Comment Isn't Free

I kind of wondered what the Grauniad's online moderators would do to all those who dared criticise the railway engineer crook running the IPCC's pisspoor article in their unquestioning organ on why he isn't a crook, why he should keep his job - and why the world really is about to end (no, really, it is). Well, Bishop Hill has had a look for us and has found the predictable, depressing censorship by the zealots continues unchecked:

Not a comprehensive survey, but of the first 50 comments on Pachauri's article in the Guardian, 18 were deleted.
Criticism is forbidden.

When it comes to the left and the climate change scam, comment isn't free, and, as Bishop Hill says, criticism is forbidden. I find that sinister, don't you? No scrutiny, no dissent, just the word of the IPCC and its tame propaganda outlets, such as, of course, the Grauniad.

Neat.

Carbon Junk Bonds

Carbon is universally ubiquitous. It is the fourth most abundant element in the cosmos and the fifteenth most common on this planet. It's the basis of all life as we know it. Yet it seems that this elegant combination of abundance and vital significance will not stop human beings, in their endless pursuit of ever greater levels of folly, from basing an entire new economic model on "trading" the stuff. It reminds me of the Golgafrinchans in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where, having crash-landed on a primeval Planet Earth, decide to use tree leaves as currency, only to discover soon afterwards that they had a serious inflation problem. Their solution? Why, burn down the trees, of course.

So you would think that this comedy science fiction is just that, comedy science fiction. It could never happen in real life, could it? Well, yes, it could. Anthropogenic climate change hysteria (it was anthropogenic global warming, but since the warming abruptly ground to a halt a decade ago, the goalposts were conveniently moved) drummed-up by discredited, numbskull scientists and then exploited mercilessly by leftwing misanthropists and 'financial engineers' alike in pursut of their own agendas, is producing its own version of leaf-trading. Both groups have something in common: while their ultimate goals might be different, they both really don't give a toss about the environment. All the traders really care about is money and all the loony Trots really care about is power. About people in general, they both care nothing.

Leaving the Trots to their own devices for a moment, in Private Eye's latest edition is an interesting article on the father of derivatives trading (junk bonds to you and me), Richard Sander. For those that don't know, derivatives, in their many various forms, are the things that brought the global economy crashing down a couple of years ago, (beginning, interestingly, with Northern Rock in Britain (it didn't 'start in America', as such, you see)). Just to put things in some kind of perspective, the entire market, if memory serves, was worth an wapping $500Tn in 2007, while the real villain of the piece, the CDS (Credit Default Swap), which was a trading invention that effectively rewarded the trader who held them with a payout should there be a default over a set period of time on a 'bundle' of mortgages, which were sold as a package, was $50Tn dollars before the sub-prime crisis went off like a nuclear bomb and plunged half the world into depression.

Well, Sander's at it again. This expert in magicking money out of thin air by trading in worthless assets is the main mover behind all the new bit of 'financial engineering' currently known as 'carbon trading'. Private Eye has done what passes in that magazine for an expose on him, though its typically MSM-style, schizoid editorial stance on all-things climate change means that it doesn't seem to be able to reach any solid conclusions about where this latest global financial scam will take us. Anyway, click on the image to read the article, or on the link above:

Whatever the ins and outs of how this thing's mechanisms are expected to work, a few things stand out in particular. First, the usual suspects are involved (RBS etc). Second, it stinks. What CNBC's Federal Reserve expert, Steve Leisman, called in late 2008, at the height of the crisis, a decade of 'fake growth' amounting to $40Tn, is about to happen all over again. A worthless commodity, in this case a commodity that doesn't actually exist - these are bets designed to offset the 'production' of carbon, or, more accurately, carbon dioxide - (at least with sub-prime, there was a real house lying somewhere at the bottom of it all), will be traded furiously in a market that some are saying will be worth $100Tn (Christopher Booker for instance) before this decade is out. And they are not wrong: one decade was all it took in the case of sub-prime junk bonds, once Alan Greenspan and Bill Clinton (and Gordon Brown in Britain, of course) had created the CDS bonanza for their banking buddies. Lehman et al over there; Royal Bank of Scotland, Bank of Scotland, Northern Rock et al over here. So long as the tax rolled in, no one in government cared. They certainly did not have clue-one about the forces they had unleashed with their vandalism of carefully created regulatory systems. Brown certainly didn't, hence the biggest exposure was in Britain. Within a decade, that market had jumped from a few hundred million in the mid-nineties to trillions by the time of what I consequently like to call 'Brown's bust'.

It's happening all over again, beginning this year. And there is nothing anyone with any political power will do to stop it. Why? Because of the propaganda that is fuelling the scheme's growth and the amount of egg on collective faces there would be should someone decide to hold his hand up and simply say, "Hang on a minute, do we really want to go down this road again?" So it isn't carbon capture we should be worrying about, it's media capture. It isn't money men like Sander we should be worrying about - he's just doing what he does best. It's the crooks in our own government.

It isn't climate change we should be worried about, it's the vast scale of the next bust, which will be inevitable if (or when) these immoral, undemocratic and economically retarded transnational carbon trading schemes are permitted to gain a grip on the world.

We do need alternative energy production systems, of course, and we must work harder to conserve and preserve the planet's ecosystem and protect it from humanity's impact (some would say that that is a human duty). What we certainly don't need is, first, insane, pseudo-scientific thought diseases that will result in real envoronmental damage (as has been seen already), and second, to pour hundreds of billions of pounds of wealth into the stratosphere based on that lie, wealth that could and should be used to modernise the world's infrastructure today.

It is time for people the world over, the vast majority of whom don't believe the climate lies any more in any case, to start shouting out loud: not in my name!

Eye Smear: Lord Monckton

This extraordinarily bad article appeared in the latest edition of Private Eye:

Former chancellor Lord Lawson may lead Britain's climate change sceptics but the movement's John the Baptist, its bearded mystic who has long preached in the wilderness, is former Thatcher aide Christopher Monckton. "Mad Monck" (whose sister Rosa married Lawson's son Dominic) is actuall ythe Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, although given that most hereditary peers have been removed from the House of Lords, Westminster is deprived of the Mad
Monk's iconoclastic, right-wing views.

But hark! Having quit the Tory party, Monckton has joined UKIP and he popped up the other day at that party's campaign offices in SW to present UKIP's "climate change statement". The meeting was held in a small room which, paradoxically, soon became unbearably hot.

The event attracted a small crowd of reporters and UKIP supporters. A fat man in a bow tie parked his buttocks in the front row. Another fellow was dressed in a dinner jacket (the meeting began at 3pm) with torn trousers. Also present was a European aristocrat, an inoffensive flower who was hailed as "Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Oldenburg". She uttered not a word.
UKIP leader Lord Pearson, who was incautiously wearing both a jacket and a sweater, chaired proceedings with the help of one of the party's MEPs, Godfrey Bloom. He sported a florid yellow hanky in his top pocket. The launch was being photographed from the side by a tall man with a ponytail, later identified as UKIP's new campaigns supremo.

Pearson apologised for the fact that adverts for the meeting had stated that "Global Warming Is Crap". He said the last word should have been written "C.R.A.P." – as in "Carbon Really Ain't Pollution". Ho ho!

Bloom now took the floor for a minute or so, placing his hands on the top of his arse, throwing back his head and saying: "I'm not a scientist but it is our job to assess information – yes! assess information!" He called climate change "one of the greatest confidence tricks the world has ever known". And then sat down with violent suddenness.

Now came the main event: the Mad Monck. To call his long speech "swivel-eyed" would be both unkind and inaccurate, for the most prominent thing about this onetime Fleet Street leader writer is the way his eyes do not swivel but bulge. He has the appearance, if not of Marty Fledman, of an indignant raven. He proceeded to peck his beak at the climate change theory and the vast apparat of scientists and lobbyists which has grown up around it.

"My lord, Duchess, ladies and gentlemen," he began, staring at the motley crew of deadbeat hacks and supernumeraries, some of whom were visibly wilting in the heat. Pearson, in
particular, was soon sweating hard. Monckton addressed him as "my noble Friend". Oh, how he grieves for that seat in the Lords he never occupied.

He proceeded to describe how recently he found himself discussing climate change with Tory policy chief Oliver Letwin and Letwin allegedly told him: "We cannot question what the scientists say." Monckton concluded that "you might as well resign and let the men in white coats take the decision for you." Men in white coats? Just to be clear, he was referring to scientists.

Over the course of the next 45 minutes, Monckton spoke crisply, without notes, about his distaste for the EU, the "zitty teenagers the United Nations uses to concoct its climate models", the "clunkers" who believe that biofuels will save mankind, and the plans of Al Gore, Angela Merkel, Jacques Chirac and others for "world government".

There were fluent tales about the Australian curly malice tree, "a strange kind of eucalypt which only grows on Dolomitic rock". Monckton, adding some stuff about calcium and magnesium, used it to make some elusive point about geology in the pre-Cambrian era ("ah yes, I remember it well," he japed) and carbon dioxide. From time to time his talk was peppered by a variety of jokey ringtones from people's mobiles. Pearson, now bright red in the face from the heat, made plain his disapproval.

Monckton laughed off theories that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 or that polar bears could be in peril. He called for cheaper beef burgers for the poor of Haiti and, while assailing the "eco-fascist agenda", described how he and a scientist called Herr Ziegler had been denied access from official symposia on "this fantasy, this chimaera, this will o' the wisp" of global warming.
Although Monckton undoubtedly came across as something of a "strange kind of eucalypt" himself, his certitude did have a certain magnificence. Can we not admire his readiness to stand apart from the stampede? The only moment he stalled was when a freelance hackette asked him about an incident in Germany recently when he compared the behaviour of some protesting climate changers, one of whom was Jewish, to that of the Hitler Youth.

Monckton soon recovered his composure, however, and claimed that an unidentified top Tory recently told him "none of us really cares much about climate change". He then launched on a homily about how salt was good for you and how, in his days at Downing Street under Mrs T, he had often had to see off theorists seeking government money for "pseudo scientific boondoggles".
At which point the Eye made its excuses and left, if only to cool down after all that hot air in the room.

This anonymous, snearing, personalised hatchet job can be condemned in so many ways, it's hard to know where to begin. So I'll limit this to just one point (sort of). It's not so much, for instance, the bafflingly high level of contempt the author, calling himself (although it could very well be a her), 'Gavel Basher', apparently harbours for Christopher Monckton that concerns me; there is very little evidence in the piece that might suggest he/she had the faintest idea who Monckton was before s/he put digits to keyboard. Or the fact that any of the bio-background included could be found out in five minutes by a quick search on Wiki - and a skim through any out of a hundred blogs (you know, the form of internet activity the Eye regularly rails against for whatever reason). And it's not the embarrassing, lazy ignorance of the piece on the detail of the climate scandal that Monckton is merely highlighting (no mention, for instance, and perhaps tellingly, of the fact that the IPCC itself has admitted the 2035 glacier annihilation date was out by a factor of ten - that the original document said 2350, not 2035. Even the Guardian got this right). It's also not the scattergun nature of the article's mindless abuse: first the audience, then the head of UKIP, then Monckton, then UKIP again, then the audience again, then back to Monckton, and so on.

It's none of these things. In fact, anyone reading the piece without the first idea who Monckton was and who doesn't like UKIP one little bit, but who has half a brain and follows a couple of newspapers and websites, will know that it's unpleasant, arrant nonsense from start to finish. So what particular aspect is it that I find the most revealing about just how bad an article this is? Well, I'll tell ya. It's that it is just so very dated! It's like some refugee hack who used to work for some dusty old rag or other has decided to get involved with 'all this climate kerfuffle'. You know, the conversation probably went something like this:

Ed (Arkala Hislop, we presume): What's all this nonsense about climate change lies I've been hearing about? I thought all that stuff was settled: we're destroying the air, or something, aren't we? Everyone says so.
You there, Gavel Basher, get down to that Monckton talk and see what you can find out.
Gavel Basher: Climate what?
Ed: Climate change.
Gavel Basher: Oh, right. I thought all that stuff was off limits. "Scientific consensus" and all that.
Ed: Just what I was saying. But there's a UKIP angle here. And a nutty rightwinger, Tory split one, too. It'll make good copy. Look, just get over there and see what crap this Monckton's spouting, and the kind of people who're listening.
Gavel Basher: Lord Monkey?
Ed: Monckton
Gavel Basher: Never heard of him.
Ed: You know, that science SpAd who used to work for Thatcher. The Viscount, or whatever he is. Just Google him. And check out a few blogs. They usually have some good stuff on this sort of thing.
Gavel Basher: (blank look, pause) Can't you send someone else?
Ed: No, you're supposed to do the fringe stuff.
Gavel Basherb: Bollocks. (picks up handbag and storms off)

You get my drift, I hope.

This hypocritical smear, as with most smears, is badly researched and pathetically prejudiced. But this one also has the dubious distinction of being totally out of touch with the zeitgeist. A bit like Private Eye itself these days, actually - and increasingly. I'll still buy it for the time being because I like Colemanballs and the letters and some of the local government stuff, too. But I have a funny feeling that that choice might be taken out of my hands relatively soon: I'm pretty certain that on the 'strength' of this piece of rubbish, among a lot of other fairly recent evidence of decline, that this once august, satirical, cutting-edge investigative organ will go the way of Punch. It'll be missed, too - for a few minutes. And then it'll become just another fondly remembered artifact of a bygone age: the age of the Mainstream Media establishment to which the Eye so clearly and firmly belongs.

PS: At any rate, I would have thought that this magazine would have been keen to get a bit of mileage out of the perverse corruptions of the brahman former railway engineer currently in charge of the IPCC with highly dubious links with that scourge of British industry (but close friend of this Labour government), Indian megacorp, Tata. Or, perhaps, the various carbon scams that have been going on all over the country for a decade or so now, and which have cost us billions. Curious editorial line, this satirical dinosaur has.

Reasoned Debate and Climate Change

For all those ardent Warministas out there (and by-now avowed sceptics - like me), this is what any future debate about the human impact on our climate should resemble. "Only connect" said Forster. At least these four are willing to try. Unfortunately, for many, mainly of the 'settled science', AGW brigade, (whatever their reasons), even that small step towards a necessary synthesis is a step far too far.

Brook + Readfearn / Monckton + Plimer from Manda Chuva on Vimeo.

Climate Ripper

I'm quite proud that my (sadly curtailed) rip of this performance by the great man, Lord Monckton, in Australia a month or so ago has now been watched by nearly 6000 people and commented on by just shy of 100 (including me).



This particular thought disease, 'Man Made Climate Change' or whatever the dangerous zealots are peddling it as now, is an especially vicious example of something we humans experience from time to time, thanks to our insatiable small-mindedness and eternal stupidity. But thanks to the apparent re-emergence, if not resurgence, of collective rational thought since Climategate, this latest example of the scale of the capacity of humans for superstitious folly is definitely on its last legs.

I think we're finally beginning to move on, socially and scientifically. And that's a very good thing, because when this ugly lunacy has been defeated, we can once again begin to focus on genuine environmental issues (the things I was brought up to care about), like saving the rainforests, saving endangered species and, ultimately, saving ourselves from watermelon, AGW, misanthropic lunatics who seem to prefer mass landscape vandalism over genuine environmentalism. They're basically Marxists masquerading as concerned citizens. We stopped that before; we'll stop it again.

But given how deep they've managed to penetrate our society, however, we're going to need not just better science, but a hell of a lot of luck if we are ever even to hope to cure our society of their corrosive, possibly deadly, disease.

I think we'll get that luck. We did in the past, and we will in the future. Maybe luck has something to do with being right - and determined!

Monckton's Australian Mission

Just watching now a tiresomely biased BBC report on Monckton's mission to save Australia from the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on humanity, namely anthropogenic global warming (or 'man made climate change', as it's conveniently been redefined nowadays by the desperate pseudo-scientists pushing this horse manure. Not 'woman made' climate change, though, strangely).

Two things struck me about it, however, both of which actually provide some cause for hope in the titanic battle against this watermelon, millennial, misanthropist thought disease. The first is that Monckton has finally made it on to the supine, notoriously and unquestioningly warmist BBC in the first place. The second is that it's pretty clear now that Monckton's mission Down Under might have actually turned at least one major nation's population to the Good Side.

As Christopher Booker pointed out today, there's a hell of a long way to go before the world is rid of this massive, co-ordinated corruption (and the parasitic Trotskyists, with this, their perfect 'end of the world as we know it' Trojan Horse narrative, could yet prevail), but Monckton, thanks to his now-legendary zeal, wisdom and logic, might finally have at least won the first battle in what has become nothing less than an all out war for truth, good science and humanity.

We are in a very bad way, especially (primarily) in the West. But clearly, thanks to Monckton's successful Australian mission, there's still cause for hope.

Libyan Health Service - Best In The World

He was wasting away from prostate cancer in a Scottish prison hospital, so the Scottish government, in a shady deal involving the Foreign Office, Lord Mandelson of Sleaze and flatulent nutcase Gadaffi's son, released the only convicted Lockerbie bomber on 'compassionate' grounds. He had an absolute maximum of three months to live, after all, said a couple of hired quacks. The poor man would have become an ex-bomber by the end of October 2009, so we were told (and didn't believe). Sorry to quote myself, but this was me back in November (three months after the Megrahi release):

Al-Megrahi: the convicted Lockerbie bomber might still not be dead as all the Labour stooge doctors and this Labour government ghoulishly promised everyone he would be (he's a full five days overdue now), but he's still about to come back and haunt at least one of them. Yes, you guessed it, the King of Sleaze himself, Lord Mandelson of Tripoli.

Now we learn from a number of sources that six months on, Megrahi is not only still alive and free, but he's actually recovering - and free. Clearly, something is amiss. Instead, however, of branding this whole, stinking affair a web of deceit motivated by a Big Oil deal and reaching right up to the highest levels of the British government, let's just praise the Libyan Health Service. Megrahi's almost miraculous cure in the capable hands of Libyan doctors offers pretty conclusive proof that Libyan health care is comfortably the best in the world.

Toby Young, however, is rightly livid about the whole, grubby, insulting episode, just as everyone else should be. He also argues - and I think this is very important - that Megrahi's conviction was absolutely safe, according to a relative of a victim who understandably took a very close interest in the trial.

Given the fact that Megrahi is a convicted terrorist, and given that thanks to these legendary Libyan healthcare professionals, he's now on the road to recovery, isn't it nearly time for him to be put right back in jail? We could even settle for a Libyan jail.

I suspect that that wasn't part of Mandy's backroom sweetener BP deal, however, so I won't be holding my breath.

Truly sickening.

Carry On - Regardless

I think, finally, together we've collectively clocked the hopeless strategy of both this crippled Labour government and this rumbled, desperately passe, climate change perversion that normal people are currently trying to shed.

But I think I've found the tune that might speak to this transition period. It's pretty ironic (inevitably) - and all the more brilliant for it!



Wonderful :)

Entire Continental United States Sees Snow

Watts Up With That is covering an AP story that's just broken about an extraordinary (possibly unprecedented) event: all 48 contiguous states of the USA (plus Alaska) currently have snow on them! Only Hawaii doesn't.

It is amazing, frankly. And combined with the fact that 1180 new snowfall records have been broken in the past week, (not to mention the catastrophic, statistic-busting winter that's being suffered all over north Asia, too), I simply can't believe the kind of abject, truly denialist, insulting, watermelon claptrap still emanating from the left media.

Now, I can tell you from experience that snow in Denver and its environs is unlike anything you have ever seen, snow-wise (unless you're from Siberia - or Colorado, I suppose), so certainly don't expect that Florida is currently experiencing the ten-foot-deep variety of snowfall that is pretty much the norm for the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains. But the very fact that Flordia (Florida!) has had any snow at all is truly remarkable.

Point is, if this is one of those "extreme weather events" we've been told about by the alarmists, then sure, I admit it, the climate is changing.

Yeah, numbskulls: it's getting COLDER. Well, double duh!