This video has been making the rounds, and the most encouraging thing about it is: it ran on the BBC. The fact that is did speaks to the growing skeptical view of climate change.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
For Gaia’s sake:
“Out the window” atmospheric conditions hve NOTHING to do with climate.
Nothing whatsoever.
You deniers harp on about rain, snow, sleet, and hail etc as if it were UNCONNECTED to Anthropogenic Global Warming And Climate Disruption.
The science is SETTLED, and your “out the window” approach simply fortifies the localised minimalist effects of random precipitation events.
You should all be aware that ALL this precipitation has been predicted by the very best climate models, and that rain, hail, sleet, snow, and teenage pregnancies (and other issues for the Postal Service) have been cast asunder upon us.
May Gaia have mercy upon our souls….
That warmed my cockles
@Charles nelson:
I think the pejorative use of ‘Jesuitical’ to describe Greens certainly does a disservice to Jesuits and probably even to warmist believers. Sixteenth-century Protestant words of abuse don’t even come close to describing the weird combination of Trots, Stalinists, earnest misanthropes, would-be totalitarians and young gullibles that comprise the Green movement. And I would bet very few of them are in the slightest religious — very little faith in their fellow humans among that lot.
Also, if I recall correctly, the first British PM who was sold on the ‘global warming’ issue was actually Margaret Thatcher, in the late ’80s.
It may be pro-AGW propaganda, but it certainly backfires – makes a mockery of it all.
Just to fill you in on the joke if you’re not British: When something major is afoot here in the UK, we get a government brochure sent to all households. We got one on nuclear war back in the 1980s, then AIDS, etc. I think the last one was on Swine Flu. The funniest one was the nuclear war one – totally useless. Of course, everyone threw them away, and I hear that they’ll be collectors favourites in the coming years.
@ur momisugly charles nelson says:
“As for the Legislation, well that’s another story.”
Absolutely, a bit off topic but since it has been raised, watch out for a UK tax on ‘carbon’ so that renewables look (more) competitive. This would seem to be the next push & gives a nuclear/wind/PV nod to investors. The question has to be: if now we are allowed nuclear, why do we need wind/PV? Added to the mix, energy security now looks to be a consideration and may even be trumping warming as the stated main driver of policy. If that is so, is it a real concern or just moving the goalposts in the game of demonising CO2?
Just to inject a note of realism. Yesterday, in Iqualuit, Nunavut, Canada, the high temperature for the day was 21 C ABOVE average. The temperature was comparable to Daytona Beach, Florida.
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
December 17, 2010 at 3:27 am
The funniest one was the nuclear war one – totally useless.
Ah yes, ‘Protect and survive’.
Great advice on how to withstand nuclear attack by piling books on your dining room table and crawling under it with your box of candles and a transistor radio.
According to the SMHI (Swedens NOAA), the past 3 weeks have been very cool in the Stockholm area might be the coldest since 1875!
In other part of Sweden this is the coldest 3 weeks ever recorded. And looking ahead it looks like there will be some brutal cold just before X-mas, -20 to -22 degree C. December temperatures in Stockholm might be record cold. (The database is from 1756). But I guess GISS will fix that in the end.
charles nelson says: December 17, 2010 at 12:57 am
David, UK says: December 17, 2010 at 2:08 am
Well there may be some genuinely skeptical comedy shots in the pipeline. What about mine: today I was going to have (subsidised) solar heating panels installed… “to offset
Voldemortyou-know-what” but they couldn’t install them because there was three inches of snow and more falling.‘Protect and Survive’ — wasn’t everyone supposed to wear bin bags as well?
Ah, they really knew how to scare the bejaysus out of people in those days. The Greens babbling on about rising ocean levels and the world warming by two whole degrees are amateurs by comparison.
And that’s in the South West, the warmest part of the UK
@ur momisugly Clare
“Also, if I recall correctly, the first British PM who was sold on the ‘global warming’ issue was actually Margaret Thatcher, in the late ’80s.”
Not correct. Thatcher (who had a science background) was persuaded to investigate any link between CO2 emissions and temperature. The UEA’s CRU was the result of that. She is also on record as being concerned that the issue could be hijacked for political purposes by those with a very different agenda to hers. She was expecting CRU to provide the truth of the situation. She and we are still waiting.
“The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
December 17, 2010 at 3:27 am”
Indeed. And then we had “When the wind blows”…and that was jus too funny!
there’s nothing new in the bbc broadcasting a bit of scepticism. it’s just a bit of cognitive disonance as far as they’re concerned.
This amusing sketch gave me an idea. The AGW scaremongers rely on people generally not knowing what the weather is doing anywhere much beyond their own localities. They exploit this lack of knowledge by suggesting a cold snap (for example) is regional as well as being just local ‘weather’. It strikes me that a ‘climate’ could be defined to some degree by the size of area a weather pattern covers as well as the time period a weather pattern covers.
Anyway, I think it might be a good idea to have a ‘Watts Out The Window?’ section on the blog – in which visitors could place a marker for where they live on a map of the world and an indication of the current weather/temperature (perhaps using a colour scale or symbol?). That way, visitors to the blog might get to see instantly that (for example) the current ‘cold snap’ I am experiencing here in London has in fact gone on for a good couple of weeks and covers a large area of the northern hemisphere. Ditto the cold weather that is apparently happening in some places down south.
Excellent analysis, Stefan; I agree with every word.
Those of us geriatrics who grew up during WWII understand the principles of recycling, “waste not, want not”, “make do and mend” and all the other ideas associated with generally taking care of the environment we live in and not being profligate with nature’s gifts.
That does not mean that we want to go back to a sort of “golden age” when life was nasty, brutish and short and the exponents of your “pre-corp” principle would be the first casualties since they would get very short shrift from people more concerned with making sure they had enough wood for the fire in the coming winter or enough nuts and berries for tomorrow’s breakfast than listening to the ramblings of people trying to convince them that this way of life was in some way preferable to having a full set of teeth and the reasonable chance of living for 80 years instead of 35.
I have spent several years in my own locality in a battle with people who oppose every kind of development that does not involve either community gardens or craft shops or re-opening of long dead and abandoned mills or other pre-industrial revolution buildings and/or practices.
What their view on climate change is I don’t know (though I can guess!) but none of their arguments is based on reason and certainly not on either empirical evidnce or anything to do with the wishes of the local population!
Yet somehow, as with such as Ehrlich and the other doom-mongers, each time a project is holed below the water line they pop up again with a new one and a new (or often the same) set of acolytes all convinced that these people have the answer and “this time it’ll be different.”
You naughty people have just about said it all. Classic Armstrong & Miller. I love it when my choir singing chums from the Wet Office tell me this pain in the rear thing of being snowed in here in darkest Devon, (btw the forecast seems to change hourly as usual, rain or shine, hot or cold) is just weather, but global warming when it’s hotter than usual.
I remember reading somewhere about a place in North America, sorry not sure where, but from 1875 to 1890, from historic written accounts (yeah I know they weren’t as clever as we are today for obvious reasons………..?) the winter snows started in the first week in September, & by the end were arriving at the last week in September! Don’t think it was a post here but might have been! Oh well time to take pooch out for his regular lunchtime perambulation. Right now, boots – check, warm clothes – check, mobile phone (fully charged) – check, thumb stick – check, inner gloves – check, sheep-skin mittens – check, compass -check, packet of peanuts – check, bar of chocolate – check, Leatherman – check, Swiss Army knife – check! Off we go!
Clare says: December 17, 2010 at 3:21 am
Yes, but with two crazy and important twists.
(1) Maggie Thatcher eventually came to realize there was no AGW. She had a science degree and understood the real science, and was not AGW-brainwashed at that point because the brainwashing started later.
(2) But she had activated the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. She was rightly, at that time, concerned about our effects on climate. Also she wanted kudos for being a scientist (so rare amongst politicians) and she wanted kudos for beating the miners, and wanted a stick to beat them with. So she set up the Hadley Institute and CRU (IIRC) – to gather together global climate science data and see what was up. Hubert Lamb, the first head of CRU, was doing proper science. But the real mischief was this: she cut back on research grants across all disciplines, except any research into… Manmade Global Warming.
Unintended consequences. Also divide-and-rule. “My research shows that AGW is not a problem… but all these other disciplines show that it is a problem… and since my funding depends on showing AGW, I will have to include this item somehow…”
h/t Richard Courtney and Chris Monckton, for this understanding.
If you think this is Warmist you’re wrong for all kinds of reasons.
The main one is that Miller and Armstrong are famous for ripping the piss out of sacred and pompous institutions…see for instance Nude Vets or Stryker…they’re comedians and their top priority is laughs. This is quite gentle but definitely in a long British Tradition of anti-establishment humour. David Frost and Co’s political satire may seem incredibly mild today but it brought down the Macmillan Government.
Gentle ridicule judiciously applied.
And though the sense of humour might be a little ‘obtuse’…being buggered in prison for making a politically incorrect statement about the weather/climate change can only be read one way right?
The Brits don’t like ‘thought police’, they went through it once during the English Revolution when the Puritans took over and they didn’t like it much. (The London Theatres were closed for over twenty years). Also they can smell a rat.
I think that as all my friends and family freeze their butts off in the British Isles, and we here in Australia are having lush cool grey Christmas, that the wheels are coming off the Warmist machine in their heartlands, where it matters most.
At the moment there are fears that supplies of heating oil may have to be rationed in the UK if the cold spell continues.
I can imagine a high level oil execs meeting ten years ago.
“Will we build that new heating oil refinery JB?”
“Nah mate…heating oil, thing of the past.”
The Brits were amongst the first to fall for the scam and they will in due course be unutterably vicious towards those who perpetrated it.
Kaboom says: December 17, 2010 at 3:08 am
Hahahaha. I had to stop and check if you were pushing the warmist agenda.
Like the video, British subtle humour. Hedging your bets.
Clare, Dec 17th, 3:21am –
“Also, if I recall correctly, the first British PM who was sold on the ‘global warming’ issue was actually Margaret Thatcher, in the late ’80s.”
The pro CAGW lobby loves to mention that, but what is not so generally known is that Margaret Thatcher, a true scientist, later became more sceptical –
From – http://www.perc.org/articles/article506.php
“In her latest book, Statecraft (2002, 449-58), Thatcher devotes ten pages to the subject of “Hot Air and Global Warming.” Thatcher is quite clear that she feels things have gone in the wrong direction since former British ambassador to the United Nations-turned-global-warming- campaigner Sir Crispin Tickell convinced her to tell the Royal Society, “it is possible . . . we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.” She notes that the doomsters’ favorite subject today is climate change, which “provides a marvelous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism” (449).
Thatcher’s critics might claim that she has–to use a fashionable term–flip-flopped on the issue, but that is not necessarily the case.
First, she stresses that she was initially skeptical of the arguments about global warming, although she thought they deserved to be treated seriously. She points out that there was “rather little scientific advice available to political leaders from those experts who were doubtful of the global warming thesis” (451). However, by 1990, she had begun to recognize that the issue was being used as a Trojan horse by anti-capitalist forces. That is why she took pains in her Royal Society speech in 1990 to state: “Whatever international action we agree upon to deal with environmental problems, we must enable our economies to grow and develop, because without growth you cannot generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment” (452). In fact, Thatcher makes it clear that she regards global warming less as an “environmental” threat and more as a challenge to human ingenuity that should be grouped with challenges such as AIDS, animal health, and genetically modified foods. In her estimation,
All require first-rate research, mature evaluation and then the appropriate response. But no more than these does climate change mean the end of the world; and it must not either mean the end of free-enterprise capitalism. (457)
As Tracy Mehan implies, Thatcher’s environmentalism is founded on Edmund Burke’s conservative view of our inheritance as being worth defending. Yet that view is tempered by her classical liberal belief that human wealth and progress are crucial. That is why Lady Thatcher can be described as a true free market environmentalist.”
Stefan says: Global warming was framed as an issue that only right-wing selfish oil interests would want to oppose.
CRU East Anglia was set up and still funded by Oil and Nuclear interests. Coal being the loser, it was already cleaning up its act, one big rival now demonised. The manipulation of data par for the course for such interests.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100020304/climategate-peak-oil-the-cru-and-the-oman-connection/
There are also more of these connections in the replies to ‘big oil against global warming’ disinformation on http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5074
Maggie’s interests coincided, becoming the first voice of AGW she set about to destroy the coal industry and increasing oil and nuclear interests by increasing funding to the Hadley Institute which joined up with CRU. An amazingly clever sleight of hand to get the Greenies who were against Nuclear energy for heating to support the destruction of its biggest rival..
The Delingpole is taken, I think, from the longer piece on http://seeker401.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/university-of-east-anglia-cru-unit-major-reasearcher-for-the-last-four-ipcc-reports etc. Sorry, can’t get it all into the link, a search should get the page up.
clare, defender of the jesuits hmmn
Could it be from the same producers as the exploding kids?
Trying to acclimatize the public and this is also backfiring?