[headlines] need to be careful

Had to smile at:

Paulson Plans to Take Control of Fannie

Well, you can't blame him. Other good ones include:

* Eye Drops off Shelf

* Safety Experts say Kids should be Belted

* Something went wrong in Jet Crash, Experts say

Do you know some good ones?

[writing on the wall] should bp have known

Gazprom

The NYT put it this way:

With British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Vladimir V. Putin looking on, BP and Russia's TNK formed a 50-50 joint venture in 2003. The ceremony may have been the company's high water mark. The only oil company with partial foreign control, TNK-BP may be excluded from developing new fields under national security rules.

Asia Times adds:

BP [had] 23% of its global oil reserves located there, 25% of its current oil production, and a comparable amount of its market capitalization. … Robert Dudley, chief executive of TNK-BP - the 50/50 joint venture BP … operated for five years with Fridman, Len Blavatnik and Victor Vekselberg … [but] was found out, having tried to negotiate secretly with Russia's Gazprom the sale and purchase of the 50% stake in TNK-BP owned by the Russian trio - collectively known as AAR, reflecting the names of their holdings, Alfa, Access and Renova.

Dudley, BP chairman Peter Sutherland and chief executive Tony Hayward may have thought their proposed deal had the blessing of Gazprom's chairman at the time, Dmitry Medvedev, and Gazprom's chief lawyer, Konstantin Chuichenko.

But these two have recently moved into the Kremlin and the game has changed.

According to the Financial Times, Russian media reports and public statements by BP and AAR, the agreement between Hayward and Fridman - if it sticks - requires Dudley to be ousted by December 1.

This in itself is not a disaster but the new restrictions on the joint venture are. And this is not the only time that foreign ventures into Russia, particularly from Britain, have come to grief.

You may recall the partial ousting of the British Council in January and the following throwing out of all foreign academics and other workers of long standing in the RF in May, a move in which I was caught up and summarily thrown out, with all the others.

Now forgotten and well before my blogging days, hence my inability to attribute, was the British crystal manufacturer in Vladimir, one of the Zolotoye Koltso towns near Moscow. Once the plant had been in production 18 months, I seem to recall, the local authority said there was something wrong with the paperwork on the site the plant was on.

It was closed down, pending resolution of the matter and the owners barred from entry. Once they were eventually allowed in, most of the equipment had been removed and that which was left had been painted over another colour and the serial numbers erased.

No one is suggesting that the current situation is anything like that and the Minister I used to work with was one of the key people bringing corporate practice into line with Europe in the past few years.

Nevertheless, there was a message from 1998 and I marvel that BP did not know the lie of the land which was perfectly obvious to irrelevant individuals like myself well ahead of time. There seems to be a blockage in the understanding of the Russian psyche outside of Russia.

[air rage] media hype or reality

It's pretty obvious to some that I've been doing a fair bit of flying this year, not by choice.

I didn't see that much fractiousness in Russia, Italy nor even at Gatwick, which makes me wonder about this article:

One respondent noted: "I worked in Australian airports for Qantas in both domestic and international terminals. Recently, I have relocated to London ... I think the [worst] ground rage I ever encountered was at Qantas domestic Brisbane Airport. Hopefully, by the time I am ready to return to Oz the travelling public [will] have calmed down."

The thing is, most of these reports came out of Australia one from China and one from Argentina. What of the UK? Well, we have this and this but in terms of total numbers, I'm not so sure.

Perhaps it's more common in countries where the public expects levels of service of a high order but in somewhere like Italy, used to bureaucratic delays and failures, they seem better able to handle it psychologically.

Don't quote me - it's just a thought. Whilst speaking with a friend on this, he pointed out that the problem seems to be today that public officials and workers seem to go out of their way to be provocative, slack, inefficient and so on and then when a member of the public reacts angrily, he/she is immediately targetted as a troublemaker.

My friend also maintains that the British public will put up with this for a while longer and then someone is seriously going to be assassinated and a very un-British revolt is on the cards.

Worth thinking about.

[black is white] when warming is called cooling

Just been reading Stephen Murgatroyd's flawed piece on global cooling, courtesy of the redoubtable Aileni, a wonderful chap but with a block on this issue.

In the article, Murgatroyd says that "it has also been warmer than it is now or is likely to be in the future. There have in fact been six global warming periods over the last half million years. " He mentions, further on, "Lord John Maynard Keynes observation that “When the facts change, I change my mind”. It is time for us to do the same."

So let's look at the facts changing. First, from About:

One part scientists agree on is that the earth is warming. Data sets show the increases in temperatures over years. Temperatures will always fluctuate, but the general trend in data is a warming.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have also increased. Scientists agree that data from multiple sources indicates that CO2 levels have risen steadily since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

This by Live Science:

As for Abdussamatov’s claim that solar fluctuations are causing Earth’s current global warming, Charles Long, a climate physicist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in Washington, says the idea is nonsense.

“That’s nuts,” Long said in a telephone interview. “It doesn’t make physical sense that that’s the case.”

... and:

“The small measured changes in solar output and variations from one decade to the next are only on the order of a fraction of a percent, and if you do the calculations not even large enough to really provide a detectable signal in the surface temperature record,” said Penn State meteorologist Michael Mann.

On the Maunder Minimum, which cooling advocates link to the current lack of sunspots:

“The situation is pretty ambiguous,” said David Rind, a senior climate researcher at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has modeled the Maunder Minimum.

Based on current estimates, even if another Maunder Minimum were to occur, it might result in an average temperature decrease of about 2 degrees Fahrenheit, Rind said.

This would still not be enough to counteract warming of between 2 to 12 degrees Fahrenheit from greenhouse gases by 2100...

So one variable leads to cooling but the overwhelming trend to warming swamps it.

One more:

The warming around Earth's tropical belt is a signal suggesting that the "climate system has exceeded a critical threshold," which has sent tropical-zone glaciers in full retreat and will melt them completely "in the near future," said Lonnie G. Thompson, a scientist who for 23 years has been taking core samples from the ancient ice of glaciers.

Of course it's warming and the breaking off of chunks at the poles is not due to cooling. Gee - this thing just needs a little common sense. All right - Russia, where I was for 12 years.

In 1998 we had temperatures on seven occasions under minus 30 but by 2004, these had reduced to the extent that the snow season had contracted by two weeks and continued to do this until I departed. In the winter of 2007/8, there were NO minus 30 temperatures. The snow had contracted and the average winter temperature had progressively risen. I know this because I bothered to record these things.

Any Russian can tell you it is warmer now than earlier so where do people get off suggesting we are cooling? They are looking at studies, each with its counter-study negating it, when all they have to do is look out of the door and observe.

Sorry if I'm a little blunt here.

UPDATE on Sunday: Whiplash article, courtesy Wolfie.

[stowaway] snake on flight

From West Australian today:

Crew on an Air India passenger jet discovered a snake coiled up under a seat and were unable to catch it as it slithered around the plane, the airline said today.

The incident, which occurred on Monday, echoed the plot of 2006 hit film Snakes on a Plane starring Samuel L Jackson and Julianna Margulies.

Question - if you're flying and you know there's a snake under the seats somewhere, do you:

1. Scream and start a mass panic;

2. Put your feet up on the headrest ahead and whimper to yourself;

3. Find the b--g-r and exterminate it;

4. Make friends and name him/her?

[good navigation] the key to readers returning

Every one of us gets about other blogs - my primary method is to go first to my comments, read through and then click on the links there.

This produces some surprising results.

In the case of ScotsToryB, it produces a page which presumably is there to provide him with a link and to register who came. That's fine, as at least it does go somewhere.

Sometimes when you click on such links, it gives you a notice that it is open to invited readers only and again that's fine.

In other cases though, it either goes nowhere or else it links to an old blog. Now I can understand a blogger wishing to route his/her readers through some other blog, a little like Madame Toussaud's taking visitors through the shop and cafe before they can leave but we now get into the question of coercion.

If I try to link back to a blog, I would like to go straight to that person's list of linked blogs, with a nice little summary, top left, under the heading "Contact", of email and web page. You might say it is unnecessary to put "My Web Page", when that page is already listed in the blogger's blogs, below right but that involves scrolling down in many cases and ... well ... you know how rapidly we go from blog to blog, don't you?

And often we can't know which is your primary blog, among all the others. True, it is often the one with the most team members but still - wouldn't it be easier for all just to put the main blog under "Contact"?

These little annoyances can add up after time.

Seems to me we should try to get the navigation working well first but as we can't visit our own blogs, as others do, we often don't know how easy or how difficult that is.

A rapid journey to your blog, which then does not take two years to come up on screen, plus the nice listing of email and web page top left, is a real boon as far as I'm concerned.