Alarmist predictions of 5 foot rise in sea level

According to a report from a UK/Finnish group sea levels could rise by up to almost 5 ft (4 ft 11 ½ inches) by the end of the century.

But ‘up to’ clearly includes any figure below that, including no discernable difference at all.

Apparently the team has built a computer model that can reflect the relationship between temperatures and sea level over the past 2000 years.

For the model’s predictions outside normal parameters to work it has to be accurate outside the parameters. It is simply not possible to test it against reality without data and many a model that accurately reflects relatively chaotic behaviour within certain bounds fails singularly when taken outside them.

It is an fact that global temperatures were significantly higher than current levels, between the 9th and 14th centuries. A period of some 500 years when temperatures were warmer than those today, what does the model say about sea level and ice cover during that period?

There is also the fact that the data on temperature predictions fed into such a model has to be accurate for it to be accurate. GIGO as they say.

The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 was statistically the same as 2006 and 2005 and every year since 2001. Unless the IPCC does a Robert Mugabe on the figures ‘global warming’ appears to have, for the moment at least, halted .

What happens next is anybody's guess - and that’s really what it is, a guess.

It could warm up to something more like it was back in the middle ages, it could remain stable, conceivably it could drop. Whatever happens it will sooner or later change, one way or the other.

That’s what climate does - and has done since long before humans learned to harness fire.

Maybe politicians on the AGW bandwagon should think twice about bio fuels and punitive taxes before they cause a crisis of their own, a food crisis.

Mind that’s no reason not to cut pollution, or build nuclear power stations, or develop compressed air or hydrogen powered transport. That makes sense anyway.

Controversy over Oxford Union Free speech event

The Oxford Union has decided to allow Nick Griffin, the British National Party (BNP) leader and David Irving, the historian who was jailed in Austria for ‘Holocaust denial’ to speak at a free speech event today.

This is billed as ‘examining the limits of free speech’ and should not be a platform for them to air any controversial views.

The predictable reflex protests have arisen from ‘advocates’ of free speech everywhere - including the Oxford Student Union, the university's Jewish society, Muslim society and Tory MP Julian Lewis who symbolically resigned his life membership of the union in protest.

The Muslim Societies apparent rejection of Griffin and Irving, presumably based on their views, seems promising, given the previous recent support of Islamist states for holocaust denial and genocide and certain parallels between the BNP and Islamists.

Though unfortunately their chosen means of expressing them tends to betray an authoritarian tendency and a cavalier attitude to free speech that we have unfortunately seen demonstrated so often before by their co religionists.

Also there are likely to be protestors intent on disrupting it. Weyman Bennett, National Secretary of pressure group Unite Against Fascism, showed just how much he knew about fascism when he smugly claimed:

"We are planning to have a big protest. There will be more people outside the Oxford Union than inside, and there will be more people outside the union than voted for this debate to go ahead."

He would have done better to ensure he was invited to participate and armed himself with all the arguments he needed to refute any attempt Griffin and Irving made to push their agenda and then went on to poke hole in anything else they said.

If you seek to suppress views you object to, and those who hold them, only supporting views compatible with your own – well frankly if you do not support free speech for everyone, including those you disagree with, then you do not really support free speech at all. You oppose it.

The whole point of debate is to air views and theories in the bright light of day, where they can be judged, if they are full of holes and do not hang together, it should be obvious to all - and then publicly shoot them down in metaphorical flames.

All extreme protests against these people and attempts to suppress, or silence them, does is make them look reasonable by comparison, hiding the faults in their ‘thinking’ under the fuss and demonstrate the poor thinking and authoritarian leanings of the objectors.

Yet more ‘calls’ for increased UK stealth taxation on alcohol

The BBC Reports that an ‘Alliance’ has been formed by ‘medical organisations’ and ‘charities’ to increase pressure on the government to curb excessive drinking and provide more ‘resources’ for alcohol-related health problems and increasing tax.

An ‘alliance’ coincidentally makes it difficult to follow the money, but normally when an individual pressure group/charity sticks it’s head above the parapet individually, they have a strong vested interest in talking up funding for themselves, and/or they are directly, or indirectly, funded by the state - so have a strong vested interest in promoting more taxation for their paymasters. Alcohol Concern for instance is largely funded by UK Department of Health.

It is interesting to note that many groups that regularly call on the Government to raise taxation levels for various reasons are part of a set of Russian dolls, that if you follow the money, through various sources eventually turn out to be State funded.

These groups justify their claims by inflating the statistics on their particular bête noire to include not only examples of their particular ‘problem behaviour’ but by stretching the goal mouth a significant proportion of the general population. Alcohol being a particular case in point.

'Hazardous' drinking for instance - The way that is classified would effectively make the entire French nation, who are held up both as both healthy and as sensible continental drinkers, hazardous drinkers, according to the state-funded NWPHO. I am sure the French will be pleased to hear that.

The BBC report contains uncritically reported claims about under age drinking yet their own recent reporting points out that fewer underage teenagers are drinking regularly, due, according to a Trading Standards survey, at least in part, to more effective enforcement of the perfectly adequate existing sales regulations.

Is it not time the public stood up to these people and told them where to stick their dubious reports, authoritarian ways and continuous demands for higher stealth taxes?

Soil Association - Organic means what we say it means

When is organic not organic? When the Soil association says so.

The soil association, one suspects having been ‘got at’ by environ-mentalists has arbitrarily decided that they will no longer count foreign organically grown produce as ‘organic’ if it is imported air freighted – unless it passes their new ‘ethical’ standards.

They have been gradually working towards this for some time.

If one didn’t know better one would assume the policy was deliberately designed to harm poorer countries. Their policy director Peter Melchett freely admits that some (poorer) overseas (Africa?) producers would find it impossible to meet the new standards they had set . Very few overseas producers meet the planned new standards at the moment and the policy was expected to reduce the use of air freight.

So it’s all in the name of attacking the environ-mentalists CO2 bête noire, air travel/freight. One wonders how else these produces can get their products to the shops before they spoil.

The chairwoman of the Soil Association's standards board, Anna Bradley, stated: "It is neither sustainable nor responsible to encourage poorer farmers to be reliant on air freight but we recognise that building alternative markets that offer the same social and economic benefits as organic exports will take time." They plan to bring the new measures in from January 2009.

How coldly patronising can you get? They sound like colonial administrators. We all have to make sacrifices for the good of Gaia. The soil Association are willing to make the sacrifice of having to do without African ‘organic’ produce, the African farmer will just have to do without his livelihood.

Executive director of the Geneva-based International Trade Centre (ITC), Patricia Francis, warned that: ”African companies and cooperatives want to trade internationally.

To get value-added organic foods on to retail shelves, they have an overwhelming amount of standards to meet.

Meeting these standards costs money - laboratories, audits and more. Too many standards will hurt African farmers, which is just the opposite of what British consumers want.”

Why should the Soil Association be allowed to co-opt and distort the meaning of a word that ’belongs’ to us all. We are not French speakers, to have the meanings of our words imposed upon us by an elite cognoscenti. We are speaking of English words, that even now, in the newspeak UK, are still not quite so amenable to imposition by fiat - or should that be Nu-Speak ;-)

No matter what the Soil association says - if the food is produced organically, it will be just as pesticide and chemical free as it was before. It will still actually be organic in the normal sense of the word. Are they just getting a little too big for their boots?

Pressure group urges Air ambulance be absorbed into NHS

The health union, financed and supported, Pro NHS pressure group London Health Emergency is, as is it’s brief, pushing the NHS agenda and urging the charitably funded London Air Ambulance service be absorbed into the NHS.

The UK Department of Health is resisting this arguing that these services are very expensive to operate and a decision must be made locally on whether the service should be supplemented. They also point out that they do provide the clinical staff for these services.

The London Air Ambulance needs £750,000 to keep the service that flies out of Whitechapel, East London, from being grounded and has recently appealed for more donations.

Clearly the service is valued by the people of London, or it would never have ‘got off the ground’ ;-) in the first place.

The problem for the DOH, if they fund this, is that it will cost them money, lots of money. There are charitably funded air ambulances all over the country once they create a precedent there are those (not least amongst them LHE) who will argue: ‘Why should London be funded when they are not’?

A further consideration is that currently, not being subject to stifling NHS management, these services are generally quite effective and responsive to the public need. In fact it is logical to conclude that if it were up to the NHS they would not actually exist at all and would certainly be vulnerable to cuts if the NHS controlled their budget.

Personally I would be far happier if my own air ambulance service were to stay well out of the clutches of the NHS and the CFD household make regular contributions to help keep it that way.

Given the vast wealth in London, especially in the City and Canary wharf it is difficult to understand why their funding is short. One would have thought it would be in the interests of businesses and corporations with a large presence in the Capital to donate to the service - Not to mention the citizens of London.

If you live in, or work in London, think about how, for a few pence, you could help keep the service going.

It would be nice to know it was there if you really needed it and couldn’t be closed by funding cuts - wouldn’t it?

If enough people think it important and donate then it’s future should be secure.

You can donate here. Pass it on…

Hat tip to SarahC on this one for drawing it to my attention.

Voter apathy in the UK

Returning to the new UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s ill conceived idea of emulating our continental cousins by holding elections at the weekend , mooted at the despatch box yesterday.

After all he has only been in the job a week ;-) and as he intimated (before he realised quite what he was saying) can’t be expected to know much about what has been going on in Government. Give him a chance…

As I observed elsewhere we do all have ‘better’ things to do with our weekends ;-)

Why has he come up with the idea? Certainly it is ‘fresh’ (for the UK) and ‘newsworthy’, probably that is enough in it’s self for a politician who desires to associate himself with these concepts -

It may be related to the apparent loss of voter interest in politics.

Lets examine that. Party politics. In my experience few supporters of any party actually like all their parties policies. For most of us who take an actual interest, rather than vote for a cardboard cut out with the right coloured rosette, it is a case of finding the party with the least objectionable set of policies and promises.

Then we cast our vote knowing that a random selection of those policies and promises will in all likelihood never actually be honoured as they were probably designed to hook votes and nothing more anyway.

Now if your constituency is subject to swings, then it is worth voting for the package you have the least objection to, but don’t be surprised if it turns out not to be as advertised. ”The manufacturer reserves the right to vary the product specification without notice” as they say - As an example in the headlines, Nu-Lab’s empty manifesto promise of a referendum on the EU Constitution springs immediately to mind.

Too much of that sort of thing and you start to loose faith in the whole system, let alone interest in voting.

Then if you live in a ‘safe’ seat and you don’t happen to support that particular party, then you are effectively disenfranchised anyway, so the best you can do is move, or make a protest vote.

What do voters do under those circumstances? They either loose interest, or if they are sufficiently motivated, drift towards single issue politics - and work to pressureall parties on their particular issue/s.

Then again there is the gradually increasing awareness that much legislation is actually now driven more and more from Brussels - and the UK Parliament is becoming increasingly irrelevant as a consequence. When you think about it, by failing to call for a referendum, Gordon Brown will significantly increase that irrelevance.

Still unelected Commissionerhood could eventually wait in the wings for our Gordon…

What might get voters interested again? Well a 'none of the above' box on the ballot paper springs immediately to mind, but I can’t see Politicians going for that as it damns the lot of them.

Maybe a negative vote. So instead of voting for someone you could vote against someone if you wanted. That would be a more honest form of tactical voting and at least probably engage the electorate. Again I can’t see politicians being too keen on it though.

Maybe binding referenda on some single issues might engage the public? A civil service dept, or independent commission, might come up with a spread of proposals for each issue, on various issues, based on opinion polls. The Referendum should be framed and worded so it didn’t prejudice the result.

A referendum on the EU Constitutional Treaty would almost certainly galvanise voters.

The prospect of Parliament regaining some of it’s powers, or at least not loosing more power, might well make voting for it’s members more relevant to the UK electorate again.

Pressure group opposes Stansted Airport passenger increase

The Stop Stansted Expansion campaign are vociferously opposing BAA’s plans to increase the number of permitted air traffic movements at Stansted from 241,000 to 264,000 a year and thus increase their maximum passenger handling ability by an additional ten million passengers per year.

A spokesperson for the group told the BBC: "If Stansted were permitted to expand to maximum use of the existing runway, the local environment would suffer, the national economy would suffer and we would have taken a giant step backwards in the battle to combat climate change."

They added that the expansion would not help the economy because it was encouraging people to go on holiday abroad - Rather stretching it there perhaps, certainly if would pour millions of pounds extra into the airport and presumably, local jobs and the wider local economy. Anthropomorphic Global Warming is a new weapon in their armoury.

The villages surrounding the airport are, it must be said, very picturesque, with many thatched cottages. There is a direct motorway link to the airport so little need for airport traffic to pass through them.

I suspect the fact of the matter is that very few of these people could possibly have been resident in the area before Stansted became one of London’s airports. The writing was on the wall in 1970 and by 78 there was a white paper laying things out very clearly and the latter was the best part of 30 years ago. No one who moved there after 1978 could have been in any reasonable doubt of the situation.

No. The protestors are more in the position of someone who buys, or builds, a house next door to a busy public house - and then complains bitterly about the noise and customers.