Met office gives up on climate change

The BBC reports that the Met Office are giving up on their seasonal forecasts.

The Met Office is to stop publishing seasonal forecasts, after it came in for criticism for failing to predict extreme weather.

It was berated for not foreseeing that the UK would suffer this cold winter or the last three wet summers in its seasonal forecasts.

The forecasts, four times a year, will be replaced by monthly predictions.

So, next time they report that global temperatures could increase by 0.5 dgrees or so in X many years keep in mind this

Explaining its decision, the Met Office released a statement which said: "By their nature, forecasts become less accurate the further out we look.
...

"Although we can identify general patterns of weather, the science does not exist to allow an exact forecast beyond five days, or to absolutely promise a certain type of weather.

The end of global warming

This just up on Watts Up With That

Kind of disproves anthropogenic climate change and that there's much to worry about with global warming, in that there was global warming before we starting burning fossil fuels for electricity and greenhouse gases and carbon footprints and all that.

There ain't no 'tipping point' in terms of temperature after which the world will end, otherwise the mevieval folk would have tipped it and we wouldn't be here.

Also
This is what the the climate scientists at UEA got wrong, and were believed by Nature magazine, the IPCC and world governments. This how much they fucked up their data.

Finally, via DevilsLPUK and others this diagram shows how politicians and the world got into this mess.


Can we cut fuel duty now, my car's running on vapours.

Flat tax and the Chevy Volt

Over on Liberal Conspiracy Tim Worstall is duking it out with the progressives in the comments, pimping the idea of a Flat Tax system.

Rather than having several tax rates depending on income, there's just one flat tax rate, and a sizable untaxed allowance.

Some of the lefties are saying its not a progressive tax, and Tim's defending that it is. I guess the problem is that its not progressive enough to satisfy. Its that untaxed allowance that makes it so great and progressive - the poor pay less.

Here's a graph showing the rate of tax for various income levels under three different tax regimes (the current tax system, a flat tax of 30% with an allowance £12,000 and my own flat tax plan 45% tax rate with an allowance equal to the median income of £25,000)

I reckon there are merits to having a really high allowance and a really steep rate, it kind of encourages the folk who decide pay levels to pay the underlings more, rather than raising their own salaries, that thought at the back of the mind that if the underlings get the money, then the government will get less money through tax than if the more highly paid people got the money. But that's just my philosophy. The underlings will undoubtly spend the money rather than save it and eventually it ends up in the treasury's coffures.

For future governments, if they find they need more or less money, they have the two options of changing the tax rate, which will lead to rich people leaving the country or coming here depending on the change, or they can change the allowance which will lead to more or less middle class people voting for them depending on the new allowance.

There's a problem in conveying the merits of each tax scheme in a single number, if you say the latter flat tax rate is 45% then the middle classes shudder, but if you say its 20% then the lefties moan that it doesn't tax the rich enough. And if you have a system with lots of different different tax bands and tax reliefs and all that then its horrendously expensive to implement, this is what we have at the moment.

Elsewhere on the internet the Chevy Volt is trending because the American EPA are giving it a 230 miles per gallon rating, the first vehicle to achieve a triple digit mpg.

My first thought was "hang on, the Chevy Volt is an electric vehicle, it doesn't use gallons of any fluid fuel". My mistake, its a hybrid, it's electric batteries give it a range of 40 miles before the gasoline engine kicks in. The gasoline engine gives it efficiency of about 50mpg.

This is the same graph as the flat tax, the initial all-electric range is the tax free allowance, and after that the gasoline engine mpg is the taxable income, and its nothing special. I get 60mpg in my Smart car, sometimes 70mpg if I'm on the motorway.

This 230mpg figure comes from including the electric only range, if you drive 55 miles, only the last 15 miles uses gas, and thats where 230mpg comes from. If the drives does 300 miles fuel efficiency is only 62mpg.

So aye, I reckon claiming 230 miles per gallon is misleading, and pretty dishonest.

That sort of thing is just going to lead to car companies developing greater battery capacity to increase the electric-only range, when in the great scheme of things, improving fuel efficiency would mean making the electric motor more efficient. They ought to be pimping some measure of miles per watt hour for the electric drive chain and also the miles per gallon for the gasoline engine, rather than pimping just the single misleading number.

Another thing to consider is when the future finally arrives and we're all driving electric cars, how will the state charge fuel duty on electricity?

UK sea level rises

Following on from my rant about sea level rise predictions the other day, I couldn't resist having a play around with the information available on the BODC webite.


Looking at it now, I think I should have used different colours for the text, and maybe not have written it by hand, still, you get the idea.

I took the mean sea level data from all available tide gaurges in 1991 and from 2008, worked out a yearly average for each location, then calculated the average yearly sea level rise. It's not the most scientific method, I ought to have pulled all the data and found the yearly rise for every year, and figured out the averages from that. But, sadly I'm not a research scientist, I'm just one of those unemployed chaps passing my time.

Some of the tide gauge data was missing, I guess back in 1991 not all locations had gauges, and sometimes they cock up, so I've culled any really bad data, to maintain integrity. This is a table which I used for the map above.

Location	Sea level change between 1991 and 2008 (centimetres)	Mean sea level rise per year (mm/year)
Aberdeen	9.933	5.843
Avonmouth	11.933	7.020
Barmouth	-2.108	-1.240
Cromer	21.092	12.407
Devonport	2.642	1.554
Dover	8.308	4.887
Felixstowe	9.575	5.632
Fishguard	8.200	4.824
Heysham	16.333	9.608
Holyhead	3.733	2.196
Infracombe	8.701	5.118
Immingham	6.842	4.025
Kirklochbervie	4.813	2.831
Leith	8.713	5.125
Lerwick	8.975	5.279
Liverpool	16.640	9.788
Lowestoft	10.675	6.279
Milford Haven	17.511	10.300
Millport	5.742	3.377
Newhaven	13.857	8.151
Newlyn	9.958	5.858
North Shields	8.800	5.176
Port Ellen	14.312	8.419
Portpatrick	12.250	7.206
Portsmouth	11.592	6.819
Sheerness	14.067	8.275
Stornoway	8.597	5.057
Tobermory	6.600	3.882
Ullapool	6.892	4.054
Weymouth	3.975	2.338
Whitby	-0.292	-0.172

Its all over the shop, I guess there are local geological features which cause this, other than anthropogenic climate change caused sea level rises. In some places regions are sinking, or rising, some places get more of a battering from fetches and waves, or building policy has cause the land to sink, all outwith climate change.

I can't remember on which blog it was, possibly many of them, but in the comments someone was criticising IPCC data, and saying "but sea levels are only rising by 3.3mm/year", I thought I'd look into this a bit closer.

In the UK, there's only one or two places with that sort of average sea level rise. Maybe 3.3mm/year is the global average, but that's not very helpful for the people of Milford Haven or Cromer who are seeing rises about three times more rapid than that. There's just so much variation around the UK alone, that one average figure is no use to anyone but national newspaper headline writers, and positively misleading for anyone making longterm planning decisions.

The great sea level rise

There was some mutterings in The Telegraph, via The Libertarian Party blog, the experts have revised their predictions.

That various climate wonks spew out this drivel is of no surprise. That the Faily Telegraph still bothers to report it is, sadly, no surprise either. But it seems we're all going to die. As usual.

Sea-level rise is now inevitable and will happen much quicker than most of us thought - and will last for centuries, according to experts.

Even if greenhouse gas emissions stopped tomorrow the oceans will continue to swell as they warm and as glaciers or ice sheets slide into the sea.

Not according to NSIC.

The growing consensus among climate scientists is the "official" estimate of sea level rise by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - 20cm to 60cm by 2100 - is misleading. It could well be in the region of one to two metres - with a small risk of an even greater rise.

In a report in New Scientist magazine, climate expert Dr Eric Rignot, of California University, said: "When we talk of sea level rising by one or two metres by 2100 remember that it is still going to be rising after 2100."

For many islands and low lying regions including much of the Netherlands, Florida and Bangladesh even small rises will spell catastrophe. Large parts of London, New York, Sydney and Tokyo could be among cities submerged beneath the waves unless a massive engineering effort can protect them against the waves.

I'm a bit of a sceptic me, so I surfed on down to British Oceanographic Data Centre, and tried to dig up some facts myself. They keep the data from UK tide gauges. Its thrilling stuff.

All round the coast of the UK there's all these sea level gauges. See, what I'm a bit sceptical of with sea level rise predictions, is that its different all over.

When the experts say, there'll be a 1 metre rise by 2100, there are two key facts missing.

Firstly, from when? Like its 2009 now, so do they mean that over the next 91 years sea levels will rise by 1 metre? Actually no, I checked up on this last time, they mean a 1 metre rise from 1990 sea levels. That was the best part of twenty years ago.

And secondly, where? That 1 metre rise is an average for the world. Some regions suffer will suffer a big rise and some regions will suffer no rise at all?

So, whenever I hear of sea level rise prediction, I think, that's probably someone else's problem. Besides, I live up a hill, we're going to need a 30 metre rise before the water's lapping at my feed.

Anyhoo, back to my point, Newhaven is the nearest tide gauge to my house, so I pulled the data from the years 1991 and 2008 from the BODC website. And after hours of data crunching in Excel, it says there was a 14cm rise over the 17 years, about 8mm per year.

Give it until 2015 and Newhaven will have the whole century's worth of the 20cm sea level rise predicted by the IPCC.

Mitigating this slightly is the old factoid that England is sinking and Scotland is rising. Wikipedia:-

At the present time, due to Scotland's continuing to rise as a result of the weight of Devensian ice being lifted, England is sinking. This is generally estimated at 1 mm (1/25 inch) per year, with the London area sinking at double the speed partly due to the continuing compression of the recent clay deposits. A contributary factor is the draining of many stretchs of land.

Suggesting that by 2100 London could have sunk by 20cm, in addition to the 20cm IPCC sea level prediction.

So, I'm having a bit of a rethink, I'm changing my policy on climate change / sea level rises. Them's scientists and experts and media are just spouting broad and meaningless platitudes. Rather than investing in inefficient and expensive green stuff, we ought to be building flood defences or heading to the high ground.

Did I mention how I live up a hill?

The White Horse

Its been a blazing hot weekend for the most part.

I have no interest in going to Glastonbury, but I do like the countryside. The other week, The Guardian was doing a series of guides to walks round the country, the only one left that I haven't chucked out with the waste paper was the one with a walk round the White Horse thing in Oxfordshire. So the missus and I made a break for the countryside.

The route in the article was miles and miles and up all hills and stuff so we gave up after about twenty minutes, and chilled out under a tree, getting bitten by friendly insects and speculating on what the various crops were in nearby fields.

I want to be a farmer. I want to be part of the sacred lineage, the bond we have with the land, where the same bit of dirt has been poked with sticks and churned out the same sorts of crops for hundreds of years. Techniques and varieties may have changed, yields increased and productivity optimised, but for hundreds of years the land has fed people.

So aye, we abandoned the walking, got back in the car and drove to the National Trust carpark, so it was just a wee stroll up the way to the horse and all the earthworks and stuff.

It makes me feel dizzy sometimes, just thinking about it, like standing on the edge of a cliff and peering down. Three thousand years ago, people in this land were gazing at the same white horse. They probably thought it was pretty neat too.

The pinnacle of human achievement

The iPhone is a marvellous thing, the touchscreen wifi smartphone, that is so ubiquitous that unemployed folk can own them, that is the pinnacle of human technological achievement.

But is it right?

I was talking to a brand manager chap the other night, its generally agreed that the world economy has been mismanaged for the past fifteen or twenty years. The world has appeared to be a lot wealthier than it is, mortgages offered to folk who can't afford them, cheap money borrowed from the future.

It is my conceit that without with mismanagement, we would not have the ubiquitous touchscreen wifi smartphone today. We wouldn't have such technological innovation for another decade at least.

The brand manager disagreed, he said "Who knows? Someone else may have developed the ubiquitous touchscreen wifi smartphone,". It doesn't need a world of such apparent wealth to make these things.

Brand Manager, my arse. I'm an engineer, I'll going to pull rank here.

There's this plot device thing in films, most recently in Transformers but also Men In Black, where so alien race has crash landed on earth and all modern technology has been "reverse-engineered". Microwaves, computers, the internet, all reverse engineered.

Reverse engineering is difficult and the whole concept is a great disservice to engineers slaving away in R&D departments continuously improving and developing new things and stuff. And it costs money. It depends on support and management and companies continously investing.

To get that touchscreen wifi smartphone it takes largest technolgie companies, hundreds of them all competing making each module each function, better thantheir competitors and better than the previous version.

To get that touchscreen wifi smartphone you need enough false money and easy credit floating around to enable a culture of tens of millions of people replacing their phone every eighteen months, upgrading to better and faster models.

It doesn't just happen.

And that, your honour, is my case in support of the financial mismanagement of the past fifteen to twenty years.

If the world economy had been managed prudentially we would right now still be ten years away from ubiquitous touchscreen wifi smartphones.

Was it worth it?

Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange

I tried having a similar discussion with a friend who works for the council, but rather than go with the economic mismanagement thing, they suggested "What's best for the human race and what's best for the planet."

We had a screaming row when I pointed out that these were two different things and you can't have both. You can have a trade off between the best thing for the human race and the best thing for the planet, but this trade off point will be a long way from having ubiquitous touchscreen wifi smartphones and will probably involve more people living in 'poverty'.

Sea levels

I generally skip the Sunday papers these days, prefering to spend my weekends catatonic in existential angst, but via EU referendum, Booker in The Sunday Telegraph reports that the sea-level rise thing is all a big lie.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

Its nice the way that this scientist's work is based on actual real-world measurements rather than computer models.

The other week when I was looking over BBC coverage of sea-level rises, I was somewhat concerned about the inhabitants of Tuvalu, who ten years back were going to have their island washed away by the rising sea levels predicted, luckily EU Ref is reassuring.

To that effect, the climate hysterics have recruited the government of the Maldives, and indeed the leaders of Tuvalu – another of the supposedly threatened Pacific islands - where the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. By lining their pockets with gold has the "international community" kept the island leaders "on-side" willing to promote the myth which sustains the whole scam.

I've read up the IPCC report with its sea level rise predictions, and they do say that sea level rises will be accelerating, which is possibly when we don't see any rise now, but as soon as the Greenland icesheet melt, then seas will bubble up and we'll all be moving to the highlands. But one thing that nags at the back of my heid is that the predictions are all for the year 2100, by which time most of the reports authors will have passed away, and thus be unaccountable. Actually, by that time, two and a bit generations, the world's populations will have gradually drifted away from the present day coasts anyway, like how people don't buy houses on flood plains in the UK so much.

Anyhoo, my point that I drifted away from is that there are few published predictions of sea level rises within lifetimes, say twenty or fifty year timescales, where you'd be able to measure the sea level now, hold your breath for a few years, then check back and say to the authors of the IPCC reports "you were so wrong, get the hell out of my way" or as may be more appropriate "you were right, please take this mountaintop palace and all our country's riches.

I want a sea level rise prediction that we can actually hold people to account on.

G20 Protest marching

Why was I there? How can I go on a protest march with my right-wing frothing-at-the-mouth libertarian capitalist views?

• Well, I've got this fancy-pants Blackberry which allows me to take photies and upload them to Flickr in one go and it seemed like a prime opportunity for such things.
• I am a victim of the credit crunch which we were lead into by the incumbant government.
• I always go on protest marches.
• Its a free country innit? We have a right to protest, don't we?
  
• The march was in aid of many different causes, some of which I agree with.

There were a load of people, not quite as many as were at the old anti-war march in Glasgow in 2003 and Make Poverty History 2005, but a load of people. Lots of different organisations all with their own banners and t-shirts and stuff.

The police presence wasn't quite as agressive as we'd been lead to expect from the media, I saw one or two vans full of polis waiting incase trouble kicked off.

But no walls of riot-gear chaps, just basically stewarding duties really, and a couple of polis photographers.

I wandered along with the procession for most of the route, taking a break around Green Park to stop in a pub, and check t'internet. It was a little worrying when I emerges ten minutes later to find the march had split into two, seems like the advance mob were charities and stuff, and the second mob were trade unions.

Its a shame that there was such a mixed message at the march, some many different voices, all asking for different things, some contradictory, all clammering for attention.

Aw well, at least it didn't turn as violent as the polis had predicted. Shows that we can;t trust the polis's predictions for these things.

Rest of my photies here

Money Saving Idea #1 Grow your own garlic - week 6

Garlic - Darren - 19-MAR-2009
Originally uploaded by manc_ill_kid

Looks like young Darren is still growing. He's a bit darker than his peers, but I see this as a sign of strength.

In the years to come I'm going to have to do a family tree of all the different garlic bulbs I've got and what happens to their offspring, so when I start selling 'Gilmour's Organic Garlic' you can order exactly who you want.

There's going to be a lot to chose from. I was a bit worried the other week, that some of the bulbs I'd planted were duds, but they're all going hunky dory.

The twins have now sprouted and are looking all healthy and everything.

And young Sharon, even she's looking good

Poking in the dirt with a stick

Hi there, when I'm not blogging, job hunting or sitting in Borders drinking cappucinos, I work in Hampstead Heath for Heath Hands. They're a volunteer group who do things like bramble clearance, laying paths, clearing ditchs and that sort of thing.

I do it about three days a week, its immensly satisfying.

This morning we were out at the Heath Extension roughly here. Some people were clearing brambles from around a pond, I was set to clearing an old path that had been blocked by a fallen tree some time in the past.

I cleared up to the fallen tree myself.

Aye, its immensly satisfying to be able to see the fruits of your labours.

Sea Level rises by 2100 according to the BBC

I couldn't sleep last night, so worried by the BBC's report yesterday that the latest predictions of sea level rises by 2100 will exceed previous predictions. I already debunked it once, that the latest prediction is only 1m whilst the previous prediction was 1.5m. But maybe I'd gotten it wrong, I'd misquoted.

So I looked up all the BBC articles that talk about predictions in sea level rises since 2000 and plotted a graph.



Can you imagine my relief to find that actually the current prediction of a 1 metre rise by 2100 is pretty much in the middle of the range of predictions that the BBC have reported.

My next thing to get neurotic about is that 1m rise, is it from 2009 levels or from the same level that predictions were made from in 2000.

Just how much have sea levels risen since 2000?

**Update**
URLs for BBC stories
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1997/sci/tech/global_warming/32958.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/368892.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1581457.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2002/boston_2002/1825283.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2219001.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/2816859.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2.hi/south_asia/3930765.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_4490000/newsid_4494200/newsid_4494263.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4565935.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4467420.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4651876.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4834806.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6405359.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6525069.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7148137.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7197379.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7195752.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7201501stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7935159.stm

Slightly more polished graph

So are sea level rises expectations getting better or worse?

Today's BBC News website has a story about how sea level rises are going to exceed expectations:-

The global sea level looks set to rise far higher than forecast because of changes in the polar ice-sheets, a team of researchers has suggested.

Scientists at a climate change summit in Copenhagen said earlier UN estimates were too low and that sea levels could rise by a metre or more by 2100.

Which comes as a surprise as a year ago the BBC reported that they were predicting a one and a half metre rise.

So my expectations aren't going be exceeded by the latest research, and I get all my news from the BBC.

Actually since 2006 the BBC have been reporting that sea levels could rise by such a wide range, what are we supposed to believe?

When applied to the possible scenarios outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the researchers found that in 2100 sea levels would be 0.5-1.4m above 1990 levels.

Are they making it up as they go along? A bt of consistency please?

Postcards from the lost continent

Via TreeHugger we find this video of a chap called Charles Moore doing a TEd lecture about plastic waste and how it ends up at the North Pacific Gyre.



Now previously I've mentioned that it would be a prime location to build an artificial island with a plastic-to-oil plant on it and just let the raw manterial float in. And as Charles moore mention in his talk, it's too expensive for one country to filter the oceans, so as I suggested previously, farm it out to an army of World of Warcraft types controling radio controlled boats. Get them to build the thing, get them to scoot round filtering and collecting debris.

Charity

I'm a big fan of charity me, I think its great when man voluntarily gives to fellow man, be it time money or expertise. That's the image I have in my head of charity.

So, I'm a big fan of that fake charities website whichs 'outs' those UK registered charities that as a result of their funding, are government agencies, wholly or mostly funded by the UK or EU governments. They're not charities in the sense of charity, cos the money they receive isn't given voluntarily. The government ought either not be spending money, or to actually be fixing the things that the charities are for, not paying them off.

There are certain things which fellow man pays the government to do through taxes, that's defend the nation, take away the rubbish and provide clean drinking water. Anything else the government does is a bonus, but not essential.

Here let's look at wikipedia's list of fastest growing nations in terms of GDP. Some of them are growing really fast, but the UK according to the list is growing at 3%, the Office of National Statistics has it at minus 1.5% Think about it.

Here's a charity called 'Charity:Water', proceeds from the London Twestival are going to them. I've heard about Charity:Water before, their Jennifer Connelly video is neat and I think BoingBoing covered them once. Something never set right with me about them.

It was India, they were building water towers in India. India's a big big, rich and fast growing nations, the 22nd fastest growing nation by GDP, the world's largest democracy. I'm not denying their need for water towers, but surely they can build their own? Surely its up to the Indian government to provide drinking water, and surely they can afford to do it themselves, without the need for a charity to provide it.

Ethiopia, now everyone knows that country is in a bad way. Well, not quite, its got a faster growing economy that India, in fact, the world's 12th fastest growing economy. Its not even an oil-rich state, that economic growth is genuine. So maybe the three hundred and two Charity:Water projects there give them a helping hand, but that economic growth has been going for the past ten years. And that big famine was more than twenty years ago, they can get over it.

Don't get me wrong, there are some great projects that Charity:Water do to provide drinking water to badly suffering nations, but at the same time, they're doing it to nations who are really in a position to do it themselves.

If the leaders of these countries know that someone else is providing essential services for their populations, then it lets them off the hook, that they can spend the tax revenue on less vital things, palaces and cars.

Its a stretch, but Twitheads and Charity:Water, with the best intentions, are enabling corruption and abuses of power.

No?

Product development

I rather like this wee graph that I found on Blue Matter here, not for the way it shows the adoption of new services and technology has speeded up.

But because it lists the trappings of 21st century civilisation, and show's how the western world has spent a century developing these things, making them affordable to the massed, ubiquitous and available.

So in third world countries, for the poor populations, for all the abuse and exploitation that goes on by the west and by their own corrupt leaders, we can take them from the top left corner to the bottom right.

No need to re-invent the wheel.

Is the touchscreen smartphone the pinnacle of human civilsation? The iPhone, is that it? The moment when every member of the human race can have a touchscreen smartphone and the infrastructure is in place to support it, that's the peak of the machine-age.

**UPDATE**
Eep, I forgot about the multi-touch touchscreen smart phone, when that's ubiquitous, then we've won.

The Lost Continent of Mu

I know its wrong, but I love the idea of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Its this feature of the North Pacific Gyre where plastic waste and debris accumulates. All the plastic waste ejected into the ocean from Asia and North America, floating about on the ocean's currents, it all ends up bobbing about in the neuston of the gyre.

Like some great automatic refuse collection system, but without the garbage trucks. Sure its not free refuse collection cos the plastic ends up killing millions of sea creatures, but in terms of human involvement, its a passive system.

Apparently the area which the plastic waste collects in is about the size of Texas, its essentially a lost continent. But its not some solid piece of land, no one can walk on it, but its big and its got mass. Plastic barrels, cargo containers, plastic ducks, monofilament fishing line, all bobbing about.

And its there for the harvesting.

I've got this idea, well, a great stream of ideas.

Did you ever read that Treehugger article about some process to turn plastic into oil? Could they no just put one of those plants on an 'oil rig' in the middle of the gyre and let the plastic come to it. The operation could be self-sustaining, and just churn out crude oil.

It might take a load of investment to get off the ground, but hey, whilst we're on the way, lets have some fun and play some games.

Remember that Onion story about dolphins developing opposable thumbs?

What we need for the North Pacific Gyre is some thumb dolphins. No no, not live mammal dolphins, but something cooked up before the folk who make things on Robot Wars. I want a radio-controlled boaty thing with a robot arm or two on it, with opposable thumbs.

Not just radio controlled, but ethernet controlled. Controlled remotely over the world wide web, so some geek in his bedroom thousands of miles away can be controlling a wee thumb dolphin as it cruises about the gyre looking for large lumps of plastic, then dragging them to other large bits of plastic and sticking them together.

The world already has thousands of folk playing World of Warcraft, running about fantasy worlds, solving quests. This would be the same thing, but not virtual, just remotely controlled.

Now the punter in his bedroom has got to be able to see what he's doing, so when he drives his boat abou the can see where he's going and when he manipulates his robot arms he can see what he's grabbing hold of. So your thumb dolphin needs two webcam eyes, for stereoscopic vision, and also cos we're playing water world of warcraft, the player could do with a third person camera angle, so how about a camera on a stick coming out of the back of the thumb dolphin. Kind of like Mark Owens' Avatar Machine. Actually, a few scouter boats with their own cameras on really long sticks would be neat, to give a wider view of the area your thumb dolphins are working on, that would be cool, and if they also house solar panels and recharging docks for the dolphins.

At fist I was thinking that these thumb dolphins could tie the plastic bits that the find together using nylon string, but thats gonna be really difficult with their little robot hands. So, maybe using epoxy glue that might be easier, or if its sunny, a big old magnifying glass to weld bits of plastic together.

Actually, sack that, why not all three, give the gaming punters a choice. Have different professions of thumb dolphins, some have glue, some have magnifying glasses, some have better developed robot arms for tying knots.

How about stepping up a level and have different races of thumb dolphins, with more specialisation.

• Tugs - clunky tug boats for locating and pulling together large bits of plastic.
• Winders - seek out the monofilament wire and wind it onto reels to be used by...
• Tyers - who tie things together
• Scrabblers - who climb over larger pieces
• Lobbers - who chuck smaller bits of plastic onto larger bits.

What we're trying to do here is build up a larger and larger single mass of plastic, a floating island, which has just enough structural integrity to hold its own bobbing about in the middle of the ocean. We want one of these, built by remote control.

Sure there needs to be some kind of central plan rather than just a load of WoW players dicking around. So you have Quests for the players things like:-

• "accumulate 5Kg of mass"
• "secure the east side of the island"
• "find 100m of filament!
• "retrieve player 23 who's run out of power"

So at the moment its all wave and solar powered, maybe the first boat on site will have to be a power station.

I ought to be thinking about structural integrity, cos those waves and storms are going to tear this thing apart. Its a big hole in my thinking, I like to think that the landmass becomes so big that no storm will destroy it. Sure it bobs up and down with waves, and sure a storm will rip bits off it, but the army of thumb dolphins can stitch it back together. And if a hurricane tears the island in half, they can stitch that back together too.

I know you're just wondering about the effect of all this on the local wild life, but don't worry, the North Pacific Gyre is mostly a dead zone, cos of all that plastic. This also makes it an excellent candidate for ocean seeding. This is the process whereby iron filings or iron sulphate are dumped in an ocean, encouraging algae blooms, which then draw CO2 out of the atmosphere, then die off and sink in the ocean. It either sinks to the bottom where the CO2 is sequestrated or is eaten up by fishies encourage more fish-life in the area.

Hmph, these fish are going to be inedible cos of the plastic and will lead relatively short and unsatisfying lives.

Ooh, you know that thing with mercury poisoning, where it accumulates in plants or animals until it kills the animal, then some other larger animal like a human or a panda eats the dead animal and absorbs the mercury and then accumulates it until they too die. But ultimately you get a corpse with a concentration of mercury in it, rather than diluted mercury spread all over the shop. Does the same thing happen with plastic and aquatic life? Our thumb dolphins collect all the large bits of plastic and we leave it to the food chain, fish and birds to accumulate all the smaller bits until they die and we can sling them on our new plasticy compost heaps.

So five years down the line, after our army if internet WoW thumb dolphin pilots have created our lost continent of plastic, we're going to want folk to live there, subsidence crofters perhaps. But more likely the sort of human life you get developing on third world rubbish tips, forraging for stuff to sell. Its not much of a life, but its what we can expect at first, loading up ships with whatever they've salvaged from the gyre, living under the shadow of our plastic to crude oil rig that's arrived.

Ooh, back to that ocean seeding operation, remember before the Beijing Olympics there was all that problem with algae clogging up the Qingdao sailing area, can we encourage that to happen, and then use all the algae as fertilizer and compost for farm land on our island. Sure it'll stink for a a few years, but it seems like a quick way to build up organic landmass, so we can start farming operations.

I see grain being grown, and potatoes, some kind of genetically engineered salt-resistant variety, and chickens running about pecking at it.

How much area of solar panels do we need to run a desalination plant? We're going to have acres of inorganic land where no plants will grow for a while and it'll be perfect for solar panels I reckon.

Earthship UK

An Earthship is a revolutionary form of housing, featuring large south-facing windows to get the winter sun, a huge thermal mass of a back wall, non-load bearing walls made out of plastic bottles and load bearing walls made from earth pounded into old tyres.

They originated in New Mexico but development was held back by local planning restrictions. It wasn't until the chief architect was baws deep in the tsunami rescue effort that the powers that be let him keep his houses.

Anyhoo, in the UK there are two of these Earthships, one in Fife and one in Brighton. The one in Brighton has tours on the first and third Sunday of each month, starting at 10:30am.

We arrived at 10:31am and by the time I'd parked my car we saw the tour party disappear up a hill beyond some gates that had been locked behind them.

What kind of ground breaking environmentally friendly eco-housing do they keep behind barbed wire security fences? I couldn't quite believe it when they set the guard dogs on us that did seem a bit extreme.

I'm not sure about the girl, but I thought 'fucket, I'll build my own' if a bunch of hippies can do it, the so can I.

It was freezing cold round Stanmer Park, but it was kind of nice, so we had a bit of a wander.

There was this beautiful old church thing too, with a frosted up graveyard, next time I shoot a rural horror movie, I should use it.

And this old frozen up pond just crying out for stones to be chucked in to see how thick the ice was.

It was still early morning so we peeled off into Brighton central. There was this chocolate shop, in the window, left over from Christmas was a chocolate baby Jesus.