Deluded or what?

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Deluded or what?

The good news is that Nouri al-Maliki has enjoyed a sweeping victory in the Iraqi provincial elections in Basra. Previously the domain of Muqtada al-Sadr, SCIRI and other nasties, voters have opted for secular and nationalist parties over the fundamentalists.Initial reports are suggesting that Maliki's list has claimed 50 per cent of the vote.

The bad news is that Major General Andy Salmon, commander of coalition forces in southeastern Iraq, is delusional. According to Reuters, the man is telling us that, with the peaceful advent of the elections, British troops in Iraq have largely met the conditions required for their withdrawal and are on track to begin leaving the country by 31 May.

The "peaceful elections," Salmon says, "met the latest of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's goals for removing Britain's 4,000 troops from Iraq by the end of July."

Gen Salmon should perhaps be reminded that Mr Brown's "goals" are of supreme irrelevance. Whether the goals were met, or not, the British are ceasing operations by 31 May and will have to be out of the country by the end of July. That is the case because they have been kicked out.

For Brown, or Salmon, to pretend otherwise, is frankly bizarre. It makes you wonder whether they are truly on this planet. The more worrying thing is that, while Mr Brown is in charge of the country, Gen Salmon is in charge of lots of men with guns. Scary!

COMMENT THREAD

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

You are welcome ...

... to pile in. Personal comments and insults will be treated with the disdain they so richly deserve. And woe betide anyone who splits an infinitive. Otherwise, it is a free for all.

More global warming

With about four inches of global warming overnight and more on its way, the climate change industry is moving into high gear to defend its turf. It gets a hearing in the warmist Telegraph which runs a story headed, "Snow is consistent with global warming, say scientists".

Britain, it tells us, may be in the grip of the coldest winter for 30 years but the current cold snap does not mean that climate change is going into reverse. In fact, the surprise with which we have greeted the extreme conditions only reinforces how our climate has changed over the years. 

Confronted with this speciousness, most people have difficulty suppressing the sniggers, except that these people are deadly serious. There is no way they are going to let go of the gravy train and admit reality.

Thus we get Dr Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics group at Department of Physics, University of Oxford, leading the charge. "If it wasn't for global warming this cold snap would happen much more regularly. What is interesting is that we are now surprised by this kind of weather. I doubt we would have been in the 1950s because it was much more common.” 

"As for snowfall …" Well, Dr Allen has an answer for that. It "could actually increase in the short term because of global warming. We have all heard the expression 'too cold to snow' and we have always expected precipitation to increase." Thus, "All the indicators still suggest that we are warming up in line with predictions." 

So there you have it from the horse's mouth (or backside). If it is hot, its global warming, if it's wet, its global warming, and if it's cold, it's global warming. And if it snows, it's definitely global warming.

With Britain being so unprepared for the current round of global warming though, we hear from David Frost, director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce. "I wonder," he says, "whether we have become a bit too complacent or we are being a bit too bowled over by the constant talk of global warming and the fact that temperatures are always going to rise, and therefore when something like this does happen we are caught very much on the hop."

The man adds that, "We should be perhaps planning on the basis that there is more freak weather about and we shouldn't just buckle to it. There should be more planning going into it." 

He has a point. But, with the warmist fixation, cold weather is not on the agenda of the climate change industry. But they need to ask themselves how many times the nation has been brought to a halt by the magnificent heatwaves we've all been enjoying recently, and how that compares with the estimated loss of £3 billion to the economy brought about by this very modest layer of the white stuff.