Oxford measurements

“there is probably a little more ozone at the seaside than inland” says Dr. Dobson. “but I doubt if what you can smell there is ozone. Seaweed has a similar smell. What you get on the ground is diffusing down from the upper air and formed by ultra violet light from the sun. it would have to be about 100 times the normal amount at ground level before you could smell it. A ground level you only get a few parts in 100m.”
The Oxford Times, feb 8, 1957



The second international conference on atmospheric ozone was held at Oxford in 1936 (the first had been in 1929 in Paris). In the following year Dobson moved into his new house, 'Watch Hill' at Shotover on the outskirts of Oxford. His laboratory there was a substantial brick building with two workrooms, one large and one small, with provision to make zenith sky observations, and a well equipped workshop. A wooden hut was built near by and was used ..... as the office for collating and plotting the data sent in by the network of spectrophotometers.

Work on atmospheric pollution
In the early 1930s Dobson became concerned with the study of atmospheric pollution, and from 1934 to 1950 served as Chairman of the Atmospheric Pollution Committee of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research Under his guidance reliable methods were developed for the measurement of smoke, deposited matter and sulphur dioxide, and a detailed survey was conducted in Leicester from 1937 to 1939.


http://www.atm.ox.ac.uk/user/barnett/ozoneconference/dobson.htm


The comparative anatomy of risk regulation regimes
....Sets out two key dimensions for analysing risk regulation regimes. The first dimension relates to the three constituent components of a risk regulation regime that are common to any control system—i.e. ways of gathering information, ways of setting standards, goals or targets and ways of changing behaviour and enforcement to meet the standards or targets. The second dimension relates both to the context of risk regulation regimes—i.e. the character of the risks being tackled, public attitudes towards risks and the configuration of related organized interests— and the content of regimes—i.e. their size, structure, and style. Analysis of risk regulation regimes along these two dimensions provides an essential starting point for compartive analysis, picks up fine-grained distinctions between regimes and identifies regime features that are central to a range of debates about risk regulation.

Christopher Hood et al, The Government of Risk; www.oxfordscholarship.com




....... The first of twin revelations to hit Bramwell was a timely spark that Thatcher was right, “state planning was bound to fail” (2). The second occurred while she stayed on a small farm (a rite of passage for some) where Bramwell “learned of the unquantifiable pleasures, and through knowing the ex-farmers, something of the unique quality of faces untouched by television expressions, or modesty, unselfconsciousness and worth – virtu.” (3) This farm experience was a “constant inspiration”, regurgitated in each book. Had she not met the ex-farmers she “would not have recognized what it was that so many ecologists were trying to preserve.” (4) Because reviewers complained her treatment of the rural couple was condescendingly High Tory, she atoned in her next book acknowledging the lives of such people consisted of dirty low-paying toil. She then takes flight again over England’s verdant countryside naming several species of trees from the farm concluding she: “is not without sympathy for ecological values” having “retained a gut feeling about the value of the rural life and the countryside”. To this she later adds, “I live in the country still, because I am happier there.” (5)

Her books are polemical. The second volume begins: “Perhaps unusually for an academic book, I have tried, deliberately, to include my own views in the analysis.” And later:

“I refer in passing in this work to the harmony and beauty of nature. I have taken this as a given....I have not formally addressed or endorsed the reality of the claim that rural life is in some way morally superior. I have however felt it throughout as an underlying argument, hard to prove, not academically acceptable, yet presiding within the assumptions of our culture...Paeans of praise for the yeoman spirit fall easily into cliché, and while such people were in evidence, it is hardly necessary to delineate their virtues in detail; it was a common presumption of the culture at the time, and like all such presumptions, it was not – it did not have to be – articulated convincingly.” (6)


http://www.ecofascism.com/review11.html