Birth control: a cold day in hell

There’s an old Chinese proverb, it may be Confucius, it may be Chairman Mao; for all I know or care it might be Ken Lo or Bert Kwok, but it goes: ‘It is always difficult to make predictions – especially about the future.’ And whoever said it, he was right.

Predictions are what Mystic Meg (told by the editor of The Sunday People that if she was any good she would have known in advance that he was going to fire her), or any of the hundreds of charlatans calling themselves Gipsy Rose Lee do for a living. If they are called Chief Monolulu, and they tell you ‘I gotta horse’– as I remember to my cost as a youth – they are best avoided.

Prediction is not science. Scientists cannot do the future. They have more than enough on their plate trying to reach any form of conclusions about the past, and that is there for them to see. They don’t know what has already happened, so how can they expect to be taken seriously when they tell us what is going to happen next?

There’s an email that circles the Internet with infuriating frequency about predictions that were just plain wrong. I won’t bore you with all of it, just with a couple from people who should have been in a position to know what they were talking about:
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. - Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. - Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. - Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

Science, as you may remember if you did physics at school, means knowledge; prediction means guesswork.

In Washington DC this spring (where the cherry blossom was waiting for it to stop snowing, so it could bloom) I learnt from a jubilant Greenpeace-US representative that the organisation had been successful in having the polar bear classed as a ‘threatened’ species under the federal Endangered Species Act, ‘due to the meltdown of its sea-ice habitat caused by global warming.’

When I ventured that there appeared to be no evidence that the number of polar bears was decreasing, nor that their continued existence was under any threat, the Greenpeacenik replied (and readers who are being scared out of their wits by the doomsayers might like to consider this): ‘Maybe not. We don’t actually know. But the classification is a temporary measure, while we try to find out the facts.’

Well, that’s one way of approaching science - declare a situation as true and scary, and then set about checking it for accuracy.

The scientific evidence to support this claim appears to be one photogenic polar bear on one tiny ice-flow. Other pictures show wiser bears moving off small pieces of ice onto a more solid footing. That, presumably, is how the species continues to survive.

The Greenpeace argument also claims to be supported by ‘NASA findings that the polar bear is at risk.’

Now, Greenpeace is an environmental lobby group with a message to sell, even if it hasn’t yet got round to standing up its own propaganda. Exactly why the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (the engineers and scientists who send people to the moon, vehicles to Mars, and run the space shuttle) should be interested in earth’s polar bears is a different matter for concern.

But Greenpeace says that NASA has announced ‘measurements showing [that] Arctic sea ice is hitting major lows. This is more bad news on the impacts of global warming effects and bad news for the polar bear.’

Only the first of those two statements was actually from NASA. And where did the spacemen get their data about Arctic ice?

Oh... from Greenpeace-US.

American travel agents that specialise in Arctic ventures were meanwhile advertising excursions on the basis that it is nowadays easier than ever to guarantee polar bear sightings – ‘possibly’ (being no more scientific than that) because of an increased population.
My own scientific conclusion is that perhaps we should be more concerned about the finders, than about the findings.

A slightly warmer than normal British January was held up by the scientists as proof that the year was starting with signs of global warming. The same experts were strangely silent the following month when five international airports were closed in the UK because of snow, and a million schoolchildren were kept out of classrooms on account of the weather. They disappeared from sight altogether in March when northern Europe was in the grip of ‘Arctic’ weather. According to the UK Highways Agency mid-March was ‘the latest in the year we’ve ever had to prepare for snow storms.’

When I wrote in a newspaper that the evidence for global warming appeared, to me, relatively unconvincing, I was denounced as a Flat-Earther. (That was nothing; Mark Steyn, plying his column on the other side of the Atlantic and saying much the same thing, was denounced as a Holocaust-Denier – such is the level of debate and tolerance among the warm-mongers.)

My point of view was dismissed as a ‘silly five cents worth’.

‘Did he [meaning me] not see the images [plural] of drowning [sic] polar bears [plural] on floating ice sheets [again: plural]?’

What I, like the rest of us, have seen so far this year is the sort of seasonal fluctuation that I have been seeing all my life, and that historians and diarists have observed down the centuries.

A friend who was in the Royal Navy during the war sent his family a moving letter about seeing a polar bear on a tiny iceberg that was inexorably drifting south - yet the 1940s was the coldest decade for 100 years.

Although there’s an enormous chunk of the population that relishes any bad news, and wants something to be done (usually by other people) about it, the facts are simply not on their side.

At the South Pole the main land mass (the Antarctic) is actually getting colder; at the North Pole the western Arctic is getting warmer but the eastern Arctic’s getting colder. If the polar bears are worried about survival, they’ll need to move around a bit, something that’s not normally beyond the wit of even the dumbest animals.

Just over a thousand years ago, when Erik the Red and his Viking pals headed off to explore, they found a place and called it Greenland. You might wonder how they came up with such a colourful name, although the fact that they settled there to hunt and to farm might be a bit of a clue.

The Little Ice Age occurred, covering the place with frozen water, about 500 years later - and while I’ve no idea what impact those early settlers had on the local environment, it seems harsh to blame them for causing the Thames to freeze over. And it may be worth wondering whether green isn’t the colour that nature always intended that part of the earth to be painted.

Thirty years ago we were threatened with another Ice Age if we didn’t change our ways; we should actually be freezing our socks off by now. The scientists who predicted that scare are now nowhere to be seen, or heard.

The generation that followed them is projecting sufficient hot air about a totally opposite effect to put the wind up sensitive people.

Anybody can be a weather expert. It’s like predicting the results of elections: there are usually only two options so you have a 50-50 chance of being right on the money.

There’s also another faction of fence-sitting experts who are simply predicting ‘climate change’ without daring to be specific - in other words, they aren’t sure which way it’s going but, whatever, it’s changing. Yes: the global climate does quite a lot of that.

Some people think they can see a pattern of extreme changes roughly every 30 years; others think it’s more like every five centuries. In some places it’s much more frequent than either of those periods: in Melbourne they sometimes experience four seasons in one day; in parts of America they say that if you don’t like the weather, just wait a few minutes...

The hairshirts, however, are never content unless they can find something to be miserable about. They read only the scary headlines (which are, after all, the bread and butter of journalism) but ignore their science.

Here’s some of mine: from beginning to end of the 20th century the temperature increased - at most - by something less than 0.75 of one degree (Celsius). In other words, by a measurement that is undetectable on the majority of thermometers.

Where does birth control come into this silly argument?

Right here.

Scientists (if you are still reading you will know by now that I use that term fairly recklessly to describe people who think what they do is scientific) are now suggesting that one solution is for the civilised world to produce fewer children.

The human race, you see, is responsible for whatever changes the climate is going through; so it follows that smaller populations would mean less impact on Mother Nature.

The birth rate in the UK is a fraction less than two children per couple; in Europe as a whole is it marginally more than one.

Now: you don’t have to call yourself a scientist to work out that if two people – what we used to call a married couple – produce only one child, and that child marries, or even doesn’t, but has a partner and between them they produce only one child, and so on, in time the human race will be extinct.

And that isn’t prediction; that is mathematics.

But wait.

There is no call for a lower birth rate in the third world, where the typical parental production line might be churning out eight and sometimes more babies per couple. Well no: that would be racist. So the starving millions would be increasing while the civilised and industrialised nations that basically fund the rest of the planet will eventually be wiped out. Long before even the polar bear.

Yeah. That sounds like a solution.

Just watch out for the men in white coats.

Or the men in white mitres.

For the Bishop of Carlisle, talking out of the top of his pointy hat as some of his rank are prone to do, has explained climate change to his congregation, and to anybody else daft enough to listen, by blaming it on you sinners.

[It should perhaps be pointed out that, while the UK has been suffering from floods, tornados and cold, cold weather, Malta has been baking. When did you last see the word ‘searing’ in a weather report?]

The Right Rev explains his lousy local weather as ‘a strong and definite judgment because the world has been arrogant . . . we are reaping the consequences of our moral degradation’.
He even puts some of the blame on the gay liberation movement: ‘The sexual orientation regulations are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God’s judgment.’

So now we know. Bloody hot (me) is caused by an over-use of fossil fuels and the exhaust emissions from buses and lorries; bloody freezing (you) is caused by ignoring the Old Testament. Forgive us our trespasses, for we are soaked to the skin and freezing verily unto death.

Malta can rest easy because, on this bishop's say-so, the sun shines only on the righteous. And that - as is plain to see - is us, folks.

Unless (and it is, I know, verging on the blasphemous to suggest it) God has more than one approach to sinners. And we in in the middle of the Med are simply being slowly fried, as a rehearsal for hell.

Having brought God into the argument (it wasn’t me, guv, but some other Rev) can we hazard a guess about what He thinks about the global warming warnings?

Here’s a clue that might be significant: attendance at the Johannesburg element of the recent round-the-world pop misery-fest was much lower than expected… because it snowed there, for the first time in 25 years. Bloody hell.
#

In my end is my beginning

A couple of generations (and several political administrations) ago, when many of today’s foreign residents decided Gozo would be an ideal place to settle, and eventually to retire, they came because the island was virtually devoid of tourists.
Tourists were people who went to Majorca, the Costas or the Adriatic. Package holidays were a new idea and people who shunned them called themselves travellers, rather than tourists, and found places off the beaten track. Like Gozo.
Crossing the channel on Imperial Eagle, sharing the journey with a fuel tanker, a donkey, cartons of tinned food and a hundred thousand toilet rolls, was part of the adventure.
The roads, then as now, were potholed, some of them embellished by a transparent layer of water-soluble tarmac sprayed over soil, and visitors who noticed that collapsed walls remained unrepaired, with stones lying in the road, remarked that “It’ll be a nice place, when it’s finished.” Gozitan sages, of which there appeared to be many, replied gently: “Better that it had never started.”
More than 5,000 years ago this was, after all, the first place on earth to have stone buildings. And construction work has been going on ever since. If a fraction of the enthusiasm that is expended on development (and over-development) was spent instead on the tourism industry, Gozo would be teeming with visitors, instead of welcoming fewer with successive years.
So when this newspaper asks in a leader whether we are facing “The End of Gozo As We Know it” (leader, last Sunday), it may be that we are looking not at the end, but at the beginning.
For tourists and travellers have finally got the message. The authorities have done everything possible to deter them from visiting in the first place, and then to dissuade them from coming back.
The biggest construction jobs (which most people would imagine might be better tackled in the cooler months) have actually been scheduled to start in summer. Last year it was Mgarr harbour and the Duke of Edinburgh project in Victoria. This year it is the road (the only main thoroughfare on the island) that runs to tourist centres like Dwerja and San Lawrenz, and to Gharb which is probably the most popular village for foreign residents. And there are rumours that work on the road to Xlendi is yet to start.
The newly arriving foreign traveller, having already spent a small fortune to get there, picks up his hire car at Luqa and drives out of the airport onto a complicated set of road works (started this Easter). He gets the benefit of a bit of new cross-country road (if he can find it, for it is not signposted from the airport), parts which may already be closed for repair; and on the last, slow, stretch, he faces speed cameras and wardens waiting mob-handed in case he crosses a single white line.
He arrives at Cirkewwa, a building site (with not much evidence of building being done) where the kiosk at which he queues for a ticket is probably unmanned. And he boards the once-new ferries – to find the seats ripped and badly stained, the doors broken, the floors worn… and the toilets being cleaned during the voyage.
At Mgarr, another building site, he encounters total chaos with coaches, taxis and private cars driving across the flow of disembarking vehicles, a perverse traffic-lane system, and bewildered pedestrians wandering all over the place. The likelihood is that his journey towards Victoria will be blocked by one or two cranes and cement mixers, the traffic lights won’t be working, and if he needs to drive further than the capital he will have to embark on a round-the-island tour, through a maze of narrow village streets on which lorries are parked (and stones are left in the road), before reaching a destination where he will doubtless encounter even more cranes.
[Note for ornithologists: the crane is a protected species on Gozo.]
If he goes for a walk around what’s left of the cliffs he takes his life into his hands, literally – for a few weeks ago a “hunter” was boasting in a bar that he “shot three tourists this morning”. I met two of them, still picking lead shot out of their flesh, and we are waiting to see how their case is handled. Not their suitcase, for we all know the risk they take with that, on their homeward journey.
And then he faces being charged Lm1.50 for a cup of coffee in a so-called “five star” hotel.
Is it any wonder, then, that a boatman who earns his living from divers reports having had only eight customers in the first six months of this year? Or that some of the best restaurants on the islands are empty except when the Maltese come over at the weekend to check on their investment in new development?
So when the government and voluntary officials tasked with the tourist and tourism businesses publicly wring their hands about the decline in visitor numbers we can recognise this as no more than a cynical act. The problem is not lack of awareness about Gozo as a holiday destination: the problem is that the travelling public is already far too aware.
The authorities have done everything short of putting up notices at Cirkewwa proclaiming Tourists Go Home.
The effect of all this is that, already this summer, residents are enjoying a considerable amount of freedom of movement. There are fewer visitors getting under their feet, more spaces for parking, less congestion in the supermarkets, more room in restaurants. And the traffic wardens (warned against booking Maltese drivers, and unwilling to ticket their neighbours) are having to work harder to find cars with a K registration*.
The knock-on may be that a few second-rate restaurants, and maybe even those hotels that haven’t maintained their standards, will have to close. And then, maybe, prices will drop to attract the handful of people that doggedly turn up.
Gozo will become a backwater again. And travellers who liked the place because it was quiet and unspoilt will recognise that it has re-found its soul, and will start coming back and spending money.
Not in any great numbers, though. So there is no need for any more new buildings to cater for them.
* Maltese rental cars have K registrations.
#

With friends like these..

IF Malta wanted to destroy Gozo as a tourism base, and thereby wipe out its entire economy, there are a number of ways this could easily be achieved.
The first step, as with any campaign, would be to disrupt communications. A simple method of approaching this would be to announce, with great fanfare, plans to reconstruct the ferry terminals as “all-weather” harbours, and then to start building work simultaneously at each end of the route – a sure-fire tactic to guarantee maximum chaos. Then it would quietly abandon the work halfway, after denying access to a café, removing a tourist office, post office, ATM machine, sandwich shop and bank from one side, while ensuring that there were no adequate facilities (not even a waiting room) at the other.
It would allow a helicopter company to continue operating an unreliable service long after it had been declared substandard in aeronautical terms, withdraw it before a replacement could be found, and then appoint a foreign operator on a lop-sided contract with a haphazard timetable and aircraft that were half the size of those they replaced.
Meanwhile it would transpire that the all-weather harbours and three impressive and expensive new all-weather ships could not operate when it was, er… windy.
The destruction of a number of historic buildings would be surreptitiously sanctioned and there would be no rush to rebuild them. One of these would dominate the harbour as if to secure as the first impression of any tourists accidentally finding their way to Gozo that the place was an on-going building site. The most ancient edifice on the island (and, coincidentally, on the planet) would be permanently surrounded by scaffolding, to illustrate the apparent fact that no construction project was ever actually completed on Gozo, not even after 5,000 years.
Raw sewage would be pumped out into the sea at some of the most attractive beaches within the archipelago and inland beauty spots would be allowed to be used for illegal dumping of waste. Hunters who menaced and threatened ramblers on coastal walks would pursue their sport, regardless of the season, without interference by the authorities.
Malta would allow heavy wagons, overladen and with insecure loads, often with no working lights, to embark unchecked from Cirkewwa and to roar through narrow streets pumping out black smoke from their exhausts across pavement cafes and market stalls.
But it would refuse to consider proposals for a golf course or an airstrip on the grounds that it was “protecting the environment”.
Rather than being promoted as a separate and quiet destination, Gozo would be marketed by Maltese businesses only as a day trip centre, more or less along the lines of an off-shore theme park. Not much different, really, from Popeye Village.
If Malta was determined to deter tourists from its “sister” island, and keep visitors for itself, that would probably be how it would set about achieving its aim.
Naturally, it would try not to be too obvious. It would want to appear to be working for Gozo, while working against it.
It might, for example, announce a “new” road, funded by the EU. This would be a proposal guaranteed to cause total disruption for tourists throughout at least one season but one that would not cut a single minute from the current journey time nor provide one jot more comfort for motorists along its route. Meanwhile the government would quietly ignore requests to improve tourist routes (to Ramla Bay, Xlendi, Dwerja, Ta Cenc, Hondoq) beyond the state of Sicilian farm roads. Gozo’s history started with cart tracks from Italy to Libya and there has been little apparent improvement since then..
It would propose improving the main car park in Victoria – by digging it up. It might promise to restart work on the abandoned harbour project – but not until the tourist season resumed. It would claim that all this was evidence of the amount of concern the larger island had about ensuring the success of Gozo as an upmarket (and different) destination, and proof that the main island was eager to direct some of its five-star tourists away from its own undersold luxury hotels, in favour of a greener and more pleasant resort centre.
The more astute reader will have gathered by now that all of the above is exactly what has been happening over the past few years.
Gozo has only one industry and that is tourism. Every other activity – agriculture, fishing, construction – survives only to support it. The schools are there to educate the children of people who live off tourism. Shops and government offices exist to service the residents who make a living, directly or indirectly, out of tourism. There is virtually no other commercial activity because Malta keeps the bulk of any incoming business on the main island, just as it hogs the tourists.
Of course, nobody believes (do they?) that Malta is bent on hampering Gozo’s tourist industry. Nobody believes that Malta, having made such a ham-fisted job of attracting tourists to the south island and in the absence of an actual surplus of visitors, would be positively discouraging visitors to its own off-shore island, and maintaining the place only as its personal bolt-hole for weekends and holidays.
But that sure is the way it looks.
#

My island in the sun

Perhaps we can come to some arrangement, here; I will tell you what is great about my island and you will agree not to come. The dilemma, for me, is that I live here (or, depending on your perspective, I live there).
Because tourism is the island’s biggest industry, tourists (you) just get under my feet; you take all the car park spaces and occupy all the seats in cafes and restaurants precisely when I need them. But duty is duty, so long as you understand that I write this selflessly, and against my own better interests…
Although the Tourism Ministry always uses “the middle east crisis” (and when wasn’t there one of those?) as an excuse for not performing better, it has been something of an economic godsend for my archipelago of five small islands. Turkey, a competitor in terms of ancient European and eastern-Mediterranean culture, sailing, diving, walking, nightlife, good hotels, friendly people and great seafood is beaten hands-down on all those factors here. And Turkey has dodgy human rights, is a full member of Nato and borders Iraq, while we are miles away from anywhere, and determinedly neutral.
Hereabouts – even the Americans have started to notice – it is, in a word, safe. It is also relatively crime free. The big news was when we had our first car theft. People started wondering whether they should now start to lock their cars, and maybe even their front doors.
They are like that, the locals: trusting, honest, helpful, and neighbourly. Tell one of them you have a problem and he will go miles out of his way (these are small islands), or find a relative, to help you. A cynic might suggest that there is nowhere to go if you steal anything; that might be a factor, but the result is the same – safe. Teenagers, tumbling out of discos at the time their parents may be preparing for Mass, confidently hitch lifts home.
Oh yes… and they all more or less speak English. And, at least in theory, they drive on the left. They support Manchester United, Spurs, Liverpool or Arsenal, and many actually travel to watch the matches.
As for the climate, it is terrific, especially if you like heat. After chilly (to us) winters - when we always joke it is like an English August - the summers are always hot. It often hits more than 40C, with 30 degrees at night, so hotels have air-conditioning, and every rentable “farmhouse” needs a pool.
There is not much in the way of beaches, but the coastline – rocks, cliffs, bays and natural harbours – is spectacular. The islands are a walker’s paradise.
The island with the airport is naturally the busiest and most popular, densely crowded in the built-up areas, empty elsewhere. Mine is more rural, greener, and (according to people from “the mainland” who visit at weekends and for their own summer holidays) quieter. I am not sure about that. From now until the end of summer we will have a festa, somewhere on this tiny rock, every week. Petards, which sound like cannon, will go off all day and every day; and one of the villages will be fully en fete for a full week with the festivities exploding in a fantastic firework display – each village is expected to present a bigger and better spectacle than the last one – at the weekend.
The name of the village in which I live is said to translate as “fountain of peace”, but I guess it was named before festas were invented.
I live overlooking the harbour, so I’ll know if you cheat on the deal we made at the top of the page and decide to come here…
#
This posting is an edited extract from an article I wrote in the travel section of The Independent.