Deep cleaning the NHS

Do you remember reading that "NHS hospitals are to be ordered by Prime Minister Gordon Brown to conduct a "deep clean" to tackle the spread of infections such as "superbug" MRSA. He wants the cleaning to be pre-emptive rather than a reaction to outbreaks." There was plenty of criticism at the time of the pointlessness of the exercise at MRSA is carried by humans - staff, patients and visitors - rather than the building.

However, having been into three London NHS hospitals over the past few years they could definitely do with a good clean; Mrs NotaSheep walked into a visitors toilet at St Mary's Paddington and found a swarm of flies, I witnessed a nurse changing a drip and wiping the spilt blood off the back of her hand onto her apron before moving straight onto the next patient, The dirt in one of the corridors at Hammersmith Hospital was not pleasant, I could go on and on.

So six weeks later has the "deep cleaning" started? Maybe it hasn't started but there must be a serious plan in place. It appears not.

David Cameron in his speech today replying to the Queens speech spilt the beans:
"Let me take just one example: the Prime Minister’s pledge to “deep clean” our hospitals. Here is the headline from one newspaper—it is just what he wanted:

“I’ll wipe the wards clean—PM’s amazing pledge on MRSA”.

When we look at it more closely, it certainly is amazing. The Prime Minister said that “deep cleaning” would happen in “every hospital”, but listen to what the Department of Health said:

“There are no plans to centrally monitor the deep cleaning of hospitals. Arrangements for the programme are entirely a matter for local determination”.

[Interruption.] Wait. The Department of Health went on:

“Undertaking deep-clean is just one of a number of approaches trusts may take in tackling healthcare infections.”

It gets worse. The Prime Minister said that deep cleaning would happen “over the next year”, but the Department of Health said that

“no specific date has been set for either the commencement or completion of the deep-clean programme.”

The Prime Minister said deep cleaning would be repeated “every 18 months”, but the Department of Health said:

“The success of the first programme of deep cleaning will be fully evaluated before a decision is made about whether to repeat.”

Then it said:

“There are also no plans to assess the effectiveness of deep-cleaning.”

Therefore, all the things that the Prime Minister told us—that it would happen in every hospital, start immediately and be repeated every 18 months—turned out not to be true.

What a complete shambles. People are worried about going to hospital and catching a disease that might kill them, and all they get from the Government are short-term tricks. I will tell you, Mr Speaker, what needs a deep clean: the culture of spin, deceit and half-truth that we get from the Government."


That's Gordon Brown's Government for you...

Do you think the BBC covered that part of David Cameron's speech? What do you think... Of course not, the only reference to health in the BBC's coverage of the debate is this "Other bills announced include a Health and Social Care Bill which introduces a single regulator for the health and adult care services who will also have the power to fine hospitals for failing to meet hygiene standards." BBC up to the usual standards of impartiality there.

UPDATE:
My humble apologies, there is a reference on the page describing David Cameron's speech it is "He also criticised the government's plans to "deep clean" hospital wards as a "complete shambles"", that covers it, no? No it doesn't. BBC bias "present and correct"...

John Prescott's deep clean

The Herald inform us that "Tory HQ last night berated the "exorbitant" cost - more than £3000 - of deep cleaning John Prescott's former grace-and-favour flat in Whitehall, famous as the scene of his romantic assignations with Tracey Temple, his diary secretary.

Parliamentary answers to Conservative questions revealed the "deep clean" of the former deputy prime minister's two-bedroom flat at Admiralty House cost £3320.

The Tories pointed out this was despite the fact commercial contractors normally charged just £200 to clean such a property when tenants moved out.

They also noted that the cleaning bill was on top of the £173,000 yearly cost to the public purse of the flat.

Parliamentary answers also revealed that refurbishing the flat, now occupied by Lord Malloch-Brown, the Foreign Office minister, cost £1030 for new curtains plus £9322 for a washing machine, tumble dryer, freezer, new taps and repainting the bedrooms, bathroom and corridor."


What John Prescott did in the flat to make it that dirty is not something I want to think about over the coming weekend.

Dirty NHS

I have blogged previously about how dirty NHS hospitals are and how Gordon Brown's "deep clean" initiative is little more than a piece of froth and spin.

Now I read in The Telegraph that:

"More than a quarter of health trusts in England are failing to meet basic hygiene standards, official figures show today.

The Healthcare Commission reports that no improvement has been made on a year ago.

In total, 103 out of 391 trusts admitted they did not achieve the minimum requirements, brought in by the Government to help combat the hospital superbugs, MRSA and Clostridium difficile.

Patients groups and politicians said that it was "shocking" that one in four still did not meet the standards, despite ministers' pledges to tackle cleanliness.

More than 8,000 deaths were related to MRSA and C. diff. The report shows that
26 per cent of trusts failed to keep facilities clean, did not have adequate infection control or follow guidelines
on decontaminating reusable equipment.

Only 40 per cent of trusts claim to have met all the Governments standards, which include patient care and confidentiality as well as hygiene, a slight fall on last year.

The commission warns that even fewer trusts may be deemed to have met all the criteria by the time it finishes spot checks this year.

The failings come despite a £50 million "deep clean" of every hospital in England, designed to curb superbugs. "

The telegraph article does include an "excuse" and an "explanation" from Ben Bradshaw but I am tired of Ministers like him who are just a walking excuse for the mismanagement of the country and so if you want to read his pearls of "wisdom" you'll have to read them in The Telegraph as they wont get house room here.

Deep-cleaning the NHS (update)

The BBC are "reporting" as I blogged recently that some NHS Trusts will miss Gordon Brown's deep-clean deadline. Of course the BBC start the article with a piece of pro-Labour spin "The NHS is likely to narrowly miss its target to deep clean all the hospitals in England by the end of March. Ministers expect 93% of trusts to have completed the process by the end of Monday. The rest have all started the cleans and will finish soon, they say."

Deep-cleaning the NHS

Do you remember Gordon Brown promising to have every hospital in the deep cleaned over a period of a year? I wrote soon after that "There are no plans to centrally monitor the deep cleaning of hospitals." and reported that the Department of Health had said that "no specific date has been set for either the commencement or completion of the deep-clean programme." and that "There are also no plans to assess the effectiveness of deep-cleaning."

Today I learn that the money to fund the "deep cleaning" hasn't even reached all of the hospitals. The Telegraph reports that "Primary care trusts across the country admitted yesterday that they would fail to hit Monday's deadline, while others have hastily scheduled cleaning programmes for the weeekend. Figures show that only a quarter of the £57 million allocated for deep-cleaning has reached hospitals."


Something for David Cameron to bring up at PMQs on Wednesday? If he did, I wonder what fraudulent statistics Gordon Brown would counter with?

The NHS is the envy of the world

A panelist on "Any Questions" or "Question Time" only has to utter the phrase "the NHS is the envy of the world" for there to be a smattering of self-satisfied applause from some of the audience, add some comment about the dedicated workers in the NHS and it makes intelligent criticism all but impossible.

Frank Dobson promised to make the NHS the envy of the world in 1997, "When the Health Secretary Frank Dobson unveiled the government's Health White Paper for England in December 1997, he called it a new beginning for the NHS. He said his aim was to promote fairness and efficiency while eliminating waste and unnecessary bureaucracy. The Paper announced a reduction in the number of NHS trusts and health authorities and a limitation on the role played by the internal market system introduced by the Conservatives in 1990. In total, Mr Dobson claimed the changes would save £1bn by cutting unnecessary red tape." Have you noticed the reduction in red tape and bureaucracy? One of the new services promised was "The NHS is to get its own information superhighway. It will be called 'NHSNet' and allow on-line booking of out-patient appointments and speed up test results. The government wants demonstration sites up and running in 1998." Remind me when that came on-line... You can read more about Frank Dobson's plans here.

In October 2007 a survey across all EU member states plus Switzerland and Norway ranks Britain 17th out of 29 countries for patient satisfaction. You can read more about this survey here. Here are some key points - "Its rating was dragged down by waiting lists, MRSA infection rates, access to cancer drugs and dentists as well as cancer survival rates." "The Euro Health Consumer Index, which has been compiled for the past three years by the Health Consumer Powerhouse, a Swedish think-tank, is the only survey that compares European health care systems from a consumer point of view. It assessed 27 indicators in five categories: patients' rights and information; waiting time for treatment; outcomes measured by certain death rates; the range of services offered by health systems; and the availability of drugs. In five categories, the UK scores just 581 points out of 1,000 compared to top place Austria's average of 806. This puts Britain behind Estonia and just above Italy and Portugal." "the report concludes: "Despite substantial funding increases, the UK is still a mediocre overall performer."

Gordon Brown and his Labour apparatchiks still believe that throwing large sums of money at a problem will solve it, especially if you pay most of that money to Consultants who can use long words and produce pretty charts. However a recent study in The Lancet said survival rates in Britain were among the lowest in Europe.
"Survival rates are based on the number of patients who are alive five years after diagnosis and researchers found that, for women, England was the fifth worst in a league of 22 countries. Scotland came bottom. Cancer experts blamed late diagnosis and long waiting lists. ."

"A second Lancet article, which looked at 2.7 million patients diagnosed between 1995 and 1999, found that countries which spent the most on health per capita a year had better survival rates. Britain was the exception. Despite spending up to £1,500 on health per person per year, it recorded similar survival rates for Hodgkin's disease and lung cancer as Poland, which spends a third of that amount." This Government has wasted more money than you would believe, one day it will be totted up and the public will not believe it possible.

"Well would you want to be ill in America" is the cry when anyone suggests that maybe some form of payment for health care might be called for. Well it appears that "Patients who have major operations on the National Health Service are four times more likely to die than Americans undergoing such surgery, according to a new study. The difference in mortality rates was blamed on long NHS waiting lists, a shortage of specialists and competition for intensive care beds. The joint study, carried out by University College London and a team from Columbia University in New York, found that patients in Britain who were most at risk of complications after major surgery were not being seen by specialists and were not reaching intensive care units in time to save them. The study followed 1,100 patients at the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth and compared them with 1,000 patients who had undergone similar major surgery at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. The results showed that just under 10 per cent of the British patients died in hospital after major surgery, compared with 2.5 per cent of the American patients. Each year, more than three million operations are carried out on the NHS and about 350,000 of these are emergencies which carry a higher risk of complications. Professor Monty Mythen, head of anaesthesia at UCL who led the British side of the research, said: "The main difference seems to be in the quality of post-operative care and who cares."" Read the rest of the article and plan to be in the US if you want to survive treatment.

But what about the cost of US treatment, at least the NHS is free. True it is free (mostly) at the point of use - if you ignore taxation, see note at end of this article -, but you do risk contracting MRSA, Clostridium difficile etc. Maybe that is why "Record numbers go abroad for health".
"Thousands of "health tourists" are going as far as India, Malaysia and South Africa for major operations – such is their despair over the quality of health services. The first survey of Britons opting for treatment overseas shows that fears of hospital infections and frustration with NHS waiting lists are fuelling the increasing trend. More than 70,000 Britons will have treatment abroad this year – a figure that is forecast to rise to almost 200,000 by the end of the decade. Patients needing major heart surgery, hip operations and cataracts are using the internet to book operations to be carried out thousands of miles away." What's the most popular country to go to for surgery? India. Why? "Almost all of those who had received treatment abroad said they would do the same again, with patients pointing out that some hospitals in India had screening policies for the superbug MRSA that have yet to be introduced in this country." You might have an 8 hour flight to Delhi or Bombay but once there the hospitals are actually cleaned properly every day, not as part of a special "deep clean". For more on the "deep clean" idea, you can read Dr Rant and Devils Kitchen. The point being that it isn't the building that is harbouring MRSA, it is the staff, patients and visitors who carry it. Roy Lilley, a former NHS trust chairman and the author of a book on healthcare management, told the BBC he thought the "deep cleaning" idea was "irritatingly populist". He said: "This will get a huge round of applause from the Labour Party conference floor and everyone will say 'yes, he's the man that's cleaning up the hospitals'. "But at the end of the day, the infection control systems are about handwashing; it's about clinical discipline and it's about screening people before they come in. "You can clean a hospital on Monday and on Wednesday, you'll be back where you started." ... " That was from Democratic Deficit.


For more on NHS stupidity take a look at the NHS Blog Doctor, Health Matters and Right for Scotland.


The NHS is free at the point of use. Yes it generally is but a 2005 estimate put the British workforce at 30m people and an unemployment rate of 4.7%. That means that just over 28.5 million people legally work in this country and pay tax. The “free” NHS was costing each worker £2,105 per year or £40 per week on average. How much would a decent private medical plan cost? Less than £175 a month I would have thought and I don't believe anyone has died from MRSA or Clostridium difficile in a BUPA or PPP or WPA hospital.

Gordon Brown on hospital cleanliness

It would seem that Gordon Brown has moved on with his cleaning of hospitals, the same hospitals that he has been in charge of funding for the last 10 years.

"All patients entering NHS hospitals in England will be screened for MRSA and Clostridium difficile, the PM has said. Gordon Brown told BBC One's Andrew Marr Show that tackling hospital-acquired infections was an "absolute priority". A programme of deep cleaning hospitals had begun and would continue across the country in the coming months, he said."

The deep cleaning programnme has started has it, what hospitals have been deep cleaned so far?


"Mr Brown said the government was setting aside £50m to pay for the deep-clean programme. It had doubled the number of matrons on NHS wards, and introduced stiffer penalties for hospitals where cleaning is not done properly, he added."

I don't know but I just don't believe either of those statistics, I wonder why? Is this £50m new money or coming from existing budgets? If it is from existing budgets then which ones and what will be unfunded as a result? Could it be that Gordon Brown has fiddled so many figures and double or treble announced so many increases in funding over the last 10 years that his credibility is at approximately zero. The man is a fraud and thankfully the rest of the country is finally catching up with those of us who worked this out years ago.

Someone who has been telling us this for longer than most isGuido Fawkes who writes today that "However much Brown smiles manically in front of the cameras, the public believe he is a grumpy, defensive, brooding control freak - because after ten years we know the truth. You can't fool all of the people for such a long time. Recognition of his mincing, finger-chewing, snot-eating, greasy haired, foul tempered nature and weird dark ways has broken out of the confines of the Westminster Village and is seeping into a wider popular consciousness."

The NHS - "the envy of the world"

It is a truism, much loved by the Labour party and the BBC, that the NHS is "the envy of the world" and so anyone that is less than passionate about the NHS must have their credibility destroyed. So it is with much glee that the BBC report the attacks on Daniel Hannan for speaking out in America. The BBC and the Labour party, and there is a definite alliance between the two on this matter as with many others, have been itching to "get back" Daniel Hannan ever since he made that speech and elicited such a revealing response from Gordon Brown. This is their first opportunity and they have taken it with both hands. Andy Burnham has accused Dan Hannan of being almost "unpatriotic" and tried to raise fears about the NHS in Tory hands with this

"What has happened within the last 48 hours is what Cameron has feared most because it lays bare the Tories' deep ambivalence towards the NHS."

The Labour party love to call Conservatives unpatriotic when they disagree with Labour policy, remember the similar Labour slurs when George Osborne said that Labour Government policies could trigger a run on the pound?

The "envy of the world" is of course nothing of the sort. If it was then other countries would have copied the NHS, but which have?

If you have had the misfortune to spend any time in a NHS hospital then you would know all about the dirt, the uncaring nurses and the overwhelming sense that the hospital would run so much better if it wasn't for the pesky patients. The "deep clean" was Labour spin. A October 2007 EU wide survey ranked Britain 17th out of 29 countries for patient satisfaction.

As I wrote in 2007: A second Lancet article, which looked at 2.7 million patients diagnosed between 1995 and 1999, found that countries which spent the most on health per capita a year had better survival rates. Britain was the exception. Despite spending up to £1,500 on health per person per year, it recorded similar survival rates for Hodgkin's disease and lung cancer as Poland, which spends a third of that amount." This Government has wasted more money than you would believe, one day it will be totted up and the public will not believe it possible.

Patients who have major operations on the National Health Service are four times more likely to die than Americans undergoing such surgery, according to a new study. The difference in mortality rates was blamed on long NHS waiting lists, a shortage of specialists and competition for intensive care beds. The joint study, carried out by University College London and a team from Columbia University in New York, found that patients in Britain who were most at risk of complications after major surgery were not being seen by specialists and were not reaching intensive care units in time to save them. The study followed 1,100 patients at the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth and compared them with 1,000 patients who had undergone similar major surgery at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. The results showed that just under 10 per cent of the British patients died in hospital after major surgery, compared with 2.5 per cent of the American patients. Each year, more than three million operations are carried out on the NHS and about 350,000 of these are emergencies which carry a higher risk of complications. Professor Monty Mythen, head of anaesthesia at UCL who led the British side of the research, said: "The main difference seems to be in the quality of post-operative care and who cares."" Read the rest of the article and plan to be in the US if you want to survive treatment.


But what about the cost of US treatment, at least the NHS is free? True it is free (mostly) at the point of use - if you ignore taxation, but you can't so - a 2005 estimate put the British workforce at 30m people and an unemployment rate of 4.7%. That means that just over 28.5 million people legally work in this country and pay tax. The “free” NHS was costing each worker £2,105 per year or £40 per week on average. How much would a decent private medical plan cost? Less than £175 a month I would have thought and I don't believe anyone has died from MRSA or Clostridium difficile in a BUPA or PPP or WPA hospital.


If the NHS was indeed "the envy of the world" then not only would much of the rest of the world have copied it but there would be little demand for expensive private medical insurance. That few (if any countries) have copied it and that there is great demand for private medical insurance speaks volumes.

Deep Cleaning the NHS

A progress report from Dr Rant.

"Quite simply, the ‘deep clean’ team is simply a collection of migrant floor-cleaners, who are mopping hospital floors rather that the local McDonalds. They are not highly trained infection control workers. They are not using state of the art cleaning equipment (Dr Rant does not consider a mop to be ‘state of the art’). And they do not appear to be doing anything more than a routine hospital cleaner would be doing.

Except for the bright yellow tee-shirt, of course.

The problems with hospital acquired infections is that NHS hospitals require far more than a simple mop and bucket. Washing a layer of dirt of a twenty year-old Skoda car will not hide the fact that it has a crap engine...

Telling doctors to remove their ties and watches will make fuck-all difference when patients are practically shitting on each other because of ward over-crowding. Four hour A+E waits force patients onto wards that have not yet been cleaned. And existing cleaners are neither motivated nor encouraged."



Do read the rest of the article.

The NHS deep clean seems to have been a great success

I read that cases of MRSA are still rising in 10% of hospital trusts and C.diff in 20%. The National Audit Office report a "lamentable lack of progress" on measuring other infections. "Lamentable" just about sums up this Labour government.

Who are the BMA and why are they opposed to the NHS reforms. Why are the BBC so supportive of them both?

All day the BBC have had representatives of the BMA on the radio, television and quoted on the web news explaining why the government's reform of the NHS is a bad idea and that hospitals will have to close, patient care will be compromised and treatment rationed by this risky restructuring.

So who are the BMA? Are they impartial observers whose only interest is the welfare of the NHS? Of course not, the BMA are part of the TUC of the NHS. There prime interest in this matter is to protect the interests of their members. When I say 'interests' I mean of course income, for the government's proposals may, if they work and are allowed to work, end the many 'Spanish practices' in the NHS, the over-generous overtime and replace them with a degree of competition.


The BBC sees itself as the protector of socialised medicine in the UK and will not accept any criticisms of the hard-working staff in the NHS. This morning 5Live were obsessed by the idea that David Cameron had let slip that he thought the NHS was (in some regards) second-rate; I think he was just talking about the UK's cancer survival rate. This comment was just not acceptable to the BBC; why? My interactions with the NHS have generally shown it to be second-rate at best. I have experienced incorrect diagnoses, had injuries inflicted upon me (and indeed Mrs NotaSheep) as a result of doctors' carelessness, spent hours in A&E waiting to see a doctor and watching the inefficiency that surrounded us, spent a night in an A&E ward kept awake by chatting nurses at the nurses station, watched my blood being smeared across the tunic of a nurse after she gave me an injection and then watched her wander off to the next patient... The NHS is not 'the envy of the world' and I blogged examples previously.

Here's something I wrote  in August 2009:

'The "envy of the world" is of course nothing of the sort. If it was then other countries would have copied the NHS, but which have?

If you have had the misfortune to spend any time in a NHS hospital then you would know all about the dirt, the uncaring nurses and the overwhelming sense that the hospital would run so much better if it wasn't for the pesky patients. The "deep clean" was Labour spin. A October 2007 EU wide survey ranked Britain 17th out of 29 countries for patient satisfaction.

As I wrote in 2007:

'A second Lancet article, which looked at 2.7 million patients diagnosed between 1995 and 1999, found that countries which spent the most on health per capita a year had better survival rates. Britain was the exception. Despite spending up to £1,500 on health per person per year, it recorded similar survival rates for Hodgkin's disease and lung cancer as Poland, which spends a third of that amount." This Government has wasted more money than you would believe, one day it will be totted up and the public will not believe it possible.

Patients who have major operations on the National Health Service are four times more likely to die than Americans undergoing such surgery, according to a new study. The difference in mortality rates was blamed on long NHS waiting lists, a shortage of specialists and competition for intensive care beds. The joint study, carried out by University College London and a team from Columbia University in New York, found that patients in Britain who were most at risk of complications after major surgery were not being seen by specialists and were not reaching intensive care units in time to save them. The study followed 1,100 patients at the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth and compared them with 1,000 patients who had undergone similar major surgery at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. The results showed that just under 10 per cent of the British patients died in hospital after major surgery, compared with 2.5 per cent of the American patients. Each year, more than three million operations are carried out on the NHS and about 350,000 of these are emergencies which carry a higher risk of complications. Professor Monty Mythen, head of anaesthesia at UCL who led the British side of the research, said: "The main difference seems to be in the quality of post-operative care and who cares."" Read the rest of the article and plan to be in the US if you want to survive treatment.


But what about the cost of US treatment, at least the NHS is free? True it is free (mostly) at the point of use - if you ignore taxation, but you can't so - a 2005 estimate put the British workforce at 30m people and an unemployment rate of 4.7%. That means that just over 28.5 million people legally work in this country and pay tax. The “free” NHS was costing each worker £2,105 per year or £40 per week on average. How much would a decent private medical plan cost? Less than £175 a month I would have thought and I don't believe anyone has died from MRSA or Clostridium difficile in a BUPA or PPP or WPA hospital.


If the NHS was indeed "the envy of the world" then not only would much of the rest of the world have copied it but there would be little demand for expensive private medical insurance. That few (if any countries) have copied it and that there is great demand for private medical insurance speaks volumes. '

The NHS in 2008

From Burning Our Money comes this anecdote that I thought worth repeating:

"Tyler went to hospital for a regular check up last week. Fortunately, he has BUPA, so it was at the local private hospital. It has never had a single case of C diff or MRSA. But in conversation with a consultant who also works in the local NHS hospital, he was told the latter - despite its recent deep clean - is still rife with the bugs: "they've colonised the place". "So what's the solution?" asked Tyler. "Burn it down" was the serious reply. "Burn it down, and rebuild from scratch - it's the only sure way". And that's what we've come to."

The Balen Report

I have blogged many times before about the Balen Report and how the BBC are so keen to keep it secret. You can read more about this report here.

Today I read in the Standard that:

"Somewhere deep in the bowels of the BBC is a top secret document that could explain a great deal about the corporation's decision to boycott the aid appeal for Gaza. It is called the Balen Report and has been seen only by a small number of individuals at the very top of the BBC. They commissioned Malcolm Balen, a senior editorial adviser, to investigate allegations that the BBC's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was biased.

Balen examined hundreds of hours of broadcast material, television and radio, and analysed the content in minute detail, often scrutinising journalists' individual phrases and choice of words. He then put his conclusions in a 20,000-word report. If BBC executives had hoped for a clean bill of health they were to be disappointed. Balen's findings, given highly restricted circulation at the end of 2004, were frightening.

Although they were kept secret, elements leaked out, including Balen's conclusion that the BBC's Middle East coverage had been biased against Israel.

...

According to sources inside the corporation tensions over Israeli-Palestinian coverage have induced a state of near psychosis among BBC executives and policy-makers. One insider told the Standard: "They are in a complete white funk. To describe them as like headless chickens running all over the place would be to convey an impression of too much order and cohesion. They are cowering in corners. The fear is palpable."

...


A sense that BBC journalists favoured the Palestinian side was reinforced by a number of famous incidents with which the corporation had to grapple. In 2004, just as Balen was becoming the orthodoxy among editorial managers, Barbara Plett, an experienced journalist who worked as a BBC correspondent in Jerusalem, took part in a From Our Own Correspondent broadcast.

Plett, who had covered the siege of Yasser Arafat's compound on the West Bank, talked about seeing Arafat being taken to hospital by helicopter towards the end of his life. She said: "When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound I started to cry ..."

Her remarks prompted outrage in some quarters, especially among Israelis and Jews who remembered Arafat as an enemy, unworthy of sympathy. Complaints poured in, but the BBC rejected them - at first. The pressure grew and almost a year after the broadcast the governors' complaints committee decided Plett's words had breached "the requirements of due impartiality".

...

The Plett affair came just after the Israeli government complained to the BBC that its Middle East correspondent, Orla Guerin, was guilty of "verging on anti-Semitism" in a report about a would-be suicide bomber. Guerin had long been an irritant for the Israelis. The Irish correspondent turned to journalism after failing to win an election for Labour in Dublin in 1994 and she joined the BBC after a promising career with RTE, the Irish broadcaster.

In 2002, Guerin claimed she had been targeted by Israeli soldiers who, she said, deliberately shot at her during a demonstration in Bethlehem. A year later Israel boycotted the BBC after accusing her of "deep-seated bias" in her reports. Then, in 2006, during the war in Lebanon she was accused of misreporting when she claimed a town near the Israel border had been "wiped out" by Israeli forces. "I haven't seen a single building that isn't damaged in some way," she said.

But Alex Thomson, filing for Channel 4 from the same town, Bint Jbeil, on the same day, presented a different perspective. He reported that the suburbs of the town "are pretty much untouched by the Israeli attack".

To the disinterested, the differences between these two versions may seem minor. But in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the passions it arouses a minor discrepancy almost always prompts an accusation of siding with one faction or the other."

Do read the whole article but ask yourself this; if the Balen report agreed with the BBC's claims of them having no bias against Israel then would not the BBC publish it, as they refuse to publish it I think we can draw our own conclusions.

Why are the "Green Movement" not interested in solutions other than reduction in economic activity

I have long wondered what would happen if a solution to the "problem" of CO2 emissions was ever discovered. What would the "green movement" do, after all if excess CO2 (whatever excess CO2 is) could be eliminated then we would not need to make the radical reductions in CO2 emissions that we are told are necessary to save the planet.

So I was interested to read this at Miller McCune:

"Peridotite, it turns out, absorbs carbon dioxide, and according to Krevor it potentially represents one of the greatest — if most bafflingly ignored — solutions to climate change in the world.

Originating deep in the earth, peridotite is a part of a family — "ultramafic rock" — that reacts naturally with CO2 to form solid minerals. Last May, Krevor was the lead author of a study identifying and mapping enough ultramafic rock in the United States to sequester an enormous amount of carbon dioxide. Taking into account various land-use constraints — private property, proximity to cities, national and state parks — he and his fellow researchers found storage potential for 500 years of the country's CO2 emissions.

So it's a mystery of current climate studies that the U.S. Department of Energy, the country's largest single source of funding into clean energy research and development, has awarded just one small grant, in 2003, to researchers studying mineral sequestration.

"It's very striking," Krevor said. "This is a technology that's a potential game changer, and there's been very little research done in the area.""

If the ecologists are not interested in mineral sequestration then might that be because their object is not CO2 emissions reduction but wealth redistribution.


All the above assumes that the science of Global Warming is correct, something that intelligent people I think realise is not by any means proven.

Monday afternoon catch-up - Climate Change Special

More Firefox tabs that I need to close...

1) Climate Realists reported on 13 January that

'Ex-CIA agent emails former colleagues of disgraced United Nations professor offering millions for evidence of climate fraud.

Kent Clizbe took time out from a busy work schedule this week to help climate skeptics in efforts to nail one of their biggest targets in the global warming scam, Penn. State University professor, Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann.

Mann is the climate scientist who devised the so-called ‘hockey stick’ graph that the UN used to blame human emissions of carbon dioxide for ‘global warming.’ The UN has since dropped the discredited graph from its publicity while Mann has been subject to increasing legal scrutiny.

State Prosecutor Makes Breakthrough in Climate Case

The latest initiative follows hot on the heels of last week’s courtroom success for Virginia Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli against Mann’s former employers at the University of Virginia. The university squandered half a million dollars in a desperate attempt to withhold past records of Mann from Cuccinelli. A court ruling ended such shenanigans.

Buoyed by the success Clizbe has been able to identify over 40 ex-colleagues of Mann at the University of Virginia (U.Va) and he’s making each and everyone one of them a tempting multi-million dollar offer.'

I wonder if anyone has taken up the offer yet?


2) Resilient Earth put forward 'The Case For Doing Nothing About Global Warming', it's a long and fascinating article, do take the time to read it all. However here's one graph and mote that I think says more than most words ever could:

'Since the rise of human civilization we have been blessed with good climatic conditions—most of the past 10,000 have been warmer than the present. With the exception of a brief cool period about 8,200 years ago, the entire period from 1,500 to 10,500 years ago was significantly warmer than present. The graph below is from Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, and is based on GISP2 Greenland ice core data. Consider all the attention that 2010 is getting as a contender for the “warmest year of the century.” Of the past 10,500 years, 9,100 were warmer than 1934/1998/2010) Thus, regardless of which year—1934, 1998, or 2010, NOAA keeps changing their data—proves to be the warmest of the past century, that year will rank number 9,099 in the long-term Holocene list.

...

That kind of puts the hoopla about the “hottest year since” contest into perspective. For more detailed information see “2010 – where does it fit in the warmest year list?” on the Watts Up With That? website. Again, the point here is that warm is good and warmer is better. If not for global warming we would still be huddled in caves and hunting mastodon for dinner.'

Here's the article's finale:

'The likely effects of global warming are more moderate weather at higher latitudes, more food from greater rainfall and longer growing seasons, and better health for all. Tropical regions are unlikely to be damaged and there will be fewer tropical storms. Commerce will be boosted as new trade routes appear around the formerly ice choked Arctic, which will also become available for oil and gas exploration. Sea-levels could rise a few feet over time (centuries), but you can build a dike around a city or even a country to hold the ocean at bay—there is nothing that can stop an advancing glacier.

As Svante Arrhenius said more than 100 years ago, global warming will make Earth's climate “more equable.” Weigh the benefits against the detriments and the conclusion is obvious—instead of trying to stop global warming, at the very least we should kick back and do nothing.

Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical.'

3) C3 Headlines reports that the oceans are not warming:

'Read here. The 'Argo' ocean buoy real-time reporting system is the most advanced technology that scientists possess for measuring ocean temperatures at varying levels. Recently, NASA scientists at its Jet Propulsion Lab reported that the Argo data was showing a slight ocean cooling trend since 2003, which was recently confirmed by another peer-reviewed paper.
This ocean cooling has proven to be a major source of embarrassment to AGW scientists as it is the exact opposite of what they and the IPCC climate models predicted.'

4) Daily Bayonet report that 'A new study suggests that compact fluorescent light bulbs may cause an increase in breast cancer:'


5) The Inconvenient Skeptic moans that:

'The longer I am involved in the global warming debate the more frustrated I am getting with the CRU temperature data.   This is the one of the most commonly cited sources of global temperature data, but the numbers just don’t stay put.  Each and every month the past monthly temperatures are revised.  Since I enter the data into a spreadsheet each month I am constantly seeing the shift in the data.  If it was the third significant digit it wouldn’t bother me (very much), but it is much more than that.
For example, I have two very different values for January of 2010 since September 2010.  Here are the values for January based on the date I gathered it.

Sep 10th, 2010:  January 2010 anomaly was  0.707 °C

Jan 30th, 2011:  January 2010 anomaly is now 0.675 °C

That is a 5% shift in the value for last January that has taken place in the past 4 months.  All of the initial months of the year show a fairly significant shift in temperature.'

Read it all, a fantastic piece.


6) Climate Realists has an interesting piece on a subject that environmentalists tend not to speak about:

'In China, the true cost of Britain's clean, green wind power experiment: Pollution on a disastrous scale,

This toxic lake poisons Chinese farmers, their children and their land. It is what's left behind after making the magnets for Britain's latest wind turbines... and, as a special Live investigation reveals, is merely one of a multitude of environmental sins committed in the name of our new green Jerusalem

On the outskirts of one of China’s most polluted cities, an old farmer stares despairingly out across an immense lake of bubbling toxic waste covered in black dust. He remembers it as fields of wheat and corn.

Yan Man Jia Hong is a dedicated Communist. At 74, he still believes in his revolutionary heroes, but he despises the young local officials and entrepreneurs who have let this happen.

‘Chairman Mao was a hero and saved us,’ he says. ‘But these people only care about money. They have destroyed our lives.’'

7) Autonomous Mind says that 'The Met Office winter forecast lie is finally nailed' and explains why...


8) UD/RK Samhalls Debatt has a fascianting article on a subject that I have blogged about several times in the recent past 'How the world temperature “record” was manipulated through dropping of (weather) stations'. Here's an extract, please do read up on this scandalous fact that the BBC have never (to my knowledge) ever mentioned. Here's a long'ish extract from a very long piece:

'I have written extensively on this blog about the tweaking, “adjustment” and manipulation of the historic and present temperature “record” which are presented in the official figures.

With the poor placement of stations (91 % of the stations are CRN 3 to 5 = bad to very poor); where they have purposely taken away the urban heat island effect, use huge smoothing radius, the historical “adjustment and tweaking” to cool the past etc.

Not to mention the great slaughter of GHCN stations around 1990 – roughly 63 % of all climate measuring stations were “dropped”. Oddly enough many of them in cold places – Hmmm? Now the number of GHCN stations are back at the same numbers as in 1890.

(See for example my posts:

Rewriting Temperature History – Time and Time Again!,

More on the Blunder with NASA: s GISS Temperature data and the mess they have,

The Big dropout of weather stations since 1989 – A 66% reduction in 11 years,

The Big Difference Between GISS and UAH Temperature Data.

Minus 60 C or not?

The world has never seen such freezing heat OR the Blunder with NASA: s GISS Temperature data)

Just one example of this historical “adjustment and tweaking” they are doing:

On average 20% of the historical record was modified 16 times 2006 to beginning of 2008. The largest single jump was 0.27 C. This occurred between the Oct 13, 2006 and Jan 15, 2007 records when Aug 2006 changed from an anomaly of +0.43C to +0.70C, a change of nearly 68%.

And what a “coincidence” that the data is always “modified” in only on direction – guess which one.

Also remember that the US stations are now nearly a third of the all GHCN world stations.

And as I said in the beginning – always remember that these figures are based on the official data that has been tweaked, “adjusted” and manipulated to fit there agenda (cool the past, ignore UHI and land use change factors, huge smoothing radius – 1200km etc.)..'

9) The Vancouver Sun reports that oddly 'A switch from incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescent light bulbs could up carbon dioxide emissions' - how can that be?

'Electricity in British Columbia, as in Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec, is almost entirely hydro. For climate-change environmentalists this is the holiest form of energy because hydroelectric generators release zero grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour. About one-third of B.C. homes are heated electrically, thus generating no carbon dioxide.

Two-thirds of B.C. homes, however, are heated with natural gas -- carbon fuel from deep in the earth.

Natural gas furnaces release 220 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour of heat.

The provincial government, the BC Hydro Power Smart advertisements, the David Suzuki website, Greenpeace and Natural Resources Canada all claim -- falsely -- that old-style light bulbs "waste energy." The reality is that old-style light bulbs and all electrical appliances are 100-per-cent efficient as space heaters.

There has been some debate about this in recent letters to The Vancouver Sun, so let's examine exactly what "100-per-cent efficient" means. Fundamental laws of thermodynamics state that energy cannot be lost: The power coming out of a light bulb must equal the power going into it. If a 100W light bulb is seven-per-cent efficient, it generates 93W of heat and 7W of light. But even the 7W of light ends up as heat (what else would it turn into?) when it gets absorbed by objects in the room. So 100 per cent of the electrical energy ends up as heat. Okay, you got me: If the blinds are open, a very small amount of the light may go out the window and heat up your lawn instead.

In the summer, I admit, light bulb heat is "wasted" but in the other three seasons it provides valuable heat that reduces natural gas consumption. As we replace old-style "hot" light bulbs with efficient "cool" light bulbs, our thermostats will keep the furnaces on longer and more carbon dioxide will be released into the atmosphere.'

Somehow I don't think that this news will be reported widely.


10) The Observatory is not a big fan of the predictions of Dr James Hansen and thinks he may have been proved wrong by events.