Photo: http://www.freeimages.co.uk/

Last time I had to visit the hospital, the first thing I noticed, apart from the hilarious waiting line, was the rather outdated, but proudly displayed ISO14001 certification. This seemed to be the great pride of the place and apparently, the certification had nothing to do with the – just reported in media – lack of proper daily cleaning for the past five years, all the nurses quitting because they could not stand the working environment, some doctors who never should have been admitted to medical school, a new – thus crashed – medical record system, numerous – sometimes fatal – cases of maltreatment, and an epidemic flu spreading in some departments. The facility is considered one of the top university hospitals in Europe, and – rightly – renowned for it’s infant and cancer care, but the rest was in real crisis. Don’t know how they established their EMS, or was it a matter of cutting down on cutlery for the food no one dared to touch.

Guess most patients would have been more comforted by a certificate for quality.

The problematic thing with an EMS as such is really the E. On the one hand, it’s used for cost control, appreciated by all interested parties, as long as quality does not suffer, but also something carried out without an EMS. Secondly it’s used for marketing, with disputable impact. For the hospital mentioned above, they did not need any marketing, being both governmental and overcrowded. In the private sector, it’s a good communication tolls with the financial analysts, who on the other hand are only interested in the costs, and in risk awareness and control.

But I don’t doubt that the ISO people are doing a good job. It’s just that maybe they are taking it a bit too far. The most recent introduction on the certification market – ISO 14005- is tailor made for small and middle sized business. Guess some people will buy this, but my prediction is that the certificate will only serve as an excuse for restricting the use of daily necessities, like office material, fuel, electricity and water. Guess some people still can see though that, but next time you stay in a hotel, consider the sign in the bathroom asking you to think about the environment and reuse the towels. I don’t mind saving some time and money for the busy personnel, but please don’t treat your guests as imbeciles.

In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt asked his administration to undertake a vast exploratory study of future technologies. A group of researchers eventually produced a voluminous report with fascinating insights. There was only one little glitch: the document did not foresee television, plastics, jet planes, organ transplants, laser technology, or even ballpoint pens.

As Ludwig von Mises stated, petrol is good for many things, but not for slaking your thirst. Similarly, government may be useful in some instances but not in others. The precautionary principle is good, provided it is used appropriately. We should first apply it to politics: our elected leaders should be required to produce impact studies, showing, ex ante, that their planned interventions will have a positive effect. Thus the scope of government would spontaneously be reduced to its congruent portion.

Here is a formidable source of data on climate change, courtesy of prof. Lindzen (MIT) from a CEI presentation a couple of weeks ago. Once more, he reminds us that many statements bandied about and accepted as gospel truths are in fact serious distortions and sometimes outright contrary even to authorities such as the IPCC.

Try this one for size:

“The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer (…) Reports all point to a radical change in climate conditions. (…) Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, while at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared.”

Sounds familiar? Sure, must have read it in the paper last week. Fact: the Arctic variations are notorious and the report above was issued by the US Weather Bureau in … 1922.

“Warming is accelerating and sea levels will rise more than expected.” The IPCC mid-range 10 year projection is 1.26 inches and may not clearly be distinguished from the change registered since the ice age ended, ie for some 10,000 years.

Yes, but what about the “consensus”? The IPCC states that it is likely that most of the warming over the past 50 years is due to man’s emissions. How did it come about? Large models which could not simulate human behaviour supposedly described natural climate variations. According to the author, “the fact that these models could not replicate the warming episode from the mid-seventies through the mid-nineties (was used) to argue that forcing was necessary and that the forcing must have been due to man.”

This makes “arguments in support of intelligent design sound rigorous by comparison”.

How unfortunate that this is not required reading in the schoolroom. Meanwhile, please do have a look.

Photos: freedigitalphotos

German Geologists Call Two Centigrade Target for Global Warming Bare Nonsense

Six weeks before the beginning of the Copenhagen summit the big German business newspaper „Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” published an interview with three leading geoscientist (Karin Lochte, Volker Mosbrugger and Reinhard Hüttl) who call UNFCCC’s official target of mitigating global warming at two centigrade through halving global CO2 emissions by 50 percent till 2050 “bare nonsense”. All these scientists believe nevertheless that human CO2 emissions are largely contributing to global warming. But knowing the earth’s history they recognize that there are also important natural factors that determine the evolution of the earth’s mean temperature. Any policy focussing only on CO2 (and some other heat trapping gases) cannot pretend to control climate change as a whole. Adaptation to climate change is the only rational option. Volker Mosbrugger, the director of the famous Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt, pointed out: “There are always winners and losers in any evolutionary process and who is adapting best will survive. It is stupid to favour mitigation over adaptation.”  

Unfortunately, in spite of having underlined this, Mosbrugger is calling for a global “earth system management” by a sort of world government. But how could man control the movements of the earth’s crust or the intensity of cosmic rays?  In reality adaption doesn’t need neither a global strategy nor global governance. It would be better to guarantee freedom of choice, i.e. let people on the local or regional level decide how to cope with positive or negative consequences of climate change.