Sir Francis Drake is an English hero but there are surprisingly few Drakestowns or Drake statues around the country. Perhaps he ended his years in disgrace after the howler on his world expedition of 1579. Drake was sailing the Golden Hind along a mysterious coastline shrouded in ‘thicke mists and most stinging fogges’...as he wrote in his ship’s log...so dense and persistent that Drake sailed away after 30 days without any of the usual explorations that Captain James Cooke would have done two hundred years later. Big mistake. The ‘fogges’ were hiding the entrance to one of the finest natural harbours on the western coast of the Americas...San Francisco Bay.
After Drake’s close encounter San Francisco was not officially discovered until the 18th century…by the infidious Spaniards. The fogs are caused by the cold Pacific waters swept down from the Arctic running into the warm moist air wafting off the California mainland. When the hot air hits the cold sea it cools and its moisture condenses into a ground-hugging cloud. Then further south there is smog and Los Angeles…which brings me to Global Warming.
Four hundred years later California was one of the biggest economies in the world…and an actor from Hollywood was Governor. Most people regarded Ronald Reagan as deeply conservative but his policies ran counter to traditional American conservatism. Noam Chomsky referred to Reaganomics as military keynesiamism. In Towards A New Old War he summarised Reagan’s programme as ‘the transfer of resources from the poor to the rich by slashing social welfare programmes and by regressive tax policies, and a vast increase in the state sector of the economy in the familiar mode: by subsidising and providing a guaranteed market for high-technology production, namely military production. This is in no sense a conservative programme, as it is customarily mislabelled’.
One of the most conservative American politicians of the last 75 years was Senator Robert Taft of Ohio…known as Mr Republican. He condemned the cold war ideology constructed by the Liberal Democrat Harry Truman at the end of the Hitler War and echoed by Neo-Conservatives today. Taft represented farmers and small businessmen who had no interest in global markets and feared militarisation of the economy and conscription as threats to their liberty. Taft rejected the idea that America should become a world policeman saying Americans ‘were not fitted to a role of imperialism and would fail at an attempt at world domination.’
Robert Taft saw small wars in the post-war world: ‘Certainly however benevolent we might be, other people simply do not like to be dominated, and we would be in the same position of suppressing rebellions by force in which the British found themselves in the nineteenth century.’ America and England are two countries divided by a common language. Words like conservatism and liberalism have very different nuances and associations. In the United Kingdom the latest leader of the Conservative Party has been on a three-day fact-finding mission to see at first hand the impact of climate change. David Cameron’s 15-mile journey by dog sled…the ultimate in environmental friendliness…took place on the Svalbard Peninsula in Norway. Big mistake. Spitzbergen is definitely not the place to go for a photo opportunity on glaciers and the melting of the Arctic ice.
Some computer models tell us that higher temperatures in the Arctic lead to more snowfall as more water is evaporated off the oceans and carried north on the prevailing winds. Conclusion? Glacial Advance. Unfortunately other computer models predict that warmer weather will lead to less precipitation…and Glacial Retreat. In the Svalbard Peninsula both processes are taking place at the same time…in different glaciers. Some climate is local.
Here was another problem. Before David Cameron jumped on his canine caravan he had to get to Norway. So he arranged to be driven from London to Farnborough in Hampshire by Government Car. Over the 38-mile journey his Vauxhall Omega spewed out 30 lbs of carbon dioxide. At Farnborough he boarded a 10-seater private jet which flew him and his entourage to Longyearbyen in Svalbard…a distance of 1909 miles. Another five tons of carbon dioxide per passenger into the atmosphere. The coordinators of the trip…World Wildlife Fund-UK…insisted that all carbon emissions would be offset using Gold Standard credits which will cost the Conservative Party a total of £200. So that’s all right then. Perhaps they might like a non-repayable interest free loan to cover. Conservative Central Office might see this as yet another example of Sod’s Law…on which more below.
Non-Reciprocal Laws of Expectations: negative expectations yield negative results positive expectations yield negative results. Howe's Law: every man has a scheme which will not work; Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving System Dynamics: once you open a can of worms, the only way to re-can them is to use a larger can; Skinner's Constant. the quantity which must be multiplied by, divided by, added to or subtracted from the answer you get to give the answer you should have got; Law of Selective Gravity: an object will fall so as to do the most damage; Jenning's Corollary: the chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet; Barth's Distinction: there are two types of people - those who divide people into two types and those who do not. Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules: the first 90% of the job takes 90% of the time, the last 10% takes the other 90%.
