Thursday, 13 January 2011

Pity poor Brazil - by Richard... Thursday, January 13, 2011


Without the wealth or the attention that Australia is getting, the scale of the human disaster from the floods is in fact far greater. Rescue workers are struggling to reach the areas cut off by devastating floods and landslides, with at least 375 people having been reported killed in what is being described as "one of Brazil's worst natural disasters in decades".

According to the Reuters report, torrents of mud and water set off by heavy rains have left a trail of destruction through the mountainous Serrana region near the city of Rio de Janeiro. Houses have been toppled and roads buckled, burying entire families as they slept.

"It's like an earthquake struck some areas," said Jorge Mario, the mayor of the Teresopolis municipal area, where at least 158 people died. "There are three or four neighborhoods that were totally destroyed in rural areas. There are hardly any houses standing there and all the roads and bridges are destroyed."

This is, of course, not the first time in recent history we have reported on floods in Brasil, most recently in July 2010 and before that in April 2010. Yet this was the region – like northern Australia – which was supposed to be stricken with drought, and is now suffering from torrential downpours.

In fact, as we were writing in March 2010, drought is the least of the country's problems, as la Nina-induced climate patterns currently dominate the region. But, even the walls of mud and water currently destroying lives and property are not as dangerous as the walls of ignorance erected by the warmists.

Weather we can deal with. Stupidly is an altogether different proposition.

COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

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Without benefit of human intellect - by Richard...

In The Scotsman today, we see an account of the odious Huhne attending upon the Scottish parliament's energy committee in Edinburgh, to which venue he did so egregiously travel by carbon-emitting aeroplane.

Thence, recalling his time as a financial journalist, did he regale the wastrels with his recollections of Alex Salmond, telling them: "That's when I first became acquainted with the expertise of one of Britain's best energy economists, now doubling up as the first minister".

In like manner – i.e., in a zone of existence not encumbered by the human intellect - we have Greg Barker, minister for energy and climate change, who tells us:
I want the City of London to be the global capital of the new, fast-growing green-investment sector. That's why we set up the Capital Markets Climate Initiative – to dismantle the barriers to low-carbon growth and facilitate a new wave of green investment in emerging economies.
This, incidentally, is the same poltroon who was recently asked by Phillip Davis for the latest estimate of fully implementing the Climate Change Act. Was there any advance on £400 billion?

Said Barker: "These are big figures and it is difficult to get one's head around them. No new data are available, but I remind my hon. Friend that the cost of not acting is far greater than the cost of prudent early action. Lord Stern estimated that the cost would be between 5 and 10 percent of GDP. Moreover, this is a huge opportunity for UK plc".

This is almost like an episode from the Twilight Zone. They are in this world, but not of it. We have a long way to go, and I suspect things will only start to improve when our politicians rejoin this planet.

COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

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Kill them* - by Richard...


Anyone in local authority "service" who sets up this job, and anyone who takes it, deserves to die. They take money from us by force – or under the threat of force - and we go to jail if we do not pay.

When a local authority is already having problems and they cut essential public services to pay for this obscenity, people die. Thus, if you ever meet any local authority Twitter and Facebook tsars, don't mess about. Kill them. This is not murder - it's self defence. And there is not a jury in the land which would think otherwise.

* And before the stupid left wingers (is there any other sort?) and other numpties start sounding off, read the comments thread, and then look up the word "polemic" in the dictionary.

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Essex bobbies - by Richard...

Essex taxpayers had to spend £62,000 fixing vehicles after police officers had mistakenly put petrol in diesel cars - even those with "talking" fuel caps warning them not to. Officers used the wrong fuel 332 times in the past seven years and, despite yellow fuel caps and a warning system on each car at a total cost of £4,000, diesel police cars were wrongly filled with petrol 110 times in the following two years.

And they let these people out on their streets ... alone? Er ... actually they don't – they always go in pairs. But now we know why. One drives the car and the other tells him (or her) what fuel to put in. Even then, they can't get it right.

Possibly though, that is being a little unfair. What we have here is the typical problem of there being no penalty for failure (or, in this case, stupidity). If officers had to pay for their errors out of their own pockets (as indeed ordinary people and the self-employed have to do), then I doubt very much whether we would have seen 332 incidents - in one police force alone. Having to pay for one's own stupidity is the surest path to wisdom.

COMMENT: "BOBBIES" THREAD

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Off and on it goes - by Richard...


The rescue operation in the Okhotsk Sea has now been resumed, but it was set back more thanwas at first admitted yesterday when the towing cables broke. As we now learn, the towing equipment was damaged as well. But, with little more detail, almost like the old days when the TV shut down every night and all you got was the station card, all the Russian media is offering are stock photographs of the Okhotsk Sea (above).

In fact, confusion abounds. We are now told that the Sodruzhestvo has to be towed 100 miles before it can be united with the Bereg Nadezhdy, a journey which, according to Voice of Russia"may take a total of 12 hours". That distance surely has to be wrong – unless the Bereg Nadezhdyhas also moved – in which case the idea of towing the Sodruzhestvo a 100 miles (nautical or otherwise – there is also a confusion of units) in a mere 12 hours is absurdly optimistic.

If this was being carried out in Western waters, with – say – a tourist ship involved, there would by now be wall-to-wall coverage as the drama intensified and the weather forecast offered adeteriorating situation. But because those at risk are Russian and a long way away, this is all you get.

Having been fed one optimistic, unrealistic bulletin after the other, Moscow listeners must feel they are back in the "good old days" of the Soviet Union. But this time it seems as much the incompetence of the media as anything else, as the standard of reporting has been dire. But, there you go. Sodruzhestvo may be on her way out. She may not. Who knows? One thing is for sure though, the Western media doesn't really care.

COMMENT: OKHOTSK SEA CRISIS

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It was bound to happen - by Richard...


Water has peaked at almost three feet below the level of deadly 1974 floods in Brisbane, giving the city some respite from the disastrous floods. However, this has not stopped the state premier's favourite warmist launching a pre-emptive strike claiming the floods for his own.

This is professor Will Steffen, the executive director of the ANU Climate Change Institute, who is forced to concede that there is "no direct link" between global warming and the flash flooding in Toowoomba, but he claims that climate change would lead to heavier, more frequent rain.

Never mind that the prevailing warmist orthodoxy has been for prolonged droughts – which is why, of course, the Australians have spent over $13 billion on desalination plants. Now, Steffen says that, "As the climate warms, there is more water vapour in the atmosphere ... This means that there is a probability that there will more intense rainfall events around the world".

Professor Neville Nicholls, an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at Monash University, is another one getting his oar in, saying that scientists would look at possible links between flash floods over the past 24 hours and global warming.

With the sort of weasel words we have come to expect from these people, he stresses that no "current link" can be made between them, arguing they were the result of a strong La Nina event. But he then goes on to say, "Is the La Nina that strong because of global warming, or is global warming exacerbating the effect of La Nina? Honestly, we don't know. But just because we don't now doesn't mean it's not happening".

"You'd have to be a brave person to say it [climate change] is not having some sort of effect," he adds. "I can guarantee you in the next couple of years people will start looking back at this event and asking was it so unusually strong because of global warming."

Matthew England of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, is also getting in on the act. "I think people will end up concluding that at least some of the intensity of the monsoon in Queensland can be attributed to climate change," he says. "The waters off Australia are the warmest ever measured and those waters provide moisture to the atmosphere for the Queensland and northern Australia monsoon."

David Jones, head of climate monitoring and prediction at the Australia Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne, then chips in. "We've always had El Ninos and we've had natural variability but the background which is now operating is different," he says. "The first thing we can say with La Nina and El Nino is it is now happening in a hotter world." That means more evaporation from land and oceans, more moisture in the atmosphere and stronger weather patterns.

And then we get US climate scientist Kevin Trenberth. He says the floods and the intense La Nina were a combination of factors. He pointed to high ocean temperatures in the Indian Ocean near Indonesia early last year as well as the rapid onset of La Nina after the last El Nino ended in May.

But the fact is that, within the bounds of natural variability, there is nothing exceptional about the intensity of the rains, and they accord entirely with a well-observed long-term cyclical pattern. Further, as always, the actual levels of flooding are nothing exceptional, as the historical record shows.

Local problems, though, have been exacerbated by urban development and the lack of sensible precautions, about which the Queensland government and the city council were warned a decade ago. Needless to say, with greed, stupidity and latterly the obsessive focus on "climate change", the warnings were ignored.

All of this was pre-ordained. It was bound to happen, but now it has, the warmists are going to be the last people on this earth to admit the flaws in their religion. This is, and has to be, another example of climate change. No other explanation is possible.

COMMENT: GREEN CATASTROPHE THREAD

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Go for the lot - by Richard...

I can't decide which of the posts bests warrants a link, out of the first five, so I'm ducking out. Go and read them all on Autonomous Mind. No comments here ... comment on AM's blog.

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The Loughner affair - by Richard... Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Michelle Malkin is worth a look, on the Loughner affair, and "the worst sheriff in America".

We haven't covered it here, partly because the MSM are giving it saturation coverage but mainly because I don't know enough about American politics to be able to offer a sensible or informed comment. But, if you want to keep abreast of the issue, Michelle's site is one of the "must go" places.

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Killing with kindness? - by Richard...


Now we get this: "Radio tags designed to monitor endangered penguins could be killing them, say scientists". It is feared that flipper bands, used to identify the birds, cause physical damage and drag under the water.

Furthermore, research published in Nature (which is pier reviewed, so it must be right) suggests birds with flipper bands respond differently to the climate by arriving later on Possession Island, off Antarctica, than those untouched.

Dr Yvon Le Maho, of Strasbourg University, and colleagues say the value of many surveys is questionable. They say: "Responses of flipper-banded penguins to climate variability differ from non-banded birds."

I'm sorry, I know you shouldn't, but there are times when you just have to laugh. Still, beats letting the polar bears have them.

COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

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This is what it has come to - by Richard...

After the faux rebellion yesterday, today we had the faux PMQs. Tomorrow we have a faux by-election, the result pre-ordained. Is there anyone out there prepared to tell us, with a straight face, what parliament is for, nowadays?

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Just sit back and watch the chaos - by Richard...

An epidemic of chronic cubical syndrome.

Dilbert: "We people are smarter than we look"

Dogbert: "How hard can that be, really?"

COMMENT: "TROLL" THREAD

Posted by Britannia Radio at 22:00