Thursday, 6 January 2011

Falling off the map - by Richard... Thursday, January 06, 2011


The online journal The Daily Climate is getting upset about the lack of media coverage of climate change. According to this source, in 2010, journalists published 23,156 climate-related stories in English last year - a 30 percent drop from '09's tally. This brings them back to 2005 levels, after spiking in the run-up to the much-hyped climate talks in Copenhagen and during the Climategate scandal.

Interestingly, of individual journalists, Andrew Revkin of the New York Times delivered the highest output, at 146, but it was our very own Louise Gray of The Daily Telegraph who came third, with 119. She beat even the lead Guardian journalist, Suzanne Goldenberg, who trailed in at sixth place with a mere 81 stories.

However, if the print (and online) volume is down drastically, US network news has shown an almost precipitous decline. Drexel University professor Robert Brulle has analyzed nightly network news since the 1980s. Last year's climate coverage was so miniscule, he says, that he's doubting his data.

"I can't believe it's this little. In the US, it's just gone off the map," he complains. "It's pretty clear we're back to 2004, 2005 levels." Coverage of Cancun is Exhibit A: Total meeting coverage by the networks consisted of one 10-second clip. By contrast, 2009's Copenhagen talks generated 32 stories totalling 98 minutes of airtime. "It's so little, it's stunning," Brulle says.

And this The Daily Climate piece is but one of a whole raft of articles drawing attention to the changed media environment for the warmists. Only a few days ago, we had a long piece in Der Spiegel which noted that "the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere keeps going up and up, but public interest in climate change is sinking".

Environmentalists, said the paper, are trying to come up with new ways to make the issue sexy – offering the picture illustrated (right) ... nude greenies, and remarkably lacking in sex appeal. But shock tactics can backfire all too easily, says Spiegel. Climate change used to make headlines. But these days the issue appears to have largely fallen off the radar.

Nature also offers a not-dissimilar whingeing piece, headed: "Why dire climate warnings boost scepticism". It tells us that: "Undermining belief in a fair world may mean that climate warnings go unheeded," then going on to tell us that, "although scientific evidence that anthropogenic activities are behind global warming continues to mount, belief in the phenomenon has stagnated in recent years".

We also get Ted Nordhaus at the Breakthrough Institute, a Californian think-tank for energy and climate issues. He remarks that, "When I was a pollster, I was detecting that many dire messages seemed to be counterproductive, we really needed someone to determine why," the dissertation then evaluating why the greenie message appears to be failing.

The real reason, of course, is that you can only offer messages of impending doom for so long before they lose their effect, so you keep having to up the ante. In time, the messages become so dire and so extreme that they lose all vestiges of credibility, and people simple switch off.

What particularly has done for the warmists this year, of course, is that white stuff that falls from the sky. Thus we have Spiked telling us that the snow crisis of December 2010 has become a striking snapshot of the chasm that separates the warming-obsessed elite from the rest of us.

Nevertheless, we have the High Priests delivering the booster messages, in particular Suzanne Jeffery in International Socialism, who writes under the heading: "Why we should be sceptical of climate sceptics". Every point she raises I have seen repeated – sometimes many times – in the Booker column comments, raised by the infestation of warmists, presented as if they were original ideas.

Much the same comes from Planet Save, with not a new idea to offer, other than to slag off "deniers" with their "BS of the year" awards.

The sheer volume of introspective and pessimistic coverage from the warmists points to a failing movement that has lost confidence in itself and its message, becoming strident and aggressive to boot. They cannot even agree amongst themselves as to the way forward.

But another failing of the warmists is their focus on the traditional media. While the MSM coverage may be falling, the internet has "exploded" – on the blogosphere and on forums and article comments. That is where the debate is being fought and, by and large, lost by the warmists. This very modern scare fails to understand the dynamics of the modern media.

Their only saviour, for the moment, is the inertia of the politicians who, having put measures in place, are not about to change them in a hurry. But the warmists are greedy and ambitious – they always want more, and the high water mark has been reached. They have nowhere to go but down – and it looks as if they know it.

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The limitations of language - by Richard... Wednesday, January 05, 2011


Northern Ireland Water's embattled boss, we are told, quit his job tonight after huge pressure was put on him to resign over the Christmas water crisis. It is understood Laurence MacKenzie offered his resignation earlier this evening and recommended that Sinn Féin's regional development minister, Conor Murphy, accept it. MacKenzie is expected to walk away with around £500,000.

And there, language is not enough. It is quite impossible adequately to express one's anger and contempt for a system which rewards public servants for their failures, flying in the face of common sense and justice. And it is this lack of penalty for failure – and in fact the rewarding of failure – that is bringing the system down.

But there is only so much people will tolerate, and this is the system taking the piss in the most contemptible way. And if the gutless and venal politicians cannot address this issue, the Northern Irish people have a recent history of more direct action.

Putting it brutally, but realistically, if Mr MacKenzie's mutilated body was now found on the streets of Belfast, do you think that anyone outside his immediate family would regret that the fat slob had met his end? To that pretty pass does the insolence of our rulers bring us. They know not what they do.

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Another local event - by Richard...


As Joe Bastardi forecasts that the "Emperor of the North" is getting ready to march south in the United States, it seems as if the Chinese have beaten him to it.

Widely reported, not least by Xinhuanet, freezing temperatures, sleet and snow in southern China have disrupted lives of over 3.83 million. The weather has forced 58,000 people from their homes and caused about $200 million in economic losses, with the collapse of the roofs of more than 1,200 homes across the southern regions of Jiangxi, Hunan, Chongqing, Sichuan and Guizhou.

Freezing weather has also damaged more than 300,000 acres of crops, including cabbage and rice. In Guizhou province, 22,800 people were forced out of their homes, and drivers abandoned thousands of cars after ice-covered roads were closed. People, especially those living in the mountains and the elderly, are still being evacuated from their homes.

The National Meteorological Center (NMC) says that the freezing weather is likely to continue for at least another week, although a repeat of the 2008 conditions is thought unlikely. Nevertheless, this is another nail in the coffin (unfortunately, only metaphorically) for the egregious Met Office chief scientist Julia Slingo who so desperately wants us to believe that the cold weather, which we experienced in Europe, was "not a global event."

Slingo is, of course, relying on unseasonably warm weather in southern Greenland, and eastern Canada, but even there she may be in for a shock as conditions there deteriorate rapidly.

But as Slingo bleats, and the warmists insist that this year was the warmest since records began, or the second warmest, or whatever, Professor Werner Kirstein of the Institute for Geography at the University of Leipzig cautions against placing too much emphasis on the decade of 2001 -2010.

The claim that it is the hottest on record, he believes, is "a joke". He ends up saying that determining a global average is a tricky business and in the end is only "a theoretical value". The one thing that is not "theoretical", though, is the repeated appearance of these outcrops of "global warming" that Slingo insists are just local events.

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And then there were (still) five - by Richard...


We were not wrong in predicting that the Okhotsk Sea drama still had a way to go. The latest newsfrom the Russian media (as of early morning Moscow time) was that the icebreaker Admiral Makarov was currently towing to safe waters the 1,300-ton trawler, Mys Yelizavety (Cape Elizabeth). The ship has been singled out for attention as it was less than half a mile from the shore and was in danger of being grounded by the moving ice.

This operation was separately reported by TASS to have been successfully completed, and the picture above shows the pair of ship on their way to the open sea. Significantly, this appears to be a "close coupled tow" which we referred to in our earlier piece (good videos here and hereillustrating the technique), a stratagem adopted inter alia in very cold or windy conditions when the ice is likely to close up immediately behind an icebreaker.

We also see in the report a reference to "hummocked" ice, which is largely a wind effect, but can make ice navigation very slow and dangerous. The story thus takes on a new dimension as we learn that, with the successful rescue of the Mys Yelizavety, the icebreaker Magadan, which was first on scene in an attempt to effect a rescue, has itself got stuck in the ice. With five ships stuck in the ice, and one now freed, the number is back to five. The other ship is identified as the Anton Gurin, a trawler registered in St Petersburg.

We are told that the Admiral Makarov is "moving at full tilt" to help the Magadan, although we last heard from the Makarov's captain that progress through the ice was very slow. That is likely significantly to delay the rescue of the other ships. But, if the Mys Yelizavety needed a close coupled tow to get it out, the big question is how the giant 32,000-ton Sodruzhetsvo will be got clear.


The 14,000-ton Admiral Makarov is a powerful ship, delivering 36,000 shaft horsepower – against the 5,000-ton Magadan with 13,000 horsepower available – but it would struggle to drag theSodruzhetsvo clear. Even the Russian flagship, the nuclear-powered 50 Let Pobedy, with 75,000 horsepower (pictured above is the Yamal, dragging an 20,000-ton SA-15, I think, in a close coupled tow), might have difficulty.

According to further reports, rescue efforts have been "hampered by weather conditions, storm winds and heavy snowfalls," and "unusually cold weather of up to -17°C" is being experienced. Furthermore, weather forecasts are unfavourable. Temperatures may plunge even further and a storm is expected in the area late Thursday/early Friday.

The implications of this weather are obvious in an area that was said to be "sensitive" to global warming, and had a recent history of declining ice formation.

But what is also fascinating is the poor and highly inaccurate coverage by the British (and western) media, which seem unable to appreciate the magnitude of the drama that is unfolding. With over 400 lives at risk, and no certainty that a speedy rescue can be effected, one might have thought that greater interest would be shown.

UPDATE: Latest is that the Admiral Makarov has now reached the Magadan and is assisting it to break free of the ice. The Anton Gurin, meanwhile, is reported to have broken free on its own.

The position of the other ships is stable, says Admiral Makarov's captain, Gennady Antokhin. The icebreaker is due to reach these remaining three ships by midnight local time (1400 GMT - about now, at the time of writing). "The ice is very serious, frozen in layers, covered in snow and hard to pass through. It sticks onto the ship," says Antokhin. "I think this will not be a very quick operation."

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Insult to injury - by Richard...

Here's the deal – our regional administration in Westminster gives the euroslime in Brussels zillions of pounds of our money, and they give a tiny part of it back – in this case £18 million – which is then used to build windmills in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

Then, of course, the BBC does an orgasmic piece, using the nearest talking head to tell us all how wonderful this arrangement is.

In this case, the talking head is Scottish "enterprise" minister Jim Mather, who betrays the usual economic illiteracy of his kind by declaring, to the obvious approval of the State Broadcaster, that there was the potential to create "more than 60 jobs" from the "investment".

Thus has our language been debauched. State robbery for job-destroying greenery becomes "investment", Mather then burbling on about exploiting Scotland's "green energy potential" and how "vital" the "EU cash boost" will be "in the economic recovery of the Highlands and Islands".

Y'know – and I might even have said this before – when I was a schoolboy, I could never understand why or how people in the French Revolution could have been so cruel as to slaughter their own rulers. But now I understand perfectly. In this case, there are 18 million very good reasons.

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How so very convenient - by Richard... Tuesday, January 04, 2011

"Hurricanes could become more prevalent with climate change, but the economic pain they deliver might not be recognized as man-made for 260 years," says The New York Times.

That means, it continues, that "smashed homes and ruined roads may not be attributable to greenhouse gases for centuries, according to new research that suggests climate policies like adaptation should be designed without financial evidence of climate-enhanced windstorms".

So, let me get this straight. We have absolutely no evidence that man-made climate change is causing or will cause more hurricanes, and are unlikely to have that evidence for an impossibly long time – after everyone currently living is long dead – if ever. Therefore, we should proceed on the basis that it is proven.

And these people want us to believe they are sane?

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The cavalry rides to the rescue? - by Richard...


We may (or may not) be coming into the last phase of the Okhotsk Sea drama with the arrival of the 15,000-ton icebreaker Admiral Makarov on station, ready to help rescue the trapped ships (pictured above).

The icebreaker Magadan is already on station and so are the ice-class tugs Irbis and Predanniy, dispatched to the rescue by the Maritime Rescue Coordination sub-center Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. But what has not been made clear from the reports is the scale of this operation, as one of the trapped ships is by no means an ordinary vessel.

Originally described as "fishing boats" with crews totalling 600 in a BBC report, latterly we have seen three main vessels trapped, with about 400 people, described as the floating platform "Commonwealth", the research vessel the "Professor Kizivetter" and the refrigerated transport ship "Coast of Hope ". (And there may be two more - 1,300-ton trawler, Mys Yelizavety, which is less than half a mile from shore with 78 crew on board, and a trawler with a crew of 25, which also became trapped on Monday).

However, as best we can establish, the three main ships are the Sodruzhestvo, the 13,000-ton refrigerated fish carrier Bereg Nadezhdy and indeed the fisheries research ship Professor Kizevetter.


The one to watch is the Sodruzhestvo (pictured above - the name means "friendship" or "alliance"). Still being called a "fishing boat" by the financially well-endowed but intellectually impoverished BBC (and joined in that by ITN News), she is actually a huge floating crab canning factory.

Built in Finland and commissioned in 1989, together with sister ships Petr Zhitnikov (pictured below) and Vsevolod Sibirtsev, this 32,000-ton giant and its sister ships have no parallels. Each can carry a crew of up to 520 (although only 320 are reported aboard the Sodruzhestvo at this time) and are able to process enough seafood each day to fill up to 350,000 cans.


The ships are ice-hardened and are used to working in Arctic conditions. They are big enough to weather all but the most furious of storms. For the Sodruzhestvo to have been caught out, therefore, conditions must have been exceptionally severe – strengthening the suggestions that we are beginning to see a dramatic turnaround in the weather in the region.

Despite its size and power, the Admiral Makarov will have its work cut out rescuing theSodruzhestvo. In the exceptional conditions prevailing, where the sea is so cold that the ice closes immediately behind an icebreaker, the Russians have developed a technique called the "close coupled tow", where the following ship is lashed directly to the icebreaker's stern.

This, though, is a hazardous manoeuvre and often damaging to the towed ship, which is literally dragged through the ice. Moreover, it has rarely if ever been tried with a ship the size of theSodruzhestvo. Thus, while the cavalry have arrived, the drama may not yet be over.

And, working on the basis that the danger is never so acute as when politicians publicly offer reassurance, the situation looked more serious later this afternoon when Putin made a telephone call to the crew of the Sodruzhestvo, promising them "quick help", telling them that the icebreakers would not reach them until tomorrow, when a break in the weather is expected.

Much more of that and they are quite obviously doomed.

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I will not be a member of such a mongrel party. - by Pete...

I don't suppose this can pass without comment. Over on the Tory blog we see Roger Helmer denouncing the possibility of a merger with the Lib Dems...
I give notice to anyone who may be interested: I will not be a member of such a mongrel party. I will not represent it in Brussels. I will not campaign for it, and I will not vote for it. And nor, I suspect, will most of the Conservatives I know.
Fair enough, one might think. His reasoning being:
What do the Lib-Dems bring to the party? An even more limp-wristed approach to immigration, and justice. A positively dangerous attitude to terrorism, as we can see from the current debate on Control Orders. Their “Pupil Premium”, which subsidises failure when we should be investing in success. A general pretension to fiscal probity, undermined at every point by a determination to spend on particular pet issues. A blind, lunatic obsession with the climate issue, and a closed-minded determination to spend eye-watering sums on futile attempts at mitigation. And above all, total subservience to the EU.

We shall never have a robust EU policy while we consort with Clegg and his kind. We shall never see the repatriation of powers from Brussels that we promised (and then forgot). We shall continue meekly passing authority and responsibility for our governance from Westminster to the EU.
But can anyone say it would have been any different with an outright victory under Cameron? And does this not come a little late? The time for breaking ranks with the Cameron loser was long ago. Had Mr Helmer and his kind, not least the pretenders Hannan and Carswell et al, grown a spine and spoke up long before, perhaps the Tories might not have lost an unlosable election to bring us here in the first place.

After years of Helmer serving as a token eurosceptic for the Cameron party, it's difficult to take this at all seriously. It's still only a phoney gesture. Since the same applies to the Conservative party with or without a Lib Dem merger, we will need to see bolder statements than this to be convinced. And then it will be interesting to see if Daniel "I voted for David Cameron and would do so again"Hannan will do likewise, or if maintaining his cushy little number doesn't warrant the risk. The smart money is on the latter.

Either way, with or without the Lib Dems, the party remains as something I do not recognise as conservative. I will not be a member of such a party. I will not campaign for it, and I will not vote for it. And nor, I suspect, will most of the conservatives I know. Go figure.

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Re-writing history - by Richard...

Winston Smith has nothing on the Met Office, which is busy re-writing history in an attempt to convince us that it predicted this awful winter weather. Autonomous Mind is on the case, complete with a reminder of what the Met Office actually did say, in public at least.

The current legend is that the Met Office did know after all – and told the government Cabinet Office. But it did not make its forecast public. That, however, hardly explains why the government budget for winter fuel payments was only £40 million for the whole winter, with the early bout of Arctic weather having triggered £100 million of extra benefits spending by early December.

There is something particularly sinister about this attempt to deceive, and Autonomous Mind is determined to track it down. This needs blowing wide open. Biased BBC is also duly affronted – particularly at the role of Roger Harrabin, who is playing a dark hand in all this - and the admirableTom Nelson is keeping track of the posts.

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Kill the cows - by Richard...

Mad Cow disease (BSE) causes global warming. I bet you knew that all along.

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Not real scientists - by Richard...

Picked up by our forum members and others - albeit somewhat late, as it bears a publications date of 13 December - is an important article in the New Yorkermagazine, written by Jonah Lehrer under the title "the truth wears off".

Its importance stems from its detailed treatment of a subject that modern science would prefer to ignore, the subject of bias in research studies, although the article is marred by the silly title and the equally silly strap, which reads: "Is there something wrong with the scientific method?"

The silliness is evident from the reading, as there is nothing wrong with the scientific method. The narrative confirms this ... eventually. Somewhat laboriously, it leads you to the main thesis about bias – bringing us then to a biologist at the University of Alberta called Richard Palmer.

His concern is the effect of selective reporting of results, the classic, so-called "publication bias", where journals will only normally publish positive results, so there is an unconscious tendency to steer results in the right direction in order to secure publication.

Palmer emphasises that selective reporting is not the same as scientific fraud. Rather, the problem seems to be one of subtle omissions and unconscious misperceptions, as researchers struggle to make sense of their results.

There are also cultural issues involved. For instance, workers in Asian countries are far more likely to report successful trials using acupuncture than their Western counterparts. Palmer notes that this wide discrepancy suggests that scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don't want to see. "Our beliefs," he says, "are a form of blindness".

Another toiler in the vineyard is John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University. One of his most cited papers has a deliberately provocative title: "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False," where he notes that the problem of selective reporting is rooted in a fundamental cognitive flaw.

We like proving ourselves right and hate being wrong. "It feels good to validate a hypothesis," he says. "It feels even better when you've got a financial interest in the idea or your career depends upon it. That's why, even after a claim has been systematically disproven" - he cites, for instance, the early work on hormone replacement therapy, or claims involving various vitamins - "you still see some stubborn researchers citing the first few studies that show a strong effect. They really want to believe that it's true."

Although not specifically mentioned, the application to "climate change" is self evident, which underlines the importance of the article. However, the theme needs to be taken further in order to have an effect.

The essential problem is getting researchers (or those who read their work) even to recognise the existence of bias. This, I write in the Booker column comments, adding that the authority and "prestige" afforded to "the science" makes it very difficult to change a settled view.

Furthermore, people who tend to be unduly influenced by authoritative views are most likely to be affected by such biases, and least likely to recognise them ... and indeed will be offended by the very suggestion of a bias (or many). And rarely inside the circle of specialists who claim authority in the field of climate change do we see any serious discussion of the possible effects of bias and, most often, it is workers outside the field who are most able to detect it.

It is my view that, however, that in the "climate change" field there are several biases at play, not least one coined by myself and my PhD supervisor, which we labelled "acceptable diagnosis bias" - a propensity to detect or report results which are acceptable to the peer group.

This phenomenon is not new. In Ceylon between 1943-46, the most common diagnosis for pyrexias of unknown origin was "malaria", accounting for some 35 percent of hospital and dispensary attendance but, after the successful completion of a mosquito eradication programme, it no longer became acceptable to report such illness as malaria. Physicians, therefore, took to labelling pyrexias of unknown origin as "influenza", the overall rate of such reporting remaining remarkably constant.

This exerts its effect in the publication of papers, where researchers tend to steer their results in a direction which will ensure peer approval. Perversely, therefore, peer group review in this context reinforces the likelihood and effects of this bias, to the extent that peer review is a major distorting factor ... alongside publication bias and several others.

So prevalent in scientific research are various biases – which emerges from Jonah Lehrer's piece – that any person purporting to offer scientific work, who is not aware of the role, nature and potential effects of bias, and has not scrutinised their work for the possibility of it being affected, is not a serious scientist.

Lehrer cites Palmer, who summarises the impact of that one bias of selective reporting on his field: "We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some - perhaps many - cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a priori beliefs often repeated," he says.

One almost shrieks with approval – this describes "climate change" to a tee. The absence of any serious discussion in the field on the effects of bias further confirms that practitioners – whatever their titles and pretensions – are not real scientists.

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Nice one - by Richard...

With Russian ships still trapped in the Sea of Okhotsk, in ice of two-metre thickness, Republican American blogger Steve Macoyrecalls a 2006 symposium on global warming.

Illustrated were findings that that a large warming area existed in the western part of the Sea of Okhotsk, and a warming trend widely extended toward the western North Pacific. It was thus "widely believed" that the global warming was recently proceeding and the East Siberia region just north of the Sea of Okhotsk was one of the most sensitive areas to the global warming in the Northern Hemisphere.

The Sea of Okhotsk turns out to be quite an important area from the warmist perspective,this paper reporting that it plays a role as the pump of the North Pacific – thus having a significant effect on the climate of the region. It forms a significant ice factory for the whole region and thereare said to be "clear indications of global warming" around the sea.

This report in 2006 claimed a dramatic shrinkage of ice (illustrated), and a shortening ice season – with dire economic consequences. And it was this paper which reported on the area of the sea being "a sensitive area to the current global warming", despite cyclical effects being reported elsewhere.

With the region now experiencing thick – and evidently unexpected – ice, this is clearly of more importance than just the trapping of a number of ships. The ice in the whole region is something of a warmist poster child, and another one that has suddenly lost its appeal.

As the reducing ice extent has been used as evidence of global warming, so can we assume that the rapid increase in ice may be an early sign that the warming is over?

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A distinct nip in the air - by Richard... Monday, January 03, 2011


To the fury of diverse warmists, who tend to lack humour or a sense of irony, the range of countries suffering from unusual coldness has now expanded to India, with a cold wave hitting the north, claiming 27 lives.

Close to 24 people died in Uttar Pradesh alone, three deaths were reported in Jammu and Kashmir with Qazigund in south Kashmir shivering at minus 7.4°C, while Kokernag town in Anantnag district recording a minimum temperature of minus six degree C. Srinagar, which experienced a heavy snowfall two days earlier, froze at -2.4° C, against 0.8°C last Saturday.

The temperature in Leh nosedived to a scary -23.6°C. The Srinagar-Jammu national highway was snowed-in, turning the place into an island with no links to the world outside. The lack of basic woollen clothing and heating facilities to the millions out there, didn't help matters either.

Even, it is said, Delhi – home of Rajendra Pachauri - quivered as temperatures dropped to 14.6°C, one of its coldest winters in years. It has been hit by thick fog which disrupted flights. The elderly and the children seem to be the most affected with a 70 year old man and a two year old boy succumbed to the extreme weather in Bahraich and Farukkhabad districts respectively.

The Times of India is recording the coldest period for seven years in Bombay, with the temperature dropping to a frigid 12.9°C overnight between 31 December and 1 January a degree less than last year's record. With increasing cold in the north, the mercury is likely to dip further, the weather department predicts.

"There was a western upper air system disturbance over Jammu and Kashmir, which caused almost a five-degree-drop in the temperatures in the northern region. Even though this system is moving eastwards, the easterly winds continue to affect the southern and western parts of India," said an official from the India Meteorological Department (IMD), Pune.

"The northerly winds, too, are quite strong and there is snowfall in some northern regions. Because of the five-degree drop in the north, Mumbai is experiencing a distinct nip in the air," he added (pictured).

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And they don't mess about - by Richard...


This could be an interesting spring, if this report is correct.

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Posted by Britannia Radio at 07:17