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?

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!

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!

Like Roger I am angry and depressed at what is happening in the Middle East - the Hizbullah rocket attacks on northern Israel, the disproportionate destruction of Lebanon and the refusal of the US and UK to back UN calls for a cease fire.

So another voice is welcome - and that of the Lebanese Christian community is one that is not often heard. Dr Martin Accad is the Academic Dean of the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary in Lebanon, and was in the US teaching when Israel bombed Beirut Airport. He writes in anger about what has happened his country. Worth a read.

Also worth a read in this thread is a gracious response from David Gushee, who Accad criticised, and a further, more hopeful article from Dr Accad.

We woke on Wednesday morning to a plumbing problem. The ball-valve in our cold water tank was not sealing off correctly, and the cold water tank was overflowing (luckily, out the overflow pipe to outside the house!).

As we have British Gas Plumbing and Drains Cover, we called them. They told us that they could send a maintenance engineer between 1200-1800 the same day. Good.

I managed to rearrange meetings and came home at 1200, and worked at home for the afternoon. The BG man did not arrive until 1830, meaning I had been waiting around for 6½ hours. But I was pleased he had arrived and could then fix the problem.

That feeling didn’t last long. He looked at the problem, assessed that we needed a new ball-valve, and asked where our stopcock was. As our house is 95 years old, the cold water can only be turned off from the stopcock out in the street. This only turns off the water to our house. But the BG man said

“Sorry, we’re not allowed to turn off water in the street, we can only turn off water using your own stopcock. When you fit your own stopcock, we’ll come back and fix the ball-valve.”

BG had inspected our plumbing in a maintenance visit in February. They didn’t mention at the time that they would not be able to cover us. That’s the second time this year they’ve forced us to take time out of work, turned up and have not been able to do the job arranged.

The only solution was for me to call our plumber, Joe. This was 7pm and he was a) bathing his son and b) about to go out. But he called round that evening, borrowed our keys and came back first thing the next morning to fix the problem. Now that’s service!