Merry Christmas - by Richard... Saturday, December 25, 2010

Merry Christmas - by Richard... Saturday, December 25, 2010

... to all our friends and readers, and especially to those who found their way to the "donate" button during the year. I didn't realise we had so many fans working for "Big Oil" but, through their generosity, Mrs EUReferendum has kept the bath well-filled with coal. What's more, we've even had a few tripe butties and the odd crisp and salad cream teacake.

'Appen, today's official forecast is for fine weather, so she can tek a break from shovellin' t'snow off backyard. Once she's broken ice int' wash tub, and tekken in the washing, she'll 'ave plenty of time to polish the doormat and shampoo t'whippets. Then she can roast the squirrel fer Christmas dinner, fer when her old man gets back from pub. It's shaping up to be a reet grand day.

That'll give me a chance to stop pretending to be a stage Yorkshireman, which doesn't come easy for someone who was born and bred in North London and only travelled to the wrong side of the Wash to export some civilisation to the lost regions of England.

Whether it actually snows today depends, I suppose, on Piers Corbyn. Contrary to the official forecasts, he is labelling the period 25-31 December a "Weather Action Red warning (World)" period with top activity expected in sub-periods 25-27th and 29/30th December. With the Met Office reputation at an all-time low, and Booker planning a demolition job for tomorrow, getting it right could make Corbyn's reputation once and for all.

There seems less uncertainly in Chicago, where snow accumulations yesterday ranged from 3 to 6 inches, and they are confidently declaring a White Christmas. The Chicago Weather Center says it has been 13 years since an inch or more of snow has fallen on Christmas Eve, and 59 years since 4 inches or more fell on 24 December.

Two inches of snow have also fallen in parts of Minnesota, but that did not stop the "holiday procrastinators" from going out to buy gifts on Christmas Eve. And the same snow belt is headed southeast, expected to bring rare Christmas Day snowfall to Kentucky

After dumping 9 inches of snow in Iowa by Friday morning, the storm was likely to dip south into Tennessee and Georgia today, then perhaps move north Sunday. Winter weather advisories were in effect from Kansas east to Kentucky and from Minnesota south to Arkansas yesterday.

Making a mockery of the claim by the British Met Office that the cold in Britain and Europe is a local event, we have also seen more than 300 people in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region stuck in a traffic jam after snowstorms blocked a national road. More than 100 firefighters and police officers and 20 rescue cars had to be rushed to clear the snow and rescue the trapped people, amid extremely cold weather with temperatures 30 degrees Celsius below zero.

Tianjin Municipality on Thursday received its first snow this winter, forcing transport authorities to close 11 highways. The temperature in Peking was around six degrees below freezing Thursday morning, a drop of 12 degrees Celsius from the same time the previous day.

Cold conditions are spreading to northern India, with mercury hovering around freezing point in several parts of Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir. And in St Petersburg, they are mounting icicle patrols in a bid to stop people being killed by falling ice.

But there's no need to worry. Once the global warming really gets going, billions will die. Human civilization will be reduced to a "broken rabble ruled by brutal warlords", and the plague-ridden remainder of the species will flee the cracked and broken earth to the Arctic, the last temperate spot, where a few breeding couples will survive.

That was James Lovelock in February 2006, so I guess it will not be long now. Enjoy your Christmas while you can. You might be having to share the next one with the polar bears.

Pic by Emma wot takes photographs.

A matter of priorities - by Richard... Friday, December 24, 2010

The Daily Mail is trying to salvage some national pride, by pointing out that our gallant French neighbours are having a little bit of problem with their global warming. Parts of the terminal at Charles de Gaulle have had to be closed because of the weight of snow on the roof, while stocks of de-icer fluid for aircraft have got so low that the number of flights has had to be restricted.

Dublin airport has also taken a hit. Until recently, they were not doing too badly, having avoided failure on the heroic scale that has blighted Heathrow. That was until yesterday when an unexpected blizzard caught the airport operator off guard. No less than eight inches of global warming forced several closures, and the airlines have been doing catch-up ever since.

Other than very brief closures during and in the aftermath of storms, however, these episodes are more about money than weather. Shortages of de-icer for instance, are simply a reflection of airport operators' reluctance to invest in bulk storage facilities, and then to tie up money in hold stocks of the fluid. This has left Charles de Gaulle exposed to a strike at the main French factory producing de-icing fluid, forcing the cancellation of half – about 400 – of the flights scheduled for this morning.

The tightness on the purse strings for winter preparations makes an interesting counterpoint, with the spend on other things, highlighted by Italy complaining about a diary being distributed free to schoolchildren throughout the EU. It wants a recall of millions of copies because they do not mention Christmas but do give the dates of other religions' festivals, such as Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, and Sikh, Hindu and Chinese feast days.

Surely the more pertinent point, though, is why the are being produced at all. We really do not need rather sinister organisations such as the Generation Europe foundation, creaming off public funds to produce something like three million copies of the Europa Diary at a cost estimated at £4.6 million.

Spread over the 27 EU member states, this would be small beer, except that it is but one small example of the continuous waste by public authorities. In this case, it is the EU, spending money on propaganda which could be picked up off the website, but it could just as well be any of the member states.

And this is the way the world now seems to work. Money is frittered away on non-essentials, while essential services go short, and are curtailed altogether when the money runs out. Locally, you could even see the absurdity of local council propaganda sheets not being delivered through want of street gritting, omitted because the money has been spent on propaganda sheets.

No longer do we seem to have public administrators who know how to prioritise essential tasks, a failure which – as we now see – has European if not global dimensions.

The pic, by the way, is icicles in Wales – the global warming prison: bars on the windows symbolising how the cold is keeping so many people housebound.

COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

"Scientists have established a link between the cold, snowy winters in Britain and melting sea ice in the Arctic and have warned that long periods of freezing weather are likely to become more frequent in years to come." This is from The Independent, which cites arch-warmist Professor Rahmstorf. Snowy winters will be about three times more frequent in the coming years compared with previous decades.

But worry ye not. "If you look ahead 40 or 50 years, these cold winters will be getting warmer because, even though you are getting an inflow of cold polar air, that air mass is getting warmer because of the greenhouse effect," says Rahmstorf. So cold winters are "a transient phenomenon". In the long run, "global warming wins out."

This means that the warmists are back in their comfort zone. Having argued consistently that global warming will give rise to mild winters, they now have a framework to explain why they are getting colder - the "immaculate conception" of climate change. The new dogma will be quoted endlessly and unbelievers scorned in the usual insolent way. Armageddon is merely deferred. The religion lives on.

And now that the freezing weather is "officially" caused by global warming, we will be seeing dozens of stories like this from the BBC (above). The reality doesn't matter – nor does the science. They never have. The only thing that counts is that the warmists have a narrative which can be used to support their belief. Rahmstorf has given them that. No further discussion is required.

COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

Churning - by Richard...

Harriet Sergeant writes an important piece in the Daily Mail, the title: "Have we customers ever been so impotent?" "Like thousands of - others today," she writes, "I am stuck in one place while the people I love and want to be with are somewhere else. In other words, BAA has stolen my Christmas".

Sergeant was meant to have flown to Cape Town to join friends and family. Instead, she had been grounded. But, she declares, "this is not just a story of the weather or incompetence. It is about a far wider issue." She is right, although the issue about which she writes is even wider than she describes.

Rehearsing her own "far wider issue", she tells us that, when she was young, we were at the mercy of state-run monopolies, such as British Rail, British Telecom and British Leyland. But now we are the victims of what she calls the new utilities. Along with airlines, this group includes train companies, mobile phone and computer suppliers, broadband providers and cable and satellite TV firms.

With these "new utilities", Sergeant asserts, the normal rules of the marketplace do not apply. "They know they have become indispensable. Like water and heating, we cannot do without them, and so they abuse their position of power." And they all share certain characteristics, the main one being a stunning indifference to us.

By way of example, she asks: "What kind of company turns off the heating at night in terminals full of stranded travellers? It was so cold people were unpacking suitcases and passing clothes to strangers". Continuing the theme, several more questions trip out:

What kind of company fails to keep travellers informed of what is happening, then locks out passengers who arrived at Terminals 1 and 3 in sub-zero temperatures — on the grounds that they were already packed with passengers going nowhere — and then sets security guards onto them when they protest?

From this Sergeant develops her thesis. "This appalling indifference to customers by large, modern companies is not confined to Christmas. It is a year-round phenomenon," she says.

Every one of us, she adds, has emerged from an encounter with one of these companies — whether it be with an airline help desk or a mobile phone operator's call centre — with the same feeling: that they have a complete disregard for us as customers and, worse, as individuals. "We are treated as part of a herd that has to be controlled, manipulated and, all too often, abused," she notes.

Confronted with these monoliths, Sergeant suggests that the argument that the free market should protect us, as these companies have to compete to provide a better service, doesn't seem to hold water.

These firms either have a stranglehold on a service that none of us can do without, such as BAA with its monopoly over Britain’s airports, or train companies which offer appalling commuting conditions. Or else they are so replete with customers — as in the burgeoning IT, computer and mobile phone industries — that they couldn't care less.

The issue she misses is that this ethos, this corporate indifference, spreads far beyond the "new utilities". We get exactly the same thing from the old utilities – such as the energy companies. And we also get it from the banks, the police, the newspapers, the broadcasters, local government, doctors, the health service, central government and the political parties. Their indifference is their defining characteristic.

However, while in our relations with the authorities, we suffer because there is no choice and the systems of accountability have broken down, with the commercial corporates there is a different mechanism at work. It is not quite as Sergeant puts it, that these companies are "replete with customers".

The essence here is that these giant corporates do lose customers. But since they are all much of a muchness, and they all share a similar arrogance and indifference to their customers' needs, they all lose customers. But they lose them to each other. Thus, we have a huge merry-go-round, with customers constantly on the move. This is called "churning".

The corporates live with their churn rates - they are regarded as normal and acceptable business expenses. They know that customers have limited places to go. What they lose in dissatisfied customers, they will get back from their fellow corporates. Thus they can afford to remain completely indifferent to the fact that we are unhappy with the service we get.

There Sergeant is right to ask: "Have we customers ever been so impotent?" Unfortunately, the answer is, "probably not". And that's just how the churning corporates like it.

COMMENT THREADPrint ready

In the land of the morons - by Richard... Thursday, December 23, 2010

Snowfall, ice, Arctic-level cold and all the rest have caused major disruption to the UK infrastructure in the last few weeks, not least because our gilded civil servants have been looking in the wrong direction. And they still are.

Thus we learn from a report published today by Defra that the UK's infrastructure will "struggle to cope with climate change". "Floods, rising temperatures and higher sea levels threaten the UK's road, rail, water and energy networks between 2030 and 2100," it says.

Consumers will have to learn they cannot expect cheap heating and lighting and to go where or when they want as floods, rising temperatures and higher sea levels threaten the UK's road, rail, water and energy networks, it says.

Dear God. The country is grinding to a halt NOW, and they are still prattling about global warming in the period 2030 to 2100? These people are truly off their trolleys. They are seriously mentally ill.

COMMENT: GLOBAL WARMING FRED