johnadams.org.uk

I’m sorry, but I don’t get this media-spun “election chaos” following the Scottish parliamentary and council elections on Thursday.

The instructions were simple:

• For the Scottish parliamentary election, mark one cross (X) in the Regional List column and one cross (X) in the Constituency column.
• For the council election, write numbers (1, 2, 3…) to express your order of preference for one or more candidates.

I don’t think the organisers could have done more to help people, short of asking people to show their completed ballot papers before putting them in the secret box!

• The system was trialled by the Electoral Commission before the election was called;
• There was wall-to-wall media coverage of how to vote;
• Every house received a leaflet on how to vote;
• The instructions were on the back of the polling card;
• When we went to vote, there was a person at the door of the polling station asking if we understood the voting system or would like it explained. And lots of big pictures;
• And the ballot papers had clear instructions.

What more could have been done?

The elections are less than a week away now and the leaflets are piling in through our letter box.

Not only do we have council elections (for the first time using proportional representation) but we will need to vote twice for the Scottish Parliament - once for our constituency MSP and once for our Regional List. And so far on our Regional List we have:

• British National Party
• Scottish Conservatives
• Communist Party of Britain
• Scottish Green Party
• Independent Green Voice
• Independents
• Scottish Labour
• Scottish Liberal Democrats
• Nine Percent Growth Party
• Publican Party
• Scotland Against Crooked Lawyers
• Scottish Christian Party
• Socialist Labour Party
• Scottish National Party
• Solidarity - that’s Tommy Sheridan
• Scottish Senior Citizens Unity Party
• Scottish Socialist Party - that used to be Tommy Sheridan
• Scottish Unionist Party
• Scottish Voice
• UKIP

Politics gone mad?

As part of our Climate Change Week at work, I watched An Inconvenient Truth, a film that follows Al Gore as he delivers his lecture about climate change around the world.

This mashup from Malcolm Daniel is a great 4-minute summary of the film:

Two things particularly struck me:

Firstly, Gore presents evidence from Antarctic ice cores, showing the atmospheric CO₂ levels over the last 650,000 years. Recently, certain climate-change sceptics have tried to throw doubt on the nature of the human-induced global warming by citing cyclical events through the Pleistocene glaciation. This graph indeed shows such cyclical events with glaciations interspersed with interglacials.

See also 600,000 year graph.

However, look at present-day CO₂ levels, at 380ppm, much higher than the historical maxima of around 280-290ppm. We are not in a cyclical interglacial, but in completely new territory.

The second thing that struck me was the fact that we have the technology, right now, to solve the problem (or at least to mitigate the worst effects). We don’t need mirrors in the sky, we need simple measures, but taken by everyone. These include energy-efficient appliances, industry and transport; renewables; and even carbon sequestration. With these, we can reduce our CO₂ emissions to 1970 levels!

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have moved their Doomsday Clock from 7 minutes to midnight to 5 minutes to midnight. The clock conveys how close the scientists believe that humanity is to catastrophic destruction by various means - nuclear weapons, human-induced climate change, developments in the life sciences.

The change of the clock from 7 to 5 minutes reflects increased nuclear proliferation (North Korea, Iran) but also the increased risk from catastrophic climate change.

Previous lows were in 1953 (2 minutes) during the start of the Cold War atomic weapons race and in 1984 (3 minutes) during Reagan’s term in office.

The highest ever was 17 minutes in 1991, just after the signing of the SALT treaty (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) at the end of the Cold War. Proliferation since then has led to a steady decline in the time.

In the words of Private Fraser from Dad’s Army:

“We’re dooomed”

Is this what the Union Flag will look like in 2008?

Lots of worrying comment in the media about the seemingly unstoppable rise of Scottish Nationalism, both Scots wanting to be independent from England and the English wanting shot of the Scots.

They all forget that there are two other nations in this union!