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.