All Eyes To Greece

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

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

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

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?

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...

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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.