Formerly "Black Dog Blog". I changed the name since these pages are not aimed at dog-lovers and there are many "Black Dog Blogs". This blog is intended to offer odds and ends of information that I hope will be interesting and amusing. Perhaps less amusing will be my occasional rants and metaphorical sighs about and at the world we live in, its governance and population.
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!
Shocked at the possibility that there is what is commonly known as "big money" behind those who prefer to believe that the idea of man-made climate change is alarmist rubbish, Ars Technica expresses concern that this might be undemocratic (oh dear...).
Well, well; I look forward to reading in the near future on a main stream site, a piece condemning the enormous vested interests behind the global warming panic.
In the meantime, there is of course always the splendid scepticism to be found on GREENIE WATCH.
[...] that his page carries an Israeli flag with the message "I stand with Israel."
Personally I can't stand Israel - at least under its present governance.
Anyway that's all off the point. The important thing is that Greenie Watch has come up with something really nice: effectively a quote from the IPCC that suggests that they are coming round to the idea that, quel choc! the activity of the SUN is responsible for changing our climate here on Earth.
Well, well. You read it here first: I wrote ages ago that the sun just has to fart once and we're all toast. It may be only a medium-sized star, but as I think Fred Hoyle remarked, expand the earth to the size of the sun and earth's atoms would become the size of toy balloons...
The energy companies will have carte-blanche to carry on their well-known policy of piracy and banditisme under the guise that it will "save the planet"
The reality is that unless new nuclear facilities are built quickly, we'll all be in the dark. The alternative is to start digging up coal again; the idea floated this week about increasing our dependency on imported gas is strategic madness; and anyway please tell me what is "green" about burning gas? The molecules found in natural gas contain naughty carbon atoms; oh dear!
Don't for a minute imagine that despoiling the countryside with those expensive, hideous and inefficient wind generators will have any significant effect on meeting our ever-expanding energy requirements. They are one of the best confidence tricks of all - together of course with the absurd idea that mankind is principally responsible for the climate which, as I have observed before, has been changing ever since the day the earth began to exist.
I have just discovered that we now have a government department that rejoices in the name - wait for it as I can hardly type for laughing - Department of Energy and Climate Change. (The italics are mine of course).
Dear God! perhaps said dept will, by means of new policies, reverse climate change?
They'll have a fair bit of work to do, given that the climate has been changing for the last 10 billion years or so (unless of course you are one of those sadly-deluded "creationists" who believe that the earth - the centre of everything of course (!) was created in six days - in which case substitute 6000 years for the 10 billion...). I read in the Wikipedia piece on the subject of Creationism that a mere 25% of the population of Turkey believe in the theory of evolution; poor Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) must be spinning in his grave.
I am a notorious pedant - especially in regard to the English language; "T" (see previous post) said to me that she found my pedantry "sexy" and when I once made a cartoon which read "Pedantry - the route to insanity" and sent it to her, she replied "It's the route to my heart."
Anyway, the title of today's message concerns my annoyance at the BBC's horrible abbreviation of the words "Metropolitan" and "Meteorological" ("MET"} relating respectively to the "Met Police" and the "Met Office" in BBC-speak. I feel entitled to consider the so-called "Met Police" as the Meteorological Police - why not? - those Climate Change bores who nag us to death with their panic-mongering.
And on the subject of the BBC, what's a "Pry Minister' and a "Seckertree of State", and why is the Chancellor of the Exchequer referred to as "The Chancellor?"
What's the matter with everybody? They say that so-called greenhouse gases are increasing, but if this is the case, why is the planet not actually warming? I don't believe in the greenhouse gas effect, and when I read rubbish such as:-
Heightened methane emission from wetlands and permafrost has regularly been touted as a potential amplifying factor in climate change, with warmer weather stimulating their release and so producing further warming.
- I despair.
HELLO BBC! ARE YOU LISTENING? THE PLANET IS NOT WARMING.
Some of you may have seen that disgraceful and disgusting campaign where those who chose not to be "on message" as far as the greenies are concerned were 'exploded' on the push of a button by some right-on twat.
It seems, I am happy to say, that the no doubt expensive campaign has proved - as it should be - a disaster for the warmists and their fellow-travellers.
Down with the warmist-fascist-communist eco-terrorists!
I make no comment on the following, which I have lifted direct from Greenie Watch, except to say read it and be scared.
Until the next time.
The 1930s all over again in Germany
Only the colour of the shirts has changed
What is it with these intolerant zealots who refuse to learn anything from history?
Right smack on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, German Parliamentarians, in a frontal assault, are now openly calling out and branding scientists for the crime of scientific dissent. These out-of-control parliamentarians are demanding that the German government take a position against dissenting views in climate science.
What follows makes McCarthyism look like a treasure hunt. What a number of zealous German parliamentarians are calling for borders on a call to launch a science pogrom.
The climate dogmatists are finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the scepticism, free speech, and dissent now spreading in Germany and Europe, and therefore want to stamp it out using the might of the federal government – and now.
The upcoming 3rd International Climate and Energy Conference, REGISTER HERE, has got them spooked as well.
Journalist Dirk Maxeiner here brings our attention to the latest development on the exploding intolerance that has gripped certain factions in Germany. Maxeiner publishes the text of a query written by the Green parliamentarians sent to the German government, read below.
As the text shows, branding of climate science dissenters has begun. Fred Singer and EIKE (European Institute For Climate and Energy) are the first to feel the sting of the denier-branding-iron. German greenshirts have sent the bloodhounds afterFred Singer because of his speech in a German parliamentary forum discussion on the economic impacts of climate protection held by the FDP Free Democrats, the junior coalition partner of Angela Merkel’s CDU/FDP coalition government. Read background here.
Some may think that I’m being over-dramatic here. I am not. The situation that the few, yet very vocal, sceptics face here is precarious. Just read the following query written by a faction of Parliamentarians to the German Government, translated of the German text presented at Dirk Maxeiner’s site (emphasis added, and note the use of the term “denier” throughout the text)......
There it is folks. All this because some people are asking questions about the science. These Green radicals are scared crapless. Their media hacks did everything possible to slander and destroy Fred Singer, EIKE, and other dissenting German scientists – to no avail.
Now for the first time they’re going after the liberty-oriented Liberal Institute of the Friedrich-Naumann-Foundation. They are de facto demanding a declaration of war on scientists and groups that have a different opinion. This level of intolerance has not been seen in Germany in over 65 years. This is their “Either-you’re-with-us-or-against us” declaration to Angela Merkel’s coalition government made up of the CDU Christian Democratic Union and FDP Free Democratic Party.
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.
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:
A smoker for over 40 years, I am, contrary to all the statistics the nanny government feeds us, still here, and, as I have been for the past thirty years, still grumbling about so-called democratic governments interfering in our personal lives. And if you are worried about "passive smoking" don't bother complaining: I don't believe the data! The same applies to the outrageous rubbish spouted about "global warming" which of course is a lie.
