Author: Paul Handover

Climate warming – two very different views!

Thank goodness for two so very different opinions.

The problem for lay persons, such as me, is that it is very difficult to read in the popular media well-reasoned arguments for each side of important issues, such as climate.  You can see my confusion being expressed in the opening paragraphs of an earlier Post on Climate Change.

It might not be rhetoric to say that the issue of man-made climate change could be one of the most pressing issues of all for mankind.  Thus having two very clearly opposing views is incredibly useful.  Learning from Dogs is grateful to both guest authors.

On the 16th October, we published a general Post about the subject that tended to lean towards the view that mankind was not affecting the climate in such a direct way as had previously been thought.

That was then followed by a Post largely consisting of an article by Patrice Ayme arguing, scientifically, that there was a direct link between mankind and global warming.

Then a Post that contained the full article by Alan Carlin arguing, again on scientific grounds, that there was not a direct link.

Patrice commented on the Alan Carlin article.  But to give greater visibility to this debate, this Post carries Patrice’s comment.  We hope to have a response from Alan Carlin soon.

Read Patrice’s comment on Alan’s article

More truth about this crisis

“Never in the field of financial endeavour has so much money been owed by so few to so many. And, one might add, so far with little real reform.”

Thus spoke Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, on Tuesday night, 20th October, to a group of Scottish

Mervyn King
Mervyn King

business people.  Echoing one of Churchill’s many famous sayings, Governor King is probably one of the highest ranking people around to state, at last, what everyone on the Clapham Omnibus (a London bus route) knows to be obvious.  Whether the forces can build to a point where common sense is applied by Governments before we enter another Great Depression is another matter.

Mention of the Great Depression (the last one) triggers a step back in time.

On June 16th 1933 Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the Glass-Steagall Act.  In fact that was the second Act signed

Senator Carter Glass
Carter Glass

into law, the first Act was passed by Congress in February 1932 and was largely designed to stop deflation.  The second Act was, in a sense, much more important because it set out to prevent bank holding companies from owning other financial institutions.  It was repealed on November 12th, 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Just a little under 10 years ago.  10 years which have seen the biggest boom-bust probably ever in modern history.  And has much of the Western world slipping into another great depression.

US Senator Carter Glass and US Congressman Henry B. Steagall must be turning in their graves

Steagall
Henry Steagall

But thank goodness for investigative journalism and the role of the Internet in creating a truly open ‘meeting place’.

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Janet Tavakoli on Warren Buffet

The following is reproduced in full from the TSF website and is reprinted with the permission of Tavakoli Structured Finance, Inc.

It’s a fascinating tale about Warren Buffet in the midst of all the financial turmoil.  And in case you think that Tavakoli Finance is run by the grey suit brigade …

Janet Tavakoli
Janet Tavakoli

Read Tavakoli’s article about Buffet

Climate warming: the debate continues

Alan Carlin believes that rising greenhouse gases are not the cause of warming, on scientific grounds.

Yesterday we published a long guest Post from Patrice Ayme who argued that climate warming is a very serious risk to this planet, as we know it.

Alan Carlin has gracefully given Learning from Dogs permission to reproduce his article that argues, on a scientific basis, that man-made greenhouse gases are not the cause of warming.

Again, this is an article that needs to be read.  Alan’s Blog is here.

Read Alan Carlin’s article

Lost for words!

Sent to me by Neil Kelly, a long-standing friend in Devon, England.

Wish I could add something witty to this, but I can’t!  But it does remind me of the saying, there’s no such thing as error-free software!

plane

P.S. the image is too small to read the copyright notice – anyone help out?  It would be good to credit it properly.

By Paul Handover

Climate warming: the debate

Patrice Ayme believes it is real, on a scientific basis.

On the 16th October, we published a Post called Climate warming?.  The sub-heading gave a clue to the content of the Post: What’s the truth about climate warming, e’rr change?

My stance was to express doubt about man causing climate warming. But then, a good friend of this Blog, Patrice Ayme, added this comment:

Lowest ice on record in the Arctic was 2007, then 2008, and now 2009. [More exactly the sea with more than 15% ice reflecting.]
As I pointed out on http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/05/ (May 31, 2009).
The sun has been going down in the last 30 years or so… Watch the nice graph there, extracted from Science Mag…
We are just coming out of a solar minimum so pronounced that cosmic rays, less deflected by the sun’s magnetic field, have become a problem… This explains why greenhouse heating has been less pronounced than some expected in the last few years. Things should pick up in the next 7 years, as the sun heats up. The multiplying factor is 3 or 4…

It seemed appropriate to ask Messrs Ayme and Carlin for permission to reproduce both their Blog articles. Both very kindly agreed – thanks Gents.

These are long articles – but will inform you in a way that the mass media never do.

Here’s Patrice (Alan Carlin’s article tomorrow):
Read more about this important subject

Greenspan being quite remarkable!

Fingers crossed this becomes a key political statement.

I am indebted to Baseline Scenario for drawing my attention to a recent article in Bloomberg.  Greenspan is voicing what many regard as so obvious we wonder why the present US Government haven’t been pushing for this for some time. (And if you want the answer to that question, read this)

Anyway, in the Bloomberg story Greenspan says:

“If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big,” Greenspan said today. “In 1911 we broke up Standard Oil — so what happened? The individual parts became more valuable than the whole. Maybe that’s what we need to do.”

Breathtaking!

And Greenspan goes on to say:

“Failure is an integral part, a necessary part of a market system,” he said. “If you start focusing on those greenspanwho should be shrinking, it undermines growing standards of living and can even bring them down.”

Amen to that!

By Paul Handover

Insulting us?

Is this, in the end, how our Governments are treating us?

Yves Smith runs the incredibly successful Blog, Naked Capitalism.  Frankly, I have no idea where she finds the time to put together her Posts, many of which are constructed on the back of in-depth research.

On Friday, 16th October there was a Post which has huge implications.  It is all about Access Journalism.  It needs to be read.  Here’s an extract.

Let us start with the cheerleading in the media over Wall Street, and in particular, Goldman earnings. Matt Taibbi, in “Good News on Wall Street Means… What Exactly?,” tells us why this is so distorted:

It’s literally amazing to me that our press corps hasn’t yet managed to draw a distinction between good news on Wall Street for companies like Goldman, and good news in reality.

I watched carefully the reporting of the Dow breaking 10,000 the other day and not anywhere did I see a major news organization include a paragraph of the “On the other hand, so fucking what?” sort, one that might point out that unemployment is still at a staggering high, foreclosures are racing along at a terrifying clip, and real people are struggling more than ever. In fact the dichotomy between the economic health of ordinary people and the traditional “market indicators” is not merely a non-story, it is a sort of taboo — unmentionable in major news coverage.

The press has been on a downslope for at least a decade, as a result of strained budgets and vastly more effective government and business spin control (and it was already pretty good at that, see the BBC series, The Century of the Self, via Google video, for a real eye-opener). I met a reporter who had been overseas for six years, opening an important foreign office for the Wall Street Journal. He was stunned when he came back in 1999 to see how much reporting had changed in his absence. He said it was impossible to get to the bottom of most stories in a normal news cycle because companies had become very sophisticated in controlling their message and access.

As I said, please read the Post in full.  Oh, and I see Baseline Scenario picked up on this as well.

By Paul Handover

Insulting us, postscript

Just a few figures that underline reality.

US rent indexes declined in September. Last time this happened was 1992.

US Consumer Price Index fell 1.3%, year on year, in September 2009. Note that it bottomed at -2.1% y/y in July 2009, making it the largest annual contraction since 1949.

September’s US food prices fell (-0.2%) in September, the first annual decline in over 40 years.

US industrial production, as of August, was down (-10.7%) compared to August 2008.

Just a US problem?

Japanese industrial production, as of August, was down (-22.7%) compared to August 2008.

Britain’s industrial production, as of August, was down (-9.3%) compared to August 2008.

Eurozone area industrial production, as of August, was down (-15.9%) compared to August 2008.

Meanwhile the banks steam ahead reporting huge profits ……

Crazy world!

By Paul Handover

Climate warming?

What’s the truth about climate warming, e’rr change?

I will put my hand up to subscribing to the notion of humans having such an effect on Earth’s atmosphere that climate warming was likely, inevitable and could be the destruction of life, as we know it.  It seemed to fit the idea of mankind being disconnected from the planet and completely out of touch with the reality that our Earth is a fragile place, our atmosphere a (relatively) very thin ‘skin’ around our planet and few of us spare a second thought for protecting the environment for the generations to come.

earth-moon

But gradually the faint sounds of opposition to the ‘simple’ argument that man is screwing up the Planet have become clearer.  The latest is a very clear cry.

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