The Progressive Contrarian

The Heartland Non-Story

2012-02-16T20:01:00.000Z

OK. I've looked at the Heartland documents that were filched (as highlighted by the ever delightful Richard Black of the BCC) and put online. I've looked again. But I'm obviously missing something. So, please can someone point me to the documents that do the following:

talk about subverting the peer review process
gloat at the death of warmist scientists
talk about punching opposing scientists in the face
discuss how to hide the decline (oops, I mean how to hide the massive increasing in global temperatures)
discuss ways of getting pesky journal editors fired
discuss ways of getting opposing scientists fired from their academic positions
talk about ways of giving each other more awards and prizes
privately discuss their doubts about scepticism while publicly villifying anyone who expresses such doubts
work out how to hide problematic papers from the NIPCC report

I've looked, but all I can find are some rather mundane documents that talk about trifling sums of money compared to the millions rolling into the warmist camp.

I Wish I'd Said That

2012-02-15T21:34:00.000Z

More rottenness is put forth in the name of Science because of the twisted cogitations of statisticians than because of any other cause.

So sayeth the inimitable William Briggs in a piece entitled Why Do Statisticians Answer Silly Questions That No One Ever Asks?. It confirms, once again, that he is the one statistician above all others worth reading. Even if, or possibly especially if, you distrust statistics and statisticians then Briggs is someone you need to investigate.

Well, him and Deirdre McCloskey (and to see why, take a looksie here: http://www.londonbookreview.com/lbr0052.html)

All Eyes To Greece

2012-02-13T08:55:00.000Z

All eyes should be on Greece again. Looking at the scenes in Athens last night the heart goes out to the protestors fighting in the streets while the political class sells the country further down the river. Mass protest and a refusal to submit is the only option now. The country is being reduced to poverty for generations while the politicians show once again that they are not Greeks but EUroperans.

There's no doubt that many on the streets view their fight as one against 'capitalism'. The Anarchists, who are leading much of the street fighting, see this in simple terms as a fight against 'neo-liberalism' or the 'tyranny of the market' and so on. And it's not just the Anarchists, the same is being said by the Greek Communists (KKE) and the other leftist parliamentarians (who are as scared by the Anarchists as the rest of the political class). However, this is anything but a fight against capitalism, the fact that so many people think so shows how successful the political class has been in shifting the blame from themselves to the faceless market.

What we have in Greece and the rest of the EU, including the UK, is not free market capitalism. We have a system of corporatism. It is an alliance of a liberal political establishment, headquartered in Brussels but with local branches in every captial city in the EU, a set of favoured corporate allies and NGOs and a compliant media. Call it crony capitalism, state capitalism, corporatism, market socialism or whatever, but it's not free market capitalism by a long shot. What we have in EUrope is the biggest experiment in anti-democratic statism since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This system is founded above all on an avoidance of democracy, it is about technocratic and bureaucratic control by an entrenched political class. And it is for this reason that even someone who is pro-market and pro-capitalist can support the anti-capitalists fighting in the streets of Athens.

Greece needs to default. Greece needs to bring down the Euro. And with the Euro down we can hope that the flames will be fanned across Europe to destroy the EU as a whole.

The BBC And Himalayan Glacier Melt

2012-02-10T09:15:00.000Z

The projected melting of the Himalayan glaciers has long been a key weapon in the armoury of climate alarmism. It has long been one of those 'everyone knows...' arguments, such that anyone doubting it could be accused of wilful ignorance, denial or, most famously of practicing 'voodoo science', as Rajendra Pachauri of the IPCC famously put it. And of course, the BBC has been at the forefront of the alarmist bandwagon - trumpeting again and again that the galciers were melting.

So, it is a major embarassment to warmists everywhere that once again nature refuses to play ball. As has been reported extensively, and covered with some glee on the Watts Up With That, Autonomous Mind and other sceptic sites. ANd, to be fair, it has also been covered on much of the mainstream press, including a detailed report in the Guardian.

The BBC, however, has chosen not to report the story. No sign of it on the website at all. Not even a Tweet from Richard Black, who finds the time to Tweet on letters to the Wall Street Journal attacking AGW sceptics. This is the same BBC that has, in the past, published articles on the publication of obscure papers that attempted to debunk Henrik Svensmark, that publishes prolifically on every alarmist claim that is made, and which prides itself on keeping us informed about all matters climate related.

So, once again we find that our state broadcaster attempts to shape the agenda and to shield those who get their news from it from any disquieting stories that might dent the public's appetite for climate disaster. The rule seems to be that climate porn is fine, but anything that suggests catastrophe is not looming is hidden from view.

Maldives Coup

2012-02-08T14:09:00.002Z

Can we now expect the new President of the Maldives to follow his predecessor Mohamed Nasheed and hold a cabinet meeting underwater? Is this something that should be enshrined in the constitution? After all, if it is to secure its place on the world stage as a laughing stock that will resort to any stunt to raise some funds, it will need to keep piling on the pressure. Perhaps the new President can have the old one drowned so that he could be proclaimed a victim of global warming? Perhaps the army can help here, and drown all those it doesn't like. A few floating bodies in time for the next underwater cabinet meeting will focus minds inside and outside the country...

Consensus Not Important - Unless It Supports AGW

2012-02-07T09:43:00.000Z

After having been told for years that there was consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), and that anyone who stood outside of this consensus was a crank, paid industry shill or a right-wing contrarian, it now appears that consensus isn't so important after all. So says Richard Black, blogging on the BBC website. Argument from authority, which is what the appeal to consensus is, has been the key plank of the AGW for so long that it's hard to imagine life without it. The entire IPCC process was about creating the illusion of consensus. A huge part of the Climategate email stash is all about perverting the course of peer review and academic freedom in the name of fostering the illusion of consensus.

At the same time, sceptics have both disputed the existence of consensus and the importance of it should it exist. Against consensus they have argued that the scientific method does not depend on a popularity contest. Largely it's an argument that has been ignored or rubbished by the mainstream media, particularly the BBC.

So, what should we make of Richard Black suddenly appropriating a key sceptic argument? He actually says:

But it is surely the arguments themselves that ought to be the focus for discussion - not what they purport to say about a cracking consensus.

Absolutely true, but he comes to it only as the weight of numbers in the climate debate starts to turn. The number of people willing to voice criticism of AGW orthodoxy is growing rapidly. The line that they are all cranks or have been bought off can no longer be sustained. At which point we should expect to see more and more warmists adopting Black's strategy. The line will now become - 'we never claimed consensus is important'. Soon it will be that they've always had some doubts about the most alarmist claims, but that the broad truth of the greenhouse effect is true (as though most sceptics disputed it), and that warming is real (again, most sceptics will agree that there has been some warming over the last few hundred years).

Also likely to happen is the fall-back position that although catastrophic global warming is unlikely to happen, CO2 needs to be controlled for other reasons - with ocean acidification likely to be the new line in the ground.

In any case, we can expect that the luke-warmist position will be in the ascendant.

Where should Chris Huhne serve his sentence?

2012-02-03T18:33:00.002Z

Here's your chance to indicate where you think our former secretary for Energy and Climate Change should serve time - assuming he's found guilty. Take a look at the poll on the front page of this blog and make your choice. Go on, where do you think he'd be happiest...

About bloody time...

2012-02-03T10:51:00.000Z

Finally it's been announced that the Energy Secretary, Chris Huhne, is to be charged with perverting the course of justice. About time. We look forward to the resignation.

We also hope that his replacement will be less wedded to climate change mania and that we can look forward to someone who will take the brakes off regarding shale gas. But nobody's holding their breath. Despite some small signs of change recently, the fact remains that our political class is the last refuge of climate change orthodoxy...

Perhaps now that Obama has deleted climate change from the political lexicon in the United States, we can have a new Energy secretary who does the same.

Thank You WUWT

2012-02-02T09:04:00.000Z

There's a good piece by Pat Michaels over at the Cato Institute about Obama's headlong retreat from 'climate change' as a major theme of his presidency. Michaels, who has long been on the alarmists hit list as a major 'denier', suggests that a major factor in this is the Watts Up With That website.

How could disagree? WUWT is a big player and outranks the alarmist sites both in visitors and influence. It's a fantastic resource, and we all owe a big vote of thanks to Anthony Watts and his helpers and contributors. If ever you needed an exemplar of what citizen science is all about then WUWT is it.

The Hester Gesture - Part 2

2012-01-31T09:22:00.000Z

So, Stephen Hester refuses his bonus. The politicians, newspapers, the BBC, Guardian and masses of churchmen (and women) are happy. So to are lots of the public, who think that this is justice, of sorts.

The cost to those same members of the public? £900 million off the share price. Probably aroynd £500,000 of lost income to the tax man. The job of getting our money back from RBS even harder.

Everybody happy now?

The Hester Gesture

2012-01-30T21:17:00.000Z

After all of the hysteria and hyperventilating Stephen Hester submitted to the inevitable and canned his bonus. All I can say is thank Christ for that. The hyperbole was becoming unbearable. We should be grateful to him for putting an end to the posturing that was already completely out of control.

There are some things that are worth pointing which were pretty much obscured in all of this fuss.

Firstly, RBS shouldn't even exist in its current form. It should have been allowed to go under. For those who are convinced that the whole bonus fiasco is an example of unconstrained capitalism, think again. If we had unconstrained capitalism (or even capitalism just a little less restrained), then RBS, Northern Rock et al would have been left to sink or swim. Capitalism is an evolutionary process at heart. By deciding to intervene and part-nationalise the banks, Gordon Brown showed once more that he was no friend of markets or market processes, but a statist who believes that capitalism is dangerous because it is uncontrolled. His first instinct, and that of Obama, Cameron and the entire Euro class, is to intervene and take control.

The fact that the Labour government did intervene means we have the situation where what is effectivaly a state employee - Stephen Hester - is able to get a potential bonus of nearly a million quid. What rankles is that at a time when everyone else is fed a diet of austerity, this class of state employee is able to earn huge bucks. And remember, this was only 60% of the bonus pot, in theory he could have met his targets and earned the full lot. If this was just another bank and not a semi-state bank, people would have shrugged, got angry but there would never have been the same reaction. And perhaps, we would have been spared the panto from political figures across the spectrum (a spectrum that stretches all the way from A to B, but never beyond that).

However, the fact is that the tax payer did rescue RBS, so arguing that it shouldn't be here is a moot point.

Having said that then, where were the politicians arguing the case that if we're ever to get our money back then RBS has to be re-privatised? Where was the case that Hester should be judged on how well that goes? His bonus should only be cashed after that privatisation. His incentives should be to get the most for RBS for the tax payer, and unless he does that his bonuses should be deferred. And what better way of making the case then to suggest that tax payers would benefit in the form of a chance to buy shares in the eventual privatisation ahead of institutional investors?

CBI Stands Beside FoE

2012-01-25T16:04:00.000Z

Following the Court of Appeal's rejection of the government's appeal against the ruling that the cuts to solar feed-in tariffs are not legal, the Telegraph quotes John Cridland, CBI Director-General, saying:

The judgement should be used to draw a line under this saga, which saw the Government scoring a spectacular own goal and confidence in the renewables sector undermined.

We must bring certainty back to this high growth sector. Looking to the future, the Government should guarantee the rate applicants will receive earlier in the process, for all the technologies covered by the feed-in-tariff, to give buyers the confidence to proceed.

Not only is the head of the CBI not standing up for consumers who end up having to foot the bill for the renewables gravy train, he is also not standing up for his members in companies suffering increased fuel costs. There are some who claim that solar is a 'high growth' industry, but it's high growth only insofar as it can suck endless subsidy. As the experience of Germany, Spain and other countries who've gone this same route has shown, the growth is illusory and represents a net loss to the economy, not a gain.

We expect this kind of nonsense from Friends of the Earth, but really, has the head of the CBI got no understanding of basic economics?

Why Vote Yes To The EU?

2012-01-24T09:07:00.001Z

I must admit to being suprised by the turn out of the Croatian referendum on joining the EU. I just assumed that the low turn out meant that most voters had been bored to apathy and that the result was that only those who wanted to join bothered to vote. Now with more detail in an excellent post over at England Expects...

It's what we ought to expect by default really...A massive corruption of the political process by local elites working hand in glove with Brussels...

Stop The US Research Works Act

2012-01-17T10:47:00.000Z

It's not often that I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with an article in the Guardian, but when it comes to the argument about free public access to tax-payer funded research it's a no-brainer. We - that is tax payers - pay for huge amounts of research, particularly when it comes to medicine. The results of that research, which we paid for, should therefore be free for all of us to access. In the US the powerful National Institutes of Health have given us PubMed, Biomed Central and a committment to making the research they pay (with tax payer dollars) should be published online and accessed for free.

Now the academic publishers are fighting back in the form of the proposed Research Works Act. This would take tax payer research results out of the public domain and back behind very, very, very expensive paywalls.

You'd expect that scientists would be out there fighting this change, but as detailed in a piece in the Guardian:

What is surprising is how complicit scientists are in perpetuating this feudal system. The RWA is noisily supported by the Association of American Publishers, which has as members more than 50 scholarly societies – including, ironically, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which by its implicit support of the RWA is making itself an association for the retardation of science.

This blog gets a fair number of visitors from the other side of the pond and I would urge them to contact their representatives now to stop this Act in its tracks.

More state action against sceptics?

2012-01-11T09:40:00.000Z

Following on from the recent police action against the climate sceptic blogger known as Tallbloke, we have the police turning up on the doorstep of an anti-windfarm activist...

http://www.epaw.org/media.php?lang=en&article=pr7

Is this the shape of things to come? The more that they lost the battle to convince the public - and the more that the 'science' falls apart - the more desperate they are becoming..

BBC Ignores Damning Report on Windpower

2012-01-11T07:20:00.000Z

BBC bias works in many ways. Often it's as important to look at what is not said as it is to look at the surface of what they is said. A prime example is the report by the think tank Civitas on wind power. Authored by economist Ruth Lea, the report 'Electricity Costs: The folly of wind-power', is frankly scathing. While it's not news to those who follow climate politics, it is blunt in its assessment of windpower, finding that that there is no economic case for wind, that it does little to reduce CO2. The headline conclusion is:

Wind-power is therefore expensive and ineffective in cutting CO2 emissions. If it were not for the renewables targets set by the Renewables Directive, wind-power would not even be entertained as a cost-effective way of generating electricity and/or cutting emissions. The renewables targets should be renegotiated with the EU.

Not surprisingly the story has been picked up in many parts of the mainstream media, as well as the sceptical blogosphere.

What about the BBC? Which is the broadcast arm of the British windpower industry? No sign of it on the website. No mention on the environment pages. No blogs that I can see. OK, so I try the search function on the website. Searching on 'civitas' shows up plenty of hits. The BBC have reported on many of the previous reports produced by the think tank, and have turned to it for comments on other occasions. Doing a search on 'windfarm' brings up a huge number of hits, including a just-published story: 'Daviot Wind Farm near Inverness to 'benefit' education'. It's a typical puff piece for the wind industry, with no real content and no challenge to the alleged benefits of this particular windfarm.

So we have a major report on wind power being reported elsewhere (Daily Mail, Guardian, Telegraph etc), but not a word from our state broadcaster.

Perhaps the BBC are just being a bit slow. But perhaps they'll prefer to set the agenda by ignoring an inconvenient report that helps burst the bubble that is windpower.

School and lack of structure

2012-01-04T07:32:00.000Z

Can anyone really be surprised by the findings of the Prince's Trust Youth Index 2012 that unstructured lifestyles amongst children lead to educational underachievement? It's right there at the top of the stating the bleedin' obvious tables. Still, the story got a fair amount of prominence, especially from the BBC. The emphasis has been on the chaotic lives of children and teenagers from poor backgrounds - the cause being poverty in the narrow sense of the word rather than referring to the culture that these children are raised in. Theodore Dalrymple, for example, has written extensively about the slack jawed chaos of the underclass. None of this is news, as I've already said.

But what hasn't been mentioned in the stories about this report, as far as I can see is the educational system that encourages disorder and lack of structure. So-called 'free flow' teaching methods that are used in many primary schools do nothing to impose set timetables for activities. Children are encouraged to manage themselves and to engage in activities that they want to do when they want to do them. The idea of having a set reading time, or class story or any other organised activity that children have to take part in is anathema to such a system. If a teacher wants to read a story to the class at the end of the day, for example, then the children (including reception and year one children) can simply decide that it's boring and carry on playing or doing something else.

This lack of structure is supposed to help children learn for themselves - it's based on Piaget's theories. These children are young scientists driven by natural curiosity to learn - imposing structure on them is authoritarian and destroys their ability to learn and be creative. While that may have been fine with Piaget's little angels, for kids brought up in chaotic homes, with no rules, no structure and no direction, all it does is perpetuate the aimlessness into the classroom. Kids schooled using free flow pay for it later - they simply never get used to structure, timetables and the idea of being told what to do and when. It's a disaster for these kids, and yet it is sanctioned as a recognised and widely used teaching methodology.

Can we expect any discussion of this from the BBC or other liberal media? Nope. Far easier to focus on economics and to blame capitalism than it is to point out that the liberal educational establishment perpetuates and worsens existing cultural poverty in huge swathes of the country.

Freezing Cancer Patients

2011-12-28T09:52:00.000Z

One of the stories that appeared in the press over Christmas was based on a report from Macmillan Cancer Support about cancer patients and fuel poverty. According to its own figures, the number of patients needing financial support for fuel payments has increased markedly in the last few years.

Of course nobody should be surprised by this. Our politicians regularly admonish the fuel companies for making 'fuel poverty' worse - conveniently ignoring their own role in driving the increase in costs. It's the natural consequence of environmental legislation to fight 'climate change'. And, as I can attest as a trustee of a small cancer charity, cancer patients are especially vulnerable.

However, we mustn't ignore the part played in all of this by our medical establishment. The medical profession are among the front ranks of climate alarmism. They have trumpeted the lies and the hysteria from the beginning, from journal articles and papers in the BMJ and the Lancet, to working for the NHS to become 'carbon neutral'.

How many of those medics will stop to think of the effect that this climate alarmism is having on their patients?

And it's not just fuel poverty - how much money that could be spent of cancer treatments is being wasted on fighting 'climate change'? As one blogger has put it:

the NHS will be paying our money on carbon off-setting instead of investing in new treatments, or improving the existing treatments.

Angry? We ought to be bloody furious.

Climate Change Sceptics - Craving A Cause

2011-12-20T21:25:00.002Z

Climate change sceptics, according to Lisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, have:

...created an intricate web of their own associations and allusions, to produce their version of an alternative story which runs contrary to that of mainstream science.

This is an article on the BBC news website ostensibly about the novelist Umberto Eco, and in particular about his second novel, Foucault's Pendulum. As she describes it, the novel is about "...the credulity of those who crave a cause to believe in." She describes the outlines of the novel, which involves an elaborate conspiracy and a manufactured alternate history of the Knights Templar. In time one of the authors of this occult history is killed by people who believe it is true, and who are convinced that he holds more secrets that he is unwilling to reveal.

Aside from being very pleased with herself for being clever in front of Eco during an interview, the article says a lot more about Jardine's mindset - and that of the BBC - than it does about climate change scepticism.

You see, Jardine feels that only those people who are on the outside looking in, those who feel excluded in some way, become sceptics in order to have something to believe in. We are, as the title of the article suggests 'craving a cause'. To climate scientists she says:

Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that international scientific near consensus is not enough to allay the fears of those who feel left out of the whole debate.

Now, personally, I feel deeply affronted by all of this. I have a PhD in a scientific discipline, I work as a mathematical modeller, I read the scientific literature and I do my research. Like many sceptics I started out wanting to understand more about the science. I had seen the hockey stick graph, I was a Guardian reading warmist who despised the United States for not signing the Kyoto Treaty. I saw the IPCC as representing an honest and robust view of the science. It was settled, I just wanted to find out more. And that's where the problem started.

In reading more widely, and at a deeper level than the New Scientist or Scientific American, I came away deeply disturbed. It had simply never entered my consciousness that so much of the evidence was model output. As a modeller this is stuff I am familiar with, it's what I earned my PhD doing. And as for the physical evidence, I was amazed at the lack of it.

And, it has to be said, far from craving a cause, I thought I had had one in wanting to fight climate change. If ever there was a cause that inflamed peoples passions and gave them something to believe in it was the fight against CO2-induced climate change.

What I discovered has caused me to question so much of what I took for granted. The people I once saw as political allies I now see as pernicious and dangerous. This has caused all kinds of arguments and strained relationships with family and friends. It's certainly not been an easy ride - I would have been better off ignoring the science and sticking to the Guardian. But I couldn't. You see, unfashionable as it might be to some, I actually believe in the scientific method. I actually think that science is not just another discourse, science is different, science has to be honest.

Jardine is blind to all of this, of course. In her simplistic world there is the 'near consensus' on one hand, and the cranks, conspiracy theorists and the excluded on the other. It would not enter her head that there are many scientists out there who disagree with AGW. It would not occur to her that the state of ignorance about climate is vast, and that far from being settled, the science is becoming more uncertain as more research is performed. And it would not occur to her to actually look at what Climategate revealed, or to look as the inner workings of the IPCC. To her and to her kind, the favoured circle of climate scientists are the good guys, the rest of us are not.

If we're talking about Umberto Eco, I would say that it's his first novel one should look at. In The Name of The Rose we have the story of a fanatical priesthood prepared to go to any steps to keep people from getting at the data (in this case a manuscript by Aristotle). The hero of the novel is William of Occam, the archetypal sceptic and one of the founders of the scientific method. The parallels with climate change are obvious, and require none of the intellectual contortions that Jardine has to go through tp make her point.

Come to think of it, maybe I do feel excluded now, thanks to people like her. But the feeling of exclusion came second, long after I had changed my mind because of the science.

Silence On Europe

2011-12-20T09:56:00.000Z

Given my stated desire to see the Euro and the EU collapse and die, my recent silence on the matter might seem strange. However, there's a simple explanation - the fact is that there are two blogs which say it all: Richard North's EUReferendum and Mary Ellen Synon's blog at the Daily Mail. These two blogs are streets ahead of the mainstream press, ahead of most commentators in the blogosphere and way, way, way ahead of anything I can say on the topic.

I know it goes against the blogging credo, but I won't pretend a knowledge or competence I don't have. Instead I'd refer people to keep an eye on what North and Synon both have to say - and to then compare and contrast with the drivel that most of the media produces. In particular, the contrast between these two and the BBC is striking. The BBC would make the North Korean state media proud.

A Stunning Endorsement...

2011-12-16T09:14:00.000Z

Seema Malhotra, the newly elected MP for Felthmam and Heston, claims her "victory" is a vote of confidence in the leadership of Ed Milliband. And she's right. It's a stunning vote of confidence. At a time when the global economy is heading over the edge of a cliff, the Euro is collapsing and we all look ahead with a deep sense of foreboding, a massive 15.7% of the electorate in her constituency felt that Ed Milliband's leadership was worth a vote.

It's a truly sad state of affairs that our political classes have colluded in making politics about as relevant as a Christmas Panto in Easter. Having ceded real power to the EU, been up to their necks in fiddles and graft and pretty much focused on making political debate an idea-free zone, is it any wonder than so few of us can be bothered to get up and vote. You can bet that they'll be earnest discussions on how to make politics relevant again - but by relevant they mean something very different to what we mean by it. To them relevant means that you go through the motions and vote in elections. That you sign up to their moribund parties. That you appear engaged in whatever narrative they're offering.

What we mean by relevant is entirely different. It means having real influence and power, of forcing our elected representatives to truly represent us. It means having a handle on how things are run, how decisions are made and being able to change things. It means being able to control the purse strings, vote directly on issues (yes, that means holding referendums) and having the ability to recall and reject politicians.

Instead of these ideas, we'll be subjected to those favoured by our politicians, many of them imported from the Euro class. Ideas like compulsory voting, various forms of proportional representation and the state funding of political parties. All of these should be rejected. Instead we need to push for our alternatives - and we need to push for things like Richard North's Referism. The idea might or might not work, but it does represent a radical departure from what the political class want.

Thank you, Canada

2011-12-13T12:54:00.000Z

Thank you, Canada. Thank you for formally dumping the dead treaty that is Kyoto. For leading the way so that hopefully others can follow.

All you need to do now is withdraw from the UN's various climate bodies - to follow through completely. Do this and you'll have the undying love and admiration of climate realists the world over. The BBC will of course declare war on you, but that's a small price to pay for daring to show true leadership.

Chris Huhne Visits This Site

2011-12-12T12:44:00.000Z

As has long been suspected, Chris Huhne is a visitor to this site. We now have definitive proof. The trap was set when a poll was added to the site - our first ever. The question was straightforward enough:

Who is the most stupid person in the government?

There was one clear front-runner: Chris Huhne. He lead the pack from the beginner, with a clear 100% of votes going to him. For a while it looked like the poll would end with that clear and overwhelming result. However, at the last minute somebody visited the site and voted for somebody else. This voter can have been none other than Chris Huhne himself. He cast his vote for David Cameron, confirming once and for all his identity.

Chris, should you drop by again, please do us all a favour and resign...

Polar Bear Cannibal Holocaust

2011-12-09T20:24:00.000Z

Delingpole has already picked up on the Polar Bear Cannibal Holocaust story from the the BBC. A story that is illustrated with a photo of the nasty deed being committed. Of course according to the BBC it's not just the polar bear cub who is the victim, it's also the male polar bear who has killed and eaten the cub. It's a victim, of course, of global warming. We all know that before CO2 sizzled the planet polar bears would never have devoured their own...

When I mentioned this strange occurence to sprog #3, he reminded me that he had an old book on polar bears that he bought at the local library when he was younger. This august tome is entitled Polar Star, by Sally Grindley and John Butler, and was published in the dim and distant year of 1997 (ISBN 1860394221). In this kids book we discover that, shock horror, male polar bears sometimes devour young cubs, and the book even features a sequence where a mother defends her cubs from the predatory male...

Here's the cover of the book...

The sequence where the predatory male attacks the cub begins here:

The text itself states:

And all of this without mention of melting ice, rising sea levels, global warming or CO2.

Where's David Attenborough when you need him, eh?

40% of cancers caused by life-style choices

2011-12-08T16:18:00.000Z

Well, at least that's what the headlines are telling us - and there are plenty of headlines based on these figures right across the media.

Now I know it's a bit much to expect scepticism from the likes of the BBC, but I'm really surprised by the lack of critical comment or scepticism that has greeted such a shocking claim. So far I've found two places where the figures are queried.

Spiked Online take a gander here: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11875/

Anticancer.org.uk discuss it here: http://www.anticancer.org.uk/2011/12/cancer-and-lifestyle-choices.html

Has anyone found other articles that do more than regurgitate the press release?

Seeing as this report is being seized on by 'health activists' the world over, you can bet your life that these figures are going to be quoted again and again to support all kinds of new restrictions on food and alcohol.

Scottish Madness

2011-12-08T09:29:00.000Z

In a bid to out-mad the rest of the UK, the Scots government decided that the EU's commitment to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% by 2020 was piddly, that the UK's commitment of a 34% drop was derisory, and that Scotland could out-mad the world by going for a massive (and impossible to acheive) target of a 44% reduction. Yep, 42%.

Of course there's a massive cost to this madness, which has just been estimated at £11bn, which seems mighty low to me. But then again we are in the world of make believe here. How else could you explain statements such as this one, from SNP MSP Rob Gibson, convener of the Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment Committee at Holyrood:

The SNP Government has made a commitment to this country which has the world's best developing technologies and energy resources in wind, hydro, biofuels, and the exciting future industries of tidal and wave and photovoltaic (solar) technologies.

Photovoltaic in Scotland?

Absolute madness that shows no signs of abating. Of course, this kind of nonsense is aided and abetted by the BBC, who in their report on the topic insist on describing CO2 as pollution. Perhaps BBC journalists don't breathe in the same way we do...

And for our next trick...

2011-12-06T12:48:00.001Z

There's a fair amount of comment about the Merkozy plan for a European fiscal union, much of it along the lines of 'they're having a laugh, they'll never get treaty change through in any time frame that makes sense.' Critics point to the glacial pace of treaty change, and the high probability that the first referendum on change will give a resulting no vote (in whichever country it's in). So, is Merkozy just blowing smoke and hoping that the illusion of change will be enough to calm the markets so the Euro can ride the storm enough to survive?

Unfortunately all of that is predicated on the theory that our Euro class politicians play by their own rules. Having engineered two coups - Greece and Italy - do people really think the Euro class are not emboldened by the crisis? The stakes have never been higher, there is no way on earth that the Euro class can afford to pay attention to the wishes of any electorates.

Mary Ellen Synon can already see the lie of the land. She has a must-read blog at the Mail, which ends:

What we have now is a German and French-led EU cartel which has so far pulled off coups in Greece and Italy. Each of those states is now ruled by unelected governments dropped into office by Berlin, Paris, the European Commission and the European Central Bank

These successful coups have made Germany and France confident of further success. They are on a roll: next target, a coup of the entire system of EU treaty law covering fiscal powers.

And here’s the surprising part – or maybe not so surprising, given his history of Vichy-like behaviour – Merkozy can count on the cooperation of David Cameron in this manoeuvre to stop any chance of any of the peoples of the eurozone countries being given a chance to vote ‘No!’

What we saw today in Paris was an announcement by Merkozy that they intend to go ahead with their drive to destroy democracy across 17 European states. By agreeing to this -- and he will -- Mr Cameron will act as collaborator in establishing Germany and France as the fiscal commanders over these nations of Europe.

Across Europe, one can only feel dread. In Britain, one ought to feel shame as well.

Keep that in mind when you hear reports that:

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has said Standard & Poor's (S&P) threat to downgrade eurozone countries is the "best possible incentive" ahead of Friday's summit.

Statists never let a crisis go to waste. Merkozy need the threat of disaster to keep their less confident colleagues in line.

Our politicians can bleat about how we are protected from further treaty change by a referendum, but what if everything that the Euro class needs can be magicked out of existing text? Expecting the Euro class to play by the rules is as naive as believing that Cameron et al are really Euro sceptics at heart.

Frermany Calling! Frermany Calling!

2011-12-02T08:17:00.001Z

With the moves for political union gaining afoot, any talk from 'our' Euro-class about 'the national interest' is more smokescreen than anything else. We can expect the usual prattle about losing our influence, of being left out in the cold, of being in the slow lane of a two-speed Europe etc. We've heard it all before. But time and again our Euro class puts it's own interests first. And that interest lies firmly in the EU.

With Merkozy making all the running, Cameron and co will squirm, pout and pose in front of the cameras, but they'll not say no. They never do.

Our only hope is that the Euro does collapse - even though the consequences fill most of us with dread...

Ten Days To Shake The World?

2011-12-01T10:03:00.001Z

The headline in today's Metro is certainly eye-catching: Save the euro in 10 days or see the EU fall apart, European leaders warned

The destruction of the Euro is necessary - it's the best chance we have of destroying the EU. Let's be clear, no amount of Euro-plastic tinkering is going to make any real difference. The colleagues are all-out for political integration, only the collapse of the Euro can stop that. They've already beggared Greece for generations, and they have no qualms about doing the same to the rest of us. For the Euro-class, economic destruction across the continent is a small price to pay to make sure the 'project' succeeds.

However, what's the likely cost of a Euro collapse? To pretend that because we're not in the Euro we have any real insulation is a fantasy. It's going to hurt like hell.

According to economist Danny Gabay, an economist at Fathom Consulting (quoted by the Economist ), we can expect:

Our simulation implies that the impact of a disorderly euro break-up on the UK will be roughly half as bad again as the collapse of Lehman Brothers.The UK economy contracts by over 7% between now and 2013, assuming a euro default in early 2012.

Moreover in the absence of massive monetary easing to prevent sterling from rising by upwards of 35%, we see the UK slipping into deflation, which would make servicing its debt even harder. And you can forget those fiscal targets, In our simulation, the austerity measures are simply overwhelmed by the impact such a huge sovereign default event has on global bond yields. Even with austerity, we see UK bond yields rising above 10% by 2013.

In other words we're talking major recession again. It's time our political class started to prepare for this, but Osborne and the Office of Budget Resposibility are decidedly looking the other way. Can anyone really believe that public debt is not going to sky-rocket above the magic 80% figure when all this goes off?

If there was ever a perfect time to seriously cut back on climate change spending, the endless layers of quangos (still largely untouched by the promised 'bonfire') and pointless foreign adventures, it's now.

Update: It looks like things are hotting up, with the latest spate of announcements from Mervyn King et al. Meanwhile, there are more important things to think about... Like the faux outrage over Jeremy Clarksons comments.

Nobody Rules The World

2011-11-29T09:15:00.002Z

Looking at the news these days I am increasingly reminded of something from one of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books (probably The Black Swan). He describes life in civil-war era Beirut, with shelling and bombardments a daily occurrence. Taleb had family members high up in the government - he comes from a prominent Orthodox family - and he recalls life in the bunker during a period of prolonged shelling from the other side of the city. He saw senior politicians reading the newspapers trying to work out what was going on - and these same newspapers were assuming that they, as well-connected politicians, could explain it to them. The fact was that nobody really knew what was going on and why. Who was bombing whom? Why this particular outburst of shelling? Nobody knew, it was random, chaotic (which is why Taleb describes it, of course), but the presss and politicians were desperate for a narrative that took away that essential element of randomness.

I see the same things now. Our politicians are in the bunker. They don't have a clue as to what's going on. They avidly devour the newspapers looking for clues. And our mainstream media search for oracular scraps in the half-baked musings of our politicians, as though they have any idea of what's happening. They don't get. Deep in the bunker they're desperately searching for the narrative that will take away the randomness. But the truth is that the global economy is a chaotic, turbulent system that nobody can control. All those who think that Wall St controls the world - you're nuts. All those who think it's the IMF - nuts too. The Jews? The Illuminati? Nuts. Politicians? Nuts. The truth is that nobody runs the world.

But that doesn't stop our political classes meddling. The hardest thing in the world for a politician to do is to stand back and do nothing. That would have been the right thing to do a few years ago. All that bollocks about too big to fail? Well, all that did was making the teetering failures even bigger. Let Greece fail? If it had been kicked out of the Euro and allowed to default, then it might have worked. As it is, now it's the Euro as a whole that's failing.

Of course, in the European bunker the urge 'to do something' is strongest. And the Euro-class only has one game plan - greater political union. And they'll carry on with that script regardless of how bad it actually makes things. Regime uncertainty is a killer - and so long as politicians keep coming up with this initiative and that initiative, that uncertainty will persist. The way to stop that uncertainty is to step back and make no new plans, create no new mechanisms, do nothing. But then to do that means admitting politicians do not rule the world. And it means stopping the moves towards full political integration.

As if that's ever going to happen.

99.9997% impressed

2011-11-28T13:20:00.000Z

I am always 99.9997% impressed when I see predictions quoted with levels of accuracy that far exceed measurement error. Take for example the latest OECD prediction of a contraction in this quarter (according to the BBC):

For the UK, the OECD's predictions are a 0.03% contraction this quarter, and a further 0.15% next.

Wow, 0.03%. They can measure a massive economy like ours to that level of accuracy? That's impressive.

It's like believing that we can predict global temperatures to fractions of a degree.

Sometimes I think we should just take Excel away from people who really don't have any common sense skills when it comes to numeracy...

Shock Horror - BBC Reports On Lowered CO2 Sensitivity

2011-11-25T09:14:00.000Z

Is this a sign of things to come as the latest UN climate fest Durban looks set to be a wash-out? There's a report on the BBC web site about a new paper in Science that looks again at climate sensitivity. And, as the BBC reports, it finds a much lower range of sensitivity than the current IPCC estimates. To quote the report:

The new models predict that given a doubling in CO2 levels from pre-industrial levels, the Earth's surface temperatures will rise by 1.7 to 2.6 degrees C.

Now what is interesting here, over and above the results themselves, is that the report doesn't come from Richard Black or Roger Harrabin, who are arch climate alarmists and who normally cover these stories. Furthermore, there are no quotes from any of the Hockey team, none from Bob Ward or indeed any of the other usual suspects.

Of course, there are the obligatory boiler-plate warnings about CO2, but even this is relatively circumspect:

The authors stress the results do not mean threat from human-induced climate change should be treated any less seriously, explained palaeoclimatologist Antoni Rosell-Mele from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who is a member of the team that came up with the new estimates.

But it does mean that to induce large-scale warming of the planet, leading to widespread catastrophic consequences, we would have to increase CO2 more than we are going to do in the near future, he said.

Could this new cautious tone from the BBC be the shape of things to come. Perhaps the recent spate of reports that show just how compromised the BBC is when it comes to climate change is starting to have an effect. The Climategate 2.0 emails can only help. Hopefully...

Climategate 2.0 - Phil Jones on Judith Curry's 'inferiority complex'

2011-11-23T15:58:00.002Z

More from Phil Jones and Tom Wigley. As bluegrue has pointed out in a comment below, the capitalised sections are Tom Wigley's. This is from #5256 - where we learn about Judith Curry's 'inferiority complex...' The more interesting bits I've bolded...

THanx Phil. Some comments in caps ....

Tom

===========

Phil Jones wrote:

BEN WAS REALLY PISSED OFF WITH ROGER -- AS WAS TOM

KARL I GUESS (NOT YET TALKED TO HIM). ALL OF HIS POINTS

CAN BE SHOT DOWN, BUT IT IS A PAIN NONE THE LESS.

APPARENLTY JUDY CURRY EXPOSED HER INFERIORITY COMPLEX

(ANS HER INFERIORITY).

Tom,

Off tomorrow and not back in CRU till March 10. I'm not supposed to

talk to anyone of the report authors ! There was a lot of odd things

said after the presentations in Chicago last week. We're charged with

writing a report, which will be published, but you get to rewrite the report

and no-one sees the one we looked at ! What is the point of publishing it !

Roger Pielke didn't come out of it too well. Some thought he had some

good ideas but didn't express them very well. Most thought he just didn't

express them very well. All thought Ben's was the best chapter. Almost

all think RSS is right. Also why is Fu et al. dismissed as controversial?

A VERY GOOD POINT TO STRESS. THIS IS CHRISTY'S WORDING.

Likely most work will be needed on Ch 6 and 1, then 2-4 and least for 5.

The Exec Summary was deemed OK, but it isn't a summary of the report,

ACTUALLY, IT IS. ALL ITEMS *ARE* IN THE CHAPTERS -- BUT ONLY

THOSE DEEMED MOST IMPORTANT (BY ALL EXCEPT ROGER!!)

MAYBE I WILL HAVE TO DO ANOTHER (SIDE) VERSION THAT CITES THE

SOURCES BY CHAPTER AND LINE NUMBER.

so you'll have to do some major reworking.

Remember I didn't tell you all this. Lots of details to come - not sure when.

Seems a long-winded process.

COMMENTS DUE BY MAY 1, THEN WE HAVE 2 WEEKS TO MODIFY/RESPOND.

Cheers

Phil

Climategate 2.0 - More errors that Al's DVD

2011-11-23T12:59:00.000Z

From the Climategate 2.0 emails - this from #5215. It's Phil Jones to Kevin Trenberth:

> Kevin,
>         Just sent an email to Martin and also Renate suggesting that
> when Patchy
>   collects the prize in Oslo, IPCC gets it scanned and sent to all of us
> on
>   AR4. We can then print it off, frame it and put it on a wall! They
> won't
>   get it for ages. It might be worth a few more of us suggesting
> something like this.
>        I know its for more than just AR4, but for all the Assessments, but
> they
>   will only have these recent email lists.
>
>         Secondly, next time you see Chris Landsea, maybe you can tell him
> he
>   opted out the prize!
>
>        All weekend op-ed pieces here were very begrudging in their praise
> for
>   Al Gore. The award was for IPCC and Al Gore, which most also got wrong
> here.
>   Also, some said it was from Sweden and not Norway. Reporting was quite
> poor.
>
>      Finally, that idiot Lord Monckton or Brenchly, is making his own
> DVD, based
>   on that awful Ch 4 program 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' !
> Hopefully soon
>   Ofcom (the UK group who assesses complaints against programs) will have
> ruled
>   on that program - which had many more errors than Al's DVD.
>
>   Cheers
>   Phil

Aside from the snide remarks aimed at Chris Landsea and Monckton, there's an admission that Al Gore's DVD contained errors. Anyone ever hear Phil Jones criticise An Inconvenient Truth before?

Get Ready For Climategate 2.0...

2011-11-22T13:51:00.000Z

Documents downloadable here: http://files.sinwt.ru/download.php?file=25FOIA2011.zip

Discussions already started by Jeff Id here and Steve McIntyre is also on the case...

Also quick off the mark are the BBC.

Prince Phillip Is No Friend

2011-11-21T09:01:00.000Z

There was some glee in the media over the weekend regarding the Duke of Edinburgh's comments on windfarms. While we can take it in good fun because it pokes one in the eye of the establishment line, let's not go too overboard with whether his comments have wider significance or not. Firsly, the comments are in the Prince Phillip tradition: highly non-PC. Where his number one son is ultra-PC on everything, Phillip delights in mocking the pieties of the day. And, let's not forget, the media takes just as much delight in reporting his comments, with varying degrees of mock outrage attending. So, in this respect at least, it's business as usual. There's the added frisson from diving cracks in the family, but again, that's par for the course when it comes to royal reporting.

And, lest we get too carried away, let's not forget that Prince Phillip is no friend of humanity. He is as misanthropic as they come, with a history of comments on over-population, environmentalism and the like. He might not like wind-farms, but it's only because they get in the way of his view of the landscape. He loves Earth first, humanity are an after-thought, and not a very welcome one at that. For example how's this for a quote:

In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.

There are plenty more such quotes here: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_depopu12.htm

Remember, remember the 17th of November

2011-11-16T13:29:00.000Z

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising against the Junta of the Greek Colonels. It has long been the key date in the calendar for Greek radicals, and often the demontsrations that commerarte the rising end in violence. It was also chosen as the name for the Greek terrorist organisation 17N, which was active for many years.

Given the current crisis in Greece it will be interesting to see what happens tomorrow. Both in terms of the size of the demonstrations and also how violent they get - if there was ever a date for expressing opposition to the EUnity government it's the 17th. More interesting will be the response from the state. Will they let things slide or can we expect a swift and violent crackdown?

A Menace To Society

2011-11-14T09:28:00.000Z

Sprog #1 is a teacher in a primary school in south west London. Her intake this year is a barely socialised rabble of five and six year olds, many of whom have difficulty with things like going to the toilet, getting dressed, eating at the table and so on. The class also includes a small group of boys prone to bouts of quite extreme violence, which, when allied to hair-line tempers, does not make for an easy time. Fights are common, and we're not talking a bit of pushing and shoving. The parents are often as feral as the children, and most weeks the school ends up having to call the police to remove parents who are aggressive or violent at the school.

This week one of the kids got into a fight on three separate occasions. When the kid was removed from the class and sent to the headmistress there was at least some expectation that at the third fight of the week some sanction could be applied. Ten minutes with the headmistress and the kid was back in the classroom, with a pile of play-dough to keep him happy. My daughter expressed her displeasure and demanded that something be done. At the very least the kid should miss play-time. No, the headmistress countered, the child could miss two or three minutes of play-time. Any more, the headmistress continued, would be to infringe on the child's human rights.

Nope, I kid you not. The headmistress really did say that, and she was being dead serious. To say that my daughter was incredulous is to understate things. So, a kid who is repeatedly violent and disruptive cannot miss out of play-time because it infringes his human rights. The teacher has no other sanction. None.

What about the human rights of the kids on the receiving end of the violence? Or the human rights of the whole class? Or even the human rights of the staff? None of those matter. What matters is the human rights of the a child who is violent and disruptive. Indeed, what about his human right to an education?

This child, and the others like him, runs riot at home and school. His parents don't care or can't control him. School is the one place that ought to be able to help him learn that he cannot carry on like that. But no, this headmistress, and the rest of her senior staff, will not help that kid at all. Better to let him trash the place then to impose some form of discipline - even of the mildest sort, such as missing play-time.

What does that kid learn? That being disruptive means you get to play with extra stuff and that there's no down-side. What do the other kids learn? That there's no profit in being good. And what does my daughter learn? That she's in the wrong school and that she can't help these kids, so has to leave for a better school.

This headmistress is a menace to society, as are the others like her, both in schools and in the education system as a whole. She does a disservice to all, including the kids who can't control themselves. She's making sure that the kids in her care are sabotaged in their education, trapped by their circumstances and the misfortune to be born poor in that part of London.

Two of our kids have gone through the system and the third is still working his way through secondary school. We've seen some great teaching and some good schools in the state system. But what we see, year on year, is a steady deterioration. And we look and we despair when we see what's going on.

It's not just the schools, what we see and hear about the next generation of kids, the ones in primary school now, really does scare the hell out of us.

Chris Huhne Is A Moron

2011-11-10T15:54:00.000Z

Chris Huhne does a really good job in the Telegraph. As Andrew Orlowski notes in The Register, Huhne helpfully "shows us why we need a new Energy Minister."

Huhne's contention is that this government will not bow to demands to 'abandon everything else for shale'. This is another example of the straw man argument that environmentalists love to attack. In the same way that they can pretend that sceptics dispute that there has been warming in the last two hundred years - which allows greens to state that 'warming is real' as though that's the end of the argument - so Huhne makes the claim that advocates of shale want to drop all other forms of energy generation. Of course it's absolute nonsense, but it enables Huhne to stand firm and tell us that windfarms are here to stay.

Another of his statements is worth picking out: Government should not pick winners.

Now, a truth almost universally acknowledged is that governments can't pick winners. Neither can most investors or business people. Winners emerge through an evolutionary process, bad ideas lead to bankruptcy and loss (or they would if governments didn't keep deciding that politically favoured industries or companies are too big to fail or in need of some other form of protection). But Huhne is unable to see that what his government is doing is shielding 'renewable' energy companies from the competition that would decide whether they are really winners or losers. In point of fact, even with plenty of subsidy, wind and solar are pretty much losers.

The real question to ask, and one which Huhne ducks, is whether shale will even be allowed to enter the competition. Huhne enumerates the many reasons why gas is a good source of energy, but in his eyes it is clear that what stands in its favour is the ability to provide back-up power for when the wind doesn't blow and the windfarms stand idle. And, to this effect, he states that:

We are keen that the market continues to invest in the capacity, storage and infrastructure to support our import needs, and are working with Ofgem to sharpen the incentives to ensure that suppliers can meet demand.

So, it's OK to import the stuff, but that's as far as it goes.

However, it's also clear that the pressure to go for shale is building. Good. We need to increase the pressure. Once shale is up and running then we'll see just how competitive the windfarms, solar and other 'renewables' really are. Anyone care to bet on windfarms coming out on top? No, I thought not...

Pap Is Gone - For Now...

2011-11-10T14:08:00.000Z

Do not imagine for one moment that Papandreou is finished. He took a major gamble and at times it looked like he had pulled it off - but in the end spooking Merkozy was a step too far. And the ploy of going to the people with a referendum was never going to play well with the colonial masters in Brussels. However, the fact that he's temporarily vacated the premiership doesn't mean he's finished. Far from it.

First, PASOK is not an ideological party in the same sense as the Greek Communist Party (KKE). PASOK is an organisation based around Papandreou - patronage and nepotism are everything. Parties are assembled around strong leaders, and how they chose to deck themselves ideologically is a secondary concern. Without Papandreou there is no PASOK.

Secondly with a Eurocrat now at the helm, Papandreou can remain on the side-lines until it all goes horribly wrong. When it does, he can rightly point out that he wasn't in charge, that he had been pushed out by the EU and that he's the one who wanted to let the people have their say. It's a sensible move on his part, even if he was unwilling to let go, he can now side-step some of the blame when it all fails. And of course, he play the martyr card - he has suffered just as the Greek people have suffered...

But, if the miracle occurs and the new government staves off the disaster, Papandreou can still benefit. PASOK was there getting things done. He runs PASOK, therefore he gets some credit. And he could argue that without his interventions things would have been much worse.

It might well be then, that for Papandreou handing over power might only be temporary.

In the meantime, the Greek people are being written out of the story completely. This ought to be a lesson for all the peoples of the EU.

In Praise of Judith Curry

2011-11-09T11:10:00.000Z

It sometimes seems that Professor Judith Curry can do no right. She is a prominent mainstream climatologist, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who has broken ranks and has, for a number of years now, been engaging with the sceptic side. One of her interests in this is to get away from the tribal nature of the climate debate, and indeed her blog 'climate etc', is one that attracts all sides of the debate. Aside from her strong condemnation of the 'team' after the Climategate scandal, she also went on record with some fairly scathing criticisms of the behaviour of Richard Muller and the science by press release around the preliminary BEST results (see her response in the Mail on Sunday, for example).

As you would expect, this has not endeared her to many of her more alarmist colleagues. In the latest spat, former IPCC author Richard Tol has accused her of spreading misinformation because she allowed two sceptical scientists to post details of their peer-reviewed papers on her blog. Apparently in doing this, she has lent her authority and credibility to scientists whose work should have been ignored.

The attacks from the warmist side are what you expect - she is guilty of consorting with heretics. If not a traitor, she is seen as aiding and abetting the sceptic cause, even if she is not herself a sceptic.

However, the fact that she is not an out and out sceptic also gets her flak from some on the sceptic side. For example, prominent sceptics like Willis Eschenbach has been quite forthright in some of his comments. At the moment most of the flak seems to be coming from the warmist side, but that seems to buy her no respite from some people on the sceptic side.

So, Judith Curry get flak from both sides. On the one hand for being too sceptical, on the other for not being sceptical enough.

This 'shot by both sides' perfectly encapsulates the tribalism of much of the climate debate. For two many people there can only be two camps - there's little room for shades of grey. As I have blogged before, there are more dimensions to the science/debate than most people care to acknowledge.

In terms of the science, as a non-climatologist I would characterise her position as increasingly 'luke warmist' - she is rowing back from the alarmism exemplified by the IPCC, the Hockey Stick team and people like James Hansen. In fact, I really do wonder now what the major difference is between Judith Curry's position and someone like Pat Michaels, who is considered firmly on the sceptic side.

The Greek People Must Respond

2011-11-05T15:04:00.000Z

After all of the high drama of last week - political theatre in the birth-place of theatre, rather than democracy in the birth-place of democracy - the dust is starting to settle. What is already abundantly clear is that the referendum was simply a high-stakes ploy by Papandreou. He needed to rein in elements of his own party and to scare the hell-out of the opposition. To do this successfully meant he had to rile the Merkozy monster - which is what happened. The response was swift enough - Papandreou is still in power and the threat of a referendum has been withdrawn. It was a smart game plan, but then Papandreou has got politics in his genes.

What we have to watch for now is the reactions on the streets in Greece and the reactions in Brussels. The Greek people were promised a chance to have a say, that is withdrawn. By rights that ought to lead to even more anger and a refusal of the Greek people to let the political classes have their way. Rather than calming things down, it ought to inflame them even more.

It will also be interesting to see how things develop in the rest of the EU. The prospect of Greece leaving the Euro, and of the EU altogether, has now been raised. Even if the politicians in the EU would want to pretend it never happened, the voters of France, Germany and the rest have seen the prospect dangled in front of their eyes.

The future needs to be decided by the people of Europe, not by the political establishment. It's up to the peoples to make their anger felt - and that doesn't mean more lame 'occupy main street' events designed to appeal to the liberal media, but in real street protests and in voting for those who reject the cosy EU consensus.

Let's have no more talk of 'renegotiations' or 'bringing back powers' - the only way forward is to change our political classes once and for all, and in destroying the EU completely. You can only do the latter by succeeding in the former.

Wily old Pap?

2011-11-02T19:07:00.000Z

Richard North of EUReferendum has some interesting things to say about Papandreou's decision to call a referendum. Perhaps it wasn't such a surprise after all, and that Papandreou had previously signalled his intention to 'go to the people' in some way that didn't involve calling a general election that he'd most likely lose. However, the fact remains that he's playing a high stakes strategy, and the potential is there for the Greek people to really upset the EU apple cart. And, to stop this we know that the colleagues will go all out to cajole, frighten, bribe and otherwise ensure that the Greeks make the desired choice.

But, given the mood in the streets, it's not clear that the old strategies that worked in Ireland, for example, will work here. As a piece in the New York Times notes:

Many Greek voters say they are tired of hearing about decisions taken in foreign capitals and political initiatives that do not represent ordinary Greeks. “The government is no longer in control - others are calling the shots,” said Akis Tsirogiannis, a 42-year-old father who recently lost his job at a furniture workshop in Athens.

He said he would vote against the debt deal in a referendum. “This deal, like all the others, is a life sentence of austerity for Greeks,” he said. “We need to reclaim our country.”

As always, when it comes to the EU, nothing should be taken for granted. They've got plenty of previous when it comes to subverting popular opinion. The question is, can they pull it off when the stakes - and the anger - are so high?

Matt Ridley on Scientific Heresy

2011-11-02T15:14:00.000Z

An absolutely must-read article is Matt Ridley's Angus Millar lecture at the RSA in Edinburgh, reprinted at Bishop Hill (http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/11/1/scientific-heresy.html).

In discussingwhy it matters that the pseudo-science that is climate alarmism has become so powerful, Ridley points out:

Well here’s why it matters. The alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not. Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.

At least sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as this griffon vulture.

At least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish.

At least creationists have not persuaded the BBC that balanced reporting is no longer necessary.

At least homeopaths have not made expensive condensing boilers, which shut down in cold weather, compulsory, as John Prescott did in 2005.

At least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel.

That’s why it matters. We’ve been asked to take some very painful cures. So we need to be sure the patient has a brain tumour rather than a nosebleed.

Greek EU Referendum

2011-11-01T13:14:00.000Z

George Papandreou's announcement of a Greek referendum on the latest EU-imposed bail out package seems to have blind-sided everyone. You can almost hear the sphincters tightening in Berlin and Paris. Like a lot of people who want the EU to crash and burn, I'll be hoping for a solid No vote from the Greeks. It ought to be a clear cut decision, but like anything to do with the EU, nothing should be taken for granted.

For example, the Greek political class will do all they can to convince people that beggary under the EU is preferable to beggary outside of it. They'll be all kinds of dire prognosticians in the media, particularly the international media.

We should also expect an increase in civil strife in Greece. There are already significant differences between the forces out on the streets. In particular there's a deep distrust between the Greek Communists and allies, and the anarchists and autonmists on the other. There have been times when this has turned violent, with Greek communists siding with the police to attack the anarchists.

In the case of a referendum the anarchists would be ideologically opposed to it because they distrust politicians and because they will see it as a means of taking the focus away from the streets and back into the formal political process. Perhaps this is one of Papandreou's reasons, because taking the heat out of the street protests is becoming increasingly hard to do. The more he unleashes the police and military forces, the more it ramps things up, and the more dangerous it becomes for the police and military to be involved in politics...

A Perfect FIT?

2011-11-01T10:21:00.000Z

There have been predictable howls of outrage following the announcement that the UK government is to halve the feed in tariffs for solar panels. It's not just the direct vested interests from the solar industry, it's also those indirect vested interests from environmentalists, climate change campaigners and their supporters in the liberal media. Some have seen this change of policy as the first signs of a deeper change in government. Is the solar FIT a harbinger of change, is the grip of climate change orthodoxy loosening? Unfortunately, I see no sign that this is happening.

Firstly, let's be clear about the scale of this apparent change. The most important point is that it only applies to new installations. In other words those who have already boarded the gravy-train and have installed solar panels are guaranteed the premium rate of feed-in tariff for the next 25 years. In practice, it means that those who could afford to go ahead and install early on, when installation costs were higher than they are now, will continue to benefit at our expense. Who could afford to go ahead and install early on? People with the money to spare - i.e. the rich. Yet again, as with wind energy, the rich are being subsidised by the poor. For those who missed out early on, the FIT is being reduced, not abolished completely. They'll continue to be subsidised by the rest of us, but the level of profit won't be as high.

Secondly, it's also clear that the move to reduce FIT is driven by political expediency and not any fundamental shift in ideology regarding climate change. With fuel poverty on the rise, and all the signs of a hard winter ahead, the government has to be seen to be responding in some way. The really difficult decision would be to stop with the hidden green taxes that inflate our fuel bills. This won't happen. The next option would be to cut the FIT for all of the 'renewables', including wind. Again, this won't happen. What we have instead is a largely symbolic gesture that will make very little difference to rest of us.

It's worth noting that this policy change has occurred just around the same time as the release of the BEST climate change results. Our political classes will have been bombarded with the simple message that global warming is real. They will, without doubt, accept that this is the gospel truth. It will reinforce the dogma. The timing of the BEST message - amplified by the BBC, Guardian, Economist and co - is perfect. It hits the news just before winter sets in, and it's in time for the next climate-fest in Durban.

So, when it comes down to it, I see no reasons to be cheerful. What we have is not a monumental shift in opinion or policy, but a minor piece of political theatre to please the masses.

What next?

2011-10-25T09:30:00.000+01:00

Last night's political panto around an EU referendum should, at the very least, skewer some common myths and misconceptions. These myths include:

Cameron and Hague are Eurosceptics
The Tory party is Eurosceptic
There's any substantive difference between the main political parties
The political classes are in touch with popular sentiment
The political class cares what we think
The mass media are not part of the problem
That petitions (electronic or otherwise) can lead to change
The what we see in politics is real, not theatre
That UKIP and the rump of 'Tory rebels' hold any sway in the country at large
The EU is the topic around which a mass movement against the establishment can coalesce

The real question we need to focus on is this: what do we do about it?

Something In The Air?

2011-10-18T20:51:00.000+01:00

Richard North over at EUReferendum regularly asks the same question about our leaders: "why should we not rise up and slaughter them." It's a good question, though a tad melodramatic. So I was a bit surprised to read similar sentiments on the normally interesting but sober Cato Institute web site:

The real villains are those in the political class who pandered to the voter by promising more in benefits to be paid for by others — "the evil rich." But if the rich people are taxed too much, they opt out by moving or no longer being rich, and then the tax revenues fail to keep up with the increases in spending until finally, the debt burden slowly sinks the ship. This is precisely what is going on in the United States and most European countries at the moment.

As more and more people lose their jobs, the demand for government payments grows, making the situation worse and worse. The U.S. government is spending roughly 40 percent more than it is taking in. President Obama and others are demanding higher taxes on the "rich" — more correctly known as job creators — to pay for more government benefits. The self-delusion of the political class goes on, and the numbers get worse. Notice that the president, when arguing that his "jobs" bill is going to increase jobs, quotes the same economists who also said his "stimulus" would keep unemployment under 8 percent, rather than referring to those economists who were correct in saying it would fail. The president's assertion that by increasing the taxes on the rich he will be able to "pay" for all his new spending is fantasy, or worse.

The simple fact is that the amount of explicit and implicit debt that the United States and other governments have incurred cannot and will not be paid back in full. The political class will try to cure the debt mess with inflation, price controls, tax increases and confiscation, but it will only make things worse. Greece is only the first canary to die. As more and more jobs and homes are destroyed by the debt crisis, the ranks of the revolutionaries will grow until, finally, the new "peasants" realize that the rich are gone and it is the political class that is responsible for the mess.

Perhaps there's something in the air after all...

A Letter From Dave

2011-10-18T09:11:00.000+01:00

Is this the letter that Dave Cameron and co are going to write to us regarding energy prices?

I'm sorry, really I am. We've screwed up. We've let you down and we're all very, very sorry. We've messed up the economy. We've frittered billions of your hard-earned cash on pointless windfarms, useless solar and provided massive subsidies to big landowners - all in the name of tackling climate change. We know you've felt this most acutely when your energy bills coming thudding on your door mat. We could have helped by cutting green taxes and investing in proper power stations and a grown-up energy policy, but we didn't. We appointed Chris Huhne to take charge, and all he did was point the finger at the power companies while making things worse. We all know he's a useless sack of shit, but it's in his genes and there's nothing we can do about it. As has been pointed out before, Chris Huhne is the man who pisses on your shoes and tells you it's raining.

And so, as a government, we're writing to urge you all to do some shopping around for a new government, because we're irredeemably broken. I know the other big government suppliers, like Labour, are no better, but at least you can pretend that there's hope rather than rising up en mass and slitting our throats.

Yours,

Dave Cameron

Instead we're likely to get a fatuous pile of shite telling us to swap energy companies, as though there's a chance of finding one not subject to green taxes, dependent on fuel imports and desperate to ingratiate itself with big government...

Occupy Wall St vs Stop The City

2011-10-17T12:08:00.000+01:00

Another must read post over at Autonomous Mind looks at the 'occupy Wall Street' and the associated 'we are the 99%' movement. Following on from the mass media reports from the States - while at the same time the protestors insist that they are being ignored - we have seen similar protests across Europe and beyond. Does this represent the beginnings of a global movement that we lead to positive change? AM suggests that the movement has missed the point and that it's not Wall Street to blame, but the state itself. He also suggests that the movement is largely a creation of the Left rather than a spontaneous outpouring of anger. To quote:

Occupying Wall Street will change nothing. Sleeping outside St Paul’s Cathedral will change nothing. The first thing to do is focus a campaign on the politicians – because it is they who have encouraged and embedded this situation – and demand a change in the scandalous government spending priorities and regressive policies which are driving up the cost of food and energy, hitting the poorest hardest.

I have a lot of sympathy with this viewpoint. I write this as someone who was very active in Anarchist politics a long time ago, so I write from a position of some experience (including being arrested at a Stop The City protest in London back in the 1980s). And, to some extent, Occupy Wall Street is Stop The City brought bang up-to-date.

The first thing to note is that, like the original Stop The City, there is no single and over-riding issue that drives the protests. While there is a very obvious 'anti-capitalist' theme, this is a very broad church - environmentalist, third world debt, poverty, climate change, anti-war activists... Any and every grievance is welcome and represented in the movements and actions. For many this is a good thing, as it brings together a variety of grievances and then points the finger at 'neo-liberal' capitalism as the cause of all of them. In point of fact what it does, primarily, is bring together activists from different campaigns together. How much it really involves 'ordinary people' is open to question. It draws towards it those who are already motivated and active.

And, like the original Stop The City movement, it uses Anarchist organising principles - it purports to be non-hierarchical, leaderless, non-authoritarian. In point of fact there are always some activists who have privileged positions thanks to being more closely involved behind the scenes. They are influential but largely hidden from view, not leaders in the conventional sense, but leading all the same.

But there are differences between now and back then.

First is the influence of technology - social media, mobile phones, tablets and the like make it easier to organise quickly. Actions are documented immediately and contact made directly with like minded individuals regardless of geography. The fact that this technology is expensive and produced by big corporations (like Apple), is largely glossed over by activists who hate big corporations but love the technology produced thanks to the profit motive. And, ironically, the technology adopted by Wall Street is also the technology adopted by the new generation of activists.

Secondly, protests like Stop The City were met with violent repression from the police and largely ignored by the mass media. Who can remember the day when over 1000 people were arrested by the Met in the 1984 protest (including yours truly)? Today's protests, in contrast, have received mass amounts of publicity from the mainstream, much of it sympathetic. We are also seeing the establishment desperately trying to associate themselves with it. Politicians and celebrities alike will want to associate themselves with the protest - they'll empathise in front of the cameras right on cue. Witness, for example, Al Gore seeking to breathe life into his faltering climate change agenda by associating with the protests. For the hard core Anarchists they'll do their best to stop this happening, but they'll fail because many of the activists drawn to the movement will want to bask in the approval of the liberal establishment.

Why this change? Why is that the new generation of protests is able to garner the approval of the likes of Al Gore? Because, as Autonomous Mind rightly points out, the focus of the protests are the big bankers, who are public enemy number one for Anarchists and liberal media alike.

This neatly side-steps the role of politicians in the current crisis. The bankers, so long the darlings of politicians, are now seen as the sole cause of the economic crisis that edges closer to melt-down every day. Politicians have been able to successfully shift the blame. So, it's the bankers at fault for the collapsing Euro - not the profligate politicians who wasted billions building up the size of the state and extending their influence to all spheres of life. It's not the politicians who are making things worse by pumping more and more money into failed economies, making the problem far worse. It's not the politicians who demanded greater access to finance to people who couldn't afford it and which lead to the subprime disaster. It's not the politicians who are decided the banks were too big to fail rather than letting them sink (which is what free market capitalism really demands). It's not the politicians who have pumped billions of our money into wind farms, bailing out banks, bailing out the Euro etc.

In other words, politicians have screwed us over and shifted the blame solely onto the bankers.

But all of this is ignored by the protestors and those politicians and establishment figures who will seek to co-opt the protest. There's almost a symbiotic relationship between the actionism of the Anarchists, the wider and more diffuse activists from different campaigns and the liberal media and politicians. For the hard-core Anarchists the only way to disrupt this cosy relationship will be to provoke violent confrontations with the police. And even then, it's not certain that the media sympathy will evaporate.

In the end, the movement will dissipate. Part of the problem is that by nature these 'spectacular' are divorced from most people's daily lives. This was a problem with the original Stop The City protests, the later Carnivals Against Capitalism, protests again the G20, WTO etc. These protests attract huge numbers, create a real sense of 'movement' and then die away as people get back to real life. For those who aren't full time activists, the protests are something they see on the news and far removed from daily concerns.

To create real change we need both to know who the targets are and to be organising close to home.

And our targets go beyond the simplistic 'greedy bankers' narrative. For sure the bankers should pay - the banks should have been allowed to fail, not saved at our expense. But it's the politicians who are the real power - they are the ones we should be targeting first and foremost. And this means focussing locally. It means doing the boring leg-work of campaigning on local issues - against profligate councils, crooked deals between elected officials and businesses, against the effects of central government on our communities, against the state at the level that is nearest to us and most amenable to action.

For those with a sense of history, we do have a model of this. The anti-Poll Tax campaign.

In the mean-time we can see some examples of this at work already. There's Richard North's campaign against illegal bailiff activity. There's Autonomous Mind using the Freedom of Information Act to expose what's going on in local government. There's the activities of the Independent Working Class Association and the slog of working on local issues in Oxford. For my own part I think we need to become a Thorn In Their Side.

If there's a movement that aspires to make deep-seated change, then it has to arise from here, not from the media-hungry activities of full-time activists and those who seek legitimacy from them.

Regime Uncertainty and Climate Change

2011-10-11T15:56:00.000+01:00

A leading article on the BBC News website covers the report by the Environmental Audit Committee, which suggests that the government has developed a "schizophrenic attitude" to climate change, and that this is starting to impact investor confidence in low-carbon industries. It quotes committee chairwoman Joan Walley saying that

Unfortunately, the government's somewhat schizophrenic attitude to climate change seems to be undermining that confidence. The chancellor's comments last week show that five years on from the Stern report, the Treasury still doesn't get climate change - or the risk it poses to global stability and economic prosperity.

And, this being the high church of global warming, the report wheels on additional fire-power to make the point, including Zac Goldsmith and Nick Molho, head of energy policy at WWF-UK. Molho states that:

Failing to clearly endorse the fourth carbon budget now will not only slow down urgent action on addressing climate change, it will also seriously undermine investment certainty in the UK's low-carbon sector and result in the UK missing out on the opportunity of creating hundreds of thousands of UK jobs in low-carbon manufacturing.

This is standard BBC fare of course, right down to a reference to the thoroughly discredited Stern report. And let's ignore the fact that a lot of these investors are just exploiting government subsidies - they're worried that the gravy train might slow down just a little. Ignore too the mythical green jobs that end up costing real jobs...

However, the underlying point that the apparent uncertainty about government policy is causing a knock-on effect in investor confidence is worth exploring. This is an example of what some economists term 'regime uncertainty', and we are seeing a lot of it at the moment. There is a good argument for suggesting that regime uncertainty was a key driver of the great depression (see the paper by Robert Higgs here: http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=430). And, thanks to the dithering over the collapse of the Euro we are seeing it in the slow motion disaster of Europe's financial meltdown.

We see it at home too, all around us. Families are hesitating about spending - rising fuel and energy prices, uncertainty about jobs and salaries and so on mean that belts are being tightened all round. Fuel poverty is on the rise, as has been reported several times recently. All of this feeds into contracting the economy, creating yet more uncertainty.

One way round this is to lessen the uncertainty of course. Perhaps by trying to put a lid on those fuel price rises, perhaps by stopping the waste of money on windfarm and renewables subsidies, perhaps by scrapping the entire climate change act completely and diverting the funds into things we actually want and need.

Ethanol, troops and books

2011-10-11T10:20:00.000+01:00

One of my sidelines is reviewing technical and scientific books, which I've done for a number of years now. This means that I regularly get emailed by authors and publishers asking if I'd be interested in their books. I have no problem with this, though to be honest the supply of books far exceeds my capacity to read and review them. So I was not suprised to receive a request from a small company publishing specialist computer science books - there's a small readership for these types of books, so getting publicity is essential. What caught my eye though was the sig line in the initial email:

U.S. troops have never lost their lives defending our ethanol reserves

The first thing to say is that this is shockingly poor business practice - and believe me, the author of the email was initiating a business transaction. Why assume that the reader - me - gives a toss what your views on politics are? Particularly when the topic is completely technical. I'd have no problem reviewing a book on the subject of biofuels and geopolitics, but that's a million miles from the books being offered for review.

Secondly, the sentiment expressed reeks of that fatal liberal conceit that motive trumps reality. The idea is that having your heart in the right place is what counts.

That's the motive but what about the reality? Aside from the huge subsidies without which biofuels would be dead in the water, what has the move to ethanol achieved? A reduction in CO2 emissions? Nope. Even the Guardian reports that Biofuel farms make CO2 emissions worse.

So, a main plank of the push to biofuels is a bust.

OK, but our emailer wasn't talking about CO2, he specifically mentions the lives of US troops. Strictly speaking he is right. But in terms of human lives overall? The biofuels are a disaster that is growing worse. The push to burn food crops for fuels is causing food prices to rise, causing poverty to rise and has alrady been linked to a number of food riots and conflicts in the developing world. And, it's not just poor brown people affected by all of this. A report from the Congressional Budget Office in 2009 concluded that:

...the rise in food prices attributable to increased production of ethanol will lead to higher federal spending for those [food] programs: specifically, an estimated $600 million to $900 million of the more than $5 billion increase in spending projected for fiscal year 2009 as a result of the rising price of food.

So, the policy is leading to increased poverty even in the US. In all respects the move to ethanol production for fuel is a disaster that will lead to loss of life, increased poverty, increases in government subsidy and more environmental degradation.

It's a complete failure as a policy, though as in all big government policies it will take years for the US, the EU and others to admit they were wrong. So, trying to sell me your books on the back of a policy fail like ethanol is itself a fail. Forget it.

Fuel Prices Up - CO2 Down

2011-10-06T10:17:00.000+01:00

Two bits of news ought to bring a smile to the face of Chris Huhne and to warmists everywhere. The first is a report that the cheapest annual gas and electricity deal for UK households has hit £1,000 for the first time ever. With all of the big six energy companies dropping the cheaper tariffs, it means that prices are continuing their inexorable rise just as we're heading into what is predicted to be a hard winter. Get ready for the mass chorus of 'weather is not climate' from the AGW apologists if it does turn out to be another bitterly cold one. And look out for the figures for the numbers who die of hypothermia or weather-related accidents and then compare to the virtual deaths predicted thanks to a marginal increase in warmth.

So, energy for light and heat is getting more expensive. Energy usage is likely to drop as some people decide that food trumps heat.

The other bit of news to cheer George Monbiot and co is that the AA estimates that petrol consumption has dropped by 15% in the last three years. And it's not just domestic users who are cutting back, businesses are doing the same. Aside from the financial side effects, this reduction will also impact emissions targets.

So, an all-round good news story for the warmists - CO2 reductions down, thus helping us save the world from global warming (oops, sorry, climate change). On the face of it then, the greenies should be celebrating. Chris Huhne should be jumping with joy.

But what's interesting is the reaction of the high church of global warming (also known as the BBC). Have these stories made it to the BBC environment pages? Nope. Both stories are filed under the personal finance section. This is about your pocket, with no mention of CO2. The nearest the BBC gets to this is a rather coy admission that 'One result has been lower emissions of potentially damaging exhaust fumes.' No mention of CO2.

Does this mean that the AGW mantra is dead and buried at the BBC? No, of course not. What we have is a clear example of bias at work.

CO2 reduction stories are only allowed if they are positive. High energy costs - whether it's petrol of domestic fuel - are negative, so they have to be divorced from the CO2 narrative. Nothing can be allowed to sully the story that reducing CO2 emissions is a good thing.

This is not an isolated case. As Maurizio Morabito has noted, we saw the same thing with the recent spell of hot weather. Normally we see that any unusual weather pattern is likely to be attributed to climate change. Especially hot weather, because then it's not just climate change, it's global warming. But in the case of the all to brief hot weather in October, the press were notably silent on the topic - despite the acres of coverage of the heat. Why? Because most people saw the heat as welcome, a change after a dull, grey and cold summer. Again, nothing can be allowed to sully the overwhelming narrative that warming is bad.

The bottom line is that the worse things get for us, the better it is for CO2 reduction, and the less likely it is that the warmists will draw attention to it. And the more we have to do to remind everybody that this is precisely what Huhne, Monbiot and co have been campaigning for.

Politics As Panto

2011-10-05T12:19:00.000+01:00

I try as little as possible to listen to the news, and aside from one or two columnists, I avoid the mainstream press. Like an increasing number of people who reject the mainstream media I get the bulk of my news and information via the web - including a range of scientific and political blogs (including spiked online, climate resistance, EUReferendum, Autonomous Mind, cafe Hayek, Watts Up With That, Indymedia and others). However, try as I must I do occasionally slip up and catch a blast of something noxious from the radio or TV. Such was the case yesterday, when the non-headlines were all about Theresa May, Ken Clarke and whether a cat is legally qualified to decide on deportation for criminals, or not.

This is, of course, yet another example of politics as panto - the cat was there, so was the villain, all we needed was Theresa May to don her panto boots and Ken Clarke to slip into his ugly sister outfit. In the real world, it's all bollocks. What the press were doing is selling us soap opera headlines about splits in the government, complete with tales of bitter in-fighting. Politics as entertainment. Noticeably absent from the story was the reality that the whole thing is decided elsewhere - Europe trumps Westminster, as should be clear to anyone with half a brain cell still functioning.

And, as should be clear as day, this government is not about to take us out of the EU or withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. It's play acting, the whole thing. The media know this, and yet they play their part in the game. Even the most brain dead of Tories must realise by now that their leaders owe allegiance to the greater state, not the tiny province we inhabit.

While they try desperately to breathe life into the stinking corpse that is the British body politic, the reality is that increasing numbers of people are waking up to the looming disaster. The sinking of the Euro will cause more pain than most care to think about. And when it gets bad, then the calls for the political class to be called to account will be impossible to ignore. The beggared populations of Europe will need to take revenge on those who have caused this mess.

Go Forth and Multiply

2011-10-03T20:50:00.001+01:00

Following on from the previous post, here's the list of email addresses for the Freedom of Information officers for each of the London boroughs - except for Enfield, which does not appear to publish a direct address. There are so many questions to ask... Easy examples that come to mind:

How many days did senior council officers spend at off-site "team building" sessions. List the dates, number of personnel and the cost.
How much foreign travel was undertaken by councilors and council employees. List the dates, the number of personnel, the reason for the trip and the cost
How many council employees are full-time trades unions officials. List the number, the job titles and the salaries.

And let's not forget Richard North's campaign on bailiffs and council tax...

Barking and Dagenham	foi@lbbd.gov.uk
Barnet	foi@barnet.gov.uk
Bexley	foi@bexley.gov.uk
Brent	foi@brent.gov.uk
Bromley	foi@bromley.gov.uk
Camden	for@camden.gov.uk
City of Westminster	foi@westminster.gov.uk
Croydon	information@croydon.gov.uk
Ealing	foirequests@ealing.gov.uk
Enfield	Unable to find an email address
Greenwich	foi@greenwich.gov.uk
Hackney	informationmanagement@hackney.gov.uk
Hammersmith and Fulham	h&fintouch@lbhf.gov.uk
Haringey	foi@haringey.gov.uk
Harrow	harrow@icaseworkmail.com
Havering	accessinfo@havering.gov.uk
Hillingdon	foi@hillingdon.gov.uk
Hounslow	foi@hounslow.gov.uk
Islington	foia@islington.gov.uk
Kensington and Chelsea	foi@rbkc.gov.uk
Kingston upon Thames	foi@rbk.kingston.gov.uk
Lambeth	foi@lambeth.gov.uk
Lewisham	foi@lewisham.gov.uk
Merton	data.protection@merton.gov.uk
Newham	information.governance@newham.gov.uk
Redbridge	foi@redbridge.gov.uk
Richmond upon Thames	foi@richmond.gov.uk
Southwark	accessinfo@southwark.gov.uk
Sutton	FOI@sutton.gov.uk.
Tower Hamlets	foi@towerhamlets.gov.uk
Waltham Forest	information.officer@walthamforest.gov.uk.
Wandsworth	foi@wandsworth.gov.uk

A Thorn In The Side

2011-10-03T09:51:00.000+01:00

There have been some interesting pieces on the Autonomous Mind and EUReferendum blogs about taking positive actions to assert a degree on control in local politics. The starting point in both cases is a wish to exert direct, democratic control in opposition to the current ruling elites (both at the national and trans-national level). While it's part of established political conversation to bemoan the political apathy that is a persistent feature of the scene in this country, the establishment seeks only to address this through means which are largely symbolic and designed to further entrench it's power.

We see, for example, discussions about the central funding of political parties - as though this is anything but a means of securing the continued existence of political machines structured to protect the current system. And, as we see in Europe, central funding of political parties leads not to a renaissance of political activity in the broader population, but to increased levels of fraud, nepotism and corruption. At the same time there are suggestions that the key is to make political involvement easier - through postal voting, reducing the voting age, electronic voting etc. Again, rather than leading to greater involvement, it creates more scope for electoral fraud and serves again to entrench the current cosy system. The same goes for things like proportional representation or the alternative transferable vote - another fix that ignores the fundamental problem - our political class sits above the rest of us and treats us all as voting fodder.

Political labels, like left and right or Labour and Tory, are meaningless. They play at politics and jockey for position but there's a consensus amongst all the main parties and they make noise over trivial details. Non-issues are elevated to major importance by a compliant media and the real issues are ignored. Witness our so-called Prime Minister pompously expound on supermarket carrier bags while the global economy veers towards collapse. And then they wonder why we view them with nothing but hatred and contempt.

So why the interest in what Autnomous Mind and EUReferendum are saying? Because they're suggesting that we exert pressure where we have at least some chance of making a difference. Westminster is a branch office of our real government in Brussels, what chance do we have of making a splash there?

The key to exerting pressure locally is to make known to our friends and neighbours what our local authorities are doing. The Freedom of Information Act is something that we can use to expose the idiocies of local policies, where we can show how budgets are disbursed according to whim or in obedience to central government diktat.

Will this type of activity create a groundswell of opinion and renaissance of political activity? Possibly, possibly not. But what other choices are there? We can sit on the sidelines and rant, or we can become a thorn in the side of the bureaucrats who run our local services.

Barnet Shale Bonanza

2011-09-29T09:49:00.001+01:00

Yet another in our compare and contrast series...

This time compare the myth of 'Green Jobs' propagated by the entire political class on both sides of the Atlantic, from Obama to Cameron to the many and varied functionaries of the EU politbureau - along with their allies in the bloated NGO sector, with the reality of job creation and economic activity surrounded shale gas in the United States. Look at the Spanish experience:

The internal report of the Spanish administration admits that the price of electricity has gone up, as well as the debt, due to the extra costs of solar and wind energy. Even the government numbers indicate that each green job created costs more than 2.2 traditional jobs, as was shown in the report of the Juan de Mariana Institute

Now take a look at the report high-lighted by the Global Warming Policy Foundation:

The Barnett Shale natural gas field has generated $65.4 billion in economic activity and created more than 100,200 jobs over the 24-county area since 2001, according to a new study commissioned by the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce.

The full report can be found here: http://www.fortworthchamber.com/BarnettShaleStudy11.pdf

This should be cause for celebration in the UK. Given the scale of recent discoveries of vast shale gas deposits in the UK, we too should be looking forward to a major boost to jobs and economic activity. This really is a no-brainer. You'd have to be totally ideologically blinkered and/or have some personal financial stake in "renewables" not to see this. Not that we would suggest that David Cameron's father-in-law or Chris Huhne's wife would have much of an influence, despite their financial profit from wind farm subsidies and the like.

It's such a no-brainer in fact, that it really begs the question, yet again, of why our leaders believe what they do.

Weather Is Consistent With Climate Change

2011-09-27T09:22:00.002+01:00

Leading scientists revealed today that weather is consistent with climate change. In a stunning vindication of climate models, the scientists have revealed that there is a very high probability that increasing CO2 is causing weather every day. In what is widely seen as a major set-back for climate change denialists, the models give clear and unambiguous results that weather will appear almost every day.

Dr Kevin Trenbeth interrupted his search for missing heat to state that: "Our model's show that weather is almost certain to happen on most days, even weekends when you'd think it was resting. Only CO2 and an atmosphere can explain this unexpected finding."

When pressed as to what type of weather the models predict, his response was clear: "What kind of weather you got?"

Whether it's hot, cold, wet, dry, snow, drought, sort of starting nice and then getting grey in the afternoon, it's all weather and so consistent with the models.

Leading researcher, Dr James Hansen, was also clear on the importance of these results. Fresh from a court appearance for trying to stop stores selling toy "death trains", Dr Hansen stated: "Look out of the window. Look now. See that weather. You did that. Think of your grandchildren. Go on, think of them. OK, you don't have grandchildren, so think of your grandparents. OK, so you've only got one. Think of someone else who has grandchildren or grandparents. Now, do you really want to inflict weather on them? Shame on you. Shame."

With these new results to hand, the IPCC will make another push for a globally binding and stringent agreement to limit CO2 production. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC and former "death train" engineer, was in strident mood. "This is a damning indictment of the skeptic position. There is no room for voodoo science any more. We can predict that there will be weather, therefore give us the money. It's that simple."

IWCA and the riots

2011-09-21T13:19:00.000+01:00

For a long while now it has been clear that what passes for the 'radical left' in this country have been a spent and demoralised force. The anti-cuts activity that has been organised by the unions has largely been about public sector workers protecting their special interests and have pretty much failed to mobilise other sections of the population. But this hasn't stopped the left from dusting off their old slogans and getting those anti-Thatcher badges down from the attic. The recent riots were yet more evidence of the decline of the left - who were completely side-lined by what went on and have largely chosen to ignore it as if it never happened. Compare and contrast with the riots in the 80's, which saw anarchists and other on the frontlines, but also triggered considerable organising and campaigning afterwards.

Just about the only 'left' group that seems to be doing any actual thinking is the Independent Working Class Association, which largely grew out of the Red Action side of Anti-Fascist Action. The IWCA has just posted an article on the riots entitled The Lumpen Rebellion. While I have no time for the formulaic pronouncements against 'neo-liberalism', the article is worth reading, in fact it's one of the few articles on the riots that shows any signs of having understood the forces at work during the riots.

A cloudy day for the IPCC

2011-09-20T11:39:00.000+01:00

Anthony Watts over at Watts Up With That draws attention to a new paper that looks at the effects of cloud cover on climate. The paper (Combining satellite data and models to estimate cloud radiative effect at the surface and in the atmosphere, by Richard P. Allan and published in the journal Meteorological Applications), appears to support the Spenser and Braswell paper, which has been such an active example of 'redefining what peer review is'. Should we expect the ritual Seppuku of the journal's editor? Or will the BBC front page the story and pepper it with quotes disputing the consensus?

Perhaps they'd care to quote Anthony Watts:

The cooling effect is found to be -21 Watts per meter squared, more than 17 times the posited warming effect from a doubling of CO2 concentrations which is calculated to be ~ 1.2 Watts per meter squared. This -21 w/m2 figure from Richard P. Allan is in good agreement with Spencer and Braswell.

For the IPCC this comes at a bad time. A successful hatchet job on Spencer and Braswell will mean that it can be safely side-lined in AR5, but what about this one? With sceptics highlighting the existence of the paper, it's not going to be possible to pretend that this new result doesn't exist.

In the rest of the news, the direct results of global warming hysteria are there for all to see. Increasing energy costs are causing pain, and so we see the despicable Chris Huhne yet again attempting to shift the blame anywhere but himself and his colleagues in the political classes.

Destroy the EU

2011-09-19T11:23:00.000+01:00

The EU is the ultimate expression of crony capitalism. It is by nature an undemocratic body that is an alliance of unelected bureaucrats, favoured companies and bought-off NGOs. It has no natural constituency and engenders no loyalty from those of us unfortunate enough to fall under its jurisdiction. Instead it follows a single over-riding directive - to perpetuate and expands its powers. To do this it channels funds - which are derived from unwilling populations - into those projects that are most politically expedient:

subsidies to favoured companies, NGOs, and local 'governments'
constant encroachments on local sovereignty
expanding the size of the central bureaucracy
furthering of its favoured agendas (climate change, green regulation, political union)
political cronyism (national politicians that toe the line are rewarded with well-funded EU jobs)

From the ground up it is a body that is staffed by a patrician class that believes democracy is an impediment to its grand visions and views local democracy as intrinsically suspect. It has co-opted politicians from 'left' and 'right', as if those fictions are still meaningful categories.

The recent spate of Eurosceptic maneuvering in the UK is largely a symbolic activity - more political panto, like the arguments over the 50p tax rate. It will seek to channel anger into activities that ultimately do not pose any real challenge to the EU.

The lesson is simple. The EU cannot be reformed, reworked or remade, any more than the old Soviet block could be reformed from within. The EU needs to be destroyed. It's that simple.

Just imagine if...

2011-09-16T10:36:00.002+01:00

Just imagine if a Nobel prize-winning physicist announced he was leaving a major scientific body, (say the American Physical Society), because their stance on climate change was too sceptical. I know, you need to try really hard to do this, but just do you best to imagine that such a scientific body exists. Now, what kind of reaction would we expect to see in the mainstream media? Now this is something far easier to imagine. The BBC, for example, would elevate this to headline news. There would be quotes from other warmist scientists, our resignee would be feted as standing up for scientific truth and there would be attacks on sceptics as being neanderthal flat-earthers.

Now lets stop imaginging and turn our attention to the case of Dr. Ivar Giaever, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1973. Dr Giaever has resigned as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (full story here). In his resignation letter he states:

In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this 'warming' period.

And the response of the BBC et al? Zero, nil, zilch. Instead we are treated to routine denounciations of sceptics as being anti-science...

Update:
Compare and contrast this to the coverage of Wolfgang Wagner's resignation as editor in chief of the journal Remote Sensing...

Global Warming Education

2011-09-15T11:11:00.001+01:00

Offspring #3 (aged 12), arrived home from school yesterday to tell us that during that day's Citizenship lesson (and yes, how we managed without that when we were at school I don't know), the teacher had been waxing lyrical about global warming. In particular the teacher had talked about those who deny the reality of what they can see with their own eyes - higher temperatures, melting ice caps etc. These deniers, the teacher said, were denying because they didn't want to change their own selfish ways of life.

Forget the fact that the teacher is an English teacher, with no apparent scientific understanding of the issue. Forget the blatant propaganda for what is at best a hypothesis - and an increasingly ropey one at that. What is interesting is the response of the kids. Nobody, not even our offspring, dared venture a contrary view.

Why not, we asked? Because nobody wanted to be seen as different. At age 12 peer pressure and the need for conformity are very powerful forces. And, in a boy's comprehensive at the rougher end of the borough, standing up to argue that AGW is an unproven hypothesis that is not accepted by every scientist in the world is a tough call. In the past our offspring have tried various tactics, including appeals to authority ('both my parents have PhDs and they don't believe in global warming, sir'), outright denial or pointing to contrary evidence ('but temperatures aren't going up, miss'). All to no avail. The objections are ignored for the most part, and most of the kids either don't care or think our children are weird.

So far offspring #3 has not been subjected to Al Gore's propaganda video, our other children were each subjected to the film, in one case on three separate occassions. But the film continues by other means, it's there in the hymn sheet in Citizenship classes, all that was missing were the visuals.

We suggested going to the school to discuss the issue with the teacher. Nope, not acceptable to sprog, who was afraid it would draw too much attention. What about writing a letter to the school? Nope. In the end we are left with the only acceptable course of action, which is to mention it in passing during the next parents evening.

Notice how fear of drawing attention, of outward non-conformity, helps the AGW cause here. The subject pervades education and makes an appearance at all levels of education - from primary through to university. At school it features in Science, English, Citizenship/PSHE and Religious Education. By the time kids leave school they will have endured years and years of it, with no outward displays of dispute. When our children have told their friends that they don't believe in it (or have doubts, or that their parents don't believe in it), they are met with incredulity. How can it be possible to disagree with such a self-evident truth?

Offspring #1 is now a primary school teacher. She endured the same educational system and learned early on that it's just simpler not to express doubts. During her degree she even had to sit a module on 'Environmental Psychology', which was ultimately about pathologising dissent. The underlying truth of AGW being accepted and that therefore anyone expressing doubt must be defective in some way. Topics included how best to convince people of the AGW gospel, particularly in regards to educating children. And now, as a teacher in a state primary school with an intake that is barely socialised, she is pressured to teach children who are often illiterate and innumerate the truth about the horrors of CO2.

Despite the fact that the evidence continues to diverge from the theory, the AGW hyopthesis is so firmly entrenched in education that nothing short of an ice age will dislodge it.

This is profoundly depressing, of course, but then I guess this must be a symptom of my defective psychology at work...

50% Tax Rate - Political Panto

2011-09-13T09:48:00.000+01:00

The issue of cutting (or not) the 50% tax rate is the latest episode in the political panto that passes for discourse in this country. We are led to believe that this is an ideological issue that pits 'heartless Tories' on one side, and their 'heartful LibDems' on the other, urged on, of course, by the Labour Party looking on from the side-lines. In reality it's another non-issue that obscures the reality of an entrenched consensus that likes to offer us the illusion of choice. There's more choice in Coke vs Pepsi than there is in our political class.

Rather than being an ideological issue, it ought to be one of empirical economics. The evidence shows that cutting taxes works - it increases the overall tax take. We need to do more than just cut the 50% rate, we need to cut rates across the board and to take low-income families out of the tax system completely. But that's not going to happen because that requires a decrease in the size of the state - and for all their fine words, none of our politicians believe that is a good thing. Instead we have the political theatre of arguing about the 50% rate in isolation.

You'll notice that the issue is never placed into a broader context that looks at how the public purse is pilfered by large corporates and large landowners in the guise of fighting climate change. There is no linkage to the reverse flow of money from our taxes into the pockets of those building subsidy farms across the country. Why should there be? All our politicians think this is a good thing - and it makes no difference whether this is for venal reasons or an unthinking belief in the goodness of the cause.

It would be interesting to compare the figures - the tax take from the 50% rate versus the cost money that goes into feed-in tariffs and other green taxes.

We see the same thing in the political spectacle of our so-called leaders arguing about the extent of EU powers. There's the same posturing, but that's all it is. The reality is that our politicians are firmly in the EU camp, and they share the same ideological conviction that trans-national bodies (EU, UN etc) are better than national ones.

You do not have to be a Situationist to realise that Guy Debord's central thesis that we do live in a 'society of the spectacle'. Politics is an illusion that is played for the benefit of the few and to the detriment of the many.

The Corporate Enemy

2011-09-12T10:52:00.000+01:00

Richard North at his EUReferendum blog has an interesting post entitled the 'Corporate Enemy'. The direct trigger for this is an article in the New York Times reporting a speech by Sarah Palin (the reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher in the minds of our liberal media here in the UK). Dr North states:

The New York Times has it that some Palin's ideas cross the political divide, but the real issue is that the nature of the political divide has changed. We no long have the left-right divisions, or the distinction between state and free market.

What has happened, as I argue in the third of my pieces, is that the line has moved from vertical to horizontal, the upper part occupied by the political classes and the corporates – with no distinction between private and public sectors.

That is in fact, where the battle lines are now drawn, something which Palin understands. If the sensitive little souls from UKIP got over their wounded feelings and used their brains, they too might realise that. The EU is only a tiny part of the overall problem. It is one corporate amongst many.

On top of the political classes, therefore, our enemies are the corporates. The battle is to be fought with them as a whole. And that is going to need a lot more than a referendum, or any of the other ideas we've seen coming from a eurosceptic camp that seems unable to comprehend that the battle has moved on.

These ideas chime with a familiar theme at this blog - the utter meaninglessness of left/right divisions. They no longer make any sense, the world has moved on considerably and yet too many people are still stuck in the past. They view everything through this simplistic prism. It means, for example, that old slogans about 'Tory cuts' can be dusted off and aired again, even though there is little to differentiate the three main political parties. They are all united by the same world view with only personality differences and presentational styles to choose between them.

It is also worth nothing North's observation that there is no distinction between state and free market. In this I think he is both right and wrong. He is clearly right when we look around us: can anyone tell me how our privatised railways differ from there nationalised predecessors? Ultimately we still have high prices, poor service and a massive drain on the public purse. The same for some of the utilities. And again if we look at the state of the banks we live in a world of privatised profits and socialised losses.

More than this we live in a world of crony capitalism. The higher echelons of big corporates - and it's not just the banks and financials - move effortlessly from the private sector to the public and back again. Big companies are increasingly becoming dependent on the public purse, particularly when it comes to public subsidies related to climate change and environmentalism. They are complicit in the scam and will campaign for increasing regulation or corporate welfare when it suits them (particularly when it cuts out competitors).

But this is not free market capitalism. From Adam Smith to Milton Freidman, free market advocates have said that capitalism needs to be defended from capitalists. It's easier for big companies to cosy up to government than it is to remain innovative or competitive. So North is right, big coporates are part of the problem, but they are because they are not looking for a free market .

But in addition to the state we also have a new player on the block, one that is also part of the problem. It's the big NGOs. WWF, Greenpeace, FoE, RSPCA and more. These are multi-billion pound organisations, with huge clout and enormous political influence. Like the corporates, the higher echelons of these NGOs move effortless in and out of government. They work with transnational organisations like the EU or the UN. They are increasingly funded by the state and in some cases, like the RSPCA, are gaining legal sanctions. But still the media treats them as though they are the small campaigning organisations they started out as.

And, it has to be said, at the nexus of this powerful mix of state, corporate and NGO - effectively our political class in toto - lies climate change. Here is the issue that unites them all, from the state looking to increasingly police it's population, to the companies looking for subsidy to the NGOs campaigning against a problem that might or might not happen.

North is right - the left/right distinction is extinct and we live in a world where we are ruled by a permanent class of powerful people looking down on the rest of still fighting the battles of thirty years ago.

Obama Is Insane

2011-09-09T09:14:00.002+01:00

There's a famous quote attributed to Albert Einstein:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

By this definition Barack Obama is insane. His stimulus packages have failed to deliver. The deficit is up. The economy is largely stalled. Unemployment refuses to budge. So what's his latest and greatest plan? More stimulus.

Why should it be different this time? What magic ingredient is there in this package that isn't in the others?

The deficit will continue to climb. Consumer confidence will continue to stagnate. Unemployment won't shift.

If he wants to boost demand then the measures are simple:

cut taxes all round
cut climate-related programs
quit foreign wars
stop supporting lame-duck banks and auto manufacturers
just leave the economy to right itself

Mind you, Obama doesn't have a monopoly on insanity. The entire political class in Europe is infected with the same madness - witness the increasingly desperate closing of eyes and hoping for the best around saving the Euro....

Attack of the Monbions

2011-08-19T10:28:00.000+01:00

What is it about Penn State University? Home to Michael Mann, Mr Hockey Stick, it is also home to a certain Shawn Domagal-Goldman, Astrobiologist and NASA affiliated scientist. Dr Domagal-Goldman has been speculating on how humans and extra-terrestrials might make contact in the future. In one scenario our alien neighbours are climate alarmists. They detect rising CO2 levels (presumably they have the technology to differentiate between anthropogenic emissions and natural sources such as out-gassing from the oceans), and, alarmed at our industrial civilisation they take action to wipe us out.

According to the Guardian, these scientists say:

"Green" aliens might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet. "These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets," the authors write.

What does this prove? It proves once and for all that people like Al Gore, Prince Charles and the like are not of this Earth. The Daily Mash has alrady jumped in with the collective terms for them: Monbions. Yep, that's what they are alright...

I love my model

2011-08-17T17:22:00.000+01:00

In this post I want to discuss an aspect of climate change research that is not often explicitly addressed, and that is the activities of the mathematical modellers who construct the complex models which are key components of the whole IPCC process. The outputs of these models are what lead to projections of looming disaster in climate change, biodiversity, population explosions, financial meltdown and all manner of doom-laden predictions that find their way to the front pages of the popular press (and to the front pages of Nature, Science et al). Given the importance of these models, it’s worth spending some time looking in some detail at the incentives of modelling.

Firstly, I need to point out that mathematical modelling is a key part of my day job. I write complex models in the finance and IT operations industry. I can’t go into detail because these models are considered to be major parts of my employer’s intellectual property, and details are shrouded by strict non-disclosure agreements. The content of the models I design, and which I and others code, give my employer a competitive advantage that it does not want to lose. However, I can say some fairly generic statements: our models are empirical models of operational activities in different domains. Some of these models are highly complex and contain tens of thousands of input variables, hundreds of thousands of data points, are multi-dimensional, contain tens of thousands of equations and produce tens of thousands of results (not as data cubes). We use specialised modelling tools and languages. This is anything but a couple of worksheets in Excel. These models have been developed and revised over a number of years and continue to evolve to take account of changes in the business landscape. As an aside, my PhD thesis was in using machine learning to generate data validation models, so aside from the day job I have also studied and researched the topic.

I am not claiming that the models I work on are of the same scale and complexity as the global circulation models (GCMs) that attempt to model the climate. However, my experience with models is closer to that than someone who deals with smaller datasets. The nature of our models depends on a high degree of numerical computation – equation driven – rather than simple summarising of data into cubes (e.g. for OLAP type analysis). Furthermore, as modellers we work with domain experts to design and test our models. In the same way that the GCMs are produced by programmers and scientists working together (sometimes the programmers are climate scientists, sometimes they are just scientific programmers working with climate scientists), so our models are produced by mixed teams, with some of the developers having domain expertise, but some just having generic modelling expertise.

Having established my credentials, hopefully, we can turn attention to the main point. How do we test our models? What are the psychological issues that arise from this validation? What does this tell us about climate change and other fields that depend on models to such a high degree?

Obviously we don’t have to publish peer reviewed journal articles, but the outputs of our models are used in business analysis and decision making. There’s money riding directly on our results. This means that our models are subject to very high levels of scrutiny. As part of the development we use test datasets during coding and testing. We are aware of the dangers of relying too much on these test datasets because there’s always the danger of ‘over-fitting’ – the model ends up being perfect for the test data because it’s tweaked and refined to give ideal outputs. So, at certain points we switch from test datasets to other datasets for validation. But this isn’t the level of scrutiny that really tells us how good the model is, for that we switch tack completely.

The best form of scrutiny is to hand over the model to panels of domain experts. At this point the model is no longer in the hands of those of us who have spent months working on them. It’s different teams of people, those who will use the models for real with real data to drive real analysis. They have no emotional attachment to the fruits of our labours. They have their own data sets they can use, they have their own theories about the given domain and often will have Excel workbooks with cut down models that they’ve used in the past. They can be ruthless. Although we may have asked for their advice or had detailed discussions with some of them during development, they will not have been involved in the design and construction of the model. This is actually a virtue, though it’s painful for us as developers.

They will subject our models to all kinds of tests and scenarios that we will not have thought of. For example, in a complex model it’s easy to propagate ‘magic’ numbers. These are hard coded factors that scale values, aid in dimensional analysis and make sure that different types of data play nice together. It’s always a temptation to put these in when coding. It just makes the code work and gives you the right sort of results. Outside scrutiny can help stamp this out. People will pore through results and disentangle layers of equations and if there’s a magic number sitting there then there had better be a valid reason for it.

As developers we do get defensive about our models, we become attached to them. Despite the mathematical nature of it, the models are implemented as code – computer programs in other words. And like software developers everywhere we can get caught up by the cleverness of our constructs, the elegance of our code or the sheer technical brilliance of our algorithms. But the people who will test our models for real, they don’t care about any of this. The results of our models drive commercial decisions, there are financial consequences of getting it wrong. This means they have incentives to be as objective as possible in testing our models. If the models are deficient in some way we have to fix them and send them back out for review again – nothing else will do.

By keeping the development and the testing separate like this we ensure that we incentives that help the process. It’s in our interest to pass the external tests imposed by independent groups of experts, and we can only do this by making sure we design properly in the first place and that we code to a high standard. It’s in the external testers interest to be objective because if they don’t then a deficient model output may impact a decision that has financial (or possibly legal) consequences.

Similarly, it’s not just the models that are developed and tested separately. Although we use test datasets during model build and developer testing, the real data comes from our users. Again, we have a separation of concerns. The input data is not collected by the same teams as those who build the models, and sometimes not by those who use the model outputs. We do not become attached to the datasets, though the people who have sweated to assemble, cleanse and validate the data will have an emotional attachment to it.

Flip attention now to the incestuous world of climate research. We have a situation where the same people are building the model, testing the model, using the model. We have the same teams collecting the data and building the models. There’s billions of dollars worth of decisions being made off the back of these model outputs, but no proper incentives to be brutally objective. With the best will in the world it’s hard to be objective about your own work, but that’s precisely what is needed in place. In a commercial environment we’ve evolved a system that separates concerns and ensures a better degree of peer review than that which exists in climate research were the same people do everything. We do it differently, they do it differently in clinical trials and they need to do it differently in climate science.

Criminal Stupidity

2011-08-17T09:31:00.000+01:00

No, not the rioting and looting, which was way beyond stupid. No, what is criminally stupid is the sentencing now being imposed on those convicted of rioting. Custodial sentences for people convicted of the most trivial of offences is ludicrous. It’s destroying lives, costs us all a fortune and doesn’t rebuild the communities that were trashed. How is this supposed to help? People are not stupid, they can compare and contrast with the derisory way politicians who filch from the public purse are treated. We’re not talking about having sympathy for those who committed acts of violence or arson, but putting people in prison for posting messages on Facebook or picking stuff up that had been looted is madness. Not only will many of these sentences be reduced on appeal (at yet more expense to the taxpayer), it will clog up the so-called justice system even more.By all means punish those convicted, but do it sensibly so that it can make a real difference, not make things worse.

The more time goes on the more I wonder about the intelligence of the political class. It’s not just suicidal policies on windfarms and climate change, it’s everywhere. The harder I try to see signs of intelligence at work, the less I find of it. Where are all the smart people in government? It’s a scary thought that the answer is that there are none.

With the riots fading from the front pages our state broadcaster has returned to its favourite topic: attacking its commercial rival News International. It’s a story that the BBC puts ahead of the slow motion collapse of the Euro, the riots, or failed environmental policies, wars on two fronts and many other more important issues. And, as the Autonomous Mind blog keeps reminding us (here and here, for example), it is also ignoring the hacking activities of its print arm the Guardian.

Thank you so much...

2011-08-13T21:02:00.000+01:00

For all those brain dead Anarchists who'll applaud any violent protest so long as it's not by racists or fascists, a big thank you. Next time you mask up for a black bloc protest, the police will beat the shit out of you. Next time you get out of hand the police will be able to call on water-cannon and baton rounds. Next time you use social media to co-ordinate an action, the police will block it or grab the records to trace the messages.

I know it's the rioters who've given the excuse to the police and our politicians who were looking to clamp down even harder on protest. The anti-terror line was getting weak recently, but now there's a new scare tactic that can be employed by statist politicians looking to take away the tiny space left to us to protest. What took hundreds of years of protest to achieve is being steadily chipped away - first in the guise of stopping Islamist terror, now in the guise of stamping out rioting.

And you, brain dead Anarchists, are there on the side-lines applauding the rioting scum who've destroyed their own neighbourhoods and who preferred to steal trainers or TVs to attacking political targets. Rioters who liked the idea of mugging people because they could rather than taking on the politicians who've screwed us all. And before you give me any of that moral equivalence bullshit - trashing and looting shops is not some anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, anti-anything protest. It's nicking stuff because you can and you don't give a shit for the livelihoods or the jobs of the people who own or work in those shops.

Crimes, Punishments and Riots

2011-08-11T09:32:00.000+01:00

I must admit to more than a sneaking sympathy for those who want to cut the benefits of anyone convicted of riot related crimes. It goes without saying that the majority of those who will be convicted who are currently in work won’t be in the future. There’s also probably a case for saying that the parents of anyone under the age of 13 ought to lose their benefits if their child is convicted. I know that 13 is an arbitrary cut-off, but once kids are into their teens it gets harder to keep a lid on what they get up – particularly when the entire welfare system seems to exist to give them free reign.

However, I’m also not convinced that prison is the right punishment for some of the less serious offences. It seems to me that we ought to be thinking of putting some of these kids to work – and it should be unpaid. . And this should be real work – a proper working day, no bus fares being paid, no social workers on hand to soothe the ruffled feathers of teenagers who actually have to do as they are told. It should be real work with some value, not ‘make-work’. How about repairing the damage they’ve committed. Or fixing up some of the estates that are most run down. For this to work you need to have penalties in place. For every day that you are late a day is added to the sentence. For every day that is missed you add two days. If offenders repeatedly don’t turn up then it’s automatically a custodial sentence.

As a corollary, if we’re cutting benefits from offenders, then what do we expect them to do instead? Something like this calls for some radical action. Firstly, waive minimum wage rules for them. If they have to work for less than minimum wage then that’s tough. If they stick to their jobs then they can move on to somewhere that will pay better. Secondly, we have to do something about the gang culture that is a cancer in large parts of our inner cities. I never thought I’d see the day when I’d be agreeing with Diane Abbot, but there you are. The police will have to come down really hard on the gangs. Loss of social housing, loss of benefits, custodial sentences – the full gamut of punitive options should be used. It’s gone too far already – now we need to take the opportunity to kill it off for good.

Nobody wins

2011-08-10T09:29:00.000+01:00

Our feral politicians do not have the moral weight to criticise rioting – they are venal, corrupt and deserve our contempt. The media, immersed in navel-gazing and reporting celebrity gossip, similarly carry no moral weight. Our education system has systematically undermined the authority of parents and others. It exists to boost the ‘self esteem’ and greivance culture that exists among sections of the poor (black and white). It too has lost the authority it might once have had.

The only people who can criticise are those of us who get up and work. Those of us who want to stand on our own two feet and not to have to depend on a welfare state that seeks to make us addicted to hand-outs. Those of us, black and white, who have raised kids to know what’s right and wrong, and to make sure our kids stay on the straight and narrow. We’re the only ones who can criticise, and we need to make sure our voices are heard above that of ‘hug a hoodie’ Dave and the rest of the parasites.

Nobody has done well out of this sorry mess. Least of all those people who's lives have been destroyed by their neighbours and the criminally stupid kids in their areas. The costs of doing business in places like Tottenham, Croydon and so on will go through the roof. Shops will be boarded up and left to rot. This effects everyone in those areas, including the morons who smashed, burned and looted. In time people will complain that their communities are not being served and no doubt some will blame racism or seek some other explanation that ignores the facts of what has just gone on.

Just about the only people who win from all of this are the BNP. Who will ignore the fact that a huge number of the victims of the riots are black, Asian, Kurdish and others. They will ignore too that in some places there were as many white faces under the scarves and hoodies as black.

An intelligent voice

2011-08-09T20:58:00.000+01:00

Internet Explorer, Intelligence and Climate Change

2011-08-04T10:26:00.001+01:00

The recent and much-publicised story about Internet Explorer users and intelligence casts an interesting light on the parlous state of journalism in much of the mass-media. On the odd chance that you missed it the story goes as follows: a psychometrics company releases a study that looks at browser usage and IQ tests, the results show that users of Internet Explorer score significantly lower on the online IQ tests than users of other browsers, the results are picked up and trumpeted right across the world and in all the big media outlets (both in print and online), finally the study is shown to be bogus and the whole thing turns out to be a hoax. Apart from the great Daily Mash headline ‘If you're using Internet Explorer, this is called a 'website'’, is there anything especially noteworthy to report?

I think there is, and it is directly relevant to much science reporting, particularly, but not exclusively, with respect to climate change.

The hoax was not especially elaborate. It appears that it consisted of little more than a purchased domain name, a plausible looking web site and some skills in crafting a press release. The media received the press release, look at the site and then went to print. Instant headlines across the world. Cracks began to show in the story, however, when careful readers and bloggers started digging deeper. It turned out that the domain name had only been recently purchased. The web site contained images stolen from another company. Nobody could be contacted directly at the fake company. This isn’t rocket science, it’s just basic fact checking and it fell to readers and bloggers to do the job that the journalists should have done in the first place.

Why was the story not subjected to critical scrutiny in the first place? Because the perpetrators of the hoax got two things right. First, they dressed up the original press release with lots of statistics, charts, breakdowns of results. In other words it looked scientific. It gave the appearance of being a piece of scientific research. Note that this was just appearance – as the BBC later reported:

Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University's Statistical Laboratory, said: "I believe these figures are implausibly low - and an insult to IE users."

Secondly, and just as importantly, the hoaxers made sure that they had results that were attention-grabbing. And they were attention grabbing because they fed in directly to existing and common narratives. In suggesting that IE users were less intelligent, the story appealed to those who dislike Microsoft and at the same time allowed non-IE users to look down on their less intelligent fellow internet users. With these two elements in place, the story was a gift and the results were global coverage and plenty of discussion (and sniggering at dumb IE users).

If this sounds like a text-book example of science by press release, then it is. The fact that the story is junk is neither here nor there. The truth is that the press is full of such stories day in and day out. A good percentage of environmental stories are built this way, as are climate change stories. There’s the attention grabbing heading (It’s worse than we thought!), the chance to divide people into groups (believers/deniers, Firefox users/IE users), and the splurge of results. How much scrutiny is applied to these stories? How much analysis performed before the stories go into press? We have repeatedly seen this pattern at work with climate change and it’s one of the issues that drives the public’s increasing distrust of climate science (cf the latest Rasmussen polls).

There is also another fact that makes this story relevant to the climate change debate: the role of bloggers and readers. The hoax was outed thanks to the activities of people who applied some common sense to the published stories and did the donkey-work of fact checking sources. This too is a familiar theme, because we see it most clearly in climate change. Blogs like Climate Audit, Watts Up With That and more are active forums where readers apply common-sense and fact-check stories and research results. The scrutiny that science journalists no longer seem wont to apply is being applied instead by members of the public who have the relevant skills and experience. It’s the ‘many eyes’ theory of open source applied to science and it throws up huge questions about peer review as well as the relationship between some climatologists and the press.

So, rather than just being cause for a quiet chuckle, this story has wider relevance. At the very least it ought to make people think next time they see a headline about the some looming environmental disaster caused by increased CO2.

Climate Change In Black and White

2011-08-02T20:25:00.000+01:00

Although this isn’t a new story, this Guardian piece on ‘conservative white males’ being more likely to be climate change sceptics is worth discussing in a bit more detail. The conjunction of race and climate is an interesting one, combining two of the key planks of current liberal/left orthodoxy.

Firstly, Judith Curry, who is decidedly not a climate change sceptic quite rightly points out what a pitiful piece of work this as in terms of research. There appears to be no clear definition of what a ‘denialist’ is, as she states:

Because of the mounting political and economic stakes of dealing with climate change, this global environmental problem has become extremely controversial in the US, and American efforts to deal with it have provoked a significant degree of denial—both of the reality of climate change and of its status as a problem deserving amelioration.

JC comment. The above is the first para in the paper. It is the only place where they come close to defining climate change denial. Do you know anyone that denies the reality of climate change? I sure don’t. Many people on their “denier” list probably also agree that the problem deserves some attention. It seems that “denier” really means people that don’t support emissions targets. This whole group of sociologists working in this area seems not to have given much thought to what actually characterizes “deniers.”

It would appear then, that in the absence of a clearly articulated definition, ‘denier’ is essentially a short-hand way of saying people who we disagree with. Note that there is not even an attempt to outline a set of criteria against which we might be able to assess degrees of agreement or disagreement. It’s all or nothing, completely binary thinking that does not allow room for manoeuvre (see the post on the Climate Quadrant on one possible approach to classifying a wider range of views on the subject). Indeed, one has to wonder whether Dr Curry herself wouldn’t qualify as a ‘denier’ as far as many people on the left are concerned – because despite her adherence to the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis she is critical of the idea of a climate change ‘consensus’, of the practices of some of her colleagues (particularly in the light of Climategate), and of the conduct of the IPCC.

Her conclusion is succinct:

JC conclusion: This article is notable primarily for coining the term “cool dudes” in the context of climate change “denial.” My main reaction to this is to question how social scientists, who actually study this, can be so clueless about the whole thing. Perhaps someone needs to develop a demographic and behavioural theory about social scientists who write about climate change “deniers.”

What is interesting to me, as a non-white sceptic (male and with a PhD in a scientific discipline), is what this piece of work says about the liberal left, over and above the content of the research itself. In the demonology of the left, ‘conservative white male’ is pretty high up there at the top of the tree. The only thing worse than a ‘conservative white male’, is a ‘white working class male’, who are deemed to be unredeemable lumpen elements – racist, sexist, homophobic and reactionary. I fully expect one day to hear that a follow up study has shown that white working class males are more likely to be fascist climate change denialists than any group on Earth.

There was a time of course, where what defined the left was class consciousness and a desire for economic and political justice for the working classes. Not anymore. The utter failure of the left has the working classes abandoned to the far Right, and concerns about social justice transferred to marginalised groups – ethnic and religious minorities, gays, the disabled etc. Class based analysis, which was based on economics, has largely given way to identity politics. At the same time the key narratives of the old left have been morphed into environmentalism. Where before capitalism was attacked because it exploited the working class, now it is attacked because it exploits the planet Earth. So, the left can keep on with the old rhetoric against the oil companies, against multinationals, against new technologies etc, but no longer because these are perceived to be enemies of the working classes, but because they damage the ecosystem.

This change in ideology is apparent too in the fetishisation of race. Where once the left defined anti-racism as attacking discrimination and the economic marginalisation of immigrant communities, now it has been transformed into an ideology of ‘multi-culturalism’. Instead of seeking to take race out of the equation, now the left seeks to put race into everything. Race has become what defines a person, not an incidental attribute (like height or weight). Cultures are static and separate and need to be preserved. Economic re-distribution, therefore, is no longer to be class-based, but is now race-based. Far from over-coming racial differences, multi-culturalism seeks to preserve and extend them.

Which leads us back to the ‘conservative white male’... In a multi-culturalist world, having you are defined by the colour of your skin, your sexuality, your gender etc. Vice or virtue are attached to you because of your identity. I, for example, would be afforded more virtue because of my background (immigrant working class), whereas a ‘white male’ would be at a disadvantage (thanks to ‘white skin privilege’). It’s nonsense of course, but pernicious and poisonous. And, frankly, racist. Ideas are assessed not on their merits, but on who holds them.

By identifying climate change scepticism with ‘conservative white males’, what the left are doing is signalling that this is a bad thing. There is no need for argument. There is no need to even discuss the science. In the swamp of identity politics, an idea can be discounted because of who adheres to it. In the same way, the suggestion that women and ethnic minorities are true believers, transfers their presumed virtues to belief in CO2-driven climate change.

Back in the real world, in my own discussions with friends, colleagues and family (a range of people that encompasses multiple social and racial groups), I see a different picture. Most people are neither wildly sceptical nor alarmist, I would guess mild scepticism is the most common reaction apart from one small group. I find that the one group most prone to a strong attachment to climate alarmism are Guardian-reading liberals, most of whom have little or no knowledge of science. It’s not connected to race or gender, and is most obviously correlated with a liberal education. Admittedly this is only anecdotal and in no way counts as a proper survey, but I have no reason to think it is not representative. If I were a sociologist I could of course extend this into a paper entitled ‘Climate Alarmists More Likely To Be Middle-class and Liberal’, and I’m sure that some journal somewhere would take the opportunity to state the obvious.

A final thought: I would guess that most of the authors of this report – and those most likely to seize upon its contents as proof that they are right – are likely to be white and male. In fact from my own experience in left-wing politics many years ago, a solid chunk of the multi-culturalist left are white and middle-class. Surely by their own logic this should cast doubt on the value of their ideas?

There are two things to say on this. First and most obvious, is that because they are part of the enlightened intellectual class they have a ‘get out of jail free’ card that exempts them from criticism from other white middle class activists. They are still vulnerable to criticism from darker skinned colleagues, or women, or gays etc. But by virtue of their more advanced consciousness they have escaped the confines of their identity. By the same token, because of my 'false consciousness' in rejecting climate alarmism, I have sided with the enemy and therefore lose my credibility.

Secondly, the definition of ‘conservative’ is an interesting one. These leftists are by any sensible definition of the word the most conservative people around. They are impervious to facts, argument and reasoning. They know the answers before we even know the questions. They also believe that it is their task to save the world, and that the state is the embodiment of good in all respects. To all intents and purposes, these are the true ‘conservative white males’, if that’s how you want to view the world.

No Shit Sherlock!

2011-07-26T20:30:00.001+01:00

What a surprise... Really, can there have been any doubt that Anders Breivik is insane? It's been apparent from the beginning that he is a classic spree killer. He is closer to Thomas Hamilton, Michael Ryan and Derrick Bird than Tim McVeigh.

Now, can people please stop taking his rationalisations on face value? Enough already on the Left with all that bollocks about the unpoliced internet, equating doubts about immigration with Nazism and the need to clamp down on civil liberties. Equally, let's stop with similar rubbish on the Right about the failures of multiculturalism, the success of political correctness and so on.

We need to debate all of those issues, but on their own terms, not in connection with a fantasist killing scores of young people as a consequence of his own psychological defects.

The Norwegian Massacre

2011-07-25T13:09:00.001+01:00

While the response of the Left to the Norwegian massacre is fairly predictable and opportunistic, there is also evidence that there are some on the Right willing to indulge in similar double standards. On the Left there is a palpable sense of relief that the spree killer was white and clearly identified with the Right. It enables them to trot out the old clichés about neo-Nazis and the internet, it tars with the same brush all those who have concerns about multi-culturalism (presumably not those of us who are dark-skinned though), and they can have a pop at Norway for being xenophobic enough not to want to be sucked into the EU. All so predictable and all so boring.

On the Right, however, we have a parallel story. While few outside of Stormfront or other Nazi forum will applaud Anders Behring Breivik for his actions, there are some who will use the attack as a means of getting back at what they see as a corrupt, liberal society. They will suggest that it is the closing down of discussion on multi-culturalism that is at fault here. They will reason that Breivik was robbed of legitimate avenues of protest, that his views have been marginalised and criminalised so that an explosion of violence was inevitable – if not from Breivik, from some other deranged individual.

The mistake being made by both sides is to give credence to Breivik’s rationalisations for his actions. There are no rationalisations. We need to look at the psychological defects in Breivik to understand what drove him to his spree. In ‘Lone Wolf’, one of the few books on the subject of spree killing, a number of commonalities emerge from the individuals profiled: delusions of grandeur, paranoia, difficult relationships with parents (especially the father), a degree of social isolation etc. So far there’s no evidence that Breivik deviates too far from this profile. Like other racist spree killers – Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, Bufford Furrow, Baruch Goldstein – Breivik had rationalisations for his actions, but to credit these with having wider significance is to miss the point that he was primed to go off.

For those on the Left there is always the feeling that we should take note of the rationalisation for Islamic terrorism – whether this is said to be because of Western actions in Islamic countries, Israel/Palestine or simply at a way of getting back at a decadent civilisation that marginalises Muslims. On the Right these rationalisations are rejected, but there is a willingness to listen to the purported reasoning behind Breivik’s actions – a feeling that his culture was under attack, marginalisation of Christianity, disgust with a decadent and sick society, mistrust of Western politicians. These are the same rationalisations, the same complaints and the same wallowing in a feeling of victimisation. It’s interesting to note that it is reported that Breivik referred to his actions as a ‘martyrdom operation’.

Breivik was following the same multi-culturalist script as Islamic radicals. He had the same psychological defects – an ability to murder at random, to view people as legitimate targets because of where they are, to want to die to preserve his culture or religion. This isn’t politics, this is abnormal psychology fed by a culture of victimisation and a focus on race/religion/culture as a holy trinity more important than anything else.

Is there a way of stopping this happening again? No.

Is there anything that we can do? Yes, carry on as normal.

What lessons do we learn? That an open society gives its enemies the means to attack it, but to clamp down on discussion gives credence to those who want to turn murderers into prophets and martyrs.

The Climate Quadrant

2011-07-21T20:20:00.000+01:00

It’s hard not to get angry reading yesterday’s BBC Trust report by Steven Jones. Delingpole does a nice job of laying into it, but there are plenty more bloggers out there covering similar ground. Having read the report it’s pretty poor stuff, and Jones comes across as lazy, arrogant and clearly not interested in attempting to be even handed. But what lies at the heart of his argument is not just another unscientific appeal to consensus, but also a complete lack of understanding that there are endless shades of opinion on the topic of climate change. In his world there are only two camps – the consensus (as represented by the IPCC and supported by the Royal Society) and the denialists (his word). Climate change is a complicated topic, is it really feasible that opinion could neatly fit into two such simplistic categories?

At heart Jones views climate science in the same way that some people view politics. There is an out-dated and unsophisticated view the imagines that political ideas, and those that adhere to them, can easily sit on a single axis of Left vs. Right. All ideologies can be dropped somewhere on this axis. So, simplistically, Hitler is on the extreme right, Stalin on the extreme Left, and everyone else sits somewhere in between. Of course this is redundant in a time when our politicians no longer have much in the way of ideology. But even so, assume that this Left vs Right dichotomy still exists. Where do you place Anarchists on this line? And judged purely on economic policies, surely the BNP are on the Left, having much in common with the authoritarian left (economic protectionism, state control etc).

In place of this Left vs Right axis, a more useful model is to switch to a two dimensional view of politics. There are now two axes. On the first is the economic model - on the Left we have communism, on the Right we have capitalism. On the second axis we have a social scale, with Authoritarian at one end and Libertarian at the other. We now have a model that has four quadrants, and a richer way of categorising political ideologies. Classical Anarchism, for example, sits firmly in the communist/libertarian quadrant, whereas free-market libertarianism is capitalist/libertarian. Stalin is communist/authoritarian, whereas Pinochet is capitalist/authoritarian. The political compass website has more detail, including an online test to see where you stand.

In terms of climate change, a two-dimensional model would be of some value as well. Here we have a horizontal scale based on the view of CO2 as a determinant of warming, and on the vertical scale we have degree of warming. In this model, therefore, the IPCC sits at the extreme end of the CO2/warming scale. But the model leaves room for those who believe that CO2 is important but will not lead to massive warming (because of low climate sensitivity, for example), and to those who believe that warming is underway due to other forcings (so low on CO2 but high on warming). There is room also for those who believe that there CO2 is relatively unimportant (because cosmic rays are more important, for example), and who believe we are in for a period of global cooling.

This model makes clear that there are many more points of view than consensus versus denialism, and in fact points to the extremism of so much climate alarmism.

Monckton, Pachauri and Hitler

2011-07-20T12:36:00.000+01:00

Can somebody help me here, please?

Not that long ago climate change sceptic Christopher Monckton compared Ross Garnaut, a leading climate change alarmist advising the Australian government, to a Nazi there was outrage. Monkcton was criticised not just by the warmist side, but by many people on the sceptical side of the fence (Anthony Watts and Andrew Bolt, for example). He apologised almost immediately, but the damage had been done, and it detracted from what he was actually saying. Some Australian academics even wanted to cancel Monckton's lectures in universities.

It's clear then, that Nazi references are verboten in climate change discussions.

So, can somebody point me to the shock horror from the climate change alarmist side when IPCC Rajendra Pachauri compared Bjorn Lomborg to Hitler? Pachauri was quoted as saying:

"What is the difference between Lomborg's view of humanity and Hitler's? If you were to accept Lomborg's way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing."

Mockton doesn't hold an official position, he's not funded by our taxes. Pachauri is the head of the IPCC, and ultimately funded by tax payers the world over. Mockton compared Garnaut to a Nazi, Pachauri went one better and compared Lomborg (who isn't even a climate change sceptic) to the top Nazi, Hitler himself.

So, please help me. Where is Pachauri's apology? And where are the criticisms directed from his own side?

I want my money back

2011-07-18T11:22:00.000+01:00

I want my money back. All of it. I was promised global warming. It was guaranteed so long as CO2 continued to rise. I was going to get hot summers and warmer winters. Instead it’s mid-July and it’s cold, grey and miserable. I want the warming I was promised. It was promised to me by Al Gore, James Hansen, the BBC, the UK Met Office, Rajendra Pachauri and the IPCC, Sir David King, Sir Paul Beddington, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, the BBC, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Times, the Royal Society, the BBC, Gavin Schmidt, Brian Cox, Leonardo diCaprio and most of Hollywood and the music industry, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Geoffrey Lean, George Monbiot, Michael Mann, Jonathan Porritt, Prince Charles, the BBC, Oxfam, Phil Jones, the Hadley Centre, the CRU, Chris Huhne and the BBC. And that’s just off the top of my head.

So where is it? Where’s this warming I’ve been looking forward to? I just checked the latest figures on the Central England Temperature record. The average temperature for June 2011 was 13.8 C. The 353-year average June temperature is 14.3 C. The 30-year average (1970-1999) June temperature is 14.1 C, the 30-year average for 1980-2009 is higher still at 14.4 C. And before you carp, I know that this is a local temperature for central England and not a global figure. And I know that weather is not climate. But local temperatures have the advantage of being more reality-based than the fictional global temperatures that warmists like.

So, having ranted because of the cold, it seems to me that a refund is in order. Either that or we need to increase the amount of coal we burn to get some of that warmth that we’ve been waiting for.

Chris Huhne and Fuel Poverty

2011-07-15T12:03:00.000+01:00

Picture this: You implement policies that are deliberately designed to make energy usage expensive. This you justify on the grounds that it will reduce carbon emmissions. Of course you implement the policy by levying various taxes and additional charges on the power companies and big users of energy (such as the NHS, for example). The energy companies pass the charges on to the consumer, as expected. What's more the systems are so complex that it's not easily possible for the consumer to see how much of the increased cost is down to 'green' policies and how much is down to increased wholesale costs or a desire to increase margins.

In any case, the consumer just gets to see increased power costs. What do you, as the author of these policies do? You pin the blame on the energy companies and encourage users to switch to different providers. Which providers? You know for a fact that all providers will be increasing their charges. But it makes you look good, and you can even convince yourself that you're standing up for the little guy.

When the number of families in fuel power rises, how do you react? With outrage of course. You promise to tackle this injustice, and, as befits a man of principle, you will look at rebates, or tax breaks or some such policy. In other words you will take some of the money that you have grabbed and give a little of it back. And you'll do this by increasing dependence on the state, by increasing the complexity of the tax and benefits system and ultimately by enlarging the state. What you will not do is directly reduce the green levies or make changes to any of your energy policies.

And, just as importantly, you will continue with the narative that the world needs saving from CO2, that the real culprits are the energy companies and that the only defender of the poor is the state.

It's a nice picture, it really is. Chris Huhne really is pissing on our shoes and telling us it's raining.

Aussie climate tax and science journalism

2011-07-14T12:20:00.001+01:00

Science journalist Fred Pearce has a piece in the New Scientist on Australia's new carbon tax. The gist of the article is that the tax is so full of loop-holes and rebates and exclusions that it is unlikely to make a dent in what he describes as 'largest per-capita emitter of greenhouse gases in the developed world'. It's the usual New Scientist story - nasty industrialists subverting a policy that is designed to save the planet. One wouldn't expect any different from the New Scientist, which seems to prefer acting as a cheerleader for Greenpeace (and yes, there's a quote from Greenpeace in his article) than in digging any deeper or disturbing the status quo.

What is conspciuously absent from Pearce's careful analysis of Australia's CO2 budget, is what effect any of this is likely to have on global temperatures. The 'per capita' figure is a red herring, Australia's population is relatively small and globally its CO2 emissions come in at 1.32%, putting it 16th in the world rankings (as reported on wikipedia).

Even if, (and it's a huge IF), we accept that CO2 emmissions cause warming, the effect of Australia reducing its emmissions is not going to make a blind bit of difference. Or at least not that you'd be able to notice with the sort of thermometer that you or I can use. So, whether there are loopholes and get out clauses, what we have is a massive new tax, an army of bureaucrats to administer it, all kinds of pain and aggravation and for what? To ultimately make no real difference to a projected (not predicted) temperature change at some point in the distant future.

Forget the science, the question that needs to be asked by Pearce and others in the media, is simple. What are the benefits of this policy relative to the costs? Is the massive cost of making a projected difference of fractions of a degree in the future worth it? Arguing over whether these expensive and intrusive measures will reduce CO2 emmissions by x% or not is almost immaterial.

A public scandal

2011-07-14T11:53:00.001+01:00

I have avoided any comment on the whole News International phone hacking scandal. It's sickening. Really, really, really sickening. The orgy of sanctimonious, hypocritical cant on display at Westminster yesterday was hard to stomach. All that bollocks from all sides on how it was parliament responding to the public was especially vomit-inducing. This is the same parliament that has listened to the public on all the important issues, like going to war, handing power to the EU, bailing out the failed Euro, passing the climate change act...

Thanks to intensive therapy, the Progressive Contrarian is able to mix with members of the public (yes, even without a minder these days), and the overwhelming feeling that is expressed by most people is contempt. Contempt for Murdoch and his minions, but even more there's a contempt for our political classes who are jumping at the chance to occupy what they think is the moral high ground. It's a times like these that one feels that removing our politicians from the gene pool would be a gift to humanity.

Science journalism and climate change

2011-07-12T21:17:00.001+01:00

In a previous post I posed the question of why our so-called leaders have fallen hook, line and sinker for man-made global warming – which is, at best, a hypothesis which is increasingly being demolished by newer results and empirical facts. It certainly does not look like the science is settled. Nor do the alarmist predictions that were being made a decade ago seem to be coming true. Despite all of this, and in spite of the increasing scepticism of the public, there seems to be no signs that our political leaders harbour any doubts. I would joke about the lights being on but nobody being home, but the lights in politicians heads are powered by wind – there are only occasional flickers of intermittent light at best.

But it’s not just the politicians at fault here. Arguably the mania for global warming would not be half as strong had there not been a near unanimous chorus of approval from the mass media. From repeating the mantra about scientific consensus, to labelling sceptics as oil-industry funded ‘deniers’ to trumpeting the most absurd alarmist claims of impending disaster – the media are complicit in furthering the green agenda and propagandising for global warming alarmism. The question we have to ask then, is what are the forces at work here? Why are there so few sceptic voices heard in public?

In a recent post at the Global Warming Policy Foundation, David Whitehouse points out that:

Many science reporters haven’t been scientists and haven’t been general reporters. Like the rise of the career politician that goes straight from University to politics it is a worrying trend.

This is a key point. Anyone who has undertaken scientific research will have an understanding of uncertainty, the contingency of results, the limitations of mathematical modelling, the importance of the choice of statistical model and so on. These aren’t abstract ideas, for someone who has performed research these are part of the very real substance of the scientific method. You don’t have to be a Nobel grade physicist, anyone who undertakes to do a science-based PhD will have to grapple with these to some extent. But for those who are studying science from the outside, these are likely to be just abstract ideas, and not very interesting ideas at that. Sure, they may learn about the scientific method, but it will be in terms of grand ideas and not the day to day slog of getting results and comparing them with them to predictions, or the painful process of having to let go of a favourite idea because it just doesn’t hold.

Besides, much scientific work is boring slog. Where’s the fun in that? For someone looking at science from the outside, what’s interesting isn’t the slog, it’s the big narrative. Even investigations of some minor area of science, some unexciting little niche, fits into a grand narrative. It’s not the painful process of crafting your algorithm or recording the results of your experiment, it’s the results that are interesting and which is a central part of the story.

So, for our trainee science journalist, science is about results, preferably science that has a good story to tell (and which makes for good copy). In fact, the more exciting the story, the more interesting to the reader. Put away the uncertainty, put away all the hedges against confounding factors, ignore the error bars and the gaps in your model. Just tell a good story. It doesn’t have to be climate change or an environmental story – this applies as much to the search for the Higgs boson as it does to the latest viral scare story. This need for narrative is at work at another level too, and one that is just as important to the climate change story.

How these different stories are framed is the next thing we need to look at. We all see the world through our own personal ideological filters, whether we admit this or not. To some this is self evident, but there are plenty of people who operate as if they are free of these prejudices. For them, the world is as they see it, and anyone who dares to suggest otherwise is wrong or misguided. This is the realm of Gramscian cultural hegemony. It is the theory that a society, including a complex and diverse society such as ours, can be dominated by one world-view, which is perceived to be the cultural norm – it’s there but it’s all but invisible. In our society this default world view is the liberal world view as exemplified by the Guardian or the BBC. This default view is firmly entrenched throughout society, even in those institutions which are nominally apolitical or viewed as being on ‘the Right’. It’s there in the leadership of the Tory party, as well as in the LibDems and Labour. It’s there in the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and the Times, as well as the Guardian and the Observer. And, most firmly of all, this world view is deeply embedded in education – from nurseries to primary schools and right on throughout academia.

From kindergarten to university, the education system imbues a set of liberal values overtly and covertly. Almost from the day that children start at school it will be drummed into them that the planet is being destroyed, species wiped out, global warming is occurring and so on. Children are taught that the profit motive is bad, that ‘public service’ is inherently good, that the state is there to protect the weak etc. Anyone who has children at school can attest to this.

When it comes to training our science journalists, these views are familiar and taken as unremarkable. It is understood that these are normal, and that anyone who disputes them is some kind of fascist. How does this view of the world frame the grand narrative of climate change?

Why, climate change fits hand in glove with this view of the world.

The story of climate change is simple, according to this world view. The planet is being destroyed because of human greed. The drive for profit is what encourages economic development and industrialisation. Industrialisation depends crucially on fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas (which every school kid knows from the age of five), and if you’re a science journalist you can probably expound a bit on the process of warming. Furthermore, there is a consensus view amongst scientists that this is happening. The only people who can possibly disagree with this are either in the pay of the oil companies, or else they are deluded ideologues who are psychologically incapable of seeing that they may have to change their selfish ways.

It’s a simple connect the dots story, it’s easy to tell, there is no room for doubt or uncertainty. What is more, the fact that there are sceptics means that there is an identified opposition. The science journalist therefore can retain the illusion that he or she is anti-establishment, they can enjoy the pleasure of being attacked (there’s nothing like that feeling of self-righteousness for making you feel good about yourself).

Forget the fact that the oil companies are fully bought in to the global warming theme – crony capitalism and corporate welfare are powerful forces. Forget the fact that the establishment is completely on board. Forget the fact that bodies such as Greenpeace, WWF, Friends of the Earth etc are morphing into quasi-state bodies, funded to a great extent by national governments and trans-national bodies like the EU.

Our science journalists, therefore, are completely in line with the establishment view of the world. And, of course, the part they play is a positive feedback on the belief system. They are convinced and therefore they take on a campaigning role to convince others. Others read the story and it gathers momentum and driving funds and prestige to those scientists who are most active and vocal. These scientists feedback to the politicians and to the journalists. It’s a perfect circle of illusion and drives out doubt, uncertainty and the willingness to test assumptions.

Again, there’s no big conspiracy here. There is no central committee that drives the global warming hypothesis forward (not even the IPCC). There is no single body that tells our politicians to destroy our economies. Why would you need such a thing? Surely the warming hypothesis is just common sense?

Why Do They Believe?

2011-07-04T18:59:00.000+01:00

I must admit that this is a topic that I continually struggle with. I’m sure I’m not the only one, and that in years to come diligent young historians will be earning their PhDs off the same question: how is that the ruling elites in the West bought in so totally into the whole anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory. And, despite the increasing scepticism of electorates and the growing number of scientists willing to admit to doubts as the evidence grows ever weaker, our politicians shown no signs of coming to their senses. If anything the mania seems to be getting worse as they bet everything on windfarms, solar energy and cutting CO2 emissions.

So why is it? Now there are some who survey the scene and conclude that it only makes sense in the context of some grand conspiracy. You know the score. Evil one worlders out to impose a de facto UN government under cover of saving the planet. They’ll even point the finger at specific individuals, like Maurice Strong, as being behind this conspiracy. But, I’m afraid that being a sceptic means remaining sceptical about conspiracies too. Sure, the IPCC, the major scientific societies, huge chunks of academia, almost the entire mass media and so on are completely over-run by warmista comrades, but that doesn’t make for a conspiracy. Instead I see networks of mutual aid and support, all buying in because that’s where the money and the prestige lie.

Absenting a conspiracy, is there another explanation?

Taking the UK as my example, what can we see? A political class that is without apparent ideology, insular and frequently venal. We have a class of politicians who have only ever known politics. They are as unfamiliar with industry and the workplace as the aristocracy was a couple of hundred years ago. For the most part they have moved from student politics to Westminster lackeys and hence into parliament. If they have worked it’s been in advertising or law, and even then it’s often not been for long. This is as true for Labour as it is for the Tories or the LibDems. In terms of beliefs they don’t really have any. Sure, there is a set of ‘aspirations’ that they all sign up to, but they don’t have an ideology as such. They might view themselves as ‘pro-business’ (which is decidedly not the same as being pro-market), or they might see themselves as being for ‘social justice’ (as if anyone is going to say they are for social injustice). In other words they adhere to a set of hazy intuitions that are uninformed by any in-depth understanding of politics, history or economics. Few of them appear to be numerate or have anything but a hazy understanding of science or the scientific method. How these people align themselves to any one of the main political parties seems to be accounted for by personal connections or careerist job prospects more than anything else.

Having worked themselves into a safe seat they finally make it into parliament only to discover that there’s not very much that they have direct control of. Most business is dealt with by the colleagues of the EU. There’s not much that they can usefully do aside from jockey for position and see what it is they can do for themselves. This doesn’t necessarily have to be financially self-serving, there are enough MPs out there who want to hog the limelight as much as they want the money – especially if they’re well-off already. Now, having worked for years to get to parliament, having hustled and worked hard to say the right things to the right people, it must be pretty dispiriting to discover you don’t even have the power to tell councils when to empty the bins, or who we can and can’t let into the country and so on. Bummer. How can you feel good about yourself in those situations? And let’s face it, we all need to feel good about what we do. Even self-serving politicians on the take will fool themselves that what they are doing is for the good of the people.

But wait. What about saving the planet? This is something that we can all do. It says so in these reports from the EU and the IPCC. Look, it’s there in simple and easy to understand sentences. There are no difficult concepts to grapple with. More CO2 causes a warmer blanket around the Earth. This causes warming and will cause major disasters that will destroy the world as we know it. Helpfully, there are some scientists on hand that can string together a story that feeds into your existing narratives – horrible oil companies feeding our obsession with consumption and so on. It can’t go on forever, this orgy of over-consumption, can it? What it needs is some brave politicians willing to take a stand. It doesn’t matter what party you belong to, it doesn’t matter how much you understand of the science, it really doesn’t. And, guess what? The mass media will love you for it. Those lovely people in WWF and Greenpeace and all the other cuddly greens will love you for it. The BBC will fawn. So too will the party whips and those people in the EU and the UN.

It’s a no-brainer. And of course the more money that gets thrown at it, the more convincing the science will appear. You can expect flack from the deniers, but that’s all to the good. It bolsters that feeling of standing up and being counted. And what’s wrong with taking money from industry and from working people to pay for all of this? You don’t understand the first thing about economics anyway. Windfarms are good. They don’t consume tons of oil and they generate some electricity. What’s not to like. And those big oil companies, they don’t seem that stressed about it anyway, they’re all on-board the green gravy train as well.

There’s no conspiracy in all this. Money changes hands. Careers are enhanced. Agendas furthered. And our brave MPs (and journalists and scientists and windfarm operators and...) can all feel good about themselves. They are insulated from the direct consequences of their actions, which won’t be felt completely for a while yet. They are convinced they are acting from the best of motives and they remain blissfully unaware of how science works, how economies work and how we have to work to pay for their largesse. And the colleagues in the EU? They up the ante, making more moves because that’s what gets them the most buy-in from national politicians. Even here it’s not conspiracy, it’s organisations following the prime directive: ensure the survival of the organisation.

And what works in the UK could well apply right across the EU. In the US we have other factors at play, but a similar outcome – out of touch politicians convinced they need to save the world because publicly funded scientists, (and bodies like the IPCC and the science academies), tell them so.

Abnormal Service...

2011-06-29T13:16:00.001+01:00

...will be renewed sometime soon.

12 Facts about Global Climate Change That You Won’t Read in the Popular Press

2008-08-19T13:07:00.000+01:00

A nice and succinct post from Joseph D’Aleo on CO2 and climate change... Well worth a read.

Plain Stupid Plane Stupid

2008-07-23T11:18:00.001+01:00

Who says that the days of radical political action are over? Dan Glass, a member of Plane Stupid, really gets radical when he glues himself to Gordon Brown's jacket. Wow! Down at indymedia there are virtual pats on the back all round... That's really radical, Dan. There you are in Downing Street to pick up an award for 'your protesting work' when you whip out the super glue and there you are, stuck to Gordon's pin stripe.

Yep, you read that right. Pick up an award. That's how radical and anti-establishment environmental protest is these days. How these people can imagine that they are fighting the establishment is beyond me. They are the establishment, lined up behind New Labour, New Tories, Lib Dems and the rest.

Global Warming Swindle - Ofcom ruling

2008-07-21T16:03:00.002+01:00

Nice to see that the media's warmist frenzy is in full flow following the Ofcom ruling on 'The Great Global Warming Swindle'. The Guardian even rolled out the former chair of the IPCC to comment that Ofcom hadn't gone far enough. Did he, or the rest of the media warmists, make similar comments when Al Gore's propagandist film was found guilty of more serious charges in court? No, I think not. Where Gore's film contains factual inaccuracies and lies, Swindle did no more than mislead some of the interviewees.

This is a huge difference, of course. Particularly when Al Gore's film gets shown to school kids up and down the country, day in and day out. My own kids report that the Gore film was not prefixed with the required warning about it being propaganda. Can you imagine the out-cry should Swindle get similar screenings in schools?

According to warmists, Swindle must count as one of the most effective pieces of propaganda ever, seeing as how it has been blamed for the skepticism of the majority of Britons when it comes to global warming. I suppose that's easier for warmists to accept than the alternative, which is that no amount of preaching and moralising can hide the paucity of evidence and lack of theory when it comes to climate change.

Brown Goes Green

2008-07-07T11:32:00.001+01:00

Gordon Brown wrested the mantle of global leader from the rest of the G8 by urging people to eat their greens. Brown, with one eye on domestic concerns and the success of David 'Green Blue' Cameron, suggested that world problems could be tackled head on by eating a plate of spinach or spring greens. 'It's the only way,' he told the world's press.

Prime Minister Brown's outburst stunned world leaders. Nicolas Sarkozy has privately admitted that he likes tucking into curly kale, but feels compelled to deny this in case it is seen as too neo-liberal by the French public. George Bush, meanwhile, agreed that he shares his father's well-known dislike of broccoli, but that he does like to have some lettuce with his burgers.

In the UK the Tory party has been thrown into disarray. With rising inflation, a collapsing housing market and an epidemic of street crime they had taken their eye of the ball. David Cameron is reported to be furious with newspaper reports that he is a pak choi man. 'Yes,' he admitted, 'I may have had some pak choi as a student, but I didn't inhale.'

Sarkozy vs. Mandelson

2008-07-02T10:09:00.002+01:00

The full text of French President Nicolas Sarkozy's comments on the EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson:

'It is an outrage zat Europe is represented by zis man. 'Ee is not a real man. No, Monsieur, Mandelson is not married to a beautiful and sophisticated ex-model like I am. 'Ee is a bandit de fess, no? Such a man 'as no feeling for the realite of Europe. 'Ee does not understand ze soul of Europe. For us Europe 'ees about protection of our farmers, our fisherman and our lorry drivers. For us Europe is about defending our way of life: ze annual burning of British tucks loaded wiz your rotten lamb, selling you our undrinkable wine and keeping ze good stuff for ourselves and most of all blockading our ports to screw your 'olidays. All of zis, Mandelson ignores. When I am President of Europe, all zis will change...'

Labour Deeply Disappointed With Henley Result

2008-06-30T13:38:00.000+01:00

Jock McJock, a spokesperson for the Labour Party, has admitted that the Party and the Government are deeply disappointed by the result of the Henley by-election. 'We are just gutted to be in fifth place. Behind the Greens and the BNP,' he said. 'After all that work we still didn't come in last. What more do we have to do?'

His comments were echoed by Mildred Dimkins-Simkins, an advisor to Gordon Brown. 'We've got good money riding on this at Ladbrokes,' she confessed. 'If we can come last then we've got a big payoff coming.'

Arnold Reichstag of the BNP outlined what he believed the Labour strategy was. 'They're doing their best to make themselves unelectable. It seems to be the aim to make even us more electable, and it's working. Just take a look at the London elections where they did everything they could to get one or two members into the Assembly. Brilliant.'

An unnamed source at Labour Headquarters has suggested that future policy announcements will include a plan to kill off first-born children, price cars off the road and reduce the number of successful mortgage applications to one a year.

Dr James Hansen Speaks Out

2008-06-25T15:26:00.001+01:00

NASA's Dr James Hansen, the man who made headlines world wide 20 years ago when he brought the subject of man-made global warming to public notice, has again hit out against those who deny the reality of the problem. 'What is it with these people?' he demanded. 'Can't they see that there's a real problem here? The world is warming so fast that soon we'll all be dead. Twenty years ago I said we had 20 years left, well, that's still true. Unless my funding is increased drastically I won't be able to carry on warning the world of danger.'

The ever-controversial Dr Hansen hit out at his critics. 'They've tried to censor me before, and they're trying to do it now,' he announced to the mass of journalists at his 23rd press conference of the day. 'This message has to get through,' he affirmed.

Dr Hansen had a number of radical ideas for raising the profile of the issue still further. Firstly he suggested that all climate change deniers be forced to wear a yellow star for easy identification. Secondly climate change deniers should be sterilised so that they could not breed. Possibly, he suggested, deniers could be used as an energy source - though he did worry about how much CO2 they would emit. Thirdly he suggested that young children should be forced to watch as their pets are boiled alive to illustrate what will happen to the world should his funding not grow exponentially during the next few years.

Finally Dr Hansen described attempts to undermine his work as criminally motivated. 'My work has stood scrutiny. No matter how many times I look at it I think it's fine. Anyone who disagrees is a fool or a liar motivated by nothing but personal greed and ambition.'

British University Announces Degree In Walking And Chewing Gum

2008-06-23T14:15:00.001+01:00

A top British academic institution, the University of Trumpton, has announced the world's first honours degree in Walking and Chewing Gum. Dr Irma Dillo, Pro Vice Chancellor and a key advisor to the government, hailed the new course. 'Nowhere else in the world can students study walking and chewing gum to such a high level,' she announced. 'Once again we are at the forefront of academic innovation and creativity.'

The course follows a recent government initiative that aims to have 50% of school leavers able to walk and chew gum at the same time, even if only at the most basic level. Leading educationalists have attacked the plan as being too ambitious. Dr Crispin Crispin-Woods voiced widespread fears that the new course would prove too taxing for many school leavers. 'This is typical of an education system that is insufficiently diverse,' he said. 'Walking, yes, chewing gum, yes. But both at the same time? And where are the NHS resources to tackle the inevitable rise in accidents and injuries as young people attempt to chew gun while taking their first few steps? It's criminal.'

Opposition spokesman gave the new course a cautious welcome. 'Of course we're in favour of our children leaving university with a solid degree in Walking and Chewing Gum,' Tim Etonian told the Times Educational Supplement, 'but we think that going for a 50% target is the wrong way to go. Not everyone needs to walk and chew gum at the same time.'

The government, however, insists that the ability to talk and chew gum is essential if Britain is to remain a competitive economic power. A spokesperson from the Department of Education and Science was quoted as saying 'Industry is starved of people with skills in this area.'

Dr Irma Dillo outlined some of the key areas of study: gum and climate change, walking and obesity, diversity and different flavours of gum. 'The climate change agenda is in an implicit part of the course,' she stated.

The new course was announced on the same day that Trumpton University announced the closure of its Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics degrees.

10p Tax Band

2008-05-14T23:01:00.002+01:00

Once more the Progressive Contrarian unearths the minutes of a recent meeting at 10 Downing St:

PM: 'Ah, Darling, there you are.'

Chancellor: 'Yes, PM. I am.'

PM: 'What's that, laddie?'

Chancellor: 'I am, PM. You said, "there you are", and I agreed and said "yes, PM, I am."'

PM: 'Enough of your wittering, Darling. We have a problem.'

Chancellor: 'Which one, PM?'

PM: 'What are you saying, Darling?'

Chancellor; 'Nothing, sir. A problem you said.'

PM: 'It's your budget. You've mishandled things, haven't you, laddie?'

Chancellor: 'But you said it was fine, I'd deciphered all the scribbles on the back of your envelope and...'

PM: 'Who delivered the budget, Darling?'

Chancellor: 'I did, PM. Sorry.'

PM: 'In cutting the 10p tax band you've made life very difficult for the most vulnerable members of society.'

Chancellor: 'The Parliamentary Labour Party?'

PM: 'Precisely. And rewarded those who deserve it the least.'

Chancellor: 'The Opposition?'

PM: 'Correct. Now, what what do you propose to do about it, laddie?'

Chancellor: 'Exactly what you tell, me, PM.'

PM: 'Good boy.'

Chancellor: 'But I told people I couldn't re-write the budget...'

PM: 'But you're not, are you?'

Chancellor: 'Technically, I suppose not. How can I be re-writing something I didn't write in the first place?'

PM: 'Well, laddie, that's one way of putting it...'

Chancellor: 'But the tax rebate is going to cost us billions, PM. Isn't that a lot of money to pay for the Crewe and Nantwich by-election? That's an awful lot of money for one MP.'

PM: 'Don't be silly, boy. It's not for one MP, it's for all of the ungrateful buggers. Ask them how much they think we should pay to keep them in their seats...'

Desalinating Livingstone

2008-05-13T13:07:00.001+01:00

Way back in May 2006 I blogged about Ken Livingstone's refusal to allow a desalination plant to go ahead in London on the grounds that it wasn't carbon neutral. Now it seems that new Mayor, Boris Johnson, has over-turned that decision. That's a good move for London. Those of us in London were 'warned' that Johnson is a closet global warming skeptic. Personally I'd like to think that this was a factor in his win. But he's a politician and he'll tow the party line, and Cameron is a definite warmist. Perhaps we can hope that Johnson will pick up on the increasingly skeptical mood to finally stand up and declare the whole warmist enterprise dead. But I'm not holding my breath. For the moment, warmism remains the dominant political ideology of all the major political parties in the West.

It's about time he had some good ol' fashioned development (yup, that's development without the obligatory sustainable prefix).

Ends and Means

2008-04-23T13:54:00.000+01:00

Numerous discussions with true believers in global warming have often ended with a rather petulant 'even if man-made global warming isn't true, it will have positive spin-offs in the end...' So, having failed to prove a case with any hard science the warmists end up reverting to an 'end justifying the means' argument. And of course they've got a long list of supposed benefits to justify Kyoto-like proposals to cut CO2 emissions. These include:

• Moving away from 'big oil'
• People buying local produce
• More emphasis on 'sustainability'
• Forcing people to think more about Nature

Well, what do we see already resulting from CO2 reduction policies (such as the EU renewal fuels policies):

• Food riots
• Increasing food prices
• Increased fuel poverty
• Environmental problems in the rush to plant bio-fuel crops
• A rush towards more nuclear power generation
• Increasingly authoritarian plans from governments and bodies such as the EU

It's especially ironic of course that the arch-demon of warming mythology (George Bush), is in part to blame for all of this by pandering to environmentalism. The subsidies to farmers for producing bio-fuel crops are seriously distorting things. On this one at least, Fidel Castro is right.

All of this is evidence, if evidence is required, that the logic of global warmism will ultimately hurt those supposedly most at risk from higher temperatures - the poor, both in the UK and the rest of the world.

But hey, at least Al Gore will continue to rake it in.

It's the weather, stupid

2008-03-11T16:29:00.000Z

While AGW (anthropogenic global warming) advocates like to point out that extended cold weather episodes (like those afflicting huge chunks of the globe) are just weather and not climate, there's also no shortage of them seizing every severe weather episode as evidence of global warming (or climate chaos as some of them prefer to refer to it). This was the case in the UK with last summer's severe floods. Warmists were happy to pin the blame on CO2-induced climate change.

Of course the research suggests that this isn't the case. As reported by the BBC: The UK's summer floods of 2007 were a freak event unrelated to global climate change, according to a report from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH).

How many people will take notice of this? In the same way that the European heatwave in 1998 is now known not to have been due to global warming but a consequence of the la Nina event that year, it's still firmly embedded in the popular consciousness as being caused by CO2. It's a regretable part of human nature that we remember the initial accusation and not the subsequent 'not guilty' finding. Of course that plays well for climate alarmists everywhere...