An affront to safety? - by Richard... Monday, July 12, 2010

An affront to safety? - by Richard... Monday, July 12, 2010

In The Daily Mail today, we see a report that competence tests on nurses trained in EU member states are to be scrapped, opening thousands of NHS jobs to Eastern European nurses.

Thus we are told, thousands of foreign nurses will be allowed to work in Britain without any safety checks – and all because EU rules demand that the tests are axed. They will not need to sit rigorous competence exams before treating NHS patients. And they will no longer even be required to show they have looked after patients in the past three years. 

The test will still apply to non EU applicants – so a New Zealand trained nurse will have to take it. They have to show they have carried out a minimum of 450 hours' nursing in their own country in the past three years or they must attend an intensive three month course with regular tests on their knowledge and skills.

In the past five years, says The Mail, more than 40,000 nurses from the EU – including former Soviet Bloc countries such as Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia - applied to work in Britain. But just 270 completed the course, deterred by its cost and difficulty. 

Now the Nursing and Midwifery Council, which regulates nurses, has been forced to scrap both requirements because they are deemed to be "discriminatory" towards workers from EU member states.

Whether this report is true, in whole or in part, is anyone's guess. We are long past the sage where we can believe any media report uncritically. Given that the tests which can be applied to medical doctors are extremely limited, however, this sounds plausible. We will have to keep an eye on it to see if it pans out.

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Excessive welfare regulations? - by Richard... Sunday, July 11, 2010

You should not be burdened with this, but I have been struggling with it all day ... the photograph. At first sight, I fantasised that it was something to do with excessive EU animal welfare regulation. But there must be a more rational explanation.

I know nothing about the picture, other than it is Spanish (perhaps) and of some antiquity. Answers on the forum, please ... I am sure someone out there knows what is going on.

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Amazongate: why it matters - by Richard...

Says Delingpole:

The IPCC made a false claim in its most recent assessment report, passing off the propaganda of environmental activists as peer-reviewed science. Instead of admitting the truth and retracting its false claim, the IPCC and its sympathisers went into entirely characteristic cover-up mode. Activist scientists like Daniel Nepstad obfuscated; other activist scientists like Dr Simon Lewis of Leeds University exploited the ignorance and pro-Warmist bias of the Press Complaints Commission to bully an entirely unnecessary retraction of a true story on the subject by the Sunday Times; activist journalists like George Monbiot then boasted that they had been vindicated – a claim that was excitedly repeated throughout the ecotard blogosphere and among ecotard cheerleaders like the BBC. All of this energy in defence of a great, stinking lie.

Modesty prohibits reproduction of the next paragraph, very welcome though it is as an antidote to the unpleasantness over on the Moonbat site.

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Dumbing down - by Richard...

Before I get down to proper work, I couldn't avoid the temptation of flagging up this report by the BBC's so called defence correspondent, Caroline Wyatt.

"In the blazing afternoon sun, a heat-haze rises from the tarmac as soldiers from 47 Air Despatch Squadron load up huge pallets of water and rations into the back of a Hercules C-130 aircraft," she tells us.

This is all about Our Brave Boys in the RAF air-dropping supplies to Our Brave Boys on the ground. This, she rather unhelpfully tells us: "... is a method dating back to the air drops of World War II, when British troops operating in France were re-supplied by air." She even gets some unfortunate airman to say those words to camera.

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper, although we then go on to see the fair Caroline witness a high-level night drop on a remote patrol base in Afghanistan, a "text-book drop" where all the supplies obligingly arrive on target. 

And the chances of that happening unaided are about zero. Left to the ministrations of the Crabs, the brown jobs would still be bartering with the Taureg to get their supplies back. And yes, I know the Taureg inhabit the Sahara. That's the point.

The miracle ingredient that allows the RAF to hurl things out of the back of an aircraft in the expectation that they will actually land anywhere near where they are aimed is a US-devised system called JPADS. These are GPS precision-guided parachutes - brilliant stuff, much appreciated by all.

Now, you would think the fair Caroline in her report might actually mention this piece of technological wizardry – but not a bit of it. It's still a method dating back to WWII, according to her.

It is possible, of course, that the MoD put a block on it being mentioned – they are stupid enough to do that. Although I cannot imagine why. It is not a secret – even I wrote about it more than two years ago and its acquisition was reported in 2007.

Another possibility is that the fair Caroline didn't notice the system, or didn't understand it, so she didn't report it. That can't be ruled out. I've only met the lady once, and then very briefly, but she didn't strike me as the sharpest knife on the planet. I don't think its just because she's a girlie Beeb - although that doesn't help.

Then, the other possibility is that the BBC thought a discussion of JPADS was far too complicated for the poor little British viewers, so it left the detail out. That patronising view, in fact, is all too possible. But whatever the cause here, we are seeing a serious bit of dumbing down.

What I don't understand, though, is why so many people are willing to pay their license fees in order to have their intelligence insulted in this way.

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Battle of Britain – day 2 - by Richard...

This was another day characterised by attacks on convoys, with attacks off the Suffolk coast. Portland Harbour was also raided. During the night there was activity over south-west England, East Anglia, the Yorkshire coast and Portsmouth. Weather was overcast in the Channel with a cloud base at 5,000 ft. Thunderstorms and bright intervals in the Midlands and North.

Action started early, with two Luftflotte formations operating out of Cherbourg detected at 7.30 am heading for a convoy in Lyme Bay. Six Spitfires and six Hurricanes were scrambled, with the Hurricanes intercepting ten Stukas and about 20 Me 109s shortly before 8 am. One Hurricane was shot down almost immediately.

The picture shows a gaggle of Stukas (Junkas 87s) from the Bundesarchiv, taken some time in 1943 – location unspecified. It is a rare shot of a formation in action, and presents something of the image that the Hurricane pilots must have seen. The action on 11 July was successful as, although two Spitfires were shot down, the Stuka attack was disrupted and no ships were sunk.

There was also a battle over the Channel over a German rescue seaplane, when two Spitfires were shot down and the seaplane forced to land. There were Stuka raids on Portland, at which the RAF was late in arriving, the radar having given false (low) estimates of strength, although a later raid on Portsmouth was well and duly carved up. A night raid on the city though, by 30 bombers, killed nine and injured 50.

At the end of the day, the Luftwaffe had lost eleven aircraft and the RAF four in the course of 432 sorties. 

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A half-hearted media - by Richard...

Readers might notice something familiar here. I'm actually quite pleased with the piece, and the paper has given it good exposure as the "editor's choice" ... even though there is a typo. I've written "Vixen" instead of "Viking".

I have to say though that it is incredibly difficult focusing on such widely divergent subjects as climate change and the Afghan War, drilling down to look at the issues behind the headlines. It would be nice, sometimes, just to concentrate on one issue ... the trouble is, which one?

Then I look at The Sunday Telegraph today and I'm not so bothered, now I see what the "professionals" are doing. In the print edition, we have a two-page picture feature on Sangin (see pic above), by defence correspondent Thomas Harding.

This is no reflection on Thomas - he's an ex-para and knows what he's doing, but he has been forced to put his name to Womans' Own soft-focus, human interest pap. It is a criminal waste of his skills and talent.

The shallowness is illustrated by a quote form Ross Wilson, the base's "avuncular 38-year-old colour sergeant". He says: "Sometimes, I feel like shouting at the local nationals that their lives would be so much better if they only got off the fence and picked a side. Then we could all get on with it, and get away." The best we get by way of strategic analysis. 

What you have to do here is stand back and assess the piece in its entirety and ask to what extent it helps an intelligent, interested adult understand the complexity of the situation, and the decisions being made. Then compare it with my piece. Would you also like to tell me, incidentally, how "being there" has improved the reportage and analysis?

If the ST piece was one of an occasional "colour" articles, to provide background to more detailed analytical pieces – from a newspaper that once employed Basil Liddell-Hart - then I wouldn't have a problem. But this tends to be all we get these days. The paper has totally lost the plot.

It's funny that just yesterday I was complaining about The Guardian and excessive reliance on soft-focus, human interest stories. Here we go again.

Hats off to the Independent on Sunday then, as one of the last bastions of adulthood. You might not agree with its politics, but at least it treats its readers as grown-ups. And it also has a fine story on the Afghan security forces. I will have to review that separately, to do it justice, and I see few other stories today in the rest of the media about which I can say the same.

We really cannot afford this. We cannot afford the Fourth Estate to be hunkering down into a facile pastiche of a second childhood, frittering away its life energy on pap. There is a real world out there and it bites. We need to know about it. 

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The source of Amazongate - by Richard...

STOP PRESS: Detailed coverage in Watts up with that?



Well, we've got there officially, to the very source of "Amazongate", a controversy which started with two posts, on 25 January and the following day. We can now demonstrate unequivocally that the IPCC did get it wrong on the Amazon. As significantly, the WWF - which was partly responsible for the false claims - has conceded the game. Booker devotes his whole column to the story and, to come, is a news story based on the column.

The column covers the ground but I want to set out on this post the full story, with all the necessary links, making it a "one stop shop" for future reference. This will this become the "index" piece - it will probably take a few days to complete, so any suggestions will be very welcome. This is interactive writing.

Before we start in detail though, the crux of the matter is that the story has been nailed through the work carried out on this blog, with the active assistance of forum members. Without it and the help of others, all working alongside the MSM, we would not have got there. 

As a result, the WWF has been forced to admit that its source of information about the Amazon, on which the IPCC relied, was an anonymous tract called Fire in the Amazon, formerly published on the webpage of an obscure Brazilian advocacy group. This webpage is not based on any known or identified research and is not peer reviewed.

If anyone wants to assert that the Amazon is at risk from climate change, we will not disagree. If anyone wants to assert that the Amazon is at risk from severe and prolonged drought - if or when it happens - we will not disagree. Heck, we will not even disgree if anyone wants to assert that, if we get a severe and prolonged drought which brings moisture levels to just above survival level for the forest, a further "slight reduction" in rainfall could have a drastic effect. But none of those things is what the IPCC claimed.

As we now know, purely on the basis of an unreferenced and unsupported assertion on a website (which was removed four years before publication), the IPCC actually claimed:

Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation (Rowell and Moore, 2000).

The IPCC the goes on to say that: "It is more probable that forests will be replaced by ecosystems that have more resistance to multiple stresses caused by temperature increase, droughts and fires, such as tropical savannas."

Right from the very start, we had said that these claims were "unsubstantiated" and with the trail ending in the website, this proves it. But, even as of last Thursday night, the WWF was not prepared to concede the point. Benjamin Ward, head of press and media relations for WWF-UK, sent us a long list of further references, arguing: 

The WWF/IUCN Global Review is now ten years old but peer‐reviewed "good evidence" published since 2000 has reinforced its conclusions as sound. We stand by the Global Review as accurately depicting the risk to the Amazon from reductions in rainfall and being in line with a broader body of peer-reviewed, scientific evidence.

But, when we asked Mr Ward to identify the papers, the references to which he had sent us, that replicated or directly supported the IPCC claim, he was unable to do so. Merely, he said, they "support and reinforce the risks to the Amazon from climate change". And that is all he can manage, six months down the line since we first raised our "Amazongate" charges.

As it stands, therefore, the IPCC claims are a train wreck. The "Rowell and Moore 2000" paper, on which the IPCC relies, refers to a non-peer-reviewed report called: Global Review of Forest Fires. As "gray" literature, jointly published by the WWF and the IUCN, it should not have been used by the IPCC, without rigorous checking. This was never done.

Nevertheless, the IPCC not only accepted the Rowell and Moore claims, it actually embellished them. The WWF/IUCN report claims: "Up to 40% of the Brazilian forest is extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall." Yet the "Amazonian forests" in the IPCC report is not the "Brazilian forest" of Rowell and Moore. The "react drastically" of the IPCC is not the "extremely sensitive" of Rowell and Moore.

This notwithstanding, the Rowell and Moore claim is actually unreferenced in their report. The WWF tell us that a reference to a paper in Nature (Nepstad 1999) only applies to the second sentence of the relevant paragraph. Just for reference, this is:

D. C. Nepstad, A. Veríssimo, A. Alencar, C. Nobre, E. Lima, P. Lefebvre, P. Schlesinger, C. Potter, P. Mountinho, E. Mendoza, M. Cochrane, V. Brooks, Large-scale Impoverishment of Amazonian Forests by Logging and Fire, Nature, 1999, Vo l 398, 8 April, pp505.

However, we only have the word of the WWF that the actual reference intended was omitted accidentally. That claim comes from a press statement on 31 January and from a letter in The Sunday Times on 7 February by David Nussbaum, Chief Executive of WWF-UK.

At this point, we should really not need to go any further as regards the IPCC. It has cited as its source a non-peer-reviewed report which lacks any further reference to support its claim. The IPCC authors did not notice and this was missed throughout the review process. That is already enough to support the charge that the IPCC claim was unsubstantiated, which is actually different from saying it was wrong.

If we are terribly kind and tolerant, though, and allow them the missing reference, we have Rowell and Moore and thus the IPCC relying on Fire in the Amazon. That is the source on which everything depends.

On 31 January, this was described as: "a 1999 overview of Amazon fire issues from the respected Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM – Amazon Environmental Research Institute)." Then we were told that the source quotation reads: "Probably 30 to 40% of the forests of the Brazilian Amazon are sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall." Incidentally, we are also told that, "Our [WWF] report does NOT say that 40% of the Amazon forest is at risk from climate change."

In Nussbaum's letter of 7 February, Fire in the Amazon is still "a 1999 overview" by the respected Amazon Environmental Research Institute that states. In an "update" of 10 February, however, it becomes "a 1999 report titled Fire in the Amazon by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM)". And on the following day, on the blog of WWF communications chief Nick Sundt, it remains a "report".

That it is a "report" (implying a degree of formality) seems to be confirmed by Daniel Nepstad, director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute and senior researcher at the Woods Hole Research Center. In an unsolicited statement made in February, he declared that Rowell and Moore "had originally cited the IPAM website where the [40%] statement was made". This definitely conveys the impression that the current citation referred to another source - and by the same token seems to rule out the website as a source.

Interestingly thouygh, Nepstad does not provide a citation for that "new" source. He merely states that Rowell and Moore 2000 "omitted some citations in support of the 40% value statement," but if you look carefully, he does not state what they should have been.

On 18 March, however, Nepstad (with others) makes another statement. This time, he tells us that: 

The passage in the IPCC that refers to the susceptibility of the Amazon forest to drought cites a World Wildlife Fund review report which, in turn, cites an article in the journal Nature. Ideally, the IPCC should have cited the Nature article as well as several other existing articles in support of its statement, and not a WWF report.

Bizarrely though, in his February statement, Nepstad has already dismissed the 1999 article - that is Nepstad 1999. And it is not just that it refers only to forests which are "severely drought stressed in 1998" (which should invalidate it as a source) but also that this forest area affected is only 15% of the total area of forest in the Brazilian Amazon (and an even smaller fraction of the total forest area).

In that February statement though, he also refers to another article published in Nature. This is a 1994 paper, in which his team estimated that approximately half of the forests of the Amazon depleted large portions of their available soil moisture during seasonal or episodic drought (Nepstad et al. 1994). Then, after the Rowell and Moore report was released in 2000, and prior to the publication of the IPCC AR4, Nepstad claimed that new evidence of the full extent of "severe drought" in the Amazon was available.

In 2004, he had declared, "we estimated that half of the forest area of the Amazon Basin had either fallen below, or was very close to, the critical level of soil moisture below which trees begin to die in 1998."

That was where he had stood in the February of this year, but a month later he does not repeat his references to the 1994 paper, relying on the 1999 paper which he has already ruled out. Then, he avers, "The point is, however, that the statement made by the IPCC about the sensitivity of Amazon forests drought was consistent with our knowledge at that time, and has been reinforced by new studies."

So, at this stage, while the WWF (which had produced the paper on which the IPCC had relied) was citing a 1999 "overview" produced by IPAM, of which Daniel Nepstad was head, Nepstad himself had variously dismissed his own paper of 1999 and argued that his earlier 1994 paper applied, only for him to "reinstate" his 1999 paper, airily declaring that the IPCC statement was "consistent with our knowledge at that time".

But this is what has been bugging us all along. Nepstad didn't write the 1999 paper on which the IPCC relied. This was written by Rowell and Moore. They, alongside the WWF (the IUCN has been silent on this issue) have then said that the source document is Fire in the Forest - which just happens to be produced by IPAM, prop. D Nepstad – although that is irrelevant. Nepstad's institute only produced it – it didn't try to pass it off as an authoritative paper. That was down to the WWF.

And now it really does not matter what they say. They have been caught out - the IPCC has been caught out. There is nothing they can say - apart from promise they will try to get the IPCC claims removed.

to be completed ...

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