Picked up by Autonomous Minid, the expectation of increasing sea ice in the Baltic this winter has resulted in Sweden withholding an icebreaker from use in Antarctica by the US National Science Foundation (NSF). This comes after the dramas in the Gulf of Finland and the Okhotsk Sea, which have completely confounded the warmists who have been predicting ice-free passages brought about by global warming.
But, as AM reports, the increasingly bitter winters that have resulted in more iced over navigation passages. Having to deal with the real world, rather than the fantasy construct beloved of the warmists, the Swedish government thus wrote to US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, to announce that the icebreaker Oden (pictured) will be kept at home and not be made available to support the work of the in Antarctica, for the first time since 2006.
The detail comes from the journal Science, announcing the abrupt end of an ongoing agreement with the NSF for the lease of the Oden, the pride of the Swedish icebreaking fleet and also the world's most capable non-nuclear polar-class research vessel.
NSF has used the ship each winter since 2006–07 to clear a path through the sea ice to resupply McMurdo Station, the largest scientific outpost in Antarctica and the hub for US activities on the continent. The Swedish government decided that the Oden needed to stay at home this coming winter after two harsh winters disrupted shipping lanes in the region.
And this is indeed what happens when the real world intrudes. The warmists can sit in front of their nice warm computers and run models until the end of time, but if the ice refuses to obey the predictions, real world solutions such as icebreakers must be employed. As real people in that real world are only too well aware, you can't eat computer models.
Asked whether he had considered turning down the returning officer fee, to which he is entitled at every election, council chief executive Steve Robinson said: "I didn’t see a need for that".
The council's accounts show Robinson's benefits in kind, including his car allowance, rose from £1,000 to £2,000 last year and his employer's pension contribution rose from £37,000 to £40,000 resulting in an overall £17,000 rise in his financial package of £235,000 compared with the previous year.
It is customary on these occasions to ask for reasons why we should not rise up and slaughter them ... but if I can't think of any, why should our readers?
COMMENT: "ENOUGH" THREAD
The number of career criminals being spared jail, we are told, has soared since the Coalition took office. An astonishing 4,000 offenders have been handed community sentences, despite each totting up at least 50 convictions.
The figure for 2010 – the year Ken Clarke took over as Justice Secretary – was 17 percent higher than 2009's and treble that of 2002. Incredibly, 408 criminals dodged jail last year even when being sentenced for what was at least their 100th offence.
Compare and contrast with the current policy of banging up this month's crop of rioters and looters, and it becomes very evident that we are dealing with a new principle of so-called "justice". People are being imprisoned not for the crimes they commit, or the severity of their offences, but for the circumstances in which they were committed.
The effect of this can be illustrated by two cases, the first of which we recounted on 18 August, where alcoholic Thomas Downey, 48, who was caught helping himself to doughnuts from a Krispy Kreme shop, was jailed for 16 months.
Hapless Downey, of no fixed address, had only been released from Strangeways prison at 7.30pm on Tuesday when he found himself in the midst of the rioting.
After attending a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, the serial offender proceeded to down a bottle of sherry and stumbled into the Krispy Kreme, in Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester, which was unsecured after being attacked earlier. He was almost immediately caught red-handed with a box of doughnuts, worth £17, when 20 riot police arrived. He was returned to custody.
The contrast is with this, reported yesterday, where a man who started a fire at the chapel of rest in a Cumbrian cemetery has been spared a prison sentence.
Carlisle Crown Court heard that on the night of 3 May, Matthew James Atkinson-Skinner, 24, had had a "huge amount to drink". He was making his way back at midnight to a Kirkby Stephen campsite – where he was staying following the breakdown of a relationship – when he reached the cemetery.
At the chapel of rest, he broke a window and climbed into a store room. He poured petrol from a lawn mower onto a mattress and set it alight. The fire spread, causing damage estimated at £20,000.
When interviewed by police, Atkinson-Skinner, who has a number of previous convictions, said he broke into the cemetery chapel to see what he could steal. He had earlier attempted a break-in at the town's Co-op. Atkinson-Skinner, of Green Head Barn, Great Asby, pleaded guilty to arson and attempted burglary.
Judge Peter Hughes QC put him under probation supervision for three years and ordered him to undergo alcohol rehabilitation. He was also made to do 250 hours unpaid community work. Hughes said that, although Atkinson-Skinner deserved to go to prison, it would be better for the community if instead he received help to overcome the alcohol problems that led him to commit the arson attack.
Now, either or both the decisions could be wrong. But one thing is for certain, they cannot both be right. And, if you care to spend only a short time on Google, you will find not dozens but hundreds of similar examples and inconsistencies.
There cannot be anything much more fundamental though than policy on custodial sentencing. The freedom of the citizen and when – and under what circumstances – he or she should be deprived of liberty should be pretty high up the order of concerns. Yet the kindest thing we can say about this government's policy is that it is a shambles.
As of now, we see a debate over the reasons for this month's riots and looting, but what we are not seeing is any coherent debate about the response, and custodial sentencing in general.
Largely, it is left to the geriatric and incompetent Ken Clarke, who is not only making a mockery of the system but is presiding over occasions of real injustice – where it is as bad not to jail some criminals as it is to incarcerate others.
The worst of it is, though, is that one does not detect within government or elsewhere any intelligence which might indicate that the system recognises the problems or has any idea how to deal with it. As with so many other things, we seem on the whole to have lost the ability to develop sensible policy.
COMMENT THREAD
MSM editors have clearly been delighted with events in Libya, providing an endless rush of easy stories to fill those virgin spaces in the press and the airwaves. And it saves for the holiday period having to focus on the dire reality of shop closures and economic retraction.
Breaking away from the travails of the euro, Ambrose is dipping his toe in the water, telling us we're poised on the edge of the second part of a double-dip recession.
Outside the capital and the more prosperous south, Britain is in fact already in recession, and the situation can only get worse as the local authority and health trusts start shedding labour on a scale that simply cannot be absorbed by an already stagnant labour market.
Trading figures, on the other hand, go up and down, but short-term rallies are no guide to the overall health of the economies, here, in Europe or the United States.
Soon enough, as the party conference season starts, the so-called "silly-season" will be over and the media will have to doff its cap to the reality. It won't be pretty, as the screws tighten with every passing day, that makes even getting an ice-cream an unrealisable treat.
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