Green/Climate

2023-02-03

It's no secret that our schools are not teaching our kids how to think - they are teaching them what they want them to think.

This was brought home to me in 2019 when I attended a General election hustings at a local school - there was no dissent, climate change was an emergency and what were we going to do about it?

"Give me the child until seven, and I will give you the man, said Aristotle, a phrase understood down the ages"

"... there are few ideas in today’s climate political agenda that require more faith than the forecasts of climate models"

Succinctly put.

"The school briefing notes suggest that climate models 'have been used to make accurate projections for the past 50 years, and have advanced significantly during this time' "

"In fact, it would more accurate to say that they have

2023-02-01

Oh dear.

It seems that no responsible politician can make any innocent move to improve our environment these days without becoming the butt of a fresh conspiracy theory.

Everybody knows that "the Science is Settled", so how is it that whenever any responsible politician takes some small step towards limiting emissions, some disgruntled amateur sleuth pops up to try to trash his efforts by throwing up all sorts of inconvenient facts that he's dredged up in a mere hour or two fumbling around on the internet?

You really couldn't make it up.

(30 minutes)

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2023-01-26

The technocrats who would rule the world may not understand that they do not understand.

What you don't understand you cannot control.

They would control the world through their AI algorithms - but could the AI understand the manufacture of something as simple as a pencil?

Could it really track its "carbon footprint" (or whatever other notional key performance indicator(s) they may from time to time dream up)?

Well, perhaps for a pencil it could be done? After all, it's simply a question of breaking the problem down into its constituent parts, tracking each individually, and then apportioning some part of the cost of each constituent to the resulting pencil. Yes, this would be a multi-levelled process but in principle...

But what about the accuracy of the necessary assumptions underlying each individual part? For instance, the costs of the pencil factory. What

2023-01-26

How it started - The Guardian March 2022: 

US transition to electric vehicles would save over 100,000 lives by 2050 – study 

How it's going - The Guardian January 2023:

Revealed: how US transition to electric cars threatens environmental havoc

"But ambitious policies investing in mass transit, walkable towns and cities, and robust battery recycling in the US would slash the amount of extra lithium required in 2050 by more than

2023-01-24

"This coupled variability improves the performance of statistical models, which project further weakening of North Atlantic Oscillation, North Atlantic cooling and hiatus in wintertime North Atlantic-Arctic sea-ice and global surface temperature just like the 1950s–1970s"

So we have our old friends the climate modellers, still busily introspecting on how to make their simplistic models reflect the mind-boggling complexity of our global convection and volcanic heating and cooling systems, not to mention the characteristics of the solar heating and cooling systems that influence our entire planetary solar system.

And who is to say that similar galactic systems hitherto undreamed of may not also be governing the heating/cooling cycles of the entire Milky Way?

Am I alone in thinking that the hubris of our ever-more-intricately-modelling pseudo-scientists knows no bounds?

If you have a mind to, you can

2023-01-20

This is a considerable discussion (some think made more pertinent by Greta's recent arrest!) where an Israeli academic is interviewed by an Israeli Christian missionary.

This is a wide-ranging discussion that probably touches on any climate question that you can think of.

"... you need to dig into the data "

"... we need power when we need power... "

"... more people die from cold than from heat... "

"... is CO₂ really something that causes temperatures to rise?"

(76 minutes)

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2023-01-18

Whilst the Mayor of London may want to hobble motor transport within the metropolis, it seems that not all local councils are on board with this scheme.

Sutton council: "We are taking this step to send a strong signal to the mayor that he must start listening to local people"

Harrow council: "Our growing coalition of London councils are not satisfied with the justification for the expansion and remain strongly opposed to it"

It's encouraging to see local councils stepping up to demand some democratic legitimacy for these policies - write in to your councillors to show them your support!

And if your council supports the ULEZ, write and tell your councillor why you disagree.

Full article

2023-01-16

Yes, it's a normal British winter, even if the rail employees nurses and border force (that went down well didn't it?) and our perfidious political classes are determined that we should make the worst of it. Keep warm if you can, but don't you know we have a war to fight in the Ukraine?

(Are you winning it yet? Do you have any exit strategy for when the truth eventually becomes inescapable? What was it to do with us in the UK anyway? Why did we not encourage Zelenskyy to negotiate a settlement whilst he still had some negotiating cards to play and many thousands still lived who have now died?)

Well, if you are planning to listen to Greta at Davos this week you may get a slightly skewed viewpoint of how our planet's much-maligned climate is doing. It's a bit like asking our politicians how the war is going. Or asking our striking border force how the squaddies are managing all the arrivals.

"None too badly thank you" it turns out 

2023-01-07

This is a huge topic but the reality is very simple - can we link the predicted "extreme weather" events (or even any predictions) to "climate change", and did those predictions come about?

Since the climate has been said to be changing for 50 odd years now, we should be able to point to some predictions that have indeed come about, and in view of the severity of the proposals put forward for combating this menace, we really ought to be able to point to some concrete evidence that (a) the predictions so far have been quite good and (b) we understand quite well how these predicted phenomena work.

In short, let's look at the evidence.

And by the way, models are not necessarily "science".

Models can only be regarded as scientific if they

2023-01-06

Our politicians and media are by nature prone to oversimplifying -

"We will fix the NHS by giving them the money they need"

"Drive diesel cars to reduce CO₂ emissions"

"Drive petrol cars to reduce particulate emissions"

"Drive electric cars to reduce emissions"

"Privatise monopolies to improve their performance"

"Nationalise the railways to improve their performance"

"Regulate the Utility companies to improve their performance"

Yeah, right.

Take a step back, the world is more complex than they would have us believe.

The Big Daddy of over-simplifications (and the competition is pretty severe) must be Climate Change: the idea

2023-01-03

Possible objectives of our UK Green Energy policies:

1. Reduce our CO₂ emissions overall
   
2. Reduce traffic emissions in city areas
   
3. Show the world that our Green policies work, thus giving them a lead to encourage them to adopt the same policies and thus reduce overall global emissions
   
4. Reduce our energy costs
   
5. Reduce pollution

Bearing in mind that UK CO₂ emissions are a tiny fraction of global emissions, if we can't show other countries that our green policies are successful in

   (a) keeping us and our economy powered

   (b) reducing our CO₂ emissions

then these other countries will see no incentive to follow

2023-01-01

Come on guys, this is 1st January, not 1st April!

(10 minutes)

And of course, nothing like this could be possibly be happening in the UK could it?

No no, of course not, that would be too ridiculous for words.

2022-12-31

Setting the scene for the battles to come, Kate Mason explains the real intentions behind the UN's Sustainable Development Goals for Farming for 2030.

Farming WEF-style that is.

"We are in the middle of one of the largest psychological operations of our time, to invert our understanding of what is healthy... a focus on altering our perception of food from something that is grown naturally in the earth, to something that is synthetically engineered in laboratories... farmers are being demonised whilst massive corporates are dominating the markets with synthetic foods... "

That isn't even the half of it.

(17 minutes)

How the Government Will Get Into Your Mindspace in 2023

2022-12-21

This must qualify as one of the most infamous (or famous, according to your point of view) assertions of all time. It shouldn't matter in all truth because at one time in history I'm sure we could have identified the received consensus that 97% of all scientists agreed that the sun orbits the earth, or that the earth is flat, or that man landed on the moon (and came back again) in the 1960s, or that the twin towers (plus building 7, 3 buildings in all) were brought down by suicidal Arab terrorist trainee pilots flying only 2 aircraft, and we still haven't nailed those issues completely either.

Meanwhile, life goes on regardless.

Or would do if the politicians were not involved.

Copernicus in 1543 published his revolutionary idea that the earth orbits the sun, but as they didn't have the internet in those days it was Gallileo who caught the full wrath of

2022-12-20

Simple messages that can be understood in a few moments are it seems to me the way forward.

Life isn't always complicated, and those who wish to obscure the simple truth are prone to embellishing it with unwanted complexity in the hope that the simple truth will get lost in the verbiage.

Here is some very simple truth (3 minutes) about our national energy policy, brought to us by GB News.

Here is another very simple truth about the Covid pandemic.

Imagine that you have been tasked to discover the reliability of a test for a disease - how would you go about it?

One way to calibrate the test would be to assemble a group of healthy people known to be free of the disease

2022-12-16

It seems to have been some time since the panic about drowning polar bears has been mentioned, and maybe this is the reason - the summer arctic ice decline has levelled off (according to investigative climate reporter Tony Heller).

Now as anybody who has followed the fortunes of their favourite stocks can tell you, today's rise can also be tomorrow's fall so maybe it's a little early to draw too fast a conclusion here, but certainly we "could" now be in for a period of higher highs and higher lows which would confirm a new rising temporary trend - nobody knows.

What we do know is that the climate changes - always has, always will - but mother earth has an inordinately long history (left to her own devices) of maintaining herself within reasonable bounds.

"It might not be a surprise to learn that sea ice extent was lower in the 1970s and it peaked in 1979. By starting the graph in 1979 a ‘fake’ linear downward trend is produced". "Fake" is a

2022-12-14

Vanguard is one of the top three asset managers that between them own just about the whole world.

And they have now forsworn the ESG investment philosophy in favour of (wait for it... ) investing in profitable businesses!

Now I would never suggest that investments should be made on the basis of profitability alone or we would all be running drug cartels, but the fact that such a mammoth investment house has thrown in the towel on "green" investments represents as big crack in the "green" narrative as we could imagine.

"In other words, saving the planet has suddenly taken a back seat to client returns at two of the foremost climate change virtue signallers on Wall Street…"

...

2022-12-10

Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil have been in the news for various reasons, but I fear that their efforts are misdirected. If they really want to make a difference then they should protest in New Delhi Beijing and Shanghai - or Berlin - where the governments that really are burning ever increasing quantities of polluting fuels such as coal are resident.

Is CO₂ a pollutant?

With no CO₂ in our atmosphere we could grow no crops - and those many net zero campaigners who want us to stop eating meat thus obviously also want us to stop eating - full stop.

In fact, more CO₂ means more crops and offers the potential for more farmland of all kinds to feed the hungry.

CO₂ is no more a

2022-12-04

Love him or hate him, David has been at the forefront of the exposure of the global project to convert the world into a global-corporate-fascist-government slave colony, seemingly from time immemorial.

He is also very articulate and clearly expresses his views. We may not always agree with everything he says, but does he have the right to say it?

Free speech has become a bit like Brexit - of course we are all free to express ourselves - or to live free of control by the EU - but of course (!) there are limits (which may be invented/interpreted differently to suit the elite at any time).

It used to be that the law clearly recognised that the freedom to only speak without offending anybody is not worth having. In recent years the invention of "hate speech" and other more or less elastic definitions of speech that some people won't like has reached an incomprehensible level of ever mutating convolution, designed to keep us constantly confused and scared to