Climategate: Statement from Norfolk Police

Jim (16:02:58) :

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Barry Foster (13:34:47) :
Meanwhile, the BBC (in a panic that people may be turning off of warming) put out more BS http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8437703.stm
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“Despite the high readings, Professor Gustafsson said that so far there was no cause for alarm, and stressed that further studies were still necessary to determine the exact cause of the methane seepage.
“It is important now to understand how fast it is being released and how much is being released,” he said. ”
Translation: “I’m gonna get a boat-load of money to study this!”

The most interesting part of the entire thing is at the end. It is a common and nasty ‘trick’:

Despite the high readings, Professor Gustafsson said that so far there was no cause for alarm, and stressed that further studies were still necessary to determine the exact cause of the methane seepage.
“It is important now to understand how fast it is being released and how much is being released,” he said.
However, there is a real fear that global warming may cause Siberia’s subsea permafrost to thaw.
Some estimates put the amount of carbon trapped in shelf permafrost at 1,600 billion tonnes – roughly twice as much carbon as in the atmosphere now.
The release of this once captive carbon from destabilised ocean sediments and permafrost would have catastrophic effect on our climate and life on Earth, warn the scientists.

(my emphasis)
So he, the accurately reported author or a peer reviewed work on this, states that “so far there was no cause for alarm”. OK, good.
Then the BBC itself helpfully adds: “there is a real fear” and goes on to describe these fearsome reports as coming from “the scientists”. No mention of which scientists. The natural conclusion (and this is not accidental) is that the same scientists just quoted are “the scientists”, but this is obviously not true if you read carefully enough.
This is exactly how the MS get the message of alarmism across. In most cases there is no conspiracy, because the only purpose of most media is to sell advertising. Everything else is just a method of getting you to see the advertising, from bare-chested young ladies to climate alarmism.
Unfortunately the BBC do not have that excuse, so I have to assume it is politically motivated.

Smokey (18:11:35) :
Another Brit (17:21:46)
Archonix (17:20:16),
“JoePapp’s opinion is his own. It’s certainly not mine, and I don’t think it’s the opinion of very many here. Most Americans look upon Great Britain with fondness and respect, and I think most Brits look upon America like proud parents whose offspring has exceeded their expectations.”
Not mine either. Apologies to the British. Papp needs to go away.

Domestic extremism of all persuasions has always been a constant blight upon our civilisation for centuries.
Over the last three quarters of a century our western society has become increasingly specialised and concentrated in most of it’s essential services and as such has become ever more vulnerable to strikes against a particular part of our essential infrastructure or leadership.
Examples such as power stations and electrical sub stations, water supply systems, rail and transport infrastructure such as vital bridges and so many more essential items that the public never give a thought to in keeping our society functioning.
With modern weapons and the ability to communicate and organise very rapidly and over long distances due to the speed and efficiency of the modern communications systems, domestic terrorism even if only organised by a tiny cell of extremists, now has the capability to destroy the essential underpinnings of our society and it’s day to day functioning as well as creating many deaths and great destruction all in the name of promoting their particular brand of a twisted and warped ideology.
For those who know their history, the Black Hand society, a group of slavic extremists are blamed for the starting of world war one when they assassinated the Archduke of Austria.
The extremist anti jewish National Socialists ie; nazi’s, arose out of the ashes of the German Weimar Republic.
The murderous European based Red Brigades of the 1970’s were domestic terrorism at it’s worst.
The animal liberation movement was steadily evolving towards a more and more extremist movement where the end justified the means no matter how extreme.
And there are indications that a similar extremism will eventually emerge in the global warming alarmist camp when we already see extremists trying to shut down power stations.
Recently in the UK, global warming extremists were attempting to chain themselves to a coal elevator feeding the boilers on a major power station and by doing so, shutting down the power station.
An act that fortunately was stopped by the police just before the extremists could carry out their act.
The long term history of domestic terrorism and domestically based extremism where any means, no matter how disruptive to society or how many innocent lives are destroyed, justifies the end has a history which shows that such movements will eventually descend into full scale and possibly murderous violence against both the leadership of our society and against society as a whole.
The reaction of governments is to now create intelligence organisations whose role is to find, watch, infiltrate and neutralise such extremist groups which has led to the creation of organisations like the UK’s National Domestic Extremism Team.
No doubt there are now parallel organisations in a number of other western countries with similar roles to play against domestically based terrorism.
The real problem is not the gathering of information or the role that these organisations play in neutralising domestic terrorism but that history shows that these semi secret governmental type organisations invariably expand their tentacles into other parts of society , something that is never envisaged or foreseen by those who set the organisations up in the first place.
So the question of real significance is not the National Domestic Terrorism Team’s existence and it’s role in watching for and neutralising domestic terrorism but ;
Who and what watches the watchers?

US Weather Bureau Report
The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto
unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as
81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.
Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
(Sorry, I neglected to mention that this report was from
November 2, 1922 as reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post.)

john (16:50:27) :
And you accept that? Of course, there is worse… an unelected Queen!
At least here in Canada our Prime Minister still has to be elected in a riding in order to have a seat in the Chamber.

By Paul Lewis, Rob Evans and Matthew Taylor~London Guardian
Police are gathering the personal details of thousands of activists who attend political meetings and protests, and storing their data on a network of nationwide intelligence databases.
The hidden apparatus has been constructed to monitor “domestic extremists”, the Guardian can reveal in the first of a three-day series into the policing of protests. Detailed information about the political activities of campaigners is being stored on a number of overlapping IT systems, even if they have not committed a crime.
Senior officers say domestic extremism, a term coined by police that has no legal basis, can include activists suspected of minor public order offences such as peaceful direct action and civil disobedience.
Three national police units responsible for combating domestic extremism are run by the “terrorism and allied matters” committee of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo). In total, it receives £9m in public funding, from police forces and the Home Office, and employs a staff of 100.
An investigation by the Guardian can reveal:
• The main unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), runs a central database which lists thousands of so-called domestic extremists. It filters intelligence supplied by police forces across England and Wales, which routinely deploy surveillance teams at protests, rallies and public meetings. The NPOIU contains detailed files on individual protesters who are searchable by name.
• Vehicles associated with protesters are being tracked via a nationwide system of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras. One man, who has no criminal record, was stopped more than 25 times in less than three years after a “protest” marker was placed against his car after he attended a small protest against duck and pheasant shooting. ANPR “interceptor teams” are being deployed on roads leading to protests to monitor attendance.
• Police surveillance units, known as Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) and Evidence Gatherers, record footage and take photographs of campaigners as they enter and leave openly advertised public meetings. These images are entered on force-wide databases so that police can chronicle the campaigners’ political activities. The information is added to the central NPOIU.
• Surveillance officers are provided with “spotter cards” used to identify the faces of target individuals who police believe are at risk of becoming involved in domestic extremism. Targets include high-profile activists regularly seen taking part in protests. One spotter card, produced by the Met to monitor campaigners against an arms fair, includes a mugshot of the comedian Mark Thomas.
• NPOIU works in tandem with two other little-known Acpo branches, the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (Netcu), which advises thousands of companies on how to manage political campaigns, and the National Domestic Extremism Team, which pools intelligence gathered by investigations into protesters across the country.
Denis O’Connor, the chief inspector of constabulary, will next month release the findings of his national review of policing of protests. He has already signalled he anticipates wide scale change. His inspectors, who were asked to review tactics in the wake of the Metropolitan police’s controversial handling of the G20 protests, are considering a complete overhaul of the three Acpo units, which they have been told lack statutory accountability.
Acpo’s national infrastructure for dealing with domestic extremism was set up with the backing of the Home Office in an attempt to combat animal rights activists who were committing serious crimes. Senior officers concede the criminal activity associated with these groups has receded, but the units dealing with domestic extremism have expanded their remit to incorporate campaign groups across the political spectrum, including anti-war and environmental groups that have only ever engaged in peaceful direct action.
All three units divide their work into four categories of domestic extremism: animal rights campaigns; far-right groups such as the English Defence League; “extreme leftwing” protest groups, including anti-war campaigners; and “environmental extremism” such as Climate Camp and Plane Stupid campaigns.
Anton Setchell, who is in overall command of Acpo’s domestic extremism remit, said people who find themselves on the databases “should not worry at all”. But he refused to disclose how many names were on the NPOIU’s national database, claiming it was “not easy” to count. He estimated they had files on thousands of people. As well as photographs, he said FIT surveillance officers noted down what he claimed was harmless information about people’s attendance at demonstrations and this information was fed into the national database.
He said he could understand that peaceful activists objected to being monitored at open meetings when they had done nothing wrong. “What I would say where the police are doing that there would need to be the proper justifications,” he said.