costs multiply - by Richard... Saturday, January 01, 2011

costs multiply - by Richard... Saturday, January 01, 2011

With this sort of thing happening, we can no longer afford the luxury of a Met Office obsessed with global warming – not that we ever could.

COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

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Happy New Year - by Richard...

Estonia joins the euro and becomes the 17th member of the eurozone, the United States, unable to use its own coal to generate electricity, is exporting it to China, where it will be used ... er ... to generate electricity, the lights are going out on hybrid Civics, German solar isn't cutting it in India, CDMs are still a rip-off, the Met Office wants more money, somebody really does want less snow ... and we're all going to die.

Seems as good a time as any to wish you all a Happy New Year.

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It's just weather - by Richard... Friday, December 31, 2010

... and it's caused by global warming. Move along there, nothing to see. And 539 new snowfall records set in the US? Just weather. US record lows outpace record highs 21 to 1 this week? Just weather. But what about the coldest UK winter for 300 years? Just weather - caused by global warming.

Even if the warmists never can seem to get it quite right, it would never do to mock Arctic specialist Bernt Balchen. According to the Christian Science Monitor of 8 June 1972, he warned that a general warming trend over the North Pole was melting the polar ice cap and could produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000.

As of last month, the Arctic Ocean had 3.82 million square miles of ice cover - an area larger than the continental United States. Ignore this. Whatever else happens, you must keep repeating the mantra.

"Though no single mega-storm is the fault of climate change, scientists agree that weather - including snow patterns - will become more intense as the planet's ecosystem is transformed by human-produced pollution. So while New York's near-record snowstorm may not be the direct result of unbridled carbon emissions, powerful storms like it will undoubtedly be more frequent thanks to our head-in-the-sand attitude toward the environment".

There! Now doesn't that feel better!

COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

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Really taking the piss - by Richard...

Of all the organisations that have really screwed up this last year, the Met Office must be high on the list, if not actually at the top. So how appropriate it is that the chairman Robert Stewart Napieris awarded the CBE "for public service", in the New Year Honours.

It is almost as if the political classes had a death wish.

COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

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Pirates - by Richard...

That's the way to do it.

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A scandal emerges - by Richard...

Coming back to the condensing boiler "scandal" - for that it is - we are aware that this equipment was foisted on the unsuspecting public in 2005 by John Prescott, then deputy prime minister. It was done through the expedient of amending the thermal efficiency requirements for domestic heating appliances in the Building Regulations.

As part of the process, though, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister then in April 2005 issued formalinstallation guidance for these boilers, five pages of which were devoted to the condensate drain. On first view, there did not appear to be any mention of the danger of the pipes freezing, but a more thorough search shows several references to the problem.

For instance, pg. 13 tells the installers: "Any external condensate pipe work must be insulated to minimise the risk of freezing". Pg. 17 states: "Where possible connections should always be made to internal drain points (stack pipe or waste pipe). External termination points are more likely to become blocked by, for example, freezing ...". Pg. 18 states: "If an appliance does not include a siphon then external pipework is best avoided to reduce the risk of freezing. If this is not possible then external pipework should have a minimum nominal diameter of 32mm".

Typical manufacturer's instructions also include warnings about condensate drain freezing but, despite this, and the fact that installers must hold government-approved ("gas safe") qualifications, and are overseen by the HSE, hundreds of thousands of boilers seem to have been improperly installed. Thus, through the freezing winter of 2009-10, very large numbers of households began to experience problems.

So extensive had the problems become by early 2010 that the issue was raised by Jeff Howell inThe Daily Telegraph on 19 January 2010. He noted that this (condensate pipes freezing) had been "a common reader's problem during the cold snap last winter", and it had "become even worse this year".

Then, on 25 February, in the context of enquiring about the then boiler scrappage scheme, Tory MPPhilip Dunne told the House of Commons that condensate pipes were freezing up and: "the boilers break, with the result that households have no heat or hot water". "What are the Government doing to stop that happening?" he asked.

Joan Ruddock, answering on behalf of the government agreed that Dunne "may be correct about this being something that we need to look into." However, she said, "I hope that he will not want to detract in any way from the great success of the boiler scrappage scheme and the huge savings in CO2 emissions - and therefore the good effects on climate change - that it is achieving".

Needless to say, nothing was done by the then Labour government, or subsequently by the Cleggerons. They seemed to have been concerned only with saving CO2 emissions.

Thus, despite the problem having been raised in Parliament, the official guidelines continue to be ignored in a large number of cases. No attempt seems to have been made to ensure that installers follow the guidance. There have been no further official warnings given to installers or existing users to take precautions to prevent freezing.

As a result of government neglect, therefore, over the holiday period, at the depths of the freeze, tens of millions of pounds have had to be spent by householders on emergency call-outs. The problem was predictable, had been reported, and then had been ignored by a government which had allowed it to develop to epidemic proportions.

To my mind, everyone who has had a boiler failure for this reason over the last cold period, has a valid claim against government, for the costs of the call-out and remedial action, and for consequential losses. That is the stuff of politics. It the government sets up these systems, it has the responsibility to make sure they work, and should be accountable when it does not.

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Open thread – part two - by Richard...

Rather than expand the original thread, I'm going to continue the discussion here. The condensing boiler issue certainly seem to have struck a chord and I'll continue on that. But we also see that the water situation is deteriorating. It is not just Northern Ireland, but my favourite company (not), Yorkshire Water, is having a torrid time.

As well as North Yorkshire, and Thirsk in particular – where it was especially cold, Sheffield has been badly hit, Bradford is having its moments, and the residents of Hull and East Riding are being asked to ration water. Outside the Yorkshire area, Wales is recording the "worst water supply problems for 30 years", and The Daily Express is telling us that "tens of thousands" of people have been left without water.

One might have some sympathy with the predicament of the water companies as they battle to overcome the devastation caused by the "unprecedented" weather, except for the fact that they have been frittering away their time and our money on climate change.

On top of that, as our own readers remind us, the capital spending on water has been heavily distorted by the often absurdly over-the-top requirements of the EU water directives, spending which now totals over £65 billion, against only £14 billion left for infrastructure.

Water leaks and now water cut-offs might not seem political, but they surely are. Between EU madness and the government obsession on global warming, at the very least we can say that they have left us unprepared. And you can now bet that the water companies will be coming to us again for yet more money, to add to their already inflated bills.

And what do you think our over-paid MPs in Westminster might say about that? And that's what politics is really all about. Everybody out there seems to have their hands out for one thing or another. On top of the water bills, energy costs are going up, petrol is going up, VAT is going up, inflation is going up – the inevitable consequence of "quantative easing" – and no end of families have had to pay unexpected call-out fees when their boilers failed.

Jeremy Warner in The Daily Telegraph thus writes, "For many, it'll be a very unhappy financial new year," predicting that, "It will only need a small nudge to tip some households into destitution". He is not wrong, and not a little of this is simply because MPs past and present have not been doing their jobs.

COMMENT: OPEN THREAD – THE STUFF OF POLITICS

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

As we noted earlier, a crucial part of the warmist mantra is that the cold we have experienced recently was a local event, balanced by greater warming elsewhere. This certainly was not the case last year, when we had the Daily Mail offer this, fronting the heavy snowfall in Mongolia (pictured above).

That was on 7 January last year and here we go again, a week early with the People's Daily Onlinereporting on heavy snowfall in Mongolia. Mongolia actually had a terrible winter last time round, and clearly has not fully recovered. Thus we are learning of the death of thousands of livestock, with many more facing starvation, after a blizzard brought heavy snow to a county in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region on Wednesday night.

The snow, with falls of over three feet in places, has stopped animals grazing and the county does not have enough stored winter feed. It is currently short of 21.5 million kg of hay and other stored winter feed. And, with roads to five townships blocked, affecting 4,928 people and 248,000 livestock, things are not set to get better in a hurry.

All this is happening on top of the US blizzards and it is not yet January. The idea that the cold weather is simply a local event is, therefore, looking even thinner than it did. The warmists are going to have to do some more reading.

COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

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Wikileaks and The Guardian - by Richard... Thursday, December 30, 2010

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Open thread: the stuff of politics - by Richard...

I'm going to try an experiment ... a combination of an open thread and a political essay written on-line, in real time, feeding off the open thread and building in my own ideas and comments.

The trigger for the thought is the aphorism, "all politics is local", which comes very much to mind when I read this piece in The Scotsman about the damage done to the roads by the recent cold spell (pictured. That is set to cost the Haggis Eaters at least £10 million in emergency repairs, which means that road authorities in England and Wales will probably have to find about £100 million.

Just walking from home to the paper shop and back suggests that this is going to be the least of it. The amount of frost damage is very evident, not least to the pavements which have been asphalted, supposedly for cheapness. To lay this topping is certainly cheaper, but then you get the utilities breaking into it, leaving porous joins when they "make good". The water then gets in and the frost heave crumbles the surface.

If there was a true local democracy, we would have been consulted about the change from paving stones (which look better as well), and we would have been able to argue that asphalt topping is a false economy. But on this, and many other issues, there is no democracy. There is no mechanism for arguing the toss - and we then end up paying through the nose for the repairs.

The other thought that comes to mind is how expensive this cooling is, compared with the warming. I don't remember the local councils having to rush out, spending hundreds of millions after a heat wave. In fact, in hot countries, one tends to see municipalities get away with crap roads, precisely because they don't have to worry about frost.

Like as not, the overall bill here will be very substantially higher than a mere £100 million. Earlier this year (25 August 2010), the Yorkshire Post was telling us that just North Yorkshire County Council was to cope with a £10m bill for mending the potholes. And, more than six months after what they were calling "the biggest freeze in 30 years", highways officials were admitting that they would struggle to complete the repairs before the onset of the winter which is now upon us.

This was the same with many other councils but, bizarrely, this was not just a question of money. Last October, it was being reported that 44 percent of the £362 million emergency funding given to councils to repair damaged roads had not been spent. Nevertheless, it was then estimated that £9.5 billion was needed in England and Wales alone "to bring the roads up to scratch".

But, even then, after two years of severe winters and localised intense flooding had had "an unexpectedly severe effect on the roads infrastructure", it was being argued that further research would have to be done should the severity of our winters continue.

Fife Council road services team leader, Mr George Miezitis, was saying that future strategies would need constant review "should these weather conditions become more the norm." But, as we struggle through the third consecutive year of such conditions, it seems the plan is to reduce spending on road maintenance by 15 percent.

And as our commentator points out, there is a link here with the water supply crisis in Northern Ireland, where the damage done to the distribution system has caused thousands of households to be without water. This is so ironic when we see that Northern Ireland Water has been in the forefront with its greenery, stating as late as October 2010 that: "potential impacts of climate change need to be factored into any long term decision making process."

Needless to say, the company - which is wholly government-owned - has blamed the rapid thaw, after a period of record low temperatures, and has also cited "historic underinvestment" in Northern Ireland's infrastructure as a contributing factor. Its enthusiasm for spending on climate change adaptation, however, is not mentioned. As Michelle Malkin so hilariously illustrates, though, there is something about the corporate mind that, once greenery gets in, common sense drains out. It is almost as if the two concepts cannot co-exist.

It is, thus, a pity but perhaps predictable that NI Water didn't spend a little more time addressing the vulnerability of its system to serious cold - which has caused a real interruption in supply - rather than giving "top priority" to hypothetical future concepts. But then, from train companies to airlines and airport operators, we are seeing the same thing.

The interesting thing here, though, is that other water companies are also reporting problems and, in many cases, they are using the word "unprecedented" in relation to the cold we have just experienced. Put the two together, as in "unprecedented cold", and we have some difficulty in maintaining the illusion that we are suffering from global warming.

An apparently different problem has been afflicting the owners of "condensing boilers", an issue picked up by The Daily Mail, the Shropshire Star and even the loathsome Guardian. Five years ago, we are told, New Labour heralded them as the modern, clean and green way to heat your house. As a result, today there are already eight million such boilers in homes across Britain. In fact, since 2005 it is illegal to fit any other kind.

At the time, says the Mail, John Prescott claimed they would massively reduce your carbon footprint and slash your fuel bills. As a result, every year some 1.2 million old-style "dirty" boilers are scrapped in Britain and replaced by this wondrous new variety.

However, the recent cold has revealed a major problem, not so much with the boilers themselves, as the way they are installed. In the nature of the beast, the boilers extract more heat from the system, producing a water condensate which drain to waste.

Unfortunately, idiot fitters – oblivious to the fact that it occasionally freezes in the UK - have been installing the narrow bore drain pipes on the outside of buildings, and these have been freezing up by the tens of thousands over the holiday period, shutting down the boilers and requiring expensive visits by plumbers, charging anything up to £300 a time. British Gas, alone, apparently, have had 60,000 call-outs in Yorkshire alone.

Although EUReferendum towers is fitted with such a device, to keep the coal in the bath warm and dry, the private fitter who installed it had the sense to route the condensate to a waste pipe within the house. Thus, we have had no problems. And, had the government – which was requiring these boilers to be fitted – had the same foresight, millions of pounds would have been saved and no end of stress avoided.

But, once again, the focus is in the perils of global warming. Small wonder that, last Tuesday, theDaily Express published an opinion piece declaring: "The main climate threat is not the heat but the cold".

COMMENT: OPEN THREAD - THE STUFF OF POLITICS