Monday, 27 December 2010

Who cares wins? - by Richard... Monday, December 27, 2010


In the tiny, foetid world of Westminster politics, where the rats are too well-paid to jump ship,passions are stirring and stresses are building up.

Despite growing unpopularity, the Cleggerons – or unidentified factions therein - want to acquire an electoral identity and put up candidates at the next playtime. Others, who still have some ambitions of being Conservatives, want to go it alone in the expectation of being able to acquire a majority vote.

The boys and girls in the playpen, however, have not yet realised how loathed they are, and that the majority of the country is entirely indifferent to their petty scheming. Short of a revolution, the population will probably not begin to take an interest until the current party structure is ripped apart and new alliances are created.

What has to happen here is that the Conservative Party splits. This has been on the cards for many years, but now it really must happen. Then, the soggy, centre-left under the leadership of the Cleggerons will form its own party, reinforced by soggy, centre-left elements from Labour.

The new, nationalist "right" will then form an alliance with UKIP (or steal its votes), while the "left" will join up with the greens to form a blud und boden national socialist alliance, where the intolerance already displayed by its members will thrive.

One can then see the new alliances squeezing the Cleggerons into oblivion, and real politics returning. It will be messy, and won't be at all pretty, but it will be more honest than the faux consensus on offer. Until then, who cares wins?

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It's a local event - by Richard...


Heavy snow and strong winds have slammed the northeastern United States cancelling hundreds of flights and causing havoc as travellers scurried to return to work after the Christmas holiday. This is according to Reuters, which informs us that the National Weather Service has issued blizzard warnings along the coast from Maine down to New Jersey with winter storm warnings in effect for nearly the entire East Coast.

Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina have declared states of emergency and up to 20 inches of snow are expected in places.

The widespread nature of this event, of course, completely stuffs Julia Slingo the British Met Office's chief scientist. Somewhat forlornly, she is insisting that global warming is still a "reality" despite the bitterly cold temperatures and heavy snowfalls in the UK and Western Europe.

The straw she is grasping is the single mantra: "This is not a global event; it is very much confined to the UK and Western Europe and if you look over at Greenland, for example, you see that it's exceptionally warm there." Actually, it never was confined to the UK and Western Europe, but now it is even less so.

But the Slingos of this world will never let go. They cannot afford to. "Global warming is continuing and we know that from the global trends. There will, of course, be large local and regional variations from year to year. So this event that we're currently experiencing is not unprecedented," she protests.

Meanwhile, snowfall records are falling like autumn leaves in what is being called the "snowpocalypse". The warmists have lost it. Their protestations are now becoming the stuff of comedy, as even the New York Times admits that the blizzards are "rare". And ours is yet to come.

COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

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Boxing day link - by Richard... Sunday, December 26, 2010

It is a little while since I linked to WfW. That is no reflection of his output, the quality of which remains consistently high, like this piece.

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What is to be done? - by Richard...

We often hear people cry: "Never mind all this writing and talking, get on and do something." The answer to that is, that at the stage at which most people in the country have arrived, writing for them and talking at them is the best kind of action. It is a change of ideas and mental attitudes they primarily need.

"Out of the People", J B Priestley, 1941.

COMMENT: PRIESTLEY THREAD

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Forcibly extracting the micturition - by Richard...

You know you are going down in the world when even the New York Times is taking the mick:
It snows in winter. This shattering discovery has now cast Britain and France into chaos for a week, with London's dysfunctional Heathrow airport leading British claims to be officially designated a third-world nation.
Thus does Roger Cohen write that we have been glued to the radio listening to people like the director of Alaska's Anchorage airport describe how, "with the help of vehicles called snowplows and stuff called de-icing fluid, it's actually possible in the 21st century to keep an airport open after a snowstorm."

This is embarrassing.

COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

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The blame game - by Richard...


In between being a propaganda sheet and a comic turn, The Sunday Telegraph does occasionally deliver an interesting story - this one on Heathrow's lack of preparedness for the snowy conditions.

What emerges though is not only that capability was inadequate but that the snow clearance plan was known to the government and had been approved by it. All this really does, therefore, is confirm the Booker thesis that the government had been so misled by the Met Office and its views on global warming that it did not believe that preparations for a severe winter were necessary.

In a sense, it is now a blessing that the warmists have now decided that cold winters are caused by global warming. At least now, they can admit that snowfall has not been abolished and that public funds can be expended on preparing for it. But when it comes to blame, it is to government that we should be looking, as well as the management of Heathrow. The lead must come from the very top, and the blame belongs there as well.

There is no point in expecting the warmists to get the message. They are beyond redemption.

COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

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Then and now - by Richard...

In my view, the Britain of 1912 was more democratic than the Britain of 1932. And every succeeding year up to the outbreak of war saw us retreating farther and farther away. It was of course mainly the fault of the people themselves. Too few of them took a critical interest in public affairs. Too many allowed themselves to be gulled by any nonsense, chiefly appearing in newspapers that could no longer be regarded as serious organs of opinion but were simply a mixture of propaganda sheets and comic turns.

(It is typical of this period that the very newspaper that told its readers every day that there would be no war was making elaborate arrangements in secret to cope with war conditions.)

It was possible to form an inner ring, centralising power, because public opinion was weak and uncritical. Let it be admitted, once and for all, that you cannot have a democratic government long, cannot make a democracy function properly, if you have an apathetic and passive people.

"Out of the People", J B Priestley, 1941.

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The question that is not asked - by Richard...


"Britons want European Union to assert itself on the global stage" says The Observer, telling us that a Fabian Society poll "reveals" that the British public wants EU states to co-operate more on major policy issues such as climate change. This is a YouGov survey, which purports to show that, while anti-Brussels feeling is still deep-rooted, "Britons now want the EU to be more active in meeting specific international and global challenges."

Thus do we discover that, while almost twice as many people (45 percent) believe Britain's membership of the EU to be a "bad thing" rather than a "good thing" (25 percent), when asked what role the EU should take in relation to key policies of global significance they are far more positive. About 71 percent of those questioned said EU countries should co-operate more closely on fighting terrorism and international crime, against only seven percent who wanted to loosen links between member states in that area.

A total of 55 percent thought member states should work more closely on climate change, against 14 percent who thought they should co-operate less. About 53 percent said they should do more to regulate the banks jointly, against 25 percent who said they should do less.

When it comes to assessing these results, however, few readers here will have missed the switch. The poll asks about EU member states co-operating. The Observer translates this into wanting the EU to be "more active". But of course people want member states to co-operate. The real question is whether we have to give up power and sovereignty to do so. And that is the question that is not asked. To do so would give the game away.

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The hijack of the Met - by Richard...


By far the biggest story of recent days, writes Christopher Booker, has been the astonishing chaos inflicted, to a greater or lesser extent, on all of our lives by the fact that we are not only enjoying what is predicted to be the coldest December since records began in 1659, but also the harshest of three freezing winters in a row. We all know the disaster stories – thousands of motorists trapped for hours on paralysed motorways, days of misery at Heathrow, rail passengers marooned in unheated carriages for up to 17 hours.

But central to all this – as the cry goes up: "Why wasn't Britain better prepared?" – has been the bizarre role of the Met Office. We might start with the strange affair of the Quarmby Review. Shortly after Philip Hammond became Transport Secretary last May, he commissioned David Quarmby, a former head of the Strategic Rail Authority, to look into how we might avoid a repeat of last winter's disruption.

In July and again in October, Mr Quarmby produced two reports on "The Resilience of England's Transport System in Winter"; and at the start of this month, after our first major snowfall, Mr Quarmby and two colleagues were asked to produce an "audit" of their earlier findings. The essence of their message was that they had consulted the Met Office, which advised them that, despite two harsh winters in succession, these were "random events", the chances of which, after our long previous run of mild winters, were only 20 to one.

Similarly, they were told in the summer, the odds against a third such winter were still only 20 to one. So it might not be wise to spend billions of pounds preparing for another "random event", when its likelihood was so small. Following this logic, if the odds against a hard winter two years ago were only 20 to one, it might have been thought that the odds against a third such "random event" were not 20 to one but 20 x 20 x 20, or 8,000 to one.

What seems completely to have passed Mr Quarmby by, however, is the fact that in these past three years the Met Office's forecasting record has become a national joke. Ever since it predicted a summer warmer and drier than average in 2007 – followed by some of the worst floods in living memory – its forecasts have been so unerringly wrong that even the chief adviser to our Transport Secretary might have noticed.

The Met Office's forecasts of warmer than average summers and winters have been so consistently at 180 degrees to the truth that, earlier this year, it conceded that it was dropping seasonal forecasting. Hence, last week, the Met Office issued a categorical denial to the Global Warming Policy Foundation that it had made any forecast for this winter.

Immediately, however, several blogs, led by Autonomous Mind, produced evidence from the Met Office website that in October it did indeed publish a forecast for December, January and February. This indicated that they would be significantly warmer than last year, and that there was only "a very much smaller chance of average or below average temperatures". So the Met Office has not only been caught out yet again getting it horribly wrong (always in the same direction), it was even prepared to deny it had said such a thing at all.

The real question, however, is why has the Met Office become so astonishingly bad at doing the job for which it is paid nearly £200 million a year – in a way which has become so stupendously damaging to our country?

The answer is that in the past 20 years, as can be seen from its website, the Met Office has been hijacked from its proper role to become wholly subservient to its obsession with global warming. (At one time it even changed its name to the Met Office "for Weather and Climate Change".)

This all began when its then-director John Houghton became one of the world's most influential promoters of the warmist gospel. He, more than anyone else, was responsible for setting up the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and remained at the top of it for 13 years. It was he who, in 1990, launched the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Change, closely linked to the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia (CRU), at the centre of last year's Climategate row, which showed how the little group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC had been prepared to bend their data and to suppress any dissent from warming orthodoxy.

The reason why the Met Office gets its forecasts so hopelessly wrong is that they are based on those same computer models on which the IPCC itself relies to predict the world's climate in 100 years time. They are programmed on the assumption that, as CO2 rises, so temperatures must inexorably follow.

For 17 years this seemed plausible, because the world did appear to be getting warmer. We all became familiar with those warmer winters and earlier springs, which the warmists were quick to exploit to promote their message – as when Dr David Viner of the CRU famously predicted to The Independent in 2000 that "within a few years winter snowfall will be a very rare and exciting event". (Last week, that article from ten years ago was the most viewed item on The Independent's website.)

But in 2007, the computer models got caught out, failing to predict a temporary plunge in global temperatures of 0.7°C, more than the net warming of the 20th century. Much of the northern hemisphere suffered what was called in North America "the winter from hell". Even though temperatures did rise again, in the winter of 2008/9 this happened again, only worse.

The Met Office simply went into denial. Its senior climate change official, Peter Stott, said in March 2009 that the trend towards milder winters was likely to continue. There would not be another winter like 1962/3 "for 1,000 years or more". Last winter was colder still. And now we have another even more savage "random event", for which we are even less prepared. (The Taxpayers' Alliance revealed last week that councils have actually ordered less salt this winter than last.)

The consequences of all this are profound. Those who rule over our lives have been carried off into a cloud cuckoo land for which no one was more responsible than the zealots at the Met Office, subordinating all it does to their dotty belief system. Significantly, its chairman, Robert Napier, is not a weatherman but a "climate activist", previously head of WWF-UK, one of our leading warmist campaigning groups.

At one end of this colossal diversion of national resources, permeating every level of government, we have the hapless Mr Quarmby, who feels obliged to follow the Met Office, advise that the present freeze is a "random event" and call for no special responses – with the results we see on every side. At the other, fixated by the same belief system, we have our climate change secretary, Chris Huhne, hoping we can somehow keep our lights on and our economy running by spending hundreds of billions of pounds on thousands more windmills.

More than once in the past week, as our power stations have been thrashed way beyond normal peak power demand, the contribution of wind turbines has been so small that it has registered as zero percent. (See "neta electricity summary page") At the heart of all this greenie make-believe that has our political class in its thrall has been the hijacking of the Met Office from its proper role. It's no longer just a national joke: it is turning into a national catastrophe.

Posted by Britannia Radio at 11:53