UK GOVERNMENT IN "VIRTUE SIGNALLING EXERCISE" TO FLAUNT GREEN CREDENTIALS

This piece explains what probably lies behind the UK government's renewed enthusiasm for carbon capture and storage. It is bioenergy and CCS (BECCS), and in recent weeks this rather crazy scheme* has been pushed in reports from (among others) the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Royal Society, and the UK’s Committee on Climate Change. These were all neatly timed to arrive in time to be digested ahead of the big climate meeting in Katowice in December. It all therefore looks as though Claire Perry, the energy minister, has simply decided to bung a few hundred thousand quid at CCS projects so that the UK can parade its green credentials on the big international stage. The money is just a rather expensive way to virtue signal.

*The idea is to convert a significant proportion of the world’s agricultural land (perhaps a quarter or more) into forest and energy crops to be burnt in power stations, with the emissions captured using CCS. It would probably lead to mass starvation and would undoubtedly be an environmental disaster.

OIL BOOM COULD HERALD RICH FUTURE FOR UK AFTER BREXIT

If only we had the courage to leave the EU and scrap the ridiculous Climate Change Act we could be a very wealthy country, with help from the oil under the sea off the Shetlands.
Is A Shale-Sized Oil Boom Hiding In Britain’s Atlantic Bedrock?
Bloomberg, 22 November 2018

Maverick geologist Robert Trice believes there are billions of barrels of crude ready to drill from granite rock buried under the ocean floor



On a sunny October morning, members of the The Geological Society pack an ornate lecture theater at their imposing headquarters on London’s Piccadilly. One of their number introduces a scientist who “needs no introduction,” the man people had come to see.

Taking to the podium, Dr. Robert Trice, a lifelong rock obsessive who’s also chief executive officer of independent oil company Hurricane Energy Plc, adjusts his glasses and shakes his mop of pale hair. Then he explains his billion-dollar idea.

From inside a ship, sloshing around the 65-foot waves off the coast of the Scottish isles, he plans to poke a diamond-tipped drill-bit into the sea bed. He’ll take it past layers of once-oil-soaked sandstone rocks straight into a strata of solid granite — what geologists call the basement. Then the drill will turn sideways and hopefully intersect a bunch of naturally formed cracks.

If his science is correct, there will be enough oil pooled in those cracks to make him a very rich man.

For more than a decade, people in the industry have excoriated his idea for being too expensive, too technically challenging and even geologically ridiculous.

“I’ve stopped arguing with them,” he said over lunch the day before his speech, sipping on a glass of red wine. “They’ll see.”

Trice, 57, a geology PhD who’s worked in the oil industry for three decades and founded Hurricane in his garden shed in 2005, likes to compare himself to another maverick who went from voice in the wilderness to billionaire prophet: George Mitchell, the father of shale drilling.

Mitchell started experimenting with the idea of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” into shale rock in the 1980s. It took thousands of wells and 30 years for the American oil industry to widely adopt the practices he pioneered. When it did, the U.S. became the largest fossil fuel producer on the planet, permanently altering the global energy trade. Mitchell died in 2013 at 94 with a $2 billion fortune.

While the granite under under the Atlantic Ocean west of the Shetland island isn’t likely to be another Permian, if Trice is right about the geology it will prove billions barrels of undrilled oil. Success would be a significant shot in the arm for Britain’s beleaguered oil industry, where drilling is at its lowest level since the birth of the North Sea in the 1970s.

“Fractured basement isn’t a myth,” said John Browne, the former chief executive officer of BP Plc, who spent part of his early career working in the North Sea. “But it’s difficult to drill.”

We’re about to get a clearer picture of how well it will work. A floating production vessel specially modified for harsh conditions is now sailing through the English Channel to the North Sea. In the first half of 2019, Hurricane plans to use it to produce from two wells.

The test of a good result? Hurricane needs the pressure underground to stay as high as Trice’s models predict, showing the cracks in the granite are interlinked and the pooled crude can flow freely to the surface for a sustained period.

A report commissioned by Hurricane concludes one of its fields, called Lancaster, likely has half a billion barrels of recoverable oil. That’s worth almost $33 billion at $65 a barrel Brent crude, much of which would go to the British government in taxes. Hurricane is also exploring another two fields thought to hold billions of barrels more.

Full story

BREXIT AND THE CLIMATE CHANGE ACT - BETRAYAL OF THE PEOPLE

Rupert Darwall: The Failure Of The Climate Change Act: Ten Years On
The Spectator, 23 November 2018

The Climate Change Act is ten years old. It was passed in a different age. David Cameron had been hugging huskies to de-toxify the Tories. It was a year before the Copenhagen Climate Conference. ‘Fifty days to set the course for the next 50 years,’ Gordon Brown declared. China and India’s veto put paid to that, but Britain is still lumbered with a law that puts huge economic power into the hands of an unaccountable body, the Committee on Climate Change, which entrenches climate policy unilateralism. However much greenhouse gases the rest of the world puts into the atmosphere, the Climate Change Act compels Britain to almost completely decarbonise.

Jim Callaghan once told his policy chief Bernard Donoghue that the one thing he’d learnt from his years in politics was that when the two front benches agree, you can be sure they’re wrong. Snow fell gently from the sky as 465 MPs voted in favour of the third reading of the Climate Change Bill. Only five MPs voted against: Andrew Tyrie, punished by David Cameron with the chance of any frontbench job, but now chairing the Competition and Markets Authority, Ann Widdecombe, Peter Lilley, Christopher Chope and Philip Davies.

Looking back ten years on, the Climate Change Act is a threefold failure. It fails the national interest. The case for the Act assumed global action – Britain leads, the rest of the world follows. Of course that didn’t happen. According to the government’s cost benefit assessment, Britain would contribute nearly half of the total global benefit. Why do anything if you’re going to get very nearly half the benefit at zero cost?

None of the cost benefit analysis accompanying the Act took into account Britain fully participating in the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme. Unless the EU’s emissions target changes in line with Britain’s, every tonne of carbon dioxide Britain is forced to cut because of the Climate Change Act enables other EU members to emit an extra tonne – all at Britain’s expense. That is to say, 100 per cent carbon leakage. The net effect on overall emissions is zero. There are no climate benefits from the Act – only costs. To Britain.

If this sounds unnervingly similar to Theresa May’s Brexit, it is somewhat ironic that the backers of the Climate Change Act were and remain strong supporters of Britain’s EU membership. Yet when it came to the Climate Change Act, they were all afflicted by ‘fog-in-the-channel’ syndrome. They simply hadn’t taken account Britain’s participation in EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme.

The Climate Change Act is a failure of politics. Politics requires debate and disagreement. With the exception of the five dissident MPs voting against, there was stifling conformity. Politics also requires a degree of honesty, something also absent from this government’s defence of its Brexit deal. Responding to a letter from Peter Lilley on the government’s estimated £404bn of costs, Ed Miliband, the energy and climate secretary, falsely asserted:

‘The impact statement shows that the benefits to UK society of successful action on climate change will be far higher than the costs.’

The impact assessment showed no such thing. Indeed, the assessment was absolutely clear this was not the case. ‘The benefits of UK action will be distributed across the globe,’ it categorically states.

In fact there has not yet been any credible official study on the overall costs and benefits of global warming to Britain, which, it is plausible to believe, could benefit from some modest warming.

Above all, the Climate Change Act is a moral failure. In the 2005 general election, the Labour party pledged to abolish fuel poverty. By 2015, fuel poverty was to have been a thing of the past. By the 2017 election, any thought of abolishing it had vanished. The impact of climate policies means that fuel poverty is here to stay.

When he was energy and climate secretary, Ed Davey admitted that fuel poverty was not something that ‘can be eradicated in any meaningful way.’ Neither did he like the way fuel poverty was measured, complaining it was ‘unhelpful’ because it was too sensitive to rising energy costs. Something had to be done.

So the definition of fuel poverty was changed. The focus was shifted from affordability to the potential to insulate properties. Overnight, the new measure nearly halved the number of households officially defined as living in fuel poverty. Cynical? The interests of the least well off were sacrificed to the powerful interests of the climate change lobby.

The treatment of the economics provides the one glaring contrast with Brexit. The government’s whole negotiating position on Brexit has been driven by maintaining frictionless trade and just-in-time supply chains for manufacturing industry. The Treasury produces forecasts predicting an economic Armageddon if these are in the slightest way interrupted.

But when it comes to decarbonising the economy, the government is entirely indifferent to the impact on economic competitiveness. If decarbonisation is so good for the economy, why is the European Union insisting on maintaining the so-called level playing field and requiring Britain write its decarbonisation commitments into a future trade agreement with the EU?

If the government genuinely wanted to improve competitiveness, raise living standards and abolish fuel poverty, there is a straightforward way. It could repeal, or at the very least, amend the Climate Change Act and remove its blind unilateralism. This is still something that, for the time being, it doesn’t need the EU’s permission to do. But don’t hold your breath.

Rupert Darwall is author of  The Climate Change Act at Ten: History’s Most Expensive Virtue Signal published by the GWPF.

TEN YEARS OF THE UTTERLY FUTILE UK CLIMATE CHANGE ACT

This article sums up the complete futility of the UK Climate Change Act. It is the most expensive virtue signal in history. As the article says:

"The reason for this is simple: before signing the Act, Britain was already signed up to the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS), designed to encourage EU member states to reduce their CO2 emissions on a collective basis. This is achieved via Emissions Allowances (EAs), a type of carbon credit. Member states reluctant to cut their carbon emissions too drastically can buy EAs instead. So long as the total number of EAs in circulation remains the same, it means that when one country cuts its emissions by a lot, other countries are able to reduce their emissions by less. " 

So the Act will not save the planet at all - merely cost everyone in the UK a great deal of money for nothing.

CARBON TAX NEEDS TO INCREASE 15-FOLD FOR IRISH TO MEET CLIMATE TARGETS

The Irish Times, 21 November 2018

Kevin O'Sullivan Environment & Science Editor App

Carbon tax will have to increase substantially – from €100 per person a year to €1,500 a year – if Ireland is to meet legally-binding targets on reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, according to ESRI projections.



A new computational model developed by the institute that factors in economic data, environmental trends and energy consumption, has found carbon tax on fossil fuels will need to increase to €300 per tonne of carbon dioxide emitted over the coming decade to avoid substantial fines in the form of compliance costs.

The current rate of €20 per tonne was not increased in the budget as had been widely anticipated, although Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Minister for Climate Action Richard Bruton have confirmed it is set to increase in coming years.

A rise to €30 a tonne as was envisaged would have added about €1 to a bag of coal and about 25 cent to a bale of briquettes, as well as increasing the price of oil and gas.

Full story

 


 


 

VAST AREAS OF THE UK MAY BE NEEDED TO COMBAT CLIMATE CHANGE, SAYS NEW REPORT

The Threat To The Environment That The Green Lobby Tries To Ignore
Andrew Montford, The Spectator, 20 November 2018

It’s not like the green blob to keep quiet when there’s a threat to the environment in the offing. Even the smallest hint of a problem is usually enough to work a tree-hugger into a frenzy. So it’s worth taking a look at their decision to keep shtum over the recent appearance of what may be one of the greatest threats to the natural world we have seen.

Over the last few weeks, scientists and campaigners alike have been turning their attention to the question of how land can be used to tackle global warming.

Their interest was prompted by the appearance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) special report on how the increase in global temperatures might be kept below 1.5°C. One of the panel’s ideas was to propose a massive expansion of forestry, allowing excess carbon dioxide to be converted into wood. This wood could then be burnt to generate electricity, with the resulting carbon dioxide emissions captured and stored deep underground. The alternative is to use all this extra wood as building materials. This would, the theory goes, keep the carbon locked in. The IPCC paper was followed up by twin reports from the committee on climate change (CCC), the government’s advisers on climate policy.

One of these papers was on the subject of biofuels; the other one was on land use. Like the IPCC, the CCC sees lots more forests and energy crops as the way forward.

But there is a problem with all these ideas, namely that if they ever came to fruition, they would do great harm to the natural world.

The use of afforestation for carbon capture will necessarily involve chopping forests down on a regular basis and replanting with the fastest growing species; it’s fairly clear that few woods would be spared. The CCC talks obliquely about all the broadleaved woodlands in England that are not “actively managed” and appears to suggest that these could be sacrificed to Gaia. So forget beautiful, leafy oaks in Sherwood Forest and start thinking sitka spruce and willow monocultures.

It’s also worth remembering that, as well as wanting something like a quarter of the UK’s land area devoted to biofuels of one kind or another, the CCC makes the case for more wind turbines. They have apparently tried to obscure this inconvenient fact in their report by lumping windfarms and urban areas in a land category called ‘settlements’. But the worry is that up to 10,000 square kilometres of land – twice the area of the Cairngorms National Park – is potentially being earmarked as part of a wider rollout of wind industrialisation.

It’s fair to say that all this amounts to an ecological catastrophe in the planning. Yet there has not been a squeak from environmentalists in response.

Full post

UN ENVIRONMENT CHIEF WHO SPENT £382K ON TRAVEL QUITS

Another green hypocrite bites the dust!

UN Environment Chief Erik Solheim Quits Amid Expenses Row
BBC News, 20 November 2018

UN environment chief Erik Solheim has resigned amid a row over his travel expenses.



A recent draft internal audit, obtained by Britain's Guardian newspaper and seen by the BBC, said he had incurred costs of $488,518 (£382,111) while travelling for 529 out of 668 days.

It said this harmed the reputation of UN Environment - a body that highlights green issues and sustainability.

There was "no oversight or accountability" to monitor this travel.

Mr Solheim, a Norwegian former environment minister, says he has paid back the money where "instances of oversight" occurred.

On Tuesday, Mr Solheim himself confirmed his resignation, Norway's NRK broadcaster reported.

A formal UN announcement is expected shortly.

Full post

CHURCH OF CLIMATOLOGY ALIVE AND WELL IN UK PARLIAMENT

Here's the most one-sided debate you are likely to find. In fact it is not a debate - just a few climate change alarmists trying to outdo each other on who can tell the scariest story on extreme weather events and blame it all on the 1 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures over the past 140 years (without referring to the tiny rise, of course).  Of course I realise that the tiny number of MPs who speak out publicly against this cannot always be there to represent the voice of reason. It is tedious to keep wasting your breath when speaking to those who are as likely to change their minds as a Jehovah's Witness on your doorstep.  

UK MEDIA LYING BY OMISSION ON FLAWED CLIMATE PAPER

Read this article and understand the bias in reporting of global warming stories here in the UK UK Media Refuses To Correct The Record On Flawed Climate Paper

Mainstream media is silent on Errors in flawed climate scare story

London, 19 November: The Global Warming Policy Forum today slammed the UK media for its failure to tell readers about errors in a widely reported global warming story.   Media outlets around the world reported new findings that suggested that the world’s oceans were warming faster than previously thought. However, within days serious errors were found in the underlying scientific paper, prompting its authors to issue a correction. Several newspapers in the USA, including Science magazine, the Washington Post and the Washington Times have published follow-up stories, outlining the discovery of the error, which entirely negates the earlier headlines. To date, no UK newspaper, nor the BBC has reported the story, or even issued a correction. By failing to report these developments and setting the record straight, the BBC is breaking its own guidelines on corrections. GWPF director, Dr Benny Peiser said: “It is an indictment of the UK press that they are keen to disseminate stories that promote global warming fears, but refuse to correct them when they are shown to be incorrect. The failure to report accurately is undermining the credibility of climate news reporting.”  The flawed ocean paper was covered by: · Matt McGrath at the BBC · Harry Pettitt at the Mail on Sunday · Harry Cockburn at the Independent  Contact Dr Benny Peiser e: peiser@thegwpf.com tel: 0207 3406038 mob: 07553 361718

UK ELECTRICITY PRICES TO SOAR DUE TO EU COURT RULING ON STATE AID

This piece gives the details. Just as we are supposedly leaving the EU up comes this judgement which basically says that the UK government is not allowed to give any subsidies to energy companies for having generating capacity on stand by to back up the renewables. Of course we now know that we aren't really leaving the EU so we will continue to have to obey their rules, the result of which means that our electricity prices will have to rise significantly, due to our having to follow the Climate Change Act. What a complete farce!

100% RENEWABLE PLANS ARE PURE FANTASY AND HERE'S WHY

This article explains the simple truth that green activists and politicians simply ignore or somehow overlook. In a word - storage - in other words, batteries! With intermittent renewables vast amounts of battery storage are required and it is simply unfeasible. 

Why aren’t the politicians talking about batteries, when they are a bigger deal than wind and solar? Where will all these batteries come from, and where will they go?

Perhaps it is because batteries are nasty chemical systems that create lots of toxic waste. They tarnish the sublime image of “clean energy” even though they are fundamental to it.

We should start asking the politicians and the green activists about the batteries.

UK HOMES MADE DAMP AND MOULDY BY BEING SEALED WITH TOO MUCH INSULATION

By focusing on insulating homes to save energy, the UK government have inadvertently caused some householders to live in damp and mouldy conditions according to this piece. The point is that unless there is circulation of air, and therefore some loss of heat, this is the inevitable result.  

HOW THE LAND BASED TEMPERATURE RECORD HAS BEEN FIDDLED

Read this article below  By Francis Menton 

Don’t be too surprised that you’re not reading much recently about the impending climate apocalypse and the supposed “hottest year,” “hottest month,” or “hottest day” ever.  The reason is that global lower troposphere temperatures, as measured by satellites and published by UAH, are down by more than 0.7 deg C since early 2016.  That’s well more than half of what was thought to be the temperature increase since the satellite record began in 1979.  September 2018 turned out to be the coolest September in ten years.

But inquiring minds are still eager to get to the bottom of the temperature adjustment scandal that has created a fake warming trend in the so-called “surface temperature” record that goes back into the mid-1800s.  For those unfamiliar with this field, the “surface temperature” record comes from a totally different source from the satellite record, namely a network of conventional thermometers, each located a few feet above the ground, scattered around the world.  The data from the surface thermometers is collected and published by three entities, two in the U.S. (NASA and NOAA) and one in England (the Hadley Center at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia).  Those three use somewhat different but substantially overlapping surface thermometers to compile their records.  All three show a noticeable warming trend in the range of 1.5 deg C since the late 19th century.

But is the warming trend real, or is all or most of it an artifact of temperature adjustments made to the record over time?  Many have noticed that substantial downward adjustments have been made to raw temperatures recorded at many of the stations in the surface thermometer networks during the earlier part of the record, mainly from the mid-1800s through 1950s.  This issue has been the principal focus of my series The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.  This is now Part XIX of that series.

Here’s the new development:  A guy named John McLean has just (October 2018) published a big Report via John Boyle Publishing, essentially consisting of an expanded and updated version of his 2017 Ph.D. thesis for James Cook University in Australia.  For his thesis, McLean elected to conduct an “audit” of one of the surface temperature records, that of the Hadley Center at UEA, a series known as HadCRUT4.  The HadCRUT4 series is the main series relied on by the IPCC for its warnings of climate alarm propounded to the governments of the world.  The full McLean Report is behind a pay wall, where it can be purchased for $8.  I have purchased a copy.  The Executive Summary and some other excerpts can be found at Watts Up With That here. 

McLean’s audit is scathing in many respects.  He covers everything from impossibly crazy temperature readings that nobody bothers to examine or correct (one town in Colombia records a three-month period with an average temperature over 80 deg C, which is 176 deg F) to ridiculous sparsity of data (in some of the early years, the entire southern hemisphere has only one land-based weather station), and so on.  The overall conclusion:

Governments and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) rely heavily on the IPCC reports so ultimately the temperature data needs to be accurate and reliable.  This audit shows that it is neither of those things.

By all means buy the Report and read it if you have the time.  In this post I’m going to focus mainly on one portion of it, which is the part that addresses the issue of the early-year downward temperature adjustments.

For extensive background on this temperature-adjustment issue, you can read the previous posts in this series.  To make it a little easier to grasp, I’ll throw in this graph from Part XVIII of the series, posted in January of this year.  This graph shows current and earlier versions of temperature data from the station at Geneva in upstate New York.  Note that this data is from GISS (NASA) rather than HadCRUT, but the adjustment issues are comparable:

Geneva+temperature+graph.png

Somehow temperatures prior to 1950 have been adjusted downward by in excess of 2 deg C; and between 1950 and 1970 by in excess of 1 deg C.  That’s one way to create a strong warming trend!  But how has that been done, and how do we know that the adjustments are appropriate?  None of NASA, NOAA or Hadley/CRU have been forthcoming with anything approaching an adequate explanation.

Now McLean weighs in with some insights.  From the Executive Summary:

Another important finding of this audit is that many temperatures have been incorrectly adjusted. The adjustment of data aims to create a temperature record that would have resulted if the current observation stations and equipment had always measured the local temperature. Adjustments are typically made when station is relocated or its instruments or their housing replaced.

The typical method of adjusting data is to alter all previous values by the same amount. Applying this to situations that changed gradually (such as a growing city increasingly distorting the true temperature) is very wrong and it leaves the earlier data adjusted by more than it should have been. Observation stations might be relocated multiple times and with all previous data adjusted each time the very earliest data might be far below its correct value and the complete data record show an exaggerated warming trend.

There is much more on this subject in the body of the Report, particularly pages 82 to 86.  McLean asserts that something like the following is a frequent occurrence:  A measuring site, originally located in an undisturbed rural area, gradually becomes surrounded by urban build-up, and becomes subject to the urban heat island effect.  Thus, the temperatures it is recording are “too high” at least as compared to some theoretical un-affected “true” temperature.  At some point, the station is appropriately moved to a new location without the urbanization.  The difference between the temperatures recorded at the new and old locations is calculated.  And then - and here is the key error - the temperatures at the old location are adjusted downward by the amount of that difference, for all times going back to the beginning of the station.  But here’s the error: in its early years, the station was not affected by an urban heat island, so temperatures from that period should not be adjusted downward.  Yet they are.  From page 84 of the Report:

It is incorrect but seemingly common to apply a constant adjustment to all data from the first site according the calculated difference between it and the second site when the data at the first site has been distorted by gradual changes in the local environment. It defies logic that a location that was abandoned because it was contaminated by external influences was equally contaminated when the observation station was first established there and throughout the entire time that the station was at that site, but this is what a constant data adjustment implies. 

So, can an independent researcher at least be given the adjustment methodology so that the process can be reverse-engineered and corrected?  From page 82:

Much of the observation station data used in HadCRUT4 is likely to have been adjusted but there is no record of the method used or the amount of the adjustment, which makes the data impossible to independently audit.

In short, there is no getting to the bottom of the temperature-adjustment scandal, because the perpetrators have created no record to make it possible to figure out what they have done or to attempt to reproduce their work. 

Final question:  Is there any possibility that this is done innocently, as opposed to an intentional effort to engineer a fake record to support the cause of climate alarm?

OK, this is just one young guy doing some due diligence.  But the fact is, he has nailed the grand pooh-bahs with obvious data manipulation to achieve their desired result.  Do you expect any kind of response from the in crowd?  I don’t.

I’ll end with some conclusions from the Executive Summary:

The primary conclusion of the audit is however that the dataset shows exaggerated warming and that global averages are far less certain than have been claimed.

One implication of the audit is that climate models have been tuned to match incorrect data, which would render incorrect their predictions of future temperatures and estimates of the human influence of temperatures.

Another implication is that the proposal that the Paris Climate Agreement adopt 1850-1899 averages as “indicative” of pre-industrial temperatures is fatally flawed. During that period global coverage is low - it averages 30% across that time - and many land-based temperatures are very likely to be excessively adjusted and therefore incorrect.

A third implication is that even if the IPCC’s claim that mankind has caused the majority of warming since 1950 is correct then the amount of such warming over what is almost 70 years could well be negligible. The question then arises as to whether the effort and cost of addressing it make any sense.

Ultimately it is the opinion of this author that the HadCRUT4 data, and any reports or claims based on it, do not form a credible basis for government policy on climate or for international agreements about supposed causes of climate change.

THE LATEST SURFACE TEMPERATURE ANOMOLIES SHOW NO CONCERNS

Below is a clip from Roy Spencer's excellent blog giving the update to the earth's surface temperature (or strictly speaking the lower atmosphere). 

The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for October, 2018 was +0.22 deg. C, up a little from +0.14 deg. C in September:

Global area-averaged lower tropospheric temperature anomalies from 1981-2010 mean). The 13-month centered average smooths out the extremes. 

The graph shows a definite average increase over

the 39 year period of around 0.5 degrees C which 

equates to about 0.12 degrees per decade or 1.2

degrees per century. This is the root of the global

warming scare. When you see the actual numbers 

it seems like a lot of fuss about very little. 

PIERS CORBYN PUTS HIS REPUTATION ON THE LINE WITH SEVERE WEATHER FORECAST

Piers Corbyn, the brother of Labour Party Leader, Jeremy, has made a forecast of very cold weather on his blog here. Piers has achieved fame as a long-range weather forecaster with some high profile accuracy in the past. Unfortunately he has had no success in persuading his brother of the case to reject the current climate change hypothesis

A FEW CLIMATE ANARCHISTS CAUSE MINOR DISRUPTION (YAWN)

This BBC article describes the action taken by a group of climate anarchists and assorted misfits disrupting the business of the UK Department of Energy. (Probably doing us all a favour, as they are fairly useless.) What is interesting about the article is the way it is written, giving every opportunity to the disruptors to explain their actions and putting them in a very positive light. What is not said is how many were there, though it looks to me like only a handful. 

Although the article does say their "demands" are unlikely to be met (as they are impossible!), it does not condemn their actions or describe them as totally unreasonable. It does not say even if any arrests were made.  With the help of the BBC these few anarchists could grow in number. What is needed is to cut off the oxygen of publicity from them and make their lives uncomfortable by keeping them locked up for a few hours, instead of portraying them as saviours of the planet.

UN IS BEHIND MANY YEARS OF FAILED CLIMATE PREDICTIONS

This article explains how this conclusion is reached. Whom or what to believe? After 50 years of failed predictions, people are reasoning that something other than science is behind this alarmism. And that something is the UN. What else? Its global reach, back corridors and duplicity have allowed it to build an unchallenged, mutually ­reinforcing $1.5 trillion industry of captive politicians, scientists, journalists, crony capitalists and non-governmental organisation activists bent on globalism through anti-Western sentiment and wealth transfer.

CLIMATE CHANGE FALSELY BLAMED FOR DECLINE IN ARCTIC BIRDS

Here are the details of how the BBC has over-looked the true reason and instead simply blamed climate change without any evidence, and despite the fact that experts already know the true reasons which are not related to climate at all. In other words it is simply more fake news.

OZ BUSINESSES BRACED FOR CRIPPLING ENERGY BILL RISES

This post gives the details of the problems being faced in Australia by businesses as a result of extreme price rises in electricity. The reason, of course, is that they have closed economical coal-fired power stations and gone over to costly wind and solar. This is the same track as we are on in the UK.

USA VOTERS REJECT HIGH PRICED RENEWABLE ELECTRICITY

This piece explains how USA voters rejected ballot propositions which would have increased the cost of electricity in order to reduce CO2 emissions. Generally speaking the majority of voters will not vote to reduce their standard of living for some unconvincing hypothesis that they will stop some unspecified warming of the planet at some uncertain time in the future.

IS THE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE RECORD CREDIBLE?

Here is another interesting video from Tony Heller. This one looks at the fundamental data underpinning the whole global warming hypothesis - the record of Earth's surface temperature. He concentrates on the "adjustments" that have been made to past temperatures that have turned the trends from cooling to warming. Heller has kept the old records and shows where tampering has occurred. What he has uncovered is mind-blowing and alarming.           

NO CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATE ALLOWED

Climate change has become an issue that is beyond argument here in the UK. That is a fact as far as all layers of government are concerned, as well as main stream media such as TV and radio. I see it in all our council reports. It is evident in seminars I attend with our water companies, electricity companies, etc. etc. I believe it is virtually unanimous across industry and business. The idea that we must reduce our CO2 emissions is never challenged in such places or at such events. To do so would be like suggesting that paedophilia should be legalised at a child protection event.  In fact it is much more acceptable to call for the legalisation of cannabis than to suggest that cutting CO2 emissions is a waste of time and money.

Of course that is not to say that public opinion cannot be changed. In fact there are a lot of people who do not believe that climate change is an urgent issue, or even a serious problem at all, but the current culture prevents them from bringing this up at formal meetings. This is in complete contrast to what people say in small informal gatherings, where I find that scepticism is a widely held view.

A few years ago I attended a political meeting where a well known politician was the guest speaker. During the question and answer session he was asked to give his view on climate change. Before giving his view he asked the audience to put their hands up if they were sceptical of it. Astonishingly, nearly everyone put up their hands. The so-called consensus was reversed among a politically active (conservative) and well-informed audience.  I had a similar reaction when my council colleagues passed a motion urging the government to reverse its policy on climate change. There was a question on this back in 2014.

A recent political TV programme had a segment on the latest IPCC report which has announced that urgent action is required to reduce CO2 emissions to prevent catastrophic climate change. When you look at the video you can see that the USA spokesman, Myron Ebell, was rudely interrupted when he attempted to put across his answer by refuting the claims in the report. It was a classic example of 'argument from authority'.  At the start of the clip the short film was simply propaganda with no statistics to back up the extreme predictions. The other guests were no more qualified scientists than Myron, but their views were 'on message' so no interruptions were called for. 

THE ROLE OF CO2 IN CLIMATE CHANGE

This paper covers much of the controversial science of climate change in a readable way. Below is a short excerpt:

The well-established medieval warm period (MWP) reached its peak in about 1200 AD and then gave way to the little ice age (LIA) that lasted from about 1400 to 1850 AD. Those periods are well documented in history and accepted by climatologists. The Viking colonisation of Greenland took place during the MWP when lush green vegetation thrived, giving it its name. The Viking settlements collapsed during the LIA, when even the Thames in London froze over.
If the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today, with no greenhouse gas contribution, what would be so unusual about modern times being warm also?
This presented a serious problem to the supporters of AGW. The MWP peaked at a higher temperature than today and at a time when there was no significant human emission of CO2. This naturally raised the question: What would be so unusual about the current warming trend that necessitated the response to link it to human CO2 emissions? In return, the AGW advocates drew attention to a little known 1999 paper using tree ring data to assess past temperatures, eliciting memories of the now infamous presentation of the ‘Hockey Stick’ curve. Tree rings are not a reliable temperature proxy because they are influenced by many other factors, apart from temperature: rainfall, sunlight, cloudiness, pests, competition from other trees, soil nutrients, frost and snow duration. Nevertheless, the tree ring curve was accepted by the IPCC and replaced their earlier curve. As we know, it has the shape of a hockey stick. Trees grow only on land and 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water. The data were only from the Northern Hemisphere, yet presented as the global temperature curve. Quoting John Daly: ‘It was a coup: total, bloodless, and swift, and the hockey stick was greeted with a chorus of approval from the greenhouse effect supporting industry.

UK OVERSEAS AID MONEY FUNDS 'CLIENT EARTH' WHO TAKES IT TO COURT

This post gives the details. The UK government is using the Overseas Aid Budget to give £1 million  a year to an environmental pressure group called Client Earth. This so-called charity pays its Chief Executive £232,000 a year. (He has just had a 50% pay rise.) Not only that, but Client Earth has recently taken the UK government to court to force it to bring forward new tougher measures to reduce car exhaust pollution.  

It makes you wonder whose side the government is on. Both sides seems to be the answer. That is both its own and Client Earth's, but not the taxpayer's! 

IS CALIFORNIA THE NUTTY STATE?

This piece explains what is going on in the Golden State which has the largest oil reserves in the USA and yet it chooses not to extract those reserves. Instead it spend billions of dollars importing oil from overseas. This is done, of course, because they pretend to be saving the planet, but in fact they are still using oil, simply buying it instead of using their own. That surely is nutty.

HOW THE EDUCATION SYSTEM ENSURES SCEPTICS ARE FILTERED OUT OF CLIMATE SCIENCE

This article explains how the education system perpetuates the bias towards the current climate change hypothesis, thus trapping us in a closed system where any sceptical ideas are filtered out. Where in the past scientists were independent thinkers who put forward the results of their work without fear or favour they now are beholden to vested interests, particularly in areas which have been taken over by political dogma. 

MEDIA CLIMATE EXTREMISTS CLAIM CENTRAL AMERICAN MIGRANTS ARE "FLEEING GLOBAL WARMING"

This piece explains how this blatant propaganda is being used to try and ramp up the GW scare. It is an example of desperation and easily seen as such by the public. 

MET OFFICE WEATHER REPORT CONFIRMS UK WEATHER IS MILD AND STABLE

This report looks at the latest Met Office report into extreme weather and overall, the report confirms  that UK weather is, if anything, becoming less extreme:

• Summer days are not getting hotter
• Extremely cold days are much less common
• Droughts are less intense

This is not the conclusion reached by the BBC who use the Met Office report to try and give a much more scary picture.