Guest post by Dr. Tony Brown
“Personal carbon rations would have to be mandatory, imposed by Government in the same way that food rationing was introduced in the UK in 1939… Each person would receive an electronic card containing their year’s carbon credits …see the Tyndall Centre’s study on “domestic tradable quotas”… and their recent establishment on the political agenda…the card would have to be presented when purchasing energy or travel services, and the correct amount of carbon deducted. The technologies and systems already in place for direct debit systems and credit cards could be used.”
(Environmental Audit Committee minutes-House Of Commons-London)
Preface. This is a factual account of the highly politicised concept of catastrophic man made climate change. The views quoted above are supported in principle by the UK govt but said to be ahead of their time. However, the means to achieve them are now being quietly introduced into main stream thinking through the systematic use of a political agenda that uses the alarming notion of catastrophic man made climate change as the means to force through a measure of social engineering unequalled in the UK in modern times.
In promoting this notion, alternative and well researched views that oppose the science lying behind the unproven hypothesis are stifled, and derision heaped on those pointing out previous well documented warming and cooling periods that occur in, as yet, little understood cycles throughout our history.
This is a long and complex document so it is suggested that a read through of the text that can be seen on your screen should serve as a useful introduction to the highways and byways of our political and scientific establishments. Additional information is provided in many of the links-some deserving of considerable time- so a second much more leisurely examination of the account will enable the reader to acquire a deeper knowledge of the subversion of science in pursuit of political objectives.
******
Crossing the Rubicon: An advert to change hearts and minds.
Finnish Professor Atte Korhola said:
“When later generations learn about climate science, they will classify the beginning of 21st century as an embarrassing chapter in history of science. They will wonder our time, and use it as a warning of how the core values and criteria of science were allowed little by little to be forgotten as the actual research topic — climate change — turned into a political and social playground.”
An advert on “climate change” – aired for the first time in Oct 2009 – is part of a long term £6 million campaign to “change the hearts and minds” of a mainly sceptical British public. This form of communication is known as “ad-doctrination.”
Link 1
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6867046.ece
It was shown at peak time on one of the mainstream British TV stations, with the message that it is unacceptable, indeed irresponsible, to be a climate sceptic, as there will be catastrophic consequences for your grandchildren if you don’t get on board. This chimes with the Governments declaration that it is also ‘anti social’ to oppose wind farms.
There is a British govt department who were behind the rationale for this advert that is known as The ‘Dept of Energy and Climate Change’ which is a 2008 spin off from a longer established dept called Defra. At this point it is useful to backtrack a little to see when the UK government got turned on to climate change and exchanged rhetoric and ‘warm words’ for action.
Link 2
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article3176458.ece
Margaret Becket headed Defra .from June 2001 to May 2006 with the brief;
“To lobby for the UK in other international negotiations on sustainable development and climate change.”
Defra have been key in shaping and promoting climate policy and the Hadley Centre (for Climate research) is largely funded to the tune of many millions of pounds through Defra’s Global Atmospheric division. Additional resources come from the Ministry of Defence and European Commission. Tony Blair’s fervent conversion to the climate cause seems to have led directly to Steven Byres organising the ‘Stopping Dangerous Climate Change’ conference at Hadley (Met office) in Jan 2005.
Link 3
http://randd.defra.gov.uk/Document.aspx?Document=GA01012_6499_FRP.doc
Extract;
5.1 Alignment of the Climate Prediction Programme with Defra’s business and science objectives
The Climate Prediction Programme was not an academic research programme; its work plan and deliverables was driven by Defra’s requirements for science to inform UK government policy on climate change mitigation and adaptation. As the policy requirements changed, so did the research programme objectives. In this section we show how the work described in the CPP Annexes contributed to one or more of the science and business objectives and issues, as published in the Global Atmosphere section of the current strategy for the Climate, Energy and Environmental Risk (CEER) Directorate for 2003-2006. The full strategy can be seen at:
Link 4
www.defra.gov.uk/science/s_is/directorates/asp.
Our convoluted story starts with Defra:
Here is Defras “Communication strategy scoping report” which directly led to Futerras “new rules of the game.” Futerra is a very high powered “sustainability communicator” (or Environmental PR Agency)
Link 5
http://www.defra.gov.uk/evidence/social/behaviour/documents/behaviours-1206-scoping.pdf
Extracts:
“This work has contributed to a shared understanding of the vision for environmental behaviour to underpin ‘one planet living’
“As part of our mapping of Defras work we drew up an initial set of ‘desired’ behaviours”.
This scoping report was the original basis for the advert on British TV through implementing Futerras “New rules of the game”.
Link 6
http://www.futerra.co.uk/downloads/NewRules:NewGame.pdf
These are their Directors and credentials:
Link 7
http://www.futerra.co.uk/about_us/directors
These are some of their clients:
Link 8
http://www.futerra.co.uk/clients/
Which includes the BBC.
Extract from Futerra web site:
“Various BBC teams have enjoyed training sessions on communicating sustainable development. Participants have ranged from producers for EastEnders ( a popular soap) to researchers on the CBeebies channel.” (The latter a Childrens’ channel)
The BBC appears to have shown reporting bias on the subject for several years and perhaps the genesis for this attutude lies with their being indoctrinated with the ‘right’ message at one of these meetings.
Further information on the background of the activities of Futerra and related research by an organisation called the Institute for Public Policy research is given below.
Link 9
http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=47
Link 10
http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=60
The Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) is a leading left of centre think tank, which seems to have a revolving door with Labour. That the climate message should not be seen as “too alarming” was a message carried by the BBC as can be seen here:
Link 11
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5236482.stm
This is a report by Richard Black environment correspondent for the Corporation, concerning IPPR acting on advice provided by Futerra.
Extract:
“The style of climate change discourse is that we maximise the problem and minimise the solution”
Solitaire Townsend, Futerra
Richard Black is already very knowledgeable on Earth matters, so may not have felt it necessary to have attended one of Futerra’s training sessions on “communicating sustainable development.”
Part of Defra metamorposed in October 2008 into;
Link 12
http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/about/about.aspx
The already mentioned “Department of Energy and Climate Change”
The Four principals involved are Ed Miliband, Lord Hunt, Joan Ruddock, David Kidney.
Joan Ruddock’s work focuses largely on “how we can change behaviour across UK society and reach an ambitious global agreement to reduce our carbon emissions in a fair and effective way”.
Joan needs no introduction to British readers.
Link 13
http://www.joanruddock.org.uk/index.php?id=13
For years she was chair of CND (Campaign for Nuclear disarmament) Eventually moved to Defra and ended up in this new dept.
Ed Miliband is a senior Labour Govt figure. His father was Ralph Miliband, the Marxist political theorist, one of the most influential left-wingers of his generation. Ed’s girl friend is an environmental lawyer.
From here:
Link 14
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article4449710.ece
Britain likes to think of itself as a long time leader in climate action, but the EU and the G8 only got on board in 2005 with this matter:
Link 15
or as a pdf
Link 16
Extract:
“The UK Prime Minister Tony Blair defined climate change as ‘probably, long-term the single most important issue we face as a global community,’ and made climate change one of his priority topics during the UK’s G8 Presidency, along with Africa. Climate change was also made a priority for the UK’s EU Presidency (1 July 2005 – 31 December 2005). In a keynote speech on climate change, Tony Blair set out three ambitious targets for the UK’s G8 Presidency in 2005:
“To secure an agreement as to the basic science on climate change and the threat it poses, to provide the foundation for further action;
“To reach agreement on a process to speed up the science, technology and other measuresnecessary to meet the threat;
“To engage countries outside the G8 who have growing energy needs, like China and India.”
To put this information into context we need to examine the run up to key events in 2005, as this led to the step change increase in the political promotion of climate change. As the British have been leaders, so it is fitting that the next part of our story – which preceded the events in link 12 and 13 – takes place at the Mother of Parliaments with the Environmental Audit Committee of the House of Commons.
The EAC had met regularly for some years and report their findings in detail after examining memorandum and questioning some of those they viewed as ‘expert witnesses.’ The relevance of this particular report of the EAC cited here, is that it was written just before the UK took over EU presidency AND the chair of the G8 in 2005. These are two very influential positions that fell to Tony Blair who was getting ‘on message’ with climate change and saw the opportunity to cement Britain’s pre eminence in this field-the Americans being decidedly “off message” and out of the picture through the refusal of George Bush to ratify the Kyoto agreement.
The report, intended to shape international policy on climate change during that influential year, has a tone that is decidedly apocalyptic That the science is settled is a recurring theme (this was prior to the IPCC assessment in 2007) with no mention of natures contribution to co2 levels, the overwhelming importance of water vapour, nor of cyclic variations in our climate. Indeed, no other information was being considered that would show that the science was not as settled as the protagonists claimed.
At this point we take this next series of links concerning this particular report of the EAC as part of one story and return to the link numbering system just before number 17, when we conclude our examination of this report and continue with the piecing together of the wider political climate change jigsaw.
http://www.gci.org.uk/briefings/EAC_Final_C&C.pdf
This report of the Environmental audit committee is subtitled
“Fourth report of session 2004/5 published March 2005”
The next few extracts come from “Conclusions and Recommendations” at the start of the document. However the whole piece is well worth reading. The footnotes in particular give some interesting snippets of information on who is informing UK policy.
Item 26: “In the context of the G8 the UK could pursue a broader range of complementary policies including the need for greater coordinated effort low carbon research (sic) the scope for developing forms of international traction and in particular the need to embed environmental objectives more firmly within a range of international organisations.”
Item 27: “It is simply not credible to suggest that the scale of the (co2) reductions which are required can possibly be achieved without significant behavioural change.”
(Note: The term used, “significant behavioural change,” is similar to that used in the extract at link 2.)
Item 28: It can be seen that the highly alarmist viewpoint detailed here echoes the recent comments about “thermo dynamic crimes”*.
(Note: *The increasingly frenetic tone of the climate debate in the UK can be seen in this comment from David Mackay that was made public just before the first airing of the advert.)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6860181.ece
“Setting fire to chemicals like gas should be made a thermodynamic crime,” he said. “If people want heat they should be forced to get it from heat pumps. That would be a sensible piece of legislation.”
Who is David Mackay?
(From the same link above) “Speaking last week on his first day as chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, MacKay set out a vision of how Britain could generate the threefold increase in electricity it needs, with nuclear power at its heart. DECC is the govt dept that is the successor to Defra in climate change.”
Mackay has also been an expert witness in front of this EAC committee.
Those individuals and organisations who presented information for the report that we are examining in detail here are listed in this document:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmenvaud/105/10502.htm
All the minutes on the fourth report of the EAC are here:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmenvaud.htm
The next extracts are taken from this document and for reasons of space are by no means exhaustive, but are reasonably representative.
Question 133 onwards from Friends of the Earth giving witness in a Q and A format.
“Do you think there needs to be a different approach to the setting of the targets? It seems to some of us that the targets have been set as some sort of political horse-trading.”
Miss Worthington: “Yes, absolutely.”
Q137 Chairman: “Do you have any idea how that process might be reformed?”
Miss Worthington: “Anything would be an improvement. Essentially it was exactly horse-trading, where countries simply went into a darkened room and beat each other up. We had no methodology attached to it at all.”
Q137 Chairman: “Do you think that the way in which, for example, most of the allocations were handed out free in the European Union scheme, has hindered or helped matters?”
Miss Worthington: “Practically, it has meant that it can get off the ground. Environmentally, it certainly breaches the polluter-pays principle quite spectacularly. We would advocate a move towards 100% auctioning. Not only would that give government a revenue stream upfront which you could then redirect, but it would stop all the horse trading around projections which are causing everybody complete nightmares, both over in Defra and DTI and other parts of government at the moment.”
(Questions 40-61 on 17 Nov 2004 are particularly interesting.)
Q41 Mr Challen: “I was just thinking of Winston Churchill’s comment that democracy is a bad way of organising society but all the other alternatives are worse. Picking up from your submission, is that your view about emissions trading systems?”
Mr Lanchbery: “Yes, it probably is. A lot of claims are made for emissions trading, for example that it provides certainty. No, it does not provide certainty unless you have got an absolutely rock-crushing compliance regime.”
“Each government, would you agree, should look at how they can get their public on board directly rather than simply saying this is an objective for our policy makers in Whitehall.”
Mr Lanchbery: “It is an appealing concept. It was mooted some time ago. I remember having a meeting with the European Commissioner at which it was mooted. I think it is a matter of practicality really though. Although most well-educated people again would be okay with it and you could see them using their carbon credit, it might be difficult for an elderly person to take any advantage of it. I can see the appeal of it, I just wonder about the practicality of it.
“It is an interesting question. Getting the public on board and using fiscal instruments to do that are not necessarily the same thing and your natural response is to think fiscal instruments doing anything is likely to alienate the public, but I think probably of all the mechanisms available the notion of per capita allowances that can be traded electronically through a credit card system—and I know the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research has done some investigation of this—is quite appealing if it is technically feasible because as well as being economically efficient it is also socially progressive in that a person who does not have many means and does not travel very much at least has an asset that they can sell to an affluent person who does wish to travel more. It has some social progressivity about it, too. It is quite an appealing way. There are obviously other fiscal measures, taxation in particular, and we would all be in favour of a variety of fiscal measures for achieving different purposes, so we argue, for example, for a well-to-wheel carbon tax on vehicle fuels.
“Do you think that without such measures as that—and that is music to my ears on DTQs by the way—we could achieve any more stringent or radical post-Kyoto targets because, after all, the domestic sector in this country contributes about 40% of our emissions.”
Dr Jefferiss: “I think that there are other policy mechanisms for driving reductions in the non-industrial sector. It is really a question of whether the Government will have the political will to implement them. Certainly, as you indicated, energy efficiency measures in the domestic sector in particular could achieve significant cuts but the fear, naturally, is a political one and the fuel poor in particular will be adversely affected. Our response to that would be that it would be much more politically expedient and effective to tackle fuel poverty head on and remove that as an obstacle to introducing a rational taxation system for energy or for carbon use. I think it is really a question of not whether there are other policy influences but whether there is the political will to deploy them. The same with fuel duty on transport.”
(Note: This link gives an explanation of DTQ’s [Domestic Tradable Quotas].)
http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/research/energy/downloads/pct/dtq-and-pca.pdf
To continue: Appendix 7 “Memorandum from the Green party” makes fascinating reading.
“However, much of the carbon dioxide that is presently produced is wasted in transporting goods from one market to another. Trade should be reduced so that it returns to being a means of obtaining goods that are not available locally, according to the principle of trade subsidiarity.
“Proposal: The Committee should investigate the possibility of creating a new global currency for carbon trading. Such a currency would need to be backed by and administered by the UN.”
(The suggested carbon quota per capita are mentioned in table 1, 2, and 3)
“The IPCC, the RCEP and more recently the UK government have accepted the need for global CO2 reductions of 60% by 2050. However, if these global reductions are to be made in an equitable fashion, the higher-polluting countries like the UK must make bigger reductions. This would translate into a UK target more like 90% by 2050 at the very latest, with clear and definite targets at stages along the way.
“We would also propose, as a short-term measure en route to a full system of eco-taxation, the reintroduction of the fuel tax escalator, which was removed for reasons of political expediency that ignored the requirements for CO2 reductions.
“The national road building programme must be scrapped, and the resulting £30 billion saving invested in a package of emissions-reducing policies including 20% traffic reduction within 10 years.”
Appendix 12 “Memorandum from Institute of Policy Studies” (This highly influential body is also mentioned in the main body of this story)
“Attention therefore needs to be given beyond these solutions towards measures of sufficiency, of social and institutional reform, and of modifications to lifestyles with much lower energy inputs and lower carbon emissions.
“The only logical way (to cut CO2) is by the introduction of personal carbon rationing, which would cover the 50% of total UK emissions which come from household energy use and personal transport, including international air travel. (The Tyndall Centre study on domestic tradable quotas discusses methods of ‘rationing’ the remainder of emissions in the economy). Personal carbon rations would have to be mandatory, imposed by Government in the same way that food rationing was introduced in the UK in 1939. A voluntary alternative to carbon rationing would be highly unlikely to make significant savings as recent history suggests that individuals would be unwilling to start taking action for the common good unless they saw others doing likewise—and the ‘free-rider’ would have far too much to gain. Appeals to reason and conscience have not been effective in achieving major changes in our irresponsible consumption patterns. In circumstances such as this, when the wider public interest is at considerable risk and the fact that the changes are made is of critical importance to the welfare of the community and, in this case, future generations, Government intervention is in our view imperative.
“The administration of carbon rationing should be simple. Each person would receive an electronic card containing their year’s carbon credits (see the Tyndall Centre’s study on ‘domestic tradable quotas’ and their recent establishment on the political agenda in Colin Challen’s Private Member’s Bill). The card would have to be presented when purchasing energy or travel services, and the correct amount of carbon deducted. The technologies and systems already in place for direct debit systems and credit cards could be used.
(My highlighting and emphasis)
CONCLUSIONS
21. Personal carbon rations offer a positive, fair and effective way of making the carbon savings necessary to prevent “potentially disastrous climate change”.
Of course attendance at this committee can be an entirely different thing to exerting actual influence, but the obvious bias to those from the environmental groups-who appear to be pushing at an open door- and against the representatives of industry such as Shell and BAA can be seen when following the full transcripts.
We now revert to our main narrative. The following year was the first meeting of the ‘ad hoc group’ to set up integrated action betwen the EU, G8 and the IPCC working groups. Both these parties and the UN (who sponsor the IPCC) are following ‘Agenda 21’ In the case of climate change that relates to the work of the IPCC whose findings are endorsed by those countries following the agenda, and who therefore subsequently have a legal obligation to implement that agenda. This includes teaching climate propaganda to our school children through Sage 21.
Agenda 21 is linked to the AD Hoc working group of the IPCC negotiations that are leading to the Copenhagen summit in December 2009. The group has five chairs, of whom several have been termed green activists. Several of them have openly written of the need for a new world governance. The SAGE21 education agenda from the UN clearly sets out to influence schools.
The Agenda 21 aims has been endorsed at UK Govt level, and councils and govt bodies have been instructed to follow this agenda.
Below is the first session of the AD Hoc group in 2006, which is the prelude to the meeting of world leaders in Copenhangen in December 2009 to sign a treaty to combat “dangerous climate change.”
Link 17
Good resumé of events below:
Link 18
http://www.iisd.ca/vol12/enb12357e.html
These are the minutes and action plan of latest meeting in April 2009
link 19
http://unfccc.int/meetings/items/4381.php
This is the ad hoc working group composition and its aims, that have fed into the UN report above. There are many individual sections worth exploring as they concern negotiating points and amendments for the Copenhagen summit.
Link 20
http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2008/awg6/eng/08.pdf
These are the key chairs:
Harald Dovland Norway –chair minister for environment http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-180526631.html
Mam Konate of Mali Vice chair http://www.iisd.ca/climate/cop11/enbots/enbots1704e.html
Chan Woo-Kim Republic of Korea http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:py3_vPi45-wJ:www.unescap.org/esd/environment/mced/singg/documents/Programme_SINGG_Final.pdf+chan-woo+kim+republic+of+korea&cd=18&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk
Ms Christiana Figueres Costa Rica http://figueresonline.com/
Nuno Lacasta Portugal http://www.wcl.american.edu/environment/lacasta.cfm
Brian Smith New Zealand
Marcelo Rocha Brazil http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file50347.pdf
This is the ‘information note’ (Background) for the meeting
Link 21
http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/032709_informationnote.pdf
It appears to be a UN document to substantially re-shape the world through the medium of the threat of catastrophic climate change.
Whilst readers should scrutinise each line for themselves in order to see what many had always believed was an agenda behind the IPCC, some highlights are;
Page 6 item 17
Page 8 item 25 and 27
Page 9 item 34
Page 10 item 37
Page 14 item 60
Conclusions on p15
Here is the effective draft of the Copenhagen treaty produced by the Ad Hoc working group.
Link 22
http://wattsupwiththat.com/?s=copenhagen+draft+treaty
(Click on PDF once linked in)
Page 67 and 122 are of particular interest. This from p. 122:
16. [Adverse economic and social consequences of response measures [shall][should] be addressed by proper economic, social and environmental actions, including promoting and supporting economic diversification and the development and dissemination of win-win technologies in the affected countries, paying particular attention to the needs and concerns of the poorest and most vulnerable developing country Parties.]
Alternative to paragraph 16:
[Adverse economic and social consequences of response measures shall be addressed by various means, including but not limited to promoting, supporting and enabling economic diversification, funding, insurance and the development, transfer and dissemination of win-win technologies in the affected countries, such as cleaner fossil fuel technologies, gas flaring reduction, and carbon capture and storage technologies.]
17. [[Developed [and developing] countries] [Developed and developing country Parties] [All Parties] [shall] [should]:]
(a) Compensate for damage to the LDCs’ economy and also compensate for lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity, as many will become environmental refugees
(b) Africa, in the context of environmental justice, should be equitably compensated for environmental, social and economic losses arising from the implementation of response measures.
In comparing the draft to the overall aims of Agenda 21 (in Link 23), it can be seen the logical progression that has been taken in order to implement Agenda 21 through the means of the dangerous climate change hypothesis .
Link 23
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
Extract:
Internationally Agreed Development Goals & Climate Change:
“Internationally agreed frameworks and goals have set an agenda for integrating climate change and sustainable development. Agenda 21, which addresses climate change under its Chapter 9 (Protection of the atmosphere), recognizes that activities that may be undertaken in pursuit of the objectives defined therein should be coordinated with social and economic development in an integrated manner, with a view to avoiding adverse impacts on the latter, taking into full account the legitimate priority needs of developing countries for the achievement of sustained economic growth and the eradication of poverty.”
Both Agenda 21 and the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPOI) assert that the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the key instrument for addressing climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, which entered into force on 16 February 2005, sets binding emission reductions targets for industrialized countries for the first commitment period 2008-2012.
Britain has always liked to see itself at the forefront of the fight against ‘dangerous climate change’ and the subject has been highly politically charged since Margaret Thatcher decided to promote it as a reason to favour Nuclear over coal and made a speech on the world stage about the subject in 1988. She then opened the Hadley Centre in 1990 who ever since have-through Defra – offered considerable practical and financial support to the IPCC.
It helps that the Chief Scientific Advisor to Defra and Director of Strategy at the Tyndall Centre for “Climate Change Research”, is an old friend and advisor of ex-VP Gore, namely Professor Robert Watson.
He was IPCC chairman before Pachauri and when asked in 1997 at Kyoto about the growing number of climate scientists who challenged the conclusions of the UN, that man-induced global warming was real and promised cataclysmic consequences, Watson responded by dismissing all dissenting scientists as pawns of the fossil fuel industry. “The science is settled” he said, “and we’re not going to reopen it here.”
These links show Watson as representing Defra and Tyndall. The second is newer.
Link 24
Link25
http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/content/%C2%A345m-boost-tyndall-centre
Link 26
Provides some interesting background.
http://sovereignty.net/p/clim/kyotorpt.htm
The nature of Defra support is described here in this DEFRA staff document relating to the Nobel Prize award for IPCC and Al Gore: http://www.civilservice.gov.uk/news/2007/December/Defra-IPCC.aspx
“Defra provides financial support to the co-chairs and their supporting secretariats. As such the UK has provided underpinning funding for almost one-third of the major scientific reports produced by the IPCC, which the Nobel committee believes have ‘created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.’ ”
Link 27. The full strategy can be seen at:
www.defra.gov.uk/science/s_is/directorates/asp.
Extract:
5.1 Alignment of the Climate Prediction Programme with Defra’s business and science objectives
“The Climate Prediction Programme was not an academic research programme; its work plan and deliverables was driven by Defra’s requirements for science to inform UK government policy on climate change mitigation and adaptation. As the policy requirements changed, so did the research programme objectives. In this section we show how the work described in the CPP Annexes contributed to one or more of the science and business objectives and issues, as published in the Global Atmosphere section of the current strategy for the Climate, Energy and Environmental Risk (CEER) Directorate for 2003-2006. Defra and now the dept for energy and climate change, see AGW as being the vehicle to promote ‘one planet living’ “
From the Met office web site
Link 28
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/hadleycentre/
Three events occurred in 1988 that assisted greatly in bringing the issue of man-made climate change to the notice of politicians:* A World Ministerial Conference on Climate Change in June hosted by the government of Canada *A speech in September by Margaret Thatcher where she mentioned the Anthropogenic climate change and the importance of action to combat it. * The first meeting of the IPCC in Geneva in November 1988. Delegates from various countries agreed to set up an international assessment of the science of change, together with its likely impacts and the policy options.
In December 1988 the UK Government announced it was committed to extending its influence internationally to provide information about climate change and to supporting appropriate research. Discussions were held with the Department of the Environment to strengthen climate research at the Met Office. This led, in November 1989, to an announcement of a new centre for climate change research in the Met Office — then called the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research. Margaret Thatcher opened this in 1990; it has since moved-as part of the Met office- to Exeter.”
The wheel has turned full cycle as the science becomes irrelevant to the politics. Observations that things aren’t as the models predicted are ignored, the planet has failed to read the script by inconveniently cooling for nearly a decade, whilst sea levels stubbornly refuse to rise beyond natural variability. The effects of the Jet stream is little understood and historic precedents for cyclic variability in our climate dismissed. Far from the ‘science being settled’, it is very poorly understood as yet. Even the Met office admit they have no idea –despite being world leaders- as to how much sea level will rise and its relationship to melting ice sheets, as this recent advert shows:
Polar ice-sheet modelling scientist
Salary: £25,500 + competitive benefits, including Civil Service Pension
Generic Role: Senior Scientist
Profession: Science
Permanent post at the Met Office, Exeter
Closing date for applications: 11 June 2009
Background information
A significant uncertainty in future projections of sea level is associated with dynamical changes in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and a key aspect of this uncertainty is the role of ice shelves, how they might respond to climate change, and the effect this could have on the ice sheets. The goal of the post is to contribute to improved scenarios of sea-level rise, which is an important aspect of climate change, with large coastal impacts.
Specific job purpose
Incorporate a model of ice shelves into the Met Office Hadley Centre climate model to develop a capability to make projections of rapid changes in ice sheets, thereby leading to improved scenarios of future sea-level rise.”
So the poitics that started this all off have come back to the fore with the TV advert. This time through a Labour govt who have a penchant for control, taxes and an idealistic view of the world. Clearly they share this idea.
Link 29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome
“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
– Club of Rome,
(premier environmental think-tank, with numerous high profile and influential members)
This is not to say that anyone in this complex saga has done anything illegal in following and promoting their own particular world view through the message of collective social responsibility, woven into the apocalyptic notion of catastrophic man made climate change.
However, the nature of the highly convoluted linking of dedicated and sincere organisations and individuals with their own interpretation of the science, means the process is not at all transparent, dissenting voices have been ignored, and there is an element of “group think” in order to conform secure desired outcomes. In effect public money has been used to promote a politically inspired ideology subject to substantial mission creep, in order to meet political aims.
Politicians and the media who share the “one world living” viewpoint have probably not been as assiduous as they should in questioning the science (because many want to believe it) Many others who may not share this world viewpoint have been equally as guilty in nodding through what has been put in front of them. The taxation, social, and cost elements of “environmental”policies has also not been clearly spelt out to the population, and are of fundamental importance to everyone as they will have a dramatic impact on their way of life, basic freedoms and finances.
“H.L.Mencken wrote: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
The science behind the IPCC has always been debatale at best – but never openly debated. It has now become the means to persuade the populace to follow broader social objectives in a “one world” scenario.
” ‘Jacta alea esto,’ Let the die be cast! Let the game be ventured!”
That was the famous declaration of Cæsar when, at the Rubicon, after long
hesitation, he finally decided to march to Rome,
With the airing of this advert a political line has been crossed. The die is cast.
Tonyb
It is not a conspiracy it is just the cosequence of extreme democracy which has taken the most idiot of commoners into power positions.
Dr. Brown, you have good information. You *Badly* need a good editor!!!
I’m sorry, I’m extremely sympathetic to the Doc Brown’s viewpoint, but this post is just too long and contains far too many lengthy quotations. It came off as a very overwordy Encyclopedia Britannica article. It is badly in need of editing, and it could have 10 times the impact if it was effectively edited so that it was only about 1/20 as long.
And please, I want to be clear that I support this information and want to see it get out. But hiding it in posts that no one will make it all the way through because they are so mindnumbingly tedious is not the way to influence opinion.
Mann uses Holocaust to Smear Sceptical Scientists
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/manne_uses_holocaust_to_smear_sceptical_scientists/P20
I left this comment over there. I wait with great eagerness to see if they publish it.
“I believe the Jewish burnt offering Holocaust happened. I believe the Russian burnt offering Holocaust happened. I believe the Chinese burnt offering Holocaust happened.
I do not believe the man-made global warming burnt offering holocaust is happening. I believe our sleepy Sun has something to do with making our planet colder.”
Is it only me but are these posts getting more and more difficult to read with the various links, quotes, inline references, headlines, fonts etc. making the whole post so messy that I cannot anymore see what the is author actually saying?
I have problems too, I meant “what the author is actually saying” in the above post.
I’m telling you people in the US (and other places) just like I stated on another thread here (and AlantheBrit has too), this is what the UK is like now, but do not think it won’t happen soon in the US! Seriously. It has crept up on us here in the UK.
They’ve tried it too with ‘fear of terrorism’ and managed to pass laws which have already been misused. We even had tanks at Heathrow Airport one day to try and ram home the message. However, a lack of terrorist attacks (and some good work by MI5) have made people wonder what the fuss was all about, but I digress. The UK government has always wanted nuclear power, and this has given them a way in (which the Greens never realised!). ‘Carbon taxes’ raises a huge amount for the UK, and NO government anywhere in the world will miss what is going on. It WILL be used as an excuse in the USA to raise an enormous amount of money, you’ll see.
I never thought I would live in a time that would show me how Medieval thought processes totally disrupted Medieval lives. We are heading for a very dark time ahead if all this Climate Change Carbon Claptrap is allowed to dominate every facet of our existence.
Climate fanaticism without a shred of proof. The present UK Government is on its last legs, will the next one be any better?
Michael (09:39:24) :
“I believe our sleepy Sun has something to do with making our planet colder.”
Could be, but you have precious little evidence for that. Do you also believe in the tooth fairy? [there is actual evidence for that, just ask my 8-yr old granddaughter].
I have just finished listening to the BBC reviewing “6 degrees – our future on a hotter planet” by Mark Lynas
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00n88d1/A_Good_Read_20_10_2009/
It was environmentl activist Tony Juniper’s favourite book (http://tonyjuniper.com). He was shamelessly talking about melting ice, dying polar bears and the swamping of possibly London and certainly Boston (US not Lincolnshire, although if the former goes there is not much hope for the latter, it’s pretty low lying). He was not challenged by the presenter but it was questioned by the other guest reviewer who pointed out that there were scientists at the UK Met Office who doubted the “science”. Juniper’s reaction was that some scientists believed that Lynas’s book was too conservative.
Another nicely balanced piece fron the Beeb.
For a more succinct summary of the current situation, see http://bit.ly/2GVuOT where a humanist supporter of Gaia goes up against a couple of deniers of Gaia’s powers.
If this is a vision of the future of the UK then for naught were the sacrifices of those brave souls who fought for freedom from tyrants.
For what are our brave soldiers shedding limbs and lives in a distant land and for whom and for why?
We reallly should be getting very angry about what our political
masters are planning for us but, most of all, we should be furious that we have allowed a once brave nation to be savaged by sheep!
“Leif Svalgaard (09:51:36) :
Michael (09:39:24) :
“I believe our sleepy Sun has something to do with making our planet colder.”
Could be, but you have precious little evidence for that. Do you also believe in the tooth fairy? [there is actual evidence for that, just ask my 8-yr old granddaughter].”
Leif,
I have a theory on this matter. I call it;
Compound Solar Climate Forcing.
Remember the poll tax
Congratulations Tony on unearthing all this. This article will be a mine of information for historians and social scientists interested in the propagation of mass hysteria.
The British government is frequently accused of having lost its way, discarded its principles etc. But in fighting Global Warming they’ve obviously found their Mission. It’s the most awe-inspiring example of misplaced fanaticism since the Crusaders sacked the Christian city of Constantinople. Psychologists call it displacement activity. We shall see soon what voters call it.
I do feel your message needs paring down though, if it’s to reach the average punter. If only we sceptics had the support of Big Oil and their Public Relations outfits, maybe the story coud be simplified (or sexed up) to get it into the mainstream media.
Tony, comprehensive. Thank you.
The above posters are right though, it needs a headline summary and some condensing. Keep this one as is and try to do a ‘press release’ in 800 words as an exercise.
“We would advocate a move towards 100% auctioning. Not only would that give government a revenue stream upfront which you could then redirect…” states Miss Worthington.
Redirection of revenue stream might be the new, more palatable and PC catch phrase we’ll be hearing in the future for redistribution of wealth. Like climate change expresses a “cover all scenarios” shift away from the more limited applications of global warming, redirection of revenue broadens the means by which people like Miss Worthington plan to milk your wallet or purse.
This isn’t about science or even about saving the world from some perceived crisis [manufactured or not]. It’s about the “green” cloaked greed of the political elite hijacking science for a purpose that cares not for science or the state of our planet.
Disarmament of British citizens in the last decade makes perfect sense now.
Micheal (09:39:24)
(09:39:24)
Manne uses Holocaust to Smear Sceptical Scientists
I thought for a moment you were referring to hockey stick Mann, but it seems not. So who is this presumptive circular argument merchant and what is his claim to fame?
It’s beyond ironic that all this is playing out in the UK, considering George Orwell was a Brit. But then Orwell was a socialist, proving even he wasn’t immune to the dangers of doublethink.
Carbon is well related to wealth. A tax on the basis of carbon, why not? Of course if you live in Europe, 2/3 of the price of a litre of petrol is already tax. So it is just extending the principle.
In the UK and other Northern European countries, thousands more old people die in cold winters than mild winters. If you explode the price of gas/electricity/heating oil to lower demand, there will be a lot more dead grannies.
Rationing seems fair. But folks are rarely happy to play a fair. Likely to make the Mrs Tatchers Pole Tax look popular. Plus in the age or cross border shopping, how do you run cross border rationing? UKIP and other anti EU parties will love that!!
In short, the voters will not stand for the kind of measures being talked about. In UK they have enough trouble introducing national ID cards – ration cards -please.
If you have some energy and you want some heat then you can either blow your energy away and use the waste heat (e.g. run electricity through a resistor to get a radiator) or you can use your energy to run a heat pump. The latter works MUCH better. That’s all Prof MacKay was saying about “thermodynamic crimes”. In the UK it has as much to do with energy security as climate change. The whole climate change issue is muddied by the fact that many people who think we need to do unpopular things to fix energy security (e.g. move to nuclear power) support climate change fear, to make the public more malleable. I’m not saying Prog MacKay is in that category, but he wants Britain to reduce its dependency on fossil fuels for various reasons. He was the head of the Inference group at Cambridge Physics department, and I encourage everyone to read his books that are free on the net: “Without hot air” and his book on Inference.
I will raise more than just my voice against anyone who dares impose this nonsense. I will raise an army. I will make sure the children of politicians will never sleep. My children will haunt their children, my grandchildren will haunt their grandchildren. I’ll make it a family ethos. There will be no let up.
Michael (10:14:07) :
I have a theory on this matter. I call it;
Compound Solar Climate Forcing.
still not evidence. Al Gore has a theory too. He calls it: AGW.
The idea of a “war time” type ration book is not accurate at all. If only it were. At least everyone would have to make the same sacrifice.
No, what has been proposed is precisely the most regressive form of taxation ever devised. Some liberal do-gooder in that article enthusiatically proclaims that “a person who does not have many means and does not travel very much at least has an asset that they can sell to an affluent person who does wish to travel more.” I can almost see them smiling as they bask in their self-righteousness.
In reality, the poorest members of society will be forced to sell their credits to “make ends meet”. When a friend asks Mr. Poor if he will be vacationing this year, what is he going to say? “I’ve had to sell my credits. I can’t aford my bills.” It is the moral equivalent to the time when women had to sell their hair to pay for food.
And this from a Labour government – Labour! Unbelievable.
However!!! I say bring it on. Give these loons enough rope and they will hang themselves. It will be worth enduring the suffering just to see the noose tighten around their necks, when the public finally snap.
Oh, I look forward to the carbon rationing! The same amount of carbon footprint for everyone. Everyone has a limited ration of flight travel miles….everybody? No, not everybody….some are more equal than others. You have to see, that politicians are other kind of people, they can fly as much as they want.
As soon as people will realize that, the politicians will dangle from the lamp poles and the spook will be over.
geoffchambers
“…If only we sceptics had the support of Big Oil and their Public Relations outfits, maybe the story coud be simplified (or sexed up) to get it into the mainstream media.”
Reply
You will never have the support of the oil companies or any energy corporation. This is because their financial interests, and those of their shareholders and directors are with the promotion of the global warming hysteria, and then providing a solution to the “problem” with hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies.
Adolfo
Your post prompted me to look at Gordon Brown’s education.He is well educated,surprisingly he is a religious man,who has had personal tragedy,but his personality is lacking to say the least(if his colleagues are to believed,and I think his actions show they are)
http://www.epolitix.com/latestnews/article-detail/newsarticle/profile-gordon-brown/?no_cache=1
Written in 2007,the criticism seems to be spot on.
Lord Turnbull said Brown operated with a “Stalinist ruthlessness”, and had a “very cynical view of mankind and his colleagues”. Of discussions with Cabinet colleagues, he said: “His view is that it is just not worth it and ‘they will get what I decide’.”
Change
Some suggest that Brown wants friends and colleagues to be compliant at best and subservient at worst.
They fear that his strict Calvinist trait of “I know best” means he will attempt to run every government department from inside a Downing Street lair – a pattern already begun during his time at the Treasury.
(Not sure this ‘took’ on the first submssion)
What of those with ‘special needs’?
What of years where one needs to run the air onditioners more on account of say, a warmer than usual summer?
Is taking an airline flight going to count in these cerdits? Will an additional credit be available for business travel? Bereavement/funeral travel? Attending the execution of a will? Personal testimony/subpoena in a court case?
What about those few of us who run a community Internet server, or a ham radio repeater (for the benefit of our community) from our homes – will we be eligible for ‘extra rations’?
What if I put up my *own* solar or wind powered sources – will I still get my _standard_ ‘carbon credits’ from the goverment – or will those credits be deducted from my allotment on account of my solar/wind sources?
If I chop firewood/collect fallen trees (long approved by the township) from the nearby woods – will that fallen would have to be declared on an ‘energy income’ form?
.
.
.
Thankfully our “government” has zero credibility with just about everyone in the UK.
Not surprising when you consider the level of damage they have inflicted on what was once a reasonably successful country.
This is not the forum for a political debate, but suffice to say the UK is now effectively bankrupt.
The architect in chief of this chaos?
Gordon Brown our unelected , and soon to be ousted, Prime minster (aka the one eyed Scottish idiot).
Michael (09:39:24) :
“I believe our sleepy Sun has something to do with making our planet colder.”
Leif Svalgaard (09:51:36)
“Could be, but you have precious little evidence for that. Do you also believe in the tooth fairy?”
How long shall we fight over one settled issue?
http://blog.sme.sk/blog/560/195013/armaghcetssn.jpg
/OT
Lassen Sie mich Ihre Kohlepapiere sehen!
As to the “advert” regarding CO2 complain here
http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/how_to_complain/complaints_form/
This is an utter disgrace and the more people who point this out the better. Unfortunately appears to be UK only. If you are not in the UK send them an e-mail and ask for an explanation
enquiries@asa.org.uk.
Thanks
Holy cow!
I’m getting out of here.
Good and important work TonyB.
I’d propose rationing of politicians’ emissions. maximum 5 words per century.
Do UK citizens want a carbon ration card?
I hope the extent of this research will be a help and an incentive for many to take this question seriously, who otherwise might be dismissive at first blush. I also look forward to the Cliff Notes! 🙂
A rationing card for each UK citizen does have all the fingerprints of a “progressive” type of wealth control and redistribution:
“Mr. Lanchbery: I think probably of all the mechanisms available the notion of per capita allowances that can be traded electronically through a credit card system—and I know the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research has done some investigation of this—is quite appealing if it is technically feasible because as well as being economically efficient it is also socially progressive in that a person who does not have many means and does not travel very much at least has an asset that they can sell to an affluent person who does wish to travel more. It has some social progressivity about it, too. It is quite an appealing way. There are obviously other fiscal measures, taxation in particular, and we would all be in favour of a variety of fiscal measures for achieving different purposes, so we argue, for example, for a well-to-wheel carbon tax on vehicle fuels.”
If you want absolute control of the populous of the world, control their energy usage and availability. Better still control their energy emissions. You don’t need an electronic chip under the skin. [Socialist] like techniques are being implemented again while the people are asleep? Create a false issue by distracting them with a false carbon emissions problem, limit debate and then offer a phony solution which is then used for completely different purpose entirely- control of people and more taxes. This is a test for the British and European people.[ US ?] Do they stand for freedom and democracy or will they voluntarily submit to dictatorship and absolute control. This game has been played out throughout our world history. Europeans especially should recognize the early signs or the the start of over control having come through so many recent struggles for freedom .
“…it does not provide certainty unless you have got an absolutely rock-crushing compliance regime.”
Hmmmm… Where do I sign up? I’m sure they’ll be providing brown shirts and shiny hobnailed boots.
Good grief, are these wackoes for real?
Juraj V – Disarmament of British citizens in the last decade makes perfect sense now.. Likewise the dismemberment of our Armed Forces.
For those who thought this overlong and convoluted, I couldn’t agree less. Tony demonstrates, through the thoroughness of the article, an enormous amount of research, which lends weight to the credibility of its conclusions. By all means chop it up in to sound bites for consumption by those with a more limited attention span, but the full article needs to be somewhere and here is as good as any.
At times it felt like I was reading a science fiction story. It also reminded me more than somewhat of the Branagh dramatization of the Wannsee Conference. Utterly outlandish proposals made in relatively mundane language and with all the appearance of logic and reasonableness. I think what it showed more than anything is how metastasized the AGW/ACC disease has become. While we’ve shouted and screamed at the headliners, such as Gore and Hansen, the termites have been busy burrowing away and building their nests. It will take more than merely refuting the AGW theory (and having that recognised by MSM and the great unwashed) , to make this thing go away.
There’s nothing wrong with reducing the need for fossil fuels, or for looking for alternative technology.
The worrying thing is that at the moment, there are abundant known deposits of fossil fuel, and probably even more undiscovered deposits, and there appears to be a concerted effort to curtail discovery, extraction and use. This can only lead to security problems, and will eventually result in strife as a result of the uncrupulous (or desperate) trying to muscle in on, or steal what IS available.
You can’t hide this stuff, it exists, and if it makes life more tolerable in a cooling world, then it should be extracted and used for the benefit of everyone. There’s no point in trying to hide it and deny it’s existence, similarly there’s even less point in not using it just for the sake of it. You just can’t eke it out a bit at a time – that’s of no use to anyone.
Discovery and extraction should be continued with all haste, whilst development of a credible and viable alternative is encouraged. The two should run in parallel. We can’t afford to cock this one up.
And all this in the forlorn hope that the planet is going to warm up to fit the “modelling” of certain “scientists”.
And if it cools? What then?
Paul H – Good grief, are these wackoes for real? Yup.
@rks (10:36:50)
3kw electric fire £20
5kW Heat o/p pump, electricity input 1-2 KW, installed cost £5000
How many pensioners in the UK can afford that to save a kw?
Also Heat pumps output low grade heat 30-40 deg C, requiring new heat transfer systems eg underfloor heating instead of rads = much more expense.
Air or ground exchange heat pump, ground exchange is much more efficient, but how many city dwellers can stick 80m of piping in 2m deep trenches around their apartments? (or a 80 m bore hole even?)
P
If you want control of the populous of the world, control their energy usage and availability. Easier still control their energy emissions. You don’t need an electronic chip under the skin. Excessive control techniques are being implemented while the people are asleep? Create a false issue by distracting them with false carbon emissions problem, limit debate and then offer a phony solution which is then used for completely different purpose entirely- control of people and more taxes. This is a test for the British and European people. Do they stand for freedom and democracy or will they voluntarily submit to dictatorship and over control. This game has been played out throughout our world history. Europeans especially should recognize the early signs of over control having come through so many recent struggles for freedom
If you manage to make your way through the mass of information included here, you will begin to understand why debate about “the Science” will do nothing to halt the environmental movement and the impending legislation that will soon affect all of our lives. (Regardless of whatever happens to global temperatures).
It is difficult to explain briefly, the comprehensive and widespread infiltration by environmental extremists of our political and socio economic organisations, without it sounding like a conspiracy theory. The author has done a good job of highlighting much of the publicly available information that shows that, as far as a “conspiracy” goes, it’s worse than we thought.
If you have the time to read all of the links, it will become obvious that we’ve reached a stage where it will be almost impossible to stop this eco philosophy. They believe they are acting for the Greater Good of mankind, and AGW is just a means to an end.
I appreciate blogs like WattsUp and Climate Audit working hard to point out the bad science/logic etc, but I don’t know what else can be done. I fear that like here in the UK with the EU constitution, legislation is going to be passed under our noses and without our consent.
Short of an anti environmental uprising (probably not the best term) I think we’re all stuffed.
http://green-agenda.com/ like this article, gives an insight into what we’re up against.
As an Englishman this is the most terrifying thing I’ve read since all the AGW fuss started. It raises the prospect of people being unable to get medical treatment, CT or MRI scans, operations or even just get to hospital without enough carbon credits on their card.
What sort of world do they think they are creating?
A personal carbon ration will be a law too far. Pressure is building in our system and when it explodes it will be ugly. Legislation of this type will be the last straw.
This is what we think of the Thermageddon induced drowning dog propaganda.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20091020/tuk-outrage-over-drowning-pets-climate-a-45dbed5.html
One of those complaints is mine.
John Edmondson. Re that advert, so far there have been over 200 complaints to ASA, which apparently is quite a lot. One of them was mine. For my money, I think this was a feeler from HMG, to test the water. Advertisers normally have to bare quite a lot of female flesh, or throw in something racially/culturally/sexually inappropriate to get this many complaints, so the more the merrier. If the reaction from Joe Public is vituperative enough, we may be able to squelch this particular approach. No doubt Futerra have another couple of lines (pun fully intended) ready to run, but we’ll deal with those if and when they crop up.
Brainless in the UK, Brainless in Montana:
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2009/10/brainless-in-montana.html
It has been my belief for several years that all the global warming/climate change bruhaha was leading this way. I still tell people that this is the way we’re headed.
I have personal experience of a low carbon life style. An old farmhouse in Perthshire Scotland. No electricity, no mains water, septic tank etc. Heating using a wood-burning range (logs were recycled old fence posts sawn by family members) cooking on this and a two burner lpg hob. Lighting by parafin (kerosene) lamps and candles. I never thought in my wildest dreams I’d end up back there!!
On the bright side we have clock-work radios now.
This all goes along with the dumbing down of the education system and the sheeple who follow without thought as long as they can watch M.U. or Chelsea on a Saturday … hopefully they have not yet drunk themselves into oblivion with all that cheap booze and are not too dumb and realize what is happening to them… I left for greener pastures 17 years ago but I now see the same things happening in New Zealand …the whole world is turning to crap and its coming to a town near you soon…
Perhaps, in a hundred thousand years, a team of scientists, drilling the two or three thousand meters of ice layer will find the remnants of some good fossilized specimens of anthropithecus politicus angliensis.
EU Climate talks collapse.
The gathering of the brainless, irresponsible breed that call themselves “Leaders” have collapsed.
This brings us hope for the Copenhagen.
If Europe can’t agree on the proposed Climate Action, how can the World?
http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/10/luxembourg-eu-climate-talks-collapse.html
@Patrick (11:32:16)
Air or ground exchange heat pump, ground exchange is much more efficient, but how many city dwellers can stick 80m of piping in 2m deep trenches around their apartments? (or a 80 m bore hole even?)
—
Once they’ve been built, rather few. We had a rash of new building though including lots of supposedly ‘green’ housing developments that didn’t do this. Including my favorite, Kennet Island in Reading. Try suggesting this, or CHP incineration to reduce waste and provide power and developers aren’t interested. Then again, our beloved ‘greens’ hate that kind of recycling as well.
As for Carbon Cards, guess that’s one of the reasons our government is hell bent on issuing us all with ID Cards. They’ll be so much more convenient if they’re combined. Plus a trading platform skimming off commissions from 60m or so citizens would be a nice little earner.
Shame Defra didn’t stick to sorting out farming.
What madness!
Will someone please stop this insanity!
Juraj V. (11:06:33) :
How long shall we fight over one settled issue?
Indeed, how long? Note that the temperature in 1660 at the depths of the Maunder Minimum was just what it was in the 1980s, at the height of the ‘Modern Maximum’, so perhaps it is time to stop fighting.
To control a population, to subjugate that population completely is the goal.
The road to dictatorships are well worn and well known, create fear and uncertainty, create an outside enemy who threatens the population, maybe just like the islamists who are the perfect vehicle with which to instill fear into the population, many new restrictive and anti democratic laws can be passed on the back of a terrorist threat, who would agree to secret trials and unlimited detention and torture when there is no externa; threat, invent a scary shadowy enemy though and those laws will be welcomed.
Add to the fear of terrorism with guilt, fear and guilt are powerful weapons and the church thrived on both for centuries, fear of the future and fear of the enemy, preferably a shadowy enemy unlike the population and an enemy who uses extreme cruelty that strikes at civilians without mercy, scared to death yet?
A closely knit and proud confident population is much less likely to be cowed so firstly allow mass unlimited imigration of immigrants with utterly different and alien social beliefs to split the population into competing groups fighting for space and recognition and then create a lax legal system where lawless streets are common this isolates the population penning them into their houses out of fear of street crime and reliant on the controled TV media for news of the outside world.
Change the law to protect and nuture the criminals and punish the law abiding which prevents them from defending themselves which in turn drives the despairing population into the arms of the state which then institutes severe clampdowns on freedom using law and order as cover.
Hey presto and you have a cowed uncertain and fearful population conditioned to obeying orders and looking to the state for everything. Its becoming clear that we are experiencing the first stages of a new dark age dictatorship, all the ingredients are in play and all the principles have their orders.
They say that freedom is hard won and easily lost and very difficult to regain, once our freedom has been handed over its going to be next to impossible to get it back without revolution, once the bloated authoritarian state gets power it never willingly hands it back.
The AGW theory is a perfect vehicle as is the threat of terrorism, drive a population into fear and enough uncertainty and there are few limits to what they will do, the manipulation of people through fear and guilt and then force is as old as civilisation itself and those who desire a one world supreme government have the means and the resources and the intelligence to make it happen and only we few citizens who are aware of whats going on are standing in the way.
Patrick (11:32:16) :
“Air or ground exchange heat pump, ground exchange is much more efficient, but how many city dwellers can stick 80m of piping in 2m deep trenches around their apartments? (or a 80 m bore hole even?)”
Well, I heat my vacation cottage in winter by the heat pump of the airconditioner, and save on electricity by a factor of three. 1.0 kwatt give 10000BTU heat which is equivalent to direct electric heating of 3kwatts
( http://www.borino.com/GYC/wattsbtu_calculator.htm )
It is easy to put an airconditioner in an apartment.
For those who think lying is acceptable politics:
” But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.” Revelation 21:8
Tony, that article was too long for my old, weak, butchered eyes. I already know that the Brits are ninnies with a few notable exceptions. (Attractive women, though.)
rks. We do need to introduce renewables to safeguard a supply, not for any climate change reasons. The first step (if the government had any brains at all) would be to renationalise the power companies. We need to switch to renewables BUT make energy as cheap as we can for the consumer. Leaving it to the European energy companies like EDF and RWE means profits for them that could be lower energy prices for consumers. Everyone knows that a cartel is going on! Even with high energy prices heat pumps just don’t work out economically. The payback period is either too long or non existant. Believe me, I have researched this, it’s my business. I buy electricity for 9p per kWh. Patrick’s fire will only cost me 27p an hour. I could get 18,500 hours of his fire for £5,000. Running that fire for 10 hours a day for the entire heating season, means it would go for over 10 years. Rather than investing the money in a heat pump, I could invest the money in a bank account. The return I would get would (even at today’s low interest rates) mean that I would be insane to buy a heat pump. So while we do need renewables to safeguard our energy, we need it to be economically viable. The government pen pushers must know that heat pumps, solar panels and wind turbines make absolutely no economic sense whatsoever to the consumer. So the only way they can be pushed onto us is through the idea of them being eco friendly. We should, right now, be nationalising energy companies, and drilling deep holes throughout Cornwall for geothermal systems. This would mean investment, yes, but it would give us free energy. I think it sad that we’re pumping £10 billion into the bloody olympics, and nothing into geothermal. Insane.
Beneath all the hype and censoring and alarmist howls, is the AGW agenda. It is founded entirely on a single, hesitant premise: man-made C02 causes global warming. From this flimsy, readily dismissed premise, arrives an invasion of human nature.
You must wonder, what form of intelligence believes in this modern era of information highways, they can sell this premise? Considering the caliber of thinkers and knowledge that is networked in real time around the world?
Is it plain hubris or ignorance that impels these misanthropic urchins to believe anyone of reason would accept this premise? Or is it more likely a virtual exercise in which all manner of absurd “human” behavior is programmed in? With the hostile intent to torment its participants into drawing certain conclusions?
Such exercises were once thought to be cutting edge education. The fact is they are utter failures at education or instruction of any kind. Why? Because they are built by misanthropic entities masking immutable grandiosity beneath a guise of good intention. It is misplaced and outdated. It is an old and unworkable exercise. it is a waste of good energy. It demonstrates an intelligence so corrupted by its own image it cannot see is imminent demise.
“The king is dead. Long live the king.”
Looking briefly, and in much more depth later on, at this posting, I get the immediate impression that climate change is fast losing any scientific credibility, and is now a part of the political agenda, such that , with this fallacy of swine flu, it is being used for social engineering purposes.
I suspect, having read the books by Richard Doland, also recently listened to the Jordan Maxwell video , twice, on Project Camelot, whose website I fully endorse, I suspect something is waiting for us in the wings that may not be entirely pleasant indeed may be a shock to the vast majority of us.
Just let me suggest , that the idea of global warming is losing track with the science and is taking on a quasi religious role and is, with swine flu just one more method the so called ‘elite’, are using to manipulate us. I remain very open minded about all this but the threads do appear to come together on all this.
Only those who think clearly for themselves such as reads blogs such as this may be free in their own minds from this attempt to lead them in some unwelcome direction. Clear, logical thinking is needed on all this.
One interesting thought, it is widely accepted from the research of Steven Greer, and others like him that the United States government is sitting on free energy devices, and has been for almost a century. This is accepted. Therefore, ask yourselves these questions.
Why are they
a) Making a fuss of global warming, like some religious obsession?
b) Keeping hidden these zero point energy systems?
c) Maintaining our reliance and the mythos that surrounds fossil fuels and the out dated ways of generating electrical energy, that should have died out in Teslas time?????????
One answer is ‘manipulation, and control’ ,
doubtless there are other reasons.
anna v. The purchase cost of the heat pump, and maintenance, simply makes them unviable. Even if we use the figure of 3.5 times out what you put in, the purchase cost is so much that you just might as well of put the investment into a high-yield interest account! Even if you take a energy-inflation rate of 10% per annum, and use a rather untypical annual energy bill of £527 (for, say underfloor heating) then you’d have to pay out £7,800 (after a grant of £1,200) to get your bill down to £117. BUT, you could invest that money in an account instead. So if you go for the heat pump it’s not until the 15th year (if you’re lucky) that you will actually start to benefit it. In actual fact, that’s not ‘real’ either, as you would have to find the money for your energy bills – that could be paid out of interest instead. And you’d better pray it doesn’t go phut, as you’ll have to employ a refrigeration engineer.
Cassandra, there is one difference – Islamic terrorism is reality, while the AGW is not.
Dr. Tony Brown (and Anthony), thanks for a well researched, in-depth exploration of the dangerous mess supposedly well meaning people-scientists have gotten us into. The details belong on this site and I will be referring to them again and again as I continue to follow the similar downfall of the U.S. (unless normal, patriotic, middle class Americans threaten to hang the malignant crew). And I support (moral) someone to edit the material down for more easy access. However, I wish readers of WUWT would not complain — we can read it; we can trace the trajectory of this new kind of “terrorism” and calculate where it is going from here and what measures (calculations, actions) can shoot it down. Warfare metaphors purposeful.
With an election due in May next year any political party in the UK that makes any credulus statement about carbon rationing will commit instant suicide. The Labour party are already damned, the Conservatives are still ripping themselves apart over Europe and the rest are a group of greens, liberals and right wingers who are baying to pick up all the disenchanted voters.
My worry is that behind the scenes preparations are being made by the faithfull scottie dog and pals ready for the day President Blair extends his god given right to embelish his name in the history books as the new Caesar of Europe.
Well now thats off my chest, top class article but should of been more condensed for those of us without a university education.
Leif,
“Note that the temperature in 1660 at the depths of the Maunder Minimum was just what it was in the 1980s, at the height of the ‘Modern Maximum’, so perhaps it is time to stop fighting.”
So there is no warming then? I don’t know what all these alarmists are on about.
Leif Svalgaard (12:10:58) :
Note that the temperature in 1660 at the depths of the Maunder Minimum was just what it was in the 1980s, at the height of the ‘Modern Maximum’, so perhaps it is time to stop fighting.
1) there was a bunch of strong cycles just around 1600 (10Be records), which pre-heated Earth before the Maunder minimum
2) notice the continuous drop of temperatures since the Sun “turned off” since 1650 and increase as soon as normal cycles re-appeared
3) we have just broken the hockey stick again 😉
nick-ynysmon,
“One interesting thought, it is widely accepted from the research of Steven Greer, and others like him that the United States government is sitting on free energy devices, and has been for almost a century. This is accepted. Therefore, ask yourselves these questions.”
Widely accepted by who? There are dozens of patents in existence for so called free energy, all have been devised by private citizens and have existed for years. And yet so far, not one of them has burst onto the commercial scene. Why not? Because it’s nonsense. Here’s a link to all known “free energy devices.” Feast your eyes.
http://www.free-energy-info.co.uk/
@ Indiana Bones (12:24:32) : “You must wonder, what form of intelligence believes in this modern era of information highways, they can sell this premise? Considering the caliber of thinkers and knowledge that is networked in real time around the world?”
It’s the same type of intelligence that thinks anyone can make a bomb on a plane out of 200 ml of lip gloss and water (or anything smearable). Sorry – it’s just a particular bugbear of mine since I have to endure a long haul flight to get anywhere out of the country.
The point is, commonsense, practicability, or feasibility of their ideas don’t seem to matter to fearmongers or lawmakers.
Wow, I knew the British goverment was quite crazy about AGW, but that amounts to a real threat of full blown eco-fascist regime based on the AGW dogma.
Lets go solar-powered?
For a practical demonstration of the economics of solar-powering your home in London see this:
http://www.muswellhilljournal24.co.uk/content/haringey/muswellhilljournal/news/story.aspx?brand=MHJOnline&category=news&tBrand=northlondon24&tCategory=newsmhj&itemid=WeED15%20Oct%202009%2010%3A33%3A36%3A497
Doctor’s solar house becomes a power station
Scientist Dr Morton, a trainee teacher at Alexandra Park School, said: “They produce just over one kilowatt when the sun’s shining strongly and they do produce some electricity even in relatively low light levels. We earned £200 over the summer – it’s not overly generous, it’s not economic, let’s put it that way, but we don’t pay tax on that which is one small advantage.”
What they did not mention here is the cost of installing all this technology, but they did include the price in the printed edition. It was £14,000.
…and notice the words “it’s not economic”.
Leif Svalgaard (09:51:36), (10:41:38).
Maybe the beliefs that (a) recent global temperature fluctuations are controlled by anthropogenic CO2 emissions and (b) recent global temperature fluctuations are controlled by the sun are both fairy tales. For the sake of argument, let’s make the assumption that they’re both fairy tales. Since they’re fairy tales, as far as our real-world activities are concerned, we can ignore both of them However, if we’re forced to act on the premise of one of the fairy tales, the choice is easy. In the “sun rules” fairy tale, we just muddle along–i.e., to arrive at a happy ending, we don’t have to spend billions of dollars to modify the sun. In the “CO2 rules” fairy tale, to arrive at a happy ending, we must spend billions of dollars and dramatically change the way we produce energy. Given that difference and assuming they’re both fairy tales, I’ll take the “sun rules” fairy tale long before I take the “CO2 rules” fairy tale.
Leif Svalgaard (10:41:38) :
Michael (10:14:07) :
I have a theory on this matter. I call it;
Compound Solar Climate Forcing.
Your confusing theory with sales pitch.
Leif Svalgaard
I’m confusing your with you’re.
Oct 19, 2009
Climate assumptions from another planet
By Roy Innis and Paul Driessen
This is about the Climate Bill which is currently prepared for a Senate Vote!!!!!!
http://www.icecap.us
Anthony, if you have thought the Brits have a weird proposal for personal carbon credits, you have not read the proposal from Revkin.
He really beats it:
Oct 20, 2009
NYT Environment Reporter Floats Idea: Carbon Credits to Couples That Limit Themselves to One Child
By Edwin Mora, CNS News
http://www.icecap.us
There are still Brits with brains who speak out.
Bravo Mr. bloom:
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/10/mep-godfrey-bloom-tells-it-like-it-is.html
Con, coerce and convince with arguments more sophisticated than the intended audience. Why not just bribe them like they do in the states? Hell Obama can bribe away half of Medicare for just $250 per oldster.
MartinGAtkins (13:19:01) :
Your confusing theory with sales pitch.
They both look like sales pitches.
Juraj V. (12:54:55) :
2) notice the continuous drop of temperatures since the Sun “turned off” since 1650 and increase as soon as normal cycles re-appeared
The MM is usually considered to have started in 1645 with a bunch of small cycles just before that. The high point on your graph is 15 years after that. For the other [questionable] alignments [e.g. 1950s], there is no such lag. For a ‘settled’ case, there seems to be a lot of stretching and believing needed.
Some of the dips were due to volcanic activity, e.g. as shown in the circles here: http://www.leif.org/research/CET%20and%2010Be.png
The activity also contaminated the 10Be record.
Kate. £14,000 to produce 1 kilowatt? Not bad, eh? I presume he means 1 kWh – which I can buy for 9p!
One born every minute.
Ron de Hann. There are quite a few of us still with brains, it’s just we’re fighting to get heard. Don’t forget we have to fight the media as well. Traditionally, the media has tended to side with public opinion – but not on warming, where they’ve taken the government’s lies and ran with them. Why? Because disaster sells newspapers. The BBC loves it because it fits right in. One public figure recently said that the BBC is currently run by lesbian Christians. I couldn’t possibly comment.
This scares the hell out of me.
Someone needs to start a non-profit organization that is capable of raising the kind of money to make people aware of the scientific data out there (McIntyre’s work, etc.) that contradicts what these 1984-ish freaks are forcing on us. The hell with peer-review — let’s stick some nice fat ads during Letterman that forces some factual data down the public’s throat. Let’s force a true scientific debate on this topic.
Does an organization like this already exist? I’ve got my checkbook out. And they can’t be connected to an oil company.
We are all born equal but be certain that the carbon credit distribution will not be equal.
People will endure nearly any hardship before they take action to remove those responsible for that hardship. The politicians are counting on that, and calculating exactly how much hardship they can inflict before the populace becomes incensed enough to actually DO something about it. As with historical demagogues they will over-estimate their power and underestimate the populace, but they will not recognize it until their heads are in baskets. As in other things, the most committed wins.
You can complain about that advert online.
http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/how_to_complain/
You will be asked to indicate a viewing time, and channel, and a UK post code. So they are not expecting complaints from anyone who saw it outside UK.
This excellent publication reveals the incredible scale of the scam and it’s sophisticated, but shameless propaganda machinery.
It shows us how big a threat we are up against and how important it is to resist it.
This is a direct threat to our freedom and our prosperity.
For the poor in the Third World countries however, this scam has become a matter of life and death.
We currently have 1.3 billion people living from less than 1750 calories per day or less.
Today the news came that Great Britain is buying food crops from the World Markets
to supply a huge bio fuel factory.
Now with a rising oil price (past $80 per barrel today) the world food prices are bound to rise as well.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to predict what is going to happen to the poor that no longer can afford to buy food anymore!
This is the prelude to mass starvation on an epic scale and we have to thank our current political establishment for that.
So if you are going to call your Senator to give him a push in the right direction, you are not only calling on behalf of your self.
You are also calling for a whole bunch of poor hungry bastards that have become the victim of our brainless AGW policies.
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/10/biofuel-insanity.html
Just one another remark.
Not only are we lied to by the MSM, they also withhold information from us.
Since the beginning of the financial crises there have been food riots all over the world.
MSM has ceased reporting on food riots which have been ongoing until today.
Mr Calente even predicts food riots in Europe and the USA, no joke:
http://www.infowars.com/celente-predicts-revolution-food-riots-tax-rebellions-by-2012/
That’s what happens if the White House and the European Member States have control over their MSM.
Reed Coray (13:12:55) :
In the “sun rules” fairy tale, we just muddle along–i.e., to arrive at a happy ending, we don’t have to spend billions of dollars to modify the sun.
there are people out there considering spending billions putting up a sunshade in space….
“there are people out there considering spending billions putting up a sunshade in space….” Leif
It won’t fly because for man to do nothing is “natural” except that man is supposed to be only natural so anything he does would be natural by definition except man somehow isn’t natural.
Somehow, man is both natural and unnatural at the same time.
“Fasting” is good for the brain. A little starvation will awake the masses to how they have been deluded and cheated. I could stand a good fast myself so I can go from 1/2 wit to 3/4 wit.
The fat PTB will stand out, don’t you know?
Apologies if someone has already said this but it’s late and I haven’t got time to read all the comments.
The point here is that the UK government is a dead government walking. Under our variable election system there has to be an election next year (probably in May) and the present Labour government are going to lose and are going to lose heavily. They will almost certainly be replaced by the Conservatives, and their policies are not yet clear. They are aware, though, that Labour’s extreme over regulation has been very unpopular, and are claiming that they will generally relax things.
There is another, possibly related, issue. Labour have deferred taking a decision on renewing generating capacity for the best part of 10 years. Quite a number of people think that soon there will not be enough electricity to go round – the most popular predicted date for this is 2016.
Tony,
Nice to see our separate lines of enquiry complementing each other.
For more info on Tyndall and UK propaganda check here: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mscp/ene/2007/00000018/00000006/art00009
For a free, earlier version, check here.
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/Spinning%20temperature%20out%20o
Sorry, incomplete link in previous post “for the free, earlier version on Tyndall etc, check here.” This is the full link.
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/Spinning%20temperature%20out%20of%20control.pdf
Leif Svalgaard (14:37:52) : To see suggestions for global engineering to WARM UP the planet in the 1970’s check this:
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/cooling2.pdf
I have an idea: Let us insert AGW models into one end of CERN, The Coming Ice Age of the 70’s into the other end of CERN, and see if we can reproduce a Matter/Doesn’tMatter annihilation.
Who can think straight with the big kids making all that racket in the attic?
Leif Svalgaard (14:37:52) :
And those same people would stick nuclear devices in volcanoes too. Then when it all went terribly wrong they wouldn’t hesitate to set as much of the world on fire as they could to try and reverse it.
What is really worrisome is their thirst for power has scorched thier conscience. They’ll do it not because it’s going to help anyone or anything, they’ll do it because they can, if given the opportunity.
So rapid changes are a foregone conclusion?
DaveE.
I think the endgame was forseen in a Sci-Fi novel I read as a kid. Took a while to find on Amazon, but it’s worth a read (“Stepfather Bank”):
http://www.amazon.com/Stepfather-Bank-David-Poyer/dp/0312910452/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256086435&sr=1-8
In the future all of humanity is governed by a single corporate identity (the bank). It tells you where to live, whom to marry, etc etc… In the book the protagonist is the one person flying under the radar and not on the records of the bank. A fun, classic Sci-Fi read. Might have to move it into the non-fiction section in the not too distant future :0
If any of those in power were really concerned for Global atmospheric issues would they not stop projecting rockets through the ozone? Think about all of them! Gov’t-corporate etv. What if the earth has atmospheric cyclical patterns, say 10 year, 500 year 1,000 year cycles and all types of cycles in between and beyond the yearly periods used for examples. Nope, their game is for money only!
Wall Street Journal has found 120 billion dollar in hidden costs in our current energy mix so they can make the point that introducing the Climate bill is more economical.
But that is if you are an idiot and believe the crap they’ve made up.
Unbelievable.
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/10/20/the-hidden-120-billion-cost-of-americas-energy-mix/
“M White (10:18:41) :
Remember the poll tax”
Yes I do, and the riots in London. it worked, to a point. While the “poll tax” wasn’t introduced, a new, similar tax was. It was called the “council tax”. I had many threatening letters from my local council about late payment, because rather than paying by direct debit, I paid using an alternative method, which took longer for the bank to process. I offered the counsil a day in court. It never got that far.
Probelm is, this tax, unlike the poll tax, will be introduced stealthily. It’s already too late.
Incidentally, when the Minitry of Food were rationing, the population of the UK was at the hight of healthiness. The only problem, criminal activity was rife and the black market boomed.
This is an excellent article. By its very nature difficult to capture everything and is a job well done. Now all we need is Adam Curtis to turn it into a documentary! Good good work Tony.
Leif 12:10:58
Why it’s the very model of a modern solar maximum!
===============================
The post is not too complicated. It is good to get all the information at once.
What would you expect from folks who require a license for a TV set?
This is just The Crown remembering past glories and past tax scams:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_tax_post
A caption under one of the pictures: No byway was too small to evade the liability for coal tax. This post is on a footpath in Wormley Wood, Hertfordshire
Remember it is still a monarchy and still has the mindset that people are the chattel of the Crown. All power derives from the Crown, bow down and pay homage and pay…
In my more paranoid moments I ponder if this whole AGW thing isn’t just a put up job via The Crown trying to recreate old power and tax structures…
FWIW, Mum was from England and I have strong cultural connections and family there in quantity. Luckily I also get an “up yours crown!” from the Irish on my Dad’s side 😉 It is part of the “Celtic Thread” that runs down the heartland of America. “Just Power” derives only from the will of the people. Kings can call for a war, but folks may choose to not show up if the king is being a turkey… And in that mind set, “ration” is what you feed to the sheep and hogs. Got a problem? Go fix it! Forget this non-sense of sharing the misery, go out and eliminate the misery. Now.
So I can see this idea working in England. But Scotland and Ireland (all of it…) not so much… America? We’ll, it would give the drug dealers a new line of merchandise and I’d finally get my “yard waste gasifier” project going. Oh, and my car would finally get it’s Big Cigar 😎
(I have a rough design for a large cigar shaped gasifier to be mounted on a roof rack. CO from yard waste powers the Diesel for about 3/4 of its power. The Diesel injection acts as a spark plug. Was done a lot in the WWI and WWII events. I just think it would be “cool” to do it as a Cigar… All I’d need to make it a priority is for someone to try to tell me my “carbon ration card” was used up.)
http://www.gekgasifier.com/
“However, much of the carbon dioxide that is presently produced is wasted in transporting goods from one market to another. Trade should be reduced
Gee, I thought increased trade was supposed to be a Good Thing…
“Proposal: The Committee should investigate the possibility of creating a new global currency for carbon trading. Such a currency would need to be backed by and administered by the UN.”
Yeah, right. Any currency run by the UN will end up worthless so fast it will make Bolivars look good.
There does seem to be a consistent push to get the UN hooks into a money bucket (not just in this posting, but in many places). It’s looking more and more like UN is in need of flushing…
rks (10:36:50) : If you have some energy and you want some heat then you can either blow your energy away and use the waste heat (e.g. run electricity through a resistor to get a radiator) or you can use your energy to run a heat pump. The latter works MUCH better. That’s all Prof MacKay was saying about “thermodynamic crimes”.
Markets are pretty much always better allocators of resources than governments. While I love heat pumps, they are a multi-thousand dollar device. So one person needs to heat the space under their desk. A $20 resistance heater is a fine economical solution AND uses less energy than the “heat pump for the whole house” would take. This kind of subtile distinction is lost in the “MUST USE HEAT PUMP” mandates.
Similarly, a small attic work space, used for a cold week end once a month, might do far better with a little gas heater than a multi-thousand dollar heat pump. Oh, and just how does one put a heat pump in a chick hatching box? A nice incandescent bulb under the box does a fine job and at the most economical of costs. Again, you can not begin to write laws or regulations that will cover all the cases. That is why markets are better.
A prime example? The green mantra to Mandate the CFL. Now I’m all for compact florescent bulbs and use them in most places in my home. But not all. Not in the fridge. Not in the infinitely dimmer adjusted bath and bedroom lights (nice on those late night trips…) And particularly pointless in places like the UK.
Why? Because when you live someplace that is substantially cold all the time, using a CFL will move your energy consumption all the way from your lighting bill to your heating bill. For every BTU taken out of the light, you get to buy a replacement on the heater. I think “the folks” are better positioned to evaluate their particular costs for light and heat and make the choice that works best for them with their wallet.
BTW, I’ve had 2 CFL bulbs shattered on way or another in the last couple of years. No idea how much mercury and other exotic metals (from the phosphors) I soaked up or are still in the dining room floor and furnishings.
Besides that, they won’t run a Lava Lamp 😉
So explain to me again why it ought to up to someone else to define as thermodynamic crimes: Raising baby chicks in an incubator, having a non-toxic-metal contaminated dining room, liking a dim bulb at 2am so as not to wake the spouse nor hurt the eyes, using LESS energy by heating only the space at the desk, saving a few thousand dollars on a heater upgrade so you can spend it on a more fuel efficient car that will save even more fuel, or yes, even having a Lava Lamp…
BTW, there is no shortage of energy and there never will be. There is no need to “conserve” that which is in functionally unlimited supply:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
It ought to be used in the most cost effective way possible, but “scarcity” fantasies are not very good resource allocators. And governments are worse. If you want to see a very good resource allocator, watch a country peasant with their pay in their purse…
David Hoyle (11:49:29) : the whole world is turning to crap and its coming to a town near you soon…
The good news is that it isn’t the whole world. That bad news is that it does seem to be the English, Germanic, and French speaking world.
The Russians are not on board with it.
China and India will sign on to a treaty only if it pays them a fortune to do it and does not impact their growth trajectories and economies.
Saw a blurb on CNBC today about BTU Peabody Energy (very very large coal miner) who have projections for ever growing coal mining. For export to China and India who are signed up to buy more. Barron’s has an article projecting a doubling of coal mining by 2050 to support increased demand from China and India (especially for metallurgical coal to make iron, but also thermal coal for electricity). IIRC they said China was now selling 1,000,000 cars a month. They have no intention of any kind of cutting back on carbon use. They will be using more of it than anyone else for the next 50 years (they already signed a 20 year contract with Petrobras for $200,000,000,000 of oil. No, that is not hyperbole. I just wanted you to really see how big the numbers are.
So while the UK, Canada, New Zealand, France, Germany, and I hope not but maybe the USA (for a brief time only… “Look out! I have a vote and I know how to use it!”) may be “turning to crap” you can turn on any decent business news show and see thriving industry in new modern comfortable towns springing up all over China and even in India. Don’t get me started about the beaches in Brazil…
So take heart. It isn’t the whole world, only the gullible.
My suggesting is to pick a nice commonwealth country and move. It is all you need to do to change from “carbon rationing” to “carbon subsidy from that old fool over there”. And IIRC it is easy to relocate inside the commonwealth.
Well done, Tony – a seriously worrying story, particularly re our Government’s ability to get this far without, it seems, any overt dissent. But is there any real prospect of a carbon rationing scheme being introduced?
I don’t think so. The process you describe has been in train for years – to the point where to express a doubt about dangerous AGW in almost any public forum is to be treated with lip-curling disdain. Yet amazingly – despite the incessant propaganda and MSM unanimity – the public don’t buy it. Hence the opinion poll that worried the Government so much recently. For an instant check, go to the BBC’s website, go to News then to “Have your say” (LH column), then click on “Have your say archive” (bottom RH corner) and select “UK climate change”. Select the “Readers Recommended” tab. You find that, of the first 10 pages (I gave up there) amounting to about 160 recommended comments, only 3 or 4 support the dangerous man-made climate change agenda. Nearly all the rest reject it – many very strongly.
We have a general election within a few months and I don’t see how this could be introduced before then. There are no votes in pushing for it. In any case, I think we can be sure that the Labour Party will fail to get a working majority – so they will be unable to implement it anyway. More likely is a Conservative win. OK, they support the dangerous AGW agenda. But ration cards? I doubt it.
This has nothing to do with democracy apart from using democracy to gain government control.
This is extreme jackbootism. Control of energy recruits every member of society into the policing of the policy. I predict rapid growth of Mafia like organisations which will garner their own local energy sources. Energy wars will follow.
Vincent (12:50:44) : So there is no warming then? I don’t know what all these alarmists are on about.
There is warming, just not enough to get your panties in a bunch and probably a good thing and also probably natural. I’d call it a feature:
Well, I took the GHCN ‘raw’ data that goes into GIStemp, but didn’t feed it to GIStemp. I filtered for those stations that were UK. These data are 12 monthly averages of (the min-max average per day) for each “station”. And while the set has been pruned down to only 10 stations now by the Thermometer Langoliers, you can still get a decent idea what is going on with it. So you take these station averages and just add them together for the whole UK and plot it. UHI and all. That is what is actually happening in the UK prior to Hadley or GIStemp turning it into computer fantasies. So what does it look like?
Well, I’m slowly learning all this graphics stuff, so I had a bit of help with the chart. The discussion happened toward the bottom of:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/how-long-is-a-long-temperature-history/
Where I posted the decade averages of temperature averages. One of the participants was nice enough to turn it into a graph for me (me being graphics challenged 😉
and this chart was the result:
http://sites.google.com/site/elliesgraphs/uk-temperature-graph
It shows the UK is, in fact warming.
From the 1760 start year of the data to 2008, the UK is warming at the astounding rate of 0.3C per CENTURY.
Call it 0.003 C per year.
So in 333 years, you will be 1 C warmer than now.
Unless of course the changing thermometer count and locations created this warming as an artifact, then you will not be warming at all. But that is for a future investigation.
For the AGW Believers:
Yes, it is not a global temperature trend. I don’t care, don’t bother bringing it up. You will just get me making more of these for more places and showing that no “place” warms up but the “Data food product” does, and you don’t want that. This is what the UK is experiencing / has experienced. So all the heartache in the UK will stop exactly what again?
Oh, and the warming all happens from a moderation of cold winter temperatures. the “peak heat” seems to always top out at about 10C. It isn’t that the hot time get hotter, it’s just that the brutal winters become OK winters. Somehow I think folks can live with that, so don’t bring up the issue of heat hurting folks or I’ll have to bring up that it isn’t “hotter”, it’s “less cold”… That those winters were worse in the LIA and not so bad now might be an Inconvenient Fact too…
And I’d need to point out to folks that the files are all FTP available from ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2 as ASCII and anyone can do this with Excel and a bit of time using the v2.mean file (or v2.min or v2.max if they wanted to explore them). First thing you know, everybody and their cousin would be doing their country and crying foul! So just leave it be and maybe nobody will notice…
Thank you Dr.Brown for an invaluable resource, that I will save and refer to regularly. And thanks Anthony for posting it!
I always incline to the cock up model of history rather than conspiracy theories. But it is difficult NOT to see a conspiracy in the way that the eco-fascists progressively took over, first ‘environmental’ groups like Greenpeace, then the political parties (all vying with each other to be greener than Green) then the BBC, the MET office, academia, the Royal Society and the levers of Government itself. Even Oxfam, once a very reputable famine relief charity, is now paying for a big AGW poster campaign – a policy which will inevitably increase the risks of major famine!
At least there are significant political figures in the US who are quite prepared to stand up and rubbish the “settled science”.
In the UK parliament (so far as I have been able to find) there are two politicians (Peter Lilley in the Commons, Lord Lawson in the Lords) who have been prepared to stand up and (in unreported speeches) rubbish Government eco-fascist AGW propaganda. I should point out that both are Conservatives (a party that I have never supported). Both are entirely isolated and marginalised within the Conservative heierarchy although, naturally they do have skeptic supporters n the rank & file membership.
There seems to be some hope that things will improve if Cameron & the Conservatives get into power in May. That would, in my view, be a triumph of Hope over Experience. “Dave Boy” (Cameron) will support absolutely any policy if he reckons that he will win more votes from AGW worriers than he will loose from sceptics. Although there are many ordinary mildly sceptical voters, his calculation is a no brainer – especially after all the AGW propaganda from the BBC and media. But the fact that Zac Goldsmith and Friends of the Earth are official “advisors” makes it pretty clear that the only clear advantage of a Tory government would be that it wouldn’t have Brown as Prime Ministers.
Not for the first time we in the UK look like hoping that our ex-colonial chums in the New World will end up by riding to the rescue and sorting out the mess. But you are going to have to sort out your own mess first!
Anthony
Another rare moment of journalism at the BBC – Andrew Neil actually asking some questions of UK Environment Minister, Hilary Benn.
Notice that (amongst a lot of other bluster) Mr Benn thinks that the vapour coming from cooling towers is CO2.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/the_daily_politics/8314566.stm
Thanks to Dr Brown for a comprehensive and illuminating account of what passes for democracy in once great Britain. And thanks to Anthony for providing him with a forum. Shame on the once free press for withholding the truth from us.
Since “ad-doctrination” was mentioned at the start of this article, I don’t think it OT to note the following.
I just learned from the Indie, that old John “two jags” Prescott “will today launch a ferocious attack on the “landowners and nimbys” who he says are holding up the installation of wind farms across Britain and thus hindering the fight against climate change.”
“In a shamless class-warrior style” he will tell the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) at its annual conference in Liverpool: “We cannot let the squires and the gentry stop us meeting our moral obligation to pass this world on in a better state to our children and our children’s children.”
The fact that “two jags” is throwing class prejudice dirt seems to be something the Indie is applauding. The fact that a government figure is even seen to be interferring in the democratic process of planning doesn’t raise an eyebrow. Is this a prelude to an outright ban of local planning decisions?
Some people are hoping that the Tories will make a difference. But how will they do this when Broon will have already signed away sovereignity to a world government at Copenhagen?
@Tony Brown
Many thanks for this. But I must start with a confession. After briefly looking over it I was unable to actually read it. The reason? It’s just too depressing. It shows that things are far, far worse than we thought. But I have saved it so that I can give it the attention it deserves, hopefully at a time when I don’t feel so depressed.
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But there are some reasons to be hopeful. Just a few years ago compulsory ID cards seemed inevitable. All of my family were passionately against ID cards on grounds of freedom and privacy. A friend who lives just across the road, and who is a leading member of the local Conservative Party, told me in no uncertain terms that he would refuse to have an ID card, even if it meant going to prison. I had a letter about ID cards printed in the Daily Telegraph (as a long-time Telegraph reader I’m very sad to see their biased and one-sided climate change reporting).
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But how things have changed in just a few short years. Now ID cards are pretty well dead, and they will be buried by an incoming Conservative government. I manage to cling on to a hope that the current madness has reached the high water mark, and that the tide will turn, just as with ID cards. Nobody in their right minds would want a colder world, but it may be the thing that finally destroys this idiocy.
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Will the next Conservative government reverse this tide of madness? Things don’t look too promising, as they appear to be equally deluded. But my feeling is that a Cameron government will be a tiny, tiny bit better, despite him sticking a ridiculous windmill on his roof. It does seem that Cameron and his people are serious about rolling back the weight of government and giving people more choice. Climate fascism just doesn’t seem to be his style. But time will tell.
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It may also be that Conservatives tend to be more sceptical, the EU being an obvious example. And there are several prominent Conservatives (e.g. Nigel Lawson) who are climate sceptics.
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It just happens that my MP is the Conservative shadow spokesman on climate change. Sadly, his writings show him to be a true Gore believer, though I suppose that was a prerequisite for the job. For some time I’ve been thinking of emailing him.
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Finally, I’d like to mention one of the few Labour ministers who I don’t actually loathe: John Denham. I believe he was the previous energy minister before it was taken over by one of the idiot Milibands. About a year ago I almost fell off my chair when he said that the UK economy was more important than climate change. Obviously, he had to go. And recently I read that he is a humanist who believes in reason. I think that just about sums it up.
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Once again, many thanks for an outstanding contribution.
Chris
Well done TonyB for uncovering this. It was a good piece. It wasn’t too long for me, although I knew some of this it has opened my eyes further still, if that was possible under New Labour!
I would like to put one or two of you straight though. The Brits DO NOT WANT THIS! The British Marxist Socialist Government wants this, because they have whored & bedded themselves with the green movement, (eg “Sir” Jonathan Porrit, who worked his way up from humble beginnings, NOT). Most of us are actually typically cynical & suspicious Anglo-Saxon Brits, when we hear something odd we challenge it for evidence, (eg, Svent Arhenius completely changed his mind after a decade, but you won’t hear that from the Greens), not propaganda. HM Gov wants to control like all totalitarian statist regimes want, I have voiced an opinion on this before elsewhere as many know. After all, they know best!
As to those with “special needs”? Well they may well be provided for with special credit limits to accommodate their needs. No problem with those in genuine need. What we will have in the end however, is the Marxist Socialist Intellectual Elite (MSIE) with their special allowances, because they after all are saving the planet, which means they will have to travel the world visiting far off exotic places, eventually returing to tell us how bad it all is & that the “guilty” must pay more still, with their inflated salaries as they will be the only ones who can afford to travel anyway, or better still, taxpayers will fund it, & we plebs will be dished out what they see fit to give us. Prince Charles will have his New Feudal System he so eagerly yearns for, (no wonder his much respected mother won’t step down, she knows him too well!) we will all pay homage to him & his ilk (the MSIE). Those dark futuramas from Hollywood aren’t too far off reality me thinks! It’s not quite the Matrix, but we’re getting there.
I echo Mr Brumby’s thoughts. Please America, saddle up & ride to our rescue at full gallup, once you have quelled the internal rebellion at the Senate & rescued yourselves first. You have no truer friend than Great Britain. We need you!
AtB
Ben (00:32:31) :
Another rare moment of journalism at the BBC …
“The truth is this is about taking a decision now as a world, which will affect every country, that is in our long term interest”. Hilary Benn.
Whose long term interest and based on what? It is rare to see Benn quite so shifty and blustering like this. Judging by Michael Mansfield’s contribution regarding temperatures in the 40’s and 50’s, a huge amount of disinformation is circulating even at his level. Where is the root source of all this and who is now handling the stage management? Answers on a postcard to the Hadley Centre.
Vintage Andrew Neal. What a shame he didn’t mention he who should not be named.
There is a great deal of difference between rationing as it was (1939-1953), and what is being looked at by the Tyndall Centre. They seem to rejected strict per capita rationing in favour of “Domestic Tradable Quotas”. I think they expect that if everybody with a need to commute from the Seychelles buys up credits from the poor, the old, the feeble-minded and the indebted, (who will presumably freeze to death) this will be more acceptable, I think it might prove highly devisive.
It is generally accepted that rationing is a reasonably equitable way to control the distribution of a scarce resource. I am not sure anyone has ever tried to ration an abundant resource without dire consequences.
Alex
I have started plodding through some of the material. The first link which I found fascinating is the Defra scoping study on something called “behaviour marketing.” It’s a pdf document, but most of the interesing bits can be found in the opening chapter. Here is the link again:
http://www.defra.gov.uk/evidence/social/behaviour/documents/behaviours-1206-scoping.pdf
As the title suggest, a study was undertaken to examine the ways that members of society can have their behaviours manipulated into what they consider “desirable.” As they say in the introduction “The scope of our work includes:
•
the main consumption clusters of food and drink, personal travel, homes and household products, and travel tourism;
•
environmental behaviours across all the environmental sectors, including climate, air quality, water quality, waste, biodiversity and protection of natural resources, taking account of our global footprint;
•
consideration of a wide range of possible interventions.”
As you can see, it covers quite a lot – in fact just about every aspect of your lives. The biggest problem they have is convincing people of the need for these behaviours, and one of the solutions is to convince people of the need to change their behaviour.
As they say “The strategy needs to demonstrate urgency and magnitude, creating the sense that there is a seismic shift under way that matches up to the scale of the challenge.”
In other, use alarmist language to “talk up” the imagined problem. I can testify that we are just beginning to witness the opening salvo with the governments ad-doctrination.
357 complaints received by the UK advertising standards authority regarding the governments TV advert about climate change.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8317998.stm
Extract:
But the ASA has still received complaints from parents saying it is too frightening, although most complainants questioned the scientific basis of the claim that climate change is man-made.
An ASA spokeswoman said: “It is not just about the issue of climate change in this particular case. We have had a huge number of complaints about the science but also whether the ad itself is scary for children.”
Patrick Davis 19:04:20:
When food and other things were rationed in Britain during the second world war there certainly was a black market, but I wouldn’t say that it boomed. There were harsh penalties, for one thing, but mostly I believe that the majority of people wanted nothing to do with it because they believed in the cause the country was fighting for.
This time, though, most of the country is less than convinced that AGW is a real problem, so I suggest that black market trading would really take off and render the whole sorry scheme unworkable.
Re DaveF (05:17:39) :
According to the Tyndall Centre’s musings it will be a white market. Those with money would simply buy credits, which they could do from those that would rather freeze than go hungry, or renege on their debts.
Alex
DaveF:
“so I suggest that black market trading would really take off and render the whole sorry scheme unworkable.”
Black market, lol!
“Psst. If you come to the back of the shop tonight, I’ve got some carbon. Fell off the back of a lorry, it did.”
Re DaveF (05:17:39):
Most of the period of rationing in the UK was after WWII (1945-1953). This does not detract from your general observation. People tollerated it because it was, and was widely seen as, necessary.
[I nearly wrote that for most of the period the UK was not at war, but that is not the case, there was the forgotten war (1950-1953).}
Alex
Alexander Harvey 06:40:31:
The black market flourished much more in the post-war years than during the war itself, for the reasons I suggest. That’s why I think it would be rampant if they tried anything like it now.
Vincent 06:29:10:
You got carbon credits? I’ve got some hoarded incandescent lightbulbs. Deal?
“DaveF (05:17:39) :
Patrick Davis 19:04:20:
When food and other things were rationed in Britain during the second world war there certainly was a black market, but I wouldn’t say that it boomed.”
Depends which side of the market you were on. If you were a supplier, it was boomtime.
“There were harsh penalties, for one thing, but mostly I believe that the majority of people wanted nothing to do with it because they believed in the cause the country was fighting for.”
Only if you were caught, and yes, people did think it a good thing, afterall, there was a war to fight. And let’s not forget that the “so called” hero of WW2 Britain, Winston Churchill along with almost all of the “rulling elite”, was also a supporter of the “Feeble Minded Peoples Control Act” of 1912 (Not passed down fortunately).
“This time, though, most of the country is less than convinced that AGW is a real problem, so I suggest that black market trading would really take off and render the whole sorry scheme unworkable.”
They have no choice, nor do most have a clue. Deadenders (Eastenders – Popular soap, but not as funny as “Soap”, US) on BBC1 remember, pro-AGW subliminal “programming”. Gordon Brown has spoken, it is real, and ye shall be taxed (In GB speak, he means you will be taxed to fix it). Unfortunately, the black (Carbon) market will thrive. Zimbabwe is an example of where the IPCC is taking us, and, I know it sounds pesimistic, but I think the AGW snowball has just started to roll down the now, snowy, mountain. It will gather more moss, I mean snow.
A Northern Ireland minister’s decision to block a government advertisement campaign on climate change has led to a call for his removal from office.
Mr Wilson has also advised Whitehall that such messages can only be promoted in Northern Ireland with his permission and he wants to see what he terms ‘postcode lockouts’ used to prevent them ‘leaking’ into that part of the UK.
Vincent (04:19:31) :
environmental behaviours across all the environmental sectors, including climate, air quality, water quality, waste,
When I read that I thought humourously of the goofy U.S. Rep from Or. or Wa. who submitted a bill in Congress to tax toilet paper. Maybe it’s not so funny….
News Flash……….
The entire “carbon footprint” of the whole of the human race is a mere 4.1 ppm per year.
Plants need sunlight in order to consume CO2 and as more than approximately 60% of the Earths surface is in perpetual darkness, this causes CO2 to fluctuate up and down like a giant sine wave.
From peak to trough the difference in natural CO2 usage by plants and production from oceans and land can vary by more than 100 ppm in any 24 hour period. Yet the daily maximum of human CO2 emissions is less than 0.0112328767123288 of a single part per million.
In order for a substance such as CO2 to absorb heat or IR energy it must also re-emit that energy equally. See the Stefan-Boltzmann law.
Or simply consider this:
If there was a substance in our atmosphere that could trap in heat, it would produce a net energy increase in the climate system. As this would have to be a fundamental law of thermodynamics (which it is not) then this situation would have always occurred and therefore the Earth would have experienced a net energy increase from the year dot and so would have over heated billions of years ago. Or at any time through out history when CO2 levels have been much higher than todays historically low levels.
In other words CO2 does not trap but rather simply absorbs and then re-emits heat. Having absorbed heat, any and all atmospheric gasses rapidly expand and due to the process of convection quickly rise up towards the freezing depths of space. But before they get too high, at approximately 5,000 meters (cloud level) they re-emit the IR energy and then once again become heavy and dense, falling back toward the ground. Due to the second law of thermodynamics the IR energy emitted continues on out into space never to return. This effect can only be described as temperature regulation.
The following is a quote from the NASA Earth Observatory program, CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System).
“Averaged over the entire globe, the Earth system neither stores nor emits more energy than it receives from the Sun.”
A substance that does not emit much energy will be a substance that does not absorb much energy such as certain plastics and rubbers. These types of substance are useful for insulating such things as wiring carrying electrical energy. The ability of a substance to insulate is not the same as trapping energy. In order to trap energy a substance must first absorb energy. But since all substances that absorb energy, always without exception re-emit equally there is no naturally occurring substance we know of which can trap heat energy.
The fact is that there is no substance known to man that possesses the ability to trap in heat. If there was we would not need to use thermos flasks and we certainly would not need to buy our energy from large corporations but instead we could take this heat trapping substance and paint our roofs with it.
AGW is a scam and the proof is billions of years of life on Earth. Without this temperature stability we could never have had the time to evolve from single celled organisms into human beings. We are living proof that the Earth enjoys relative temperature stability, the climate is extremely robust and our annual 4.1 ppm in CO2 emissions is not only insignificant but totally irrelevant.
For a more detailed look at the AGW scam download: CO2 The Debate Is Not Over, free .pdf
[snip – self promotion ]
Forget about average global temperatures. Forget about ice caps melting and Polar Bears floating across the Atlantic on ice cubes. Forget about rising sea levels, droughts, increased hurricanes, floods and on and on. Forget about sunspot cycles or El-Nino and La-Nina, or whatever the hell else has been thrown into the mix as a distraction because none of it matters, none of it is relevant . All we have to do is drill down and focus on one thing only.
That one thing is CO2.
It is claimed that humans are responsible for Climate Change because of our CO2 emissions and that we need to have limits imposed because we need to reduce our emissions of CO2.
So first simply ask yourself this:
Can CO2 trap in heat?
Answer: NO, nothing traps in heat, substances can only absorb and re-emit heat but they cannot trap heat.
Next question, does CO2 absorb heat more strongly than the other gasses in the atmosphere?
Answer: NO, CO2 is only 0.03811% of the atmosphere and remains as solid ice up to a temperature of 194.65 K
Nitrogen and Oxygen which make up 99% of the atmosphere on the other hand, begin to melt at temperatures as low as 50-60 K and so are much stronger absorbers of heat and at the same time, make up most of the atmospheric gasses.
This puts the effect of CO2 into context. CO2 cannot trap heat as no gasses in the atmosphere can. CO2 is a tiny proportion of the gasses in the atmosphere, so tiny in fact that compared to Oxygen and Nitrogen it is barely noticeable. The effect of such tiny amounts of CO2 being a much weaker absorber of heat than Nitrogen and Oxygen, also show that the warming effect of CO2 is insignificant.
So the final question is, are we responsible for Climate Change through our CO2 emissions?
Answer: NO WE MOST DEFINITELY ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR CLIMATE CHANGE.
Take that to Copenhagen!
If you would like to know more about the AGW fraud and carbon tax, download this free .pdf book
[snip – self promotion ]
Aligner, WOW! Wow is all I can say. Will he get ousted? Or will it prompt, as it gets very cold in “Nornirlan” this winter, some support? I wish.
Ben (00:32:31) :
Anthony
“Another rare moment of journalism at the BBC – Andrew Neil actually asking some questions of UK Environment Minister, Hilary Benn.
Notice that (amongst a lot of other bluster) Mr Benn thinks that the vapour coming from cooling towers is CO2.”
Way to go Andrew Neil, he just needed a little more coaching & he would have been perfect. 8½ minutes of pure joy. He really ripped into Hilary Benn so badly Benn almost completely lost his mantra, the visible shock on his face was worth everything, he stumbled over his words, got temperature confused with CO2 emissions in an effort to counter, & as for that ad hom it was an absolutely brilliant demonstration of being slammed against the ropes by an interviewer, his colours showed true, that “I am not a scientist & neither are you, Andrew!” classic meta-speak put down. As for the other half-wit the flooding occurred primarily as a result of poor catchment area contol, poor maintenance of what drainages systems there were, & TOO MUCH building on the flood planes in the 70’s, 80’s & 90’s, not through Global Warming. Not even the eco-nazis in the Met Office would dare claim that those specific events (which I hasten to rub salt, they didn’t predcit but rather the opposite a hot summer) were a result of Climate Change, clearly Michael Mansfield knows more than they do. Oooh, I’m all excited, I need a lie down in a darkened room for a while. No more Christmas cards from Mr Benn for you, Andrew!
Patrick Davis 19:04:20:
Well, Patrick, I didn’t live through the war, but my parents, uncles, aunts etc did, and from everything they told me and everything I’ve read (and I’m afraid I can’t give you chapter and verse on that at the moment) I believe that the black market boomed in the post-war period much more than in the war itself, and I believe that personal carbon rations would soon become unworkable.
I agree with you that if nations follow the lead of the IPCC then the present recession will look like a mythical age of plenty, but I’m not as pessimistic as you that it will happen. I know that there are an awful lot of thick people out there, but there are quite a few bright ones. too. I mean, you’re not thick, are you? And I can follow an argument if you speak very slowly. Then there’s TonyB and Lucy Skywalker, so that’s four of us. Ought to be enough.
Best wishes, DaveF
Re Black markets:
What is making people think that it will be illegal to trade credits/coupons? Is there another proposal mentioned other than the Tyndall one?
It is certainly not what the Tyndall Centre is advocating.
Alex
DaveF (05:17:39) : When food and other things were rationed in Britain during the second world war there certainly was a black market, but I wouldn’t say that it boomed.
There were also non-black market transfers. My Dad was a very young US G.I. at the time. He regularly delivered gifts to his girl friend (now, my Mum) and her family. So don’t forget the power of the “non-market black transfers” if I might coin a phrase. A “date” often started with a shared meal based on some G.I. food gift. (I remember stories about a can of spam and a potato smuggled off base as a “night out” meal.)
This time, though, most of the country is less than convinced that AGW is a real problem, so I suggest that black market trading would really take off and render the whole sorry scheme unworkable.
And this time there is the small problem of The Tube and The Channel. It is going to be Very Easy for a truck delivering, oh, Cheddar Cheese to France to return loaded with bags of coal or even just old cardboard boxes. (“Why No Gov, Its not fuel, ’ems just me’ trash ‘m ‘auling ‘ome.”) Will a border inspection be put in place to prevent unlawful transfers of trash?
And how easy will it be to take every car boot (trunk) and fill it with some “carbon intense” products? Will bags of cement become contraband? Will a “gift bottle” of Rum be grounds for arrest? And a boat often has a very large fuel tank (100 gallons is not unusual) so will pleasure boats going to France at Dunkirk have their fuel measured both outbound and back? Will “Your Papers Please!” be said at the end of each such trip to assure you paid enough guilt tax and were not just using French fuel for such sins?
So, while in WWII, an alternate food and fuel supply was 3000 miles of U-boat infested ocean away; now it is 19 miles and a weekend trip away. I can easily see folks from France visiting friends in England with a full fuel tank and a trunk full of plastic goods and booze; and leaving with 2 gallons. There will be a lot of non-market transfers and, I would predict, cross border vacation swaps with France will increase.
So unless the border is sealed and guards posted to measure all fuel tanks coming and going, “this isn’t going to work”. And somehow I don’t think you will be able to get the French to go along with this kind of rationing scheme…
Yes, I was raised with stories from Mum about feeding tiny bits of coal to the stove and everyone huddled around it trying to get a bit warm. Oddly, though I’ve never lived such a life, it is part of me from birth. I can see and feel those times; such was the power of a mothers stories to a babe in arms… Later, when I was about 5 or 6, Mum mixed up a can of tuna with a bit of mayo and a half dozen crackers and took me out to the back yard. While we were snacking, she impressed on me to think what life would have been like if that was ALL the food you had for a week. The intensity of her memories of war years of scarcity were strongly imprinted on me. Please, just say no to self imposed irrational scarcity. There really is no reason and there is no scarcity:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
My parents lived through real deprivation and built a world where there would be none for their kids. We have everything we need to have a world where there is NO deprivation for anyone. It would be much better to set about the job of building that world of plenty rather than going down the path of self flagellation.
From cold wet and windy Scotland.
On Monday 19th, our beloved leader ‘Pinochio’ Brown told us he/we had 50 days to save the planet from AGW catastrophy. This is the same guy who said in parliament last December that he ‘had saved the world’ from economic disaster. Certainly the bankers are reaping the benefits with their megabucks bonuses. Our Global Warming Channel, aka the BBC web news, were foolish enough to ask people if they agreed – yes or no.
During Tuesday they took 1662 hits. They censored 211 and published 1267. Unsurprisingly approx 80% branded MMGW a blatant lie and another tax scam.
They hurridely shut the debate down.
The really sad fact is that here in the UK, virtually all the media & every politcal party supports the great 21st century lie of MMGW, so apart from Sammy Wilson in Belfast we have no Political say in the matter.
This is why the http://WWW.com is the biggest blessing of the 20th century.
Keep the faith.
Alexander Harvey (08:33:21) : What is making people think that it will be illegal to trade credits/coupons? Is there another proposal mentioned other than the Tyndall one?
Black Markets spring up any time there is a government imposed artificial price difference. So “credits” are tradable, so what. Their presence tilts the price structure. I take my “fuel credit” and trade it away, then my cousin visits from France with a tank full of lower cost French Fuel and I buy most of it from him at lower cost.
So yes, folks will trade away their carbon credits. They will then set about taking advantage of the price differential to places that have no such scheme. This is called arbitrage and it is as old as time. In financial markets, price differences of as low as a penny can trigger arbitrage trades.
A real example:
For years, the state of Oregon has had no Sales Tax. California has an ever higher one, now about 8 percent. There is a band of about 200 miles of Northern California with substantially NO large shopping centers. Just over the border in Oregon there is a Very Large shopping center. Larger than can be supported by the local population.
When I lived 270 miles south of Oregon, it was only economical to arbitrage if I had a very large purchase to make. Then a friend moved to Oregon. Oregon had (has?) a State Liquor Store (with high prices and low choice). Now the economics were even better. For years I paid for each trip to visit said friend with a trunk full of booze on the way up and a trunk full of high value (so high sales tax) items for neighbors on the way back. And absolutely everything was ‘tradable’. Tax arbitrage paid for my gas and food. “Free” trip.
FWIW, when my Texas Uncle comes to visit, he loads up on selected booze on the way home at places with lower tax rates. A couple of years back I needed new truck tires (about $1000 worth!) and it made a trip to Oregon economical, even from 500 miles south. And right over the border with Arizona there is a Very Large travel plaza (on I-10 IIRC) with none on the California side of the bridge. The difference is about a dime a gallon of taxes. And a very large number of folks always tank up there. I plan my trips to cross that border to arrive on near empty outbound, and always fill to the brim on the way back. As does my Texas Uncle.
Now these do not topple the California Tax And Spend system (partly because the distances are very large, partly because the price differential is pretty small); but they do put a limit on degree.
And in the far limit case, the people just decide to “up and move”: For a decade plus the city of Henderson, Nevada was the fastest growing city in the USA. It was in a rocky desert just outside of Las Vegas and had no reason to be growing… except… it was a reasonable distance up I-15 from Los Angeles and in a much lower cost, lower tax, location. There actually developed a set of folks who would commute from Henderson to the Los Angeles basin for work (though a lot of folks just retired to Henderson on L.A. pensions).
Why this matters? Say I’m a pensioner in the UK. I can live one life style in the London outskirts. But if I move to Brittany I can be 2 times as comfortable and warm due to no “carbon ration” system. If only 5% of folks in that group move, the impact on local markets can be very large. Vis Henderson that literally turned from bare rock desert to boom town of the Nation overnight. So just as folks had a “killer home” in Henderson and a studio apartment in Los Angeles for mid-week; folks will have a studio in England (if needed for some tax or pension need) but spend most of the year in Brittany.
(Sidebar: A California home in a good but not great location can cost, for 1000 square feet, $700,000. In 2001 we looked at Henderson and you could buy a 3000 square foot “near mansion” for $250,000 with a pool and a nice view. Almost made the move, but some personal issues popped up.)
It is this kind of “externality” and these side effects that all the Grand Schemes forget about. The laws of economics are not subject to repeal. You can put in all the draconian sills and dikes you like, the economy will flow around them. Most often, what is forgotten is that “dynamic scoring” is right and “static scoring” is wrong. The schemes are almost universally based on a “static scoring” system where “everything else is held constant”. Then they are surprised when things like Henderson barge onto the scene.
So a “Carbon Ration” will simply act as a large tax on carbon or energy based purchases. The dynamic scoring economy will react. Partly with black market transfers, partly with private non-market transfers, and partly with net migration out of the UK (along with a long list of OTHER effects like cutting down the UK forests rather than burning coal…). If that is the world you want, go right ahead and “do the deed”.
Me? I’ll be on a warm beach somewhere with all the carbon based energy I want living a warm life with lots of food, and not a bit of deprivation derived misery. Probably with some ex-pat Brits next to me… French Polynesia is looking interesting, but a friend assures me that the beach in Chili is the place to be. Decisions decisions…
Oh, another fascinating tax arbitrage impact is Vancouver Washington and Portland Oregon. Washington has no income tax. Portland has no sales tax. The are across a border from each other. Portland has hugh shopping facilities. Vancouver has lots of housing. Lots of folks live in Vancouver, but work and shop in Portland. So buy land around the French side of the chunnel, it will be a popular place to live…
EM Smith:
Exactly my point – when people don’t sufficiently believe in the necessity for it they’ll find ways round it. Unless you have a ruthless dictatorship, of course…..
By the way, I couldn’t agree more with your point about your parents (and mine) living through real deprivation to build a world that had none for their children. The last 60 years have been a fantastic economic success (despite the best efforts of politicians) and to see all that at risk of being thrown away is infuriating.
Regards, DaveF.
DaveF:
“I know that there are an awful lot of thick people out there, but there are quite a few bright ones. too.”
Not according to the Defra scoping project, who have categorised the population into 7 distinct segments:
1.
Greens
Greens are driven by their belief that environmental issues are critical. They are well-educated on green issues, positively connected to arguments, and don’t see environmentally friendly people as eccentric.
2.
Consumers with a Conscience
Consumers with a conscience want to be seen to be green. They are motivated by environmental concern and seeking to avoid guilt about environmental damage. They are focused on consumption and making positive choices.
3.
Wastage Focused
This group are driven by a desire to avoid waste of any kind. They have good knowledge about wastage and local pollution, although they lack awareness of other behaviours. Interestingly this group see themselves as ethically separated from greens.
4.
Currently Constrained
Currently Constrained want to be green, they just don’t think there is much they can do in their current circumstances. They have a focus on balance, pragmatism and realism.
5.
Basic Contributors
This group are sceptical about the need for behaviour change. They tend to think about their behaviour relative to that of others and are driven by a desire to conform with social norms. They have a low knowledge of environmental issues and behaviours.
6.
Long Term Restricted
This group have a number of serious life priorities to address before they can begin to consciously consider their impact on the environment. Their everyday behaviours are often low impact for reasons other than environmental.
7.
Dis-interested
This group display no interest or motivation to change their current behaviours to make their lifestyle more pro-environmental. They may be aware of climate change and other environmental issues but this has not entered their current decision making processes.
As you will observe, the segment labled “skeptic” does not exist. No, we are all putty in the hands of these behaviourists once they press the right buttons.
>>Leif Svalgaard (09:51:36) :
>>Do you also believe in the tooth fairy? [there is actual
>>evidence for that, just ask my 8-yr old granddaughter].
Don’t be an *** Leif, it is not becoming of you. You know very well that there is good circumstantial evidence to link the Maunder and Dalton minimums to a colder climate, even if the precise mechanism is not yet fully understood.
You would be better off looking for possible causation factors, than taking the Micky out of anyone that dares to suggest a link.
.
What I was going to say is that although this post is far to long and complicated, it does demonstrate how far down the AGW road the UK government has travelled. They have firmly affixed their flag to the AGW pole, and so if we get a few harsh winters this government will sink without trace.
Let’s hope so.
.
Leif Svalgaard (12:10:58) :
>>>Indeed, how long? Note that the temperature in 1660
>>>at the depths of the Maunder Minimum was just what
>>>it was in the 1980s, at the height of the ‘Modern
>>>Maximum’, so perhaps it is time to stop fighting.
Not according to this graph Lief, which is in the “IPCC Crushes” thread above. Why don’t you acknowledge that you are out on a limb with your opposition to the Maunder Minimum?
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/2000-years-Loehle.jpg
.
Related:
Oct 21, 2009
Economic impacts from the promotion of renewable energies: The German experience
Final report – October 2009, Project team: Dr. Manuel Frondel, Nolan Ritter, Prof. Colin Vance, Ph.D
http://www.icecap.us
Comment from icecap:
Icecap Note: This mirrors the findings of Spain and Denmark. The administration points to these countries as models for future US energy reliance on renewables. We should be learning from their experience and NOT TREAD down the same failed paths. Read these stories and write/call or visit your congressman and senators. If they won’t read the 1500 page bills, maybe they will take the time to read these reports and reject their leaders flawed plans for the sake of their constituents and our and their futures.
Vincent 12:27:59:
I’m still not as pessimistic as you – if they can’t push your buttons there’s bound to be others that can’t be brainwashed. Quite a few, I should think.
And you haven’t said whether you want any of my incandescent lightbulbs yet!
Re: E.M.Smith (10:09:30),
Very interesting, but which of those activities is part of a Black Market? Which bits are illegal?
I was only asking that simple question.
What the Tyndall Centre seems to be advocating is that people should engage in buying a selling in a legal market.
My view is that it the scheme is somewhere between plain daft and truly disasterous it is just cap and trade on an individual basis and the likelihood of unexpected consequences is huge. But I expect that they would be legal.
Alex
I occasionally watch Andrew Neil’s show, and I’m sorry I missed this one. That video is extraordinary. Andrew Neil clearly knows a lot about climate change and he made Hillary Benn look like an idiot. But what is extraordinary is that this was a major BBC program. Recently the BBC carried a climate report that was actually balanced, something that was probably unprecedented, to use a popular word in climate change. Could there be changes going on at the Beeb?
The BBC has been defending the rights of Nick Griffin to appear on Any Questions. I was wondering if they would do the same for a climate sceptic. I assumed they wouldn’t, as they probably think climate sceptics are far, far worse than the BNP. But now, after seeing Andrew Neil, I’m not so sure. Maybe there are grounds for hope after all….
Chris
@TonyB,
Tony, I believe that some time ago you gave a link that gave a large chunk of a book by H.H.Lamb. I had a look through, but neglected to save it. I would like to read it. Do you still have the link? Many thanks.
There is a connection with the Andrew Neil program. The other guest cited recent storms to prove how awful global warming is. These idiots seem to think that there were no storms or droughts until carbon dioxide was invented. However, I recall reading in Lamb’s book that, during the onset of the Little Ice Age, there were storms in England and western Europe that killed hundreds of thousands. I think that puts things into perspective….
Chris
DaveF,
“And you haven’t said whether you want any of my incandescent lightbulbs yet!”
Actually, I don’t use incandescent bulbs – I use those new fangled CFL’s and I’ve got a couple of LED’s installed.
In the UK there are national debts to be paid too. Carbon taxes raise a lot and add billion of £ to energy and oil companies like BP. They’re very much in support of the AGW cause. The racket has to be maintained here – London aims to be the premier centre of the financial trading in carbon.
So it is in the interest of all to see a normal-high carbon consumption in the future. Thats why they’re expanding airports.
addendum: Its also why Al Gore has his investment management company based here.
Chris Wright
I’m obviously better organised than I thought. Here it is I think. There are lots of others so let me know if it wassn’t the one you were thinking of
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=u-sOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA5&lpg=PA5&dq=olive+trees+england+middle+ages&source=bl&ots=WTPpDWDyWH&sig=WXhrKVnyRESur0RPFsuqutmllJs&hl=en&ei=YQPCSs-pF4mw4Qad87iLCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=olive%20trees%20england%20middle%20ages&f=false
Tony,
Yes, I’m sure it’s the one. Many thanks!
Table 13.3 on page 120 is stunning. It’s a list of historical storms going back to 350 BC. Just a few examples from the beginning of the LIA:
1164 NW Germany: 100,000 estimated perished
1200 Friesland: 100,000 estimated drowned.
1212 N Holland: enormous loss of life – estimated 306,000 drowned.
1570 Netherlands: the great cities flooded, possibly as many as 400,000 drowned. Flood extended from N France to NW Germany.
I think this puts things into perspective….
Table 13.4 is also interesting. It shows that the greatest number of storms, by far, occurred in the 1200s.
Many thanks, I look forward to reading it.
Chris
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/carbon/6527970/Everyone-in-Britain-could-be-given-a-personal-carbon-allowance.html
Thought this might be relevant