Thinking Ahead

With so many looming disasters to chose from in international affairs and finance as well as an increasingly chaotic political situation it is anybody’s guess which might be pick of the day or week.

One choice item is the appointment of a Belgian economist to the European Central Bank to head up its economic policy team. There is a joke about Belgian economists having to work out their theories in several different languages none of which can make sense of the conclusions.

It was the Daily Mail which came up with one story, the content of which was derived largely from the Wikipedia entry, on the Laacher See, a lake in Germany to the west of Koblenz apparently situated in an ancient volcanic crater. It has begun to fizz a bit and volcano experts suggest that as the last blow was 12,900 years ago and it is overdue this could be another worry.

It is potentially a big one. The last time it went up much of Northern Europe was plastered with ash and this coincided with the Younger Dryas, a very cold spell that lasted a long while. They say that whether the two are connected is speculative. Barclays probably are now pricing the risk and trying to hedge on the Asian markets.

Meanwhile Katla Volcano in Iceland, also Wikipedia has slipped out of the news but is still twitchy and the experts are keeping their cards on the table. Quite how big it might be is not known, probably enough to ground a lot of air traffic for up to a month. This would suggest a holiday season might be worth betting on.

One of my family cheerily reminded me of the Cumbre Vieja volcanic ridge in La Palma in the Canary Islands which has been studied closely. One theory is that if there is a major slip of territory following volcanic activity the ensuing tsunami would wipe out a great deal of the Eastern seaboard of the USA and much of Southern England. The Thames Barrier would not be a lot of help.

Historically, these things can come together. For example Ijen in Indonesia is on the move and can put up a lot stuff in the sky. This one went up in 1817 two years after the Mount Tambora one had radical effects on the world climate and this had followed an 1812 big one in South America. The onset of the Little Ice Age at the beginning of the 14th Century is suggested as the consequence of a series of events of this kind.

One thing that we have been confident about for a while it that we thought we all knew who or what we were, given a few trivial points of detail. But it seems that our past is more mixed that we ever thought:

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/hominids/2011/12/top-10-hominid-discoveries-of-2011/

So whilst in the past we asked where have they all gone, the question now might be how far are they still with us?

Volcanoes And Other Fall Outs.

Well, I called Iceland right and for those looking for follow-up Bill McGuire in today’s “Times Online”, Friday 16th April has a good piece in the Comment section titled “A Few Grounded Planes, We Got Off Lightly”. Bill is a man for whom I have a great deal of respect.

What else has been going on? Not much really, so last night we put on a saved programme “Beautiful Minds” second out of three from BBC4 dealing with James Lovelock, the individualist scientist whose insights and Gaia Theory attract so much debate. He was telling us that we are all doomed in the nicest possible way.

For a more local type of doom Market Oracle dot co dot uk on 13th April has a long and detailed analysis by Nadeem Walayat, titled “Britain’s Accelerating Trend Towards High Inflation And Debt Default Bankruptcy”. It is a subject you do not hear a lot about although it is touched on by some people who tell us that they can increase and cut public spending at the same time without increasing taxes to inconvenient levels and let us all have all the presents we want for whatever festive season is appropriate.

There are other things we do not want to talk about in front of the children or those of a nervous disposition. There is Afgh….(shush!!!)..There is the £500 billion needed to sort out all that infrastructure and there I was thinking the Olympics were the key investment. There are other things as well. “Care In The Community” is on the verge of collapse. The NHS has abandoned and stopped bothering about anything that does not require targets to meet set by media advisers in London.

Around the web there is a good deal of mention of knob twiddling on TV. The thesis is rather than thought or analysis we should all base our political responses on the instant of time we react to the personalities involved. So what promises might have prompted me to hit the top buttons?

Free beer for the workers! Ban binge drinking! Spend more on OAP’s, Education roads and social services! Cut local government expenditure! Hang the Kaiser! Unify with Germany! Bring the troops home! Declare war on Russia! Hang the bankers! Easy credit for all! Tear down the barriers to foreign investment! Keep British firms British! End celebrity culture! Give peerages to game show and TV reality show entrants! The list could be endless.

At last the plumbing work in the bathroom has just been finished. I think will go and sit there quietly for a while, if only to avoid the fall-out.

The Planet, Earthquakes and Climate.

Could the picture above be London in 2020? The web site Armageddononline Dot Org featured an item a few days ago setting out the areas where a major earthquake might be due which would have serious effects. This follows the tragedy of the Haiti event to say that they happen and more often than we think in our day to day short term world. Within the week of that item the Chile ‘quake struck.


Ever since I went on broadband I have been following the USGS site and others. The experts know where many of the most vulnerable areas are but not all. They know that something will happen, but not exactly where or when. However, politicians and the media want certainty and this is not on the agenda of the geophysicists.


The USGS shows the big ‘quakes, 6+ in red and there are more than people think. The great majority are at sea and deep down, resulting only in faint tremors on any land and a few small waves at sea. Some are closer to land causing problems and then some happen within land masses. As humanity has taken more and more of the land masses to live on with much of this close to the coast and waterways then more and more of us are affected.


What I have learned is that when there are a longer run of days when a 6+ ‘quake does not appear then it is just a question of where and how big. This time it was Chile which was followed quickly by another in Japanese waters. The experts are still unsure as to how far a big one in one vulnerable area can lead to another far away so who can say what comes next. There are plenty of choices.


The physics of planetary uncertainty apply also to climate and some argue to any complex and essentially uncertain activity, for example international finance. There is now a bitter and muddling debate over which way the inevitable climate change will go which has spilled over into politics and international rivalry. Warmer is very possible and figures point that way but for contrarians the Armageddon site had an article "Ice age is overdue - could start in five years, suggests a Croat scientist” on 26 February 2010.


Quote:


A leading scientist has revealed that Europe could be just five years away from the start of a new Ice Age. While climate change campaigners say global warming is the planet's biggest danger, renowned physicist Vladimir Paar says most of central Europe will soon be covered in ice.
The freeze will be so complete that people will be able to walk from England to Ireland or across the North Sea from Scotland to northern Europe. Professor Paar, from Croatia's Zagreb University, has spent decades analysing previous ice ages in Europe and what caused them.


"Most of Europe will be under ice, including Germany, Poland, France, Austria, Slovakia and a part of Slovenia," said the professor in an interview with the Index.hr


Is an ice age overdue?


"Previous ice ages lasted about 70,000 years. That's a fact and the new ice age can't be avoided. "The big question is what will happen to the people of the Central European countries which will be under ice?
"They might migrate to the south, or might stay, but with a huge increase in energy use," he warned. "This could happen in five, 10, 50 or 100 years, or even later. We can't predict it precisely, but it will come," he added.
And the professor said that scientists think global warming is simply a natural part of the planet. "What I mean is that global warming is natural. Some 130,000 years ago the earth's temperature was the same as now, the level of CO2 was almost the same and the level of the sea was four metres higher.
"They keep warning people about global warming, but half of America no longer believes it as they keep freezing," he said.


Unquote.


Just as well we kept all our winter woollies, now to check out our savings.