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Don’t underestimate the Brexit effect. The landscape is shifting.
The Paris agreement just became less likely. The UK Dept of the environment will submerge, and Boris Johnson, the outspoken skeptic and Brexit figurehead, has been promoted to foreign minister.
James Delingpole says: Britain’s New Prime Minister Drives A Stake Through The Heart Of The Green Vampire
Britain no longer has“the greenest government ever.” This is good news. Very good news. The agonised screeching of all the usual suspects in the Environmental movement will be enough to sustain many of us in lols for weeks and months to come.
Five years ago, could we imagine an “infamous climate denier” like Boris rewarded in any Western Government? There were closet skeptics in the cabinet, but that’s not the same. In Australia, Tony Abbott once said climate change was “crap” and somehow still managed to become PM, but once he was, his official line was the permitted global warming story. ( He pandered, but in the most sensible possible way. And because he did not flagrantly add to the climate slush fund they still called him a “denier” but he rarely said anything openly skeptical.).
To have Boris in such an […]
The fifth biggest economy in the world suddenly frees itself from worlds biggest bureaucratic basket case, and everyone else is knocking at the door?.
Daily Mail: Countries are lining up to enter trade talks with Britain in the wake of the decision to leave the European Union, it was claimed last night.
American politicians are clamouring for an agreement, while talks could soon begin with Australia, South Korea and India.
Otherwise, Brexit is a disaster. Indeed it is so unthinkable, half the pundits are still thinking up reasons why it might not happen. Today uncertainty is what Tony Blair wants, and for as long as possible — “Let’s keep the options open” he says, as he thinks up a list of excuses to ignore a Yes:No vote, like an opinion poll. “People can change their minds” he points out. And they do, which is why we elect governments then throw them out two weeks later when their polls fall below 50%.
On the Twelth Day of Brexit the excuses are hitting the Orwellian-Turbo-Booster: If Britain leaves the EU it will lose sovereign control says some guy in Ireland. Black is white. Up is down. And […]
For five days headlines have told us the markets are being “Pounded”, with “Turmoil”, like a “Wild Ride” with “bloodletting“. I thought I’d graph the horror of the last week on the FTSE100, DAX, the CAC40 and the Euronext. Naturally big-government fans in the media have no interest in overselling the disaster that is Brexit.
Spot the crisis?
The last five years of the FTSE 100. See the carnage of the last week:
5 Year FTSE graph TradingEconomics.com
More shocking routs on the continent. Here’s the last twelve months of the EURONEXT:
9.4 out of 10 based on 56 ratings […]
EU fans are rightly fearing the unravelling of their empire, built on decades of sneaky, undemocratic bureaucratic creep. The French, Austrians, Finns, Dutch and Germans want a vote on the EU.
All over the establishment media, the derogatory narrative is that “Little Brits” are scared of the outside world, and are xenophobic, racists, too afraid to engage with the rest of the world. So let’s look at how inward-looking and timid the Brits were in times before the EU modern wisdom.
Here’s the British Empire circa 1920:
The Sun never set on the British Empire
Map adapted from Wikipedia
Get into the spirit Rule Brittania! Want more?
“Little Britain” ran the largest empire the world has ever known — spreading democracy, justice, and one language across a broader array of races and places than any other nation. (And the real Anglosphere includes The United States of America.)
The Brits are the bigots who outlawed slavery, widow-burning and fostered democracy in India.
It’s not surprising that the Brits are leading the way out of the false anti-democratic empire known as the European Union.
The fight has just begun
Based on past form, we know that […]
Both sides of Brexit were shocked — the Remainers because they have never met a Brexiteer nor bothered to read their arguments. And The Brexiters were a bit shocked too — amazed that despite the big-media bias, puffed up economic scare and the blanket of institutional warnings, the public can still fight off big-gov with their votes in a bloodless coup. It’s a rare win.
Who wants to be tied to an economic basketcase?
Under the media shock and warnings of the recession coming almost no one mentioned “Switzerland”, or “Norway“. Here’s the GDP growth graph from the World Bank showing just how well the EU fares compared to the non-EU countries of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, The US, Switzerland and Norway. Note the success of the EU red line which in nearly every year is outdone by nearly everyone else. The economic disaster that the UK faces is better GDP growth.
EU GDP Growth 2008 – 2015, World Bank, compared to non-EU nations, Switzerland, NZ, US
The reasons to leave the EU were so compelling the amazing thing is that 48% of the public still voted to stay. Chalk that “success” up to the media, and on an […]
Best wishes to our UK friends on this important day. UPDATE: Polls shut at 10pm on Thursday UK time (7am Friday AEST). Final Tally: “breakfast time” Friday in the UK ( which is 4- 6pm on the East Coast of Australia).
“… it’s the last chance most of us are ever going to get in our lifetime to vote for an outcome which is genuinely in the interest of us the people – the demos – rather than that of the increasingly powerful, ever-more-deeply-entrenched elite.”
— James Delingpole
The British Isles Invented Freedom
“… the people of what is now called Great Britain created something entirely different from the closed and centralized regimes that have been the norm in most of human history. They produced a society where rulers were subject to the law and the law belonged to the people, where collective will did not trump individual right, and where free citizens were permitted to create and keep their own wealth. These principles have transformed the world: “The miracles of the past three and a half centuries—the unprecedented improvements in democracy, in longevity, in freedom, in literacy, in calorie intake, in infant survival […]
If there is anyone out there who hasn’t seen the M.P. Daniel Hannan speech on BREXIT two weeks ago, it’s worth your 6 minutes. It’s articulate. Compelling. Why would any great nation vote to give up their right to set their own laws and negotiate their own deals?
The EU is it’s own best example of big-government grown too big. As Hannan says, the “Every continent on this planet has grown over the past decade except Antartica and the European Union.” And it is so much more than just economics, but economics is the main reason given to stay.
“It’s not just the financial price of EU membership – it’s the democratic price.
We fought a civil war in this country to establish the principle that laws should not be passed nor taxes raised except by our own elected representatives. And now supreme power is held by people who tend to owe their positions to having just lost elections: Peter Mandelson, Neil Kinnock and what have you.
No one is talking about drawbridges or isolation. Nowhere else in the world do countries apologise for wanting to live under their own laws. New […]
A few weeks ago UK Minister Amber Rudd cut subsidies to solar in the UK. I thought the UK government might be showing some signs of making sense, but now it appears Rudd was saving up for a UN gift:
The UK is increasing the money for climate activities in the development pot by at least 50%, to a further £5.8 billion of funding from April 2016 to March 2021, including at least £1.76bn in 2020. The UK is a leader on climate finance – we are the only G7 nation to meet the 0.7% aid commitment and the only one to enshrine it in legislation.
The UK is a leader on climate finance – we are the only G7 nation to meet the 0.7% aid commitment and the only one to enshrine it in legislation.The UK is a leader on climate finance – we are the only G7 nation to meet the 0.7% aid commitment and the only one to enshrine it in legislation.
Luckily it doesn’t cost money to fix the weather, it makes money.
To ensure a more secure and prosperous future for us all, the UK is playing its part […]
The best of BBC science reporting. Actress cum climate scientist, Emma Thompson, predicts that Arctic drilling will cause 4 degrees of global temperature rise by 2030, 15 years hence. The BBC reporter, Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis, trained with the best of BBC science and journalism, lets it pass.
Obviously, we’ve reached a tipping point — in journalistic standards. If a Nobel Prize winning physicist said that “warming may be natural”, BBC journalists are trained to point out he is not a climate scientist. But if an actress predicts Armageddon, the nation needs to know.
Perhaps Arctic drilling will unleash global magma?
165 years of global warming is about to hit escape velocity
At least one climate scientist is not going to let nonsense be broadcast without protest. Where are the others?
David Rose, Daily Mail
One of Britain’s top climate scientists has launched a blistering attack on actress Emma Thompson and the BBC, accusing them of ‘scaremongering’ over the speed of global warming – and risking a worsening of the refugee crisis. Richard Betts, head of climate impacts research at the Met Office and a professor at Exeter University, launched his attack on Twitter about […]
Renewable power is always as “cheap as coal” except when subsidies are slashed, then it’s “the end”, “terrible”, and “fragile”.
If only renewable power could actually compete with coal.
Greenclick tells us the UK solar industry is “reeling” in “shock and anger” as the UK conservative government cuts the renewables feed-in tariff there by as much as 86%. Even for the hydro industry (about the only renewable industry that can survive on its own), the news could spell the “end”.
Joss Blamire, Senior Policy Manager at Scottish Renewables, which represents more than 300 green energy businesses, said: “The proposals in the Comprehensive Feed-in Tariff Review are, quite simply, terrible news for homeowners, businesses, communities and those local authorities which have plans in place to develop renewable energy schemes.
“The levels of reduction in support announced today will severely curtail development of small-scale onshore wind and solar projects and endanger jobs and investments across the country.
“The cuts could also spell the end for much of the hydro industry, which has enjoyed a recent renaissance but relies more heavily on Government support because of the length of time taken to develop projects and the sector’s […]
The Institute of Mechanical Engineers in the UK (IMechEng) has a new “climate” survey out. It’s good fodder for headlines about fear and worry. But after priming the audience with a litany of climate disasters and asking them if they are worried about “cyclones”, “droughts” and “the future of the human race”, the awful truth is that half of the Brits don’t want to pay anything to stop it.
It’s another motherhood-two-cent-survey, meaning it asks motherhood type questions and gets everyone’s “2 cents” on an issue (and it’s worth both cents). We get insights like finding that 64% think global warming is “already a problem”, but it can’t be that big a deal because 52% of people don’t think they personally should pay more in tax in an effort to do something about it.
No hard questions are asked, no one is forced to rank the worries of life, only the worries of the climate industry. Evidently the surveyors don’t really want to know if people think “climate change” is man-made. Nor do they want to know how much people want to spend attempting to change the weather. Money is only a Yes No type question.
As usual, there are […]
I’ve discussed the big ComRes/ITV survey before, which showed that 62% of UK citizens are skeptics and are not convinced that humans are changing the weather. This is the same interesting survey which also showed that the highest proportion of skeptics were in the educated upper middle class, and the lowest was in the unskilled workers and pensioners. I didn’t explain then that this survey also split the groups according to age. So here (finally) are those graphs. Fittingly the young are undecided and the wise are more skeptical. But surprisingly there is a peak believer age, and that’s around 35 – 44. Either this generation has been assailed with more propaganda than any other, or something else is going on.
Is this the beginnings of the youthful revolution? Only 20% 34% of 18 – 24 year olds would be called believers?
They quizzed 2047 people from across the UK early last year and I’ve graphed the results according to age, and the “peak believer” band is clearly visible. In all three questions I colored believers red, and skeptics blue. The undecided are grey.
People generally switch from the “don’t know” category when they are young into the skeptic camp […]
Tony Thomas visited the UK and found old fading National Trust signs using scary photos of flood damage and warning people to “eat local” and change their light globes to stop more floods. He followed that thought to a 2005 web plea from the National Trust, to find them claiming floods are accelerating but using 20 year old photos to scare people with.
Years from now people will study climate propaganda and marvel at how stupid it was. — Jo
Guest Post by Tony Thomas
My wife Marg and I, two Antipodean yokels, wound up at the National Trust’s Bodiam Castle in Kent last month, awed at its 650-year history. After all, our colony’s iconic historical moment was in 1854, when someone broke a hotel lamp in Ballarat, Victoria and precipitated a scuffle between goldminers and police. The ringleader, instead of being quartered like Mel Gibson — sorry, William Wallace — acquired a seat in Parliament next year and eventually died in bed. That’s all you need to know about Australian history, unless you’re into sheep.
Marg and I had lunch and wandered out the back of the Bodiam cafe towards the Rother River. “Hey, come […]
That didn’t take long. The recent UK election means the conservative government has the power to get rid of some subsidies for “low carbon”, “green” electricity, and make it easier for oil and gas. Renewable energy companies are feeling the pain, and complaining bitterly. Of course, if they were competitive, they wouldn’t need the subsidies and the stock market would throw money at them. Such is the fear, that there is an emergency summit happening within the green energy sector. “Scottish Renewables has warned the move could put up to £3bn of investment in Scotland at risk.” So $3 billion dollars was placed on a bet that the subsidies would continue, that the voters would not get sick of paying too much, and their bets have failed. I have no sympathy. Anyone playing the subsidy market should have done their homework. With the science shot with holes, the subsidies were always built on vapor. GWPF has all the stories.
The green tax target is going
Tim Ross, The Telegraph: Green energy subsidies spiral out of control
George Osborne to abolish coalition’s green tax target as customers face paying £1.5billion more through their bills to subsidise wind farms, […]
Is this the way the Great Global Warming Scare fades out?
The UK newspapers are full of “Maunder Freeze Coming” as forecast by Ineson et al.[1] Rest assured, the solar-driven-cold is only a local effect, only 0.1C, and only a vague short 20 to 40 winters to come. The Sun, which has been ruled out as a major cause of global warming, is still not a cause of global warming — it’s just a minor technical issue called UV from a local star, which will be affecting an ocean current. Then the Big 6.6 degrees of heatstroke will land upon us.
Britain could be on the verge of a mini Ice Age as the Sun enters a cooler phase, the Met Office warned yesterday.
The last big chill was felt hundreds of years ago when Frost Fairs were held on the frozen River Thames.
However the Met Office said the new freeze will not be enough to cancel out the effects of global warming.
We’ve seen this all before, but not on this scale. If there was a volatility index — like a VIX for climate-PR — it would be setting records. The contradictions […]
In the latest news about wind-generators, The Australian reports that a new Australian study estimates we wasted $70m on RET* certificates last year because of losses the wind turbines put on the rest of the grid. About a fifth of the CO2 supposedly cut by wind-farms was emitted by the rest of the grid as it ramped up and down trying to cope with the erratic supply from the on-and-off whirly-gigs.
If we double our wind-farms the losses are proportionally even greater (every extra wind farm is even more useless than the one before). With twice as many, all of the wind towers would only be 70% effective. But this is all a wild fantasy overestimate, since the point of wind towers is not to reduce CO2, but to reduce global temperatures, stop storms, and hold back the tides. The 3.5% reduction in total Australian electricity emissions changed global temperatures by 0.00C, hence RET on wind is 100.00% useless, accurate to two decimal places. The Clean Energy Council said they had no answer at all, and wouldn’t talk about it, except to say that Australians like “renewables”.
In other news in from the UK, the new majority conservative government says […]
UPDATE: So far it’s being called a “shock victory” for conservatives, and a humiliation for Labor. See also ABC UK Election results. Farage not looking likely to win his seat.
An election to watch for those concerned that bigger bureaucracy suffocates science. Will the creeping rise of big-government in the West stall?
The old party-landscape is quaking in a land where last year 45% of the Scottish voted for permanently not-voting at any more UK Elections. Nearly half the Scots wanted out of the Union — that’s flat out remarkable. Meanwhile, UKIP, which got 3% of the vote in 2010, are now polling at 12%. As with most western nations the main parties have been mirror images of “left” or “more left” and voters get the choice of big or bigger government. Nigel Farage, heading UKIP, is posing such a threat to that system, that in his own seat Labor voters are said to be thinking of voting conservative, just to keep him out. (More evidence that modern conservative parties are often just Labor-lite). Conservatives are thinking of voting against conservatives (see Delingpole below), and Labor are thinking of voting for them. What a difference a UKIP has […]
Ian Dunlop in the Canberra Times, The Age, and The Sydney Morning Herald namecalls away, discusses a mythical creature called a “climate denialist” and shows how little research it takes to get an opinion page in the Fairfax mastheads. (Comments are “open” at these sites).
He thinks that PM Tony Abbott ought follow Margaret Thatcher on climate policy, without realizing that skeptics would say “Bravo — Yes Please” to that. Thatcher was a chemist, and no fool. In 2003 she made it clear, when few people did, that she was absolutely a skeptic.
Ian Dunlop 2015:
It is too much to expect the male-dominated, eminence-grise of the incumbency to rise to the occasion, but women might. There is a precedent. Margaret Thatcher, addressing the United Nations General Assembly in 1989: “We should always remember that free markets are a means to an end. They would defeat their objective if, by their output, they did more damage to the quality of life through pollution than the wellbeing they achieved by the production of goods and services”. Just so. You may not agree with Margaret Thatcher on many things, but on climate change she was spot on, three decades ahead of her […]
The UK Met Office went to some effort to graph the last 160 years, from hottest calendar year to coldest.
Name the scientific reason:
1. Because the order of the calendar years is important.
The graph reveals mysterious patterns — Years ending in 3, 4, or 5 are more likely to be hotter. Years containing a six are statistically more likely to be green.
OR
2. Because climate models show a linear rise in temperatures, and no “pause”, and this graph does too. Glance at it sideways and be afraid!
The Met Office used to say one year doesn’t mean anything, only long term trends matter.
Now they graph the noise.
…
Thanks to Barry Woods for pointing me at this, and carefully putting the years back in their chronological order in the graph below.
See the pause? See the noise?
8.7 out of 10 based on 98 ratings
Somewhere in the country that led the Industrial Revolution, hundreds of the best and brightest most-productive workers work full time at predicting, gaming, marketing and compensating for the complex modern laws of electricity. And during winter months, thousands of other productive workers have to stop work because the electricity they need might be too expensive. With the UK’s spare electrical generation capacity down to a razor thin 4% this winter, UK manufacturers are warning they will have to shut down even more often than they already do.
Someone thought it would be a good idea to use the UK electricity grid to control global weather, which turned out to be expensive. In a plan to contain electricity costs, someone else had the bright idea to trim back electricity peaks by charging a lot lot more during the worst three half hour periods of energy demand, known as triads. The mysterious triad spikes are subject to the weather and human circadian timetables and hit a bit randomly, though most often on a Monday to Thursday from 5 – 5.30pm. By definition they occur in winter months, and must be separated from the last triad by 10 days (though I didn’t think […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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