A Place to Stand

CLIMATE FRAUD - DO THESE UNPUBLISHED LETTERS PROVE CENSORSHIP

2009-11-30T10:52:00.005Z

These are 4 letters I have done since the CRU documentation leaked. Google News & google show none of them as published. Google news is not even close to definitive on letter publication. Nonetheless between them these have gone out well over 100 times & appear to have a 0% publication rate. By comparison I have sent 3 letters on other subjects (Turin Shroud & a Herald one) with a far above average 100% publication rate. The comparison is not really fair because my address is in the catchment area of the papers that did publish & all of them were specifically in reply to previous letters. Nonetheless the comparison isn't that unfair. Checking through newspapers I find the Herald has its first letter on the subject today & more creditably the Aberdeen Press & Journal has now run letters for 3 days in a row, which shows up the average well.

Sent Saturday 21st as soon as it broke - Hacking Reveals Massive & deliberate Fraud by Climate Alarmists

Hackers, identity unknown but quite possibly from Russia, have broken into the email records of the world's main "global warming" research centre, Hadley, & made public emails from numerous employees at all levels boasting of how they have faked the alleged warming evidence. Such remarks as "I've just completed ----- Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for ------ to hide the decline" & "I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that ...I don't think it'd be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have" abound.

Since those involved have been receiving public money, in one case £13.7 million of our money, I trust anyone involved in fraud will be brought to justice. Science is, by definition, the search for truth irrespective of whether it is "inconvenient" or not & the truth is that global warming was never a real threat & that currently the globe is cooling.

I look forward to newspaper & TV coverage of this fraud in manner which is balanced with the decades of dubious alarmist stories we have read, though I note the BBC, while reporting the hacking online has unaccountably failed to report the news the hacking revealed.
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Reference http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2009/11/warming-alarmists-deliberate-fraud.html which contains everything said here & links thereunto. I would understand if you decided to edit the last paragraph out though I hope you take note of the sentiment. I have already edited out names elsewhere.

Weds 25th As will be apparent this one involved cannibalising the last - CRUde & Not Real Science

Records of the world's main "global warming" research centre, Hadley Climate Research Unit, have been leaked. Numerous emails from employees at all levels boasting of how they have faked the alleged warming evidence have also been leaked. Such remarks as "I've just completed ----- Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for ------ to hide the decline" & "I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that ...I don't think it'd be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have" abound. Real computer experts online looking at the computer files released have said of the CRU files "This isn't science, it's gradeschool for people with big data sets" yet these are the alleged world's top experts in climate computer modelling "science."

Since those involved have been receiving public money, in one case £13.7 million of our money, I trust anyone involved in fraud will be brought to justice. Science is, by definition, the search for truth irrespective of whether it is "inconvenient" or not & the truth is that global warming was never a real threat & that currently the globe is cooling.

Though this has been the major news story on the net worldwide & extensively covered by eminent publications like the Wall St Journal our newspaper & TV coverage of this fraud has been limited, keen to explain to us that "trick" is merely a technical term & concentrating on how dreadful leaking is rather than on how dreadful it is that people we pay for should conceal their evidence, or lack thereof & indeed should be openly conspiring to break the Freedom of Information law to do so. Surely this is, by definition, much more important than the news stories we do see about action at Copenhagen to cut CO2 since, if catastrophic global warming is the fraud it appears to be higher taxes, economic destruction & more government lives to "fight it" are, at best, useless.
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Reference http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2009/11/warming-alarmists-deliberate-fraud.html which contains everything said here & links thereunto. I would understand if you decided to edit the last paragraph out though I hope you take note of the sentiment. I have already edited out personal names elsewhere.

"This isn't science, it's gradeschool for people with big data sets" from http://www.tickerforum.org/cgi-ticker/akcs-www?post=118625&page=13

Friday 27th - Global Warming Leak - We Need a Public Enquiry

Last night I watched a guest on Question Time talking about emails from the Hadley Climate Research Unit, the world centre for collating & proving catastrophic global warming. We have long been told "the scientific debate is over" but this documentation shows they had been "juggling with the figures" & doing everything to "hide the decline" in global temperature. Online, where this story has been heavily reported for nearly a week, examination of the data files, leaked at the same time & on which the entire global warming scare is based are described as "This isn't science, it's gradeschool for people with big data sets."

If this leaked material is faked or if the interpretation is entirely wrong then we should know. If it is right then the entire catastrophic global warming story, which has induced government to increase our taxes, regulate us & spend £100s of billions on subsidising windmills & preventing economic growth has been a, possibly criminal, fraud. The emails show one scientist saying he had got £13.7 million for his research. There must be an immediate & public enquiry, with witnesses on oath. We are entitled to know if we have been lied to & how far up the political & funding chain these lies go.

Sat 28th - Climate "Consensus" but nobody can name someone not paid by government in it

For years we have been told that there was a "consensus" on global warming. We see from the leaked email scandal that "climate scientists" have conspired to prevent publication of sceptical research, even to getting editors fired to pervert the "peer review" system. This is not how real science is done. It has also been known that the largest single expression of scientific opinion, the widely unreported petition of over 31,000 scientists, says that not only is there no catastrophic warming but that increasing CO2 is BENEFICIAL, because CO2 helps crops grow. It has long been obvious that a disproportionate number of scientists putting their heads above the parapet against warming were emeritus (retired) professors which raises questions answered by Dr Joanne Simpson (1st female President of the American Meteorological Society & has one of NASA's Cray supercomputers named after her) when she said on retiral “Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receive any funding, I can speak quite frankly" & proceeded to demolish the alarmist case.

I have asked on a number of alarmist websites if it is possible to name 2 scientists not paid, directly or indirectly, by government or the likes of Greenpeace who actually say that catastrophic warming is real. So far none of them have produced even a single name so I appeal through your pages to see if anybody can. It is time to have an open & public enquiry, as with Iraq, taking evidence under oath to investigate all aspects of this campaign.
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Ref Dr Simpson's statement http://climatesci.org/2008/02/27/trmm-tropical-rainfall-measuring-mission-data-set-potential-in-climate-controversy-by-joanne-simpson-private-citizen/Oregon petition of 31,000 scientists http://www.oism.org/pproject/Sites I have asked to name alarmists who aren't government paid http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2009/11/climate-fraud.html
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Reader's letters are normally considered the last place where something that doesn't fit the editorial line will appear. Seeing the level of interest in this news online I simply cannot believe that there are not hundreds, probably thousnads, of people writing letters on this subject & seeing the online stuff, that they are not, by an overwhelming margin, critical of the eco-fascists.

I consider the theory that we are witnessing massive MSM censorship in the cause of big government fascism to be conclusively proved.

CLIMATE FRAUD - ROUND UP

2009-11-29T16:32:00.005Z

This flow chart comes from Devil's Kitchen. Can't fault it - I'm in the pub.

The Mail, easily the best journalistic newspaper in Britain if journalism is a matter of printing things that aren't just rewritten press releases from government & approved sources. Time & again they are the place where inconvenient truths get reported.

There are 3 different articles today, including a (new?) story suggesting that the CRU are going to release the data they held back:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1231788/U-turn-climate-change-cover-university-says-publish-leaked-email-data.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1231673/Global-warming-Dont-wait-The-Earth-tricks-carbon-count-control.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1231694/The-inconvenient-truths-Mr-Gore-fanatical-friends-DIDNT-tell-climate-change.html

The Telegraph's Tim Booker points out why this discredits the entire warming thesis

The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it

On the other hand our own Scotland on Sunday lies, saying in its leader "That the scientific consensus is firmly behind the notion of man-made global warming is now beyond question", & "That the planet is getting gradually warmer was confirmed last week with a forecast from the Met Office's Hadley Centre that next year will be the hottest on record" which is also what Hadley said of last year & of the year before & of this year's "barbecue summer" so the "proof" of a prediction is simply that it has been predicted, by many of the same people, in exactly the terms they have previously been proven to get it wrong. Since it has been proclaimed by so many religious nutters over the years on assumes SoS are also proclaiming Armageddon as definitely about to hit us. Perhaps their very strangest remark comes, characteristically, from David Miliband "The idea that it is not getting warmer is untrue. When you see the evidence from the Met Office or from the Royal Societies, they are not in my pay. I'm not engaged in a conspiracy with them and it is far fetched to imagine that," The Met Office is, of course, government funded & the Royal Society gets £45 million from them.

On the BBC's Marr show he interviewed the leader of the Parasitic Eco-Nazi Grandparent Murdering Party (OK they call themselves Greens) & gave her a slow ball question about the fraud which she said was unimportant because it was only a few scientists, who implicitly ought to be sacrificed. Not a statement which she could honestly say if Booker were telling the truth (& he is). Marr naturally didn't try to lob that back at her.

Looking more to the future recently Professor John Brignal said "this is a phenomenon of group psychology. One of the best treatments of it in fiction is the spy novel by John le Carré, The looking glass war, in which an isolated intelligence outfit develops a fantasy world of its own, which is disrupted when its ambitions collide with reality. Such groups tend to become exclusive brethren, who avoid interaction with others who might threaten their beliefs. They develop a group paranoia and feel the need to defend themselves against what they see as hostile interest from outside. In this case, however, the “opposition” have acted to preserve the niceties of scientific discourse. Steve McIntyre, in particular, has gone to great lengths to maintain polite debate. Yet he has been foisted with the role of “devil incarnate” and subjected to outrageous ad hominem attacks and vilification. These groups lose their moral compass and excite each other to forms of behaviour that they might not have adopted as individuals. The formation of “peer review rings”, designed to deny a hearing for alternative opinions is a notorious case in point, which was comprehensively exposed in the Wegman report. As in the days of absolute monarchy, protection offered by the powerful is an incentive towards the abuse of position. In history, favourites of the king tended to have their days in the sun ended in ignominy or worse.

If, however, sceptics think that global warming is now simply going to fade away they are very much mistaken. It is now a political theory with a life of its own, independent of any support from junk science. Governments depend on it as an excuse for onerous taxation and the erosion of human liberties. Billion dollar industries are set up to exploit it. Hundreds of the new type of journalists who call themselves environmental editors need it to pay their mortgages. The first reaction will be to ignore this development and, with complete control of the establishment press, it is a viable one. It can already be seen in the silence of the press at these startling revelations. If that fails then expect a vicious counter-attack.

We live in interesting times"

However I think we have reached a tipping point. As says this fraud has been going on since the beginning "Nothing about the revelations surprises me. I have maintained email correspondence with most of these scientists for many years, and I know several personally. I long ago realized that they were faking the whole exercise.

When you enter into a debate with any of them, they always stop cold when you ask an awkward question. This applies even when you write to a government department or a member of Parliament. I and many of my friends have grown accustomed to our failure to publish and to lecture, and to the rejection of our comments submitted prior to every IPCC report.
...in 1990:

Jones, P. D., P. Ya. Groisman, M. Coughlan, N. Plummer, W. C. Wang & T. R. Karl 1990. Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land, Nature 347 169- 172.

Wang, W-C, Z. Zeng, T. R Karl, 1990. Urban Heat Islands in China. Geophys. Res. Lett. 17, 2377-2380.

The first paper has been the major evidence presented by Jones in all of the IPCC reports to dismiss the influence of urban change on the temperature measurements, and also has been used as an excuse for the failure to mention most of the unequivocal evidence that such urban effects exist. The paper was even dragged out again for the 2007 IPCC report.

The second paper, which shared authors Wang and Karl from the first paper, used the very same data from China which the first paper used to demonstrate the absence of urban influence — yet instead concluded that same data to be proof of the existence of urban influence.

In 2007, the following paper exposed the whole business:

Keenan, D.”The Fraud Allegation Against Some Climatic Research of Wei-Chyug Wang. Energy and Environment, 18, 985-995.

The author Keenan obtained the original Chinese data and found the claim that the data referred to a continuous series was unfounded. He accused Wang of fraud — and it is interesting to read that Tom Wigley (of the CRU emails) agrees with him.

Wigley fails to say, however, that his colleagues Jones and Karl are guilty of much worse than Wang — as they continued to use their fraudulent paper to boost their constant and sometimes daily assertion that recent global temperatures are unprecedented."

The difference is that enough has come out & been seen by enough people that we all know there has been massive fraud. Therefore for the first time it means that anybody pushing eco-fascism is likely, usually correctly, to thereby be proving themselves also corrupt. At this point being part of the mob ceases to be fun. The pressure must be kept up but it can be kept up.

According to the BBC's "climate expert" (degree in English) East Anglia U is to do its own enquiry. The question being who runs it. Harrabin says "Scientists will be scrutinising the choice of chair and the terms of reference.

One senior climate scientist told me that the chair would have to be a person accepted by both mainstream climate scientists and sceptics as a highly respected figure without strong connections to either group.

BBC News understands that senior individuals at UEA have acknowledged the potential damage to the university's reputation from the CRU affair and are anxious to clear the institution's name.

But there is a risk that some people will not accept the findings of any inquiry unless it is fully independent, as demanded by the former UK Chancellor Lord Lawson earlier in the week. (he called for a High Court judge, others seem to be lining up the boss of the Royal Society Miliband denies gets government money)

And finally UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA PROMISES TO RELEASE CLIMATE DATE only problem being that if they are to be believed THEY HAVE ALREADY "ACCIDENTALLY" DESTROYED MUCH OF THE DATA.

PAYING FOR CLIMATE FRAUD WHEN £175 BILLION IN THE RED

2009-11-28T15:06:00.007Z

since 1990, Phil Jones has collected staggering 13.7 million British pounds ($22.6 million) in grants. The major amounts came from HEFCE (6.6 million pounds) and NERC (2.7 million pounds).

Britain has a truly stupendous budget deficit of £175 billion a year. Various Conservative politicians are on the lookout for parts of our overall budget of about £700 billion that can be cut. Large areas of cuts that would not hurt the famous "front line services" by the Taxpayer's Alliance among others. I have suggested how it could be done previously. Much of it boils down to finding quangos that are particularly useless or even economically negative. So lets look at these candidates:

HEFC - The Higher Education Funding Council for England is a non-departmental public body of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (previously the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills) in the United Kingdom, which has been responsible for the distribution of funding to Universities and Colleges of Higher and Further Education in England since 1992. It was created by the Further and Higher Education Act 1992.

In 2007-08 HEFCE allocated £7.1 billion in public funds from the UK Government to universities and colleges in England to "support them in delivering high quality education, research and related activities". It only funds the institutions and does not give grants or loans to individual students.

So since this has been given to Professor Jones as boss of the CRU which is only tangentially part of the University of East Anglia & as such it is not going for eduction they seem, at the very least, to have been pushing the envelope of their remit. They are giving so much money, so easily for "research" which has been conducted unscientifically, fraudulently & so poorly as to be scientifically worthless, allegedly "losing" the data on which it is based. Professor Jones is on record as saying of that data "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it" & then, following an FoI enquiry, that it had been lost. At the very best that means his alleged findings are worthless & no sort of science.

When an organisation has enough money both to spend on things which are not its remit & which turns out to be wasted onn junk then there is something wrong. If they are doing their main job adequately then they have a lot too much money to play with & as a rough estimate I would expect an accountant with experience in restructuring companies in bankruptcy would cut it by a minimum of 1/3rd without doing significant harm to its real remit. Digby Jones would probably put it very much higher but lets move cautiously.

So that can be £2.4 billion saved.

Of course this assumes that there is not an overall government conspiracy to produce fake scares & that they are merely serving as a conduit for such fraud. But again lets be cautious.

NERC Natural Environment Research Council is a British research council that supports research, training and knowledge transfer activities in the environmental sciences. Budget £400 million. The Natural Environment Research Council delivers independent research, survey, training and knowledge transfer in the environmental sciences, to advance knowledge of planet Earth as a complex, interacting system.

This is clearly a misuse of the word "independent" since it is dependent on NERC payment, NERC's website is long on pictures of polar bears & quotes of how "the climate change issue is every bit as serious as the press make it out to be" which if scientific would be the question not the answer. However working down through layers of information for press, policymakers, other bureaucrats etc. etc. what they have actually done for that £400 million comes down to :

Role of forests in storing carbon becomes clearer (Trees in African rainforests are getting bigger and are trapping more carbon)
Arctic sea ice is receding and thinning
Effectiveness of iron fertilisation in doubt
Bumblebees benefit from varied landscapes
Algae adopt Cheshire Cat defence
DNA study illuminates ageing in swifts
Solving the riddle of the smell of the sea
How do predators know where to look for food?
Keeping moorland carbon underground
Researching a sustainable path to bioenergy
Carbon capture and storage in China
Probing the causes of the Sichuan quake
Forecasting floods across the nation
UK rivers still too acidic for sensitive species (waterways are recovering from acid rain)
Identifying looming tipping points
Quantifying effects of man-made atmospheric nitrogen on the ocean
Taiwanese typhoons bury carbon at sea
World's biggest digital geological mapping initiative
From molten metal to blood clots
Tougher ozone controls needed
Protecting plants without pesticides

Of these the first is an expected beneficial effect of more CO2 though I bet it doesn't say that. Arctic ice is not receding. Carbon capture is not a technology in non-laboratory use anywhere & is just the next eco-hype to avoid nuclear & draw attention away from the failure of windmills. Acid rain is simply another eco fake scare. "Looming tipping points" presuppose everything about warming is already proven.

For £400 million a year this doesn't look like much particularly since this is 1 1/2 times what is needed to make Britain the world leader in the industrialisation of space. I know that most, though not all eco-fascists want us not to spend money in space until we have solved every problem on Earth but surely spending money on giving bees a better view should not take such an absolute priority over supporting one of the world's (well humanity's) fastest growing industries currently worth $6 billion a year to us but which could be doubled just as a start.

I have previously dealt with NERC when in 2006 its boss Alan Thorpe challenged climate sceptics in the Guardian & elsewhere to a public debate & then went into purdah when the challenge was taken up. The challenge indicates this grant giving body had eschewed any attempt at scientific impartiality, the vanishing indicates he wasn't expecting to have to back up the challenge & knows perfectly well it cannot be factually supported.

I very much doubt if any of the "research" NERC is supporting is adding anything significant to the sum of human knowledge & some of it is clearly subtracting. If any part was it could get funding for conventional sources. NERC appears to be a bureaucracy which exists purely to push its own eco-fascist agenda.

Abolishing it would save £400 million without coming within even hailing distance of any front line service.

And These 2 make up £9.3m of the £13.7m. I do not know where the rest came from but with £2.8 billion saved if I was the minister I would be looking at the donors of the rest. If they were proportionately equally useless that would allow savings of another £1.3 billion. That's a total of £4.1 billion. Not going to balance the budget on its own but in practice no less than the total cuts suggested by the Labour or Liberal Democrats have produced.
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Science is vital to the growth of our society, more vital in my opinion than any political debate between "socialists" & "capitalists" (who are usually neither). Government should be prepared to fund it even, indeed particularly, in a recession. Nonetheless the investment is only beneficial if it is directed to improve the science. However there is strong evidence that government funding, as presently done, has a net negative effect. Funding designed to "prove" catastrophic global warming clearly has so in spades as well as being intellectually & morally corrupt & damaging to all the basic principles without which science is replaced by what Richard Feynman called cargo cult science. Such patronage by those without understanding may be the difference between Renaissance Italy & the post Renaissance period.

I do think government should promote real research, but not by directly acting as gatekeeper to what and who gets funded. It should:

1 - Fund an X-Prize Foundation or indeed several for different branches of science
2 - provide special assistance to individuals & small businesses seeking to register international patents & copyright
3 - Abolish the employer's National Insurance contribution, or for self employed the entire amount, for researchers involved in technology research.*

1 & 2 don't workm until we have actually achieved the technology promised & so would cost nothing for several years. Then it would still be highly profitable almost no matter how large the investment. Jerry Pournelle had this to say, in testimony to Congress, on real technology investment.

Knowledge gained through the X programs helped U.S. aerospace firms to dominate the world industry. In the 1970’s US high technology, particularly aircraft, were the largest single cash export of the nation. They were very important in making up the deficits in our balance of payments.

*HT Mark Wadsworth for #3

MORE TURIN SHROUD - THE HERESY THAT CAN BE PRINTED

2009-11-28T12:28:00.005Z

The Scotsman has printed up a follow up letter of mine to my previous Turin Shroud one. This was in response to a wrong but sensible reply pointing out that the record of the Shroud goes back to southern France in 1389. Once again neither they, nor anybody else, according to Google, have published any of my now 3 letters on the climate fraud (though the aberdeen P&J has, to its credit, published a 2nd letter decrying BBC censorship of the news). Spooky.

That there was a holy shroud mentioned in 1389, as Stephen Moreton says (Letters, 27 November) is beyond dispute. Indeed, across Europe there were several of them. Those who believe what we know as the Turin Shroud was made by Leonardo for the Savoy family assume the Savoys had first purchased an old one, going cheap because it had been discredited as a fraud, and after keeping it out of sight for 50 years substituted the present creation, thereby giving the new one a spurious history.

Looking at the current one it is clear that, whatever it is, it is not an obvious fake. Moreover, the muscle definition of the body is simply far beyond any medieval art. It is either a genuine miracle, but showing serious errors on God's part, or an article created by some unrivalled Renaissance artist using a camera obscura (something da Vinci was interested in) and recently available silver sulphate (he was also interested in chemistry). If that technique is accepted, a medieval origin is also impossible.

I do not exclude the possibility that the universe has some sort of self-aware creator, but I do exclude as unreasonable that He would have spent time creating the shroud, in France in the 14th century, in a way we can now duplicate, and got it wrong in this way.

For God to impersonate da Vinci is not quite as great an achievement as for da Vinci to impersonate God.

Last line highlighted because I am pleased with its studied arrogance. The self aware creator may be the human race.

CLIMATE FRAUD - CONSERVATIVE RE-POSITIONING

2009-11-27T11:31:00.006Z

John Redwood, on his blog, has called for a public enquiry.

It would be helpful if in the UK there was a proper enquiry into what has been happening to the evidence and its interpretation at East Anglia. Where public money is being spent on scientific research we need to be assured the standards and independence of the research are worthy of public support.

On Question Time last night the BBC did actually allow a question on the emails & fraud. Melanie Philips, who has long written that it is indeed a fraud was put in the first position, always the hardest because you can't marshal your thoughts, everybody else gets to pick you apart & at least on this occasion, you have no comeback. Nonetheless she put the case cogently |& accurately. The BBC's own guest, comedian Marcus Brigstocke said that he had helped perform scientific experiments in Greenland & seen with his own eyes that it was melting away which is simply a lie. Conservative David Davis showed movement by saying that while warming is definitely happening (it definitely isn't now) there was doubt it was catastrophic, which destroys the entire case cutting half the economy. Later on Andrew Neil's Politics show Michael Portillo said roughly the same. A silly woman on QT & another on Neil's (Diane Abbot MP) said the Cockermouth flood "proves" catastrophic warming which may fit the BBC's assertions of 2 years ago, during the floods then, that CAGW would mean more floods but not their assertion the previous year that it would mean droughts. In fact the Cockermouth flood could have been averted if the eco-fascists had not vetoed it, which does not affect whether warming is real but does show that mitigation is infinitely more practical than what they propose.

I Have written this summary of the global warming theory & its faults on Charles Crawford's blogoir but think it worth putting here too. Strangely enough LibDem Norman Fraser, in his role as the ghost of Christmas past, has taken to making his normal illiberal assertions there, as always without stooping to facts.
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That CO2 absorbs more infra-red than oxygen & nitrogen is not in dispute. The question is whether this is a catastrophic, serious, trivial or minuscule effect.

CO2 makes up about 3 parts in every 10,000 of the atmosphere which is up by about 1 part. Calculations have suggested that a doubling would increase temperature by about 0.3 C - the rest of the alleged catastrophic warming assumes positive feedback systems, primarily increasing heat putting more water vapour in the air (water vapour being orders of magnitude more important as a greenhouse gas) & also assuming no negative feedback (primarily more cloud cover which is highly reflective).

However 0.3 C is a minor effect compared to variations we have seen - the little ice age being significantly colder, the medieval warm period being about 2 C warmer & the Climate Optimum (9,000 to 5,000BC) possibly as much as 4C warmer. In none of these did we see the positive feedback system required. That we stand on the cusp of a global tipping point & have done so for millions, even billions of years without tipping into runaway warming is inherently unlikely . It is orders of magnitude more likely that negative feedback effects predominate which is why we have relative stability - we are probably much closer to a cooling tipping point where increased snow cover increases reflectivity increasing snow since we have had ice ages as recently as 10,000BC but the current eco-fascist scare is not concerned with that.

Beyond that only 3% of Earth's CO2 production is of human cause, farting cows make more & termites much more.

Beyond that there are geo-engineering things we could do now to induce cooling (putting SO2 into the stratosphere) & that we have the capability to do in a generation to induce warming (square miles of orbiting tinfoil mirrors) if the human race does not succumb to fascist Ludditry

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Meanwhile, nearly a week after it broke across the world online, our media still censor as much as they can. This from Aberdeen is the only letter I can find on it & since i have sent 2 almost everywhere I can say for a fact that it is not that the press aren't getting letters but that they are censoring.

CLIMATE FRAUD - POLITICAL EFFECT OF ALARMISM CRACKING WORLDWIDE

2009-11-26T13:55:00.004Z

Via WattsUpWithThat is the news of cracks in the political wall. The Australian opposition Liberal Party is fracturing on the issue of global warming.

The Liberal Party is in turmoil with the resignations of five frontbenchers from their portfolios this afternoon in protest against the emissions trading scheme.

Tony Abbott, Sophie Mirabella, Tony Smith and Senators Nick Minchin and Eric Abetz have all quit their portfolios because they cannot vote for the legislation.

Senate whip Stephen Parry has also relinquished his position...

The resignations began this afternoon after Mr Abbott and Senator Minchin confronted Mr Turnbull,leader urging him to put off a vote on the scheme until February.

Mr Turnbull refused so Mr Abbott handed in his resignation.

"This is a very difficult decision for me. I've always regarded myself as a very loyal party man," he said...

Mr Abbott says he urged Mr Turnbull to reconsider his position after being inundated with calls and emails from voters.

"The phone lines have been in meltdown with people saying that the Liberal Party would not be doing its job as an Opposition simply to pass this thing without the scrutiny that people calling my office think it demands," he said.

After Mr Abbott announced his resignation, news that the other four had also quit quickly followed.

The party's emissions trading spokesman, Ian Macfarlane, is now in Mr Turnbull's office.

As the revolt unfolds in Parliament House sources say the Government has offered to gag debate on the ETS legislation, which is now underway, in order to bring on a vote.

It is understood that the offer is being considered but it is thought such a move would be unlikely to succeed.

Special meeting

The Senate is due to sit until Monday to vote on the scheme and Senators Minchin, Abetz and Parry say they will stay in their positions until then.

A special meeting of Liberal senators is now under way.

The Opposition's spokeswoman for early childhood and women, Ms Mirabella, says she also cannot support the scheme.

She says she decided to resign after the party room meeting on the ETS legislation "left a bitter taste in my mouth".

"It's not a decision that you take lightly," she told Sky News...."It's not a matter of desertion. It's a matter of not being able to vote for bills that are so bad under any measurement," she said.

And she conceded she has never witnessed such extraordinary scenes during her time in Parliament.

"Quite frankly I hope not to experience another week like this," she said.

Yesterday Senators Mitch Fifield, Mathias Cormann and Brett Mason also offered to resign from their frontbench positions.

This is actually rather creditable since resigning is what one is supposed to do when one seriously disagrees. In Britain ministers just leak that it wasn't their fault. This remark from Mr Turnball also suggests that he is acting ethically, from a different point & that this breach is indeed purely because it has only recently become obvious that warming catastrophism is a fraud.

'This has now become a question not simply of the environmental responsibility of the Liberal Party but its integrity,' Turnbull said amidst the turmoil. 'We agreed with the government on this deal. We must retain our credibility of taking action on climate change.'

He is actively not saying that he now believes in alarmism but that previous promises must be kept. If the promises were obtained through fraudulent claims, as they were, & if they will produce unjustified costs to the people they represent, I don't think they should be binding.

Would that some British politicians were willing to say the same in the Commons.

Also from WattsUp it turns out that the New Zealanders were also fixing their own warming figures even before the CRU got hold of it & refusing to make data available for verification. Exactly the same tactics & they remain completely incompatible with real science.

What did we find? First, the station histories are unremarkable. There are no reasons for any large corrections. But we were astonished to find that strong adjustments have indeed been made.

About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming. All the adjustments increased or even created a warming trend, with only one (Dunedin) going the other way and slightly reducing the original trend.

The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming, as documented below. There is nothing in the station histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr Salinger and NIWA have not revealed why they did this.

In a related matter I asked this question

Can anybody name 2 scientists who aren't paid directly or indirectly by government (that includes Friends of the Earth) or charities/foundations specifically committed to alarmism who have said catastrophic warming is real. That excludes statements along the lines of "most of the 20thC warming (0.6C) may be anthropogenic" but genuine catastrophism.

on 3 catastrophic warming sites & one sceptical one. The results are:

Realclimate post 137 - one answer asking me to define catastrophic which I did & then no answer.

Brave New Climate - question censored

Deltoid - question censored Deltoid comments are worth reading simply because they are an example of directed mob behaviour - that by starting with people with an agenda, many of whom are genuinely prominent "climate scientists" & censoring serious comments on alternative sides, people can work themselves into persuading themselves of the most obvious lies eg "If there were any damning info, as is being alleged, it would come out in the peer review process."

And on the other side WattsUpWithThat again where the question stood but nobody came up with any names.

So nobody anywhere is able to name 2, or apparently even 1 prominent scientist, anywhere in the world, who openly supports the catastrophic warming claims who is independent of funding by government or committed alarmists. 'Nuff said.

TURIN SHROUD LETTER - SOMETHING UNCONTROVERSIAL FOR ONCE

2009-11-26T09:59:00.006Z

I have this letter in today's Scotsman. It is a reworking of this blog I recently did & is in response to other letters on the subject recently. The highlighted line is excised. Saying that the images of Christ prior to the Renaissance vary widely, some bearded & some not etc., but that almost all those since have been the face depicted & thus the face of Leonardo da Vinci may have been a step too far.

If the Turin Shroud were genuinely caused by Christ's body miraculously transmigrating through it while it was wrapped round him the marks would be as wide as the circumference of the front half of a body rather than the diameter as it is. It is also taller at the front than the back because the face is larger than real faces. It is unlikely that God would have made such elementary errors.

The alternative is that it was manufactured using what amounts to a photographic process using silver sulphate, by some Renaissance artist with a unique knowledge of anatomy & attitude to heresy. That is almost certainly Leonardo da Vinci.

I do not think that seriously reduces its importance. If art is the process of evoking awe & empathy the Crucifixion is the ultimate subject & Leonardo, whose face appears to be the one used for Christ, & which since then has become how Christ is depicted, has created, unknown to the world for centuries a work of art which makes the Mona Lisa look like a painting.

I have also sent 2 letters (well 1 1/2 because the 2nd was a rewritten version of the first) to papers everywhere on the leaked global warming alarmist information. Google search doesn't show any of them published. It seems some things are nowadays just too heretical to be discussed & it is interesting to see where the divisions are.

Professor Colin McInnes also has a letter in it attempting the Sisyphean task of educating Professors of "architecture & alternative energy" (Howard Liddell) in the basics of economics, engineering & physics.

BIG ENGINEERING 39 HIGH SPEED TRAINS IN VACUUM TUNNELS

2009-11-25T10:02:00.007Z

Been a while since I did one of my mega-projects - mainly because on all the big stuff I have already shown how easy it is to change the world. However since, like war, much of progress is getting there fastest with the mostest here is the ultimate in high speed on Earth.

The advantage of a mag-lev train moving in vacuum is that it has effectively no friction restraints. It can thus move at any speed, far faster in theory even than stratospheric jets, & that since there are no energy losses in movement, though there are in accelerating to that speed, running costs are very low. Disadvantages are that getting in and out is a fairly complicated process & turning tight corners at that sort of speed not pleasant (though if cornering the train can tilt & since there are no windows all you would feel is a slight increase in gravity pressure which is kinda cool). Accelerating at 1 g (10 m/s^2 = 22mph acceleration a second would mean it takes 45 seconds to accelerate to 1,000 mph by which time one has covered 62 miles). Since that acceleration is horizontal while gravity is vertical the combined G would be 1.41 which is perfectly acceptable sitting down, though seats would have to turn round before deceleration at the end. However it means that this is a system which would be optimum only for long distance travel. The other disadvantage is that building hundreds or thousands of miles of tunnels & keeping them airtight is not cheap. Vacuuming is probably not as big a problem as appears because it is only a 1 atmosphere pressure differential & engineers regularly work with thousands. Where air travel is the only competitor it is an option worth looking at.

A vactrain is a proposed, as-yet-unbuilt design for future high-speed railroad transportation. This would entail building maglev lines through evacuated (air-less) or partly evacuated tunnels. Though the technology is currently being investigated for development of regional networks, advocates have suggested establishing vactrains for transcontinental routes to form a global subway network. The lack of air resistance could permit vactrains to move at extremely high speeds, up to 6000-8000 km/h (4000-5000 mph or 5-6 times the speed of sound at sea level and standard conditions), according to the Discovery Channel's Extreme Engineering program "Transatlantic Tunnel".

Theoretically, vactrain tunnels could be built deep enough to pass under oceans, thus permitting very rapid intercontinental travel - wiki ctd

The optimum first development would be something 200-300 miles long connecting really large & wealthy cities separated by sea & thus currently only accessible by air. Japan, Seoul, Beijing are slightly further apart than that but not a bad fit, between some of the Japanese islands are a shorter distance. Since this is tectonically active I would need some convincing however.

My other suggestion is from London. There is already a tunnel connecting it to Paris, 2 of the world's great cities but an alternative would be connecting to Amsterdam, still a major city & one where English is almost ubiquitous. A straight line from there passes just north of Berlin & then Warsaw. It would require some bend to extend it to Moscow (1500 m) but there is a lot of room to manage it. Rail's major problem for the commuter is that it goes only to very restricted locations. Hour & a half from the centre of London to that of Moscow is pretty wonderful. Even an hour in traffic at each end making it 3 1/2 hours from Brent Cross to Krylatskoe isn't shabby.

Vac-trains have been proposed before. In the 1970s Robert Salter suggested

A route through the Northeast Megalopolis was laid out, with nine stations, one each in DC, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and two in Connecticut. Commuter rail systems were mapped for the San Francisco and New York areas, the commuter version having longer, heavier trains, to be propelled less by air and more by gravity than the intercity version. The New York system was to have three lines, terminating in Babylon, Paterson, Huntington, Elizabeth, White Plains, and St George.

The killer argument against

In Salters day "Enormous construction costs (estimated as high as US$1 trillion) were the primary reason why Salter's proposal was never built" which is hardly surprising when the entire US economy was only a couple of trillion.

Here also is a link to discussion of the idea - it gets a rough ride but that is what such discussion is for.

However times & technology change. Tunnel boring technology in particular. Between 1982 & 2000 Norway built over 750 km of tunnels at between £3.2 million & £10mill per km. London-Amsterdam is 356 km. At an average of £6.6 million X 2 tunnels come out at £4.7 billion. Double that for airtighting & double it again for track & because everything costs more & takes longer (#119) we come out at £20 billion. That is not a sum to take lightly though it is less than the proposed high speed rail link between London & Scotland which many favour, though I do not.

Even if it isn't profitable it may be financially viable in terms of how it enhances property values. That is why the cold-hearted and calculating property developers at Canary Wharf offered to pay for the entire Jubilee Line extension themselves. They did their figures and worked out that £400 million spent on the extension would have boosted the value of their office blocks by over £1,000 million.. A few years of world average economic growth would certainly expand the market. Moreover technology didn't stop in Norway in 2000. I don't know if tunneling costs have further reduced but it is certainly possible & I can imagine that it would now be possible to build a better tunnel borer, better than this tiddler
possibly even run by one of Hyperion's reactors, which would chew through ground steadily at a much reduced price. If it doesn't exist now it is the sort of technology bottleneck which could be considerably eased by an international technology prize. Also there should be economies of scale in longer tunnels. Indeed looking at the falling cost of tunneling & the ever increasing share that lawyering plays in getting permission to build on the surface, which contributes to the £26 billion price of a London-Scotland high speed train, we may well be close to the stage of crossover.

Finally an idea which is not entirely mine, I wrote of it here, but has not been applied to such trains - just as accelerating a train takes electricity, deceleration produces current. Such power can be stored with high efficiency in flywheels which can, in turn, power that train starting on the next stage or another in the opposite direction. If so energy costs are pretty much limited to the inherent inefficiency of any system. Not only the fastest transport in the world but +80% of the energy reused as well.

UPDATE Colin McInnes has sent this link to an alternative which, by boring through the centre of the Earth allows for gravity to provide the motive power. However with flywheels already saving approx 80% of the power I think the energy costs of core cooling would significantly exceed the saving. We will probabnly have to make do with taking the long way. http://www.mprize.org/?pagename=mj_mprize_learn

On such concepts it would be theoretically possible to accelerate the train to above 16,000 mph. This, at 1G acceleration would take 12 minutes & a distance of 1,600 miles. Because of the rate at which the train would drop due to the Earth's curvature beyond that speed we would perceive negative gravity. This could be obviated by the train swinging over & running on the roof. At 1 G acceleration for 6,000miles & the same deceleration we could reach Australia in 47 minutes, reaching a peak speed of 31,000mph and achieving a maximum negative gravity of 93% of normal gravity. This is only 5 minutes longer than the direct route. Heinlein's book Friday contains this method of transport though for lesser distances & speeds.

CLIMATE FRAUD - BBC NEWSNIGHT REPORT IT

2009-11-24T09:51:00.006Z

The BBC Newsnight have actually reported this fraud & I have to admit the video which is (or was earlier) available here is well balanced.

I commented on Mark Wadsworth, from which this is taken

That is a a good piece from Newsnight. It has always been apparent that Paxman didn't believe the warming scam but knew which side his bread was buttered having produced this sarcasm -

“I have neither the learning nor the experience to know whether the doomsayers are right about the human causes of climate change. But I am willing to acknowledge that people who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that it is the consequence of our own behaviour. I assume that this is why the BBC's coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago.”
Jeremy Paxman, BBC "news" presenter

Clearly he has recognised change in the wind. Nonetheless the BBC use Newsnight, which has a very small audience, to put out inconvenient facts while the popular news programmes were doing a puff piece on George Osborne's commitment to alarmism. They did the same when they put their only report on the way NATO police had been allowed to dissect Serbs, while alive, to sell the body parts to our hospitals. Until it is getting EXTENSIVE coverage on the 10 o'clock news we are still seeing censorship.

Channel 4 also had a quick mention 18 mins & 18 seconds inasking an alarmist scientist about it & for balance, agreeing with him.

Much more credibly Andrew Neil had a real debate with Professor Singer V Bob Watson. Andrew Neil recently chaired questions at a lecture by Ian Plimer at which he acted professionally & presumably understands what is going on.

In the rest of the media George Moonbat, the Guardian's standard bearer on all things eco-fascist has said

It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

... But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.

But we should beware of warming alarmists bearing gifts & this article, headed "The leaked exchanges are disturbing, but it would take a conspiracy of a very different order to justify sceptics' claims" looks like a damage limitation exercise in which Professor Jones is to be amputated to stop the bleeding. "They damage the credibility of three or four scientists" which is less than some single emails, having more than 3 recipients, do. He then says what, to him, would be required to prove warming a scam & it is essentially the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with Jews changed to alarmists. Obviously & presumably coincidentally (?) he is setting up the same straw man that Realclimate did when they said "There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords". Personally I find the protocols a bit overdone & would be suspicious of such an absolute confession but I am not Moonbat.

Elsewhere Lord Lawson, the one British politician who has an unblemished record on alarmism, has called for an enquiry on this. I have some doubts on this since government enquiries are usually ways to firstly defuse damaging stories until they have gone away & secondly a way to apply whitewash (see the Hutton enquiry on Iraq or the one on the Scottish Parliament scandal). It also seems to me that a very good enquiry is going on online without any need for "assistance" from elderly but respectable judges. A criminal investigation of what is palpably fraud in which all involved, including the politicians who were paymasters here, would be desirable but that is very different from a government enquiry.

By coincidence Lord Lawson has also announced the formation of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation is unique. We are an all-party and non-party think-tank and a registered educational charity which, while open-minded on the contested science of global warming, is deeply concerned about the costs and other implications of many of the policies currently being advocated. On the eve of the UN climate change conference at Copenhagen, designed to secure agreement on such policies, this has become particularly timely.

Through our website www.thegwpf.org and in other ways, we shall be subjecting both the claims of the damage that might be caused by any future warming, and the costs and consequences of alternative policies that might be put in place, to dispassionate analysis based on hard evidence and economic rigour. We are in no sense 'anti-environmental'. There is a wide range of important environmental issues, which call for an equally wide range of policy responses. Our concern is solely with the possible effects of any future global warming and the policy responses that may evoke. But we are also aware of the curse of world poverty, and of the crucial importance of growth and economic development in the poorer countries of the world as the only serious means of alleviating it.

The Foundation is headed by its Director, Dr Benny Peiser, who founded (in 1997) and continues to edit the world's leading climate policy network

PS I have put a comment on the Guardian saying this & adding "Incidentally George says "Had I known that it was this easy to rig the evidence, I wouldn't have wasted years of my life". A couple of years ago a Guardian journalist fronted an hoax designed to take in the sceptical community & prove their credulity. In this it abjectly failed being rumbled within minutes. Compare & contrast the many years repeated frauds by Mann & co have been accepted by alarmists. Would it be possible for Monbiot, or indeed the Guardian as a whole, with their newfound understand of fraud, to make an educated guess as to who the people that Guardian journalists is fronting fraud for are?". In the best traditions of that fakenewspaper i expect it to be censored but will let you know if it isn't or even if the guardian acknowledge its deletion.

CLIMATE FRAUD - I TRY TO BE CYNICAL BUT ITS HARD TO KEEP UP

2009-11-23T13:31:00.006Z

For the first few days the news has been about the emails because they are accessible. Now we are starting to see people having had the time to check the data. I am certainly not qualified to do this but it seems to be very much the sort of thing one would expect from pseudo scientists rather than the real sort.

Via Devil's Kitchen:

The hacked e-mails were damning, but the problems they had handling their own data at CRU are a dagger to the heart of the global warming “theory.” There is a large file of comments by a programmer at CRU called HARRY_READ_ME documenting that their data processing and modeling functions were completely out of control.

They fudged so much that NOTHING that came out of CRU can have ANY believability. If the word can be gotten out on this and understood it is the end of the global warming myth. This much bigger than the e-mails. For techie take on this see:
------
There is another problem: the values are anomalies, whereas the 'public' .grim files are actual values.
------
How handy - naming two different files with exactly the same name and relying on their location to differentiate! Aaarrgghh!!
------
dtr2cld is not the world's most complicated program. Wheras cloudreg is, and I immediately found a mistake! Scanning forward to 1951 was done with a loop that, for completely unfathomable reasons, didn't include months! So we read 50 grids instead of 600!!!
------
This isn't science, it's gradeschool for people with big data sets.
------
the filenames in the _mon and _ann directories are identical, but the contents are not. And the only difference is that one directory is apparently 'monthly' and the other 'annual' - yet both contain monthly files.
-------
As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless.

It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective - since we're using an off-the-shelf product that isn't documented sufficiently to say that.
--------
There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found.

WattsUpWithThat has

As soon as the emails became public showing Professor Jones saying had used "Nature's trick .... to hide the decline"

However, Jones denied manipulating evidence and insisted his comment had been taken out of context. “The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially, as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward,” he said in a statement Saturday.

Ok fine, but how Dr. Jones, do you explain this?

There’s a file of code also in the collection of emails and documents from CRU. A commenter named Neal on climate audit writes:

"People are talking about the emails being smoking guns but I find the remarks in the code and the code more of a smoking gun. The code is so hacked around to give predetermined results that it shows the bias of the coder. In other words make the code ignore inconvenient data to show what I want it to show. The code after a quick scan is quite a mess. Anyone with any pride would be to ashamed of to let it out public viewing."
-------
Computes regressions on full, high and low pass Esper et al. (2002) series,
; anomalies against full NH temperatures and other series.
; CALIBRATES IT AGAINST THE LAND-ONLY TEMPERATURES NORTH OF 20 N

This all rather reminds me of the findings of Professor Wegman when he was called in by Congress to say whether Mann's Hockey Stick maths were correct, as he insisted, or wrong as Stephen McIntyre said. His conclusion is limited by the fact that he is a gentleman & writing for Congress & I assume has not had access to the raw data here but:

Findings

In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling. We also comment that they were attempting to draw attention to the discrepancies in MBH98 and MBH99, and not to do paleoclimatic temperature reconstruction. Normally, one would try to select a calibration dataset that is representative of the entire dataset. The 1902-1995 data is not fully appropriate for calibration and leads to a misuse in principal component analysis.

However, the reasons for setting 1902-1995 as the calibration point presented in the
narrative of MBH98 sounds reasonable, and the error may be easily overlooked by someone not trained in statistical methodology. We note that there is no evidence that Dr. Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimatology studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians.In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of
coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface. This committee does not believe that web logs are an appropriate forum for the scientific debate on this issue.
It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has
been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.

Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.

We are clearly seeing persons not even competent to do statistical analysis masquerading as scientists This is snake oil of the first order & since politicians do have real scientists, like Professor Wegman, to call on the fact that they & our obedient journalists have deliberately limited themselves to these fraudsters & proclaimed them to be the scientific "consensus" & provided them with such excessive amounts of money (£13.7 million to Jones) cannot be coincidence. The only answer which remotely fits the facts is that since "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." (Mencken) they quite deliberately hired these charlatans to pump up a scare story because, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they needed another hobgoblin.

This has a long way to run yet - these people are just the hired assassins, it is the hirers who count. The BBC, naturally, are still censoring.

Richard Black of the BBC has been muzzled. It is official the BBC is involved in a massive cover up.

Update 2309: Because comments were posted quoting excerpts apparently from the hacked Climate Research Unit e-mails, and because there are potential legal issues connected with publishing this material, we have temporarily removed all comments until we can ensure that watertight oversight is in place.
(comment 09:40:01)

CLIMATE FRAUD - THE MSM CENSORSHIP CONTINUES BUT THE NEWS KEEPS GROWING

2009-11-22T12:51:00.006Z

The files revealed by hacking the CRU continue to gather momentum from the original Air Vent site to Devil's Kitchen, Biased BBC , Bishop Hill , Mr Eugenides etc in the UK & WattsUpWithThat, Climate Audit, Andrew Bolt The Register overseas on the net & remain censored on the MSM. Mark Wadsworth has read the papers. Michael Mann's RealClimate is, naturally censoring comments. This morning during the Andrew Marr show the BBC news censored it & in the papers round up 2 warming alarmist puff pieces were read out (on how Obama really intends to do something & another threat to polar bears) but the main story was entirely censored. What did we do before the net - well we got lied to & led by the noses by the fascists as the lies about Yugoslavia prove. The MSM cannot plug this information hole. It has the feel of an electronic Berlin Wall falling. There is no way that the BBC is ever again going to fool people into thinking it is a trustworthy news organisation.

While not having any intention of going through the lot of it I Did check up pages 33, 32 & 31 (randomly selected later ones) of these emails & found these on 31
#################################

Michael Mann on hiding some data whose origins researchers want to keep hiddenI propose, hoping that their is no loud objection, that we will include a line in our response indicating that we have confirmed that we get similar results using the GKSS Erik simulation. We'll leave it at that. We don't need to show that result necessarily, unless the editor/reviewers demand to see proof, and we certainly don't have to reveal where we got the GKSS data. As I mentioned, there are enough groups out there that now have it, that VS and Zorita would not know the source, and we would not reveal it.

We feel as if we cannot completely hide the fact that we have confirmed our result w/ GKSS, hence the "compromise" suggested above. Meanwhile, we can pursue a more thorough, official collaborative effort in the future.

At this point , it is fair to

Keith Briffa

say that this adjustment was arbitrary and the link between Bristlecone pine growth and CO2 is , at the very least, arguable

Martin Juckes
At this point , it is fair to

say that this adjustment was arbitrary and the link between Bristlecone pine

growth and CO2 is , at the very least, arguable
---------------------------
and I am surprised by the extreme weakness of the evidence. There is

one

> study of 27 strip-bark pines which shows that they clearly developed

> anomalous growth around 1850. Attributing this to CO2 is odd, to say

the

> least

Raymond S Bradley

There are other examples of how Jack Eddy's grey literature publication was misused. In

a paper in Science by Zielinski et al. (1994) [v.264, p.xxx xxxx xxxx]--attached-- they

P Jones

in addition to a poleward shift in the storm tracks and an > increase in their average intensity, there is a decrease in the number > of storms . This is probably too much for the bullet, so that a less > specific version may be required. > > I think the whole bullet could be: > > Mid-latitude westerly winds have shifted polewards and stengthened since > about the 1960s, with associated changes in storms [ie dropping any mention of the decrease in numbers indeed that the only change is that "associated" with strengthening this may not be completly lying but is dishonest & certainly not sciene - Neil]

reproduced [in Figure 1c] a similarly schematic version of Holocene temperatures giving

the following citation, "Taken from J. A. Eddy and R. S. Bradley, Earth-quest 5 (insert)

(1991), as modified from J. T. Houghton, G. J. Jenkins, J. J. Ephraums, Climate Change,

The IPCC Scientific Assessment (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1990)."

But I had nothing to do with that one!

So, that's how a crude fax from Jack Eddy became the definitive IPCC record on the last

millennium!

WARMING ALARMISTS DELIBERATE FRAUD PROVEN - Professor Phil Jones got £13.7 million for what he has boasted to colleagues is fraud & should go to jail

2009-11-21T10:45:00.009Z

Somebody, probably Russians but perhaps somebody inside disgusted with what was going on, has hacked into The CRU (main world centre for global warming data collection) files & released a large amount of data & emails. I like to think it was Russian hackers, it is the romantic in me, but in any case some of the things these people have committed to email are astonishing/ For Example Professor Phil Jones

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.

Gary Funkhouser

I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material, but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that. It was pretty funny though - I told Malcolm what you said about my possibly being too Graybill-like in evaluating the response functions - he laughed and said that's what he thought at first also. The data's tempting but there's too much variation even within stands. I don't think it'd be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have

So no question then that these people & the people they were writing to, were perfectly well aware that they were deliberately falsifying the data to produce the appearance of global warming.

For this Professor Jones has received £13.7 million (that is about 1/3rd, adjusting for inflation, the £2.5 million the Great Train robbers got between them, but the collateral damage is far greater running into billions.

Once again we see that the entire warming scam is deliberately fraudulent but this time there is written evidence.

In Blackadder "The criminal's vanity always makes them make one tiny but fatal mistake. Theirs was to have their entire conspiracy printed and published in plain manuscript" but that was in an anachronistic 18thC & today they have used email. If this is what so many of them were putting in writing & reading think what they must have been saying over a beer. It is impossible that anybody in any part of the scientific community with any sort of regular communication with the Climate Research Unit (CRU), including the editors of Nature mentioned above, can have been unaware or unsuspicious of this. Those actively complicit in crime should be imprisoned. Those involved by inaction should never work in any scientific institution again. Indeed it will be impossible to describe any institution which wishes to retain any such frauds as in a scientific institution.

Since the money was provided by government it is unlikely that those at the top paying our money for it were not deliberately & actively guilty & impossible to believe any of them weren't at least passively so.

The BBC has reported on the hacking but carefully censored any mention of what was actually said which puts them in the position of saying of Auschwitz only that anybody who says anything about it is breaking German law. This has just broken but even so the lack of MSM coverage is indicative. By any objective standards this is the major news story of the day. I think, once again, we are seeing the blogsphere as the only trustworthy source of real news. Incidentally it looks like Palin is about right when she recently answered a repetition of the question what papers she reds by saying "I read Newsmax and the Frontiersman and Wall Street Journal and everything online" but I may be proved wrong & see the dead tree press giving the proof of the entire global warming story being built on massive & deliberate fraud as much coverage as they have of the original fraud. Any bets.

Either way congratulations to the hackers who brought these emails to the public. Links to the entire records further coverage is on The Reference Frame here & everywhere else shortly.

If it was Russian hackers who did this I will raise a glass to them & be glad that they, at least, live in a country which will not extradite hackers to foreign countries for things done in their own homes. That we learn of this today means that we live in a freer country because of them.

5TH Anniversay of A PLACE TO STAND

2009-11-20T10:24:00.007Z

I started this blog in November 2004, actually on the 14th, by putting up Milosevic's opening "trial" speech , some previous stuff from another page & a set of 12 programme suggestions made in response to a radio request for ideas. These still fit pretty well with what I am pushing now & are largely still things the MSM won't discuss. Some years later Ms Riddoch used 1 of them, a discussion of why Ireland's economy is growing & gave me an on air acknowledgement.

Looking back virtually everything holds up. Things I got factually wrong - I thought the Sun must have had Mark Oaten's outing on file for years & used it as a deliberate spoiler & the climate hoax. Falling for the hoax is the only thing which got me mentioned on Australian media but by holding up my hands to it & following up on it redeemed myself - certainly, as I pointed out at the time, the MSM fall for much more obvious hoaxes & don't hold their hands up. On balance I'm sure it did much more to discredit alarmist hoaxers than real science. I have been wrong several times in trusting to politicians. I was enthusiastic for the SNP's alleged conversion to Irish style growth. While there are people in the party who sincerely want that, the leader & deputy are quite obviously not & nothing has been done. I also thought Gordon Brown had the capacity to be a really very good PM. However in both cases they could have been & it was their error not mine. Still it makes me more cynical about politicians. Out of about 1.300 posts, almost all of them saying something controversial, that isn't bad.

Beyond those, while there are very many things which I said which weren't politically correct then & still aren't I cannot see anything on which I was actually wrong & not even anything on which opinion has clearly moved against me.

And that is the purpose of this blog. "Give me a place to stand & I will move the world" said Archimedes & he had got the orbital mechanics right, but to do it you have to get your fulcrum right & pull for a long time without any measurable movement. But once you change an orbit even slightly it can take an entirely new direction.

There has certainly been movement on nuclear power (all parties were opposed when I started); Yugoslavia (progressives now tend to think our leaders were wrong & nobody is willing to defend it, merely to censor); commercial space & X-Prizes; global warming (now rebranded climate change since it isn't warming); eco-fascism generally; the media (we have seen the net growing as a general & trusted source of news & the MSM deservedly failing); even on growth Irish style while we have only seen Brown take 2% off corporation tax it has become a subject of limited public debate & the Conservatives are, sort of, promising more. Whether on the blog or newspaper letters or comments on other blogs like John Redwood, Iain Dale, Mark Wadsworth & Douglas Carswell I have helped is impossible to say. The fact that Scotland's politicians are the most Luddite in UK on nuclear & warming would suggest not but I am not sure they are representative. In the process I have been banned from C4 discussion board, the Guardian, Herald, Scotsman, Your Scotland board, Sun & alternative history board (the last called me a liar for saying the Dargodan Massacre & Dissections happened in a thread discussing an alternate Kosovo war). Probably the one thing I can definitely say I achieved myself (well with Steuart Campbell's help) was the coverage of SEPA's fraud in claiming to have found radium at Dalgety bay which they are no longer pushing & which has probably spun off into the more limited cover recently of a similar lie about Dounraey. My expulsion from the LibDems coincided with their high water mark, having just been the 2nd party in Scotland in votes & in government & widely seen as more competent than the leading Labour party. I think their collapse has been for the same reason as my expulsion - divesting themselves of all liberal principles - but no newspaper has been willing to report my expulsion so I can take little credit. Had the party gone up as much as they have gone down they would be looking at being the government shortly.

I am proudest of having the first & still almost only news coverage of the Dragodan Massacre & of making myself unwelcome on various papers by saying they should report NATO's dissections of living people to steal their body parts. Following that would mainly be the engineering & science stuff - radiation hormesis - the various Big Engineering items - X-Prizes & a foundation - stuff on the Multiverse - Ascension Island spaceport - Scottish Tunnel Project - nuclear pulse launches. These don't generate as much reaction as I would like but there is a significant amount of original stuff there & it can all change the world in a massive way.

Over the years readership has risen to about 7,000 a month. This is not much compared to Dan Hannan's 80,000 or Iain Dale's quarter of a million but that can be multiplied by comments on other blogs etc & I am doing something more eclectic. I rarely do breaking news & am more interested in stuff which will be important in 1,000 years than today's headlines. For example if humanity survives to then & we have not cybernetically enhanced ourselves so much that we no longer use language the question of whether the language spoken by humans in star systems 10s of light years away will be derived from English or Chinese is being settled today by space development, with few headlines & fewer sensible ones, probably in China's favour.

My biggest disappointments are the things which everybody informed knows are lies but still monopolise the press. Yugoslavia, global warming, anti-nuclear lies, AIDS etc. To choose 1 - radiation hormesis which is the fact that at low levels not only is radiation not harmful, as the normal theory supposes, but that it is beneficial. I first wrote about this in May 2004 before I started this blog (it is on the "earlier stuff" section) & in my naivety really thought I had found something little known which would revolutionise attitudes to nuclear power saying

there can no longer be any intellectual doubt whatsoever. Radioactivity, up to 50mSv, is good for us.

This is reminiscent of the time when Galileo turned his telescope to the skies & for all time disproved the, then politically correct though scientifically shaky, theory that the Sun revolved around the Earth. True the Pope of the time forced him to recant or be dealt with as heretics then were. True it took a long time to bury. However from the time of Galileo's observations the official theory was dead. Unlike normal life, in science the truth always wins in the end though sometimes the end can be a long time coming & much pain may be caused in the interim. This is because while opinions change repeatable science results remain the same - that is the nature of the universe.

The effect of this proof on our nuclear power industries can hardly be underestimated since with the collapse of the theory go most of the fears that have so crippled it.

I still believe that but the end is clearly decades away. I found out that (A) nobody in the media was remotely interested in reporting truths, however exciting & I consider this infinitely more exciting than duckponds, which the establishment has invested political capital in the falsehood; (B) that nobody running government scientific institutions was more than marginally interested & such interest as they had was to blow smoke across the results & change the subject (many individual scientists are interested); & (C) that this had been thoroughly proven at least 4 decades before.

Take that as an example of a general condition. Pournelle's Iron Law , that organisations without competition come to be run by corrupt parasites, applies to government institution including political parties & the allegedly free media. But that people chosen randomly average pretty decent, real scientists much moreso. That while we are being bombarded by false scare "hobgoblins" there are no real problems that we cannot solve. And that we have barely entered the Age of Progress.

Neil's Index

VACLAV KLAUS BLOGS

2009-11-19T13:25:00.005Z

Vaclav Klaus has a website where his speeches are recorded, in English. They are well worth it. While our own politicians spend their time lying, or spinning as they call it, about issues of titanic insignificance he speaks, as somebody who has seen freedom, dictatorship, honesty, lies, competence & parasitism in government & recognises both the difference & the importance of knowing the difference. One of the great things about the net is that we can see the thoughts & opinions of politicians & political movements which our national MSM would rather we didn't.

This is part of a speech he made a few days ago at the Reform Club in London about the collapse of communism, which he puts down to its total economic & moral failure, & clearly sees the same happening again. Can anyone imagine David Cameron saying this?:

To my great regret, our development in the last 20 years was not linear, going in one direction only. The first post-communist decade can be characterized as an “uphill” movement – more freedom, more democracy, more market economy, less state intervention, less regulation. In the fundamental equation: citizen vs. state, we had been moving towards the free citizen, away from the state and its masterminding of society. Socialism (or social democratism) was in retreat, the role of new collectivistic “isms”, such as environmentalism, was not yet as dominant as it is now.

This has, however, dramatically changed. The now ending second post-communist decade has been quite different. We have been moving into the opposite direction: downhill. Now, we experience less freedom, more regulation, more manipulation of people in the name of all kinds of politically correct ambitions, post-democracy instead of democracy, growing disbelief in markets. Social democratism and environmentalism are on the winning side. “Market economy” practically disappeared, we got a “social and ecological market economy” instead.

This shift has been made more profound by the current financial and economic crisis. As we all know, the crisis will sooner or later be over, but the real damage caused by the crisis will, I am afraid, stay with us for a long time. The adversaries of the market have again managed to spread a far-reaching distrust in the existing economic system, but this time it is not the mistrust in the free market capitalism, in the laissez-faire system, in the capitalism of Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, as it was the case 70 – 80 years ago. It is now the mistrust in the highly regulated capitalism of the second half of the 20th century. We have an interpretation crisis. The adversaries of free markets claim that for the last decades we have had a laissez-faire market-place. If they were right, the problems of today are due to laissez-faire, but they are not.

We should consider it our duty to fight against the newly rediscovered belief in the state, against the “second-generation” Keynesianism we see around us these days. We must not allow the repetition of the 1930s and the decades that followed. We must limit, not expand government interventions into the market

HYPERION MINI NUCLEAR PLANTS

2009-11-18T11:35:00.005Z

Tomorrow at the Barbican Centre in London Hyperion will unveil its design for small nuclear power plants.

CEO John Grizz Deal to present at several Masterclasses at the Powering Towards 2020 Event, The Future of Power Generation in the UK. Held at The Barbican, London
November 19th
Register to attend!

Al Fin reports

Hyperion's 25 MWe reactor is factory built and factory fueled and re-fueled. It can be shipped by truck, train, or ship. It provides enough power for 20,000 modern homes. A single fueling is good for 5+ years. They are designed for burial underground, for additional safety. All for a mere $25 million -- or about $1,250 per household in a 20,000 home community. For over 5 years of baseload power and heat, a $1,250 investment is minimal.

$25 million puts it at $1 bn per Gigawatt which is less than the purchase price of the Westinghouse AP1000 ($1.2-$1.8bn) & without the running costs. I assume they are expecting this because of the economies of scale in mass producing these. That comes to 42p a day though the price of $25 million does not include the power conversion and other "balance of plant" costs. So the price needs to be doubled to $50 million to get more of an all in price. I'd go for that - I think almost everybody would.

Previously I wrote of Hyperion's intent to make 1 of their 3 worldwide factories in Britain, thereby scooping the entire British media which is more interested in reporting, at least when feeding at the trough of government spin doctors, that the government is going to put £50 million into refurbishing 10 railway stations in Labour constituencies.

Before that I expressed doubts about this on the grounds that at that time it looked more expensive than normal sized reactors & that it was therefore an example of the political advantages of small engineering trumping the marginal cost disadvantage. This appears no longer to be the case while the political advantages remain.

Because the units are as interchangeable as cars & not much bigger, the service they provide will be exactly the same anywhere in the world. That means that it will be absolutely clear to voters that any difference in price or in installation time will be entirely due to government parasitism. This transparency will be a very strong factor minimising such regulatory parasitism.

Another effect Al discusses is that it will allow small communities to maintain easy power off the national grid. The social effects of this could be immense since it will make seasteding viable or economic independence for small communities. Just as Victorian mass industrialisation created big political units so technology like this makes small communities, competing on economic & technological freedom rather than economies of scale more viable. An Islay community as an independent state becomes more viable. There is also a psychological advantage in small local generation - indeed Hyperion have had enquiries from windfarmers about getting one of these so they can supply windpower when it isn't windy, which shows how cynical the entire eco-fascist thing is.

Next Big Future goes into the technology of these "nuclear batteries" here.

Al Fin also has this listing of small, though mostly not as small, nukes coming up.

The Age of Cheap & Available Power, far from being over, has barely begun as we see that nuclear generator technology generally improving & equally important, the ability of eco-fascist parasites to stop it has just been sharply reduced.

CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS 10 LIABILITY REFORM

2009-11-17T15:55:00.005Z

That for any suit for damages to succeed it must be brought against the individual or body primarily responsible, or previous suit must have been brought & no lesser damages obtained against the primary defendant.

In the event of the defendant not being found liable they shall be entitled to recover their cost from the pursuer, or their legal representatives.

The legislature may not discriminate between the liability of professions within the same case.

The media shall be liable for non-punitive damages for damage caused by their statements, if untrue & which would not have been considered proven by a reasonable person with the information available at the time. The court may also order equal space or broadcast capacity to be made available for a correction.

The first of these is to prevent just suing the rich person (Bloom County legal maxim - never sue a poor person) & trivial suits by idiots who did it to themselves & then sue somebody else for not telling them the coffee was hot. The 2nd introduces the rule in British law, but not American, that, by ensuring the person bringing suit has to pay if they lose, discourages discourages "tactical litigation" where they make it better for the victim to settle out of court than to win the case. The third is to deter frivolous suits by lawyers & to end the injustice that a doctor may be sued for an error in an operation, by a lawyer who cannot be sued for bollixing a court case. The reason legislators, who are mainly lawyers, justify lawyer's inviolability, is because the stress of having to worry about a malpractice suit would have a negative effect on their work. Brain surgeons apparently do not worry about such things.

The final part is so that when the press say we had better ban fire because the globe is catastrophically warming or had better bomb hospitals because the Serbs are killing civilians it had better be justified or the press will have to pay for Kyoto or wars. As Michael Crichton said why should a journalist be able to shout "global warming" in a crowded theatre.

The intent of all of these is to make legal parasitism non-profitable. While America is, in some ways, more economically free than here they have saddled themselves with horrendous legal parasitism on the costs of living or doing business. This is an unusual sort of socialism which, in a small degree may be quite fun, a la Robin Hood, & probably even gives some people a sort of justice but whose overwhelming net effect is to transfer money from productive members of society to lawyers.

UK POLITICAL PARTY DOESN'T CENSOR THE KOSOVO DISSECTIONS - ITS THE BNP

2009-11-16T13:24:00.011Z

One of our parties has broken ranks with the others & indeed virtually all the media & reported the way our police (formerly KLA terrorists/freedom fighters) were allowed to kidnap thousands of Serbs & Gypsies & dissect them while still alive to provide body organs for our hospitals.

According to Swiss-born Del Ponte, who was a Chief Prosecutor of two United Nations international criminal law tribunals and prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the kidnapped Serbs were given a medical test. Those who passed were treated well, fed and looked after until they were brought under the surgeon’s knife. From several concentration camps in Kosovo, they were then transferred to cities in the north of Albania. Their body parts were later flown to European destinations.

General Mamir Stayanovich was head of the intelligence service of the Serbian army during the war. He has no doubt that the claims in Del Ponte’s book will sooner or later be proven. The places she mentions as hidden operation rooms are in exactly the same location as the camps Albanians used for training soldiers.

“In these hospitals they decided amongst themselves what each commander of the Muslim KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) would have after victory. They decided who would make his money from drug dealing, who from weapons, and who from selling body parts. Hashim Thaci, the prime minister of Kosovo, was among them,” General Stayanovich claims.

There are more than 2,000 names on the list of missing Serbs. Sima Spasich is the leader of an organisation trying to discover their fate. He showed the pictures of body parts he filmed in 2003.

“Right after the war, when we understood that too many people had disappeared, I went to the K-For commanders and asked them where were the people, and they just shrugged their shoulders. ctd

Regrettably all the other parties as well as the main BBC, ITN C4 & Newspapers are still censoring mention of this. This party, the BNP, are thus the only one that can be conclusively described as anti-Nazi. The other main ones & even moreso the BBC & ITN are thus undeniably under the control of genocide deniers. This has been made particularly obvious in the case of the "LibDems" whose leadership have issued instructions that any comments which mention this holocaust (or it now appears Hitler's too) should be censored.

Talking of which here is a letter sent to most of our national press which has apparently & unsurprisingly not reached the required literary standard of any of them:

"The vote for the fascists at the Springburn by-election was only to be expected. It has long been said that this was the sort of loyal Labour constituency where you could put up a donkey in their rosette & it would win & once again this has been proven. The fact is that the Labour. Conservative, SNP & LibDem parties are essentially one group imposing fascism not through 1 leader but an amorphous political class with similar attribute to the old Soviet "nomenklatura".. When Mussolini came to power he changed the system to give an automatic majority to the largest party even though it had only minority support & with the SNP & LDs dissenting, our political class supports a similarly corrupt electoral system here - they know that the only thing that gets people voting for them is that an alternative vote is "wasted". These parties are also united in their commitment to an undemocratic empire controlling Europe; in their contempt for the electors, cynically making manifesto or "cast iron" promises of our right to a democratic referendum on the country's future & then cynically breaking them; in their enthusiasm for war crimes, mass murder, genocide, ethnic cleansing, the sexual enslavement of children & the dissection of Serbian "Untermensch" while still alive, for their body parts, all to support (ex-)Nazis) (to be fair the SNP were divided on these atrocities); this nomenklatura are united in spending £92 billion of our money on jobs for the boys quangos which cause immense economic destruction, though all of them promise a "bonfire of the quangos" & all of them break the promise after the election; they are unanimously committed to destroying half our economy, but subsidising their friends, in the name of "fighting global warming" when they know this is a lie designed merely to scare us & the globe is cooling; they all know how to end recession, by stopping their own parasitism which amounts to 75% of our entire economic potential; they are all committed to deepening the recession by preventing "continuous economic growth" (though only the Greens are honest enough to say so).

However this under the surface fascist alliance can depend on the total, loyalty of the media, not merely the directly state owned BBC with their enthusiasm for "lynchings" of politicians outside the nomenklatura. It is therefore unsurprising that the fascists took the first 3 places in the Springburn election though gratifying that their 4th segment, the "Liberal Democrats" (a party who have made it a condition of membership that one on no account support free market liberalism but are required to support war crimes & genocide) placed 6th. Such a party is clearly less entitled to the name "liberal" than Hitler was entitled to call his "Socialist Workers." Nonetheless the abysmal turnout proves that though they may be able to smear the opposition they can, under no circumstances, inspire the trust of the people.

PS Since I am certain your news reporting, feature articles, columnists & leaders will be united in supporting the fascists & denouncing those who voted for the BNP it might be wise, if only to provide some slight appearance of balance, to allow one or two letters putting a balanced position"

Note that on other issues the BNP remain a much more statist organisation than the much more libertarian UKIP & perhaps surprisingly for people committed to national pride, uninterested in a realistic space development programme. I may be one of the few to disagree with the BNP primarily on their economic policies but it is quite certain they cannot be criticised on racial grounds by any party which supported these atrocities.

HORNBLOWER WOULD BE ASHAMED, SO WOULD FLASHMAN

2009-11-15T13:22:00.008Z

I am astonished that this is not getting massive coverage with shadow ministers announcing how shocked etc they are. This is the AP version.

The crew of a Royal Navy vessel watched as a British couple was abducted by Somali pirates, unable to rescue them without endangering their lives, the British military said Friday.

As armed pirates boarded Paul and Rachel Chandler's yacht on Oct. 23, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary replenishment tanker Wave Knight was within view, carrying light arms and a crew of 75 merchant seamen and 25 navy sailors in the Indian Ocean, the Ministry of Defense said.

But the crew could not intervene without putting the Chandlers at further risk, and could only watch as the pirates forced the couple off their yacht, the Lynn Rival, and onto an open skiff.

The ministry refused to give further information, saying it could not comment on operational details. It said in a statement that the Wave Knight "did very well under the circumstances."

Authorities believe the Chandlers, who are in their 50s, are now being held on land in Somalia. Pirates have demanded $7 million for their release — ransom the British government says it will not pay.

Hardly in the tradition of Nelson then. Not even of Jelicoe with his Phyrric victory at Jutland. Even the Prince of Wales & Repulse went down fighting the Japanese. It is difficult to say how disgraceful it is that the British navy, at one point within 50 feet of this piracy, did absolutely nothing while British civilians were carted off. At the very least a pistol shot over the bow of this skiff would have made them amenable to an offer to let them leave in peace.

The captain of this ship is not fit to serve in the same navy as Thomas Cochrane even though I actually have some sympathy with the his predicament, caused by the rules of engagement the politicians have put him under.

The British Navy have been ordered that under no circumstances should pirates be brought aboard our ships because they would then be in a position to apply for political asylum. It seems we are all living in a political asylum.

The combination of bullying & the most abject poltroonery of the British political class is even more disgusting than each fault separately. Milosevic's act of good faith in releasing 3 incompetent American soldiers who strayed across the border & were captured by the Home Guard was rewarded by these Nazis continuing to cluster bomb civilians in the cause of "making NATO respected" by employing Islamic drug lords, child sex slavers & organleggers as "police". These same politicians are now so cowardly they cover themselves with stupid bureaucratic rules that allow pirates total freedom to operate.

I have previously discussed how the far more difficult task of preventing piracy in the Singapore Straits has been done in the tradition of our navy but fortunately without the assistance of the present emasculated muppets.

WORSE
We were lied to about this. The initial reporting of this by the MoD said that the boat had been "found" empty on the high seas. This is not the same as that the "Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessel managed to get within 50 feet of the pirates" as they stood & watched.

The admission by the Ministry of Defence that a Royal Navy ship was at the scene during the hijacking conflicted with an earlier statement which suggested the couple's yacht was found by HMS Cumberland empty some time after they had been seized. HMS Cumberland was the nearest warship to the scene but was two hours' away from the hijack, whereas the Wave Knight was close enough to see what was going on.

The MoD agreed it had been "economical with the truth" but maintained that it kept quiet about the true course of events for operational reasons during a "hijack situation".

which is a lie about a lie & one which only came out because one of the sailors went public. The reason you keep quiet during an operation is so that the enemy won't know about it. Since the enemy were on the skiff they already knew & were unlikely to need to read about it in London newspapers. The reason they suppressed the truth is simply that it shows them to be useless traitors who in a more honest age would have been courtmartialed & shot. In an earlier age incompetence, not remotely as gross, would have led to the government falling. Lying to the British people about it would have ensured that none of them ever held any form of office again. The government has said that they "do not pay ransoms" which sounds brave & has led to deaths in Iraq but it is only meaningful if you do something to actually discourage kidnappings & killings as well. We should negotiate a prisoner exchange between the Cabinet & the Chandlers & then demonstrate our bravery by refusing to pay a ransom for the cabinet while doing absolutely nothing else.

Pournelle mention here He also says of Sarah Palin "She would not be my first choice for President of these United States, but that should not be taken as condemnation -- I wouldn't be my first choice either" which is reasonable perspective. I would choose President Pournelle first.

ECONOMICS IN ONE LESSON

2009-11-14T13:49:00.003Z

the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

This is from Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. It was written 63 years ago & is not a matter of magical new insights but just the basics. Though those who use calling themselves Keynes' followers an excuse to print money or rig the game have come, gone & returned none of them have seriously addressed what he says here. Indeed they are simple enough to be self evident once somebody else has said them. Hat tip to Al Fin & in particular from his list of links which contains a whole range of classic & valuable references.

The above quote comes from the end of section 1 which starts with this:

"The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine-the special pleading of selfish interests. While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible."

This gives you the chapter by chapter index. Virtually every modern snake oil nostrum presented to us today is dealt with. Economics is sometimes called "The Dismal Science" but it is no moreso than any other - merely that it is more overrun by charlatans. Medicine is not a dismal science merely because it has proven that Lilly the Pink's elixir, bleeding, & praying to Apollo don't work - modern medicine does achieve things far greater than any of these. In the same way economics may show that printing more money, protectionism & subsidising the politically connected don't work but it does show that classic free marketism, in the current era of scientific & technological progress can achieve double digit annual growth. That is far from dismal.

CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS 9 MONARCHY

2009-11-13T16:19:00.005Z

This isn't really a potential amendment to the US Constitution as the others have been but is designed purely for Britain & its monarchy. It works on the theory that intelligence is largely hereditary (which twin studies & other things make a virtual certainty) & that high intelligence would be a good thing for a monarch, even a constitutional monarch to have (which is questionable but I think on balance is the case). Constitutional monarchy is a strange thing - it holds that the monarch is the source of all legitimate authority & at the same time that they should not exercise it. However it has a lot going for it - indeed when the US became independent they deliberately based their government on a variant of the separation of powers that constitutional monarchy implies, except that with the President having a popular mandate he has more power.

The only power a constitutional monarch should have is as the backstop defence of the constitution having the power, in an absolute crisis, to dismiss the government & substitute a new one & having the innate obedience of the government officers & particularly soldiers, to make it stick. A well run state should be able to go for centuries without having to invoke that power but it is a vital ultimate power. They are likely also to have influence on some of the Prime Minister's lesser decisions & particularly appointments. The function is to maintain the constitution & look at the long term future of the country whereas few politicians do, or can, look much beyond the next election.

Examples of it being used are the Italian king's dismissal of Mussolini when Italy had clearly lost in WW2 & Hirohito's decision that Japan should surrender after Hiroshima & less unequivocally successful, the Australian Governor-General's 1975 dismissal of the Prime Minister. The Japanese history is the most interesting in that while all other constitutional monarchs have faced some form of democracy, for centuries they were run by a Shogun while power remained constitutionally in the Emperor's hands.

The said lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, do further pray that it may be enacted, that all and every person and persons that, on properly applied intelligence tests fails, on average, to match the IQ of their predecessor or shall marry somebody whose IQ is at least 2 standard deviations above that of the predecessor shall be excluded, and be for ever incapable to inherit, possess, or enjoy the crown and government of this realm, and the dominions belonging thereunto, or any part of the same

The effect of this would be that we would develop a very smart bunch of royals, probably improving by one standard deviation (about 12 points) per inheritance. Whether Prince Charles would be able to match the IQ of his mother is an open question but I have no doubt that Prince Andrew, who has flown helicopters & fighters for the RAF could.

The wording for this is taken from the British Bill of Rights - the unprepossessing bit where, for perfectly valid reasons of the time, Catholics were excluded from the succession.

FREDKIN PRIZE - X-PRIZE IN COMPUTING

2009-11-12T09:52:00.005Z

1980: Fredkin Prize

Edward Fredkin, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, offered $100,000 for the first computer program to beat a reigning world chess champion. The prize is won by the inventors of IBM’s Deep Blue chess machine in 1997, after its victory over Garry Kasparov. IBM boosts the jackpot for both sides, paying $700,000 to the Deep Blue Team and $400,000 to Kasparov.

From an article on the history & success of a number of such prizes.

I have mentioned the Fredkin Prize in passing before but decided to give it more attention.

This is the 1997 press release announcing it being won. It confirms "The prize was established at Carnegie Mellon 17 years ago by Computer Science Professor Edward Fredkin to encourage research in computer chess. A prize of $5,000 was awarded to the first chess program to attain a Master's rating in 1983. A prize of $10,000 was awarded to the system that achieved Grandmaster status in 1988...Feng H. Hsu, Murray Campbell and A. Joseph Hoane, Jr. will split the final, $100,000 award at a special chess pioneer recognition event ... The Fredkin Prize is being awarded under the auspices of AAAI. The funds have been held in trust at Carnegie Mellon University."

Converting $115,000 to today's money comes out at $362,000 (£220,000) which is not out of the range of even moderately wealthy donors.

Note that by Moore's Law that computer capacity doubles every 18 months such capacity is nearly a million times what it was when this prize was offered. Time for another...

-------------------------
Edward Fredkin (born 1934) is an early pioneer of digital physics. In recent work, he uses the term digital philosophy (DP). His primary contributions include his work on reversible computing and cellular automata. While Konrad Zuse's book, Calculating Space (1969), mentioned the importance of reversible computation, the Fredkin gate represented the essential breakthrough.

Edward Fredkin dropped out of Caltech after one year and, at age 19, joined the USAF where he became a jet fighter pilot. Fredkin’s computer career started in 1956 when the Air Force assigned him to work at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He worked at BBN in the early 1960s where he wrote the first PDP-1 assembler.

In 1968, Fredkin returned to academia, starting at MIT as a full professor. From 1971 to 1974 he was the Director of Project MAC. He spent a year at Caltech as a Fairchild Distinguished Scholar, working with Richard Feynman, and was a Professor of Physics at Boston University for 6 years. More recently, he has been a Distinguished Career Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a Visiting Professor at MIT.

Fredkin founded Information International Inc. and has served as the CEO of a diverse set of companies ctd

PENNY MARSHALL - THE ONLY THING SHE WILL BE REMEMBERED FOR IS THE FAKED "CONCENTRATION CAMP" FILM

2009-11-11T12:20:00.007Z

Yesterday checking people who had linked to me I tracked back to the Google search link for "Penny Marshall ITN". This is the woman who led the ITN team who, allegedly accidentally faked the Bosnian concentration camp film. As I reported (my link is currently #24) ITN have since rebroadcast it claiming it was not only truthful but proved Karadxic had been running concentration camps. Marshall's claim that she had accidentally faked the film relies on the contention that neither she nor ITN had actually said it was a "concentration camp" but merely not noticed when everybody else did. Clearly their recent claim that it was, which they refused to retract, represents the very highest standard of honesty to which anybody at ITN aspires. Of course it is also total lie.

I am happy to report that the overwhelming majority of popular links Google lists are to reporting of her fraud. Despite the judge telling the jury that it "doesn't matter" that the allegations against ITN were essentially true the court of public opinion has spoken.

Whatever she achieves in her career it seems that the only thing she will be remembered for is producing an, accidentally she assures, faked film used to promote genocide. That is as it should be.

This, the 2nd picture on Google Images, is from the Yugoslav TV crew that were also present at the time & shows her inside the barbed wire enclosure which she "accidentally" entered & through whose barbed wire she "accidentally" filmed the people on the outside.

It would be nice for her to be remembered for being convicted in a trial but there are very many before her on the list. It is clear that, however belatedly, the truth is becoming known.

COPENHAGEN - ARE WE BEING BLINDSIDED AS THEY ESTABLISH WORLD DICTATORSHIP?

2009-11-10T14:48:00.007Z

It is generally being accepted that the Copenhagen Climate Summit isn't going to produce an agreement because while all the politicians are going to say how important it is that we destroy much of the world in furtherance of the War Against Fire none of them are willing to put their part of the world economy on the block.

We may be being blindsided. Viscount Monckton thinks so. While the politicos may not put up any money for the bonfire they may be willing to sacrifice national independence. Seeing how almost the entire political class in almost every European country have been keen to immerse their country in the EU, even when the people haven't (which diffuses power but does not reduce it, while making every layer of government less accountable & less able to be opposed by ordinary people).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMe5dOgbu40&feature=player_embedded

“At Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed — Your president will sign it. Most of the third-world countries will sign it because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regimes around the world, like the European Union, will rubber-stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.

“I have read that treaty and what it says is this: ‘That a world government is going to be created. The word, government, actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity.

“The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third-world countries in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, a ‘climate debt,’ because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t - and we’ve been screwing up the climate. We haven’t been screwing up the climate, but that’s the line.

“And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.
“How many of you think that the word election or democracy or vote or ballot occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right. It doesn’t appear once.

“So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace so that my friends who founded it left within a year because they’d captured it.

Now the apotheosis is at hand.....
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Now it will actually be relatively difficult to apply this in America because they have a minor thing called the constitution but this will not stop it being passed, very quietly, here. Though it has naturally gone unreported by our media it will mean that as soon as it is passed we will be told we cannot decide that catastrophic global warming is a lie because it is in a treaty & once something is in a treaty you can't object to it.

I am with Professor John McCarthy on why a world government should be opposed.

You say the only alternative to nuclear war is world government. There is only one possibility worse than nuclear war for the survival of modern civilization, and that is world government. Civilization might recover from the damage of a nuclear war, but judging by past static empires in Egypt and China, it might never recover from world government, there being no chance of external intervention. As it is, present governments are only prevented from becoming dominated by crazy ideas that will suppress all opposition by the existence of other governments. The only way a people can be sure that their government is substandard is that it does worse than those of other countries.

Having other countries also gives sceptics somewhere to go & even write subversive things from beyond the government's reach. Global warming is clearly the current crazy idea & now officially, in Britain, a religion & one which would like to persecute heretics.

Even if the current warming lie collapses because of the obvious fact that we are undergoing cooling, once such government is in place it will be used, possibly to promote the next global cooling scare. The important thing is not any genuine concern for any real phenomenon but the way all such scares ("hobgoblins") are used to maintain & extend power.

RISK AVERSE SOCIETY

2009-11-09T11:15:00.004Z

I have discussed before how the 'elfin spectorate cost us the equivalent of 4 million people's work & indeed that the extra deaths from lost economic growth exceed, by a couple of orders magnitude any possible lives saved by the bureaucrats.

This is from an article, with my comments,
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several factors shape people's perception of risks:

Trust. The more we trust the people informing us about a risk, or the institution or company exposing us to the risk, or the government agencies that are supposed to protect us, the less afraid we'll be. The less we trust them, the greater our fear. Not sure about this - politicians & journalists are the 2 groups at the bottom of public trust lists & they are the ones pushing almost all scare stories whereas scientists come pretty high up & they are the ones who say nuclear is safe & make up the large majority of prominent warming sceptics. This suggests that advertising of scare stories is a much greater cause of worry than the intrinsic trustworthiness of the fearmonger. It should be acknowledged that politicians have gone to considerable lengths to find fakecharities or scientists, invariably ones they employ, as front men - hence the firing of Professor Nutt for not making scary claims about drugs.

Control. The more control we have over a risk, the less threatening it seems. This explains why it feels safer to drive than fly, though the risk of death from motor vehicle crashes is much higher. True

Dread. The more dreadful the nature of the harm from a risk, the more worried we'll be. Cancer is generally considered a more dreadful way to die than heart disease, yet heart disease kills roughly 25 percent more Americans. True & entirely reasonable

Risk vs. benefit. The more we get a benefit from a choice or behavior, like using a cell phone when we drive or that "nice, healthy-looking tan" from the sun, the less concerned we are about any associated risk. Though this applies only to personal benefits not those to society as a whole.

Human-made vs. natural. Natural risks seem less scary. Solar radiation causes an estimated 7,100 melanoma deaths in the U.S. per year. Yet many sunbathers worry more about nuclear radiation. Among more than 90,000 survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only about 500 cancer deaths have been attributed to radiation exposure over the past 59 years. This is a biggie. I'm not sure that this is innate rather than that the Luddites controlling the media & politics give infinitely more coverage to new alleged risks. I don't think Victorian sailors showed an aversion to steam ships on the grounds that though they sank less often than sail ships they did so for new reasons like boiler explosions.

"Could it happen to me?" Statistical probabilities like one in a million are often used in risk communication, usually to no avail. One in a million is too high if you think you could be "the one." That is why the public sometimes demands additional regulations to cut already low risks to zero. This also suggests reporting error as a cause. By definition, if the risk is higher, the chances of it happening to you, except where it is very strongly limited to particular risk groups, is higher. This is probably why the AIDS virus scare was pushed since, if it had been seen to be overwhelmingly limited to gays & drug users there would have been less public interest & thus less money.

New or familiar. New threats--for example, West Nile virus when it first appears in a community--generate concern. After residents have lived with the risk for a while, familiarity lowers their fear. For diseases over the very long term, ie centuries, there is something to this since diseases mutate to take only the already weak. Also when a disease first appears it is difficult to assess the threat & it can quite easily spread 1,000 times more or 1,000 less than the median estimate - it is therefore wise to worry much more than the median estimate. This happened with mad cow disease & indeed SARS. Fortunately we have not yet found something where the error has been significantly on the low side.

Children. Any risk to a child seems more threatening in the eyes of adults than the same risk does to them. Which is entirely reasonable in itself since they have much longer life expectancy. However it does give the fearmongers a handle. Any time you are told we must have no smoking/ID cards/more prisons/more global warming regulations/censorship "for the children" you can be fairly sure that anybody using children as a moral hum,an shield is out of all the other arguments.

Uncertainty. The less we know, or understand, about a risk, the scarier it seems. And uncertainty is, by definition, the other side of the coin of the promotion of unproven or false fears since they are unproven but it is inherently impossible to disprove an unspecific scare. The entire anti-GM foods scare is based on claiming that some unknown effect might happen from some unknown cause, at some unknown period in the future.

Perceiving risk through these emotional and intuitive lenses, which have been identified by researchers Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, and others, is natural human behavior, but "It can lead us to make dangerous personal choices," Ropeik says. Driving may have felt safer than flying after September 11, 2001, but those who opted to drive rather than fly were actually raising their risk. Risk misperception can threaten health by making us too afraid, or not afraid enough.

Finally, as George Gray points out, failing to keep risk in perspective leads us to "pressure government for protection against relatively small risks, which diverts resources from bigger ones."

"By understanding and respecting the way people relate to risk," Gray says, "risk communicators can play a vital role in improving the public's health."

This list does not include air crashes, which may be above the 1 in a million listed but difficult to accurately assess, being killed by meteorite - my own favourite which can be assessed as about 1 in a million in a lifetime of being killed by a dinosaur killer meteor (which hit 65 million years ago), or another 3 mile island (well under the million to 1). Interestingly it does include Radon in homes which is a risk only if you accept the LNT radiation damage theory, while epdimemiological evidence shows Radon beneficial.

LIBDEM ADVICE ON HOW TO HANDLE THE TRUTH

2009-11-08T15:07:00.005Z

The LibDems have produced advice for their bloggers on how they handle comments. Though nobody in the party is able to answer accusations that they have been complicit in war crimes & genocide they have clearly been considering it.

You really can decide your own policy on abusive comments or swearing. It’s your blog. Again, it hardly ever happens. But if someone, for example, writes that a very genteel politician is an “organ thieving Nazi whore”, then you are within your rights to delete that comment.

Indeed. This is allegedly because of the threat he might sue. The fact that no such LibDem politician has even disputed, let alone felt able to sue over anything I have said would, as a matter of fact, largely preclude them suing their own supporters for not censoring now.

In the interests of good fellowship & because I thought the advice contained some danger if applied only to censoring criticism of LibDems in a way which would imply approval of criticisms of others I put up this.

Also if you subsequently allow a comment which says that Nick Griffin were a Nazi (which for the record he isn’t) or indeed anything questionable about him & it had been proven that you HAD censored similar remarks about a LibDem politician, allegedly on the grounds that it was libellous, you would not only have to prove that Griffin were a Nazi but that he was more clearly a Nazi than any aforementioned LibDem politician who had a proven record of supporting ideological Nazis publicly committed to & engaged in racial genocide (also organ thieving) in the Nazi cause. If it could be proven you were using a different standard against Griffin that would be proof your libel was malicious which makes it considerably worse.

The easier & commonly used LibDem tactic is simply to censor anything factual but unsupportive of the party & make no bones about it.

They seem to have misunderstood it presumably misreading writing that Griffin is not a Nazi as that he was. An easy mistake to make if you are not good at reading. Certainly it in no other conceivable way breaches the rules for what should be censored yet, to my astonishment, it has been