunteered on the Finnish side, were the major reasons for a strong anti-communist feeling when WW II started. It therefore felt natural for many Danes to join the Germans and continue the battle against the Russians (i.e. communists) forming the SS Viking division.

So, how do we judge this today?

We know too much! Socialism was a way forward at the time. Perhaps Communism and Nazism were as well? Who in the 1930s could tell for sure after the wars in the 19th Century and after WWI? At this time Stalin was creating ’Paradise’, building a state based on collectivism, but did we realise how many eggs he was cracking while making the omelette? Did we know that this process made Hitler’s approach look like play in a sandbox?

Both sides had their protagonists.
What we forget, when judging today, is to eliminate our 21st Century knowledge and think ‘1930’!

When we say ‘Nazism’ today, it evokes images of suppression, persecution, concentration camps and war. That was not the reaction in the 1930s.

But what do we say in 2012 about Stalin’s extermination of more than 20mill. People – in a time of peace!! – and deportation of whole populations such as the Kalmyks and Tartars? How about the collectivisation in Ukraine, that in 1933-34 cost over 6mill. people their lives as one of the largest human-created hunger disasters ever? Or being shot for possessing food in this period? Gulags? Systematic removal – back to Russia – in the 1950s of all industrial production assets from East Germany, Poland, Czekoslovakia and Hungary, maintaining suppressed agrarian nations as a buffer zone towards the West? And how about Hungary 1956, Czekoslovakia 1968, Stasi, Ulbricht, and Honecker?

Hang on a second! Did we know all this in the 1970s, while the cultural elite in Denmark was as red as tomatoes? After all, this was only 35 years after Walter Duranty, New York Times, had reported ‘no problems’ during his Soviet sponsored travels in Ukraine, in the middle of the hunger disaster.

A report for which he got the Pulitzer prize.

Why has no one insisted and told the Danish left: “You owe us an answer?”
Perhaps it is easier to sling such questions at the now deceased Wivel and Jensen?
How many of the extreme left in Denmark have not said “we didn’t know”?

Obviously, people find it difficult to admit errors, and in the political climate after the war was it surprising that neither Wivel nor Jensen had any motivation to express remorse publicly? Who knows, perhaps their feelings hadn’t changed. Self perception, survival instinct and adjusted knowledge and information could be determining factors. No one wants to stand out as a social pariah. It must be remembered that many people, who had been too close to the Nazis, had been executed after the war. So in short: with an adjusted outlook, one has to consider the consequences and the lie becomes an invisible friend.

Clintons ‘I did NOT have sex with this woman’ is a good example.

Despite the realisation that Stalin was nothing less than a monster, probably worse than Hitler, and despite the collapse of both communism and the Soviet Union, it has still not become fashionable to attack the communists for their misbehaviour. Perhaps we still haven’t completely digested the information in the KGB and Stasi archives, where evidence of a planned East German led invasion of Denmark during the cold war came to light. Perhaps there are still too many old extreme leftists in power or opinion forming positions? A minister in the present Danish government (2012) is the ex chairman of the Danish Communist party and under investigation for having received personal funds from KGB.

Then it was much easier and more politic to accuse the asylum seeking Kravchenko for being a CIA spy than to expose Duranty and his nonsense.

In the 1970s I was mentioned in an ultra-left anthology as an ‘enemy of the State’ – “Vrag Naroda”, a terminology with a very dark notion from Soviet times – due to the fact that I had worked in the Ministry of Defence. What would have happened, if Denmark suddenly had an extreme left government?

Nazism? Communism?
Plus ca change!

In our open and transparent societies we have the tradition of speaking up and to protest, based on our development during the last 200 years and our cultural roots in a humanistic outlook after the French and American revolutions. We therefore have the right to say to Ole Wivel and Knud Jensen and to many people still alive: “You owe us an answer”, but not to attack them from a position in a glass-house.

However, it is not just in Denmark that our concept of tolerance has led to a complete imbalance of what we accept and what not in terms of extreme opinions. A good example is represented by the Hizb-ut Tahir group. In England the Imam Abu Hamza has publicly encouraged extermination of Jews with a call to continue where Hitler stopped. It took the authorities several years to have him arrested, only made possible when the terror laws changed after 9/11.

The Imam Abu Quatada is another example. In 2004 he travelled up and down the country preaching jihad and repetition of 9/11. England is still trying to get rid of him (2012), prevented by the EU statement, that extradition to Jordan would hurt his human rights due to possible torture or execution.
Eh? Human rights?

On the other hand, the increased resistance amongst ordinary people against medieval cultures, in particular hate-preaching religions, tend to be met with silence by the media or even laws prohibiting critique.

This does not make sense any more. Where did our right to freedom of speech go?

The question is, whether our tolerance, normally a strong pillar in a democracy, will be criticised in the future. Is it possible, that in 30 years from now people will reproach us and say that we didn’t do enough? Or will they say: “You really managed that well”?

Personally I am afraid, that we will be considered a failure, as we are slowly abandoning the right to free speech. Without criticism, there will be no dialogue and the increasing undermining of our right to speak up will hit us hard in the end.

Relativity in perception has always existed.
A good example is the way medieval painters depicted the crucifixion – with soldiers in uniforms and armour of the 1400s and not as Roman soldiers.
It is important to remember this when we go to the barricades and shout “J’accuse”.

The right to speak up, think and express one self freely must necessarily be followed by the duty to defend it. It is inevitable that we sometimes exceed this right, but it is a necessary element in the exercise of democracy. The Americans manage this concept through their 1st amendment, but both England and Denmark are slowly putting a clamp on this important issue.

It took a little too long, during WW II, before the Danes began to protest. They made good money on the Germans! Today other dangerous issues seem to find people in the West completely asleep. In particular religious criticism is too often considered racist or political incorrect. This loss of dialogue stifles society and can be extremely dangerous if not modified.
But perhaps it is understandable, as we have not even come to terms with the past, the communist atrocities and Lenin’s omelette statement.
20-30mill. Russian and Ukrainian eggs. Cracked in time of peace.

In order to understand our thoughts and ideas today we have to go ”back to the future”. This future has been clear for some time concerning Nazism, but it hasn’t arrived yet in respect of our assessment of communism and fundamentalist religions, and certainly not in our understanding of the dramatic social upheavals that are going on in Western societies at the moment.

On 20 July 2004 the Germans held a 60 year memorial day for the assassination attempt on Hitler. There were many speeches and a solid attempt to unravel the built-in conflict: were the would be assassins traitors or heroes? The tendency went in the direction of heroes. After all, it was now 60 years later. But Schroeder avoided the use of the word ‘hero’, even though his speech clearly indicated this direction.
This shows how difficult it often is to change our stance and self perception.

In respect of communism, there are many who owe us an answer.
How long must we wait?

One also wonders what went through Kim Philby’s brain, when he sat lonely, isolated and under constant KGB supervision and censorship in his Moscow apartment, devoid of all civil dignity. The sausages and sour cucumbers that he served for the last BBC journalist, who visited him before he died, were a far cry from the Steak and Yorkshire Pudding in his local pub back in England.

If his pitiful existence had managed to bring about a level of regret, he didn’t show it.

Our species is a master in the defence of our errors and stupidity!
So, how could we ever expect two pillars of society as Ole Wivel and Knud Jensen to show regret?

Perhaps we should wait until our own communist top-dogs are dead. It will be much easier to attack them then.
Or perhaps we should learn from history and begin to think forward instead of complaining backward, concentrating on the issues of today!

Until wisdom one day descends upon us, we can do nothing but watch. The many immigrants, who now express anger and hate against our society and who left countries devoid of the concept of freedom, countries they didn’t like either, can now enjoy our benefits, order, security and social support – until they have re-created the societies they disliked so much!
People want freedom, but it is the first value to be suppressed.

As far as the old communists are concerned they are welcome to go on holiday to e.g. Ukraine, where they can experience the mess their political conviction created in an otherwise beautiful country, mentioned by the World Bank in 1996 as ”the potentially richest country in Europe”.

Long live the relativity of perception.

And long live the freedom of speech!

July 2004 (with a few changes 2012)