A heart of stone - by Richard... Tuesday, June 29, 2010

A heart of stone - by Richard... Tuesday, June 29, 2010

"It was hailed as Britain’s first 'green' island and a glimpse of what the future could hold for the rest of the country." And it looks as if it is giving us precisely that - an all-too-accurate glimpse of what will come to be called "the land that Huhne built."

It may be an overused cliché, but your heart would have to be made of the hardest granite not to laugh at this story.

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

Just what is wrong with us? - by Richard...

My daughter Emma, the real artist – wot paints pictures and takes photos – says these "conceptual art" persons are called the "black-specs-roll-necks" brigade. She is far too generous.

But, doing my GOM impression (Grumpy Old Man - hey, we all have to start somewhere), I can most pompously declare that a modern jet aircraft is the ultimate expression of form defined by function, combining engineering and design in a highly complex machine which, as a single entity, is also an object of grace and beauty and well as power and ingenuity.

If you half close your eyes, you can almost imagine me in a pulpit - or pontificating at the bar of the Pig and Whistle. There, I roundly declare that, as such, the aircraft itself is a worthy object of display, and many find their ways into museums and air parks where they provide entertainment, fascination and education to generations of adults and children.

But not the Tate gallery. It hires some idle tart to mess around with two important aircraft, types which have a long history and which in their own ways represent considerable achievement and pride, and this becomes "art" for the clever-dicks and chatterati to prattle about, to mock and to denigrate.

Now I get serious. This little episode really does seems to typify everything that is wrong with this country. We don't seem to be able to take pride in our own achievements any more, or take uncomplicated enjoyment in what is. It has to be dressed up as "art" and used to send some perverted, distorted, sick message, no doubt at inordinate expense.

Fiona Banner they call this tart, who thinks it is soooooo clever to truss up a Sea Harrier, the type that helped save the Falklands, and much else besides. Now if they would truss her up and hang the stupid, vain bitch upside down from a lamppost, then that might not be art. But it would be a small compensation for the insult, and the offence she has given.

And if you really want art, this is art. Feast your eyes on it!

COMMENT THREAD

Print ready

Credo in unum tipping point - by Richard...

Here they go again, a bevy of the so-called experts, making predictions about the climate which they cannot possibly justify.

It's all going to go belly-up by the year 2200 they tell us – in no less than 190 years, when the global climate "is more than likely to slip into an unpredictable state with unknown consequences for human societies". This is, of course, "if carbon dioxide emissions continue on their present course".

Almost all of the leading researchers who took part in a detailed analysis of their expert opinion believe that high levels of greenhouse gases will cause a fundamental shift in the global climate system – a tipping point – with potentially far-reaching consequences.

Yea, right. And next week's weather is? Er, sorry – I forgot, weather isn't climate, but they can predict neither with any confidence, much less telling us what the climate is going to be in nearly two centuries' time.

Meanwhile, I have been ferreting around on the Monbiot case and just one of the little delights I have stumbled on is a claim by Daniel Nepstad (pictured) in 2005, in a publication called "Tropical Deforestation and Climate Change".

In it, Nepstad and his pals predict a reduction in "mature" Amazon forest of between 15% and 40% - the top level being, it seems, just what the IPCC was asserting. But while the IPCC was putting the decline down to a slight reduction in precipitation, Nepstad does no such thing. All the studies he looks at – he tells us - demonstrate that "fire provokes significant reductions in the total biomass".

The scale of reduction is, he says, "directly related to the intensity of logging, the intensity of drought, and the occurrence of previous fire between an unburned forest (undisturbed) and a logged and burned or just burned forest."

And this is precisely the point – that the threat to the forest is multifactorial, that drought is only one factor and that, for drought to be significant it must be severe and prolonged. Thus, in 2005, Nepstad is not supporting the IPCC thesis.

In 2008, he is then saying that using his "deforestation model," and projected out the year 2030 using current climate patterns, he finds by the year 2030, "55 percent of the forest will be either cleared or damaged" — 31 percent cleared and 24 percent damaged by either logging or drought, with a large portion of that damaged forest catching fire.

Once again, this does not support the IPCC's 40 percent claim – or anything like it. Yet, two years later Nepstad is saying that "the IPCC statement on the Amazon was correct", and the WWF claiming that support for the thesis comes from Nepstad – in 1999.

And what does the 1999 work say? Well now, that is where it gets really interesting. I'll post on that later today, when I've put all the bits together – but it knocks Monbiot and The Sunday Timesinto a cocked hat, or a rather nasty little "tipping point" of our own.

Moonbat thread