Warmer temperatures will save lives, writes Bjorn Lomborg. Global warming will mean more frequent heatwaves, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – by 2100, every three years instead of every 20 years. But bitterly cold spells will decrease as quickly, coming once every two decades, rather than every three years. For the UK, studies show heat-related deaths caused by global warming will increase by 2,000. But cold-related deaths will decrease by 20,000. The only global study suggests that this is true internationally: by 2050, there will be almost 400,000 more heat-related deaths a year, and almost 1.8 million fewer cold-related deaths. Warmer temperatures will save 1.4 million lives each year. The number of saved lives will outweigh the increase in heat-related deaths until at least 2200. Faced with Lord Laming's report on Baby P, does one laugh or cry, asks Martin Kettle? The man who delivered a bureaucratic blizzard of 108 recommendations after Victoria Climbie's death and helped overload a system that failed Baby P was surely not the right man to think of 58 more. But the reaction of Ed Balls, who appointed him, is even more bizarre. From his desk in Whitehall, the secretary for children, schools and families decrees that all social service directors must be sent off for retraining, as if they were disgraced Chinese officials sent back to the fields during the cultural revolution while Chairman Balls, who would certainly look good in the jacket and cap, acts the role of Mao Zedong. This is Labour's centralist impulse at work on an almost demented scale. MARTIN KETTLEThe Guardian The Good Friday Process has – from the beginning – been focused on the small elite of politicians at the top, says Johann Hari. Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness have been sitting together – inspirationally – but in the streets and estates beyond Stormont, Northern Ireland has been becoming even more divided. Only five per cent of the workforce in Catholic areas are Protestants, and vice versa. Some 68 per cent of 18- to 25-year-olds had never had a meaningful conversation with a single person from "the other side". The young are more likely to fear and hate the "Prods" or "Taigs" than any other group. We have been fixing the ceiling, while the foundations fracture. If the Germans are serious about stopping killers running amok in schools, they might consider the Israeli solution of arming teachers. It works there, as it has on occasion in America - the massacre in the “gun-free zone” of Virginia Tech can be contrasted with the assault by a former pupil on the neighbouring Appalachian Law School in 2002 that was halted by two armed students. But though we might wish guns had never been invented, our abhorrence of them comes at a price. “Gun controls” disarm only those willing to be disarmed; and the disarmed are then defenceless in the face of predators - criminals, killers, terrorists like the gunmen who shot 200 people dead in Mumbai or, worst of all, predatory states. The disarmament of the Jews from 1933 was the most effective example of gun control in Germany. RICHARD MUNDAYThe Times Increasingly the view seems to be that whole swaths of children have become almost impossible to teach, that teaching is mostly behaviour management and that anyone who thinks they could do it better is naive,writes Camilla Cavendish. That is the tenor of most of the comments about fast-tracking bankers. But there is no genetic reason why Finland routinely comes top of international league tables that Britain keeps slipping down. When one in five children is leaving school without any recognisable qualification after 11 years in the classroom, a period in which we have spent £650 billion on education, we literally cannot afford to be defeatist. You might think, like President Sarkozy, that manufacturing output in the UK has been declining remorselessly for decades. If so, you would be wrong. Until the global collapse in output triggered by the financial crisis in late 2008, manufacturing output in the UK was higher than it had ever been. In 2007 it was two and a half times higher in real terms than it was in 1950. And despite the surge in imports from China, production was 7.1 per cent higher in 2007 than it was in 1995. I'm worried about our city's rep. The Jackson concerts are drawing comparisons with the "residencies" staged in Las Vegas by other performers well past their best-before date. Do we really want to become the kitschy, good-time destination where the rest of the world spends weekends they'd rather forget? The astonishing element of Mr Madoff's magic is that, by all accounts, he made the money disappear. Investigators do not expect to find it stuffed under a Manhattan mattress or locked away in a Panamanian bank. They say that it has literally vanished. One minute it was in a Florida savings account, the next it was being propelled through the ether and beyond. Whoosh! Mr Madoff's loyal followers have been left with a whole lotta nuthin'. For the victims of Mr Brown, it's worse than that. Of course, children are beautiful and innocent and, as William Wordsworth said, come "trailing clouds of glory", but parents are still inclined to view them chiefly as yarn-fodder. And let's face it, "Kieran is captain of the school football team" or "Jake simply adores Treasure Island" will not be in the same league as my groundbreaking "Bob set fire to the next-door neighbour's shed because he thought 'it looked cold'." There is even a reasonable artistic defence of product placement, which is that the items a person buys are revealing of character. Take two shopping baskets - one containing a six-pack of beer and a Yorkie bar and the other holding a bottle of Chablis and a bar of Green & Black's organic chocolate - and the customers are likely to come from very different demographic groups: the whole science of advertising follows from this assumption.Global warming will save lives
BJORN LOMBORGDaily Telegraph
Full article: Global warming will save millions of lives 
Two years to climate change meltdown
A reduction of human numbers is inevitable
Global warming can be a force for good Labour's stupid response to Baby P
Full article: Labour's centralist impulse is verging on the demented
Airtime: The language of nothing that says everything about the Baby P case 
Why Northern Ireland is divided
JOHANN HARIThe Independent
Full article: Peace in Ireland depends on ending the educational divide
Will Self: The IRA didn't die, it was supplanted by al-Qaeda
Ian Paisley - the colossus of Ulster 
Germany needs to arm up
Full article: Tightening gun controls is pointless
In pictures: German school shooting
In pictures: Virginia Tech shooting Britain's defeatist schools
CAMILLA CAVENDISHThe Times
Full article: Brilliant. UK education gets an A* for defeatism
Will Self: for better state education we need a better state
Politicians not teachers are to blame for Britain's decline in education In Brief
Britain still makes things
Philip Whyte The Times
Full article: It's a fabrication that Britain doesn't make things any more
The folly of pandering to financial services The new Vegas
Susie Rushton The Independent
Full article: The new Las Vegas?
People: Jacko hits London Madoff and Brown
Jeff Randall Daily Telegraph
Full article: Gordon Brown and Bernard Madoff are separated by a single detail – Bernie's pleading guilty
People: Madoff to plead guilty to protect his family 
Yarn-fodder
Frank Skinner The Times
Full article: Hmm, dumb kids... I see a career move Product placement
Mark Lawson The Guardian
Full article: Relax, Andy. Real beer at the Rovers Return won't kill us
The hype is not enough for BMW and Bond
Friday, 13 March 2009
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