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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day – we really are a post-truth civilisation Over eight in 10 of the 113 temperature measuring stations opened in the last 30 years by the U.K. Met Office have been deliberately or carelessly sited in junk Class 4 and 5 locations where unnatural heating errors of 2°C and 5°C respectively are possible. This shock revelation, obtained by a recent Freedom of Information request, must cast serious doubt on the ability of the Met Office to provide a true measurement of the U.K. air temperature, a statistic that is the bedrock of support for Net Zero. Over time, increasing urban encroachment has corrupted almost the entire network of 384 stations with 77.9% of the stations rated Class 4 and 5, but it beggars belief that new stations are being sited in such locations.
– Chris Morrison
I used to quip that the only thing I believe on the BBC is the weather reports. Even that is no longer true.
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This matter has been covered in quite a bit of detail here.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/
Paul Homewood has worked tirelessly to expose all aspects of the Climate Change fraud.
And at Anthony Watts’ site here
I don’t frequent Watts’ site much anymore, but he went into some depth about the incorrectly placed temperature recording stations, some having been in location for twenty years, meanwhile a concrete jungle had grown up around. Leading to (Suprise!!) higher temperature readings.
The Met Office sold its soul years ago under the leadership of John Houghton. It jumped aboard the climate scare bandwagon/boondoggle, and got a lot more taxpayers’ money as a result. It is sure to be added to the Climate Scaremongers Hall of Fame one day when this era of credulity and foolishness is over. Future generations will suffer from Dropped Jaw Syndrome when they look back at us.
Can remember writing about this (and urban heat island) twenty odd years ago for a University presentation as a freshman.
There was also, some years ago, a newspaper which listed all the weather stations used for the global temperature measurement. I remember the ones in remote environments (like the arctic) which showed “warming” were located in galaxy brained locations like on jetways.
It can’t be that hard (in a strictly mechanical sense) to get a general idea of the local temperature. There are parks in the cities, and there are old, well-established buildings in the countryside, no? So place your urban temperature stations in the parks, up away from the ground far enough that a hot sidewalk isn’t going to change the reading. Similarly, place your rural sensors on the shady side of those picturesque churches that dot your countryside.
That all those stations are in questionable locations makes me think the problems are deliberate, rather than the result of carelessness. Rising temperatures are just too useful to the people in charge of capitalizing on the problem.
*Sigh*. In polite company, one does not discuss politics or religion. Weather has now joined that select club. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Samizdata still seems to not be polite company. Fortunately, there isn’t much Woke to screw things up.
I stopped taking the “climate change crisis” seriously once I examined the data local to me… The primary weather station site has been an extension site for the local agricultural college since about the early 1910s. Back then, it was in the middle of a bunch of orchards, and the nearest bit of “town” was about a mile or so away.
Since then, the city has grown up around it. It’s all urban, semi-suburban stuff now, not orchards. There are asphalt parking lots where there were trees, once, when you look at aerial photos from the 1930s.
Now, you would think that if the NOAA eggheads were to do anything, they’d look at that, nod sagely, and say “Well, since this used to be countryside, we ought rightly “norm” the current temperatures down, to reflect the growth of things contributing to the urban heat island effect…”
That’s not what they did. In order to produce the data for creating the “climate crisis”, if you go and look at what they did, they instead “normed” the old temperature readings downwards. Which, if you’re aware, is really egregious because the 1930s were some of the hottest years on record. Not anymore; they done changed the data so that they can claim it was cooler, then… Which it wasn’t.
I’ve an acquaintance whose family used to operate orchards in the vicinity to that extension site. They kept their own records of temperatures, because it was critical for them getting the smudge pots out and the fans running for things like early frosts. If you go and compare their records to the original set of NOAA archival records, you can see close congruence. You look at it after the climate crooks got at the data, and there’s very little that matches… All the old temperatures were lowered.
There’s been so much “The sky is falling!!!” scaremongering over this crap that it’s not even funny. Right now, they’re hyping “Heat Warnings” for temperatures that aren’t even that far off of what they were a few years ago, and which did not get any hype at all. I speculate that this is because they’ve discovered that it’s a really good way to get money thrown at meteorology and climate research… Which they are shameless in demanding, “or else…”
Not really sure what the hell they’re expecting; we’re coming off the tail end of a glacial period, and entering into an interglacial. The temperatures are going to rise, keep rising, and likely continue to stay that way for some time to come. This is pretty much a natural thing, and the way they’re going after the issue strikes me as opportunistic charlatanism. It always has, always will be. The world has been a lot warmer in the historical past, with both the Roman and the Medieval climactic optimums for evidence. Greenland once hosted fairly significant Scandinavian agriculture; the reason it was named Greenland isn’t because of some real-estate scam, but because when the Vikings first saw the place, it really was green down at sea level. They grew all sorts of cereal crops there, and guess what? It still isn’t warm enough to do that again…
The thing I’ve found most amazing about the climate idiocy is the way people can’t seem to even identify the contradictions in it all… Medieval mining camps coming out from under the glaciers? Evidence of that “evil global warming”. Nobody stops to connect the fact that the very existence of those mining camps implies that it was once considerably warmer up where those glaciers once roamed, and that the current warming is actually a return to the norms of the era when they were able to mine successfully there…
I love listening to people tell me all about these things, parroting whatever they read in the media, which was written by obvious idiots that can’t string a series of thoughts together to even ask the obvious questions at these press conferences they hold to “highlight climate change crisis events”. I sat through several of these things that were recorded and put up on YouTube, and I’ve yet to hear one of these press cretins even ask the obvious questions, like “Hey, if they were mining up here, and the glaciers have receded enough to excavate, doesn’t that mean the mines were accessible back then?”
Also, if you’re finding things in the Scandinavian mountains now that the ice is going away, that sort of militates towards the idea that if those areas were being hunted, then… It couldn’t have all been under ice and snow, now could it? I mean, if there wasn’t any significant game in those hills, why the hell would hunters have been up there with bow-and-arrow, losing arrows? I grew up in the mountains; if you go up above the snow line, there ain’t squat worth hunting, really.
Most of this “climate change” BS is predicated on the audience being a bunch of white-coat worshipping rubes. Nobody at these press conference events ever asks any real penetrating questions, it’s all bowed heads scribbling away, parroting the lies and misinformation they’re told, which then produces the desired effect in the population, because most of them are too trusting and far too poorly educated to think for themselves.
I mean, supposedly the sea has been rising. Get out the historical photos, and look at the sea level in locations like at Gibralter and other known locations. Where there hasn’t been surface subsidence, it’s exactly the ‘effing same today as it has been since the dawn of the era of photography. If you go even further afield, and examine old landscape paintings, you can ascertain that the sea levels haven’t appreciably changed since the 1700s.
Meanwhile, the media credulously reports that islands like the Maldives are due to vanish within the decade… Which they’ve been saying since the 1970s, from what I remember. Maldives are still there, are they not? Not under water? Hmmm? Do those things not catch people’s attention, when the dire predictions fail to come true?
@Ellen, that made me LOL.
Bent climate data? ( Steps back in amazement. )
Some people, such as my fellow Red Sea pedestrian Tony Heller, have been pointing out for years that establishment agencies (both government and corporate) are liars – deliberately distorting, or just making up, basic data – on historic temperature figures, medical drug safety, you-name-it and they have lied-about-it.
However, now the general public are catching on – because the lies have become so blatant and absurd For example, most ordinary people know someone who was harmed by the Covid injections, and people, in in the local supermarket, were openly mocking the “Met Office” that X month was “the hottest in history”.
If people are cold and you tell them they are hot (the hottest in history) – they know you are lying and they have contempt for you. And rightly so.
The problem is what can we, ordinary people, do about any of this?
The liars have the power – they control both the government bureaucracy and the corporate bodies, so what can we do?
Meanwhile Plato’s dream of destroying the family, and all liberty, and creating a totalitarian (total) state, marches on.
Now we are told that parents can not be trusted to feed their children breakfast – not a few very poor or very neglectful parents, all parents. So the government “has to” take over providing breakfast at school – the same state that has been undermining the family since the 1960s.
It is not just on the Climate that government (and corporate) bureaucracies lie – it is on everything, and the agenda is always the same – an agenda of power, of total control.
The “Spell of Plato” as Sir Karl Popper called it.
Paul Marks said:
They “have the power” only because we ceded it to them.
This is the fallacy of all of this Gramscian bullshittery, wherein the bright lights and brilliantines of the intellectual world determine to “create change” by clambering atop the working structures of society, and commanding that change happen.
Small problem that Gramsci et al failed to comprehend: The institutions captured have a role, a purpose. If you take them over, make your changes, and… They don’t work so well, anymore? Guess what? They’re going to be replaced at worst, and at best, simply routed around.
You want to be a “social revolutionary”? You’d best be damn certain that your revolution is actually going to work, lest the populace say “Screw this…” and go back.
Witness the French Revolution. How long did the first Republic last, before being overtaken first by Napoleon and then the Bourbons? Who both, successively, proved to be “ideas that didn’t work” just as badly as the ancien regime and the revolutionaries…
End of the day, things have to work. They don’t work? Something that does will inevitably replace them. Capturing the bastions of the media here in the US is not working out very well for our leftoid Gramscian disciples, because fewer and fewer people are taking them seriously. At the rate they are going, once the last cohort of the Baby Boom is in its dotage, they’re done. Toast. The only people I run into who even bother to tune into the news these days is my mother, and she’s in her mid-eighties. Guess what? Even she’s starting to lose her “willing suspension of disbelief” with regards to the BS.
You want a lasting “revolution in affairs” of any kind? Best be sure that said “affairs” still work, when you’re done. Because, my friends, the evidence of failure is hard to hide, and once people see it, they won’t unsee it any time soon. Piss away the legacy of trust and credibility you have trying to get crap like the LGBTWTFBBQ “agenda” crammed down people’s throats? It’ll be generations before you get it back. If you ever do…
The so-called Climatologists don’t care. So long as the fraudulent measurements support their ’cause’. There is no one to police the crap data that these organisations produce and no repercussions for defrauding the public and humanity at large. Personally, I would charge them with Misconduct in Public Office (https://lawcom.gov.uk/project/misconduct-in-public-office/). The Met Office is a publicly funded organisation.
The real crisis in Western Civilization is not the “climate” the way they harp on continuously.
The actual crisis is that of accountability and consequence.
They’ve been predicting the “end of the world” since the 1970s. Instead of them being fired for that, they get more money. The more they spin things up, the more money and power they are granted.
None, I repeat, none of the predictions made by all the bright lights of the last hundred years have come true. Ever. Do any of you have the experience of trolling through the old popular culture sources, the magazines, newspapers, and books of the 1930s and 1940s? D’you know what was in those, right up until about 1938? Widespread and massive encomiums talking all about the coming age of perfection brought through socialism, either the national or international varieties. One of the big reasons they had such trouble mobilizing people against Hitler was because all the COMINTERN agents and publications in the West were mostly on his side, up until Barbarossa. You couldn’t criticize any of these people… Statism and state planning were all the rage, and all “the way of the future”.
None of it worked, and in the end, it came down to disaster. Were any of them held responsible and accountable? Nope; they all went on to their gray little lives as apparatchiks in academia or government during the 1950s and 1960s, and many of them were lauded for their performance. These are the same people that turned Detroit into a hellscape, and none of them were ever held accountable for that, either.
The wry observation made by many of my peers in the Army was that “…you f*ck up, you move up…”, which I fear was more true than not. If you ‘effed something up by the numbers, then you were almost certain to be promoted, it seemed. Truly egregious errors? You were never held accountable. We had a company commander that managed to actually lose an entire set of anti-tank mines she drew for training; the investigation? Held her guiltless, even though it was all her decisions that made it happen. Why’d it happen? She was the “Golden Girl”, and not to be derailed. They wound up blaming some lower enlisted, and last I heard, she retired from the Army as a Lieutenant Colonel. The guy who got the blame was thrown out on his ass, and all he’d done was obey, under protest, her orders.
The crisis is that precisely none of these assholes are ever held responsible and they never face consequences. Paul Ehrlich single-handedly convinced a significant number of people that we were doomed to a population crisis. Well, we are, but it ain’t “overpopulation”, it’s the coming disaster of below-replacement fertility rates across the West, ‘cos everyone believed Ehrlich when he said the sky was falling. Same with the rest of this bullshit… They’ve invested trillions of dollars in these pork-fest “alternate energy” sources, and what have we to show for it? Oh, look… They’ve shut down Martha’s Vinyard beachfront, due to contamination from broken fiberglass fibers in the water, from broken wind farms that haven’t even reached initial operating capacity yet…
You want to fix 90% of what ails us, as a civilization? Start holding these assholes accountable. You screw up, you lose your job, your pension, and any chance of future employment. That’s what ought to happen to the current head of the Secret Service, and about 99% of the rest of the government.
Perfect case study: Massive incompetence and malfeasance in the EPA led to them killing about a thousand miles of Colorado River tributaries. What happened to the bureaucrats responsible? Were they disciplined, fired? Nope; none of that. Promoted and given performance bonuses.
Until that crap gets fixed, we’re doomed.
Kirk – yes we originally ceded power to them, but (as you know well) power has a life of its own. Once given away to rulers it tends to grow and be very hard indeed to take back.
The First Book of Samuel, Chapter Eight, does not just apply to monarchies – it describes a danger with all forms of government.
As John Adams explained in his letter to Roger Sherman – people (all people) have terrible passions, and will tend to grab more power, at first telling themselves that they are doing it for “the good of the people”.
I am sure even the bribe taking Joseph Biden told himself that government interventionism (spending and regulations) was for “the good of the poor” (even Pope Leo XIII argued that – as far back as 1891, and that is the only bit of “Social Teaching” that Joseph Biden really knows) – and if he, Joseph, also benefitted from the odd bribe what was wrong with that – as long as he was “helping the poor” (Mayor Daley in Chicago – and, even more, Mayor Curley of Boston) – ditto if he, Joseph, rather enjoyed ordering people about – got a kick out of making people obey his whims (all humans have that desire within them – which they need to control).
The head of the FBI (the chief “watch dog”) was Director James Comey.
I just watched him (thanks to scumbags of CNN – owned by a vast Corporation) – I watched James Comey praise Mr Biden to the skies (how much he “admired” him, how much “good” he has done – and so on) – yes Comey was trying to flatter Mr Biden to get him to go-quietly (as part of the establishment effort to defeat President Trump), but it also shows a lot about the government.
Director Comey of the FBI could not give a damn about the bribes, including from vicious regimes such as the People’s Republic of China, that Mr Biden has taken – the “watch dog” is just as corrupt as Mr Biden himself.
“Who is the custodian of the custodians?” – who guards the guards.
And remember the FBI have firearms and get a kick out of threatening dissenters with those firearms. Before dragging those dissenters to corrupt courts to be sent to prison (to be abused) for fake crimes.
The armed forces?
How would things go for you Kirk if you expressed your political opinions openly – how likely would it be that you would be promoted to high rank?
it’s largely irrelevant what the recorded temperature is, the question is whether an increase or decrease is going to cause major issues, which is where the science is uncertain and has yet to be explained.
These arguments are superfluous, the real question is, if we spend this gargantuan sum of money what impact will it have on global temperature, if that cannot be answered then we shouldn’t be spending one penny.
I can answer the question. The answer is non whatsoever. Reducing man made CO2 emmisions will have zero effect on global temperatures. Firstly the warming effect of CO2 in the atmosphere is negligible. Secondly there is a natural cycle of CO2 being added and subtracted from the atmosphere, human activity adds just under 4% to the positive side. All things being equal you would expect that this would cause a slight rise in atmospheric CO2, but we don’t even know whether all things are equal, the current increase could be completely natural. In any case there is no point whatsoever in the West committing economic suicide while paying the Chinese to emmit CO2 on our behalf.
The most striking thing to me since leaving the western hegemony twenty years ago is that none of the things you are expected to believe are actually true. Human activity is not altering the climate, COVID is not a threat to healthy young people, a man in a dress is not a women and mass immigration does not benefit the economy. Western civilization is senile and delusional, and its death is unfortunately inevitable.
RlJ, I think you’re on to something. Dogma that is accepted without foundation could include a large university educated cohort being good for the economy, that the west has a duty to intervene in the internal troubles of other countries or, perhaps most obviously, that diversity is a strength.
I’m sure Samizdatizens (if that’s even a word) can list dozens of examples.
WindyPants, I believe the preferred autonym is Samizdatistas.
Regarding CAGW, it long ago became a belief system for many people. No proof is necessary and attempting to question the evidence is heresy. The bigger question is why so many people in Britain, America, Germany, Australia, et cetera have so much hatred for themselves and their own species. That self hatred is what predisposes many people to blindly believe in CAGW. Where does this self hatred come from?
That is correct 😀
Maybe I’m just being contrarian, but if new met stations are put in pristine class 1 or 2 sites, and THEN the city encroaches and turns them into overheated class 4 or 5 sites, the climatistas can then point to the resulting warming and scream “We’re all gonna die!”
If the new sites are already garbage, they can’t warm up much more.
I grew up with gendered language. Are the male posters thus Samizdatistos? Samizdatisx? 😉