It Must Be Global Warming

No Ice At The North Pole screams another typical front page headline from the left-wing newspaper, The Independent this morning.

According to The Independent, the article is apparently ‘an exclusive’ – but truth be told, it is not. In fact the story came to light more than eight years ago in the United States and has cropped up in the global and national media more than a few times since.

Back in August of 2000, The New York Times printed a similar but equally erroneous report suggesting that ‘the North Pole is melting’. Yet, the Times were forced to issue a retraction after it was pointed out by other scientists that in the summertime open stretches of water in the Arctic were a normal occurrence.

Thus, the US-based Capitalist Magazine observed less than a year after the New York Times article:

Objective science reporting has become a casualty of the Kyoto crusade. Last August, for example, the New York Times hastened its slide from respected news source to leftist propaganda rag, by screaming from its front page that ‘The North Pole is melting’.

The story was based, not on scientific data or even computer models, but on the claims of a single scientist – an apparatchik in the UN global warming bureaucracy – who attended a summertime tourist cruise to the North Pole on a Russian icebreaker. The tourists arrived at the pole, the Times breathlessly reported, and saw open water. ‘The last time scientists can be certain the pole was awash in water’, the reporter declared, ‘was more than 50 million years ago’.

Real scientists reminded the Times that stretches of open water in the Arctic are a normal summertime event, caused by shifts in the ice, and the paper was forced to publish an embarrassing retraction.

However, the eco-left were not content to let the story lie forgotten and managed to revive it again in April this year with ABC News claiming that the ‘North Pole Could Be Ice Free in 2008’. Today, eight years after the original claim and two months after its latest appearance in ABC, The Independent has just caught up and republished the falsehood.

What’s more, the Independent article fails to even mention the volcanic eruptions that have very recently been discovered by scientists under the arctic icecap. But then why would The Independent worry about such trivial matters as truth, fact and good journalistic standards and practices? They are convinced that Global Warming is almost solely caused by the activities of humanity and will publish any evidence, whether true or not, to persuade others that they are correct.

Conservative Thames Victory

The Conservative candidate, John Howell has comfortably won the by-election in Henley as originally predicted with a small swing to the Conservatives while the Labour vote collapsed.

However, the Liberal Democrats share of the vote did also increase slightly despite the fact that they spent more time playing the man rather than the ball in what was for them a typically ‘negative’ by-election campaign.

While overall turnout fell it would appear that the Conservative vote held up reasonably well especially when considering that this was not a high profile by-election in the eyes of the national media in the same way as Crewe and Nantwich.

Much hard work and effort was put into this campaign by MPs and party activists who, much like David Cameron this morning, will no doubt be very pleased by this result as it vindicated their ‘positive’ campaigning approach without revealing actual policies.

This may hint that the Conservative voting electorate are in some respects optimistic that David Cameron will be more conservative in Government than he is saying he will be in opposition.

Forgotten Henley

With the Irish Referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and now the saga of the Zimbabwean Presidential elections riding high on the news agenda, the by-election in Henley today has largely been forgotten by the national media.

In part this is because the result is practically a foregone conclusion. The Conservatives have held the seat since 1910 and at the last General Election, Boris Johnson held a comfortable majority of over twelve thousand.

While William Hague has been doing the rounds on the television networks saying that the Conservatives will take no vote for granted, Henley is still very much considered a Conservative safe seat by all parties and the majority of political activists.

With Labour out of the running and the Lib Dims highly unlikely to spring a surprise, the only thing left to watch for will be the turnout of Conservatives. If the Conservative vote in Henley drops badly as it did in Bromley then this will only go to prove correct the old mantra that it is Governments that lose elections rather than oppositions which win them.

Why, you may ask? Well, when I have been out canvassing in constituencies across the South West, the people I have met will say that they hate Labour and the Government and really want a change so they will vote Conservative next time around.

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Quaking In His Boots

With Morgan Tsvangirai out of the running for the Zimbabwean Presidency, our utterly incompetent Foreign Secretary, David Miliband along with the Queen have said that the soon to be ‘re-elected’ Robert Mugabe will be stripped of his Knighthood.

Such a strong, decisive and well thought out act on the part of our Monarch, Ministers and Government will no doubt leave Mugabe quaking in his boots when he hears he’s lost his title as Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. Not.

If this rather pathetic and purely symbolic act is the best our Government can muster then Mr Mugabe has little to worry about, while the people of Zimbabwe still have much to fear.

Gordon Brown talks of wanting to see an end to violence in Zimbabwe and a peaceful transition to democracy – but this will not happen unless Mugabe is forced in some way to listen. Since African leaders have failed to strongly condemn President Mugabe’s terrible and oppressive regime; unless a western nation chooses to step in and take action then the suffering of the Zimbabwean people is only set to continue.