What will the warmists do? - by Richard... Thursday, October 14, 2010

What will the warmists do? - by Richard... Thursday, October 14, 2010

They ought to make Louise Gray write the sort of article illustrated above, as a penance for the sort of crap she so often produces. But it is great fun to see the warmist Telegraph offering dire warnings about forthcoming cold winters.

Also fascinating is to see is the forecaster "Weather Outlook" - which is said to have an accurate seasonal forecasting record – warning that the UK is "now being gripped by a bitter series of winters comparable with the harsh 1939-42 winters which made conditions so horrendous during the Second World War."

I seem to recall saying something not dissimilar myself recently, once or twice, although it is difficult getting a reliable narrative as, in the UK, it was illegal for newspapers to publish details about the weather during most of 1940.

However, someone must have seen the fatuity of banning discussion when the Germans were sitting on the other side of the Channel, and their aircraft were making daily visits to all parts of the country. Thus, towards the end of the year (1940) there was a slight relaxation.

As a result, on 11 October 1940, we had John Ware in The Daily Express writing a long article about the weather. I thought you might find it interesting, so I have transcribed the whole article below:

Now that the Germans are just across the Channel and over this country every day, the weather is again being talked about and written about in the news. But for nearly a year it was kept secret – the most fantastic weather year since British records were kept.

Hardly a week from November 1939 to the end of September 1940 would have been off the front pages in peacetime with its weather freaks, and the Englishman's favourite topic would have echoed all over the country like the meteorological storms that made it.

The coldest winter for forty-five years was followed by the best summer of the century and the driest since 1921. But it was not a particularly hot summer – the impression of heat that lingers in your mind from those days between the beginning of May and the middle of September is due to the almost continuous sunshine. No day produced a temperature over 90 degrees, although June 8 and 9 were near this figure.

But the hottest day of the year came late. It was on September 4 when the mercury just touched 90. No previous record of the hottest day coming so late in the year has been found. The drought, which would have been on the front pages for many weeks, was almost continuous from May.

No day until the middle of July recorded more than .01 inch of rain – the minimum required to break the drought. May and June were continuously sunny and clear-skied. The July break lasted a fortnight with some rain and cloud. Everybody said: "We can't grumble. We've had such a wonderful summer and now it's over. How we could have enjoyed it but for the war."

And then August came in – the driest August since 1818, a hundred and twenty-two years! Even with the ever-present danger of giving information to the enemy the authorities had to put out posters warning you to use less water. August was almost entirely rainless and this persisted until September 8, when a gradual deterioration in the weather took place.

The spring which followed the severe winter began the long summer with almost summer temperatures. April averaged more than three degrees up on normal. And surprisingly the BBC mentioned the "beautiful spring day" on April 8 in a broadcast to Germany. But the newspapers were prohibited from mentioning it.

The winter, as you well remember, was the coldest since 1895 and January the coldest since 1838. The Thames was frozen in the upper reaches, ice interfered with shipping in the Estuary, and even the sea froze in Morecambe Bay.

The lowest temperature was 10 below zero, recorded at Rhayader, Radnorshire, on January 21. More insurance claims for cars with engines split by frost were recorded in January than in the whole of any one winter. Trains took a week to get from London to Glasgow, the passengers sleeping at wayside stations unable even to reach a road, which in any case they would have found blocked.

Factory workers in East London were unable to go home for two days and stayed in the factory hostel. Snowdrifts sixteen feet deep were reported in outer London areas.

This weather, which began before Christmas, lasted until March. It included Britain's worst ice storm, which was hailed as a thaw and proved to be a frost. The rain came down and as it fell into the lower atmosphere it froze. Nearly the whole country was covered with ice for two days, and transport was stopped.

Conditions were so abnormal that the Air Ministry relaxed its ban on the news and told the story.

Ware concludes with a hope for a winter of low cloud and really cold weather – to keep the bombers away. He certainly gets the really cold weather but, unfortunately, it does not keep the bombers away.

Of special interest to us though, is that this is the start of thirty-year so-called "little cooling" – bizarre weather which exactly conforms with the warmists' "climate disruption". The more we get of this weather, and the closer the parallel we have with the forties, the more likely it is that we can say we are experiencing another period of extended cooling.

And what will the warmists do then, poor things?

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An MSM riposte to Marr - by Richard... Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Nice piece from Jim. Well worth a read.

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The price of knowledge - by Richard...

Over at the shop this morning, collecting my paper and the statutory Kit-Kat (to eat while reading the paper), I paid over the £1.50 - £1.00 for the paper and the 50p for the chocolate.

I could not help but observe, though, that in 1940, the position was exactly the reverse. The newspaper would have cost you 1d (old penny) while the KitKat cost – as you can see from the advert – twice as much at 2d.

Mind you, a packet of cigarettes would have set you back 1/6d (7½p in new money), something like 18 times the cost of a newspaper. Now, your cigs are about five times the cost of a daily paper. By any measure, the relative price of newspapers has increased massively. Combined with their decrease in value, it is entirely unsurprising that they are losing circulation.

Funnily enough, one of the few stories of interest in today's edition is this one - on the BBC and climate change.

The mighty Beeb is being told to row back from its current position, that the science is "settled". Instead, its new editorial guidelines, published yesterday, say expressly for the first time that scientific issues fall within the corporation's obligation to be impartial.

"The BBC must be inclusive, consider the broad perspective, and ensure that the existence of a range of views is appropriately reflected," says BBC trustee Alison Hastings.

Coincidence or not, this morning I got a phone call from BBC Radio Oxford, asking if I would speak on their show tomorrow (at about 10:10am) on ... climate change. Specifically, they are having a debate about the resignation of Hal Lewis, which Dellers did big, amongst others.

I suppose I'm now going to have to take a little more interest in the issue, but at the time, I was distinctly underwhelmed. What particularly grabbed my attention in the transcript of the letter was the comment from the egregious Hal, on the treatment of "Climategate" by his society.

"It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity," he says, adding: "Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work."

That rather sort of comes under the category, "No shit, Sherlock!" After all these years, only now does he tells us, "This is not science; other forces are at work?" This is either pathological myopia or naivety to a most extraordinary degree.

Anyone who is interested in science, and has even a passing knowledge of science history, will know that the scientific establishments in their various disciplines are driven by politics, so intense and vitriolic at times as to make party politics look like the kindergarten.

Nor has it ever been any different. On my bookshelf, I have a treasured copy of "The Life of Pasteur" by René Vellery-Radot, first published in English translation in 1901 and reprinted several times until 1920, which is the date of my copy.

His life spanned the days of applying leaches to patients and where the existence of bacteria was denied, and infection was a result of "spontaneous generation". Germ theorists, or "deniers" such as Pasteur, were given short-shrift and, at one time, he had to leave the country to continue his research.

One quotation from Pasteur which I treasure, was in response to a question from an admirer about the "attacks and praises" he had endured and enjoyed through his career. "A man of science should think of what will be said of him in the following century, not of the insults or the compliments of one day," he replied.

Another of his more profound statements related to the respective roles of personal beliefs and "acquired science". Said Pasteur, "the two domains are distinct, and woe is him who tries to let them trespass on each other in the so imperfect state of human knowledge".

That rather pins down the Michael Manns of this world, who have difficulty separating the two domains, but in Pasteur's day, no less than now, the purity of science was an issue that had to be fought for. One of the problems we have now, I think, is that the likes of Hal Lewis have been asleep too long in their ivory towers.

Welcome back to the real world, Hal, where newspapers now cost twice as much as chocolate bars – and tell you less.

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Little news - by Richard...

There's big news, as in earth-shaking events (sometimes literally), and then there's "little" news, things that happen to ordinary people and normally don't make the media – but which very often have a vastly greater impact on the people involved. Richard Littlejohn is doing the latter in this article - rather appropriate, given his name.

The first story concerns a brush with the police, all too familiar these days – leading to the observation that "the police wonder why Middle Britain’s faith in the forces of law and order is at an all-time low". Actually, I don't think they do. My general experience is that they don't give a shit what "Middle Britain" thinks of them – otherwise they wouldn't be doing what they do, in the way that they do it.

And this is not just theoretical. We now have Kit Malthouse, London's deputy mayor with responsibility for policing and crime, saying officers from Britain's largest force are living in villages in Surrey and Hertfordshire partly because of concerns over living in London.

He said there is a "growing divide between the police and the public, which is not yet at dangerous levels but may well become so". Speaking to the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, he said: "Police officers now, certainly Metropolitan Police officers, often want to live in police ghettos, villages in Surrey and Hertfordshire, which are disproportionately over-populated with police officers because they like to live together."

The chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority said the growing divide between police and the public could be seen "in all sorts of ways". Officers and police community support officers (PCSOs) "now don't like to travel in uniform because they don't want to be identified", he said.

This was a reference to an incident in Croydon two years ago in which two officers were attacked by "a baying mob" after confronting two young girls over dropping litter. "No one came to their aid, quite the opposite," he said. "The public feels as it they have less and less investment in the police service. That sense of investment, and that sense of ownership of the police, has somehow deteriorated."

And the guy featured in the Littlejohn story is yet another one who would probably no longer cross the street to help the police, even if they were on fire. And that is not so very far from being there to pour the petrol. As they sow, so shall they reap. It may take time – but it happens eventually. And it's the "little" news that gets the crowds going.