A cunning plan (no turnip involved)

In a world where the lunatics have not only taken over the asylum, but are clearly intent on returning it to the Dark Ages, it is easy to become disheartened.  But there is something the rest of the world can do to fight Trump's short-sighted environmental menace.  Just suppose that all of America's trading partners got together and agreed to impose a climate tax of say 10% on all imported American products, to be lifted only if the US lives up to its commitments under the Paris climate change agreement.

Could this happen?  It may sound an impossible dream to get so many countries to agree on anything, but if they could overcome their differences to set up the Paris agreement, then it can be done again.  After all, the stakes could not be higher - the Earth's sustainability as a habitat for life.  Our life.  Spread the idea.

Infinite Wisdom

Despite its generally pro-Beijing editorial stance in recent years, on the whole the South China Morning Post has done a fair job of covering the Occupy movement.  However, one sentence in today's account of the clearance of the Mongkok protest site defies the laws of physics:

Since Portland Street and Nathan Road run parallel to each other, they can only intersect at infinity!

Another thing I noticed in the Post's latest online poll - 3 of the responses here are favourable to the police, and only 2 unfavourable; there is no neutral choice on offer.  And while I don't believe most cops are bad, "Poor" is a very mild description of the stupidity, incompetence and brutality we have seen from a a few of them in the past three weeks.  "Bloody awful" should have been one of the offered choices.

I suspect the results (54% negative, 46% positive) owe more to attitudes towards the protests than directly towards the police.  There are some sociopaths on the pro-government side who would be perfectly happy for them to replicate the Tiananmen massacre on Hong Kong soil (well, tarmac).  If the police cut off Joshua Wong's and Benny Tai's heads and paraded them around Central they would consider it an excellent performance.

Old Boys Network

Chief Excutive CY Leung today refuted criticism that his recent round of appointments to public bodies was a case of "jobs for the boys", pointing out that one of his highly qualified cronies appointed was in fact a girl.

Seriously, look at this: Vincent Lo succeeds Marvin Cheung as Chairman of the Airport Authority for one year, at which time Jack So will take over.  In the meantime Jack So remains Chairman of the Trade Development Council until mid-2015, when he will be succeeded by:  (pause for fanfare) - Vincent Lo!  Also popping up as a new member of the Airport Authority is that rather unpleasant character Franklin Lam, whom we thought we'd happily seen the last of when he resigned from the Executive Council after it emerged that he'd sold a couple of flats shortly before the government imposed additional stamp duty to cool the property market.

Lam is also one of the mad bunch who want to smother our country parks with concrete and encourage even more mainland tourists to flood Hong Kong.  He and Lo were on the (previously) losing side of a battle with Marvin Cheung over plans to develop a new shopping mall at the airport - we can probably assume, therefore, that the new appointments reflect the government's support for constructing yet more shops selling overpriced luxury crap to yet more unwanted visitors.

Meanwhile CY's campaign manager Fanny Law becomes chairwoman of the board of the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation, while solicitor Larry Kwok, who "has been serving in many Government commissions" (in other words is another one of the boys), becomes the new Chairman of the "Independent" Police Complaints Council.  Secretary for Security Lai Tung-kwok argues that the Council's professional secretariat will somehow ensure Kwok's impartiality.

In a city of seven million talented people, why are appointments to public bodies so often drawn from the same incestuous little pool of (sometimes ethically-challenged) yes-men (and occasionally women)?

Without Exception - Except...

US Republican Representative Joe Walsh (not the rock star of the same name) is, he says, "pro-life without exception".  And in his view that means not only the widely accepted exceptions for rape and incest, but even cases where the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother.  Like his party colleague Todd Akin, who famously and wrongly argued that women's bodies are able to prevent pregnancy in cases of rape, Walsh shows an alarming ignorance of female physiology.  Apparently he believes that medicine has advanced to the point where no woman's life is endangered by pregnancy.

If Walsh had been able to impose his ignorance on my sister-in-law, who suffered an ectopic pregnancy a few years ago, she would be dead now instead of the healthy mother of two young children born subsequent to the operation that saved her.  I can't help wondering why any woman would support the Republican Party when such ignorant prejudice is becoming increasingly characteristic of its leading figures.

In fact I have difficulty understanding the entire mentality of the so-called pro-life movement.  The same people who are most fiercely opposed to abortion in any circumstances are often also opposed to sex education and even to convenient access to contraception, making it likely that more women will experience unwanted pregnancies which they will seek to terminate.

But the contradictions don't end there.  If Walsh is really "pro-life without exception", why does he belong to the party that plans a massive increase in America's military budget (contrary to its claims to want to reduce the country's budget deficit).  And why is it also the party more supportive of capital punishment?  It seems that "without exception" really means "without exception unless the child is already born, in which case it's OK to put them into uniform and send them off to be cannon fodder somewhere; or OK to strap them to a gurney and inject them with lethal drugs".  And this in the name of a god who said "blessed are the peacemakers" and commanded his followers to love their enemies.

Whether all this is hypocrisy or just stupidity, I will leave you to decide.  But I hope American electors will think about it when they choose who to vote for this year.

You learn something new every day

Did you know that a zebra's stripes form concentric rings around the base of its tail? No? Neither did I until I came face to face - well, face to backside - with this specimen.


So much to learn, so little time...

Debate or Denial?

As the great Climate Change Conference opens in Copenhagen, one of Hong Kong's TV stations (I can't remember which) used the term "climate change deniers" in a news broadcast.

This is a singularly unhelpful term in the context. It is clearly intended to resonate with the term "Holocaust denier", but we are dealing with a very different phenomenon here. The Holocaust is a historical fact, attested to by thousands of reliable witnesses who survived Hitler's death camps, the testimony of Allied forces who liberated them, the confessions of camp guards, and numerous Nazi historical documents. Those who deny that it occurred are either deluded loonies, or more commonly evil racists seeking to whitewash the reputation of the Nazi regime.

Climate change is not a solid fact in this sense. It is an interpretation of masses of statistical observations, which means that more than one interpretation is possible. The majority of climatologists concur on it, but those who do not are better described as sceptics than deniers. In fact there are several levels of interpretation at work:

1. Climate change is occurring, i.e. substantial long term change in prevailing patterns of temperature, precipitation and wind strength and direction, as opposed to periodic shorter term fluctuations in local weather patterns. Most scientists agree that we are now seeing long term global warming, though some diagree, and some even posit the opposite - global cooling.
2. Given that global warming is occurring, human activity is responsible for (or a major contributor to) it. Again the scientific consensus agrees with this interpretation, but again there are dissenters. The general view is that the rise in the emission of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, is a key factor in causing rising temperatures.
3. This warming is having, or will have, a disastrous effect on humans and the many other creatures with which they share the planet.
   
4. Given this, we should change our behaviour to mitigate the effects. Here we begin to move from scientific to moral and political questions. Some prominent voices have suggested that we should just "get used to the idea" - not a view, I suspect, that will be shared by people in countries such as Bangladesh and the Maldives, or cities like New Orleans, which could largely vanish with a rise of a few feet in sea level.

The fact is that propositions 1 through 3 above are generally agreed to be the best interpretation we have of the available data, but they are not "facts" in the sense that the Holocaust is. In the nature of scientific method (something sadly misunderstood by most laymen), they are open to challenge and alternative hypotheses. The debate will and should continue, and it is neither fair nor logical to stigmatise those who do not share the prevailing view as "deniers". ( I was intending to compare this scientific debate with those over the tobacco/cancer and HIV/AIDS findings, but will save that for another day.)

What does this mean for proposition 4? In my view, regardless of the fact that climate change may eventually be disproved, we should continue to act for now as if it is a proven fact. If it turns out to be a false alarm, we will have at least cleaned up much of our atmospheric pollution and developed new cleaner sources of energy, while doing no harm. If not, our actions now may make the difference betwen the survival and extinction of the human race.