Well Said

Sometimes the Daily Mash hits the nail on the head - how can you improve on this?

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/business/old-bastard-attacked-by-useless-shower-of-piss-201205025183/

My thoughts on Murdoch, Leveson and the rest of the circus... A pox on the bloody lot of you.

And will the bastard BBC just STFU about it? The way they're devoting so much time to the story and attacking their key commercial rival is sick-making.

Another Met Office Fail?

Keeping up a grand tradition of forecasting fails, the UK Met Office forecast for April (now officially the wettest UK April on record), stated:

The forecast for average UK rainfall slightly favours drier than average conditions for Apri lMay June as a whole, and also slightly favours April being the driest of the 3 months.

Outstanding. But don't worry, they can't get the weather right a few weeks in advance, but they can't get it right decades in advance in climate modelling...

Windfarms Cause Climate Warming

The odious Richard Black, uber green propagandist at the BBC, highlights a new paper that purports to show that windfarms cause local warming:

...the researchers say the scale of the effect they saw is equivalent to a warming of about 0.72C per decade.

Now given that, according to the alarmists, warming is always and everywhere bad, does this mean that we can expect that Black and his comrades will start to campaign against windfarms?

No, I guess it'll just prove that some warming is more equal than others...

Green Energy - Value For Money?

According to a piece from the BBC:

He [David Cameron] will also welcome the investment of £350 million on energy projects that will create 800 jobs.

Surely some mistake. The Prime Minister is 'demanding' value for money from green energy, but welcomes an investment that will create 800 jobs at a cost of £350M. That works out at a nifty £437500 per job. And it'll deliver a tiny fraction of energy needs. Yep, that's affordable.

Double Dose of Good News On UK Shale

It's not often we can report on two bits of good news at the same time, but today there are two things worth noting regarding Shale gas in the UK. The first, and mostly importantly, is that a panel of experts convened by the government have given the go-ahead for fracking to continue. It's hedged with provisos and conditions to appease greenists, but it's decidedly a step forward. Even the odious Richard Black of the BBC reported the story rather than ignoring it. We hope, like the GWPF does, that this is a sign that belatedly common sense is asserting itself.

The second story is also connected with shale gas in the UK. This time it's a report from Reuters that suggests that the UK is sitting on vast off-shore shale deposits. Enough shale gas to put us in the top five in the world. The figures are mind-blowingly large: UK offshore reserves of shale gas could exceed one thousand trillion cubic feet

Of course it's more expensive to get at the stuff off-shore at the moment, but as the technology develops who knows when it will become economically viable. What it suggests though, is that shale is here to stay...

Useful Idiots

Donna Laframboise has an interesting post about Big Oil funding of environmentalism, highlighting in particular the long-lasting relationship between Shell and the WWF. This isn't an isolated example, and it's known that the fuel companies have been more than generous with funding and patronage across a range of green organisations and campaigns. The fuel companies have also been notably active in climate alarmism. How is it that the green movement can accept cash from the corporate enemy while at the same time they imagine that Big Oil is funding climate skepticism? And how can they justify their own feeding from the hand of Big Oil?

Lenin talked of 'useful idiots' in describing fellow travellers and Soviet sympathisers from amongst the bourgeois class. These were people who would have been put up against a wall and shot in Russia, but who adopted positions that were useful to the Bolshevik state. For Lenin, there was nothing morally wrong in exploiting these people at all. In fact pretty much any act could be justified if it was for the cause.

In the modern world the useful idiots sit on the boards of Big Oil. They are more than happy to fund green causes and organisations that view them as the spawn of Satan. They will happily give money to people who are delighted to bite the hand that feeds them. What the greens get out of this is funding and influence, but they feel that they are not compromised because they are exploiting the relationship.

What's harder to understand is why the fuel companies are playing the game? Perhaps they feel that their money buys them some influence in the wider green movement - it doesn't. Perhaps they want some useful publicity - but they're paying for anti-fuel and anti-energy publicity that's more virulent than any marginal brand benefit they get. Or perhaps they really are idiots who just aren't bright enough to see themselves as useful idiots...

Earth Hour 2012

Over at the ever wonderful Watts Up With That, Anthony Watts has chosen to reprint Ross McKitrick's response to Earth Hour.

It is well worth a read. It expresses perfectly the sentiments of so many of us who reject the reactionary idea that we should seek to 'return to Nature'. And he points out that:

People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.

Absolutely.

Here's a simple thought experiment- if there was a time machine that could take you on a one-way trip back to a time when you could 'live in Nature', without electricity, clean water, modern medicines and the other benefits that we have now, how many of these environmentalists would take it? How many would really opt for the state of grace they like to imagine over and above the benefits of modern capitalist society? There are plenty of people I'd chose to send - starting with the gurus of the modern green movement - but I for one would stay put no matter what.

More UK Shale

A report on the Global Warming Policy Foundation's website covers the discovery of even  more potential shale gas fields in the UK. You'd think that this would be good news all round. Good for the economy, good for the local community, and, if you're that way inclined, good for lowering CO2 emissions. But no, this is the age of green, sustainability and climate alarmism. Instead of being greeted with a welcome and the wish that the government takes the brakes off development, we get local politicians like this:

Melton borough councillor Matthew O' Callaghan said: "While an additional source of fuel is to be welcomed, there are significant concerns about the process used to extract this form of energy.

"There should be exhaustive tests and concerns allayed before any commercial extraction is even considered in what is an extremely sensitive area of the countryside."

Coun Malise Graham, a member of the same authority, said: "It is vital that a thorough investigation is undertaken before work goes ahead."

Tony Stott, chairman of the Leicestershire branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, said: "The development of a gas industry on a large scale could transform and industrialise countryside and many rural communities.

"More research on the environmental effects, such as methane leaking, pollution, groundwater contamination, and the risk of minor earthquakes, is urgently needed."

It's hard to feel optimistic when green ideology is so all-pervading that even local officials, whom one would hope are more closely connected to their communities than the parasites that infect Westminster, respond so negatively to the chance of lower energy and increased development.

Save The Carrier Bag

Of all the lost causes that this blog supports, the campaign to defend the carrier bag seems the most Quixotic. After all, who can love the humble supermarket carrier bag? They're cheap, ugly and functional items that manage to unite forces as disparate as the BBC, the Daily Mail and legions of right-thinking people everywhere. But not here.

Firstly, let's note that the terminology around these bags has shifted. The bags are now referred to as 'single-use carrier' bags, to emphasise the wastefulness of the whole enterprise. Single-use is bad by definition, however, who decided that supermarket carrier bags are single use? Most people I know generally re-use the bags. A lot of people have a pile of them at home for storing and carrying all kinds of stuff, including taking them back to the shops to use again.

Next we have to look at why 'single-use' has such negative connotations, and it's all to do with using up the Earth's scarce resources. Except that supermarket carrier bags are made from polyethelene, which comes from ethelene which is a waste product from natural gas production. If it wasn't used as a feedstock, then the ethelene would have to be burned off - which is both wasting energy and also produces more CO2 emissions (if you care about such things). So, far from wasting valuable resources, making carrier backs finds a use for an existing by-product.

But surely bags from renewables - like paper - would be better for the environment? Nope. Think again. Carrier bags are light, and take less energy to produce and transport than paper bags. According a story from the Independent (hardly a bastion of contrarian thinking), a study sponsored by the Enviornment Agency, showed that polyethelene carrier bags have about less than a third of the carbon emissions of paper bags.

Ah, but what about the pollution? What about the plastic 'garbage patch' twice the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific? We've all seen the pictures in the Daily Mail... Sorry, overdone. Not only is the size of the problem exagerrated, there's also not much evidence that carrier bags are a key component of the pollution.

So, in all, the plastic carrier bag is yet another example of environmentalism wanting to solve non-existent problems. The solutions proposed end up being worse for the environment, and in the process make life just that little bit more expensive and a little less convenient. So, par for the course really.

BBC in bed with FoE again

As usual, the BBC can do a good job in leaving the reader speechless (with rage, usually). Take this latest example from the always odious Richard Black. Under a headline of UK nuclear plans 'put energy in French hands', Black regales us with the story of 'four senior environmentalists' (all former directors of Friends of the Earth UK), warning David Cameron that the plans for new nuclear build put the UK tax payer at too much financial risk.

The gall of these people is unbelievable. One of them is even quoted as saying:

"How on Earth can the prime minister justify paying billions of pounds of subsidy to French power companies when the chancellor is slashing welfare budgets for poor people in Britain and there are a million young people unemployed?"

Since when have these four ever been interested in the British tax payer? I hear no complaint from them about the millions wasted on wind farms, solar and other 'renewables' gravy trains. Nor do they seem to be aware that it's because these renewables don't function as effective power sources that we're having to go the nuclear route - all in the cause of reducing CO2. Some environmentalists, like James Lovelock, George Monbiot and Mark Lynas have followed through on their own logic and accepted that nuclear is the way to go.

But the truth is that we're already dependent on nuclear, including French nuclear generated electricity piped to the national grid. And that dependency will grow even as we throw money at windfarms.

These four unelected politicians (which is what they are, the FoE being part of the corporate state that runs the EU), are also against the one fuel source that can stop both windfarms and new nuclear in its tracks: shale gas. What's more, shale will also reduce CO2 emissions to a greater extent than most renewables. If they were serious, they would be out campaigning for shale and trying to end the windfarm subsidy-fest that they helped engineer in the first place.

And, if we were serious, we'd also be campaigning for more research into thorium reactors - which again promise cheap, low-carbon energy and without the military spin-offs that have driven so much development of conventional nuclear energy.

But that's never going to happen. The truth is what Porritt and co want is to scale back industrial development, cut back on cheap energy and move society back into a world where light and heat are luxuries and we live in a cold, dark world that's closer to nature and more in tune with Gaia. When all is said and done, primitivism is where their brand of environmentalism inevitably leads...

Please Help Us Poland

Living as we do in the UK, in one of the citadels of green orthodoxy in the world, we often have to look abroad for positive signs that world is coming to its senses. It's normally slim pickings, but we did have the recent example of Canada coming out strongly against a new Kyoto-type climate treaty. And for a long time we've had the positive example of the Czech President Vaclav Klaus of a leading national politicians speaking sense on climate change and the EU. Increasingly we are also taking note of what's going on in Poland. First off there has been the welcoming of shale gas and fracking, giving Poland a chance a cheaper energy and more independence from Putin's Russia.

Now in a another positive move we see the BBC reporting that:

Poland's Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper says that "tomorrow Poland is ready to veto the EU plan to reduce CO2 emissions"...Poland's Environment Minister Marcin Korolec has sent a letter to his EU colleagues urging them to reject the 25% target, the Financial Times newspaper reports. "There is no point whatsoever in gambling with the European economy's future, introducing policies that might put our industries in jeopardy versus our competitors," he was quoted as saying.

This isn't the first time that Poland has acted. Back in June 2011 Poland blocked similar moves to go for more stringent cuts in CO2 emissions.

As always the UK is at the forefront of the suicidal tendency in Europe. Confirming once again the power of the orthodoxy to close eyes and ears to economics, science and reality in general, the BBC quotes an unnamed spokesman from our Department of Energy and Climate Change:

"Moving to a higher target will bring other benefits such as reducing our dependence on imported energy, stimulating jobs and growth in green sectors, and delivering health benefits from reduced pollution."

So, not for the first time, we have to hope that we are saved from the follies of our leaders by politicians from other countries...

Fakegate or Deniergate?

The battle of the gates is more than a silly bit of trivia. Climategate stuck as a name, and it continues to resonate. After the initial release of the Heartland documents, the alarmist camp was almost wetting itself because finally they had a gate of their own - Deniergate. Here was the one word which they hoped would eventually eclipse the running sore that is Climategate. Alas, for the warmists, Deniergate itself was eclipsed by Gleick's confession (after he was outed by the sceptic blogosphere) and the announcement that the smoking gun document was a fake. Now there's a new gate on the block - Fakegate.

A quick Google this morning shows that Deniergate gets 70,400 results, while Fakegate has already surged ahead with 325,000 results. Tough luck warmists...

However, both of these are still far behind Climategate, which on my spot check still gets 2,920,000 results.

Update: Just checked to see how one of the other climate-related -gates compares. Amazongate - a relatively minor affair in the IPCCs continuing sink to the bottom - gets a lively 191,000 results.

The Poverty of The Left

Far be it for me to suggest that what passes for 'the Left' in this country is reactionary, backward looking and a force for conservatism, but what else can one say when the following arrives in an email from Pluto Press...

Get Political Campaign - key activists urge engagement with Trotsky, Lenin and Luxemburg

Fifty key figures on the left, including China Miéville, Lindsey German, Ken Loach, Suzi Weissman, Michael Yates and Immanuel Ness, have backed a Pluto Press campaign urging activists fighting for the 99% against the 1% to draw inspiration from the lives and writings of three giants of 20th-century political change: Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and VI Lenin.

Yep, from the whole of the 20th century and what we've had so far of the 21st, these 'key figures' can only hark back to the period around the Bolshevik coup in Russia. This is a form of politics immune to history, knowledge or experience. It ignores both the failure of every form of state socialism and central planning ever attempted and the huge advance of economic development since the early 20th century. It even ignores any developments from the non-Leninist left.

Nope, it's still the same old cant on offer:

The Get Political campaign statement argues that 'It will not be a simple thing to win the battle of democracy...Luxemburg, Trotsky and Lenin were among the most perceptive and compelling revolutionaries of the 20th century. The body of analysis, strategy and tactics to which they contributed was inseparable from the mass struggles of their time. Critically engaging with their ideas can enrich the thinking and practical activity of those involved in today's and tomorrow's struggles for a better world.'

Note the use of the word democracy there. How well does that sit with Lenin and co? Remember, Lenin is the architect of 'democratic centralism', 'the dictatorship of the proletariat' and other zany ideas that ultimately lead to the murder of millions all over the world.

Have these 'key thinkers' - the vast majority of them being salaried academics and/or aligned to the Socialist Workers Party - really not learned anything at all? Sure they have... Why, the campaign is also part of a commercial endeavour by Pluto Press, who are flogging a new set of books off the back of it. Good to know that at least some elements of free market thinking have got through...

Faster than light neutrinos - not proven

So it looks like the faster than light neutrino experiment may have been wrong after all - just as most people suspected. Now what's interesting is that if ever there's an example of someone going against the scientific consensus then this has to be it - big time. And yet not once did I see anyone insisting that there was 'consensus' on the speed of light. Nobody called the team responsible for the experiment 'Einstein deniers'. The scientific societies didn't issue statements insisting that it was irresponsible to speculate that Einstein might be wrong. No papers were denied publication and no journal editors were pushed out of their jobs. Hell, from what I can see nobody was even ostracised for daring to suggest that neutrinos could break the light barrier.

Isn't this how science is supposed to work?
Isn't this precisely what we don't see when it comes to 'climate science'?

Russian Heatwave Due To CO2?

Having covered the Heartland affair early on, Richard Black of the BBC has been notcieably silent on the follow up. No news of the Gleick confession or the fact that Gleick's career is imploding - for example he's been dropped from the American Geophysical Union's (AGU) task Force on Scientific Integrity. Black is resolutely looking the other way, even when he's been directly challenged on it on his Twitter feed.

It was while checking on Black's Twitter feed that I saw mention of a story that says the Russian heatwave can be explained as part natural and part global warming. Or in Black's Tweet:

Latest on Russian heatwave - natural or human-driven? New AGU paper says a bit of both http://t.co/rIicn4Fu - extreme temp risk x3 from AGW

Follow the link and you get a story on the AGU website:

Russian heat wave had both manmade and natural causes

Now that's a fairly definite headline - and it's in contrast to previous studies that explained the heatwave as being due to natural weather phenomena and not AGW. Attribution - assigning causes to specific weather events - is a big deal. If scientists can pin the blame on climate disasters to CO2 then that's a major step forward in convincing the unconvinced masses that the AGW hyopthesis is not just a massive scam.

So how have they untangled the complex mix of factors that can partially pin the blame for the heatwave on human CO2 emissions?

Well, the short answer is that they haven't. What they've done is run a series of simulations and compared results. In one set of simulations they used data said to represent the 1990s, in the other they ran data said to represent the 2000s. The results showed that the chances of a comparable heatwave occuring were three times greater in the later set of simulations.

Yes, that's all there is to it. You run a model one way, tweak the inputs and run it again and then compare the results. You don't actually look in detail at the specifics of the real heatwave that happened. You don't look at the weather patterns or anything like that. You run two sets of simulations and just note that in the second set you can get some of the characteristics of a heat wave occuring more often.

I don't need to labour the obvious inadequacies of this. I don't need to point out the inherent uncertainties involved in such a process.

But where is the hint of this uncertainty in that headline or in Richard Black's Tweet? Where is there anything to indicate that this is all based on software and models?

Sceptic Blogosphere Devours Gleick

Peter Gleick's confession that he lied to obtain the Heartland documents - though at present he's insisting that he didn't fake the key document that has the warmists ablaze with righteous anger - is welcome. It would have carried a bit more weight had he not already been fingered as the most likely candidate by Steven Mosher, Roger Pielke and innumerable sceptic bloggers. Now that he's confessed, he'll be wanting to clear his name of the forgery charge by allowing some IT forensic analysis to be done on his computers and servers. It should be fairly straightforward to establish that the forged document arrived unbidden and wasn't just rustled up on his machine...

The whole affair casts an interesting light on the whole climate wars front, particularly on the asymmetry of forces.

While the warmists were over the moon about the Heartland documents because it shed a light on the perceived nefarious forces fighting 'climate science', what they revealed instead was the petty cash available to the sceptic side. When cast next to the millions of dollars available to the climate orthodox from governments, transnational bodies (the UN and the EU, for example), from chairtable foundations and big-dollar environmentalists (Greenpeace, WWF etc), the money available to sceptics is tiny. I mean really, really, really tiny.

And it's not just the money, it's also the media. The climate orthodox have at their disposal most of the world's mass media - from the bastions of climate alarmism at the BBC and the Guardian, to well-funded web sites such as RealClimate, DeSmogBlog and others.

And yet, despite the money and the media, the climate alarmists know they are losing support. Despite everything that they have done to subvert peer review - and the Climategate emails showed us what was going on, warts and all, without the need to resort to forgeries - more and  more papers are being published which cast doubt on the alarmism. The public perceives the lack of warming and the message that there is still so much doubt about what we do know is getting across. The only way for the alarmists to explain this process, despite the clear disparity of forces, is by an appeal to conspiracy theory. As the Guradian puts it, in its story about Gleick's confession, there is...

a network of fossil fuel interests, rightwing think tanks and politicians have been working to block action on climate change

Greek General Election Cancelled?

If, as looks increasingly certain, the next EU bail-out of Greece goes through, then it is almost inevitable that all attention in Brussels will switch to stopping a Greek general election. Having been completely sold down the river by it's political class, the Greek people are inevitably going to be looking to those parties that reject the imposed austerity. For now it looks like the hope lies on the Left, with the Communists and other leftists doing well in the polls. If Merkel was leant on to get her to agree to the bail-out, then her domestic standing will plummet if a rejectionist government takes hold and renounces the terms of the bailout. And those who pushed most stringly to keep Greece in the fold, will also suffer badly in their own domestic politics.

All this means that the only way to keep the peace - and the existence of the EU - is to stop a Greek general election from taking place. In days gone by the army would have stepped in. But this is the EU, there's no need for that kind of thing anymore. Instead we should look to see what pressure is applied to those elements of the left who'll prefer to stick with the EU rather than risk 'chaos'. And this is the trump card that the Euro class has got - there's a lot of people who fear the chaos that would emerge should a new government simply renounce eveything and go for a fast exit from the Euro and the EU. It's this fear of chaos and the anarchy on the streets that the right will seize upon, ably abetted by the existing unelected powers that be.

Greece Should Look To Iceland

Here's an interesting little snippet from the BBC...

Iceland is safe to invest in again, according to Fitch, which has upgraded its credit rating three years after its economy spectacularly collapsed.

It's almost text book stuff. Economy collapses under a mountain of debt. Country living beyond its means. It's the end of the world etc etc. Currency collapses and no one is willing to touch Iceland with a bargepole.

With a collapsed currency exports are cheap and start to pick up. Because of the disaster the government is even allowed to borrow and delays implementing the kind of austerity being foisted on the Greeks.

So, remind me again why Greece should remain in the Euro?

The Heartland Non-Story

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

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)