A Place to Stand

  There has been another ecofascist hoax on the blogsphere. Someone nominally unknown but stylistically identified as Peter Gleick, who is currently declining to deny it. Andrew Montford reports..

    What happened is that a faked paper was released together with a number of stolen genuine ones. The faked one was written in the subtle manner used in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion fraud.

  As Anthony Watts points out 

Key sentences are rather clumsily written and some make no sense. This contrasts with purposeful language in the other documents. This one sentence in particular has gotten a lot of attention:
"His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science."

I can’t imagine pitching “…dissuading teachers from teaching science.” to a board of directors at a meeting. It is a sure recipe for a public relations nightmare.

  Clumsily written and makes no sense does point to a Green agenda. They might as well have quoted them as saying "Heh, heh this is how we Jews/Sarah Palin/scientific sceptics will run our secret plan to take over the world/abolish black people/take over the world will run.

    Some years ago I was one of only 4 bloggers worldwide who were, for a few hours, taken in by a similar fraud fronted by a Guardian journalist David Thorpe, though it subsequently became clear he hadn't read it. Who, in the ecofascist movement a minor Guardian apparatchik might take orders from remains a mystery to me and to George Moonbat.

     This appears to be wholly unrelated but while one fraud may be exceptional 2 (well there were attempts at fraud against the Oregon Petition) at least allows to show a statistical trend - namely that warming alarmists consistently have no compunction about fraud.

     This is supported by the enthusiasm with which the alarmists in the media pushed it.

     Within an hour of receiving it, with no attempt to contact the Heartland Institute Desmogblog had frontpaged it. 12 hours later, shortly AFTER Heartland had officially announced it was a fraud the BBC were pushing it, so presumably they also didn't check. Their claims have been rewritten in Orwellian tradition on the BBC site but are republished here.

"Denier-gate" is the label being applied in the blogosphere, in case you're interested.

    Incidentally a Google news search shows that the sole use of that term is by him so one assumes he simply made it up and is lying. Who woulda thunk the BBC would lie?

      Compare my behaviour when I found I had been hoaxed, I immediately acknowledged this publicly and followed this up with reporting how the fraud was being reported. At the time i suggested that, having been proven false it was more likely to get reported by the BBC & Guardian than similar real news would and was quickly proven right as they both hired Thorpe to detail the success it clearly wasn't. Clearly nobody honest could suggest that the entire BBC has remotely as much journalistic integrity as I have. Indeed even at the time I pointed to a silly story non-science "news" story the BBC were pushing which had already been proven a fraud (they didn't ever correct that either).

     Thorpe himself, it turned out, had been paid by the government to abuse children by writing a book aimed at them to scare them about catastrophic warming. This is an example of the very bottom of the warming alarmist food chain.

   Scottish Sceptic reprints an interesting article comparing the sums available to sceptics and alarmists.

      The other point the alarmists have been making is that the Heartland Foundation have, over time, received several millions in donations and that this can only mean that they are corruptly in the pay of "Big Oil" (though this is small beer by the standards of many thinktanks let alone the WWF's of the world. Of course, since the econazis themsleves have received many billions to push their story, thereby proving they are thousands of times more corruptly in the pay of the government. That is why every single person at the BBC who is not a wholly corrupt Nazi parasite has publicly pointed out that the BBC gets 33 billion a year from the aforementioned state. Should anybody ever met a single employee of the BBC who is not personally a wholly corrupt, racist, murdering, child raping Nazi animal, with less human decency than a rabid dog I hope they will let me know. Such a unique creature would deserve comment if it existed.

  This is from a British "Hostess Book" published in 1937. It says where the £500 a year, upper middle class, household budget went.

Rent, rates and taxes  - £80 = 16%
Food and small household expenses - £150 = 30%
Heating and lighting - £20 = 4%
Education - £45 = 9%
Insurances - £20 =4%
Clothes = £85 = 17%
Maid's Wages - £30 = 6%
Health (doctor and dentist) - £10 = 2%
Recreation and holidays - £30 = 6%
Miscellaneous (subscriptions, etc.) - £15 = 3%
Savings - £15 = 3%

Ah how things change.

I have, for some time, being trying to find rates figures for for the past without success. I think it would be reasonable to take rates as about £20 of the above and divide rent and taxes at £30 each.

Lets see what that would be in today's money, according to this inflation calculator site. First as a proportion of income and second on retail price equality and then as a proportion of per capita GDP.
Food and small household expenses - £150 = 30% £7,950 retail price index; £23,100 average earnings; £33,200 per capita GDP
Rent, rates and taxes - £80 = 16% £4240; £12,300; £17,700
(Assuming rates £1060; £3,075; £4,400
and Rent/Taxes each £1,590; £4,610; £6,640 )
Heating and lighting - £20 = 4% £1060; £3,075; £4,400
Education - £45 = 9% £2,380; £6,920; £9,960
Insurances - £20 =4% £1060; £3,075; £4,400

Clothes = £85 = 17% £4500; £13,100; £18,800
Maid's Wages - £30 = 6% £1,590; £4,610; £6,640
Health (doctor and dentist) - £10 = 2% £580; £1540; £2,200
Recreation and holidays - £30 = 6% £1,590; £4,610; £6,640

Miscellaneous (subscriptions, etc.) - £15 = 3% £800; £2,300; £3,320
Savings - £15 = 3% £800; £2,300; £3,320



Total £500 = £26,500; £76,900; £111,000 

I doubt if many families spend £23,100 on food and household expenses now.On the other hand you don't have to be upper middle to be paying £4,610 in income tax alone and people on the dole will probably be paying that much in other taxes today.Rates are probably only slightly up, for the sort of expensive house such a family would have but remember that at least 80% of council bills are paid from the rate support grant today.

The average British electricity bill is now £1,300, though it is intended to rise 60% to just over £2000. Again making comparison with the well off household here means that they will probably be paying more as a proportion of income (certainly far more as in RPI terms) than then, though to be fair they will have more electric goods.

Education - private schools can cost less than £6,920 though not for a family with more than one children so it looks like this is more expensive in real terms. Schooling is relatively labour intensive  and certainly more regulated so no surprise.

House insurance probably about the same but car insurance will be up. The major part of car insurance is public liability - however it is worth mentioning that deaths from motor vehicles are lower than in the 1930s even though the number of cars is 10s of times larger. I guess back then the dead and injured didn't sue.

Clothes - I couldn't spend £13,100 on clothes if I wanted to but I'm certain some women could.

Maid's wages. £4,610 would be about £2.30 an hour .Admittedly she will be getting full board on that basis and a modern employer would certainly charge for that. However it gives her £90 a week to spend on herself, or possibly send home (then to the working class neighbourhood, now to Slovakia). The killers are probably PAYE and the numerous regulations and paperwork any employer has to deal with
, which will probably take a lot more time than loading your own washing machine or dishwasher.

Health - OK so taxes are higher but we do have doctors, though in practice not dentists, on the NHS.

A £4610 family holiday would be a very expensive one. Even straight RPI comparison of £1,590 is high. Probably the falling cost of flying has greatly reduced it in real terms as well as improving it - that 1936 holiday was probably in somewhere posh like Bournemouth. People are also more likely to have more than 1 holiday and weekends away nowadays.

Subscriptions etc will also include Sky, AOL & so on.

Most savings will now be through pensions. Nominally national insurance payments  include pension savings.

The biggest proportional change is the massive differential change between average earnings being only 2/3rds of the GDP increase.I assume this is the increase in our tax burden, particularly the "stealth taxes which don't come directly out of ay packets but we do pay for - everything from VAT to corporation tax..

  I was sent this picture by Mike Darwin which I am largely reprinting with his permission, because I very much appreciate the words, based on the description somebody on the Scotsman online gave me.

I thought you might enjoy this pic, "The Lone Wolf" by Wierus-Kowalski.
It has been FORTY years since I, as an 18 year old kid, realised that most of the productive output of civilization is both stolen AND wasted, and yet I see no signs of that understanding ANYWHERE. Your work is the first evidence I've seen that anyone, other than myself, understands this critically important point....

I've thought long and hard on why no one gets this very obvious fact of economics, let alone its implications. I think one reason for this is that the diversion of wealth beyond that required for sustenance and security is difficult to sense. Historically, insurgencies and revolutions occur when the populace experiences any threat to their security and survival such as starvation, loss of civil order or extreme crime (predatory or terrorist) These thus serve as triggering mechanisms that alert the people that there is danger - and elicit action.
Technological civilization has generated unspeakable amounts of wealth relative to anything in prior human experience. There are thus no cultural or inborn biological tools(e.g., hunger) to allow for effective monitoring of predation and the waste of such a vast resource pool. As a consequence, the system is insensitive to theft or waste until it consumes most of the wealth it generates! It is very much the reverse problem that is seen with the obesity epidemic which is a complex, multi-factorial response to the heretofore unprecedented easy availability of almost unlimited quantities of highly addictive calorie dense foods, coupled with huge decreases in the need to take exercise - or indeed, in the need even to move about in the environment!
The theft and waste of the fantastic bounty of wealth generated by the scientific-technological-industrial revolution is, however, far, far more dangerous and deadly than obesity and sloth. Theft and waste on such a grand scale serve to corrupt and degrade the productivity and the pervert the moral direction of the civilization. Unarguably, it the perversion of civilization's moral direction that is the most damaging and deadly aspect of this phenomenon. There is a difference between a civilization preoccupied with understanding and exploring the universe, and one that is preoccupied with war, scandal, celebrity status and short-term hedonism. It is the difference between a civilization that is engaged in opening up the solar system to its peoples, whilst also granting them indefinitely longer lives, and one that is preoccupied with endless wars, religious madness, and Madonna and Lady Gaga.
Mike Darwin

  Looking at Mike's wiki page he seems to have done considerably more than his share to get us into the future that technology can take us to.

   However, so long as we don't establish a world government (which could suppress progress everywhere) I am not merely optimistic but confident thaty progressive societies will ultimately emerge and lead humanity. It is only my personal chauvinism that would prefer they be Scottish, British or Anglospheric.

   Mike I think you will find Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor, Al Fin or Next Big Future also understand these issues since I owe much to them.

    I also think that, because of the exchange of ideas the net has made possible and is displayed by such sites, for the first time in my lifetime we are seeing an enormous growth in popular understanding of the restraints government imposes on us. The rise of the Tea Party, Ron Paul and libertarianism generally would have been inconceivable even a decade ago. The rise of UKIP in Britain is more restrained because we and in particular our mainstream media are more controlled but even so it is rising fast.

The police have seized thousands of copies of a magazine with this joke on its back cover because "The consequences of taking no action could have resulted in public-order incidents" as "hundreds of thousands of people" might display them. Spiked has the full story & shows how you can censor absolutely anything in Britain with the most pitiful of excuses.
 Cover of the Sun the day NATO started bombing Yugoslav hospitals to help our very own terrorists in the campaign of mass murder, ethnic cleansing, genocide and the dissection of thousands of living people under our government's authority.

Obviously every single honest official or politician who has not denounced the police for the first bit of censorship is publicly on record as having called for the police to seize every issue of the Sun or any other paper supporting the Nazi atrocities of the Westminster politicians.

But only every single honest one- not the lying racist Nazi obscenities who will use any excuse to change our laws to censor absolutely anything.

Talking of lying Nazi filth, Dame Shirley Williams was on the BBC propaganda show Question Time last week where she said that the Kosovo war had achieved good results. Since the Nazi whore has previously publicly acknowledged that what they achieved was indeed mass murder, ethnic cleansing and the dissection of living people she clearly knows what she considers desirable. That is why every single member of her party, the LibDems, who is other than an obscene subhuman racist Nazi animal morally on a lower level than the guards at Auschwitz, has publicly dissociated themselves from her. But only all of the ones who aren't, so, so far, none.
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  And talking of Nazi filth here is the late Christopher Hitchens, whose death spawned much fawning coverage from the BBC & other "left wing" media, lying about Slobodan Milosevic after our government murdered him.
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How the "Srebrenica Massacre" fraud falls apart the instant you subject it to any examination on the most basic intellectual principle. Which obviously means that no non-Nazi could claim to know anything about it and still treat it seriously. Not a problem for our state propaganda "service" if one assumes everybody at the BBC is a corrupt, lying, racist Nazi. Otherwise inexplicable.
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     Vojislav Šešelj still not convicted of anything and still in prison.
In late February 2003, Šešelj surrendered to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on the indictment of "eight counts of crimes against humanity and six counts of violations of the laws or customs of war for his alleged participation in a joint criminal enterprise. Since he wasn't part of the government but of the opposition the "joint criminal enterprise" can't actually be doing anything but simply means being a Serb.

"In February 2009, the prosecution had presented 71 witnesses against Šešelj. With seven hours left in the prosecution, his trial was suspended because of alleged witness intimidation. The trial was resumed on 12 January 2009, and Šešelj does not plan to call any witnesses in his defence, stating that there is no need since the prosecution has not presented a single worthy witness. On 24 July 2009, he was sentenced to a further 15 months in custody for disrespecting the court." As of now the "trial" is still not proceeding and the "court"  still has no actual evidence.

  So no case whatsoever, no witnesses, no evidence. The only reason NATO "indicted" him was that he was, at the time, 2 weeks away from winning a democratic election against NATO's hirelings.

  Obviously this is rather more important than the Abu Qatada farce and has, over the years received thousands of times more coverage by every journalist, "newspaper" or state propaganda organisation in Britain, or America that does not consist of wholly corrupt, lying, Nazi animals, less moral than the guards at Auschwitz.

  That would be none of the racist bastards since it is censored with a unanimity Goebbels would have admired..
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And here is James Delingpole on the BBC, speaking in the restrained manner that is his trademark.

The BBC is not a benign organisation. Indeed, it probably bears greater responsibility than any other institution for Britain's cultural, moral, intellectual and economic decline.

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  I hereby call on everybody in the "anti-racist"  movement to personally dissociate themselves from the members of what is legally a "joint criminal conspiracy" of the lying, genocidal organlegging Nazi who make up our main political parties & "journalistic" organisations to or be shown as undeniably wholly dishonest parasitic, racist, Fascist filth themselves. No offence to anybody in the "anti-racist" movement.

 
 On January 9th I asked for some clarification of previous statements made by SEPA in the previous FoI and today, just shortly after the legal limit of 20 working days, the final part of their answer came in.

  This is what I asked 

Your answer on the first point - what is the theoretical maximum amount of radiation present - implies that the MoD have refused to supply data they must have known. The Mod, however, have said they have co-operated with you. I would therefore like to see a copy of the communication from the MoD refusing this reasonable request - assuming it exists.
I would also like to know what "imprecise" estimate you have been using for all this time and what it was based on?

Since SEPA decline to give even an imprecise estimate of how much effort has been put into this does SEPA accept that the average square mile of land, to a depth of 1 foot, would yield 9 tons or uranium and thorium and 1 gram, vastly more than you have actually found - if SEPA were to put enough effort into searching for it. Obviously much more if it were done in any Aberdeen which is the closest thing SEPA have produced to a control area.

  On the first point SEPA have sent me copies of the information they requested (they made it under the Freedom of Information Act ;-) but redacted (ie censored) the MoD's reply. In theory that would mean we would just have to take their word that the MoD had refused to give information about the amount of radioactive material that could possibly be there, thereby breaking the law. Or not depending on the level of trust readers may have in the integrity of anybody at SEPA.

   Fortunately that is not the case because we know precisely what information SEPA ever asked from the MoD in support of their deeply scientific inquiry into this load of bull. They asked, in a letter dated 21/12/10 "Any information that the MoD may hold on radium contamination at at former MoD site,  Dalgety bay, Fife" "I am particularly interested in historic activities that may have gave rise to the contamination eg activities with radium paint, aircraft stationed that were repaired, salvaged or destroyed on site, waste disposal areas etc."

    This is remarkably late to first be asking such questions considering their "investigation" has been goi8ng on for nearly 2 decades. Moreover it is remarkably vague and generalised request, even for a fishing expedition. I would be ashamed to have gave rise to such an unspecific request. Moreoverer, even within that they have managed to exclude any request for information about the per cent of radium in the paint or amount of paint used so it is clearly a lie to suggest that the MoD have refused to answer that question.

   On the second part of the first paragraph - SEPA having said they could not give me a "precise estimate" of the amount of possible radiation exposure & my request that they give the imprecise estimate they would have had to have to even begin any scientific investigation. They replied "SEPA have not used an imprecise estimate".

   So no actual attempt at a scientific investigation and the use of the qualification "precise" was simply a deliberate attempt of obfuscate the fact that they had not done even the most basic investigation.

   SEPA's answer to the question of whether they accept that normal land contains 9 tonnes of uranium and thorium and 1 gram of radium was

"Several of the fragments of radioactive material "particles" recovered at Dalgety Bay over the previous few years are radium sources with no uranium present ... such sources are not natural"

  Which, since it doesn't even attempt to answer the specific question in the FoI, appears to be a breach of the Act. It can also be taken as a de facto admission that my figure is perfectly correct (which it is) and that they amount of radiation which could possibly have been added is far less than trivial.

   However the most interesting thing is this claim to have, over many years, recovered pure radium. Since it is going out under a legal duty, with plenty of time to consider it, this must be accepted as representing the very highest standard of honesty to which SEPA, or any employee thereof ever aspires. It also appears to be a deliberate lie.

     I am replying to them thus.

Dear SEPA,
                    In your letter on case FOI82465 of 6th Feb you made the claim that, over the "past"few years" you have recovered a number of particles that are "are radium sources with no uranium present".

     This seems strange since SEPA's previously first claimed that you had determined that radioactive particles had been identified not by radium but by chemical tests that proved they were paint and that therefore they were assumed to be manmade radium particle. (Byron Tilly BBC Radio Scotland 2/2/2009) While not wishing to dispute that such claims, maintained ever since by SEPA, represent the absolute pinnacle of honesty to which SEPA aspire several FoI's later it became apparent that no such tests had ever proven any such thing and that it was total lie. Obviously had you had evidence that the particles were radium it would have been redundant to attempt to prove they must be by linking them to paint.

     Later SEPA said "They claim to have found ‘radium and its associated daughters’ mixed together" - Dunfermline Press 11th June 2009 also represents the very highest standard of honesty anybody at SEPA ever aspires to. It is also, of course, a total and deliberate lie since the "daughter elements" of radium are the single element radon, which being a gas could not possible be rock. In any case if you had found pure radium there would be no point in having to claim the lesser target of having found impure radium.

      I therefore must ask you under the FoI for the independent chemical or perhaps simply spectrographic evidence of radium in these particles you claim to have. I will not insist on spectrographic evidence that none of the 9 tonnes of uranium and thorium naturally present had reached these bits of soil, which you claim, though this would be a most remarkable event.

     I must also ask you to say whether you have publicly retracted the claims to have found radioactive paint or the non-existent "daughter" elements whose existence also represents the highest standard of honesty SEPA aspires to.

    I must also ask you whether, after spending an estimated £4 million, you can dispute in any factual way the best (admitedly only, since you haven't even tried) calculation of the maximum possible original radiation exposure here - that any radium lost there could not exceed 1/4 of the radium naturally present in a square mile or 1/36 billionth of all the radioactive material.

      Finally I must ask if SEPA's remit has ever or will ever allow you to claim that any report whatsoever from SEPA ever has or ever will represent a higher standard of honesty than the total dishonesty that would be demonstrated by a failure to produce "daughter elements" of radium in solid form; WW2 era paint in the particles or pure radium particles.

  Joseph Friedlander has written a guest post on Next Big Future on why the astonishing scientific breakthroughs seen almost daily and reported on that site, haven't led, at least in the developed world, to fantastic growth rates.

   Spoiler alert - Joe has quoted later in the article from me several times and once from Adam Smith, so it may be argued that the fact that his conclusions are similar to mine is not fully independent support. On the other hand if he gets no factual or logical dispute either, just as I have not had either here or on ThinkScotland, it does tend to confirm that we have got our facts indisputably correct.

    "Tyler Cowen's 'Great Stagnation' (explaining the rather disappointing future we live in compared to projections of where we would be by now) makes (most famously) the ‘we ate the low-hanging fruit’ argument that the easy things have been invented and the high yield moves made, and thus the economy faces the point of diminishing returns--...

   My own understanding is that a number of things are necessary for economic growth and prosperity:
1. Freedom of endeavor (which I define more completely below, but basically an environment in which your every move is not checked in advance by powerful connected parties in government, professional associations, cartel-like groups in the economy, and in which your surplus is not siphoned away by the same parties) An environment in which endless permits are not required to start a business, nor endless bribes or legal maneuvering to keep it open, and in which you are free to make your decisions chiefly with reference to your customers’ needs with an eye to future business. The right of freedom of transaction, association and the right to decline unfavorable relationships and transactions.
2. Cheap energy and transport that is reliably available upon demand without political interference. (In some countries in the vicinity of Europe, for example, car prices are double USA prices (taxes and customs) and gas is $10 a gallon. In the USA many poor people get started salvaging junk with an old truck and driving it to a place they can get money for it. That would not really be possible with the $10 a gallon gas (and restricting the supply of new cars drives the cost of used cars sky high as well)
3. A tolerable administration of justice, taxation (and what ever governmental functions exist) in the area where economic operations are being undertaken
4. A rule of truth and true (rather than politically-dictated) equality of transaction and information, with no game playing. This means no rigged markets, that no actor is above the law, and that no unquestionable ‘high priesthood’ of favored people get to create lying statistics, (ask yourself why the site Shadowstats exists--)) dictate accounting rules that destroy the ability to discover truth by a simple examination of accounts, http://blog.jim.com/economics/economic-decline.html and it means that ONLY those who lose bets pay them, not the general public getting to bail them out.
5. Reasonable land prices. High land prices are not a sign of national wealth, but rather of real capital fleeing productive uses.
6. Capital that pools for easy investment in new ventures, and is not drained by deliberate inflation or games played by government or the favored connected players’ “patronage economy” or sapped by excess circulation. Capital is like blood or sap—produced at a certain rate, and easily drained out by vampire like parties with not as much interest in sustainability as the producing party. Note that restricting access to capital by elaborate SEC type rules makes it much harder to start businesses while apparently not doing much to stop fraud (Enron existed after SEC, Sarbanes Oxley basically stopped new startup and small IPO formation, http://blog.jim.com/economics/sarbanes-oxley.html "

     The Adam Smith quote is

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: All the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. 
Adam Smith

  with which I, or any but the most unbending libertarian would agree. The latter would remove would the "little else" qualification. I am confident that Smith formed his opinions entirely independently of my blog.

   I also added this comment

Taking the low hanging fruit analogy, technology is an extendable ladder. Before the taming of fire the resources of northern Europe and Asia were out of reach. Currently we have the technology, any time we decide to use it, to mine the asteroids. Where the analogy breaks down is that trees get smaller at the top whereas resources, both geographical and in the ability to manipulate them (silicon chips and flint axes are made of not dissimilar material but one can do more with the former) are much larger at the top.

  I strongly reccomend that anybody interested in a successful human race read the whole thing here.


  Bill Willingham, writer of the Fables comic books also wrote on the Great Stagnation, blaming it on the safety culture (not the same as the problem of overgovernment  but largely a consequence of it). He pointed out some interesting cases of where our technology, mostly computer related, is actually far ahead, even centuries ahead, of where we were promised it would be when we were being promised jetpacks, just not in the big visible stuff.
    It is also a good article and wholly independent of the others here.

  SEPA, while claiming there is a radiation risk at Dalgety Bay, through numerous FoI inquiries (the latest of which have will put up shortly) have gone to great length to not even estimate how much radiation was ever released there. By comparison we know that the average square mile to a depth of 1 foot, or 3rd of a mile to a depth of 3 feet which is a better comparison with the ground SEPA have been examining, contains 3 tonnes of uranium, 6 tonnes of similarly radioactive thorium and, as a consequence of the breakdown of these, 1 gram of radium.

  So if SEPA won't make the estimate of radium that could possibly ever have been dumped there lets try it ourselves.

  Assuming each of the figures on dials, painted in radium paint was 7mm long (1/3rd inch) and 2mm wide.
  That there are 20 figures on each dial and they average twice the size of a single line
  That there were 10 painted dials per aircraft (this may be high since we are dealing with relatively primative WW2 bombers)
  20 aircraft were broken up there

   Then the total area of paint would have been  {7 X2 X 20 X 2 X 10 X 20.) 56,000 square millimeters or 0.056 square metre.

    Commercial paint is advertised as covering 13 metres with a 1 litre can. I litre of water is 1 kg. I assume paint is similar.
    Commercial paint runs at "about 6 to about 13 percent by weight of a pigment paste composition". Since radium is very many times rarer and more expensive than normal dyes I would expect it to make up a much smaller proportion than that, perhaps mixed with other pigment or with some reflective backing, but to calculate the maximum possible amount of radium I will assume the 6%.

     So the weight of radium that could possibly ever have been dumped is { 0.056 X 6% /13 ) 0.00026 kg or 0.26 g. A quarter of the amount of radium to be found there naturally.

    By comparison SEPA already know that the amount of radiation in any street in Aberdeen is more than half as much again as at Dalgety Bay ie over half a gram.

    This is all as nothing compared to the 9 tonnes of uranium and thorium but SEPA have decided to ignore the science and pretend that radiation from radium has some magical effect makingb it more important than the 9 tons of other radioactives 9 BILLION times greater (1kg = 0.001tonne). However even ignoring SEPA's fraud in pretending to ignore 99.99999999% of the radioactives reveals that their scare story is still false.
      
     There was less radium, alone, in that ground, than occurs naturally up the road in Aberdeen.

     The operative word being "was". If the dials were not recycled, or taken by souvnir hunters this paint was still water soluble and over the intervening period it is virtually certain that, on a beach in Fife, it would have got wet and mostly washed away. SEPA's answer to that is that it is possible, though there is no evidence for it, that the dials might have been burnt and that this would, in some undisclosed way, have chemically altered the paint ot make it non-soluble. However if that had happened then obviously some ot the paint would also have been altered into smoke and blown away.

     If SEPA have been telling the truth in their responses to various FoI legal questions they have made absolutely no attempt whatsoever to quantify the alleged maximum possible exposure. In which case this estimate, by default, is the most (indeed only) credible one.

    I will be sending it to SEPA to see if they have any factual dispute of this estimate and any alternative. Or if they have not, if they dispute in any way that their entire scare story is proven false and that their threat to declare the beach "radioactive contamination" is wholly, completely and totally fraudulent and could never, under any circumstances, have been made by any organisation which was not wholly, completely and totally corrupt bureaucratic empire-builders or even any organisation which, while being so corrupt, was not wholly, completely and totally scientifically illiterate.

    I will also be sending this out as a press release to the Scottish and British press and a few politicians. Anybody want to bet on how much, if any, of our media are remotely interested in reporting wholesale fraud by government departments and the deliberate attempt to falsely smear a decent community. Over the next few days we will all find out if any part at all of the MSM is remotely interested in reporting corruption, scaremongering and lies.

    I will look forward to seeing if, after repeatedly answering FoI's by saying they have no estimate of the theoretical maximum exposure, they now produce some alternative to this one.