Noel Hodson Blog: October 2012

Tuesday 30 October 2012

FLOODS, POLAR ICE CAPS - BLOG ARCHIVE

Blogs about global warming and rising sea-level. Move to Higher Ground

SEA-LEVEL AND MELTDOWN

ARCTIC AND ANTARCTIC WARMING – SEA LEVEL RISES

STORM WARNINGS – HURRICANE SANDY

DOOMSDAY – LONDON & NEW YORK FLOOD

LONDON FLOODS - 300ft UNDERWATER

GLOBAL FLOODS - READ ALL ABOUT IT!

S.O.S. – ARCTIC ICE MELTING

NOAH'S FLOOD - 2012-25

FLOOD ALERT

MOVE TO HIGHER GROUND - CLIMATE CHANGE

MOVE TO HIGHER GROUND - THE CURSE OF ST. SWITHIN.

“MOVE TO HIGHER GROUND & MOVE YOUR MONEY ON-SHORE!...

NOAH'S ARK 2012

BIRD-FLU AND FLOOD INSURANCE

Science Fiction, Sci-Fi, The real future

JFK and New New York

http://www.amazon.co.uk/OUT-THE-DEPTHS-future-ebook/dp/B007MB9ZHY/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1346672388&sr=1-1#_

FUTURE INTELLIGENT TRANSPORT

THE TWO TIER SYSTEM (TTS) TO DRIVE THEM OFF THE MAIN ROADS!

CLEAR THE PLEBS - WE'RE COMING THROUGH
(MALLALIEU RESTORED BENTLEY MARK VI)

Most citizens of most countries are truly experienced experts on roads, rails and transport. To the great inconvenience of tidy civil servants, we all travel and clutter up the otherwise empty, pristine and manageable routes that THEY are responsible for. We walk, cycle, drive, ride, abuse and generally mess up the traffic systems – that would be better and cheaper …if entirely unused.

The average citizen, in the average pub, after the average number of drinks can suggest highly intelligent transport improvements, with excellent reasoning, for many a happy hour. If only THEY would listen – and learn – and apply. As it is, THEY have all the saying and doing and we, the people, do all the listening and applying. Too often, the first we know of major changes to our travel arrangements is when we find railway lines torn up, streets going one-way only, bus-lanes, bollards and hazard signs blocking our path; holes, ditches, broken bridges and a million other impediments to our smooth and elegant procession; that were definitely not there yesterday.

We do however, today, have notice of one of the more insane and idiotic proposals to discourage our wanderlust. Drivers are to be fined for using the main roads.

I will repeat that: DRIVERS WILL BE FINED FOR USING MAIN ROADS.

There are little known rest-homes, far from any roads and rails, retreats for traffic planners who have had enough, or usually have had far too much and have been reduced to gibbering wrecks. As they are restored to health, they are encouraged to take up their burdens once more – under strict medical supervision – and to frame novel, experimental ideas that can be imposed on their fellow countrymen. This idea emerged from just such a place. Let’s have a jar or two at the bar in the clinic and, kindly, unpick this latest offering from these mentally vulnerable invalids.

Where I live, Oxford, is an old, small city of 250,000 souls, with medieval winding streets, few car parks, at least 10,000 empty buses a day clogging its roads – with a problem peculiar to university cities, namely an endless stream of young learner drivers, a constant river of visiting foreign drivers, a deluge of meandering lost tourists, a scalding spring of cantankerous academics determined to abolish, or at least block, all “wheeled vehicles”, and a sad dribble of distressed, disoriented but still driving very, very old, often titled persons or retired judges who don’t so much steer as tack, like a yacht, and so require two or three clear traffic lanes ahead and to the side of them. Oxford does not suit the impatient. It often takes an hour to drive two miles. At the beating heart of the city is the least intelligent, slowest, most gridlocked central traffic flow ever conceived – serving Oxford Railway Station. This most stupid of all systems (if you imagine I exaggerate – view it on Google Earth) hates pedestrians, loathes cyclists, blocks buses, gridlocks cars and immobilises vital trade vehicles. It serves no travellers. Its purpose is to be the unavoidable hub that gridlocks all Oxford. The designer’s logic and cunning plan is that after a century or so of terrible, raging frustration and apoplectic deaths – all travellers will learn to avoid the centre of Oxford.

Fortunately, and surely this is true of most small towns, the outskirts are by-passed by fast main roads. The A34 pounds along with thousands of vehicles a day from North to South; the A40 zooms by with more thousands travelling between London in the East to Wales in the West; the M40 thunders day and night with six lanes of passenger and goods vehicles from the East before swinging North to Birmingham. We also have an outer Ring Road, a fast (a relative term) dual carriageway incorporating the main roads and feeding into carefully and consciously obstructed suburban roads; and an inner Ring road, which isn’t a ring, more of a ribbon car park, damned at both ends to ensure hours of gridlock.

What the combined brains of the civil service and local traffic planners now want to see around Oxford is a set of signs warning drivers on the main roads that if they continue on those roads they will be charged, fined, perhaps arrested and most certainly vilified. The poorest and most timid of those who have previously dared to by-pass the inner and outer gridlocked city streets on the main roads are to be forced onto the minor roads and streets. They will have to get out of the way of the rich, the busy, the impatient and the robust and clear-off their preferred routes as the privileged drivers blast through on their vitally important journeys.

Across Britain, these STOP or PAY or DIE signs will cause confusion on the main roads; which will cause accidents, queues and traffic jams. Once the message gets through to its intended victims – short journey shoppers, school run mums, commuters circumnavigating the city - and other wastrels; ten percent will turn off the main roads onto minor roads and will instantly create gridlock on all the minor roads; will run down suburban cyclists, pedestrians and joggers; endanger local children in the streets; and utterly baffle the foreign tourists.

To those purblind, smug planners who imagine all travellers will simply pay the extra tariffs – please take a look at the almost empty M6 Toll road running alongside the overcrowded but free M6 Motorway. Most travellers will use the free gridlocked routes to avoid paying an extra £5 in cash. It will be chaos on our minor roads.

Go back to your rest-homes, tranquillisers and drawing boards – and start thinking.

Monday 29 October 2012

GREEK TAX EVASION WAR ESCALATES

Those heinous socialist revolutionaries, The French, with their pinko, communist anti-Free Markets ideas of Liberté, égalité, fraternité, bought data stolen from Switzerland, with 130,000 names of secret bank account holders. Christine Lagarde, then French Finance Minister, met a request by the Greek Finance Minister for the Greek names on the list. There are 2,000 top Greeks listed.

An investigation into the finances of a sample of those listed found insufficient licit funds to fill their Swiss Accounts - but, surprise, surprise, this anomaly was not followed up by the tax collectors. The Finance Minister, Papaconstantinou, accused the tax authorities of being too scared of the big names listed to take recovery action. The list was then "LOST" by Greek officials. In the face of his countrymen going without food, jobs or a future, this annoyed magazine editor Kostas Vaxevanis who published all 2,000 names.

In an archetypal Big Brother NewSpeak reversal, the innocent whistle-blower was arrested and is now being dragged through court by the authorities, accused of invasion of privacy.

The battle lines are being drawn; between the sensitive, shy tax-evading Greeks (or at least a few of them) protected and aided by the Greek government, and the increasingly angry mob, led by a journalist. In the birthplace of democracy - will the brave publisher representing The People be damned? The dodgers say the "stolen" list cannot be used in Greek Law to prosecute them for tax-evasion; a nice legal point which might not stand the scrutiny of a revolutionary court.

Minister Papaconstantinou says there is an even longer list of 54,000 Greek nation robbers who siphoned off $22 billion to tax-havens, compiled by the Bank of Greece. I assume the accompanying paper-work claims tax-relief on assets in Greece and is, as usual, so imaginatively fabricated as to amount to a set of fraudulent conspiracies. This is apparently an "official" list and so can be used in Greek Law to get the money back.

Maybe this escalating row between poor but honest and rich but dishonest Greeks will pave the way for rapid mass repatriation of substantial funds, via back-duty-tax-cases, and be an exemplar for all other OECD countries to recover their share of the $21 trillion of lost liquidity. Releasing this inert buried treasure, would quickly get the world economy back on track. It must be recovered and invested in the communities from which it was taken. ...Irrespective of the hurt private feelings of the hoarders.

I wonder what Angela Merkel "feels" about the issues.

PS - Remember, if you have been professionally advised on such tax-planning - and it goes wrong - you will be covered for losses by your accountant's and lawyer's Professional Indemnity Insurance (PII) - NIL DESPARANDUM.

GLOBAL ECONOMY - BLOG ARCHIVE

STORM WARNINGS – HURRICANE SANDY

Hurricane Sandy is a portent of increasing sea-level rises and storms, leading to floods along the coastal margins and in flood prone water courses in higher areas.

America is a large continent with more weather extremes than island Britain, but the Climate Change scientists, who have accurately predicted worsening events in the US, do not spare Europe and the UK – or any region – from the consequences of global warming; which will, by the way, feel damn cold as icebergs drift into warm oceans.

It has to be hoped that good preparations, neighbourly care and attention and vigilant, efficient emergency services will preserve life and limb and people’s homes. But in the longer term, it is beyond doubt that the ice caps are melting and sea level is rising, as predicted, and that disruption from extreme weather will, as predicted, become more prevalent.

FLOODS, POLAR ICE CAPS - BLOG ARCHIVE

We humans have a marvellous capacity for enjoying the calm after the storm. For most of us, we know for certain that things go back to normal; that the threatening waters recede and life resumes its habitual patterns. It will not be like that. As the massive polar ice mountains slide into the sea from the land, they will melt, the sea level will rise, and it will stay high for ages – permanently flooding the coastal margins where 80% of us live. This is what the science tells us.

Most people haven’t the time to wade through hundreds of pages of data and academic conclusions. Most scientists are reluctant to be classed as scare mongers and go up against the massed guns and mass wealth and mass media of the vested interests of climate change sceptics – who quite simply are enjoying their lives and incomes and don’t want any changes – particularly climate changes. So they find it is best to reinterpret the data and convince themselves that “It will be OK”.

So, to help most people, I have followed the scientific reports over the past fifteen years and built the consensus conclusions into two exciting, readable novels which forecast what is happening now and how it will be looking back from five-hundred years in the future. It will be tough, but well worth surviving. Here are a couple of extracts:

OUT OF THE DEPTHS:

New York, New York

Sociologists have reasoned that the birth and development of great artists, philosophers and inventors, such as the famous figures of the Renaissance in Europe, requires a critical-mass of population to educate, inspire and support them and to create a receptive environment in which their talents will flourish. In short – emergent genius needs to stand on the shoulders of giants of civilisation; giants who have created stability and prosperity, and who provide liberal, intelligent patronage of arts and science. Can we, without the critical-mass, from our tiny, shattered population, struggling for survival, organise society and find the wherewithal to nurture mankind’s next Renaissance?

Professor Martin Blackmoor, Dean of the University of London 2008.

80% of the World’s population lives on the coastal margin. If they suddenly retreated inland, utter chaos would ensue. Global Analyses of Populations and Physiography -1997

In America in New York State and New York City, the rising waters had disturbed the lives of twenty-million people. As in Europe, a large percentage of the population had died of Glacier ‘Flu, the indiscriminate killer pandemic. Long Island was mostly below water, the Statue of Liberty stood ankle deep in the ocean, battered by waves that on stormy days leapt up and disrespectfully doused her face. Fierce ‘Can-Do’ survivors had miraculously constructed floating wooden skirts around famously tall buildings; skirts that rose and fell on the tides providing safe landing and berthing for a myriad of small boats clustered at the feet, or rather knees, of Manhattan skyscrapers. The Hudson River made a conduit for the sea to invade inland, west of the Taconic Mountains. In the north, Lake Ontario rose as ocean waters reversed the flow of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, and flooded down the Mohawk River, cutting the State in half. The Atlantic water, fed by the Labrador Current, complete with immense icebergs as large as major mountains, direct from Greenland and the Artic Circle, was bitterly cold, giving rise to innumerable grim ironic jokes on the theme of “global warming.”

Like Londoners, millions of citizens had made for higher ground – of which, unlike London, there was plenty. And like London, the New York supply infrastructure, food, medical, fuel, sewage and water failed under the strain of the mass relocation and shorted-out electrical power. Like London, all these things could be fixed. But again like London, the experts and labour to make things work were in very short supply.

At first it seemed the smart money was on those who made it into the Appalachian Mountains and the Allegheny Plateau, rising in places as high as six-thousand-feet – for how could the ocean reach up there – and there was plenty of space, all the space they needed, for mankind and all the displaced farm animals. In theory the mountain dwelling refugees would be alright. A little of the old pioneering spirit – some rapid courses on farming and food production and those who survived the ‘flu would make it. They would pull through.

But, there were two additional buggeration factors that Londoners did not have to cope with. Firstly, it was now winter and it was unbelievably cold. It was hellishly cold. And it snowed heavily. It was so cold and wintry that it was far safer to stay indoors than to venture out to take care of cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry; particularly for amateur farmers, still dreaming of centrally heated penthouse apartments. So getting food was a very tough proposition. The distances to storage centres, abandoned supermarkets and the like could be very long – and fuel was now harder to come by. So foraging for food was often unsuccessful. Some isolated and unfit people simply died of hunger, marooned in snowdrifts or iced in to their cabins and mansions.

And secondly, most people were armed.

AMAZON KINDLE

http://www.amazon.co.uk/OUT-THE-DEPTHS-future-ebook/dp/B007MB9ZHY/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1346672388&sr=1-1#_

AD-2516 – After Global Warming:

Accustomed as they had become to marvels in the few short days since they had thawed, the fast approaching scene fried the Survivors’ logic circuits and frazzled their anticipatory visions. New-New-York was as much like old New York as King Kong resembled a ripe banana.

Joe was beside himself with excitement and nostalgia. Nostalgia softened his soul, despite his still firmly held convictions that the aircraft in which they were sweeping across the New York harbour approaches, was not an aircraft but an optical illusion room, that the New-New-York now being presented to him was a fevered, albeit very, very clever and real looking, creation of a computer nerd’s imagination, projected onto the windows of the non-aircraft in which they were not flying and that the date was now the 9th of January 2000AD; and that therefore he was still the 140th Richest Man in the World, according to Fortune Magazine's analysis, with all that that implied for his position, power and influence in society; which he intended to re-establish in the next few minutes by producing the Concorde's cockpit pistol, fully loaded, from his capacious hip pocket and re-establishing his customary role of command.

Joe was intent on demonstrating his right to bear arms and to arrest, or at least escape from, these strangely courteous but clearly unhinged commie-bastards who had interrupted the flow of his life.

New-New-York was tall. In its shadow, in the waters at its feet and minuscule by comparison, stood the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and a dozen or so famous profiles which had once adorned the Manhattan skyline. These ancient monuments were a mile or more out to sea, their lower floors under one hundred feet of ocean and linked by high, enclosed walk-ways. The floating docks, originally conceived by a long dead business leader called Donald Trump, wrapped around each building and rose and fell with the tides. They were filled with people; New-New-Yorkers visiting the museums and artefacts dedicated to a bygone era.

Miles beyond, on dry land, stood the new city. To Sebastian, desperately struggling for metaphors and descriptions for the magazine article he might write for the folks back home, it most resembled an Australian desert termite hill; a mountain of a termite hill. A mountain honeycombed with highways, streets, tunnels and open spaces. Whatever brash excess of confidence had inspired the New Yorkers of the early 20th Century to build the Manhattan skyscrapers, the 26th Century New-New-Yorkers had literally put in the shade - they had looked at old New York and found it wanting. They had looked at old New York and saw it was not only now mostly under water but was small and uninspiring. They had decided to build big - bigger than anything anybody had ever conceived of at any time in the history of mankind. And then they had doubled it and trebled it.

AMAZON KINDLE

http://www.amazon.co.uk/AD2516-Global-Warming-Future-ebook/dp/B007N2H9JI/ref=tmm_kin_title_0#_