The Paris climate fiasco leaves UK alone in the dark per The Telegraph

Christopher Booker nails it in this article
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/12060003/The-Paris-climate-fiasco-leaves-UK-alone-in-the-dark.html

Here's an extract:

'It really is time for us all to grasp just what a charade all that wishful thinking in Paris turned out to be. Lost in their self-deluding group-think, the 40,000 delegates may have been happy to cheer the idea that we must abolish fossil fuels. But not one pointed out that the world currently depends on fossil fuels to provide nearly 87 per cent of all the energy it uses. Those useless "renewables" they want us all to use instead – based on the wind and the sun – supply less than 2 per cent.'

BBC bias, yesterday, Today, and tomorrow per Christopher Booker in The Telegraph

This part of Christopher Booker's column caught my eye:

'... on a whole range of issues, from the EU to climate change, the BBC is so lost in its own groupthink that it simply does not recognise just how biased it is. And the point about people who have become caught up in groupthink is that, whenever anyone dares question it, they can only respond with a flood of angry intolerance ... '

I think that sums up the BBC to a T.

More here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/11859875/BBC-bias-yesterday-Today-and-tomorrow.... And More clear bias every day on all of the BBC's outlets

MPs want to turn your lights off. A shame no one told you - Telegraph

' By 2020, it said, Britain must reduce its electricity use by "103 terawatt hours", rising by 2030 to "154 terawatt hours". This could have been understood only by someone aware that we currently use each year some 378 "terawatt hours". So what was being proposed was that this must be cut down in six years by 27 per cent – more than a quarter – rising 10 years later to a cut of more than 40 per cent, or two fifths.'

The climate change obsession that will destroy our economy and lives, more here from Christopher Booker in The Telegraph

UPDATE:
I am informed that Christopher Booker has corrected his article thus:

I must correct a rather serious error in this piece on such an important and complex subject. Although the amendment to the Government’s Energy Bill calling for a 27 percent reduction in Britain’s electricity use was bundled in with others, it was not a Government amendment, and although it was not formally withdrawn, it was not therefore part of the Bill as approved by the House. Later in the debate the minister, Greg Barker, did say that he “welcomed the principle behind the proposal’, but said that this issue should remain part of his Department’s ongoing review of how our electricity demand should be reduced. I apologise profusely to my readers for my misreading of what happened, which I will return to correct and explain in more detail in next week’s column. 

Look at the graph to see the evidence of global warming - Telegraph

'In recent months, even such fanatical proponents of the warmist orthodoxy as Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, James Hansen of Nasa, and the Met Office have all had to concede that since 1997, the warming trend has stalled virtually to a standstill. Of course, there was a modest temperature rise in the 20th century, as a continuation of the warming that began 200 years ago as the world naturally emerged from those centuries of cooling known as the Little Ice Age. But the 0.5C rise between 1976 and 1998 was no greater than the 0.5C rise between 1910 and 1940 (with 35 years of cooling between them, so that the net rise in the past century has been only 0.8C).'

More from Christopher Booker here - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/9919121/Look-at-the-graph-to-see-the-evidence-of-global-warming.html
Do read it because you won't read such commonsense on the BBC.

Wednesday morning catch-up

The usual story; too many open tabs and not enough time.

1. Christopher Booker explains why the BBC steadfastly avoided the facts about the wind farm scam in David Shukman's reports on energy policy for the BBC. Christopher Booker unveils the true lunacy of the Government's plans, plans idiotically pushed by Chris Huhne.

2. The Register report that coal power stations may be responsible for global cooling. When will scientists admit that even the most complex climate models can only approximate the Earth's true climate?


3. The Globe & Mail explain why gold coins are not an investment bubble.


4. The Standard reports the on the FSA report into the collapse of RBS and unlike the BBC actually reports what was said about the partial blame that was layable at the feet of Gordon Brown and Ed Balls.

The EU in context - 'Article 50 of Lisbon requires the EU to make a trade arrangement with any nation deciding to leave it.'

As the EU leaders meet to decide how to arrange the financial deckchairs on the Eurozone Titanic I thought some links to some EU related articles that I have been hoarding for a while.

1) Christopher Booker explains that:

'The EU's architects never meant it to be a democracy
The rise of a "technocracy" was always part of the plan for Europe.

...

The events of last week were by no means the first time that an elected prime minister has been toppled by the Euro-elite. The most dramatic example, as we also showed in our book, was in 1990, when Mrs Thatcher had emerged as the biggest obstacle to the next great leap forward in their slow-motion coup d’etat, the Maastricht Treaty, creating the European Union and the single currency. Following her ambushing at a European Council in October 1990, when she was outnumbered 11 to one, the trap was sprung. An alliance between the European elite, led by Jacques Delors, and our own Tory Europhiles, led by Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine, brought her down within weeks.

They had disposed of the greatest political obstacle to the onward march of their project just as ruthlessly as they were later to brush aside all those referendums expressing the objections of the French, the Dutch and the Irish to their Constitution. The one thing for which there has never been any place in their grand design is democracy.'

2) Liebrich has a wonderful collection of EU and Europe related quotations, here's a few of my favourites - as ever just listen to what they say:

'"Monetary Union is the motor of European integration"
Jean-Luc Dehaene, Prime Minister of Belgium.


"The richest state in Asia is Singapore - a small island with almost no natural resources; the richest country in Europe is Switzerland, which is not even in the EU, never mind the Euro."
'In or out - the case against the Euro', Fabian Society Pamphlet by Janet Bush and Larry Elliott, Labour party policy wonks. 3 August 2002.


"On 1 January 1999 with the introduction of the Euro ... an important part of national sovereignty, to wit monetary sovereignty, was passed over to a European institution ... The introduction of a common currency is not primarily an economic, but rather a sovereign and thus eminently political act...political union must be our lodestar from now on: it is the logical follow-on from Economic and Monetary Union."
Joschka Fischer, German Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor since 1998. Former Communist firebrand and photographed beater-up of a policeman (ironically called Mr Marx). Speech to the European Parliament, January 1999.


"The finance of the country is ultimately associated with the liberties of the country. It is a powerful leverage by which the English liberty has been gradually acquired. If the House of Commons by any possibility loses the power of control of the grants of public money, depend upon it, your very liberty will be worth very little in comparison."
William Ewart Gladstone, British Liberal Prime Minister 1868-74, 1880-85, 1886, and 1892-94. Speech in the House of Commons, 1891.


"The single currency is the greatest abandonment of sovereignty since the foundation of the European Community ... it is a decision of an essentially political nature. We need this United Europe ... we must never forget that the Euro is an instrument for this project."
Felipe Gonzalez, Socialist Prime Minister of Spain from 1982 to 1996. May 1998.


"There is no example in history of a lasting monetary union that was not linked to one State."
Otmar Issuing, Chief Economist of the German Bundesbank Council,1991.



"A single currency is about the politics of Europe. It is about a Federal Europe by the back door."
John Major, British Conservative politician, Prime Minister 1991-1997, widely viewed as a failure and famous mainly for calling Eurosceptics bastards and shagging Edwina Currie. November 1996.


"The fusion of economic functions would compel nations to fuse their sovereignty into that of a single European State"
Jean Monnet, founder of the European Movement. Former Cognac salesman and bureaucrat at the League of Nations. 3rd April 1952


"We have started a new chapter in the structure of Europe. The Euro was not just a bankers' decision or a technical decision. It was a decision that completely changed the nature of the nation states."

"The pillars of the nation state are the sword and the currency, and we changed that."

"[My] real goal [is to draw on] the consequences of the single currency and create a political Europe."
Romano Prodi, EU Commission President. Interview in the Financial Times, April 1999.


"The Euro can only lead to closer and closer integration of countries' economic policies ... This demands that member states give up more sovereignty".
Romano Prodi, EU Commission President. Interview in Daily Telegraph, 7 April 1999.


"We must now face the difficult task of moving forward towards a single economy, a single political entity... For the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire we have the opportunity to unite Europe."
Romano Prodi, EU Commission President, speech to European Parliament, 13th October 1999.


"The single market was the theme of the Eighties. The single currency was the theme of the Nineties. We must now face the difficult task of moving towards a single economy, a single political unity."
Romano Prodi, EU Commission President, speech to European Parliament, 14 April 1999.


"I am sure the euro will oblige us to introduce a new set of economic policy instruments. It is politically impossible to propose that now. But some day there will be a crisis and new instruments will be created."
Romano Prodi

"I know very well that the Stability Pact [which fines Euro-zone countries if they persistently run budget deficits over 3%] is stupid, like all decisions which are rigid."
Romano Prodi, EU Commission President. Interview with le Monde, 17 Oct 2002. The Stability Pact immediately became known as the Stupidity Pact.


"[European Monetary Union is] a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe ... [if you are prepared to give up Sovereignty to the EU] you might just as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly."
Nicholas Ridley (1929 - 1993) Secretary of State for Trade and Industry under Margaret Thatcher, taking a career-ending dive into the swivel-eyed tendency, for which he was forced to resign. From an interview in Spectator magazine, July 1990.


"[What is needed is the] Europeanisation of everything to do with economic and financial policy. European Monetary Union has to be complemented with political union - that was always the presumption of Europeans."
Gerhard Schröder, German Chancellor from 1998 who does NOT dye his hair. Interview, 2002. Well that's pretty clear.


"Of course the risks will remain, especially if we don't follow up the bold step that led to a single currency with further bold steps towards political integration".
Gerhard Schröder, German Chancellor from 1998. Date uncertain.


"The introduction of the Euro is probably the most important integrating step since the beginning of the unification process. It is certain that the times of individual national efforts regarding employment policies, social and tax policies are definitely over. This will require to finally bury some erroneous ideas of national sovereignty... I am convinced our standing in the world regarding foreign trade and international finance policies will sooner or later force a Common Foreign and Security Policy worthy of its name... National sovereignty in foreign and security policy will soon prove itself to be a product of the imagination."
Gerhard Schroeder, German Chancellor from 1998. From 'New Foundations for European Integration', 19th January 1999.


"A European currency will lead to member-nations transferring their sovereignty over financial and wage policies as well as in monetary affairs... It is an illusion to think that States can hold on to their autonomy over taxation policies."
Hans Tietmeyer, Bundesbank President. Date uncertain.


"When exercising the powers and carrying out the tasks and duties conferred upon them ... neither the ECB, nor a national central bank, nor any member of their decision making bodies shall seek or take instructions from Community institutions or bodies, from any government of a Member State or from any other body. "
Treaty of Rome, 1957, Article 107. This doesn't explain why it was so important that the second head of the ECB be French, since he's not allowed by law to act in the interest of any one country.


"The process of monetary union goes hand in hand, must go hand in hand, with political integration and ultimately political union. EMU is, and always was meant to be, a stepping stone on the way to a united Europe."
Wim Duisenburg, President of the European Central Bank. Date uncertain. Note the choice of words "was always meant to be", which communicates a false inevitability.'

I'll repeat one of those for emphasis:
'"I am sure the euro will oblige us to introduce a new set of economic policy instruments. It is politically impossible to propose that now. But some day there will be a crisis and new instruments will be created."'
Romano Prodi, EU Commission President. Financial Times, 4 December 2001. Amazing, the front on these guys. So a future crisis is not seen as an indictment of the current system but an opportunity to extend it.


3) M E Synon in The Mail takes the EU to task for peddling the lie that: 'We (the EU) secured the last 50 years of peace'

'The word around Brussels is that the euro-elite thought the EU was in line to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yes, I know: all one can say is, 'Huh?'

Yet it seems that José Manuel Barroso, Herman Van Rompuy and the rest fancied the EU deserved the prize for keeping Europe at peace for 50 years.

At which point 'Huh?' becomes disgust. This 'the EU kept the peace for 50 years' lie is being used by euro-ideologues in their efforts to re-write history. (If you have school-age children, better check their school books to see just how far this lie has seeped into their curriculum.)'

4) The Telegraph reports that:

'Britain will be better off in five years’ time if the eurozone breaks up than if the single currency survives the debt crisis, research suggests today. '

According to The Telegraph the report that I have not heard the BBC mention suggests that:

'The disorderly break-up of the euro would mean a short, sharp economic shock and probably a recession, but would be followed by a quicker return to strong economic growth, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

As European governments struggle to keep the eurozone together, Greek political leaders last night sealed a pact to form a national unity government after George Papandreou, the prime minister, announced his imminent resignation under pressure from a European ultimatum.

David Cameron will today tell MPs that the failure of eurozone leaders to resolve the debt crisis is harming the economy, and will warn that the break-up of the single currency would be even more damaging.

However, CEBR economists suggest that the demise of the euro would “not be anything like the disaster that has been argued”.

Freed from the constraints of the single currency, strong countries such as Germany would see their currencies gain in price in relation to the pound, boosting British exports.

The economists also predict that break-up would free many eurozone members from the deficit-cutting austerity policies that threaten to subdue their growth for years.

“If it breaks up the immediate pain is much more intense, but then there is a more stable basis and we would expect that within about 30 months growth will actually be faster than if the eurozone survives in its current form,” CEBR said.

After five years, Britain would be “at least as well off if the euro breaks up as it would be under the alternative scenario of holding it together”. '

This is not a majority view but it is a view that deserves discussion not ignoring.


5) Finally Simon Heffer in The Mail nails the lie propagated by the BBC and other Europhiles that 'leaving the EU would destroy Britain;. Here's an extract:

'a pamphlet published this week by David Campbell Bannerman, a Tory MEP, seeks to argue (against party policy) the contrary. Its title says it all: ‘The Ultimate Plan B: A Positive Vision Of An Independent Britain Outside The European Union.’

Coinciding as it does with the ICM poll findings, his thesis deserves to be studied carefully. Firstly we need to break out of the mindset that anyone who tries to make the case for Britain leaving the EU is mad — or, to judge from the contempt in which such a view is treated on certain BBC programmes, downright evil.

Mr Campbell Bannerman’s strongest argument is that there would be no economic downside to our departure. As the EU sells more to us than we do to it, it would be very much in its interests to enact a free trade agreement with us were we to leave. In 2009, our trade deficit — the excess of what we bought over what we sold — in manufactured goods with the EU was a shade under £35 billion.

Better than that — and here, at last, there is something to be said for the 2007 Lisbon Treaty — such a free trade agreement would not be a matter of conjecture. Article 50 of Lisbon requires the EU to make a trade arrangement with any nation deciding to leave it.

So the claim that there would be inevitable and large job losses is cast into doubt. He also argues that — with the ascent of China, India and Brazil — Britain would do well to leave a trading bloc whose share of world GDP is forecast to fall to 15 per cent in 2020, down from 36 per cent in 1980.

Just as the EU took no account of its role in a post-Soviet world, it seems incapable of understanding how to remain competitive in relation to rising powers such as China.

Britain also enjoys trading relationships elsewhere in the world that are not shared by other EU countries. We send 18 per cent of our exports to the U.S.: Germany sends only 7 per cent. And the biggest external investor in Britain is America.

Mr Campbell Bannerman rests much of his case for leaving the EU on the liberation it would bring from over-regulation of every aspect of our lives — one of the reasons for the EU’s poor competitiveness. He says that more than 100,000 regulations and directives have been imposed upon us since we joined the EU in 1973.

For example, the working-time directive — designed to limit the number of hours we can work, and which is estimated to cost £11.9 billion a year in lost productivity — would go if we left the EU. So, too, would a host of environmental orders such as the EU renewables directive, which insists we derive 20 per cent of our energy from renewables such as wind power, at an estimated £22 billion a year.

The Open Europe think tank reported last year that EU regulations had cost Britain £124 billion since 1998. This figure is not a partisan invention, but based on the Government’s assessments.

But the truth is the ‘bonfire of regulations’ that ministers talk about would be possible only if we left the EU or had a successful renegotiation to repatriate such powers.'

There is a lot more in the article, do read it all and remember the fact that 'Article 50 of Lisbon requires the EU to make a trade arrangement with any nation deciding to leave it.'

Thursday afternoon catch-up

The usual story, too mnay open Firefox tabs and not enough time:

1. Christopher Booker in The Telegraph had a fascinating piece about how local councils may be holding their rates level but they are raising money from elsewhere:

'There was a time, 40 years ago, when the most obvious source of council revenue was the rates, topped up by grants from central government – in return for which we could expect all the services that councils provided. But, largely below the radar, councils have discovered all sorts of ways in which they can take money off us, by levying charges, fees and penalties – some of which are actually illegal – for countless things that used to be free, or at least very much cheaper.

We have become familiar, for instance, with the practice whereby we must now pay for planning applications, anything from £150 for a garden shed to £250,000 for a large housing estate. We all know about the cost of parking fees and penalties, which earn councils £2 billion a year. And businesses must now pay billions to have their waste collected.

What most of us are less familiar with is the proliferation of new licensing charges for everything from pet shops to car boot sales, from riding establishments to “sex establishments” (up to £9,935, plus a yearly renewal fee of £5,000). Pubs that used to pay a yearly £10 to the local magistrates for their licence must now pay up to £1,905 to the council (plus £23.50 to notify the town hall if the landlord dies). Big pop festivals must pay £64,000 for a licence, even before they pay hundreds of thousands more to hire the police to provide security.

In 2007, the Lyons report on local government found that more than a quarter of councils were already earning more from such charges than they were from council tax. This has now risen to the point where “sales, fees, charges” and “other income” now yield some £25 billion a year, much the same as council tax.'

2. Is it just me or is there a word seeming to be missing from this article about 'Many thousands of children across England ... being sexually exploited by gangs, the Office of the Children's Commissioner suggests.'


3. CNS News report that:

'There is not a single, public Christian church left in Afghanistan, according to the U.S. State Department.
This reflects the state of religious freedom in that country ten years after the United States first invaded it and overthrew its Islamist Taliban regime.

In the intervening decade, U.S. taxpayers have spent $440 billion to support Afghanistan's new government and more than 1,700 U.S. military personnel have died serving in that country.

The last public Christian church in Afghanistan was razed in March 2010, according to the State Department's latest International Religious Freedom Report. The report, which was released last month and covers the period of July 1, 2010 through December 31, 2010, also states that “there were no Christian schools in the country.”'

Anything on the BBC about this?


4.  The Telegraph reports that:

'At least 200 potential terrorists are actively planning suicide attacks while living freely in Britain, intelligence chiefs have warned ministers.

A senior intelligence source has revealed that the figure is a "conservative" estimate of the threat facing the country from UK-based Islamist suicide bombers.

The would-be killers are among 2,000 extremists who the security services have said are based in Britain and actively planning terrorist activity of some kind. '

Oh marvelous and these people are left free to plot the deats of hundreds of Britains because ... How mnay more innocent people have to die before the fanatics are locked up or...?


5. USA Today have an article that you should read only if you are sitting down with a stiff drink. Investing may never be the same again.


6. YNet explains that Barack Obama is advocating the ghettoisation of Jews in Israel. My only question is - why is anyone surprised by the actions in this regard of Barack Hussein Obama?


7. The Telegraph reports that:

'Facebook has admitted that it has been watching the web pages its members visit – even when they have logged out.

In its latest privacy blunder, the social networking site was forced to confirm that it has been constantly tracking its 750million users, even when they are using other sites.'

Facebook, like Google before them, are saying it was a mistake...

USA

Sunday morning catchup

1) The Blaze spots that scientists have discovered a planet with a Death Star revolving around it...

2) The Mail wonders at the labour party's definition of equality.


3) Richard Littlejohn wonders how history would have differed had the IRA not bombed The Grand hotel in Brighton. Would Norman Tebbitt have succeeded Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister rather than John Major. I wonder what that would have done to the UK's dalliance with the EU.


4) Watts Up With That isn't falling for thE LINe that Arctic ice is reducing and has the figures to prove it.


5) Max Farquar is not impressed with Anthony Richardson's 'apology' for that video - I remember blogging about the incident at the time.


6) The Anger of a Quiet Man is not happy that he cannot say what a representative of an ethcic minority can say:

'It comes to something when we have to rely upon a representative of an ethnic minority group to say in the MSM what all the rest of us are thinking and occasionally saying to our friends about certain ethnic minority groups. Such is the hold of political correctness and not saying the "bleeding obvious" on our political representatives that for your average (white) politician to say what Baroness Flather did say would be tantamount to political suicide complete with ritual disembowelment from certain sections of certain sections of the media lead no doubt by politicians of the left.'

The subject?

'BRITAIN’S first female Asian peer has stirred up a storm by claiming that some immigrant families have large numbers of children simply to milk the benefits system.'

7) Christopher Booker is still pointing out the absurbity of wind farms in the UK. Christopher Booker talks more sense about thissubject than almost anyone else I read, and certainly more than Chris Huhne.


8) The Globe & Mail have some ideas for alternativeafternoon teas in London. Here's my favourite from their list:

'Men’s Afternoon Tea
TWIST: Men are invited to a tea of their own, complete with more “manly” fare – mini-cheeseburgers and steak sandwiches instead of egg mayonnaise with watercress – and an optional glass of single-malt whisky. Diversions such as backgammon are also offered.
BIGGEST PLUS: Steak and whisky – what’s not to like?
ADDED BONUS: One table may order from multiple tea menus, choosing from the Men’s Tea, the Fashion Ladies Tea or the Gluten-Free Tea.
REASON TO RETURN: At $9.50 (£6) a dram, the selection of whiskies offered is not only broad, but also economically priced.
NOT SO GREAT: Finding the hotel on foot based on the woefully inadequate map available at the website is a frustrating task.
DETAILS: 1 to 5:30 p.m. at The Mandeville Hotel, 8-14 Mandeville Place; West End; mandeville.co.uk. From $42 (£26.50, £32.50 with a glass of whisky or champagne).'

9) Israel National News report that 'Clinton Adviser Greenberg is Behind Israeli Protests'. An interesting article that you won't hear of on the anti-Israel BBC.


10) Watts Up With That also have some facts and figures to show that reporting of Antarctic ice levels are often misleading and alarmist.

Who profits from climate change hysteria?

Christopher Booker explains... Do read the whole piece.

More on who is to blame for the Australian floods

'Australia was told to prepare for droughts as a result of climate change, and let down its guard against flooding.

Ever more alarming facts are emerging to show how Brisbane’s floods were made infinitely worse by cockeyed decisions inspired by the obsession of the Australian authorities with global warming. Inevitably, the country’s warmist lobby has been voluble in claiming that such a “freak weather event” (as the BBC called it) is a consequence of man-made climate change. But far from being an unprecedented “freak event”, the latest flood was nearly a foot below the level of one in 1974 and 10 feet below the record set in 1893.

For years, Australia’s warmists have been advising the authorities that the danger posed to the country by global warming is not floods but droughts: not too much rain but too little. One result, in Brisbane, was a relaxation of planning rules, to allow building on areas vulnerable to flooding in the past. As long ago as 1999, this was seen as potentially disastrous by an expert Brisbane River Flood Study (which was ignored and for years kept secret). Instead of investing in its flood defences, Australia spent $13 billion on desalination plants. (Queensland’s was recently mothballed because of the excess of rain.)

Last week’s most disturbing revelation, however, was the contribution to Brisbane’s flooding by the South East Queensland Water company’s massive release of water from its Wivenhoe dam upstream from the city (for details see “Brisbane’s Man-Made Flood Peak” on the Regionalstates blog). Instead of controlled releases through the previous week, the company allowed the level to rise to within a few inches of the top of the dam before releasing a vast volume of water, with devastating consequences for Brisbane 36 hours later.

Last spring, Queensland’s prime minister, the drought- and warming-obsessed Anna Bligh, ordered the water company not to allow any releases from the dam because water was such a “precious resource” that none must be wasted.

Unsurprisingly, on Friday, the city’s Lord Mayor asked for a full judicial review of what had happened. But it is time our Australian cousins carried out a very much more wide-ranging inquiry into all the other decisions made by their gullible politicians in recent years, under the spell of a pseudo-scientific ideology which now looks utterly discredited.'

The above is Christopher Booker's latest thoughts from The Telegraph, thanks to Climate Relists for the spot.

Another result of the law of unintended consequences

'Another frozen chicken which came home to roost was the crisis confronting many of the eight million homes now heated by condensing boilers, made compulsory by John Prescott in 2005 as a way of reducing Britain’s carbon footprint. What Mr Prescott failed to do was impose, on this tightly regulated industry, any requirement that the pipes to take away the resulting water should not be placed on the outside of buildings. (Responsibility for this crucial system failure has since been passed to the Health and Safety Executive.) The result is that up to a million external pipes froze in December, shutting off the heating.'

More in this Telegraph article by Christopher Booker.

Why do the Met Office get their forecasts so wrong?

I have explained before why this might be the case, adherence to dogma outweighing science, but here is Christopher Booker. Do read the whole article but here's an extract:

'The reason why the Met Office gets its forecasts so hopelessly wrong is that they are based on those same computer models on which the IPCC itself relies to predict the world’s climate in 100 years time. They are programmed on the assumption that, as CO2 rises, so temperatures must inexorably follow. For 17 years this seemed plausible, because the world did appear to be getting warmer. We all became familiar with those warmer winters and earlier springs, which the warmists were quick to exploit to promote their message – as when Dr David Viner of the CRU famously predicted to The Independent in 2000 that “within a few years winter snowfall will be a very rare and exciting event”. (Last week, that article from 10 years ago was the most viewed item on The Independent’s website.)

But in 2007, the computer models got caught out, failing to predict a temporary plunge in global temperatures of 0.7C, more than the net warming of the 20th century. Much of the northern hemisphere suffered what was called in North America “the winter from hell”. Even though temperatures did rise again, in the winter of 2008/9 this happened again, only worse.

The Met Office simply went into denial. Its senior climate change official, Peter Stott, said in March 2009 that the trend towards milder winters was likely to continue. There would not be another winter like 1962/3 “for 1,000 years or more”. Last winter was colder still. And now we have another even more savage “random event”, for which we are even less prepared. (The Taxpayers’ Alliance revealed last week that councils have actually ordered less salt this winter than last.)

The consequences of all this are profound. Those who rule over our lives have been carried off into a cloud-cuckoo-land for which no one was more responsible than the zealots at the Met Office, subordinating all it does to their dotty belief system. Significantly, its chairman, Robert Napier, is not a weatherman but a “climate activist”, previously head of WWF-UK, one of our leading warmist campaigning groups.'

The 'anomalies’ of Dr Rajendra Pachauri’s charity accounts

An absolutely fascinating piece by Christopher Booker in the Sunday Telegraph about the beleagured Dr Rajendra Pachauris. You must read the whole piece because the BBC will not report such inconvenient truths. Here's an extract or three:

'Last winter, Dr Pachauri’s reputation took a hammering. On the one hand, there was the exposure of all those glaring and alarmist scientific errors in the IPCC’s last major report, produced under his guidance in 2007. On the other was the revelation in this newspaper of how his prestige as the “world’s top climate official” had coincided with a massive expansion in the fortunes of Teri, his Delhi-based research institute. Not only had Pachauri been appointed as an adviser to some of the richest banks and investment funds in the world, but Teri’s empire had mushroomed to include branches in Europe, North America, Dubai, Japan and South-East Asia.

...

When Dr Richard North and I came to examine this empire, our interest was drawn to Teri Europe, based in a suburban house in south London, which is registered under British law as a charity and is obliged to publish its accounts on the Charity Commission website. When we looked at these, however, they seemed rather odd. The figures showed the charity’s income and expenditure rising steadily in its early years – but from 2006 onwards they suddenly plunged to below £10,000 a year.

This was significant because £10,000 is the threshold below which a charity does not have to publish full accounts. Yet we knew that in these years Teri Europe was rapidly expanding, receiving sums way above that threshold. These included several payments from the UK government, such as £30,000 for the services of an employee of Dr Pachauri’s Delhi office to act as his co-editor on the IPCC’s 2007 Synthesis Report.

...

Since it seemed that both Teri Europe and the trustees were in serious breach of the Charity Commission’s rules, this has led over recent months to a protracted series of exchanges with the commission.

First, the names of Houghton and Tickell swiftly disappeared from the list of trustees. Then, in May, after an audit by a firm of accountants, the commission’s website showed dramatically revised figures for one of the three years in question. The charity’s income for 2008 had now risen from £8,000 to £103,980, its expenditure from £3,000 to £97,419. But the figures for the previous two years were unchanged. The commission explained that it had allowed this “to save the charity a considerable amount in accounting fees”. It also claimed that the errors were due to the charity’s “inexperience in preparing accounts”, though the figures for earlier years showed no sign of “inexperience”. '

If true, the facts uncovered by Christopher Booker deserve wider exposure.

The truth about wind farms

EU Referendum has a fine analysis, along with Christopher Booker, of the media's complicity in the lies that underpin so much of the foisting of wind farms onto the British landscape and excehequer.

'... it is being ignored by the BBC and almost all of the media – that "the world's largest wind farm" opened off the Kent coast last week, is going to cost us £1.2 billion in subsidies over the 20-year working life of this installation. The corrected headline, by the way, reads "billions" and not "millions".

At a time, supposedly, of economic stringency, it is offensive beyond measure that this government – like its predecessor – is encouraging such huge amounts of money to be top-sliced from our electricity bills, "by far the most important and shocking aspect of this vast project" writes Booker.

But what is equally offensive is the silence of the media on this aspect. Those outlets which have reported on the installation have been completely silent on the fact that, for the subsidy we are being forced to pay, we could have a 1GW nuclear power station, which could yield a staggering 13 times more electricity, with much greater reliability.

The obscenity does not stop there, though. The Swedish owners, Vattenfall, may have commissioned 100 turbines but they are only the first stage of a project eventually designed to comprise 341 of them. When complete, this will generate subsidies of £1 billion every five years.

And even then, that is not the end of it. A final claim for the Thanet wind farm (which Mr Huhne boasts is "only the beginning") is that it will create "green jobs" – although the developers say that only 21 of these will be permanent.

Now, when you work it out, each of these are costing, in "green subsidies" alone, £3 million per job per year. That is £57 million for each job over the next 20 years. The Government gaily prattles about how it wants to create "400,000 green jobs", which on this basis would eventually cost us £22.8 trillion, or 17 times the entire annual output of the UK economy.'

As ever, read the rest and get angry; but also get informed...

Amazongate - Christopher Booker explains

Christopher Booker explains why: 'The IPCC's attempts to hide the truth about its exaggerated claims on the deforestation of the Amazon have ended in defeat'.

URGENT - David Cameron I can save the country £18.3 billion a year

David Cameron is looking for necessary savings and being attacked by the BBC/Labour alliance for threatening jobs, so surely he will be interested to learn that he could save £18.3 billion a year...

Christopher Booker in The telegraph explains:

'One of the best-kept secrets of British politics – although it is there for all to see on a Government website – is the cost of what is by far the most expensive piece of legislation ever put through Parliament. Every year between now and 2050, according to Ed Miliband's Department for Energy and Climate Change (Decc), the Climate Change Act is to cost us all up to £18.3 billion – £760 for every household in the country – as we reduce our carbon emissions by 80 per cent.

...

we contribute less than 2 per cent of global emissions, while China continues to build a new coal-fired power station every week, these empty getures will do nothing to reduce the world's overall "carbon footprint". Not that this makes any difference to global warming anyway – but at least it will give the Government billions more pounds of our money, while we still have any of it left.'

So what's more important David, appealing to the man made climate change brainwashed BBC and Guardian or saving money being spent on the pointless Climate Change Act?

Himalayan glacier update

Three articles from the weekend's press that I think need referencing:

1. The Mail reports that:

"The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’"

So much for checking data and peer reviews.


2. The Times reports that:

"The chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Rajendra Pachauri's Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion's share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC's 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.

The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 - an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report. "

'Follow the money' is often a good way to discover the truth.


3. Christopher Booker in The Telegraph writes:

"I can report a further dramatic twist to what has inevitably been dubbed "Glaciergate" – the international row surrounding the revelation that the latest report on global warming by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contained a wildly alarmist, unfounded claim about the melting of Himalayan glaciers. Last week, the IPCC, led by its increasingly controversial chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was forced to issue an unprecedented admission: the statement in its 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 had no scientific basis, and its inclusion in the report reflected a "poor application" of IPCC procedures.

What has now come to light, however, is that the scientist from whom this claim originated, Dr Syed Hasnain, has for the past two years been working as a senior employee of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Delhi-based company of which Dr Pachauri is director-general. Furthermore, the claim – now disowned by Dr Pachauri as chairman of the IPCC – has helped TERI to win a substantial share of a $500,000 grant from one of America's leading charities, along with a share in a three million euro research study funded by the EU.

...

Until now it has been generally reported that the IPCC based its offending paragraph on an interview Dr Hasnain gave to the New Scientist in June 1999. This was a time when global warming researchers were busy making ever more extravagant claims in the run-up to the IPCC's 2001 report. It was in that year that Dr Michael Mann in America launched on the world his famous "hockey stick" graph, purporting to show that temperatures had risen faster in the late 20th century than ever before in the Earth's history. The graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report, though it has since been comprehensively discredited.

In fact Dr Hasnain had first made his own controversial claim two months earlier, in a much longer interview with an Indian environmental magazine, Down to Earth, in April 1999. It was the wording of this interview which the IPCC was to quote almost exactly in its 2007 report.

Clearly the IPCC was aware that to cite a little Indian magazine as the reference for such a startling prediction would hardly seem sound scientific practice. But it discovered that Dr Hasnain's slightly later interview with New Scientist had been quoted in a 2005 report by the environmental campaigning group WWF. So it was this, rather oddly, which the IPCC cited as its authority – even though the words it quoted were taken directly from the earlier interview.

But even before the 2007 report was published, it now emerges, the offending claim was challenged, not least by a leading Austrian glaciologist, Dr Georg Kaser, a lead author on the 2007 report. He described Dr Hasnain's prediction of glaciers disappearing by 2035 as "so wrong that it is not even worth dismissing".

The year after the IPCC report was published, however, Dr Hasnain was recruited by Dr Pachauri to head a new glaciology unit at TERI. In a matter of months, TERI was given a share in a $500,000 dollar study of melting Himalayan glaciers funded by a US charity, the Carnegie Corporation. It is clear from Carnegie's database that a key part in winning this contract was played by Dr Hasnain's claim that most glaciers in the region "will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming".

In May 2009 TERI was also given a share in a three million euro project funded by the EU. Citing the WWF's 2005 report, the EU set up its "High Noon" project to study the impact of melting Himalayan glaciers. It was particularly keen to foster alarm over the Himalayas as a means to win Indian support for action on climate change at last year's Copenhagen conference."

Christopher Booker deserves a medal for his work on the deceit behind the 'science; of Climate Change, he was pushing the truth in The Telegraph (and elsewhere) when to do so brought only ridicule from the MSM (main stream media).


Meanwhile has there been any coverage of these revelations on the BBC? What do you think...?

Globalisation, Climate Change and the silence of the BBC

Christopher Booker explains "What links the Copenhagen conference with the steelworks closing in Redcar?" and it is not a pretty tale. Of course to the BBC 1,700 jobs in Redcar are a price worth paying if the Copenhagen conference sets out seriously strict CO2 reductions.

"Redcar will lose its biggest employer and one of the largest manufacturing plants left in Britain. Tata, having gained up to £1.2 billion from "carbon credits", will get its new steel plants – while the net amount of CO2 emitted worldwide will not have been reduced a jot. "

Climate Change update

These updates are almost a daily occurrence at the moment as the news keeps coming in and it's not all to the benefit of the "warmists". Two Telegraph items have caught my eye; the first is a news piece that reports that despite the wall to wall pro-"warmist" propaganda spewed out by the BBC and most of the rest of the British media, "Only one in two voters accepts man-made climate change, according to new poll". It seems that the British public is more sensible and sceptical than the political class and media would like. The Telegraph's article uses some loaded language (my emphasis) as it reports

"Asked if they backed the main conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that humans are largely responsible for modern day rises in temperatures, 52 per cent of voters agreed.

However, 39 per cent said climate change had not yet been proven to be man made, while seven per cent simply denied the phenomenon was happening at all. Furthermore, fewer than one in four voters (23 per cent) believed that climate change was "the most serious problem faced by man" – a view endorsed by governments across the world.

A clear majority (58 per cent) said it was merely "one of a number of serious problems" while 17 per cent believed it has been exaggerated and is "not a very serious problem." "

With these sort of numbers will the British media respond by seriously analysing the climate change data to see if the British public might be right to be sceptical or redouble their efforts to persuade us of the "warmist" agenda and the desperate need for green taxation, redistribution of wealth and a "new world order".


One beacon for sanity on Climate Change has been Christopher Booker's column in the Telegraph and his latest one is no exception. He neatly summarises much of the current debate on Climate Change data including the "hockey stick" expose, the Yamal peninsula tree rings fiddle, the analysis of "Lucy Skywalker" that showed that "in the past 50 years temperatures have not risen at all" in that part of Siberia and why the Copenhagen conference may produce "the most costly economic suicide note in history".

Climate Change roundup

1. The Times reports that (my emphasis):

"SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

...

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.” "

How convenient, just the adjusted data remains, the data that their models say is more accurate than the original data?


2. The Telegraph's Christopher Booker discusses where we are with this story and what aspects concern him the most and it is this passage that the "warmists" need to address before they come on my blog bleating about science:

"But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results. "

3. John Redwood explains the different strands of thought that non-warmists fall into - Global warming sceptics, People who do not believe that man made carbon causes warming, Lawsonists and Pragmatists. Have a read, unless you are so wedded to the religion of "warmism" that to read anything contrary to your beliefs is taboo.