Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Jeremy Corbyn, brother of famous British skeptic Piers Corbyn, is currently the front runner to win the leadership of the Labour Party, the main political opposition in the British Parliament.
According to The Express, a popular daily British newspaper;
Following the tensions between Ed Miliband and his elder brother David that dogged the party – after they ran against each other in the last Labour leadership election – the current front-runner to replace Ed as Labour leader could yet face his own fraternal headache.
In stark contrast to his younger sibling, Piers Corbyn, 68, has made no secret of his dislike for “global warming hysteria” and has built a reputation as one of Britain’s most vocal climate change sceptics.
The Corbyn brothers disagree wildly on environmental issues, with the left-wing Islington North MP and Labour leadership front-runner a keen supporter of green issues.
Jeremy, 66, was one of more than 400 MPs who signed an parliamentary Early Day Motion on climate change, leading to the 2008 Climate Change Act and ambitious carbon reduction targets for 2050.
He has also taken a lead in campaigning on the issue, including taking part in a mass climate change lobby outside parliament in May.
Piers, who has now built a career as a long-range climate and weather forecaster, served as a councillor in the 1980s but quit the Labour Party in 2002.
As The Express indicates, this sadly doesn’t herald an immediate major change in the British political landscape regarding climate change. However, it probably doesn’t hurt to have someone close to a person who may become the next Prime Minister of Britain, who understands the issues.
Piers Corbyn is a controversial figure. His weather prediction claims have attracted strong criticism from WUWT. On the other hand, Piers is undoubtably a significant thorn in the side of the British climate establishment. For a while he was the go to guy for climate stories, back when British producers tried to show different points of view. Given that Piers’ brother Jeremy achieved such political prominence, we can probably expect to see more of Piers in the British media.
Piers also got a mention in the Climategate archive, an intriguing email which suggests that many people in the climate establishment are very hostile to nuclear power, despite nuclear being a totally obvious solution to the CO2 problem they allege we are experiencing.
Climategate email 0837094033.txt
PS Britain seems to have found it’s Pat Michaels/Fred Singer/Bob Balling/
Dick Lindzen. Our population is only 25 % of yours so we only get 1 for
every 4 you have. His name in case you should come across him is
Piers Corbyn. He is nowhere near as good as a couple of yours and he’s
an utter prat but he’s getting a lot of air time at the moment. For his
day job he teaches physics and astronomy at a University and he predicts
the weather from solar phenomena. He bets on his predictions months
ahead for what will happen in Britain. He now believes he knows all
there is to know about the global warming issue. He’s not all bad as
he doesn’t have much confidence in nuclear-power safety. Always says
that at the begining of his interviews to show he’s not all bad !
Cheers Again
Phil
Dr Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit
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Jeremy Corbyn has no chance of becoming PM
The very idea is laughable. Scotland has been lost and will not be recaptured. Labour is finished.
It is, after all, the party that gave us ‘Rotherham’
Err, it was just one of these days, that Labour stated that their lost voters may never come back… Labour is down the toilet, so obviously, this is not going to be the next PM.
Corbyn is a Trotskyist and allied with the SBP (Scottish Bolsheviks) north of the border would dovetail quite nicely into an unreformed EU alongside bailed out Greece.
Jeremy Corbyn will ring the death knoll for the Labour party. He is a remnant of history when the workforce was Miners, Rail, Big industry, steel, automotive, etc, etc. The utilities were nationalised, Gas, Electric, Water, etc … So Labour had a large core vote of workers. The economy has changed, New Labour understood that but they cagged it up with the Invasion of Iraq and the sexxed up dossier. Brown who took over from Blair lost the plot when the economy collapsed… JC wants to go back to Labour of the past, and that, I’m afraid is where the Labour party will end up.
More background on the brothers Corbyn here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11762773/Ive-lived-under-Jeremy-Corbyns-rule-it-turned-me-into-a-Tory.html
Quote, the last paragraph of the article:
‘This story has everything you need to know about life as it was under Corbyn Labour – class hatred, the indulgence of unionised labour, and the Soviet-style handing out of favours to party loyalists on the council payrolls. Mr Corbyn often says that his political principles have not changed. Take that as a threat.’
Like others, I think the chance Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister is vanishingly small.
When the UK electorate turned right (to Margaret Thatcher) in 1979, the defeated Labour Party turned left. As a result they lost power for a generation, and were riven by internal factionalism until Tony Blair took them back the other way. They are on the cusp of repeating the mistake.
One small problem. Cameron is no Thatcher.
A quote from Wikipedia by Piers Corbyn:
I have always liked this fellow since the time I first heard of him. It seems that he realizes that insolation from the sun, gravity, mass of the atmosphere, and water in all its phases are the drivers (with a lot of passengers of course) of climate and not the Jim Hansen inspired claptrap about CO2.
And now, he may be able to talk to his brother the potential Prime Minister. Some good news in a sea of not so good news.
This story only becomes relevant in the highly unlikely event J Corbyn becomes Labour leader. However, it does tell us a lot about the media, something which may be relevant to their excruciating climate coverage. After the May general election and the failure of opinion polls to get close to the actual outcome, the UK media rose up on their hind legs and declared it was the pollsters’ fault and they would never trust them again. They had been misled in their coverage by the polls, etc etc. Of course, many of those polls were carefully sampled and rigorously processed. The poll on which Corbynmania is based was an online, self-referenced, poll with apparently little scope for cross checking. But the media were all over it (without exception?). They are like Pavlov’s dogs or Skinner’s birds (or is it mice?). So conditioned, they respond automatically to certain stimuli. One of these stimuli is any climate Armageddon story or weather (as in proves climate disaster) story.
Lamb mentioned “climate change” in his literature for the leadership of the Liberal (Democratic) Party. Farron didn’t, so with nothing else to choose between them, I voted for Farron. Perhaps many others had the same thought?
I hadn’t realised the two were brothers.
Still, Jeremy becoming Prime Minister is about as likely as one of James Hansen’s predictions coming true.
Chris
basicstats:
Information on the candidates for Labour Leader is here.
I agree with you that J Corbyn is unlikely to become Labour leader and that the media usually fail to represent such matters accurately. My politics are most closely aligned with those of Corbyn but I will be voting for Liz Kendall as the Party Leader because – in my opinion – she is most likely to impress the public.
I write this post because you say
Whatever the media say, the pollsters did get the shares of the vote right to within their claimed accuracy of ±3% but – on this occasion – those shares did not directly relate to seats won because of the non-uniform distributions of SNP and UKIP votes. I provide the data which explains this in my above post.
Despite the wishful thinking of right-wingers in this thread, the demise of the Labour Party is NOT indicated by one left-winger standing as one of the candidates for party Leader. The Labour Party would form the next UK Government if in the next General Election the Party were to win back the votes it lost to UKIP in the recent General Election.
Richard
I’m pretty right wing personally, but I don’t underestimate the Labour Party.
I find Piers Corbyn pretty interesting though. I’m not convinced of his weather prediction abilities, but he’s a hardcore climate skeptic. He also seems pretty left wing, he once stood for the Tenants and Squatters party – which kindof blows apart the myth that all climate skeptics are right wing.
As for regaining the votes which went to UKIP, you might want to consider that UKIP once made Lord Monckton their climate spokesman – so the Labour votes which were “lost” to UKIP were not voters whose top priority was more renewables.
Eric Worrall:
Thankyou for your interesting post. I am replying because you say to me
Yes, and I agree with you that AGW is not a party political issue in the UK.
I state and debate the facts of what happened in the May General Election in the above sub-thread that begins here.
But those facts beg the question as to why people who previously were Labour voters jumped over voting Tory and went further right to vote UKIP. To date any polls of this matter which Labour has commissioned have not been made public and, therefore, any suggestions can only be guesses (some of which will be educated).
In my opinion, the UKIP vote was mostly provided by people who wanted an alternative to the Tory policy of austerity. Labour was offering a ‘watered down’ version of the same policy; i.e. Labour offered some lesser austerity than the Tories but for longer time than the Tory policy. If my opinion is correct then Corbyn as Labour Leader would regain the votes lost to UKIP: however, it is also my opinion that Corbyn as Labour Leader would lose many existing Labour voters to the Tories. These opinions lead to the suggestions that the Labour Party needs to present an alternative policy the Tory policy of austerity, and that Corbyn should not be Leader (hence, I will vote for Liz Kendall although Corbyn’s politics are nearer to mine).
Richard
I don’t think you have grasped the true nature of UKIP. North of Watford they’re very left wing. I went to a Better Off Out meeting once in Birmingham, lets just say we strongly disagreed on economic policy – but even the ultra left wing Trotskyite types still shook my hand, and made me feel like part of their group, because we all felt that as long as Britain was in the EU, it didn’t really matter what any of us wanted.
So you richardscourtney are totalitarian which thinks that the Governemnt should rule over vast number of human activities…
Anyway i am puzzled by this post and some bizarre reaction to hit, like if having a brother from another side changes the stance in a subject where Jeremy already state that he is in Global Warming bandwagon.
AlexS:
You write
So you, AlexS, are an offensive and abusive troll who has posted an untrue smear which I have here quoted.
Slither back under whatever stone you live under beneath your bridge and don’t bother me again.
Richard
You may well find that one of the reason Labour lost is because of such dismissive ideas that those who fail to agree with me must be ‘right wing ‘ and therefore bad . Such arrogance in action and its reaction is likley to increase under Corbyn who has made it clear that ideology is all.
The irony is that he has made a career out of being a political ‘contra’ , the classic staying in the tent and pissing inside it , but would show no tolerance to those that are ‘contra’ to his position.
knr:
You say
If you check you will find that your suggestion has no relation to reality.
Richard
I think more Labour voters would defect to UKIP if Corbyn became leader, unless of course he campaigns for NO in the EU referendum. (I think he may not have had the full benefits of membership of the EU “explained” to him yet and is Eurosceptic.
There’s more chance of man landing on the sun than Jeremy Corbyn becoming the British PM.
A man did land on the Sun didn’t he, in that movie I saw on the TV, “Sunshine” wasn’t it, by that Danny Boyle who dreamed up the idea that the Sun might “burn out” in a few decades time, and that it is a reasonable idea to start it up again by using a two “Giant” Nuclear bombs, containing “All of Earth’s fissionable material”
….. which of course, even if it were possible to gather all that and make it into bombs, and launch it into space in two rockets, it would hardly even warrant a visible splash on the Sun’s surface !!! Entirely risible movie, but this is the tripe that people will believe, and yet not believe the truth about the reality of Earth’s climate. Baffling !
Maybe we need to make the TRUTH more fantastic than it really is, so that then they will believe it ?
example :
The big hot firey thing in the sky, what comes up in the morning from it slumber, as it lights-up warms the planet. Then the bad clouds come and fight the Sun for control of the sky. Sometime the clouds win, and it will rain, and sometimes the Sun wins and we all can have a bar-b-que, and laugh in the garden with a bottle of wine. Climate is where we have a year when there is no so many bar-b-ques, and then everybody says – “Ahhrgh, an ice-age is coming”, or when a year comes and the Sun wins more daily battles than the bad clouds, then everybody says “Man has caused a Global Warming, and all Polar Bears must die”. Everybody is sad, and that’s “climate change”, it’s really true, so there !
Next Prime Minister is a bit of a stretch.
Well its not hard to see who the intelligent one in the family is…………………….
Corbyn as said that of he get tp be PM he will bring back Ed Millband in has ‘energy secretary’ the last time he had that job he signed the UK up to whole load of rubbish ideas and created the ‘climate change act ‘ problems of which we will be dealing for years . And given that ‘social justice ‘ hiding under green/red banner is part of the ACGW and that Corbyn is very keen indeed on ‘social justice ‘ , you would really not want him has PM even if you could ignore the half/fully mad left wing ideology he pushes.
In that case he is badder than worst, because fails to specify what kind of “nuclear” is meant.
Most nuclear designs are hazardous indeed, except a molten salt reactor, which is inherently safe. There is nothing flammable or explosive in it, operates at atmospheric pressure, chain reaction is stable, there is only a small amount of fuel in it at any one time and can be shut down with no backup power whatsoever. Plus it burns all the fuel, not only less than a percent of it, so it produces a hundred times less waste for the same energy output, with no long half life radionuclides left in it. It can also use Thorium, which is way more abundant than Uranium.
Operating this kind of reactor is actually sustainable, for the rest of the Solar System’s lifetime.
The nuclear safety argument really stinks, IMO. The greens claim that if we don’t mend our ways, we’ll all die. So how could any imaginable string of nuclear accidents possibly compare to the extinction of the human race? Even a couple of meltdowns per year would have to be less worse than everyone dying. So the nuclear safety argument simply doesn’t make sense in my opinion – unless the greens believe they themselves are exaggerating the climate risk, and a few meltdowns really would be worse than what they actually think will happen to the climate.
One of the nice things about MSRs is that no meltdown can occur ever, for the fuel is already molten 😉
Oh noes, a continuous meltdown… 🙂
Please know that this planet on whose thin crust we all sit, is a giant thermonuclear reactor inside, at the same temperature as the surface of The Sun. and yes it’s radioactive down there, but we all still manage to survive that up here on the surface though.
I had a funny experience with Piers Corbyn twenty years ago: invited him to give a lecture at University College London. He turned up 1.5 hours late, by which time everyone had gone home, was totally unapologetic but was surprised to find that he couldn’t give his lecture. Against my better judgment, I invited him again and this time he turned up 1 hour late. Some people were still there and he gave a very good talk, marred —from a purely scientific standpoint— by the fact that he could not reveal his proprietary methods. He would make a delightful Minister of Science in his brother’s administration.
One component of the Corbyn’s forecasts is based on the past solar activity. He searches for similar sunspot patterns in the past cycles, then looks up relevant weather conditions; to what extent this is included in his final forecast it is not known to me.
For general weather patterns and temperature departures from normals, his forecasts are based upon analogue years derived from theoretical solar-lunar beat periods. Which is not actually forecasting the solar signal, so it goes wrong a lot. On UK forecasts over say a year, overall results on temperatures can easily as low as 60% generally correct. I introduced him in 2007 to the idea that down to daily changes in the solar signal cause latitudinal shifts of the jet stream, which he resisted for some months before conceding. I had also discovered in 2007 how to forecast the solar signal at such scales, and made a good forecast for a strong warming from around 10 Jan 2008, whereas Piers had Jan 2008 as very cold. The solar signal that he attempts to forecast, is what he calls his red spikes, which form the basis of the timing of the heavier weather events. I don’t really see him revealing how he does this, as it would go down like a lead balloon, you won’t like it.
My UK region forecast for weather type periods is tracking well, third comment:
http://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2015/04/13/more-warm-weather-this-week-but-whats-in-store-for-the-summer/#comments
Corbyn is a Trotskyite and allied with the SBP (Scottish Bolsheviks) north of the border, would dovetail quite nicely into an unreformed EU alongside bailed out Greece. Although to their credit the Greeks did save us at Salamis in 480 BC.
Although the program of the SNP is Communist, they are in fact, IMHO, better classified as National Socialists, ie N@zis.
1. JC is currently one of 4 candidates and ‘opinion polls’, which are as unethical a way of sampling truth as you could hope to find, suggest he is doing rather well. Every professional knows that opinion polls are used strategically to try and create the ‘big mo’. They aren’t truthful in the main….he is is 35% likely to be elected leader, no better than even money of making it as leader to the 2020 GE and no better than 35% of becoming PM after that election. So ‘ may become the next PM’ probably means 5% chance right now….
2. Piers’ approach to weather forecasting isn’t based on exact precision, it’s based on probabilities. I’ve subscribed in the past and sometimes the forecasts are uncannily accurate, other times, wrong in the second half of the month. His methods are updating regularly, so he shouldn’t be damned for doing what you guys don’t have the balls to attempt. The costs of his forecasts are that of a cheap insurance policy, which is one way of seeing them: you get to see whether you may need to take precautions or not.
3. You are a political website which has published some disgraceful rubbish in amongst a huge amount of damn good stuff. You are an outlet for a small bunch of cronies, which is also something we could talk about. You suppress within-the-rules comment you don’t like, which is a crime when you slag off Piers’ work…..
4. The fact that you use Phil Jones to slag him off means, 100%, that you will never try to emulate his forecasts as they are such rubbish. The CIA will not be stealing them and no-one in the USA will EVER make money using his methods. Cyber-waterboarding of your website would surely be appropriate if you disagree………………
[Rhys, I’ve looked at Piers forecasts and found them to be little more than generalized forecasts like you see in Astrology columns. They are written in such a general way that they can easily be interpreted as being correct, but are such broad generalizations that I don’t think of them as useful. Initially, I thought Piers was on to something unique and useful, but after examining some of his specific forecasts and his claims of success, and I gave them a long and fair examination to reach that conclusion. Therefore I no longer think that. To each his own opinion though.
If you want to punish me for holding this opinion by “Cyber-waterboarding of your website“, whatever that means, then go ahead take your best shot, but know I’ll return the favor legally if you do something illegal, now that you’ve stated that threat.
I’m free to choose what I want to cover here, it is my right, and I won’t be intimidated by threats to cover something I don’t wish to. – Anthony Watts]
@Anthony
I think this is a reference to the infamous
“Sony North Korea hacking incident”
at the end of last year
The “Variety” Magazine reported that …..
“The studio has faced the equivalent of cyber-waterboarding during the past few weeks as bits and pieces of highly sensitive data, from the company and individuals, as well as personal emails have been disseminated to the media by a group calling itself Guardians of Peace.”
http://variety.com/2014/tv/news/sony-pictures-hastily-pulls-tv-spots-for-the-interview-as-exhibs-bail-out-1201381957/
Corbyn has not the slightest chance in hell of being the next prime minister as repeated ad nauseam already. But it really it is a misleading headline….worthy of the climate alarmists insofar as it is just as probable that we will endure CAGW.
The way things are going, Jeremy Corbyn may well be chosen as the next leader of the Labour party, but he has as much chance of being elected Prime Minister as his brother Piers has of being picked to head the IPCC.
Roy Spencer is denying that Water Vapour is both a heat trapping and heat transporting gas.
Wow!
He also thinks that if you insulate something you ‘make the outside of it colder’!
With Dr. Spencer’s model, there is no difference in the cloud forcing in either direction between night and day, and assumes the exactly similar cloud patterns during the night and subsequent day, or am I wrong ? Doesn’t Dr. Spencer’s model use the same black body disc modelling which has proved so unreliable for others in the alarmista campes ?
He certainly seems to have little grasp of the practical and straight forward subject of water vapour convection. And he doesn’t seem to understand the term ‘insulation’ very well either.
I’ve often said that I wouldn’t leave the climate controls of a building in the hands of some of these ‘physicists’!
What is it that you find difficult to comprehend in the statement “if you insulate something you make the outside of it colder”? Assuming it is a warm object (the house) in a cold climate, that is precisely what happens, since the heat flux from the house is reduced. You may argue that the effect is negligible, but you can’t argue that the physics is wrong. I think Dr. Spencer was being rather clever with that initially counterintuitive statement.
We can say this about Corbyn’s, has people pay for his forecast it he is consistently wrong they will stop paying and he is out of business. On the other hand official weather sources are in the position that if they consistently wrong they get extra funding so they can get it right in the future.
There is world of difference between the two mind sets these conditions create .
“next British Prime Minister.” If various people have their way after paying £3 to join the Labour party just to vote him in, he’ll be leader of the party and immediately make it absolutely unelectable, as opposed to totally unelectable, which it is at the moment.
The guy extolls the virtues of Karl Marx, tweets away with Gerry Adams and has never yet failed to align himself with any extremist group that kills ordinary people. What’s not to like?
Punts Labour into the political wilderness for another 18 years …
Pointman
In this talk, Piers Corbyn described the failure of standard meteorology (SM) in outlook, theory, and practice. He included: signals in real meteorology data unexplained by SM; real role of jet stream, stratosphere, electro-jets, magnetosphere, solar wind, solar corona, and the Moon; the total inability of SM to explain: sudden stratospheric warmings and its consequences, tropical storm intensifications, angular momentum concentration in tornadoes; and the need for something else such as electromagnetic plasma explanations; the theoretical basis of non-standard long range weather forecasting on a real planet; a summary on his WeatherAction forecasting skill and examples; and the future of forecasting and meteorology, climate ‘science’ and science in general.
https://youtu.be/6R26PXRrgds
24 minutes in; “Beats between Lunar nodal crossings and the magnetic cycle of the Sun drive the ~60yr modulation of the jet stream shifts and many other weather events”
The ~58yr beat is derived from 9.3 and 11.07, that isn’t the magnetic cycle, and 58yr is nearer 5 sunspot cycles, that’s not a whole number of Hale cycles either. The AMO envelope is nearer 65-69yrs, and it’s the AMO that would be modulating the daily to weekly scale solar influence on the jet stream. The Moon doesn’t come into it, there is an entirely solar reason for the AMO periodicity.
Piers has said that there will be a reduction of El Nino for the next 20 years. He clearly does not understand the relationship between solar activity levels and ENSO, and neglected to take a look at ENSO during past solar minima. The coldest part of the Dalton Minimum in CET (1807-1817) had El Nino roughly double in frequency:
https://sites.google.com/site/medievalwarmperiod/Home/historic-el-nino-events
Which is pretty obvious if you understand your meteorology properly. A solar minimum will increase negative North Atlantic Oscillation conditions, and negative NAO is directly associated with slower trade winds, which means more El Nino. But then I did have to explain what the NAO was to him in 2010, he had never heard of it.