William Shepherd

Until now I have remained in semi-detached mode vis-à-vis the Radical Consultation with my role limited to attending half a dozen planning meetings, throwing out a few ideas, putting my foot down on occasions and giving generalised moral support to John Papworth who has been organising the work. However I have taken on the tasks of making sure the radcon III websites are ready for the brochure launch in The Ecologist and for having a Local Charter ready by mid-June so the Conference Steering Group can put their names to it.

Much of today was spent with the Conference Websites. Here is a short version of the e-memo that went off before I rushed off to catch the 1750 train to West St Leonard’s: ‘I have integrated the various radcon III websites and web addresses. This is our Web Project holding position for the next few weeks to give us a breathing space to develop the two main sites which are www.radcon3.net for older more books, print publishing and academic papers oriented people…and www.myspace.com/rad3con ...for young people more into music, media, festivals etc.

The Pentagon has started to express alarm over ‘the rapid pace of China’s military expansion’ by giving dire warnings that ‘Beijing is intent on projecting its missile, naval and aircraft power far beyond its shores’. It’s been 50 years since the Military-Industrial Complex dished up The Yellow Peril for breakfast. Perhaps budgets are under threat from the rising power of the Political-Legal-Media Complex (PLM). Perhaps it is concern about their street-cred in the wake of recent Mesopotamian Adventures. Anyway according to the Pentagon China is spending two or three times more on defence than they are telling us. For decades the Pentagon and the CIA told us the same about the Soviet Union during the Cold War but none of it turned out to be true. So a heavy dose of scepticism is in order. But for what it’s worth the figure being put around for Chinese defence spending is $100 billion next year.

This recent dodgy dossier on China’s military spending is an annual event which gives America’s Generals a chance to frighten the politicians with their latest news of nuclear arsenal upgrades and China’s latest purchases of killingry from Russia. The message the Pentagon wants to get across to the Hawks in Congress to pass on for PLM Massaging is that ‘the lack of transparency and the scope of the Chinese arms build-up is evidence of Beijing’s desire to interdict at long ranges aircraft carrier and expeditionary strike groups that might deploy in the western Pacific.’

Once the reality on the ground has been defined it is just a few short procedural steps to bills for the US Congress …and the US tax-payer. ‘An immediate American pre-emptive response is vital to our national security!’ ‘America must have a deployment capability between Mainland China and Taiwan…though not before our marketing boys have done their stuff and sold killingry to both sides. The last place any sane American should want to place an expensive US Pacific fleet is between warring Chinese factions in No-Man’s Sea.

One of my many unpublished articles is entitled The Royal Prerogative which begins with a short history of the English Commonwealth which goes like this. ‘In England the royal prerogative is the way centralised Government bypasses Parliament. These princely prerogatives are what Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army left in the royal domain after grabbing the things that mattered for their Short, Long and Barebone Parliaments.

Oliver Cromwell was born in 1599 and was elected to represent Cambridge City in the Short Parliament of April 1640. He continued to serve in the Long Parliament convened in August 1640 and took a leading role in that parliament's refusal to bail out the bankrupt King Charles I, eventually stripping him of his power, taking control of fiscal policy and placing the army and navy under parliamentary control. Within two years a Civil War was waging throughout the land with families divided and royalist Cavaliers and parliamentarian Roundheads at daggers drawn.

Out of the skirmishing the Puritans emerged victorious, cut off the king's head and after an interlude with the Barebones Parliament appointed Cromwell as Lord Protector of England ruling with the help of a single-chamber parliament. It was not long before the expense of a standing army and the cost of the trade war with the Dutch brought Cromwell to his knees too. Nations need finance as well as firepower if they are to undertake glorious action. Cromwell died in 1658 and two years later the monarchy was restored.

The immediate legacy of the English Civil War was a constitution in which the King in Parliament was the glue that bound together the monarchy and the three branches of government: the legislature, the administration and the judiciary. Before the English Civil War the princes did not rule unfettered. There was a written constitution imposed by provincial barons on King John at Runnymede called Magna Carta. But mostly the princes were constrained by the unwritten Common Law and the rights derived from it upheld by a semi-independent judiciary’.

There will be more about Magna Carta…and the sequel Magna Carta II which Charles III, King of England, will be signing into English Law at Runnymede at the Summer Solstice of 2015…800 years on…in my weblog on 15th June. I am proposing that radcon III draws up a draft of Magna Carta II and a Declaration of Intent.

The case for Global Warming does not hinge on a tenth of a degree Celsius or a few experts quibbling over the technical details behind a graph of carbon emissions. What the Carbonistas need is something with emotional impact. Tsunamis fit the bill. So their present case hinges upon the sea-level records. It won’t last. Their case will shift again when the scientific community refuses to kow-tow to their paymasters by permitting misleading use of their data. But it has served their purpose well. Truth after all is not where it’s at. With the Fear Factory perception is all…from a Goebbel‘s Primer.

So the Climate Changelings are shining their spotlights on helpless, victimized, impoverished people being flooded out of their ancestral homelands. They talk of the terror of sea levels rising precipitously…and inexplicably…with no conceivable cause. They tell of extraordinary events and unprecedented happenings affecting the entire world in recent years. Something unknown is causing sea levels to rise and threaten innocent men, women and children.

The idea is that if a convincing record can be shown of rising sea levels then the Carbonistas will be on very strong ground. When the public and the policy makers commanding the public purse strings…insurance companies for instance…see the damage that has been done and the costs they might incur…and here the computer modellers come into their own…they will spend money to solve the problem and scan the horizon for someone to blame for the mess.

Grappling with problems is not what action-oriented types do. They define, act and solve. They get it sorted. Then they look for someone to blame…and somebody else to pay the bill. So not only is the sea level data important to the Carbonista’s Bait & Switch Strategy but the fact that sea levels are rising around the world must be beyond dispute.

Unfortunately that’s the rub. There is considerable dispute about sea level. It is not simple at all. You cannot just put a mark on a dock at high tide, measure it year after year, watch it go up and publish your findings. One of the core concepts in the measurement of sea levels is the geoid…the equipotential surface of the earth’s gravitational field that approximates the mean sea surface.

Then there are the complexities of glacio-hydro-isosatic modelling and the eustatic and tectonic effects on shoreline dynamics. Even with some rudimentary grasp of these subjects there is still holocene sedimentary sequences and intertidal foraminifera distributions to master. And when that is done waiting in the wings are the carbon analysis of coastal paleoenvironments and aminostratigraphy. Sea level is not simple.

Were this enough to determine the precise scientific nature of sea level data, a consensus about this data might be feasible even if some agreed to disagree. However there would be many different hypotheses about the causes of any drift or sudden shift in the data pattern. But unfortunately for the Carbonistas this is likely to be the wrong consensus.

One of several places around the Indian Ocean decimated by the Boxing Day Tsunami was The Maldive Islands. But it would be quite wrong to think that the inhabitants of these islands had been sitting on the beach for the past few decades waiting for the tsunami to strike. They had arranged for a team of Scandinavian researchers to study sea levels in the ocean around them. The scientists found no rise in several centuries…and a fall in the last twenty years.

Michael Crichton started his research for State of Fear...published in 2004...in 2001. At that time I was reading through Tom Clancy’s published works and was somewhat alarmed to notice that many of Clancy’s plots turned up in the real world a few years after he had seemingly invented them. I had two conspiratorial explanations. Either Clancy was on a retainer with the CIA or Mossad were reading the plot outlines he sent to his publisher.

Crichton and Clancy plots have wheels within wheels and move rapidly between different pieces of the action before bringing it all together in one hectic final sequence. Their plots are full of outrageous and improbable coincidences and...as in the old Westerns...the hero comes through unscathed while the baddies and the secondary good guys go down like flies. That’s not a problem for me...it’s the nature of the genre. But one of Crichton’s subplots worries me.

The Island of Gareda is one of the Solomon Islands off the coast of New Guinea north of Australia. Here the Pacific Plate slides under the Ontong Java Plateau resulting in the Solomon Trench...a huge underwater feature that curves in an arc all along the northern side of the island chain and is an active geological region with a deep trench. Along the length of the trench are undersea volcanoes with lots of slope debris and therefore the potential for undersea landslides which displace enormous volumes of water very quickly...the most common way a tsunami is formed.

In Crichton’s book the really really bad guy heads up a global environmental organisation. The underlying action that provides the fiendish plot for the novel involves three earth shattering natural disasters...each timed to take place on the first morning of a conference on Abrupt Climate Change...a lightning-induced flash flood in Yellowstone National Park, an enormous ice floe breaking off from a glacier in Antarctica and...you are there before me...a tsunami activated by giant Hypersonic Cavitators placed on the seabed off the Island of Gareda.