Flat-lining climate change

A new international climate change conference has come and gone in New york - so quickly you may not even have noticed it - after all it only lasted for one day.  It was the first major conference on the subject since the infamous gathering in Copenhagen in 2009, which as the Washington post's foreign policy magazine says, "ended with a dismal, eleventh-hour whimper".  

This meeting was an attempt to "defibrillate" an issue which has been flat-lining for several years, and was attended by over 100 heads of state, including the dutiful President Obama, but conspicuously absent were the heads of state of the new emerging big polluters, India and China, although the later did send a deputy prime minister.

There were a few big but almost ritualistic street processions and demonstrations leading up to the meeting, but from the meeting itself, hardly even a statement or communique.


If the issue of climate change, a few years ago, was literally such a burning issue, with bitter confrontations between climate change believers and climate sceptics, why does it arouse so little passion now?  Is it so polarised and politicised, with emerging nations suspicious that the whole idea is a conspiracy by the old rich countries to inhibit their economic growth and hold them back?  What right has the West to tell India to hold back their greenhouse gas emissions?

Is there the weary realisation that even if climate change is occurring, there is no proof that man's economic activities are responsible for it, and even if they were, there is nothing we can really do about it? The data that for the last five years or so there is little evidence of increase in temperatures or atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide?  

Or the inescapable conclusion that at the present time 'green' energy is too expensive, unless offset by huge subsidies which cash-strapped Western governments are increasingly loath to come up with, and too miniscule to make any significant contribution to a country's total energy needs (in no case, do wind turbines provide more than 2% to electricity generation), and the cancellation or shelving of grand projects, such as that to bring solar electric power from the north African Sahara to Europe?

Clothes, social issues and everything else are subject to fashion, and climate change is well, so... 2004, like Al Gore - remember him?
It seems that even the real problems of climate change will be shelved for at least another half century or more.  The fact is that the world is living, as Jack Lew said, in a golden age of fossil fuels.  There is still plenty of oil, and with fracking, a huge amount of gas.  When the last drop of oil or the last cubic centimetre of gas is burned, the world will turn to green energy.  Until then, not seriously.

A forgotten Namibian world record?

Those who follow football, with special reference to the woes of Manchester United (how could they get beaten 5-3 by the minor side of Leicester after having been 3-1 up?) may have missed a game on Sunday, because it was not part of the English Premier League but the lesser known Capital 1 Cup, and I am not sure it was even broadcast live on DSTV.    It was a game of Liverpool against another northern city of Middlesborough, and thirty 30 kicks were needed to decide the game, Liverpool eventually the victor by 14 to 13.
It was rightly hailed as an epic shoot-out, but it was not the longest of all time in a professional match.  That honour belongs to Namibia.  I actually don't remember it - maybe I was out of the country at the time, but it was January 2005 and the match was KK Palace v FC Civics Windhoek - KK Palace won 17-16, a shoot-out involving 48 kicks, after a 2-2 draw after full and extra time.
This is a tally officially acknowledged as a world record.  KK Palace ultimately held their nerve to win the cup. According to the Times of London, Titus Kunamuene, the head of competitions at the Namibian FA, spoke for many inside the ground when he told CNN: “At the end of the game, everybody was more relieved than anything else.”

See: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/sport/football/article4216623.ece 

Independence for Scotland?

Scotland is the northern half of the island of Great Britain (why 'Great' Britain?  not because of past imperial glories but to distinguish between Lesser Britain, which is Brittany in France).  It has achieved a fame and character totally out of proportion to its size - barely five million people, a tenth of the population of Britain and a tenth of its economy - but everyone throughout the world knows about kilts, bagpipes and whisky and Scottish food such as shortbread and 'haggis'.  Scottish inventions include the steam engine, tarmac roads, television, the telephone, antibiotics; not to mention Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electromagnetism, without which modern civilisation would not be possible.  Its people speak English with a very distinctive accent and they also have their own ancestral language (Gaelic).  If you go there it does actually feel like a different country.  But - does it deserve independence from the rest of the 'United Kingdom' - comprising at present England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Island? (southern island having of course long since broken away to form its own republic, after centuries of blood and oppression from their supposed unionist compatriots).
Scotland today votes in a referendum on independence.  If it votes 'yes' - and as you have maybe read in the media, the polls are very close, the consequences will be serious, some may say calamitous.  How did it come to this?  A couple of years back, David Cameron considering himself a consummate politician, thought he could scupper the independence movement in Scotland, by offering a referendum which he thought he was certain to win, given that the supporters of independence were in a definite minority.  That was the case until a few weeks ago, when poor tactics by the 'no' to independence campaign, allowed the 'yes' movement to appeal to the heart and emotions of the Scottish people (and by definition, 'yes' always sounds more positive than 'no') so that now the result is too close to call, as they say on TV.  So the whole affair might backfire on Mr. Cameron, and if it does, he will go down in history as the British prime minister who lost half his country.
The domestic debate on this issue centres around the local economy, the national health service etc, but what concerns us at a distance should be the matter of separatist movements around the world, which generally cause great suffering, social disruption, damage to the economy and often leading to armed rebellion, displacement of populations and civil war, with no good end result.  We can think of the Biafran war in Nigeria, the 'tamil tigers' in Sri Lanka, the FARC in Columbia and of course our own abortive Caprivian 'independence' movement, which after fifteen years is still dragging through the courts, and refugees still living in Botswana.
Although the independence movement in Scotland has so far been non violent, it cannot be denied that if it succeeds the consequences will be serious, firstly to Scotland itself, because many of the big businesses and financial institutions there have threatened to move 'south of the border' if Scotland breaks away.  The rest of the UK will be weakened (can for instance the 'less-united Kingdom' retain its permanent seat on the UN security council?) the EU will be weakened, the Western alliance will be weakened, and many countries in the world will be concerned about the 'inspiration' this will give to their own separatist movements, for instance in Spain.
Meanwhile China and Mr. Putin must be quietly smiling at the sight of a western country trying to pull itself to pieces.  China does not tolerate separatists - it is one of their most serious crimes - can you imagine a referendum on Tibetan independence? - and the Ukraine crisis has arisen because Russia considers Ukraine to be a historic and cultural part of itself, so that its move towards the west and the EU is countered as a 'separatist' movement which cannot be countenanced.
Let us hope that sanity prevails and the 'no' to Scottish independence succeeds today.  But either way, damage will have been done.

Investment for dummies

Apologies for any infringement of copyright first of all, as I am sure the above must be a title of a book, or many.

I attended a very pleasant breakfast presentation given by EMH Prescient, the fund managers.  This was informative and featured many formidable looking graphs, a bit much to take in on one sitting.  However I was mainly preoccupied with the thought - why does the ordinary person never seem to make any money on the stock exchange, 'funds' or other 'investments'? 

There is the old joke that whenever there is a big investment conference, the fund managers arrive in their Mercedes and Bentleys, and the clients arrive in their Toyotas.  In question time I referred to my wife's experience as a generic example of an unhappy 'investment' experience  Some ten years ago she had an amount of £60000 (currently about N$ 1 million) to invest.  She had an experienced financial consultant, and bought a few speculative stocks but mostly international blue chips, in hard currency.  The investment was monitored fairly often, but the net result at the end of ten years was that the £60000 had turned into £45000, in fact she would have been far better of keeping her funds under the bed.  At least she didn't lose all her money.  How can this be?

To try to understand this, I met up again with Melanie Allen, the MD of EMH Prescient, to ask the question -what goes wrong with investors and investments, at least when 'amateurs' make them?  Melanie replied that several points must be borne in mind.  Firstly, the investment regulatory environment has been tightened up considerably from a few years ago.  Then, for instance, anyone, a retired teacher or policeman could rent a one roomed office and put a plate on the door saying Financial Consultant.  Now, this is less easy and will soon be legally impossible.

Second, it is impossible for an ordinary person to know all the factors, which can range from technical to financial to political, to the global economy and to subjective public perception, which affect a company's stock price.  Yes, some shares do increase by 10% overnight, but the amateur investor is not going to get that 10% - it is swallowed up by the professionals.  You do need to take the advice of consultants, or spread the risk over a portfolio containing a wide spread of interests.

Third, there is the tendency to think that fields are 'greener' the further away they are.  In other words, they like to invest in international stocks quoted in foreign currencies.  Not only are the factors affecting the stocks price of global corporations even more impenetrable, you run the further risk of being burned by exchange rate fluctuations.  Fourth, investors should be patient and stay with with investment for the medium or long term.  If you have put funds away for a five year period, do not panic over their performance after the first year etc.

Then there is the suspicion that the average person will never show a profit from your investment, because any profits will be eaten up by consultant and fund manager fees.  The answer is that you get what you pay for.  It is cheaper to buy your groceries wholesale, but many people find it a soulless experience trudging around a remote warehouse buying goods in inconvenient packing and quantities.  It is much nicer to go to your local friendly retail supermarket. Of course, rich people can have housekeepers who will choose what is needed and do the shopping for them.  If you wish to go through a 'pyramid' of financial advisers and investment consultants, each of these of course will take their commission.  But you can go straight to a wholesaler such as EMH, select one of their managed funds, and leave it to them.

Demand regular statements on your investment.  Query mysterious fees, like when you take your car for a routine service but the bill contains unexpected extras, or of course a restaurant bill which adds an amount for a tip but which says at the bottom that 'service is not included'.

The baseline goal is to protect your little bit of money from inflation.  Putting your cash under the bed will not help with this - neither will putting it in a bank or post office or bank savings account (how can it - the bank and even the post office must make money out of your savings, so that the interest they give you must be less that your savings' net worth).  But inflation is relative and may differ for every person: if you are into photography and buy a lot of camera equipment, the inflation rate of this is important to you - if you never take pictures this is irrelevant.

Having said all of this, I recall an experiment which was conducted recently in the UK (there have probably been many) where ten expert financial advisers were retained to design a stock portfolio for Mr. Average Investor, over a period of two years.  Then a portfolio was chosen purely at random, maybe with a roulette wheel.  After two years, the random portfolio had performed better than the average of all the expertly chosen stocks.  So there you are.  Personally, I have still some money saved with the Post Office.

The Internet is not making us dumb

There was an article by the journalist Janice Turner a while ago in the London Times.  It was stimulated by the statistic that in Britain the average teenager now spends more time on-line, whether by phone, tablet or even PC, than they do sleeping, or watching TV, and reverts to the venerable question: "Is the internet making us dumb (or dumber)?"    Of course this is an impossible question to research since it would be now totally impractical to create a test group of children without on-line exposure and compare them to a group typical of the iphone and ipad generation.  And anyway how do you define and measure 'dumbness'? 

Rather one presumes this article was a reproach to young people to switch off their devices sometimes, and get out there and 'get a life'.  This may be reasonable in Europe where there is a bewildering choice of sporting, cultural, theatrical, festival activities and movies available more or less 24/7, in every area, and clubs and groups devoted to every interest.

But let us rather consider Windhoek, which has, at time of writing so far as I know, uniquely among the world's capital cities except maybe in Saudi Arabia:

• No movie house (even the small one in Swakop seems to have vanished)
• No Indian restaurant
• No Chinese restaurant (there are a couple of small take-aways)
• No public library (there was one I think, which was refurbished and reopened but was again closed due to enterprising customers coming in the evening and using its secluded corners for sex)
• No specifically child-friendly facilities or activities
• No Sunday newspaper, except for the one imported from South Africa

and think what we (the lucky ones, with network connection) would do without the internet, and how boring life was before its arrival here.  Now we can read whatever international newspaper we want, any day, any time, we can download any music or movie we want (pace DSTV) and watch or listen to it at any time, we can find any of ten of thousands of recipes we would never find in any cookbook, we can post all al pictures online and never lose another photograph, we can keep in touch with any or all of our friends, and tweet our opinions on any subject via the social media (whereas before it could take years to track down an old school friend) play on-line games with anyone in the world, find the most obscure information or quotation with a couple of swipes or clicks (whereas before it might takes days to find an encyclopaedia in a library).

No, for us, the internet is not make us dumb.  We would be exceedingly dumb without it, and giving network access to all our population is a necessity for national development.

The complexity above us

Many of our compatriots, even those or especially those who do not fly and have never flown, must sometimes wonder at the complexity of the skies above us, where thousands of aircraft criss-cross the globe every day (for a stunning animation of this see www.flightradar24.com) without incident or mishap, punctuated only rarely by a foul-up or tragedy.  

This is achieved not only by airframes and jet fuel, but by some of the most sophisticated computer technology and information systems on earth.  Systems that do not just direct and navigate the aircraft, but ensure they do not collide with each other, and find each one a landing slot at the airport of destination,even at airports which handle hundreds of flights per hour.  Long before anyone had heard the word internet, SITA, the airlines technical organisation, had a  communication network and email system which linked the globe.  The first online interactive system was SABRE, developed for American Airlines in the US in the 1960's to automate their reservation system, and thus cater for thousands more passengers and fill their flights more efficiently.  SABRE and other systems still exist, with fiendishly complex yield management systems, which enable anyone with access to a website such as expedia.com to request a journey between the most obscure destinations on the planet, on any required date, and have the best fare displayed within a couple of seconds, to be booked immediately, if desired.

There are  still glitches.  Try to explain why, when my daughter's family were confirmed booked on the 'South African Express' (seemingly not the same as SAA) from Cape Town to Windhoek, and even received an email the previous day inviting them to check in online, they arrived at Cape Town airport at 4.30 am for the 6 am flight, only to be told that not only was the flight cancelled, but the route was cancelled, several months before.  They had bizarrely printed out boarding passes for a non-existent flight.

Of course, there are more serious gaps.  Since a delivery van can have its position tracked anywhere in the country at any time to within a couple of metres, you might assume the same holds for aircraft during their flight.  Surprisingly, this is not so: planes flying over land are tracked by conventional radar, but if they fly long haul over the great oceans, they fly alone.  Any accident will necessitate a long an arduous search on the bottom of the sea for the 'black boxes', which are still basically 1970's recording devices.

This of course brings us to the search for MH370, which has just resumed, at a cost of another US$25m.  What are the chances of finding it now?  It was said that our knowledge of the topography of Mars is some 100 times more accurate than our knowledge of the floor of the Indian Ocean, and the months of delay have been caused by attempts to better map the latter, which at least has scientific value of its own.   

But how difficult will it be to locate the remains of the airliner?  Imagine that South Africa was uninhabited; a lunar wilderness covered with 3000 metre mountain ranges and vast sludge and rock filled valleys and ravines.  Now imagine the whole being submerged in 5000 metres of water.  Now search that for some pieces of aluminium.  What are the chances?  And if they do, what are the chances of discovering the causes of the disaster, especially if due to human factors?