Tag: United Kingdom

Climatology-Watching: Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research

[from Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research]

UK’s climate change readiness has made ‘significant progress’

by Renee Karunungan on May 4, 2022

There is significant progress in the UK for reporting and implementing climate change adaptation, according to a new study led by Tyndall UEA’s Katie Jenkins. Katie has created an Adaptation Inventory of adaptation actions happening based on official records of adaptation projects being implemented by both public and private sector, accompanied by  a systematic review of the peer-reviewed literature of adaptation case studies.

Adapting to climate change means taking action to prepare for and adjust to current and predicted effects of climate change. Adaptation plays an important role in managing past, present and future climate risk and impacts. However, there is an “adaptation gap” where the distance between existing adaptation efforts versus adaptation needs is widening, according to the United Nations Environment Programme’s Adaptation Gap Report. Tracking national adaptation plans is deemed critical to support future decision-making and drive future actions.

Studies of adaptation consider the UK at the forefront of adaptation planning, setting an early example with the Climate Change Act 2008 which contains a five-year cycle of adaptation planning, published as the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment. Evidence from the UK Climate Change Committee shows that adaptation action has failed to keep pace with increasing climate risks. 

According to the Committee’s assessment, adaptation planning for 2C and 4C global warming is not happening, and that the gap between future risks and planned adaptation has widened, delivering the minimum level of resilience.

Katie’s new Adaptation Inventory provides insight on what is currently being implemented, which helps policymakers and practitioners learn from existing knowledge and practical case studies.

“The Adaptation Inventory provides a consistent and easily searchable database which will continue to evolve. It can provide evidence on the specific types of adaptation implemented on the ground as well as provide more detailed insight into the specific examples of action being implemented. This has the potential to help and inform UK-based decision-making,” Katie said.

The Adaptation Inventory identifies and documents current and planned adaptation in the UK, and how it is being implemented through adaptation actions, the sectors where adaptation is occurring, and where the gaps remain. There were 360 adaptation actions identified in the Inventory, comprising 134 adaptation types. Out of these 360 adaptation actions, 80% have already been implemented.

The private sector accounts for 74% of the actions with water companies dominating. Regulatory frameworks, standards, and reporting requirements are key drivers required by water companies by the Regulator. For example, water companies are already required to plan their resilience to drought.

The most common types of adaptation actions are flood protection (12%), leakage reduction (4%), water metering (3%), property level flood protection (3%), operational improvements (3%), and back-up generators (3%). Most actions were categorized as structural and physical interventions. Other interventions were categorized as technological and ecosystem based. 

An example of a structural adaptation action is raising boat landings to address higher tides because of rising sea levels. For an example of technology, London Transport has installed air cooling units and mechanical chillers at two key busy tube stations to address heat stress. An ecosystem-based example  introduces barley straw to reservoirs to control blue green algae, more common with warmer summers.

The Adaptation Inventory also looks at the types of climate hazards being addressed. It found that 76% of the actions were in response to drought, 26% for extreme rainfall, 13% for flooding, and 11% for higher temperatures. One example of adaptation for drought is rainwater recovery using storage facilities available on the site, reducing the demand for fresh water during drought. For alleviating flooding, a water company is using afforestation. The London Underground has doubled the capacity of ventilation shafts on the Victoria line, which provide more air flow on hot days.

Education and the World As “Rorschach Test”

The Rorschach test is a projective psychological test in which subjects’ perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both. Some psychologists use this test to examine a person’s personality characteristics and emotional functioning.

It is also called “an Inkblot test.”

We use this test as a metaphor that suggests that people see what they want to see and choose to see.

Here’s an example based on the Verdi opera La Forza del Destino. The black intellectual leader, William E.B. Du Bois, sees it as a veiled racial story where Professor Niall Ferguson of Stanford/Harvard tells the story of how he emerged from a performance of the opera on the very day that Britain devalued the pound sterling in 1992.

Black Wednesday refers to September 16, 1992, when a collapse in the pound sterling forced Britain to withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (European Monetary System).

Thus the opera, La Forza del Destino is both a Verdi opera and a kind of “raw material” for personal and private interpretation with Du Bois seeing racism and Ferguson seeing national or financial fate.

La Forza del Destino or The Power of Fate, (often translated The Force of Destiny) is an Italian opera by Giuseppe Verdi. The libretto was written by Francesco Maria Piave based on a Spanish drama, Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino (1835), by Ángel de Saavedra, 3rd Duke of Rivas, with a scene adapted from Friedrich Schiller’s Wallensteins Lager. It was first performed in the Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre of Saint Petersburg, Russia, on 10 November, 1862 O.S. (N.S. 22 November).

(Wikipedia)

Synopsis—Act 1

The mansion of Leonora’s family, in Seville.

Don Alvaro is a young nobleman from South America (presumably Peru) who is part Indian and who has settled in Seville where he is not very well regarded.

He falls in love with Donna Leonora, the daughter of the Marquis of Calatrava, but Calatrava is determined that she shall marry only a man of the highest birth. Despite knowing her father’s aversion to Alvaro, Leonora is deeply in love with him, and she determines to give up her home and country in order to elope with him. In this endeavor, she is aided by her confidante, Curra. (Me pellegrina ed orfana—“Exiled and orphaned far from my childhood home”).

When Alvaro arrives to fetch Leonora, she hesitates: she wants to elope with him, but part of her wants to stay with her father; she eventually pulls herself together, ready for their elopement. However, the Marquis unexpectedly enters and discovers Leonora and Alvaro together. He threatens Alvaro with death, and in order to remove any suspicion as to Leonora’s purity, Alvaro surrenders himself. As he flings down his pistol, it goes off, mortally wounding the Marquis, who dies cursing his daughter.

This is the racial aspect on which W.E.B. Du Bois focuses.

Niall Ferguson, by contrast, sees a different “Rorschach inkblot” and hones in on the financial policy story which went like this:

“Soros’ Quantum Fund began a massive sell-off of pounds on Tuesday, 15 September 1992. The Exchange Rate Mechanism stated that the Bank of England was required to accept any offers to sell pounds. However, the Bank of England only accepted orders during the trading day. When the markets opened in London the next morning, the Bank of England began their attempt to prop up their currency as per the decision made by Norman Lamont and Robin Leigh-Pemberton, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer and Governor of the Bank of England respectively. They began buying orders to the amount of 300 million pounds twice before 8:30 AM to little effect.

The Bank of England’s intervention was ineffective because Soros’ Quantum Fund was dumping pounds far faster. The Bank of England continued to buy and Quantum continued to sell until Lamont told Prime Minister John Major that their pound purchasing was failing to produce results.

At 10:30 AM on 16 September, the British government announced a rise in the base interest rate from an already high 10 to 12 percent to tempt speculators to buy pounds. Despite this and a promise later the same day to raise base rates again to 15 percent, dealers kept selling pounds, convinced that the government would not stick with its promise. By 7:00 that evening, Norman Lamont, then Chancellor, announced Britain would leave the ERM and rates would remain at the new level of 12 percent; however, on the next day the interest rate was back on 10%.

It was later revealed that the decision to withdraw had been agreed at an emergency meeting during the day between Norman Lamont, Prime Minister John Major, Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, President of the Board of Trade Michael Heseltine, and Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke (the latter three all being staunch pro-Europeans as well as senior Cabinet Ministers), and that the interest rate hike to 15% had only been a temporary measure to prevent a rout in the pound that afternoon.”

For W.E.B. Du Bois, the story within the story of the Verdi opera is the color-line that governs the world, while Ferguson sees the story as a “dramatic” instance of financial and economic force or working out of trends that becomes a destiny.

Hence people see what they choose to see and interpreting and seeing are wrapped up in each other.

Students should assimilate this aspect of the world.

Note: one source of the Du Bois interpretation of the opera comes from the University of Chicago book, Travels in the Reich: 1933-1945 (edited by Oliver Lubrich, 2012) which has a chapter on Du Bois in Germany in the thirties where he plunges into music and opera and highlights this Verdi one.

Education and Hegemonial Struggles

Dominance by Design, by Professor Michael Adas, is a very “intellectually useful” overview of the American thrust towards world domination by force, whether through the backdoor (covert means) or through the front door (invasion of Iraq in 2003, etc).

Michael Adas is the Abraham E. Voorhees Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

“Long before the United States became a major force in global affairs, Americans believed in their superiority over others due to their inventiveness, productivity, and economic and social well-being. U.S. expansionists assumed a mandate to “civilize” non-Western peoples by demanding submission to American technological prowess and design. As an integral part of America’s national identity and sense of itself in the world, this civilizing mission provided the rationale to displace the Indians from much of our continent, to build an island empire in the Pacific and Caribbean, and to promote unilateral—at times military—interventionism throughout Asia. In our age of “smart bombs” and mobile warfare, technological aptitude remains preeminent in validating America’s global mission.

Michael Adas brilliantly pursues the history of this mission through America’s foreign relations over nearly four centuries from North America to the Philippines, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. The belief that it is our right and destiny to remake foreign societies in our image has endured from the early decades of colonization to our current crusade to implant American-style democracy in the Muslim Middle East.

Dominance by Design explores the critical ways in which technological superiority has undergirded the U.S.’s policies of unilateralism, preemption, and interventionism in foreign affairs and raised us from an impoverished frontier nation to a global power. Challenging the long-held assumptions and imperatives that sustain the civilizing mission, Adas gives us an essential guide to America’s past and present role in the world as well as cautionary lessons for the future.”

(Harvard University Press, 2009)

The whole issue of hegemonial struggles (as opposed to left-wing emphasis on “class struggles”) is very eye-opening in terms of achieving a more comprehensive understanding of the newspapers and history books themselves.

For example, Paul Kennedy’s book, “The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism: 1860-1914” (1980) is a very important book in giving us this layer of reality which complicates the parallel layer of globalization forces from 1870-1914.

Globalization narrowly speaking is about econo-technical changes unifying prices and other economic variables, while hegemonial struggles involve the struggle for mastery by rival countries or blocs.

This book gives an account of the rivalry between Great Britain and Germany in the period leading to the First World War. It gives readers a thorough comparison of the two societies, their political cultures, economies, party politics, courts, the role of the press and pressure groups, and so on.

Hegemonial rivalries between nations, blocs, empires are a key “motor” in world history and globalization and this rivalry are entwined at all times. Holistic education is partly the understanding of how entwining governs the world around us, in all areas.

Is Poetry Sometimes Informative in a Special Way?

The Case of “Dover Beach”

In the previous “Durkheim Anomie” post we saw the following lines:

“In Durkheim’s view, traditional religions often provided the basis for the shared values which the anomic individual lacks. Furthermore, he argued that the division of labor that had been prevalent in economic life since the Industrial Revolution led individuals to pursue egoistic ends rather than seeking the good of a larger community.”

Along these lines, the great English critic Matthew Arnold senses the rise of an anarchic anomie nightmare world coming into view as the old anchors such as religious beliefs crumble away:

Dover Beach

by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the celebrated headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator.

Born: December 24, 1822, Laleham, Staines-upon-Thames, United Kingdom
Died: April 15, 1888, Liverpool, United Kingdom

What We Mean by “Towards a Composite Understanding of Education”

(MI slogan, motto or catchphrase)

Let’s be concrete and start with the title of the classic 1978 book by the Princeton professor and 1979 Nobel Prize winner, Sir Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913 (introduced in the previous essay on “Looking Backwards and Forwards at the Same Time”).

Notice the following other dimensions that have to be included to “compositize” our understanding:

  1. The period 1870-1913/4 is called Globalization I by economic historians. Globalization in this view is not about Marco Polo, but the rise of world prices, such as for wheat.

  2. Paul Kennedy (Yale), who is known for his Rise and Fall of the Great Powers classic, wrote a tighter book called The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914 (1980), described as follows:

    “This book gives an account of the rivalry between Great Britain and Germany in the period leading to the First World War. It gives readers a thorough comparison of the two societies, their political cultures, economies, party politics, courts, the role of the press and pressure groups, and so on. …”

  3. The first treaty between a European power and an Asian country was signed in 1902, “The Anglo-Japanese Alliance.”

    “In this book, Professor Nish deals with one of the most important aspects of far eastern politics in the critical period between 1894 and 1907. His object is to demonstrate how Britain and Japan, at first separately and later jointly, reacted to Russian encroachments in China and east Asia; he is concerned also with the policies of the other European powers and of the U.S., to whose hostility towards the Anglo-Japanese alliance after 1905 Britain showed…”

  4. The first defeat of a European by an Asian nation (i.e., the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5). The famous Indian writer Pankaj Mishra wrote a recent book on this, showing how this defeat of a European country sent shock waves through the world and especially through the anti-colonial movements of Asia and Africa…

  5. Partition of Africa:

    “Between 1870 and 1914 the whole of Africa, apart from one or two small areas, was partitioned by the European powers.”

    (David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914, 1978, Penguin Books, page 203)

  6. Rise of Suburbia:

    “The 1890s saw the coming of the first electric trams, the first “tubes,” and the first motor-cars. By 1914, almost any provincial city of any size had its electric trams, mostly under municipal control, and London had its buses and underground (i.e., subway). “These changes in urban transport created suburbia.”

    (David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914, 1978, Penguin Books, page 202)

In other words, the world itself is a crisscrossing composite of processes at different scales.

We have growth and fluctuations, the partition of Africa, suburbanization, Anglo-German tensions, techno-revolutions (including those in urban transport), interacting with Globalization I.

All of this culminated in the “guns of August” (i.e., World War I).

We are downstream from World War I, what the Germans call the “Urkatastrophe” (i.e., original calamity), and its reincarnation in World War II and its progeny, the Cold War.

The more you can “compositize” the elements of this “historical matrix,” the deeper your MetaIntelligence will be. Hence the catchphrase for the MI site:

“Towards a Composite Understanding of Education”

How to See Fundamental Tension in the World Easily

People-Class Part II

A few years ago, in 2006, there was a first rate movie called The Last King of Scotland with the great black American actor, Forest Whitaker, playing barbaric Idi Amin Dada Oumee who destroyed the life of the Asian community in Uganda in the 1970s.

This great actor later appeared on the TV talk show, The Charlie Rose Show. Charlie Rose and Whitaker were discussing the movie and Rose denounces Idi Amin as the mad barbarian he was.

But Whitaker objects and says, “You gotta keep in mind, Charlie, that more than 90% of Ugandan commerce was in Asian hands and the situation was not viable.”

We have here a simple way of seeing our world more clearly since commerce is a cosmopolitan activity of business people whereas “ethnonational” considerations (expressed by Whitaker) are tribal and backward or inward looking and not conducive to cosmopolitanism.

Somebody once made the quip that the world, country by country, is divided into the tribal “ethnonational” Serbs (so to speak) in conflict with the “cosmopolitans.”

In this vocabulary Trump and Trumpism are “Serbian.” He will decide who is and who is not a “real American.”

Go back to our essay on the concept of “people–class” and all the attendant genocidal murders. (Uganda under Amin being the example we’re mindful of here).

Ethnonationalism (e.g., “Serbian” style anti-cosmopolitanism) is of course exactly what is at war with cosmopolitan or internationalist global trends and commercial chains which makes it nativist. Populism refers to that connected sense that the elites (in the worst case, “The Davos Crowd”) are trying to destroy the real people (e.g., “Trump’s America”) via their internationalist or cosmopolitan attitudes and behaviors.

Thus the movie The Last King of Scotland and the discussions it engendered are very “canonical” or educational in laying forth this “civil war” everywhere.

Thinking of a group as a “people–class” tells you that Idi Amin or Rwanda 1994 belligerence (i.e., ethnonationalism) is being stoked by politicians to create “hatred opportunities” like Trump did. Trump’s idea was to use hatred as a “wave maker” that he could ride. The Trump voters created a nativist/populist cult figure in Trump. He would protect them from the outside world and globalism by ethnonationalism.

Forest Steven Whitaker (born July 15, 1961) is an American actor, producer, director, and activist. He is the recipient of such accolades as an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a British Academy Film Award, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.

After making his film debut in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Whitaker went on to earn a reputation for intensive character study work for films such as Bird; Good Morning, Vietnam; The Crying Game; Platoon; Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai; The Great Debaters; The Butler; Arrival; and Respect. He has also appeared in blockbusters such as Panic Room, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story as Saw Gerrera and Black Panther as Zuri. For his portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the British historical drama film The Last King of Scotland (2006), Whitaker won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Wikipedia