Why this Blog?

A place where I can lament the changing times; for eccentric comments on current affairs and for unfashionable views, expressed I hope, in cogent style; also occasional cris de coeur largely concerned, I regret to say, with myself.



Comments

I welcome your comments, so do please write. Please note however that all comments are moderated prior to publication. Whilst I fully appreciate that life can be frustrating, nevertheless, abuse, SMS language and illiteracy will not be tolerated!

Thursday 24 December 2009

Merry Christmas

Hello,

I wish you all the very best for Christmas and of course, the New Year.

Here's a little bit of silly fun from 1955:



Until next year

Sunday 6 December 2009

My Position on Climate Change

Ha-ha!

No that's not exactly it, but in some ways not far away.

Of course the climate is changing; since it has been changing since the dawn of time, where's the surprise? And yet we are harangued daily about our so-called "carbon footprints" and our CO2 emissions etc.

I am often depressed at the lack of a sense of history amongst contemporaries and the current near-panic, fuelled by the alarmist media is a classic case-in-point.

Even today the ludicrously-incorrect phrase "global warming" is still to be heard. In case you didn't know, here are a couple of facts:

1. The earth has actually been COOLING since 1998.
2. The earth was hotter in medieval times than it is now: Chaucer wrote of vineyards in northern England. (Of course if the panic brigade is correct, this hot period was due to the fact that the likes of Geoffrey Chaucer and King Richard II drove Ferraris)

The medieval hot period was followed by "The Little Ice Age" a period of low temperatures that lasted until the 18th century since when the earth has been warming. I do not believe for one minute that human activity (by which I mean consumption of fossil fuels and industry in general - I admit to concern about deforestation which might be a factor) is responsible for any change in temperature trends - or if it is, it is most likely immeasurable.

And now we are to have, starting tomorrow, the ridiculous UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Too late to stop it, since it was only recently that the balloon went up in regard to the leaked data and emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, an institution that receives very large sums of money from around the world and is supposed to be the leading authority on the subject. The leaked documentation demonstrates that so-called scientists have been "losing" and manipulating data - presumably in the interests of self-aggrandisement and perhaps to keep the money flowing in. Please read the following:

Climategate - read all about it

By Andrew Bolt

Christopher Monckton writes the first book(let) on Climategate, the greatest scientific scandal in our lifetime. The summary:

The whistleblower’s data file revealed, for the first time, the innermost workings of the tiny international clique of climate scientists, centered on the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, that has been the prime mover in telling the world that it is warming at an unprecedented rate, and that humankind is responsible… He had revealed what many had long suspected:

# A tiny clique of politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today’s climate. The “Team”, as they called themselves, were bending and distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research.

# The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of at least $20 million in “research” grants from the Team’s activities.

# The Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, so as to exclude inconvenient scientific results from its four Assessment Reports, and to influence the panel’s conclusions for political rather than scientific reasons.

# The Team had conspired in an attempt to redefine what is and is not peer-reviewed science for the sake of excluding results that did not fit what they and the politicians with whom they were closely linked wanted the UN’s climate panel to report.

# They had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.

# They had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures in the paleoclimate.

# They had expressed dismay at the fact that, contrary to all of their predictions, global temperatures had not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years, and had been falling for nine years. They had admitted that their inability to explain it was “a travesty”. This internal doubt was in contrast to their public statements that the present decade is the warmest ever, and that “global warming” science is settled.

# They had interfered with the process of peer-review itself by leaning on journals to get their friends rather than independent scientists to review their papers.

# They had successfully leaned on friendly journal editors to reject papers reporting results inconsistent with their political viewpoint.

# They had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase and corrupt science for political purposes.

# They had mounted a venomous public campaign of disinformation and denigration of their scientific opponents via a website that they had expensively created.

# Contrary to all the rules of open, verifiable science, the Team had committed the criminal offense of conspiracy to conceal and then to destroy computer codes and data that had been legitimately requested by an external researcher who had very good reason to doubt that their “research” was either honest or competent.

SOURCE

The above comes from a splendid (in that I agree with its content!) website called Greenie Watch.

There is plenty of eyebrow-raising material to be read there. Recommended. I particularly enjoyed this video, although sadly it seems that the presenter is still "on-message" even using the incorrect term "global warming" several times:



"'Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented!'‏

Ho ho, about time that that appalling windbag was deflated a little.

I am not generally given to conspiracy theory, but I know for certain that if anything (God forbid) is agreed at Copenhagen, then the result will be taxes. Now we have just endured a severe world-wide recession. Any connexion I wonder?

By the way, Greenie Watch included in a temperature trend chart the following, showing the temperatures at Copenhagen since 1880. I think that the graph speaks for itself:


Until the next time.