Dr Laura James's writings

Check out the Met Office's review of 2020's weather: ...the UK’s third warmest, sixth wettest and eighth sunniest year in the UK national series, which extend back to 1884 for temperature, 1862 for rainfall and 1919 for sunshine. 2020 is the only year that features in the Top 10 ranking for all three. .... It is likely that, globally, 2020 was one of the three warmest years on record and that 2011-20 was the warmest decade. ...The UK has warmed by close to 1C, comparable to the global rise in average temperature.   February was the wettest ever for the UK, and the fifth wettest calendar month ever. It was followed by an exceptionally dry and sunny spring - the sunniest on record. What's the long range forecast? Relative to 1981-2000 average, 2020 was 0.93C warmer than average. However, the chart above suggests that, by the 2040s and 2050s, this would be counted as a cooler than average year. For rainfall, annual projections for the UK have a large range as men

Matthew Taylor on accountability , highlights mine: If accountability is based on multiple objectives, relating to quite different domains, things become more complex. Perhaps it is not surprising that organisations often duck that complexity. More and more businesses advertise their ESG framework, but in many of them employees find their day-to-day incentives are still overwhelmingly aligned with profit. A friend of mine who works on ethical leadership says that acknowledging the existence of genuine dilemmas is an essential first step to developing a practical ethical mindset but that most executives are loath to admit such conflicts exist. Unless accountability systems incorporate multiple measures and openly recognise potential trade-offs between objectives they are neither as powerful nor honest as they could be. ... Weak and mythical accountability is a big part of the erosion of trust and credibility in our politicians and political institutions. Ministers make promises they ca

Looking back at my 2019 notes , it is tempting to say little has changed. My conclusion then feels prescient: So, this is my inspiration for 2020 (reposting from November): https://twitter.com/debcha/status/1193143681181736961 “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation” is Scottish writer Alasdair Gray’s rephrasing of a line from beloved Canadian poet Dennis Lee (the original was "a better world"). “The Jackpot” comes from William Gibson's novel The Peripheral , and is a distributed, slow-motion apocalypse of climate change, crop failures and famine, pandemic, political collapse, etc. My resolution for 2020 has been going ok: https://www.instagram.com/p/B5dUD_cpwHv6VslBA1cpt__8Mjf9D6vUe8qAXA0/ Perhaps we can skip the 'unprecedented' or 'strange' comments, and simply feel lucky that the challenges of this year for a lot of 'us' were not that significant compared to the challenges of this or other years for so many in our own