Owing to my habit of listening to the BBC radio news at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, on account of me liking to record CD Review, I just heard about this:
The heads of 15 green campaign groups have written to the prime minister warning the government is in danger of losing its way on environmental policy.
I do hope so.
The letter says the coalition should promote a green economy with “urgency and resolve” if it is to follow its vow to be the “greenest government ever”.
The groups include Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the RSPB.
Downing Street says it stands by its record of protecting the environment and delivering a low carbon economy.
A year ago, David Cameron said the environment would be a top priority.
I love the phrase “a top priority”, in particular the “a”. And when a government says that it “stands by its record”, that often means that it realises that it’s a stupid record and is about to attempt a somewhat different record. It will never apologise for past errors, but is now wanting to make different errors, now that the political wind has altered somewhat. It was trying to get elected. Now, it is trying to at least to appear to balance the books that the election has placed in front of it.
David Cameron is the sort of politician who cannot be relied upon even to break a “vow”, but this news sounds, if not good, then at least like an improvement. There has been quite a little furry of news lately to the effect that his government is starting to have doubts about its electoral promise to wreck the British economy in the name of junk science, by making modern life illegal. Given that the British economy is already being wrecked in the service of junk money, I guess they are starting to reckon that one self-administered catastrophe is probably as much as the country can take just now.
Presumably similar calculations are going on in all other countries. Again, I hope so.
Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.
A bunch of rent seekers are whining because they didn’t quite get as much rent as they sought. My heart bleeds.
I’d be celebrating if I thought this was an actual change of direction by Cameron, or if I thought he’d tell them to FOAD. But I think he’ll fold and the greenies will get their
pound of flesh454g of tofu.Like Mr. King, it would be nice if the course was changed but I am not optimistic. I suspect that he has too much invested in the green scam to listen to reason. He has form.
For such a short piece, this little post contains a several wonderful phrases:
“It will never apologise for past errors, but is now wanting to make different errors”
“starting to have doubts about its electoral promise to wreck the British economy in the name of junk science * * * [it] is already being wrecked in the service of junk money”
Great writing! Thanks.
It would be ironic if bleatings from vested interests should spark the reaction from Cameron:
“How much are we funding them to bother me? Are they doing me any good or are they simply trouble-makers previously funded by Nu Liebore (Gordon, the filthy ***) from whom I can cut the funding while making myself look good?
I say, flunky, found out how much we’re funding them, and how much the blaggards are paying themselves.”
Somebody ought to see to it that Andy Atkins and his ilk are at the back of the line when they start rationing the tofu…
Why all this talk of tofu? Tofu is made from soya. Soya is to a very great extent GMO ergo the likes of Greenpeace hate the stuff.
Now if the Optimum Population Trust have their way and spay the darkies it’ll be Soylent Green for all!
Production of soybean has a much lower “carbon footprint” than its equivalent in weight for meat.
U.S. Police State Target (rock music video) Released
Anti U.S. Police State Musician/activist, Scott Huminski, releases his 6th rock video with his band Scott X and the Constitution Commandos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niLKRjLo4cA
I have to agree with Laird about Brian’s writing in this case. Junk money, and junk science will be the ruin of Western liberal market economies.
But is it junk science? I am keeping an open mind- and the recent reports that Britain went through a very dry spring, with fires blazing up, certainly lends to the impression of extreme weather! (Conversely, here in sydney, we are having cooler-than-usual autumn mornings!)
And is it true that the glaciers of Greenland are still retreating? Maybe the world is heating up, but we can play some part.
Sadly, it would appear that any optimism provoked by Greenies complaining is premature at best.
Delingpole has a piece up putting the pessimistic line, and I fear he is right. Certainly for the time being.
@’Nuke’ Gray
This kind of thing used to be just called weather. The weather has always been variable and sometimes prone to extremes, it is only in recent years that any spell that is in the least unusual has to have some huge significance. The recent dry spell here in the UK hardly qualifies as a drought and many of the fires that we have had were started deliberately.
One of the hallmarks of good science is its ability to make accurate predictions. I think that the wheels will finally come off the AGW bandwagon due to more and more spectacular failures of its dire prophecies.
Stonyground writes:
I think he may well be right.
But this was also predictable, on the balance of probabilities.
In computer modelling of complex systems, it is necessary to have enough ‘training’ data to learn the values of the appropriate number of parameters (the dimensionality of the model).
Having got that training data, it is then necessary, to confirm that one’s model is good, to test the trained model on new data. For CAGW, that would be data relating to period after the end of the training data.
Given that the right sort of training data (satellite observations) only became available around 1978/79, it is only now that one might have enough training and test data for computer models of this complexity.
Thus, only around now could we possibly have a proper view that the models are working well enough. [Aside: and this is, of course, assuming a proper separation of training and test data. Also that the oceans have been included in the model, given their multi-century low-pass filtering effect. Back in 2001, they were not; now (IMHO) the quantity of ocean data does not match even the timescale of satellite observation of input and output Earth radiance.]
If you assume that your scientific problem, and its computational model’s data needs, do not follow this modestly simple rule, you risk being wrong: it is not certain that you are wrong, just IMHO 90+% (though that is not a very scientific percentage).
Believing that one knows more than one does is not very scientific, though it is a pretty human failing. The speciality of ‘scientists’ (the political kind) is to dress it up as authoritative: particularly with lots of numbers. This differentiates them for non-scientists of the political kind: they (just) dress things up with lots of words, especially long ones.
Best regards
Policy will never change.