UK: Met Office madness – temperatures may rise 10˚C in Northern Europe!

17 November, 2009 by

end_nigh

The next logical step…

They must be putting something in the water down in Exeter, Devon, where the UK Met Office is located, as scare stories are flying out of there by the dozen. The latest contains all the usual apocalyptic ingredients, as reported lovingly and unquestioningly in The Telegraph:

Heatwaves that kill thousands, tropical-style storms and widespread flooding could be regular features of Britain’s climate within a generation if global warming is not checked, according to the Met Office.

The forecast is part of the most comprehensive study into the impacts of climate change ever conducted. It shows the effects of global warming on Europe over the next 50 years and beyond. Unless pollution [?] from greenhouse gases is reduced, temperatures could rise by an average of 7.2F (4C) across the continent, transforming the landscape, agriculture and industries, it found.

In some parts of the far north of Europe, temperatures could rise by up to 18F (10C), melting the permafrost and wiping out endangered animals and bird species.

Southern Europe would become unbearable in the summer, destroying the tourism industry and making it impossible to grow staple crops like durum wheat for pasta in Italy and fruit and vegetables in Spain.

In Britain, floods and extreme storms would become more frequent, pushing up insurance premiums on homes and buildings.

In the summer, temperatures could reach 104F (40C) in London, causing heatwaves like the one in 2003 that killed an estimated 2,000 people.

More flawed models producing more flawed projections. We always knew the hysteria would get worse as the global warming bandwagon derailed, but this is verging on the ridiculous. Next week the Met Office are sending some poor bloke down to London to walk around with a sandwich board saying “The end of the world is nigh.”

Beyond parody.

Read it here.

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UK Climate Madness: Individual carbon rations proposed

16 November, 2009 by

That's it for the year. Don't breathe it all at once.

That's it for the year. Don't breathe it all at once.

Not an April Fool, by the way, and I guess it had to come sooner or later. The Brits have hamstrung themselves by legislating to cut CO2 emissions by a whopping 80% by 2050 [And based on 1990 levels! How could they be so stupid? Oh, hang on, so are we – Ed], but without working out first how to do it. So in desperation, the wacky schemes are coming thick and fast. Now each Brit will have a carbon allowance, and when they’ve used it up, they’ll have to buy more:

Lord Smith of Finsbury believes that implementing individual carbon allowances for every person will be the most effective way of meeting the targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

It would involve people being issued with a unique number which they would hand over when purchasing products that contribute to their carbon footprint, such as fuel, airline tickets and electricity.

Like with a bank account, a statement would be sent out each month to help people keep track of what they are using.

If their “carbon account” hits zero, they would have to pay to get more credits.

Those who are frugal with their carbon usage will be able to sell their unused credits and make a profit.

Lord Smith will call for the scheme to be part of a “Green New Deal” to be introduced within 20 years when he addresses the agency’s annual conference on Monday.

An Environment Agency spokesman said only those with “extravagant lifestyles” would be affected by the carbon allowances.

And in New Labour speak, “extravagant lifestyles” means anyone not on the poverty line. I guess the next step will be oxygen credits. You are allocated a cylinder of O2 at the beginning of each year, which you have to drag around with you. If you use it up before December 31, say, by breathing a bit too heavily, then you’ll have to buy top-ups, maybe at the gas station with your 20 litres of unleaded, at a price to be determined by the market. Anyone caught breathing the oxygen in the atmosphere and not out of a tank will be sent to jail.

I can just see it: we’ll have the situation where the poorest in society will have loads of carbon credit cards, all maxed out, and then dodgy debt companies will spring up advertising on daytime TV, offering to “consolidate your carbon loans into one gargantuan one with an easy to manage monthly payment (which you still won’t be able to afford)”.

Carbon lunacy.

Read it here.

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Copenhagen deal "impossible"

16 November, 2009 by

Maldives: nothing to do with climate change - it's sinking

Maldives: nothing to do with climate change - it's sinking

More from the UK Telegraph which reports that Copenhagen will, like most other climate talks, be a damp squib:

The UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December has been billed as the world’s last chance to stop global warming. But negotiations soon broke down because the US refused to sign up to targets on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

The deadlock has forced world leaders at a summit in Singapore to step in and admit that any deal this year will be little more than a “political agreement”.

However they insisted that a legally-binding treaty will be thrashed out by the end of 2010 and even suggested a timetable and deadline to ensure negotiations stay on track.

The new “two-step” plan, put forward by the Danes, increases pressure on President Obama to attend the talks in Copenhagen and reassure the world that the US is serious about tackling climate change.

It also gives the world a chance to rescue the Copenhagen summit from certain failure by giving lawyers more time to work on a hugely complex international deal.

So remind me, why is Australia desperate to get a legally binding ETS in place before Copenhagen, when other countries will only be subjecting themselves to a political agreement?

Read it here.

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Climate threat to Italian pasta

16 November, 2009 by

Thanks to climate change, this won't be happening again

Thanks to climate change, scenes like this will be a thing of the past

Add it to the list of things caused by “climate change” – the disappearance of Italian pasta (no joke). Embarrassingly, this is from the UK Meteorological Office, which now has a reputation for crazy predictions which always fail to eventuate:

SCIENTISTS will this week warn that Italy may be forced to import the basic ingredients for pasta, its national food, because climate change will make it impossible to grow durum wheat.

In a report to be released by Britain’s Met Office today, scientists predict that Italy’s durum yields will start to decline from 2020 and the crop will almost disappear from the country later this century.

The report will say: “Projected climate changes in this region, in particular rising temperature and decreasing rainfall, may seriously compromise wheat yields.”

…

It reinforces earlier research suggesting climate change may leave France unable to produce many of its leading wines, including champagne.

Oh well, we’ll all have to drink Aussie sparkling wines instead!

Read it here.

UPDATE: More on the Met Office report: “World has only ten years to control global warming, warns Met Office.”

Ten, five, twenty, a hundred – pick a number.

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UPDATED: UK Poll: Majority say global warming "not our fault"

15 November, 2009 by

More colourless, odourless CO2

More colourless, odourless CO2

More bad news for the warmists, as the public wise up to the propaganda and spin. From the UK Times Online:

Less than half the population believes that human activity is to blame for global warming, according to an exclusive poll for The Times.

The revelation that ministers have failed in their campaign to persuade [mislead? – Ed] the public that the greenhouse effect is a serious threat requiring urgent action will make uncomfortable reading for the Government as it prepares for next month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen.
Only 41 per cent accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made. Almost a third (32 per cent) believe that the link is not yet proved; 8 per cent say that it is environmentalist propaganda to blame man and 15 per cent say that the world is not warming.

Tory voters are more likely to doubt the scientific evidence that man is to blame. Only 38 per cent accept it, compared with 45 per cent of Labour supporters and 47 per cent of Liberal Democrat voters.

The high level of scepticism underlines the difficulty the Government will have in persuading the public to accept higher green taxes to help to meet Britain’s legally binding targets to cut carbon emissions by 34 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050.

But then Ed Miliband, Energy and Climate Change Secretary, gets desperate and lobs in the D-word:

“The overwhelming body of scientific information is stacked up against the deniers and shows us that climate change is man-made and is happening now. We know that we still have a way to go in informing [brainwashing – Ed] people about climate change and that is why we make no apologies about pushing forward with our new Act on CO2 campaign.”

Read it here. (h/t Climate Realists)

UPDATE: The Times opinion writers cannot conceal their contempt for the British public for being so ignorant of the “climate crisis”, branding them “global village idiots”:

It is possible that the collective expertise of brilliant scientists could be wrong. The best minds in the world once held a geocentric theory of the solar system. Before the discovery of sub-atomic particles they believed that everything was made of earth, air, fire and water. Right up to the 19th century, serious scientists wrote recipe books for making animals. But no previous process of scientific trial, error and progress has ever overturned such a well-attested thesis. Lord Rees has reminded us that we now live in a global village and it is, he pointed out, probably inevitable that there will be some global village idiots. (source)

Read all of James Delingpole’s blistering attack on this nonsense in the (usually more sensible) UK Telegraph here.

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UK: Gordon Brown's transaction tax given lukewarm reception

8 November, 2009 by

Time warp back to the 1970s

Political version of "Life on Mars"

Gordon Brown is a deep red, old fashioned socialist in the 1970s Labour mold. Whereas Tony Blair was the shiny, spin-obsessed, non-stick façade of “New Labour” (i.e. not really Labour, but Conservatives with compassion), Brown is like a throwback to the days of Jim Callaghan and Denis Healey, to the days of Arthur Scargill and strikes every week and power cuts and garbage piling up in the streets.

So in the dying days of the UK Labour government, with no hope of being re-elected, Brown is trying to impose global socialism for one last time, with a “transaction tax” on all financial institutions, to funnel a proportion of all global financial transactions back to the government for redistribution, one of the beneficiaries of such a tax being “tackling climate change”. But no-one is buying it, thankfully (not even the US):

The proposal, which took delegates by surprise at the [G20] meeting in St Andrew’s overshadowed other items on the agenda.

The US said it would “not support” a transaction tax and Canada added it was “not an idea we would look at”.

The Conservatives said that Downing Street had previously “poured cold water on this proposal” and that the Treasury had called it “unworkable”.

…

The head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Khan, said he believed the transaction tax was unlikely to be adopted.

“I don’t believe it will be a transaction tax because transactions are very difficult to measure and so it’s very easy to avoid a transaction tax,” he told Sky News.

US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner dismissed the idea of such a tax, saying: “That’s not something that we’re prepared to support.”

He told reporters: “This is an idea that has been around for a long time. Many countries have a lot of experience with the design of these kinds of taxes. I think, frankly, the experience has been mixed.”

Canadian finance minister Jim Flaherty also rejected the proposal, telling Sky News it was “not something we would be interested in in Canada”.

He added: “We are not in the business of raising taxes, we are in the business of lowering taxes in Canada. It is not an idea we would look at.”

Your time has run out, Gordon. The exit is that way.

Read it here.

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UK tribunal rules climate change is a "philosophical belief"

4 November, 2009 by

Tim Nicholson

Tim Nicholson

A UK employment tribunal has ruled that an employee can take his employer to an unfair dismissal tribunal on the grounds that he was discriminated against because of his views on climate change.

The relevant regulations, the Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations 2003 state the following:

3. – (1) For the purposes of these Regulations, a person (“A”) discriminates against another person (“B”) if –

(a) on grounds of religion or belief, A treats B less favourably than he treats or would treat other persons; (source)

“Religion or belief” is defined as “any religion, religious belief, or similar philosophical belief” and it is the last part of this definition that is important here, as the judgment confirms that belief in AGW is a belief system, as opposed to an opinion or viewpoint. The BBC manages to report it without drawing any such conclusions, buried in the darkest corner of their website:

Tim Nicholson, 42, of Oxford, was made redundant in 2008 by Grainger Plc in Didcot, as head of sustainability.

He said his beliefs had contributed to his dismissal and in March a judge ruled he could use employment equality laws to claim it was unfair.

But the firm appealed against this as it believed his views were political.

After the hearing on Monday, Mr Nicholson said he was delighted by the judgement for himself and other people who may feel they are discriminated against because of their views on climate change. (source)

To be honest, I hardly think that those who believe in climate change are the ones who can claim to be discriminated against. After all, they are not called flat earthers or Holocaust deniers every day of the week.

Unfortunately, reading the judgment, it is pretty clear that the judge was looking for a way to allow the appellant to fall within the scope of the Regulations:

30. In my judgment, if a person can establish that he holds a philosophical belief which is based on science, as opposed, for example, to religion, then there is no reason to disqualify it from protection by the Regulations. The Employment Judge drew attention to the existence of empiricist philosophers, no doubt such as Hume and Locke. The best example, as it seems to me, which was canvassed during the course of the hearing, is by reference to the clash of two such philosophies, exemplified in the play Inherit the Wind, i.e. one not simply between those who supported Creationism and those who did not, but between those who positively supported, and wished to teach, only Creationism and those who positively supported, and wished to teach, only Darwinism. Darwinism must plainly be capable of being a philosophical belief, albeit that it may be based entirely on scientific conclusions (not all of which may be uncontroversial). (source – Word document)

But the judge did say one very interesting thing, when setting out the criteria for a philosophical belief (my emphasis):

It must be a belief and not … an opinion or viewpoint based on the present state of information available.

That just about sums up the present state of the climate debate!

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Environmentalism and fear

2 November, 2009 by

You will recall the disgraceful UK government ad, using a bedtime story to scare a little girl about the dangers of “climate change” (see here). Brendan O’Neill, writing in The Australian, analyses the motivation behind such actions:

Not surprisingly, the ad has caused a storm. Nearly 400 people have complained to Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority. Some are disturbed by the ad’s scientific illiteracy (how one gets from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s relatively sober reports about changing weather patterns to a cartoon dog drowning in a flooded city is anybody’s guess). Others have slammed the government for knowingly and deliberately – and with taxypayers’ money – scaring kids.

Yet the ad is only an extreme version of what has become mainstream environmentalist policy in recent years: terrifying children.

The environmentalist ethos, whether it is spouted by official bodies or radical, dreadlock-sporting campaigners, presents itself as caring and considerate, yet it is shot through with the politics of fear.

In place of grown-up, adult debate about the future, environmentalists continually use scaremongering – conjuring up horrid, squalid future scenarios based more on their fantastic imaginations than scientific fact – to try to force people to lower their horizons and change their behaviour.

And this green politics of fear is starting to have a detrimental effect on children.

As popular culture bombards kids with messages about a fiery, bunny-hostile future, and as many schools in Britain and elsewhere rebrand themselves as “eco schools”, devoted to reducing children’s carbon footprints as much as expanding their minds, so children are becoming paralysed by fear.

In 2007, a survey of 1150 seven to 11-year-olds in Britain found that more than half had lost sleep as a result of worrying about climate change.

“It’s making me and my friends go mad,” said a 12-year-old girl.

In the environmentalists’ desperation to get their message across, we are bringing up a generation of children scared out of their wits.

Read it here.

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