In 1214 the English Barons assembled at the Abbey of Bury ‘under cover of going thither to do their devotions to the body of St Edmund which lay there enshrined where they uttered their complaint of King John’s tyrannical manners’. In the following year...1215...Holinshed’s Chronicles tell us that the Barons ‘began to make war against King John’. The ‘chief ringleaders of their power’ were ‘Richard Earle de Bigot and G de Mandeville Earl of Essex’.

After the Barons captured London the rest of the nobility left John complaining that he had ‘made them subject to Rome’. This was the year of Magna Carta but there is little evidence in Holinshed’s Chronicles that Runnymede had much effect on the pattern of events because the next year...1216...the Barons appealed to the French for help.

The resulting alliance of the Barons with King Philip’s son Lewis prompted John to ask the Pope to have a word with the French King to warn him off. On the face of it this does not seem a very smart move. This was the same Pope Innocent that in 1209 had ‘determined to deprive John of his kinglie state and had absolved all his subjects and vassals of their oaths of allegiance made unto the same king’. And this was just the half of it. When Popes write Bulls half measures are not where it is at. Holinshed continues his report.

‘...and after deprived him by solemne protestation of his kinglie administration and dignitie, and lastlie signified that his deprivation unto the French king and other christian princes, admonishing them to purse king Iohn, being thus deprived, forsaken, and condemned as a common enemie to God and his church. He ordeined furthermore, that whosoever imploied goods or other aid to vanquish and overcome that disobedient prince, should remaine in assured peace of the church...not onlie in their goods and persons, but also in suffrages for saving of their soules...’

Whatever passed between Philip and the papal legate Cardinal Pandulph in 1216 obviously failed to have the effect John desired for shortly afterwards Dauphine Lewes landed at Sandwich and set up camp. This was enough to put the wind up John who scuttled off to Winchester three days after Lewes sets foot on the Kentish shore.

However Winchester seems to have imbued John with the Spirit of King Alfred because after a few weeks he decides to fight back against his enemies and sallies forth to take on Lewes...the French upstart who dares to champion the English Pretender Arthur. ‘Having gotten togither a competent armie for his purpose, he brake foorth of Winchester, as it had beene an hideous tempest of weather, beating downe all things that stood in his waie...and thus the countrie being wasted on each hand, the king hasted forward till he came to Wellestreme sands, where passing the washes he lost a great part of his armie, with horses and carriages, so that it was judged to be a punishment appointed by God, that the spoile which had been gotten and taken out of churches, abbies, and other religious houses, should perish, and be lost by such means togither with the spoilers.

Quite what John had in mind is not clear from the accounts I have consulted. Perhaps he needed to give London a wide berth once the Merchants and Moneylenders had gone over to the French King. Nor would John have been the first or the last king to be hiding from his creditors.

But whatever the reason for dragging the whole army north to Lincolnshire this bold outflanking movement...though reminiscent of the campaigns of Hannibal and Alexander...failed to achieve its objective. If you are a king it is not good public relations to lose your army in this manner. You are seen as a loser abandoned by the gods.

John himself seems to have taken this view because although ‘...the king himselfe, and a few other, escaped the violence of the waters, by following a good guide,’ he was not in a very happy frame of mind for ‘...as some have written, he tooke such greefe that he fell into an ague, the force and heat whereof, togither with his immoderate feeding on rawe peaches and drinking of new sider, so increased his sickness that not able to ride, but was faine to be carried in a litter...the disease still so raged and grew upon him that through anguish of mind rather than through force of sicknesse he departed this life.’ Such is the fate of kings. But note that remark ‘as some have written’.

Holinshed also tells of another theory about John’s death...much to Shakespeare’s delight who makes it the basis for his treatment of King John’s death. Here is Holinshed. ‘There be some which have written, that after he had lost his armie, he came to the abbeie of Swineshead in Lincolnshire...a moonke...being mooved with zeal for the oppression of his countrie, gave the king poison in a cup of ale, whereof he first tooke the assaie, to cause the king not to suspect the matter, and so they both died in manner at one time.’ And you thought Al Qaeda invented suicide bombers.

So to 1218 and some good news for English supporters. Holinshed again. ‘...when it seems that a new supplie of men was readie to come and aid Lewis, Hubert de Burgh, captain of Dover Castle, attacked the French fleet at sea...in the end the Englishmen bare themselves so manfullie, that they vanquished the whole French fleet, and obteined a famous victorie’. Echoes of the Spanish Armada three centuries later. Now you know what I know.

Another gorgeous day on this sliver of land between the English Channel and the North Atlantic Ocean. This could be the reason Europeans are gung-ho for the Carbonista Nonsense while Americans regard Kyoto as a lot of hooey. Summer on America’s East Coast has been wet and miserable with New England suffering its worst flooding in decades after it non-stop rain in May and June. Last week New Jersey and Maryland were deluged by some slow-moving thunder storms and on Sunday a foot of rain fell on Washington. Flash floods and mudslides closed roads, railways and the underground while floods swamped basements and caused power cuts. The US National Archives and Smithsonian Museums had to close and the storm knocked down a large tree in front of the White House.

The rains came from a long weather front draped down the eastern states as a steady stream of very moist tropical air from the Bahamas met cooler drier air to the west. The weather front stalled as it ran parallel to the jet stream... the ribbon of air sweeping overhead several miles high...and so the storms inched forward painfully slowly. It is no wonder the Climate Changelings shifted tack from Global Warming to Abrupt Climate Change. Even PT Barnum would have been hard-pressed to sell Global Warming to folks with flood waters lapping round their feet.

My library session was booked for 1030-1130 which gave me a five hour session after getting up with the sun at five. I devoted the time to Cultura’s accounts. I keep a pretty good tally in my head but with five weeks in Sweden ahead and £300 of translator payables coming due while away an accurate count of the State of the Kitty was called for.

A hundred pounds of Good Yacht Guide orders...from New South Wales and Mid-Lothian...came in this week to keep matters on an even keel. And I can set my clock by NCAB who pay on 30-days to the minute which is nice in a customer. We never got off the hook with our Norwegian midsummer problem...NCAB Sweden even picked up some flak from NCAB Norway...but we got the OK to send in our £250 invoice today. So all’s well that ends well.

PCHut has been down to three computers for the past week. Today for the first time capacity shortages caught up with le propiéteur. Sandra was at my computer when I arrived to clock on at a quarter to twelve. So I jumped at the excuse to treat myself to egg & chips at Strand Cafe. At midday the customers at PCHut indulged in some musical chairs so by a quarter past...or ‘after’ as the Americans say...I was in business posting blogs and deleting junk mail.

Yesterday I sent Dele Oguntimoju a paper for the Real Nations Forum entitled States, Nations & Diasporas. Today I followed it up with another entitled Village Trusts for Angela Bates’ Real Communities Forum. John Papworth emailed back an enthusiastic endorsement of the first paper which puts him back in my good books. The two papers started life as the Rye’s Own article that ran into a Coleridge Moment. This article was then recycled into a couple of this week’s weblogs before re-emerging as the Ugly Sisters. I would like to think they improved as they matured.

I am having another go at the Scots in these articles of mine. But I have good reason. Not even Horatio Nelson is immune to their stealthy takeover of English public life. After all what could be less Scottish than Nelson...despite his dalliances with a lady by the name of Hamilton. It now transpires that the man at the top of the column in Trafalgar Square overlooking the goings-on in Whitehall is Scottish. Nelson’s statue is made from Scottish Craigleith stone. A large supply has just been sent south for use in renovating the column. Och ‘n aye ‘n Auld Land Syne.

Down south at Southwark Crown Court two customs officers have been jailed for their part in an alcohol and tobacco smuggling scam. Their job was to wave smugglers through dockside controls at Dover. Meanwhile up in the north-east Newcastle City Council has been rapped on the knuckles for flying the European Flag without planning permission…technically it’s an advert. You couldn’t make it up. By the laws of the land only National Flags can be hoisted up the country’s flagpoles without planning permission. With World Cup fever at a pitch before England’s quarter-final match against Portugal on Saturday perhaps some Europhile might like to test the law by challenging the flying of the Flag of St George. There must a million on them south of the Tyne and east of the Severn.

By the end of this century Village States will have learned how to protect them and theirs from Commercial, Administrative and Personal Interests. They must also learn to differentiate between personal possessions, private property and common wealth. This is where Civic Wisdom starts. R.H.Tawney sought to persuade the Labour Party to adopt the idea of Improperty. He almost succeeded. The Atlee and Wilson governments discriminated between Earned and Unearned Income...squeezing the latter until the pips squeaked. But they never took onboard the theories of Henry George that lay behind the thinking Tawney’s thinking. Real Property escaped and no liens were lain against the profits derived from public licensing of development...and the unearned windfall profits...and local corruption...that followed in its wake. But the concept of Improperty is crucial in dealing with Personal Outsiders.

The retired desk officer from the Stupidity Services or the Merchant Banker day-trading in government-commissioned lethal weaponry from their homes in Islington or Chelsea might like a second home in a quaint historic country town but why should they be allowed to let it stand empty? Tawney discriminated between Working Capital and Idle Capital. Ownership of a second home involves the legalised theft of a Village State’s housing stock from the Common Wealth of local families. It is a problem the world over and getting worse as the fat cats lap up the cream so that real property in prime locations becomes the speculation of choice for the rich...and the collateral desired by the bankers in their never-ending quest for risk-free placements of their credit creating commercial banking mechanism.

In fact this is part of a much broader mechanism that sanctions the theft of personally managed Common Wealth by means of the maldistribution of money and credit. But locality has the means to fight back against this legally- sanctioned looting by Outside Interests. The Norwegian Parliament has responded to their second home problem by applying the Tawney Criteria. In tiny fishing villages along the Norwegian coast from Bergen to Tromsö good tenants are like gold dust to the property owning class hundreds of miles away in Oslo...and local rents are extremely reasonable. The reason? Second homes are forfeited if they are not occupied. An empty house represents Idle Capital.

A Village State’s Common Wealth is by its nature unlikely to sit idle. But it has problems of its own. Over the years philosophers and radicals have remarked on the problem of the Competent Receiver. It is the same problem for the trustees of the Church Commissioners and the National Trust as it is for a political party intent on reclaiming private property for We The People. Eventually the Labour Party settled for the British National State as the Competent Receiver for the Common Wealth of the United Kingdom. It came to be known as Nationalisation.

This solution might have been suitable for the dying days of empire. But there is little reason to assume it is right for all times. Future generations might choose to legislate for a Programme of Localisation. Some day there might be sound arguments for King Charles III to instruct the National Trust, the Church Commissioners and the Ministry of Defence to settle their property on Local Village Trusts. Each generation makes its own choices. There were some within the Labour Movement who agreed with Francis Bacon that ‘wealth be like manure...best if it be spread’.

Internationalists believe that power should be drained away from Nation States into some world governing body. Trade Unionists want the power nexus to be in a place where it can do battle with the Money Power. Anarchists seek for power to return to the individual citizen. Syndicalists want individual power held in common. Party Politicians in Westminster and Central Bankers in Threadneedle Street have the quaint belief that the nexus of power resides with them and wish for this power to continue to accrue to them and theirs...while the flows to rival centres be stopped up.

In recent years political debate about the Nexus of Power has been stifled. Attempts to discuss derivative subjects like Secession and Cantonisation, Property and Money or Livingry and Killingry have been sidetracked and trivialised by the private agendas of Commercial, Administrative or Personal Interests seeking to control the power flow. So Feminism is deployed to thwart a new generation’s attempt to fight for Global Justice. So a War on Terror is created and Global Warming invented to remove the threat to Piped Energy of a pipe-free energy infrastructure. So it goes on.

Structure determines behaviour and power flows only one way at a time. The structure of power relationships determines the direction of the power flow within an organisation. The struggle to control power has obscured the purpose of wielding that power and the effects of the scale and pace of the power flow on an organism.

One day subjects like Social Morphology and Structural Sociology will be on the agendas of Curriculum Committees. Conferences about Making Local Government Local will be reported in the media. Books will be published on Village Democracy and The Wealth of Villagers. Scale and pace will take centre stage as academics and politicians deconstruct such long-abandoned orthodoxies as Big is Best...for Capital...and Small is Beautiful...for People. Better policies and recipes will emerge from the structural rearrangement of human affairs. But until then Real Progress will splutter to a halt and the Adventure of Civilisation will be subverted by the forces of Death and Destruction.

Sir Halford Mackinder was a geographer at the London School of Economics in 1906 when he wrote a short book entitled Democratic Ideals and Reality published after the Kaiser War in 1919. Mackinder was guaranteed a bad twentieth century press once Hitler’s Nazis latched on to his ideas and set off on their quest for Lebensraum by way of Mackinder’s Heartland.

Mackinder’s thinking is first-rate but like everyone else last century he failed to anticipate the Reverse Colonialism that crept up on the old imperial powers at the end of the 20th century...something that fails to fit with any Nazi or Zionist chosen race theories. India provides a good example of the new world we inhabit.

Two thirds of India’s population of 1100 million live in 638365 villages...some very remote and without water or electricity. yet at the same time there are 25 million Indians living around the world in the Indian Diaspora. Two million of them live in this country. Hundreds of them are millionaires and a couple are billionaires. India has eighteen official languages and 1600 regional dialects but fifty million Indians speak English and this is likely to rise to seventy million quite soon...overtaking the English-speaking population of these European offshore islands.

In cricket test matches one of the questions asked is whether Our Indians...like Monty Panesar...are better than Their Indians. Heathrow to Mumbai is looked upon as domestic travel by many Indians...and there are suggestions that if Shakespeare were alive today he would be writing Bollywood scripts. There are successful Indian populations all over the world...in America, South Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean...tied together by family links, mobile phones, the internet, Bollywood, cricket and travel. But the capital of this Greater India is London not Delhi.

Statecraft needs new words to deal with this new world...or wordsmiths to breathe new meanings into old words. We should start with the word State. Any group can get together and call themselves a State. Historically the word has been reserved for City States like Firenze, Bruges, Hamburg or the City of London...a state within a state if ever there was one. People with shared interests preferred to see themselves as Tribes where there were blood ties...or as Guilds and Livery Companies where bonding took some other form like shared work skills or common trading interests.

It is ironic that in 1776 a group of Freedom Fighters...they would be called Terrorists or Insurgents nowadays...in the thirteen breakaway English colonies of Virginia, New England and the Carolinas were the first to register as the United States. When the League of Nations collapsed in the 1930s the only collective name available was the United Nations. But this is not a good name for a league of states bound by a treaty of confederation ruled by a Gang of Gun Runners. China along with the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council...America, Britain, France and Russia...top the league of Global Armaments Manufacturers...and Killingry Exporters.

Outsiders arrive in our towns and villages in several guises. Commercial Outsiders like Tescos are the most obvious Outside Interests threatening a small town. But Administrative Outsiders like District Councils also pose a grave threat to a locality because of their presumptuous claims to rule over the people who live in small Town States within the geographic area of their administrative jurisdiction. However there is also a third category who we can call Personal Outsiders who come to the nicer small town in pursuit of their own selfish interests. Perhaps the most obvious sub-group in this category are the Second Home Owners.

George Bernard Shaw...a key contributor to The Fabian Papers in 1884...always insisted that Socialism is Equal Money. For Shaw dividing the Economic World into a Public and Private sector was a rhetorical device that obscured reality. Shaw understood that the Man on the Clapham Omnibus had his own meagre supply of Personal Possessions and was regularly being ripped off by the rich and powerful with their Private Property and the One Pound One Vote theology with which they sought to legitimise this wide scale theft of the Commons by enclosures, clearances and other legal trickery. Shaw called this third category of property Common Wealth.

The Common Wealth of a particular group of people might relate to a particular place and could be looked after by people in some other place. But this is only a weak tendency. The largest Hedge Fund in the world is run by a civil servant from a small office in Oslo. The Norwegian Government set up a savings fund so that the descendants of today’s two million Norwegians could enjoy the fruits of the natural mineral resources being extracted from the Norwegian North Sea. The Scots could have done the same had they focussed their considerable political skills on breaking away from their union with England...as Vermont is intent on seceding from the other American states.

But instead the Scots have allowed themselves to be deluded into believing that a few million feuding Catholics and Presbyterians from north of the border could wield long-term power over England’s forty four million Elizabethan Subjects by means of a decade of ineffectual and unprincipled rule from Labour Party headquarters in Glasgow and Dundee. The Indians are taking a different route by becoming an economic superpower. As a white middle-class Englishman I have little doubt which side my bread is buttered.

A week from now I will be in Sweden. My hope is to spend the winter in Lund with a Swedish Filosophie Kandidat under my belt by year end from studies at the universities of Stockholm, Uppsala and Lund over the past 35 years. Other hopes are to get housing and storage organised and to spend time in Tucson and Bogotá. I would like six months of Forward Living Capability in the bank before moving to Lund or Cambridge. But this time I plan to give myself a contingency position by building an investment fund from tithing a fixed portion of my Cultura earnings to my IG-Index account…and spread betting my account balances all the way to the bank.

During my first six months in Lund I will be working as an economic historian researching the banking and financial arrangements of the Hansa by getting stuck into some real documents like the ledgers of the companies trading at Novgorod and Visby. By the time I have completed the last 20 betyg of my Fil Kand I should know whether I am on the right track with my hunch about the root cause of the mechanisms destroying civilisation.

My hypothesis is that things went wrong when Italian double-entry bookkeeping was allied to a Money Creation…and destruction…System in Northern Europe and then got itself incorporated into a Power System by the English adoption of the Dutch idea of the Central Banking Mechanism. These three ideas came together at the end of the 17th Century and have continued to hold sway ever since with the Central Bank of China the latest member of the club.

The focus of my academic research will be the sweep of European financial history from 1100 to 1700 with a focus through the histories of the Hanseatic Towns. What historians call an industrial revolution may be no more than a quickening of the pace of innovation as a technique for money manipulation emerged with the discovery of The Rule of Five…when money is available things happen five times as quickly...and cost five times as much.

Today and tomorrow are allocated to weblogs to allow time on Thursday and Friday for websites. My weblogging is complicated at the moment with several themes running. Magna Carta turned out to be more difficult than anticipated and weblogs on economics, climate and politics have not fallen off the keyboard the way they might.

Before leaving Rye for Purton I finalised my 2005 accounts and filed my tax and working tax credit returns online. Last year’s income worked out at £2400 and expenses were £5145 giving me a loss of £2745. If you are interested in how Voluntary Simplicity works here is my Profit & Loss Statement for 2000-2005 with all figures in £ uk.

Bogotá was on my mind yesterday. I have been steadily removing stuff from the boat since returning to Rye in February. Upon finishing A Flower That‘s Free I placed it in a box acquired to tidy up little things on the boat and placed alongside it Wild Swans by Jung Chang, Julian by Gore Vidal, Masefield Park by Jane Austen, Saigon by Anthony Grey and Chasing Men by Edwina Currie and prepared the package for posting to Mexico City. I could not quite stretch to the twenty five pounds demanded by Royal Mail for air freight so three months from now…God willing…Constanza will be surprised by the arrival of an early Christmas present. Surface Post cost eleven pounds.

Christopher Strangeways is in the vanguard of environmental activism in and around Rye and is the mastermind behind the Rye Farmer’s Market. As he is thinking of entering mainstream local politics by standing for the Rye Town Council next year he has started addressing such local issues as a Town Programme to counter the effects of Global Warming. During a recent e-mail exchange I pointed him to my Climate Blog and he responded by giving me his understanding of what my climate blog was saying.

Christopher picked up on Michael Crichton’s presentation in State of Fear of the idea that increasing concern for the environment since the fall of the Berlin Wall had been orchestrated by those with an interest in creating a crisis to preoccupy The West…and that this Fear Generation had got out of control. I share Crichton’s suspicion about the Fear Factories but Fear Generation being out of control is mine...though not my central idea.

I don't think I suggested that environmental fears were irrational and based on dodgy science…although this might be the case...so I responded to this interpretation of my views by remarking that my principal concern was the extent to which the Climate Change scene was bedevilled by bad science. Everybody was spinning findings that were derived from preconceived prejudices and manipulating public information. For the Environmental Movement this was a mistaken strategy. They should change tack and be seen as cleaner than clean whenever they adopt scientific findings to champion a particular case. Truth will win through in the end. The quality of the science matters.

I was also concerned to see a shift in the way the Precautionary Principle was applied. To do anything just because the situation was desperate begged two questions. Firstly how desperate was the situation and secondly whether what was being suggested would help or hinder. The answers at the moment are that we don’t know whether the situation is desperate…the data is ambivalent, poorly collected and badly processed…and we don’t understand the planet’s climate. So we have no way to appraise the consequences of our meddling.

While in this state of limited knowledge Environmentalists should be sceptical about the Smoke and Mirrors Departments. Bad science is always bad science, every scientist is paid by someone and pipers calling the tune have agendas. In summary I am calling for intellectual clarity. One thing we know little about is Ocean Algae.

For centuries there has been anecdotal evidence that small creatures can sense the approach of earthquakes. But it now turns out that tiny algae in the sea are every bit as sensitive to earthquakes. Studies of recent earthquakes with epicentres close to the coast…Gujurat India (2001), Algeria (2002) and Bam, Iran (2003)…have supplied evidence of a huge surge in Chlorophyll levels just before a quake. It might therefore be possible to programme satellites to flag up unexpected algal blooms and to use this data as the basis for a reliable Earthquake Early Warning System.

The behaviour of algae is important because algae fix half the world’s Carbon. Every year more CO2 is produced than can be accounted for in the atmosphere so the numbers don’t work out. Algae and photosynthesis might explain the missing CO2 and European Oceanographers may have found the missing Carbon Sink and how it works.

Water surging into the open ocean from the Iberian Peninsula pulls Carbon out of the air. Nutrient-rich water from a deep Upwelling near the coast causes a burst of algal growth. When algae are eaten the CO2 they absorb is recycled back into the atmosphere. But some of the water travels hundreds of miles out into the Open Atlantic causing even more algae to grow. In the open ocean the algae simply die and sink taking their Carbon with them. The effect is much greater than was previously realised.

Something else that has been puzzling Ocean Researchers is the way that half the algal species in our oceans need to take in Vitamin B12 from outside in order to grow properly. They do so by means of a beneficial relationship with bacteria. Here is the science. It seems that no algae have the necessary genes to produce Vitamin B12. Those that do not require a supply are like higher plants with an alternative metabolic process that does not need the vitamin.

However algae that need Vitamin B12 cannot make it themselves and must get it from somewhere else. But the numbers do not add up because the amount of Vitamin B12 required to grow the types of algae that do not need the vitamin in the laboratory is much higher than natural levels in the seas and rivers. It turns out that in the natural environment Bacteria supply the necessary Vitamin B12. But this is not a one way relationship. The algae support the bacteria by providing them with Carbon from their own photosynthesis.

What these observations demonstrate is that although algae live by harvesting the sun’s energy through photosynthesis many of them are like animals in that they need another organism to supply them with a vital nutrient. Time and time again as you look at the science it becomes apparent that these are early days in Climate Science. Caution and not desperation is what is called for. Don’t just do something…anything…stand there!

You couldn’t make it up. Today I received a letter addressed to The Occupier, P.O. Box 36, Rye. I sneaked out through the back door of my post office box and beat a hasty retreat to the far side of the kingdom. It was a beautiful day and the sun was beating down on the tourists in Trafalgar Square. After a coffee at St Martin in the Field I headed down Whitehall and through St. James Park to Victoria Coach Station.

A taxi collected me from Swindon Bus Station at a quarter past three and I was playing with Tempe on the lawn of 26 The Close in Purton when John Papworth eased himself off the garden bench at four o’clock to prepare himself for the 5 pm. meeting of the Radcon III Planning Group. I had not been followed. There were no police marksmen positioned outside the house.

There had been some sharp exchanges during the course of the previous two weeks as I accused John of highjacking the proceedings for his Charter of Real Nations agenda which I argued had very little to do with a conference on Making Local Government Local that was supposed to concentrate on the Real Communities Charter. He shot back that until local communities had the benefit of the newfound powers that the Real Nations Charter would give them there was very little they could do with the Real Communities Charter.

I didn’t bother to reply to this as my purpose had been to put a shot across the bows and slow down the Real Nations Juggernaut with its paraphernalia of a new 2006 Declaration of Independence and the 2001 Real Nations Charter worked through five years ago at radcon I…and deepened with practical action to place secession on national agendas at radcon II…to make more room for the Charter 2015 Project and some serious work at radcon III to work through a new Magna Carta.

Dr Aidan Rankin has been reading my weblogs because I notice the Tory Leader David Cameron is thinking in similar terms when he is calling for a British Bill of Rights steeped in English legal precedents instead of being swamped by the Napoleonic Code from Europe bedevilling the present set-up.

Nonetheless my thoughts had been turning to resignation from the Radcon III Conference Planning Group yet again so I thought I would fire off a memo to Anton Pinschof and the rest of the 2001 Radical Consultation Steering Group…Tom Greco, Aidan Rankin, Kirk Sale and Chris Wright…by way of a mid-term report in case the Saturday meeting failed to go my way. As it happened it did so I took upon myself the task of writing the background briefing paper for a meeting in London next month of patrons and officials for radcon III. Here is my pre-meeting memo.

Please regard the radcon flurry as my way of briefing the 2001 Radcon Continuity Group on how things stand midway towards the Five Years On Swindon Conference. My private opinion at the end of 2001 was that there would not be another radcon...without a radcon process...and no mechanisms were put in place in 2001 for this to happen...and the attempt to develop the idea of an Academic Inn Association to take on this task was sabotaged leading to my resignation from the London Academic Inn Committee and predictably to the collapse of the London Academic Inn a year later. The committee has been disbanded and there have been no events now for three years.

My private opinion at the end of 2005 was that what was going to happen at the Five Years On Gathering in September 2006 was another Fourth World Assembly…appropriately The Thirteenth…plus a Book Launch of Village Democracy. I did not believe this Five Years On Gathering would be part of any radcon process...and nor would the Middlebury Institute...dubbed radcon II to avoid a return to the Fourth World Assembly model in September 2006 and because it might have become part of a radcon process once there was a third point on the progress line.

My private opinion at mid-year 2006 is that the Five Years On Gathering seems to be acquiring a third pillar...the launch of an international organisation from Swindon with no understanding of the decades of diplomatic spade work required...while the focus on the Local Communities Charter...despite the imminent book launch...is being lost.

So unless there is an unprecedented change of heart over the next couple of weeks I am now slipping into damage limitation mode...in the hope of taking something useful back from the September Gathering to some future convening of the Radcon Continuity Group. The two best hopes at the midway mark look to be firm plans to set up an Edward Goldsmith Institute for Human Scale Ecology; firm support for the further development of the Magna Carta II Charter 2015 Project and the Resurgence Group of Institutes Development Plan.

The Radcon III Planning Group were also given the glad tidings that Heidi Foster had agreed to help me ensure that there was a bookshop facility from the opening night of the conference on the Thursday evening until the close of proceedings with the Final Plenary on Saturday afternoon. The Post-Meeting Prandials were different this weekend as Adam Crossland invited us all to The Commons just outside Purton where a party was in full swing to cheer off a local group of New Age Land Girls heading for the hills of Vietnam next week on a development aid mission.

King John’s troubles began in 1199 when his father died and he ascended the English throne. Eight years earlier Father Richard had made his son Arthur his heir and successor…to the delight of his mother Constance. But between 1191 and 1199 Richard the Lionheart changed his mind and rewrote his will in favour of his brother John.

We have to suspect Henry II’s wife Eleonor as the prime mover in this. She was the mother of Richard and John and the grandmother of Arthur. John was 32 when Richard died and Arthur was 16…although Shakespeare portrays him as 10…so perhaps Eleonor and Richard reasoned that the kingdom needed a man and not a boy in the hot seat.

Hollinshed implies that The Lady Constance would have ruled in Arthur’s stead and also remarks that John established himself in England ‘thanks to the work of Eleonor’. So there was unlikely to be much love lost between the two fine ladies. Nonetheless with feuding women meddling in the affairs of state, the English Court must have been a place to avoid. And of course altering a king’s will plays havoc with the betting in the City of London. Yet John seemed to have been up to the job. Hollinshed presents King John as a political fixer par excellence…howbeit a failed one. But then all political careers end in failure so there is nothing remarkable about that.

Nowadays disrupting markets by changing a King’s Will would fall foul of the London Stock Exchange’s rules of disclosure and attract the attention of the Serious Fraud Squad. But though Shakespeare’s knowledge of people and power is second to none he had a blind spot when it came to understanding the ways of The Money Power. For an understanding of this we need to go to Shakespeare’s sources...and in particular to the financially astute Hollinshed…for a feel for the wheeling and dealing of the English and French aristocrats and their London backers.

Receiving early warning of changes to a King’s Will is akin to getting transcripts from bugging monthly meetings of the Federal Reserve Board. Doubtless the London merchants had their own Watergate teams in place monitoring shifts in moneylender fortunes. But Shakespeare misses the significance of the £30 000 King John agrees to pay the French King as part of his deal with Arthur. It is there in Hollinshed but went beneath Shakespeare’s radar because The Bard had only a layman’s understanding of money and hence no place for such snippets of information in his power framework. Hollinshed on the other hand realised that money was central to the problems of John’s reign.

Hollinshed sets out his history chronologically dating his entries like a diary. So we know that in 1200 King John ‘now resting from wars with foreign enemies began to make war with his subjects purses at home emptying them by taxes and tallages to fill his coffers’. John also ‘dealt severely with the white monks’. By 1204 John has ‘gathered huge sums in subsidies’. Hollinshed is showing the way things are headed in order to explain the background to the confrontation with the barons at Runnymede in 1215.

Hollinshed portrays John as a skilled political operator juggling his credit cards while robbing Peter to pay Paul. The impression Hollinshed gives is of a politician weaving and bobbing between rival power factions playing one off against the other…a deal here, a deal there…as the bills pile up. In 1213 for instance Hollinshed notes that the peace with France didn’t work because King Philip’s backers had counted on getting back the £60 000 owed them by the French King from the seizure of the estates of the English Catholic Barons who they planned to denounce as traitors.

The Church too is destined to play a key role in the unfolding drama ‘for neither were the bishops, abbots, nor any other ecclesiastical persons exempted by means whereof he ran first into the hatred of the clergy’. John’s problems with The Church start to appear in 1208 when he refuses The Pope’s appointment of Simon Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury. Until them the abbeys and churches are tax points ripe for looting. Yet seven years later The Barons complain that John had made them ‘subject to Rome’. The Vatican was playing its own game with European Courts.

Shakespeare portrays the wielders of state power as no different to lesser mortals…wracked by similar personal dilemmas and subject to the same individual choices. In fact Shakespeare invented the Personalisation of the Politics of Large States. The Elizabethans of Shakespeare’s day stood at a crossroads. Size was central to their situation. Behind them lay the personal politics of small Village States. Ahead lay the impersonal bureaucratic politics of totalitarian states with increasing scale and pace leading politics into unknown territory. To right and left were the roads not taken. Hollinshed has a better grasp of this than Shakespeare and understands that it is no longer what governments do but what they are. Shakespeare saw governments as controlled by individuals. He was wrong.

For the Elizabethans the parallels were between Good Queen Bess and King John. But the parallels run true even today. The contortions that Washington demanded of Sadam Hussein or the Shah of Iran are those The Vatican demanded of John and Elizabeth. In modern times David Kelly unwittingly replayed the part of Count Melun with his timely deathbed revelation of a French conspiracy. Courts and governments are brands and the shifting fortunes of their firms at the whim of The Money Power move financial markets. Plus ça change plus c’est le même chose.

Three score years and ten is our allotted span and we don’t really get going until our mid-twenties so 50 years is the best we can plan for. Economics is not good with time. But time is the key because time…not money…is the scarce resource for the little individual. While a graduate student with the System Dynamics Group at the MIT Sloan School in the early 1980s I read a paper entitled Energy: a long wave perspective to the annual conference of the Association of Eastern Economists. The paper was based on some energy system modelling the group were doing. System Dynamic models are good with time…unlike economic models. Economic Systems may have equilibrium states but the real economy oscillates through them and spirals off to new equilibria before the old oscillations settle down.

Real economies are dynamic and not static. The Delay Factors incorporated into System Dynamic models are critical variables. The time factors are often responsible for the real world behaviour the models are designed to create. My MIT work disappeared with my divorce but one of the four energy papers...energy policy...turned up recently. My pet slide in the 1981 Philadelphia presentation included the equation (E = p x e x t). Economic activity (E) takes place when people (p) have the energy (e) and the time (t) to carry it out. This formulation of the economic problem differs from the classical one which ignores time, views energy as a line in the Input-Output Matrix and includes people as a factor of production called Labour…thereby placing it on an equal footing philosophically with Land and Capital.

There is also a crucial difference between Mind Work and Manual Labour. Mind output (knowledge) is not consumed but replicated as it passes from one person to another. Schumacher's Adaequatio Factor and Knowledge Obsolescence should also be factored into the equation. This replication creates islands of Increasing Returns in a sea of Diminishing Returns…and these are central to the theory that Bigger is Better. In fact big is best for capital. And small is better for people. In the real world as economic sea levels fall so islands become continents. Money enters the Pet Formula by way of The Rule of Five as a secondary variable. This encourages The Natural Order as opposed to the classical formulation of the economic problem that has played a key role in Societal Inversion. Reformulating the economic problem more along these lines will be crucial to the recreation of The Natural Order in our societies.

Another way to effect the shift to a Cathedral Culture from a Money Culture is to address the problem of short-termism by caring more…rather than less…about the morrow. The shift to shorter and shorter time frames may be a consequence of the maldistribution of money between different sizes of business enterprise? Size matters. The experience of the Prince of Wales Trust would seem to support this hypothesis.

Small businesses grow organically by serving more customers. Big businesses acquire customers by gobbling up other businesses or by selling more products and services to their existing customers. The Diminishing Utility of each accretion is critical to the Junking Up and Dumbing Down that takes place in Overdeveloped Societies. Bullyboy tactics are also deployed to eliminate smaller competitors. Governments with their Laws against Monopolies and their Offices of Fair Trading are not blind to these problems. They even have some inkling that oligarchy and unfair competition are related to scale. But there is no unified Theory of Scale and Pace to support the development of such sensible policies as graduated tax rates targeted at the size of an enterprise.

The rise and rise of Microsoft on the back of its Share Options and rising share price and the Overdeveloped World’s practice of dumping their surplus and obsolete products are two examples of Big Corporation Behaviour. They call it Best Practice. I call it Murder. People die in droves as a result of Big Corporation Best Practice. In the 1960s the British National Coal Board was the largest business in Europe in terms of the number of households dependent upon the enterprise for their livelihood. This was central to the management of the business but cut little ice with the Pension Fund and Insurance Company managers who have been given a private monopoly over the disposition of spare money and created credit in this country.

Instead Stock Markets glorify Market Capitalization and Annual Turnover irrespective of what they are, where they come from and how many people are involved in generating the numbers. Enron provides a clear warning of the pitfalls of this approach. The notion of productivity is crucial but is badly defined, poorly understood and never integrated into any broader theory of Work and Personal Fulfilment. Besides the only legitimate function of financial markets is to match those who want to exchange twenty pounds today with those wanting a pound a year for twenty years. All other trading on these financial markets should be taxed until the pips of these barrow boys squeak.

Microbusinesses also have a key role to play in re-establishing the natural time-frame for human life and human endeavour. The natural time-span for collective human economic activity is a span of two hundred years from the birth of the oldest family relative alive to the death of the youngest child in the family. Inter-generational family businesses are vital to The Good Society. One day William Franklin & Sons Limited will be seen as a model for such businesses...and in particular for the Transition Mechanism incorporated into the structure of the firm.

Hastings Pier…one of England’s last great Victorian wooden piers…has been closed after safety experts said it could collapse. Five metal trusses supporting the privately owned nine hundred foot pier have given way. Failure of one is enough to render it unsafe. A couple of years ago the West Pier in Brighton burnt down after it had passed into private hands. Brighton is where the Rye trains from Ashford end their journeys. Sea Front (below) by Matt Hardman…mixed media 18”x24”…gives an idea of what these piers have withstood over the past hundred years.

I spent a couple of hours with Heidi on the boat yesterday afternoon. I contrive to get my guests to visit at high tide but as Vemara spends twice as much time on the mud as afloat the odds are against me. At the moment our tides are on neaps which means that the highest tides are a week away in either direction and the daily high and low tides are in the middle of the full range…a 2.7 yesterday compared with a 3.3 on 13th June and a 3.3 again on 27th June.

The highest and lowest tides of the year are around the Equinoxes in March and September when they range from 1.7 to 4.3. The highest points of the spring tides…this is what these two weekly high tides are called…occur at midday and midnight with the high tide advancing by about an hour every day to give us the neap tides at six o’clock morning and evening. On most tides Vemara is afloat for at least an hour and a half either side of high tide. Philosophically tides are quite dangerous. They were instrumental in persuading Galileo to the Copernican Cause and look at the trouble this caused him with the Roman Catholic Hierarchy of the time.

I went to Ashford in the morning and called in on Lesley Brownbill on my return to give her the sad news that I may have attended my last ever Ryesingers rehearsal. I am not planning to return from Stockholm for next month’s concert in Camber and hope to be settled in Lund by the time of the Christmas Carol Concert at East Guldforde and the February 2007 performance of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Princess Ida.

Next year is an Elgar Anniversary Year so it will be The Dream of Gerontis everywhere. Not one to follow the herd Lesley was looking for something completely different. My suggestion of Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio did not go down well. Local people have mixed reactions to Paul McCartney. One of my stories is that my daughter was once employed to paint Paul’s boat.

But the favourite McCartney story in Rye is about the time that Linda McCartney came aboard Barnaby Rudge. As is the way with royalty, during the lads’ lunch break Linda asked one of them what he had in his sandwich. ‘Ham, Ma’am!’ was the reply. Related with relish this story never fails to get a laugh. Decades before the Great Unwashed were taught by Jamie Oliver that you are what you eat, Linda was an Evangelical Vegetarian…which in small towns like Rye means seriously subversive and downright weird.

I love these light midsummer days and was up with the lark at five. By the time I arrived at Jempson's for breakfast at eight my e-mails had been sorted at Meads Books. NCAB came in with a rush job last week just as all our translators disappeared for their Scandinavian Midsummer Breaks and we were still scrambling for someone to deliver 380 words of Norwegian. But at midday Cultura UK (me) put Cultura Sweden (Alan) on the phone to sweet talk the client. A deal was struck so the heat is off. Our normal translator will do it on Monday when she returns to her desk.

While searching for a translator several offers went out to translators registered on a Translators’ Exchange…a very impressive website that seems to works extremely well. But the whole business is crying out for a Union Organiser as websites like this force down wages. Of course with the side effects being the main effects the website probably doubles up as a Singles Agency…much like Friends Reunited…so it gives good value for money to its users.

I posted my Runnymede weblog yesterday almost a week late. I had struggled over it and even after posting it I was still far from happy with my version of events. The more research I did the less sense it all made. So today I shut the cabin door…metaphorically speaking…ignored the beautiful weather and the cormorants, ducks, oyster-catchers, terns, heron and seagulls weaving and dipping around outside…and settled myself down to read Shakespeare’s King John. It made matters worse. So I read the introduction. This added to my confusion so I got hold of Holinshed’s Chronicles…the source for Shakespeare’s Histories. At last some light at the end of the tunnel.

The version of the Runnymede weblog posted last Wednesday assumed Shakespeare’s Histories to be reliable history. This is not the case and King John has been called Shakespeare’s most unhistorical play. John reigned from 1199 to 1216 and even though Shakespeare only concerns himself with the last months of John’s reign he still condenses the months of action into a few days to get his play to work on the stage. In 1213 for instance…according to Hollinshed…John gave his crown to the Pope’s ambassador Cardinal Pandulph who held onto it for five days before giving it back. In Shakespeare’s play Pandulph keeps it for five seconds. Historians hate this sort of inaccuracy.

Shakespeare’s manipulation of historical facts brings out the dangerous similarities between the reigns of John and Elizabeth where for Arthur Elizabethan audiences would read Mary Queen of Scots. An English sovereign…said to be a usurper and a bastard…defies the Pope; is excommunicated; imprisons his rival barred from the crown by a will; the Pope invites another king to invade; the English sovereign urges the murder of the Pretender and then needs a scapegoat; a foreign invasion is attempted…the invaders planning to kill the Englishmen helping them; their navy is providentially wrecked off the English Coast and finally English unity is achieved through the failure of the invasion.

John Masefield pointed out that the great scheme of the play is the great achievement. Treachery is the play’s leitmotiv...with Machiavellian morality-free politics the same problem that Elizabeth was facing in her own day. King John was about Elizabethan Times…and was deliberately crafted to emphasis the Elizabethan parallel. Every deviation from Hollinshed that is not there from dramatic necessity…is included for this reason.

Shakespeare is fascinated by the power of women like John’s mother Eleanor, Arthur’s mother Constance and his future wife Blanche. Arthur is portrayed as being as besotted with Blanche as Henry VIIIth was with Ann Boleyn…before she agreed to marry him…as the Henry-Ann Boleyn letters bear witness. Shakespeare’s complex understanding of the personal power of women in relationship has been analysed by Ted Hughes in The Goddess of Complete Being…his analysis of the last twelve plays of Shakespeare from this viewpoint…although Hughes’ ideas have yet to percolate through into Shakespeare Scholarship. But Hughes deals with only one of the two key aspects of Women & Power. The other related aspect concerns the manner in which women wield power within power systems. Shakespeare has little doubt that their influence can be considerable for both good…Portia in The Merchant of Venice…and evil…Lady Macbeth. King John should feature in any scholarly analysis.

Blanche…who has a minor walk-on part in King John…is given a good one-liner by Shakespeare when she remarks that ‘The Lady Constance speaks not from her faith but from her need’ which gets to the very heart of the drama. Shakespeare uses messengers as a dramatic device to keep the audience informed of the twists and turns in the plot and it is in this way that we hear that the Lady Constance ‘in a frenzy died’. Hell has no fury like a woman scorned...or crossed. Here is Constance’s reaction to the peace deal between France and England.

‘War! War! No peace! Peace is to me a war.
O Limoges! O Austria! Thou dost shame
That bloody spoil; thou slave, thou wretch, thou coward!
Thou little valiant, great in villainy.’

Constance’s real concern is what will become of her once there is a deal between the English and the French. She rightly reasons that her plan to rule England as the de facto Regent of the Realm until the boy-king Arthur comes of age puts her at a grave risk. John also knows that he must square Constance for his deal with Arthur to work. Indeed this is his first thought after establishing the price of Arthur’s allegiance. Here is King John.

‘...We will heal all up;
For we’ll create young Arthur Duke of Britain
And Earl of Richmond; and this rich fair town
We make him lord of. Call the Lady Constance;
Some speedy messenger bid her repair
To our solemnity; I trust we shall,
If not fill up the measure of her will,
Yet in some measure satisfy her so
That we shall stop her exclamation.’

Next Constance has a go at the Earl of Salisbury…going for the messenger because she dislikes the message.

‘Gone to be married! Gone to swear a peace!
False blood to false blood joined! Gone to be friends!
France friend with England, what becomes of me?

Fellow, be gone: I cannot brook the sight.
This news hath made thee a most ugly man!’

So there! Salisbury has a bad play. He goes over to the French in an effort to keep his lands in Brittany only to learn from Count Melun’s deathbed confession that the French nobles had sworn an oath to slay the English traitors once they had served their purpose…except that this like everything else in King John could be more disinformation.

Paul McCartney was 64 yesterday and had his first family with him in Peasmarsh…a few miles from Rye…to celebrate the occasion. Paul’s children met up at the Abbey Road Studios a few weeks ago and recorded a new set of lyrics for one of Paul’s best-known songs: When I’m 64. I thought of writing new lyrics for the song a few months ago. But my idea was to write the song from the point of view of somebody in his or her mid-eighties looking back at the time they were 64. No matter. We can make it a trilogy.

Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio is seriously under-rated and many of the songs he wrote as one of the four Beatles can be compared favourably with the best that Mozart or Schumann produced. The other day I listened again to the lyrics of his song For No One…a poignant love song from the break-up of a relationship…that appeared first on The Beatles’ Revolver Album and was then recycled into another underrated artistic work…this time a film…Say Goodbye to Broad Street. Paul wrote the song in a ski chalet while on holiday with Jane Asher.

The ability to write great songs does not diminish with age but the urge to do the necessary mental and psychological workouts to be able to do so gets harder as you get older. There will be more to come from Paul McCartney now he has broken up from Heather Mills and can start grieving properly for the death of his first wife Linda Eastman several years ago. Bereavement is hard enough without having to do it in the public eye.

My laptop refused to crank up on Sunday morning with a full day’s work planned…so much for the best-laid plans of mice and men. The gods love doing this to me. I took my Apple Mac Mini out from the storage to which it had been consigned since my return from Llangolmen but it too refused to work. My third option was Heidi’s old desktop that has been under the cabin table for the past year or so. It started, went for ten minutes and then gave up the ghost. I decided enough was enough, removed my hard drive and a couple of working DVD Players and threw the remains in the skip. From boom to bust…but at least I have some legroom under the table now. I still have the keys to Clive Ogden’s bookshop so figured I would have emergency back up…something I used yesterday and today.

Last Wednesday NCAB gave us a newsletter to translate urgently. By Friday NCAB had asked for it in Norwegian, Finnish and Spanish as well as in English. Norwegian is causing us problems again…it is boom time for Norway and Norwegian translators. Our regular Norwegian translator has gone home for Midsummer and three other Norwegian translators have turned us down so we are scrambling. Our best hope lies with our Finnish translator who may have found someone. We will know tomorrow. It is irritating as the newsletter is only 380 words.

It has been a cultural few days. On Friday I was at Hastings College in St. Leonard’s-on-Sea for the private viewing of the college students’ end-of-year exhibition. The sheer range of arts, crafts and artefacts on display was what impressed me most. I did not get to meet Françoise but her pièce de résistance…a screen with thirty-six panels of black glass each with its own multi-coloured metallic flashes…was worth the trip across the county.

Saturday was the Ryesingers’ Summer Concert with a rehearsal at 5 pm and the performance in Rye Methodist Church from 7.30 pm until 9.15 pm. This may turn out to be my last appearance with Ryesingers although Princess Ida is on the schedule for February 2007. Hmm! We delivered our best performances on each item on our Mozart programme which is the way one hopes it will be...trusting to the adrenaline to kick in.

In between cultural events I have been writing my weblogs, keeping abreast with e-mails and reading Sarah Harrison’s 1980 novel A Flower That’s Free. This was given a boost on Sunday following the digital disasters of the morning. Being able to think of nothing better to do I took the rest of the day off. No bad thing as it meant Vemara’s engine got a one-hour workout between 1550 and 1650...its first since moving moorings. A birthday greetings card went off to my brother and my son over the weekend. Here is what I had to say.

‘This is the first and last time I can justify sending the same card at the same time to John Clive (62) born 19 June 1944 and Nicholas John (31) born 18 June 1975 because Nicholas will never again be half the age of John...numerologically speaking. If you count weeks, months or days and anything other than years it doesn't actually work out because the first year of our life is year zero. There's something to mull over for a day or two.’

‘And look out John. Nicholas is catching you up. The ratio of the length of your life to the length of his is decreasing steadily. And unless Nicholas gets run over by an elephant…this almost happened before when he was in Africa… the natural order of things is for the ratio to plummet to zero about thirty years from now when the mean average of the biblical three score years and ten (70) and the age of the oldest Englishman alive (110) brings The Grim Reaper to John's door.

Whether or not I'll be there to witness the event is a moot point. We're born with nothing. We go with nothing. So what have we lost? Nothing!’ John responded to my philosophical thoughts with the alternative view that ‘we are born with no memories and die with many memories…hopefully good ones’. Hmm! I know the theory.

Whilst wintering in Llangolman I made it through the long dark Welsh winter nights by watching DVDs of a twelve-part series of The Best of the TV Detectives acquired for the price of a copy of the Daily Express each weekday for two weeks. The plot of one of these dramas hinged on a claim that there was no mobile phone signal. The hero of the hour did his research and at the last moment…with the situation at its bleakest for the poor besieged train driver up for manslaughter…a defence witness was rushed onto the stand. He was an expert on mobile phones and duly explained to the judge and the jury that mobile phone signals are affected by wind and rain.

The strength of a mobile phone signal dips in the rain…and in sleet, snow and hail. The heavier the precipitation the greater the interference. So next time you are on the train tell your caller that it is raining outside as well. This presents an interesting opportunity for a new era of Gentlemen and People Science. Mobile phone networks can replace radar as a back-up to rain gauges…with the big advantage that they record what happens under the clouds instead of guessing that where there are clouds there must be rain like the radar does. But then guessing is what meteorologists do…and climatologists have carried on the tradition.

The atmosphere is a big mystery. The Carbonistas like to push the notion that Global Warming is going to raise the temperature so more moisture will evaporate from the ocean and put more moisture into the air and that this will increase the Greenhouse Effect by fifty percent. Their computer models tell them that a doubling of CO2 in the air will heat the planet by 3 to 8 degrees Celsius. The trouble is when you talk to people who understand things like the scientists at the Center for Clouds, Chemistry and Climate in La Jolla California they tell a rather different story.

A warmer moister atmosphere will create a different pattern of cloud cover. This might dramatically enhance the heating…or it might counteract it. Five years of satellite measurements between 1984 and 1989 established that clouds cool the planet more effectively than they heat it…for now. Clouds remove the heat of a 60-watt light bulb from every six-by-six foot patch of Earth’s surface. These results show that net cloud cooling is four times greater than the warming expected from doubling CO2. Without clouds the planet could be twenty degrees hotter.

Clouds matter…so water is one of the greenhouse gases that Carbonistas have mixed feelings about because it might just play merry hell with their Carbon Story. The H2O molecule has four times the power of the CO2 molecule. So the climate modellers take the only course open to them. They make a stab at it when it comes to clouds. As far as cloud cover is concerned they guess…although it is only the very best scientists that call it that. The rest use words like estimate, parameterisation or approximation. But how do you approximate something you don’t understand? Finger in the wind? Whistle in the dark? It’s a guess. But perhaps the humble mobile phone can come to the rescue.

The evidence is not there yet but the thinking is that if the mobile phone mast is picking up fluctuations caused by wind and rain then it is probably reacting to shifting levels of water vapour in the atmosphere as well. Mobile phone masts might not be the scourge we all thought they were. They could be the leading edge of the War Against Global Warming. Now there’s a thought…and a rather useful one…because collecting scientific date is no simple matter.

It is no accident that so much science is qualified by the term ‘under laboratory conditions’. Operant conditions have a way of playing havoc with the best-laid scientific hypotheses so good scientists always record all of them. Take the temperature-time series to illustrate. You can do one of two things. You measure the temperature in the same place for as long as possible…hopefully for centuries...or you measure under similar operant conditions.

The first course of action seems to make sense because the shape of the landscape affects the local climate. A number this side of the hill will not be the same as one from the other side. But there is a problem. A hundred years ago your measuring point was in the middle of a field five miles out of town. Today it’s in the middle of a shopping centre. In fact as a general statement towns have expanded to overwhelm most of the climate scientists’ data collection points.

Built-up environments are several degrees warmer than similar places without people. On that at least there seems to be a consensus…although I have not delved that deeply and have become sceptical about the idea of consensus. So what does our poor scientist do? He looks for an article in the scientific press with a graph of temperature versus land use. He gets a little hot under the collar when he sees that it swamps any shifts in his own data but he has learnt how you do this sort of thing in college…and besides everybody else does it. It is best practice. So he alters his data.

He has clever names for these alterations like correcting for anomalies. But to you and me what he is actually up to is crossing out the numbers he measured and replacing them with different numbers that