The icebreaker dance - by Richard... Monday, January 17, 2011

The icebreaker dance - by Richard... Monday, January 17, 2011

Here we have it again, this curious "dance" by the Russian icebreakers, which we observed yeasterday. This time, the picture (above) accompanies the news that the Krasin and the Admiral Makarov have manged now to extract both the Sodruzhestvo factory ship and the Bereg Nadezhdyfish carrier out of thick ice in the Okhotsk Sea.

With a little more detail given, we learn that the icebreakers first towed the bigger factory ship to a safer area, and then returned for the Bereg Nadezdy, which they took to thinner ice. The report acknowledges a change of plan but it looks as if, in the final stages, the two ships were escorted out together.

The drama is not entirely over though. TASS reports that the ships have got through the "hardest 10 miles" with the highest ice pressure. The convoy will keep sailing northward to a safe area in the Okhotsk Sea, which "may take another few days".

Led by the Krasin, there is an unintended irony here. The ship is named after Leonid Krasin, the Russian Kommisar who is credited with devising the refrigeration system which preserved Lennin's body. Having put his body in ice, so to speak, this icebreaker, the second to bear the name, is dedicated to getting bodies out of the ice, in a manner of speaking, which it has done so spectacularly this time.

With the crisis having started on 31 December, it has now taken 18 days to get these ships released, and mighty relieved they must be. Weather continues to deteriorate as global warming takes its malign grip of the region, with 50 mph winds and temperatures currently down to -20°C. Think how terrible it might have been had the world actually been cooling.

COMMENT: OKHOTSK SEA CRISIS

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They would kill us all - by Richard...

The great hope for energy is shale gas, one of the few ways we might loosen the grip of the greenies on energy policy. Needless to say, the greenies have seen the threat to themselves, and – with the help of Roger Harrabin - are calling for a moratorium on drilling.

Ministers, so far, aren't wearing it – but these are just the opening salvoes. The battle has just started and the greenies mean to kill us all. Nevertheless, over at The Register we learn that the government has been "blasted" for ignoring shale gas. And indeed it has, in common with the MSM which seems to be unaware of what is going on – and there's a surprise.

Is it time to decouple "Climate Change" from the Department of Energy and Climate Change? If it was the plain old "Department of Energy" again, it might spend more time researching new fuel sources, says Andrew Orlowski, effectively repeating a refrain that Booker has been singing for some time.

Anyhow, if the greenies don't finish us off, the Cleggerons will. The coalition has backtracked on a promise to bring in a stabiliser which would have ensured petrol tax was reduced if oil prices went too high. Treasury chief secretary Danny Alexander says that Euroslime Dave's stabiliser idea was "complicated" and would be "difficult to achieve".

Ministers have also rejected calls to scrap the 1p rise in fuel duty due to come in on 1 April. So, while the political élites swan about in their chauffeur-driven cars at the taxpayers' expense, we pay through the nose for their privilege.

COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

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Ahead of the game - by Richard...

I don't recall the exact time, or even whether I made a conscious decision, but at some time fairly recently I resolved to distance this blog still further from the MSM and its attempts to dominate the news agenda. For long enough, we have argued that the poison of the MSM is as much in what it tells us is important, as what it actually tells us – the fact that it expects us to fall in with its values.

It has, therefore, been something of a delight to have followed the Okhotsk Sea crisis so closely, even adding to what the Russians were telling us, and anticipating some of their moves. This makes blogging fun, as well as important. We are adding value. Equally, it is encouraging to see other blogs take up the cudgels and cover issues, either in parallel or separately, and we are always very pleased to link to them, blogs like Autonomous Mind, Subrosa, Biased BBC andWitterings from Witney (who is doing extremely good work).

Here, though, there is one of the few agreements I had with Iain Dale. His dictum was: if you don't link to me, I don't link to you. It took some bloggers an inordinate amount of time to learn this lesson, and some still do not seem to be able to grasp the principle. But I have no time for theprima donnas or the "precious" bloggers who think they must "own" an issue in order to discuss it, and present themselves to their readers as the only toilers in the vineyard.

With that, one can only express an element of pride in the way bloggers, in Australia and here, have been leading the field in unravelling the events behind the tragic floods in Queensland. The essence was recorded by Booker yesterday, the first British MSM journalist to step outside the box, rehearsing events which the Australian media is only just beginning to look at.

As we, the bloggers, more and more frequently set our own agendas, this would be to no avail if the readers were not there. But, of late, those that do the work – this blog included – are experiencing healthy increases in readership numbers. Individually, our hit rate may be small but, collectively, we have a huge reach and those of us who work together (albeit informally) are reaping the benefit of such co-operation.

The MSM, on the other hand, become but shallow bulletin boards. With rare exceptions, they do not inform us any longer - merely they identify stories that we, the bloggers, can look at. We can then research them properly (there will always be bloggers who know more than the media about a given subject), and post without the (self-imposed) pressures and limitations of the dead tree press and their equally lame broadcasting counterparts.

Given the way MSM circulations are declining, we'll still be there when some of them have gone. By then, we hope, even the politicians will have woken up to where the action is ... although they may be gone too, judging from current performance. On the other hand, blogging is beginning to come of age. We are ahead of the game.

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BBC bias - by Richard... Sunday, January 16, 2011

Superbly done ... one to savour.

COMMENT: GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

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She's out – one to go! - by Richard...

After what appeared to be a close-down on publicity, the Okhotsk Sea crisis moves into its final phase with what the Russians are claiming is the successful extraction of the Sodruzhestvo from the ice and her return to open waters. We also learn that the fish carrier Bereg Nadezhdy is still in the ice but is now being towed by the Krasin and the Admiral Makarov.

This seems to have been a change of plan. It was originally intended that the two trapped ships, having been re-united, would then be escorted out of the ice in a single convoy. Some clue of the plan change came earlier today when the Russian Transport Ministry states that an operation had started "early on Sunday" to free the Bereg Nadezdy.

On instructions from the rescue coordination headquarters in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, we are told, the icebreakers approached the trapped Bereg Nadezhdy at 05:00 am Moscow time, when it was five miles to the south of the Sodruzhestvo, and started preparing to tow it.

"At 09:25 am Moscow time, the icebreakers started towing the refrigerator ship towards theSodruzhestvo mother fishery ship," the press office said. But even then, it was telling us that the icebreakers intended then to move the ships together, toward clear waters in a single-file convoy.

At some stage, though, they must have decided that taking two ships out at the same time was beyond the capability of the breakers. Thus it became a matter of one at a time, this time taking the bigger ship out first. It would be nice to have some detail as to how this was achieved, but for the moment we can only surmise.

However, the nose-to-nose formation (pictured above) might give some clue. As we saw earlier, what may have happened was that the Krasin goes ahead and clears a channel while the Makarov tows more slowly (seen here with the Bereg Nadezhdy). Once the channel is clear for a stretch, theKrasin returns and they both "work" the channel to get the ship through.

Whatever way it was done, they got the big beast out - a testament to the skills and seamanship of the Russians. The adventure is all but over.

COMMENT: OKHOTSK SEA CRISIS

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That dam - by Richard...

As time passes, the issues relating to the Queensland flooding begin to become clearer. But, as always, the blogs (and Booker) take the lead with the MSM trailing far behind. Posted on the Booker column is a comment from another blog, originally posted by an Australian who lives about 140 miles north east of the Brisbane River catchment, on the coast.

Of the floods that devastated Brisbane, he notes that the rain depression had formed weeks earlier and had caused disastrous floods in Rockhampton, 250 miles to the north, and caused wide spread flooding in the central Queensland coalfields.

This rain depression was slowly moving south without losing intensity and flooded the Burnett river catchment to the extent Bundaberg city suffered serious flooding. Still the rain depression moved south with very heavy rain, with the north easterly air flow carrying the rain right into the Brisbane river catchment.

Thus, the Wivenhoe dam management had plenty of warning that this rain was on its way and had been so for weeks. Yet the policy of the Queensland Government was to keep the dams full because of their advice from the likes of Tim Flannery et al. This was that, because of global warming, Queensland was going to remain in drought.

What is then crucial here, we are told, is the timing. This is one of the points made byRegionalstates: it was "all inconvenient". The rains increased in the Brisbane River catchment on Thursday 6th. By Friday afternoon the spillways were releasing 8000 cubic meters a second - just a trickle for this dam. This was in order to maintain 100 percent capacity as per government policy.

Then, as we also learned from Regionalstates, no one could be contacted over the weekend of the 8/9th to make the decision to go against government policy, and open the spillways to lower the level in the dam. Thus, over the weekend, the dam went from 102 to over 144 percent in just two days - and this is a massive dam.

By Monday it was too late, the die was cast. The inflows to the dam were greater than could be released. Yet the gates should have been throttled back because of the enormous flow in the Bremer river and Lockyer Creek which join the Brisbane below the Wyvenhoe dam.

The level in the dam went to within an inch or so of having the emergency spillway plugs failing and releasing an unbelievable amount of water to save the main rock and earth fill wall. They are saying, behind closed doors, just over an inch more of rain and the dam would have failed. Brisbane would be no more.

Because of bad policy, policy makers asleep at the wheel over the weekend, the Wyvenhoe Dam did nothing to reduce the flooding in Brisbane. In all, building the dam was a waste of time if it could not be managed in the way it was designed.

If the dam had been at 40-60 percent when the rain started, there would be no flooding in Brisbane and the dam would have done the job for which it had been designed.

Perversely, straight out of the "shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted" department, water is now being released from the Wyvenhoe Dam (pictured), although levels remain at 160 percent, which is what caused the problem in the first place.

This is matched by a weasel-worded, "on the one hand this, on the other hand, that" article in The Australian, which completely misses the point about the impact of the global warming obsession on water management policy.

COMMENT: GREEN CATASTROPHE THREAD

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Booker rampant - by Richard...

Three stories today in the Booker column, with the lead on stolen children - another ghastly story. It really is about time other media got involved, together with some input from politicians. But, as always, "solitary furrow" comes to mind.

The rest is two global warming stories, the first on the Australian floods. It might be that the theme is a little bit familiar to you. Yet it is the first airing in the British MSM, as far as I know – although the issues are being discussed elsewhere. Then there is a dig at electric cars, again a familiar theme. Online, there is another story tucked in on censorship and The Guardian.

So far, the trolls have been contained, and a trawl for items about Australia and climate change has yielded dividends. Battle will resume later today.

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In days to come - by Richard... Saturday, January 15, 2011

A striking feature ... has been the unpopularity of the regimes combined with their depressing ability to stay in power. Most have found ways of preventing revolutions or military coup d'etats through ferocious security services protecting rickety state machines that mainly function as a source of jobs and patronage.

This is Patrick Cockburn writing in The Independent. He is referring to the Middle East, and specifically Tunisia - or thinks he is. The Middle East, he says, still has a reputation for coups but a striking feature of the region since the early 1970s is how few of the regimes have changed.

He adds: "The forces behind the Tunisian events are not radically new but they are all the more potent for being so long suppressed" (my emphasis), then telling us: "Western governments have been caught on the hop because explosions of social and economic frustration have been long predicted but have never happened".

There but for the grace of God go they, one might think. But they are not very good at joining the dots. The odd thing is, though, in years gone by, we used to look at such scenes and think ourselves lucky that we lived in a stable country and could avoid the turmoil. But these days, such events are more likely to invoke the question: "why can't we do this?".

The wish is the father of the thought, they say, but with the caution, "be careful what you wish for". On the other hand, if we wish to avoid "explosions of social and economic frustration" can we merely avoid talking about the possibility in the hope that they will never happen?

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