Britain: THE SNOBBERY BEHIND ZAC AND DAVE'S 'TAX THE PLEBS' PLAN

Once, just once, wouldn't it be a joy to pick up a newspaper or turn on the television to find a complete absence of anything to do with politics? The problem is: politicians abhor a vacuum. If there's newsprint or airtime available, they think it is their divine duty to fill it, even at the expense of boring us all to distraction. Not a day goes by without some new crackpot scheme being hatched. Politicians wake up each morning determined to find fresh ways of picking our pockets and intruding still further into our lives. None of it is ever thought through properly.

Take yesterday, for instance. On one page, ministers announce they want to cut prison overcrowding. On the next, they call for motorists using mobile phones on the move to be jailed for two years. Go figure.

The "climate change" hysteria has proved a godsend for prodnoses and punishment freaks. I doubt there is a single country on earth where the entire political class has so completely taken leave of its senses over alleged global warming. Here in Britain, it has been seized upon as an exciting new weapon with which to inflict more taxes, fines and regulations on us. You expect this kind of nonsense from Labour and especially from Gordon Brown, who has never met a tax he doesn't like. Socialists have only ever had a passing acquaintance with the concept of individual liberty and low taxation. But when it comes to banging the climate-change gong, [Conservative leader] Call Me Dave and his gang are obsessed to the point of mental illness.

CMD's latest wheeze for winning power is a plan to put 2,000 pounds on the price of a family car and ban plasma TVs. Brilliant. That should go down well in the marginals, along with his other cunning scheme to make Britain the only place in the world to call a halt to airport expansion. Egged on by his Old Etonian mate Zac Goldsmith, whose dad made part of the family fortune tearing up large chunks of Bolivia, Dave also wants to restrict essential road building. So if your village is crying out for a new by-pass, forget it. Think of all the polar bears whose lives you're saving.

Where does Cameron get the idea that millions of swing voters are desperate to pay even more for their cars than they do already? Or that people will give up their plasma TVs for the sake of some unspecified rainforest? Why pick on plasmas? Are we supposed to go back to cumbersome cathode ray sets? It's not so long ago we were told they were destroying the Earth's crust in landfill sites. Are we supposed to stop watching television altogether?

What about all those people who make a living manufacturing, selling and servicing televisions? What are they to do - go and work in a windmill? Surely the Tories are the party of small government, individual choice and low taxes, or they are nothing. Yet here they are making common cause with "zero growth" eco-loonies who knit their own toilet paper.

More here






Climate Round Up (to September 13, 2007) below from Marc Morano, Communications Director, U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee

(Note: Laurie David was one of former Vice President Al Gore's producers for "An Inconvenient Truth.")

Press Release: SPPI Exposes Fundamental Scientific Error in Laurie David's "Global Warming" Book for Children

A fundamental scientific error lurks in a book calculated to terrify schoolchildren about "global warming", Robert Ferguson, SPPI president, announced today: "The Down-To-Earth Guide to Global Warming", by Laurie David and Cambria Gordon, is intentionally designed to propagandize unsuspecting school children who do not have enough knowledge to know what is being done to them. A new SPPI paper briefly examines a cardinal error, found on page 18 of the David book, where she mousetraps children: "The more the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the higher the temperature climbed. The less carbon dioxide, the more the temperature fell. You can see this relationship for yourself by looking at the graph. What makes this graph so amazing is that by connecting rising CO2 to rising temperature scientists have discovered the link between greenhouse-gas pollution (sic) and global warming."

The SPPI paper states, in part: What really makes the David-Gordon graph "amazing" is that it's egregiously counterfactual. Worse, in order to contrive a visual representation for their claim that CO2 controls temperature change, the authors present unsuspecting children with an altered temperature and CO2 graph that reverses the relationship found in the scientific literature. The manipulation is critical because David's central premise posits that CO2 drives temperature, yet the peer-reviewed literature is unanimous that CO2 changes have historically followed temperature changes.

Case in point, on page 103 of their book, David cites the work of Siegenthaler et al. (2005). However, Siegenthaler et al. clearly state the opposite, that CO2 lags "with respect to the Antarctic temperature over glacial terminations V to VII are 800, 1600, and 2800 years, respectively, which are consistent with earlier observations during the last four glacial cycles." "Parents and teachers should be concerned enough to demand that the publisher, Scholastic Books, recall, pulp and correct the error before mores copies reach innocent children," said Ferguson.

Source. Full Report on David's Book here




New doubts on global warming in revised NASA temperature data

Excerpt: Imagine basing a country's energy and economic policy on an incomplete, unproven theory - a theory based entirely on computer models in which one minor variable is considered the sole driver for the entire global climate system. This is precisely what former Vice President Al Gore, Senate Environment Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer and others want their nation to do.

They expect Americans to accept on blind faith the thesis that human carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are causing catastrophic climate change. Boxer, Gore and their allies readily resort to emotional bullying against anyone who dares question this dogma. Their pronouncements - Boxer's juvenile "the American people have the will to slow, stop and reverse global warming" is a prime example - are merely displays of arrogance that expose their lack of basic science understanding, and their complete disrespect for public intelligence.

The policies they advocate are wholly unjustified scientifically and have extraordinarily damaging economic implications for the developed world. The scientific method, which even grade-schoolers know, provides that science advances through hypotheses based on a set of assumptions. Other scientists challenge and test those assumptions in what philosopher Karl Popper called the practice of "falsibility." Trying to disprove hypotheses is what real science is all about. Yet the hypothesis that human addition of CO2 would lead to significantly enhanced greenhouse warming was quickly accepted without this normal scientific challenge....

Four of the 10 warmest years on record are now acknowledged to have occurred when human production of CO2 was minimal, in the 1930s. The past decade now includes only three of the 10 warmest years. Will Gore withdraw "An Inconvenient Truth" pending necessary corrections?

A second "proof" of human CO2-caused warming, according to the U.N.'s IPCC, was a claimed increase in global temperatures of about one degree Fahrenheit over 130 years. This was asserted to be outside natural variability. But the uncertainty in the measurements was more than 0.3øF, meaning possible values could vary by as much as 66 percent of the total change.

The source of this temperature calculation, University of East Anglia's Professor Phil Jones, has refused to disclose which temperature records were used and how he "adjusted" them. Clearly, the IPCC's conclusions must be viewed with considerable suspicion until they provide full disclosure on the Jones data.

The meaning of these revelations is clear: Computer models are the basis of all forecasts used by alarmists. These models used temperature data that is now known to be suspect or completely wrong. Will Gore, Boxer and the IPCC call for a rational re-evaluation of the global warming scare? Don't bet on it - accurate science was never a hallmark of this crusade.

Source




Marie Claire Magazine calls for 'global cooling' so women can wear $41,000 of winter apparel

Excerpt: In one picture the female model sits in a $7,595 Prada "feather-and mohair-trimmed coat." She's holding a "Preserve the world now" sign as an RV sits parked and power lines stretch out behind her. In another picture, the same model oversees seven men painting a banner that appears to read "Resistance" and "Rise Up." Particularly dramatic was the protest photograph. A black-and-white image with the model holding a megaphone, "Stop Global Warming" painted on the street, fog meant to look like smoke or tear gas clouding the scene. The protesters held signs proclaiming: "Save Earth," "[No] Plastic," and "Be the Change" as the same menacing power lines stretch behind them.

Source




Column: Global warming is not about the Science

FOR YEARS, supporters of global warming alarmism have repeated an odd refrain: Even if we're wrong, we're right. Sen. Timothy E. Wirth, D-Colo., said it in 1988, as the National Journal reported. "What we've got to do in energy conservation is (to) try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy."

Source

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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