AGW, what do you think?

The article is a long read, but shows how the AGW theory is really a green religion. Note the typical agenda of those who believe in it, always try to taint their opponents with Nazi or other epithets. reasoned debate is beyond them. "We are right and you are wrong", no attempt at discussion of the facts.

This interesting report comes from St Andrews University Debating Society, written by Dr.Richard Courtney ...


I write to report on a debate that defeated the motion “This House Believes Global Warming is a Global Crisis” during a meeting of the St Andrews University Debating Society. It is difficult to arrange a debate of anthropogenic (that is, man-made) global warming (AGW) because few proponents of AGW are willing to face such debate. They know from past experience that they always lose such debates because there is no evidence that AGW exists and much evidence that it does not.

However, on Wednesday 4 March 2009, the St Andrews University Debating Society held their debate of the motion, “This House Believes Global Warming is a Global Crisis” in the Old Parliament Building, St Andrews. The debate was organized and presided over with exemplary efficiency and professionalism by the Speaker of the Society, Ms Jessica Siegel. It was conducted with all the pomp and ceremony that could be expected of an ancient society of so ancient and prestigious a university.

And the debate was lively, informative and entertaining. It got emotional at times. Some of the contributions from the floor were of exceptionally high quality. But, it was somewhat spoiled by the weakness of the proponents of the motion (I have good reason to suspect this weakness is because stronger speakers could not be obtained to propose the motion. If so, then it is yet another example of leading proponents of AGW fearing to face their critics in open debate).

The proponents of the motion were Ross Finnie MSP, former Scottish Government Minister for Environment and Rural Development; Mike Robinson, Chief Executive of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and Chair of Stop Climate Chaos Scotland; Gregory Norminton, Novelist ‘Serious Things’, Environmental Activist, Founder of ‘Alliance against Urban 4x4s’.

The motion was opposed by myself, and Nils-Axel Morner, Leader of the Maldives International Sea-Level Project who was awarded the ‘Golden Contrite of Merits’ by Algarve University, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, Former advisor to then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and now an Investigator of Scientific Frauds.

Each speaker was given a strict maximum of 7 minutes to speak. The speakers would alternate between proponents and opponents of the motion until all 6 had spoken. No speaker was allowed to speak more than once except to raise a point of information, order, or etc.

The proponents had clearly not prepared. They were not co-ordinated in their presentations, they each lacked any significant knowledge of the science of AGW, and they each assumed that AGW is a fact. None of them made a substantial presentation of arguments supporting the motion, and they all (including the politician!) lacked adequate skills at public speaking. The opponents of the motion were a sharp contrast to that. They each have significant expertise in their subject, and they had agreed the case they were to put and how they were to put it. Also, they are all very competent public speakers and their very different styles made their presentation much better than the sum of its parts.

Finnie spoke first. He argued that AGW is a fact because the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has published its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) that says the IPCC is “90% certain” that AGW exists. From this he claimed there is a “crisis” because governments are failing to give the matter sufficient importance. It is necessary for governments to decide a treaty that would follow on from the Kyoto Ptotocol that intends to constrain emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) but ends in 2012. The decision needs to be made at a meeting later this year.

I replied by outlining the case for the opposition. I asserted that governments do need to have policies on climate change but empirical evidence denies the existence of AGW and so there is no need to constrain fossil fuel emissions. Indeed, the harm caused by the emission constraints would be greater than any harm that AGW could induce if it were to exist.

Robinson’s response was very angry. He seemed to think attacking the opposition speakers would provide a victory for the motion. Almost his entire speech was attempted defamation of the opposition speakers. Within seconds of starting to speak he had accused them of being “like supporters of the Nazis in 1930s Germany” (my family lost everything in the blitz so I did not take kindly to that). The speakers on the opposition side “could not get anything published in peer-reviewed journals” (Morner and I each shouted out that we have and we do). And much of the same. He said people and governments must act to stop global warming (but he did not say how they should act) because - according to him - if a person had an elevated temperature of 2 degrees then he would die so we cannot let the Earth get 2 degrees hotter in case that kills the Earth.

Morner then gave a witty, entertaining and informative lecture on sea level change. The major potential threat from AGW is severe sea-level change. He interacted with the audience and selected one individual to jape with (his skill at this selection was later demonstrated when that individual stood and gave a speech that won the prize - of a Society neck-tie - for best speech from the floor). Morner presented data that showed sea level is not rising as a result of AGW at a detectable rate anywhere.

Norminton then spoke to conclude the case for the proponents of the motion. Like Finnie he seemed to be extremely nervous: both were shaking during their presentations. Norminton’s hand was shaking so much he put it into his pocket (I know others interpret this to be nervousness, but I think it was extreme anger: Norminton had not expected any opposition to the motion, and the assertion of clear evidence that AGW does not exist was - to him - an outrage too hard to accept). Also, like Finnie, he did not address the motion. He said he was not a scientist so he had to accept the word of scientists about global warming and scientists agree that global warming is real and man-made. He said the speakers on the opposition side were “not scientists”. Lord Monckton interjected that “Courtney and Morner are”. And Norminton replied, “So was Mengele.” Monckton raised a Point of Order demanding withdrawal of the remark. Norminton lacked the wit to withdraw. Monckton persisted, pressing the Point of Order, and Norminton continued to refuse to withdraw. Only moments before Morner had made himself the lecturer the students would most like to have, and support for Norminton drained away as he insisted that Morner was akin to a murderer operating in a Nazi concentration camp. Norminton continued by saying the threat of global warming was real, and it was killing polar bears, but it is not clear that anybody was listening to him.

Monckton then summated the case for the opposition. He had not prepared a speech but took notes of the proponents’ speeches with a view to refuting arguments of the proponents that Morner and myself had not covered, and by defending the opposition case against rebuttals of its arguments. This was a deliberate use by our side of Monckton’s debating skills. But he had a problem because the proponents of the motion had not made a case and they had not addressed any of our arguments. Instead, they had made personal attacks on the opposition speakers, and they had asserted - with no evidence or argument - that the IPCC is right. So, Monckton’s summarizing speech consisted of evidence that the proponents of the motion had merely provided errors of logic and fact but they had not a case. He pointed out that polar bears had quadrupled their number in recent decades and this was not a sign that their species is threatened. And he cited and named each of the logical fallacies utilized by the proponents of the motion.

The debate then opened to the floor. Four persons each spoke well. One gave a balanced presentation and the other three spoke in favour of the motion. But by then the debate had been settled. Prior to the debate the opponents of the motion had expected to lose the vote because the students have been exposed to a lifetime (i.e. their short lifetime) of pro-AGW propaganda. We consoled ourselves with the certainty that we would win the arguments because opponents of AGW have all the facts on our side. But in the event we won both. The motion was defeated when put to the vote.

Leaving aside the slightly adolescent tone of Dr.Courtney's report, this was evidently a fascinating occasion - one wishes one had been present.

Debates are essentially a very democratic process - everyone gets their say, and the audience decides who said it best. But in recent years it's become very typical of the green lobby that democratic process isn't to be allowed to stand in the way of their superior knowledge and will. They know best, and the rest of us can just keep our opinions to ourselves. Secretary of State Ed Miliband is our current Wanker of the Week for saying just this - he claims that opposing wind farms should be as socially unacceptable as not wearing a seatbelt.

James Hansen, a climate modeller with Nasa and the darling of his American Global Warming co-religionists, said this week that corporate lobbying has undermined democratic attempts to curb carbon pollution. "The democratic process doesn't quite seem to be working," he said.

Speaking on the eve of joining a protest against the headquarters of power firm E.ON in Coventry, Hansen said: "The first action that people should take is to use the democratic process. What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash. The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes. So, I'm not surprised that people are getting frustrated. I think that peaceful demonstration is not out of order, because we're running out of time."

Hansen, who famously dubbed coal-trains "death trains", said he was taking part in the Coventry demonstration tomorrow because he wants a worldwide moratorium on new coal power stations. E.ON wants to build such a station at Kingsnorth in Kent.

So, democracy is all well and good as long as it produces the results Hansen wants. As soon as the majority of people stop accepting the gospel according to Gore, democracy is clearly not working and should go out of the window. Let's leave the last word to Christopher Booker, writing in the Telegraph ...

If the present trend continues, the world will be 1.1C cooler in 2100
Considering how the fear of global warming is inspiring the world's politicians to put forward the most costly and economically damaging package of measures ever imposed on mankind, it is obviously important that we can trust the basis on which all this is being proposed. Last week two international conferences addressed this issue and the contrast between them could not have been starker.

The first in Copenhagen, billed as "an emergency summit on climate change" and attracting acres of worldwide media coverage, was explicitly designed to stoke up the fear of global warming to an unprecedented pitch. As one of the organisers put it, "this is not a regular scientific conference: this is a deliberate attempt to influence policy".

What worries them are all the signs that when the world's politicians converge on Copenhagen in December to discuss a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, under the guidance of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there will be so much disagreement that they may not get the much more drastic measures to cut carbon emissions that the alarmists are calling for.

Thus the name of the game last week, as we see from a sample of quotations, was to win headlines by claiming that everything is far worse than previously supposed. Sea level rises by 2100 could be "much greater than the 59cm predicted by the last IPCC report". Global warming could kill off 85 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, "much more than previously predicted". The ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica are melting "much faster than predicted". The number of people dying from heat could be "twice as many as previously predicted".

None of the government-funded scientists making these claims were particularly distinguished, but they succeeded in their object, as the media cheerfully recycled all this wild scaremongering without bothering to check the scientific facts.

What a striking contrast this was to the second conference, which I attended with 700 others in New York, organised by the Heartland Institute under the title Global Warming: Was It Ever Really A Crisis? In Britain this received no coverage at all, apart from a sneering mention by the Guardian, although it was addressed by dozens of expert scientists, not a few of world rank, who for professional standing put those in Copenhagen in the shade.

Led off with stirring speeches from the Czech President Vaclav Klaus, the acting head of the European Union, and Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, perhaps the most distinguished climatologist in the world, the message of this gathering was that the scare over global warming has been deliberately stoked up for political reasons and has long since parted company with proper scientific evidence.

Nothing has more acutely demonstrated this than the reliance of the IPCC on computer models to predict what is going to happen to global temperatures over the next 100 years. On these predictions, that temperatures are likely to rise by up to 5.3C, all their other predictions and recommendations depend, yet nearly 10 years into the 21st century it is already painfully clear that the computer forecasts are going hopelessly astray. Far from rising with CO2, as the models are programmed to predict they should, the satellite-measured temperature curve has flattened out and then dropped. If the present trend were to continue, the world in 2100 would not in fact be hotter but 1.1C cooler than the 1979-1998 average.

Yet it is on this fundamental inability of the computer models to predict what has already happened that all else hangs. For two days in New York we heard distinguished experts, such as Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, former director of the International Arctic Research Center, Dr Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, authoritatively (and often wittily) tear apart one piece of the scare orthodoxy after another.

Sea levels are not shooting up but only continuing their modest 3mm a year rise over the past 200 years. The vast Antarctic ice-sheet is not melting, except in one tiny corner, the Antarctic Peninsula. Tropical hurricane activity, far from increasing, is at its lowest level for 30 years. The best correlation for temperature fluctuations is not CO2 but the magnetic activity of the sun. (For an admirable summary of proceedings by the Australian paleoclimatologist Professor Bob Carter, Google "Heartland" and "Quadrant").

Yet the terrifying thing, as President Klaus observed in his magisterial opening address, is that there is no dialogue on these issues. When recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he found the minds of his fellow world leaders firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers. As I said in my own modest contribution to the conference, there seems little doubt that global warming is leading the world towards an unprecedented catastrophe. But it is not the Technicolor apocalypse promised by the likes of Al Gore. The real disaster hanging over us lies in all those astronomically costly measures proposed by politicians, to meet a crisis which in reality never existed.

I personally think that Al Gore should be dumped on the arctic ice cap alone without a gun. Polar bears 1, Al Gore 0.

H/T to the grumpy old sod

Anyone remember the CAP?

Mr Hannan speaks it is it should be.



Only a short speech, but we must remember this insanity that we are paying over the top for.

Daniel Hannan and the Left

I've spent a while on various lefty/left leaning websites tonight. What is astounding is that, believe it or not, most of the comments about Daniel's speech have been positive. The gist of the comments is "I will never vote Tory, but I agree with what he said".

Hopefully the tide is about to turn.

Michael White of the Guardian has been attacked from all sides for his dismissive, and condescending remarks.

Even the comments on labourlist are about 60% in favour of Daniel Hannan's speech.

However, can we last, if that one eyed fuckwit decides to continue with a slash and burn policy for the next 440 days.

Do I go quietly?

I'm going to retire after my forthcoming appointment to one of our government's ships has been completed. However I can't right a retirement letter, but instead, have to right a resignation letter. Considering my para-military outfit are a shower of politically correct, H&S nazis, can't run a piss up in a brewery, etc, what should I put in that missive?

Would, "I think that you are a shower of wankstains and I quit", be too strong?

Or, should I write, " I have had the honour to serve in the *** for more than 43 years, and it is with regret.................

Your obedient servant

PS. can I have an MBE.

Personally I don't care, but if anyone has any good lines for either, please let me know.

Note to self: Need to write the letter soon

We need her here

This is the mayor of a city in Canada. 88 years of age. Elected for 11 terms. Watch the video. I wish she was the mayor of my town.



Not only has she 91% of the vote, but her city is debt free and running a surplus.

Not likely to happen in Kent, where our leaders lost £50M in the Icelandic bank crash.

H/T to Iain Dale for this.

I've got to fly

Readers may know that I work for the Ministry of defence, and that occasionally have to go and do some work. ( Have I any readers? who cares?)

Anyway, I've to join my ship on the Island of Crete. Simple you would think. Oh no it's not, Not if you work for MOD.

If I was to book my own flight I would have a direct flight lasting 6 hours.

The MOD has arranged this:

Leg 1. Depart Heathrow 1710 hrs
Arrive Amsterdam 1935 hrs

Leg 2. Depart Amsterdam 2035 hrs
Arrive Athens 0050 hrs

Leg 3 Depart Athens 0550 hrs
Arrive Chania 0640 hrs

That's nearly 12 hrs to do the same journey. I cannot believe that's the cheapest option. Apart from the fact that I've got to hang around Athens airport for 5 hours in the middle of the night. I did that in Johannesburg a while back, no fun believe you me.

Mind you, they've contracted out our travel arrangements to a private travel firm.

Mmmmm

We've had it.

This is staggering.

The FT’s resident economics guru Chris Giles has a flabbergasting explanation of the scale of the debt the government is raising in the next two years: £350bn.

“That is more debt bequeathed to its successor than the total borrowed by successive rulers and governments of Britain between 1691 and 1997, the year Labour was elected.”’

Will we ever be able to pay it off?

The workers and the welfare state

We don't suppose there's anyone in the country today who doesn't know who the Chawners are. We particularly appreciated a thought-provoking article in the Times last week by Alice Thomson ...


Be afraid, be very afraid ...


Michael's alarm still goes at 5am every morning, by 7am he has cleaned his Notting Hill house, at 8am the children have a three-course breakfast and by 9 he has walked them to school and is sitting at his desk sending out his CV. Six weeks after he lost his job at Goldman Sachs, he still works a 14-hour day. He now waits tables at his favourite restaurant, sweeps the leaves from the communal garden tennis court and helps the neighbours' Filipina housekeeper to clear the drains.

Paul Bright, a factory manager for a paper doily factory in Essex who has also been made redundant, has the same drive. At 60, he could retire. “All I want to do is work again,” he says. “I am like a smoker who doesn't know what to do with his hands once he's quit. I need to feel useful.”

The Chawners wouldn't understand. Mr and Mrs Chawner and their two daughters insist that they are “too fat to work” because they have a combined weight of 83 stone - so they watch television all day living off their £22,000 benefits. In the past 11 years, only the youngest daughter, Emma, has attended a job interview and that was on The X Factor, where she was kicked out in the first round. Mr Chawner explains: “Often I'm so tired from watching TV I have to have a nap. I certainly couldn't work. I deserve more.”

These are Britain's two nations. Not those born abroad and those born here, not black or white, rich or poor, men or women, North or South, public or private sector. But those who belong to the world of work and those who are alienated from it, living off the taxes from other people's earnings.

In the past ten years a chasm has opened up between the workaholics and the quaintly named “work-shy”. Labour still isn't working, claims a revised version of the classic Tory poster, as unemployment passes two million. In fact, nearly eight million people of working age in Britain have been “economically inactive” for the past few years. More than 2.5 million of them are on incapacity benefit - of these 2,130 people are too “fat” to work; 1,100 can't work because they have trouble getting to sleep; 4,000 get headaches; 380 are confined to the sofa by haemorrhoids; 3,000 are kept at home by gout; and half a million are too depressed to get a job. According to Dame Carol Black, the National Director of Health and Work, one child in five now comes from a family where neither parent works, yet at the end of last year there were half a million job vacancies.

The BNP's message over the past decade has been loud and clear - your job is being stolen by the Somali next door. But it's just not true. The Somali and the Romanian, Chinese and Ukrainian are doing jobs that many British won't now contemplate. The majority of migrants to Britain - more than 80 per cent - are earning less than £25,000 a year in industries that have become unpopular for British people to work in.

That is why immigration in Britain rose by 2.5 million in the past decade and why English is now a second language for one in seven pupils in primary school. Immigrants have kept Britain working. It is also why the Tories couldn't turn immigration into a vote-winner in the past two elections. People recognised that we needed the Chinese to pick our strawberries, the Czechs to blow our children's noses, the Pakistanis to sweep our hospitals, the Afghans to drive our minicabs, the Australians to pull our pints and the Poles to put up the scaffolding.

Only last year £13 million of British fruit and vegetables went unpicked because farmers couldn't find enough British labour to harvest their crops, forcing the Government to raise the quota for migrants under the seasonal agricultural workers' scheme. As one man outside a Jobcentre Plus in Peterborough explained: “I'd prefer to sign on than do that. I don't want to work in no cornfield for £25,000 a year.”

Now, however, everything has changed. The new unemployed aren't those who don't want to work, they are the committed, driven employees who are horrified at the thought of no longer being able to commute into the office. They are the 3,000 people who are prepared to queue for 150 part-time jobs at Twycross Zoo in the Midlands and who bitterly resent having to sign on.

These are the unemployed who keep Gordon Brown awake at night. The millions of British citizens who are already economically inactive will be eternally grateful to the former Chancellor for having provided them with such generous pocket money, but those now joining the unemployment statistics won't be bought off so easily.

They are the newly unemployed dry cleaners in Didcot and Devon, the estate agents in Christchurch and Cornwall, the factory-floor managers in Swindon and Staffordshire and building contractors in Brighton and Bedfordshire - people who won't vote Labour again if they can no longer pay their mortgages and don't appreciate being forced to watch flat-screen TVs all day.

The Government's response has been to blame the immigrants who helped Britain for so long. Only this week Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister, brought up Sangatte again. Yesterday, as the unemployment figures were released, Hazel Blears, the Secretary of State for Communities, suddenly announced a new migrant tax of £50 on overseas workers coming from outside the EU to pay for their public services.

But the answer doesn't lie in supertaxing the migrants, cordoning off the white cliffs of Dover or forcing Ethiopians on to planes at gunpoint. Like drugs, immigrants will find a way into this country if the demand exists. They may be putting a strain on the NHS but many services wouldn't exist without them. In 2008, 14.7 per cent of health and social care workers were migrants.

Attacking immigrants and talking about British jobs for British workers won't help anyone but the BNP. What is required now is the courage to push ahead with welfare reform despite the recession, and close the only gap that matters - between the active and the idle. Michael and Paul will find a job in the end, it's part of their DNA. Tackling the Chawners is the real challenge.

Of course this isn't the first time the Chawners have hit the headlines. Their younger daughter Emma took part in X-Factor (twice) and was swiftly booted out by judge Simon Cowell who, even if he is one of our most-hated celebrities, is no fool. Watch a film-clip here (if you must).

And the family made themselves so unpopular with their neighbours that last October they were evicted from their council house.

They don't seem to be disposed to make much of an effort for themselves. "We have cereal for breakfast, bacon butties for lunch and microwave pies with mashed potato or chips for dinner," Mrs Chawner told Closer magazine. "All that healthy food, like fruit and veg, is too expensive. We're fat because it's in our genes. Our whole family is overweight. We all love nibbling on biscuits. I once bought some pears, but they tasted funny".

They've become expert at playing the victim card. "I’m a student and don’t have time to exercise," Emma said. "We all want to lose weight to stop the abuse we get in the street, but we don’t know how."

Awful though this family is, and penetrating though Alice Thomson's article is, we'd like to suggest another scenario. We think the Chawners are just stupid.

They're so dim that they have completely swallowed the modern media's philosophy that all that matters in life is celebrity, that success doesn't have to be worked for, that all you need is a little luck and you'll be catapulted to fame and fortune, and that the fact that you "really, really want it" means you must be entitled to it. Most of us know this garbage for what it is, but to the Chawners it's real.

And they're so dim that they accept without question the modern left-wing belief in a benefits system that sprays money in all directions (unless, that is, you're an elderly invalid who has the misfortune to own a house, or a child whose parents are invalids and need caring for all the time).

They're so dim that it never occurs to them that while they and others like them live comfortably off the state, the rest of us are paying through the nose to fund their lardbucket lifestyle. It never occurs to them that the big white thing in the kitchen can do a whole lot more than just heat up supermarket pies and oven chips, or that millions of other people quite happily eat pears that "taste funny" so it might just be worthwhile persevering.

And they've bought in wholeheartedly to the modern craze for victimhood: if you're fat it's someone else's fault and you're the victim. If people shout at you in the street or snigger behind your back it's their fault and you're the victim. If nobody'll recognise your talent and give you a lucrative record contract, it's their fault and you're being victimised. If your shouting and caterwauling in the small hours of the night annoys your neighbours so they complain to the council, it's so unfair and you're the victim.

And they won't ever change, because in order to change you have to understand what the problem is. And the Chawners won't ever know what the problem is, because they're too thick.

Mind you, this is just a theory. We could be entirely wrong. Maybe they know exactly what they're doing. Maybe they've worked out what the system is and how to exploit it.

Maybe they're just having a laugh, and the laugh's on us.

Either way, it's possible that the Chawners are the face of the future, and that's very scary indeed. It makes you view Polish immigrants in a different light, doesn't it? When did you last see a fat Polish person?

We really are going to hell in a handcart. Why have I spent the last 43 years working to support these wankers? Have they no ounce of shame? Afraid not, they are the core labour voters, that is if they can get off that fat arses to waddle to the polling station.

A message to Gordon Brown

This is a must watch.



Daniel Hannan MEP puts it to the dear leader. (And well and truly shafts him). One of the best speeches of recent weeks. Dave, you might need to watch this man.

That green paper

We should be so glad this won't come into force.

 

In return,citizens would be obliged to:

Treat public sector staff with respect

Bollocks, why should they get preferential treatment?

Live in a green way

I'll live in a way that suits me. If I want to turn the heating up, that's for me to decide. I pay the bill.

Report crimes to the Police

Only if you reassure me that I'm not going to be forced into giving a DNA sample

And where's the bit about getting off the social security and finding a job?