Concentrating the Mind

David Davis with Michael Winning (beers)

In the last few days, we have had a lot of stuff about volcanoes. Mainly because our old friend, Iceland, has decided to do its normal thing from over the last 40-or-so-million-years, and produce large volumes of asthenosperic materials, for high-level-projection, in short order. Indeed, an even cursory look at geological maps of Iceland will show an even shorter history of eruptions than that.

The Icelanders ought to be our friends. Indeed, those of us who live here in the North West are probably more closely related to them than you can shake a stick at. But today, I thought I would type rapidly, and without too much affore-thought, about modern civilisation, economics, and (you’ve guessed it) climate change. We people of today, in “New Britain, a YOUNG COUNTRY” as the disgusting and over-grasping pig Blair put it, once, have never seen a real volcano. Nor indeed has anyone else alive today, or even whoever has been alive in the last 70,000 years or thereabouts. (We think….)

What would happen to the AGW movement, which sets out to destroy humanity on purpose, and is by way of almost succeeding now, if there was a real volcanic eruption? You knowof what I speak! The kind from a crater the size of Wyoming, and which carries on for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years? If not thousands? They could,and have done in the past. Planets, especially large and massive rocky ones close(ish) to suns, are big objects with a lot of inertia, in respect of the organisms which might cling tenuously to life on their surfaces. It’s fortunate that they’re mostly as big as they are, or we’d have other difficulties too.

Let’s suppose that Yellowstone goes belly-up, tomorrow. The odds are it probably won’t, but it could. Should we apply the “precuationary principles” to such as event, and indeed could we even do so?

Almost immediately, pretty much all the agricultural land of North America will vanish. Along with it, about half the world’s acreage of grain and other plant crops, in productivity terms. Forget the “people” – to GramscoStalinists, people who live in North America are mere dross or statistics. Unless they are Mexicans or “blacks” but that won’t help much as Mexico and New Orleans (where of course Gramscians say all “blacks” live and all are “disadvantaged”) will be under the ash too. The stratospheric dust and ash clouds will persist for years, maybe decades or centuries. No growing-land will be safe anywhere, and billions may die.

At first, GreeNazis will rejoice. Food will still be avilable, at a price, and the metrosexual kinds will eat, for a while. But the planet has about 66 days’ supply of primary foods for humans at any one time. After the “little local shops” have run out first, and the “locavores” have begun to get restive and angry about “failure of government initiatives to ensure supplies for families, workers and young people”, thngs will start to get exciting. People will start to rob for food and to rob food: Police forces, especially in the UK, will start to behave like they have been itching to for years, deploying all the guns they have been hoarding and training with, especially against “terrorists”. The familes of Police will eat tolerably well, for a time….

The sky will be a dark grey colour most of the time, and it will seem very cold, all the time. The sun will not appear to heat the air at all. Yorkshire-sized icebergs, carrying their own microclimates, will travel as far as Tenerife before melting. The Shetlands may have to be abandoned, along with their oil and gas – which will become a prized commodity. No surviving GreeNazis will dare to speak openly of “bio fuels”, for fear of being made to watch their children being lynched and eaten, before they themselves are spitted and roasted over the fire, fed by their children’s uncollected fat. Saudi Arabia might dry up completely and rains there may fail.

A small Ice Age might be triggered. Two or three thousand years, no more than that, if we are lucky: a mere blip on the paleogeological temperature record.

The precautionary Principle suggests to us two here, that we ought to do the following, given the 1,100 trillion tonnes of Oxygen depositied, for our benefit, in today’s atmosphere:-

(1) Burn as much fossil fuels as we can pump, to make concrete and steel to build as many nuclear power stations as we can fill with nuclides, as fast as possible,

(2) Pay the Chindians to mine as much coal as their hearts can spade up, to help same process,

(3) Raise the atmospheric CO2 percentage to about 1% asap (that’s nearly 30 times the present level!), to promote regrowth of plant life as fast as can be managed, given that air temperature /could/ be a limiting factor.

We might, just might, if  we did all this, now, avert a fully-major human disaster, in which billions of people will die. Ought we not to do this for the children? Afeter all, the probability of this is far higher than AGW…

Norman Tebbit on climate change

David Davis

Usual good sense from this fellow.

James Lovelock talking vaguely sensibly…

…in here…you can respect his intellectual honesty about eco-fashion green-ness etc.

David Davis

…but not here, where he buys into totalitarianism. h/t Samizdata.

Watch this space today

Muichael Winning

It says over at The Ebnglishman’s Castle that we should all look in at Bishop Hill today. BH is an admirable blog recently dedicating lots of time to unravelling the “climategate” scandal about AGW data-falsification and selective witholding…

Climategate brilliant strategic analysis

Machael Winning

I dont know if that title makes grammar sense but  the Brian Micklethwait article at Samizdata ought to be read.

Libertarian Alliance “circumlocution award of the day”

David Davis

Climate change has mutated from being a physical phenomenon to be studied to an idea to be contested. The sites of adjudication between competing truth claims have therefore moved from the secluded academy and scientific peer review to the vociferous agora and the extended peer community.

H/T Englishman’s Castle, referring to this article.

In other words, “the bastards have been rumbled and all the dirty washing’s out in the open.”

The poor Moslems should not let themselves become….

…catspaws and fall-guys for the GramscoFabiaNazis.

David Davis

The living man currently purporting to be one of the audio-voices of Osama bin Laden (who will continue to remain dead) comes out on the side of greens, dollar-dumpers, anti-Americans and other types of droid opposed to liberalism and the maximisation of energy-use to benefit humans.

This is of course no surprise: indeed, I wonder why the fellow purporting to be bin Laden did not actually orate about this matter during Copenhagen, which would have had more effect.

The effect of this voicover-tape on ordinary people who follw Islam may be the main worry. Ultimately, they and Islam cannot be the real or even a very substantial enemy of progress and emancipation for all people, although grievous harm has been done by some of them in the past in the name of destruction of secular Western liberalism and society.

I think in passing of the necessity for the medieval Crusades, for which an apology offered to existing European nations, as well as to obliterated ancient Christian countries, is long overdue – but which probably will never be forthcoming. Just like the deeply heartfelt and trans-global apology which is owed to Britain in general, and the Royal Navy in particular, over the little matter of “slavery”, which we here abolished in 1807. (Some questions to the French Government here might be in order, especially concerning Haiti and the position of slaves there after their rebellion and ejection of French colonial repressive interests…)

I also think of the frequent and partially-successful attempts by both Inperial Wilhelmine Germany and also by the Third Reich, to suborn latent Moslem enmity as an ally against “the West”. Buchan’s “Greenmantle” was partly based on fact. You could even say “it was all about oil”…..

Modern Moslems are far more in tune with Western values and liberalism than a small lunatic fringe of both “Islamists” and Western Multiculti-agitproptists cares to admit. They ought not to be taken in by stuff like “audio broadcasts”.

And so where is the fellow then? Repeated occasions of not appearing in public on live broascast media do tend to support the evidence that he is dead.

If Moslems allow themselves to be used as an anti-civilisation-weapon, then they will find themselves cast off and obliterated, as “useful idiots”, just like Lenin said about others such as Fabians and “socialists”.

“Hilary” Benn and the coming food rationing

David Davis

Now they’re getting at restaurants and the poor-people’s takeaway joints first. These will cave in because there is “no-one to stand up for them”.

“part of a new Government drive to prevent obesity, climate change and global food shortages”

My trousers!

And furthermore, how can a person give a job to a man called “Hilary”?

Biased BBC: BBC EDITOR IS CLIMATE CHANGE ACTIVIST

BBC EDITOR IS CLIMATE CHANGE ACTIVIST

Sean Gabb

>> Monday, December 28, 2009

I’ve become increasingly convinced that the BBC is part of an international conspiracy about ‘climate change’. It isn’t simply that the reporting is so biased; it’s also because there seems to be a concerted effort to make sure that whatever so-called sceptics discover, for example over Climategate, the warmists bounce straight back with a new set of warped theories or bent facts to support their arguments. The feed of material is relentless, as if it is coming from an organised source. Over the holidays, I’ve been doing some digging on this, and I wanted to share one of my first findings.
A BBC journalist called Peter Thomson is not a household name in this country, but he’s the environment editor of the BBC programme (made jointly with WGBH Boston and RPI) The World, which on a daily basis pushes out climate scare stories to millions of people. Mr Thomson, it turns out, is also the secretary of the Society of Environmental Journalists, a US organisation, the main purpose of which is to spread alarmism through a ‘guide’ about ‘climate change’(masked of course, under the cloak of ‘objectivity’). There can be no doubt that this is a campaigining organisation which wants to achieve political change because it believes that the world needs to reduce CO2 emissions.
Mr Thomson’s activism does not stop there. He’s also a member of the advisory board of the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, yet another international organisation with alarmist goals. It, too, publishes a guide to how journalists should cover ‘climate change’; in truly chilling McCarthyite terms, the introduction explains how anyone who disagrees with “the consensus” should be ignored and that journalists should frantically pester editors to publish ‘climate change’ scare stories.
So, to recap. One of the BBC’s most senior editors responsible for environmental reporting has formal roles at the epicentre of a worldwide coinspiracy among ‘climate change’ alarmists. Not only that, he is assisting in the international propagation of so-called science communication guides, the main purpose of which are to enlist other journalists to spread the same lies in which he also believes. I suspect there’s a whole phalanx of Peter Thomsons, all feeding the BBC’s insatiable appetite to feed us with moonshine.
Update: Richard North, of EU Referendum, has kindly provided further information about BBC propagandists. Nik Gowing, a prominent – and rather humourless – BBC World Service presenter, has a no-doubt lucrative sideline in chairing ‘climate change’ conferences convened by the alarmist-in-chief, IPCC head Dr Ravendra Pachauri.

Biased BBC: BBC EDITOR IS CLIMATE CHANGE ACTIVIST

Ah, that global warming thing…it’s so much so much fun…

…so much for that, then.

David Davis

I have not experienced several days of ice (in a row, not serially but collectively) for 46 years. And I even live, now, in a mild-climate-region, in the North, which has always been mild, which is why lots of people in mini-skirts lived here until a few days ago – now they all wear tights.

The cooling is clearly down to our warming the atmosphere.

Must be our fault, then, that we’re now under the ice.

ShootinPutin187 shows his hand on climate change

David Davis

In the wake of the climategate emails bonanza, (get them here, they’re heavily discounted now)we here in the West now experience what Russia can really do when it tries. We are bust, and it is not, yet, and Putin will have stolen the Star Wars plans by now. Of course; what did you expect, letting Reagan-Bush go, and letting the ObamaClintoid in?

In the TA in the 80s, I always used to come under fire from our lieutenants, who insisted that “The Russian Infantryman is trained to do eleven things. You are trained to do 13!” I never thought this was enough things to overtrump with, and now I know that changing the weather is the best of them.

Me, I do fourteen things!

The warmgloamers are at it again

Michael Winning

Its hotter and hotter and hotter (not here its not.)

I hope they are enjoying theire religious festival, nice city they’ve chosen, because it’s fun, and I hope the poor Danes get lots and lots of money for their trouble. At least that’ll be some proper outcome.

Errrr…the evidence is invisible…

Michael Winning,

Good one, that, Millibind old man! We’ll really believe you now!

Extraordinary TV exchange

David Davis

I’d never heard of these guys, but this is hilarious:-

TEN GIGATONNES … sounds like quite a lot …

Shock-Horror! Gosh! (Sounds a lot, doesn’t it.)***

David Davis

But it’s 0.65% of the Earth’s atmospheric CO2…..ZERO POINT SIX-FIVE PERCENT. (I worked it out just now.)

How is this going to help? Can anyone tell me that the Earth’s climate teeters on either the brink of disaster or relaxes into neo-pastoral ideality, with a movement of +/- 0.65% in atmospheric CO2 concentration?

***Ten billion tonnes of CO2 gas at STP would occupy 5 x 10^+12 cubic metres, which is a cube 10.6 miles along one edge. (So what are they beefing about?) The earth’s atmospheric CO2 (at the same standardised conditions) now occupies a cuboid of the same height (10.6 miles) and an area of 101 by 159 miles…150 times as much…

***If it was Dry Ice, it would be, roughly, about 1/1000-th of this volume, which is a cube about 1,700 metres along an edge. (You’d be hard put to see it from space.)

(H/t Samizdata for Guardian link)

“Copenhagen” will fail – and quite right too

David Davis

Today I unashamedly lift the text of Lord Lawson’s piece in The Times, regarding the staggering potential costs of implementing “low carbon” and “no carbon” strategies, allegedly to “fight climate change”. The text also bears significantly upon the effects of the “British” data released helpfully by some Russian Gentlemen (I presume they were male – those Russians that do shattering things unannounced to other people, are almost invariably male these days) and which originated in the CRU, a British outfit that purports to do “Climate Research” for people like the UN. ‘Nuff said.

(NB I can only find ONE USA blog that’s picking up this story – please wise up over there, gents, for it affects you and your somewhat strange president also.)

Even if the science was reliable (which it isn’t), we should not force the world’s poorest countries to cut carbon emissions

Nigel Lawson

• 38 Comments

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Exactly a fortnight from today, the United Nations climate change conference opens in Copenhagen. Its purpose is (or was) clear: to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Under Kyoto, all those developed nations that ratified the treaty (all, in practice, except the US) agreed to cut their carbon emissions to 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. The successor treaty, to be agreed at Copenhagen, was intended to secure a cut in global emissions, from the developed and developing world alike (and China has now overtaken even the US), of 50 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050, leading to more or less total decarbonisation by the end of the century.

As Gordon Brown declared in his Guildhall speech only a week ago, Copenhagen must “forge a new international agreement … [which] must contain the full range of commitments required: on emissions reductions by both developed and developing countries, on finance and on verification”.

This is a pretty tall order; and, needless to say, nothing of the sort will be agreed. Even if the Kyoto 5 per cent cut is achieved, it will be only because the developed world has effectively outsourced a large part of its emissions to countries, such as China and India, without Kyoto constraints. Not only is 50 per cent rather more severe than 5 per cent, but (except in the unlikely event of world industry migrating to Mars) a global target removes the escape route of outsourcing emissions.

Moreover there is a strong moral argument, too. The reason we use carbon-based energy is simply that it is far and away the cheapest source of energy, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

Switching to much more expensive energy may be acceptable for us in the developed world. But in the developing world, there are still tens of millions of people suffering from acute poverty, and from the consequences of such poverty, in the shape of preventable disease, malnutrition and premature death. So for the developing world, the overriding priority has to be the fastest feasible rate of economic development, which means, inter alia, using the cheapest available form of energy: carbon-based energy.

Mr Brown’s Copenhagen objective will, happily, not be achieved. But the meeting will still be declared a great success. Politicians do not like being associated with failure, so they will make sure that whatever emerges from Copenhagen is declared a success, and promise to meet again next year. This will at least give our political leaders the time to get themselves off the hook.

The greatest error in the current conventional wisdom is that, if you accept the (present) majority scientific view that most of the modest global warming in the last quarter of the last century — about half a degree centigrade — was caused by man-made carbon emissions, then you must also accept that we have to decarbonise our economies.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I have no idea whether the majority scientific view (and it is far from a consensus) is correct. Certainly, it is curious that, whereas their models predicted an acceleration in global warming this century as the growth in emissions accelerated, so far this century there has been no further warming at all. But the current majority view may still be right.

Even if it is, however, that cannot determine the right policy choice. For a warmer climate brings benefits as well as disadvantages. Even if there is a net disadvantage, which is uncertain, it is far less than the economic cost (let alone the human cost) of decarbonisation. Moreover, the greatest single attribute of mankind is our capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. By adapting to any warming that may occur over the next century, we can pocket the benefits and greatly reduce the disadvantages, at a cost that is far less than the cost of global decarbonisation — even if that could be achieved.

Moreover, the scientific basis for global warming projections is now under scrutiny as never before. The principal source of these projections is produced by a small group of scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), affiliated to the University of East Anglia.

Last week an apparent hacker obtained access to their computers and published in the blogosphere part of their internal e-mail traffic. And the CRU has conceded that the at least some of the published e-mails are genuine.

Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.

There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. But what is clear is that the integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British Government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay.

It is against all this background that I am announcing today the launch of a new high-powered all-party (and non-party) think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (www.thegwpf.org), which I hope may mark a turning-point in the political and public debate on the important issue of global warming policy. At the very least, open and reasoned debate on this issue cannot be anything but healthy. The absence of debate between political parties at the present time makes our contribution all the more necessary.

Lord Lawson of Blaby was Chancellor of the Exchequer 1983-89. He will be speaking at an Institute of Economic Affairs debate on climate change at the Institute of Directors in London today.

 

Take a look at this

Michael winning

Over at The Englishman’s Castle it says that some Russian fellows have hacked into the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, and published all its files. I won’t put them up here in case its actionable but you can have a look for yourself. I’ve scanned down them and if it’s a hoax, it’s pretty convincing and very very detailed!

some good news at last

Michael Winning

6 deg C warming this century? Bring it on I say. Pay Chindia to burn more coal, and do it now, at Copenhagen.

Climate Change, and what people really think

Update:- Good physics-based demolition of the CO2 myth over at Counting Cats….h/t the Devil

David Davis

I was intrigued just now by something Bishop Hill has done, in placing different strands of opinion about AGW and climate change generally, on a sort of Johari Window.

Here it is, but do read his piece.

100 watt light bulbs.

Fred Bloggs.

Although there is a store in Southport which has a large sign saying  ”We now stock 100 watt light bulbs.”

Here’s the details:
Chris Taylor Electrical Supplies
01704 544047

Enjoy.