It Must Be Global Warming

I haven’t had much time in the past few months to update my website due to working and other commitments. However, hopefully this will change in the next few weeks as I free up more time.

In the mean time I’ve been keeping tabs on the whole ‘Climategate’ saga which thankfully blew up a few months ago before the Copenhagen Climate talks. Much of the foot work was done by the blogs both in this country and in the United States as the mainstream media sort to bury their heads in the sands and managed to turn a collective blind eye.

Today has seen heavy snowfall right across the country causing disruption to traffic networks and business. However, predictably the usual suspects have been quick to claim that what is predicted to be the coldest winter in thirty years is not, in any way whatsoever, in conflict with man-made global warming.

If you haven’t read it already, Dr Richard North wrote an excellent article for the Mail on Sunday about how the Met Office has been so wrong about its long term forecasts. I am also about to start reading Christopher Booker’s latest tome on the subject of Global Warming and Climate Change which comes highly recommended.

As I write, it is beginning to snow again, so I leave you with a photograph of all that Global Warming in my garden this morning. Clearly I had absolutely nothing better to do…

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Thirty Years On

It is now exactly thirty years to the day since Margaret Thatcher became the first female British Prime Minister after her Conservative Party swept to victory in the UK General Election of 1979.

During the past few days there has been much discussion of her legacy in the media and on the internet, with Boris Johnson in the Telegraph, the Conservative History website, and even the BBC getting in on the act.

However, with all the fawning praise and, conversely, criticism from the Left, very little in the way of analysis has been given to Thatcher’s Governments from a conservative perspective. How about the traditionally conservative argument that Thatcher’s governments did nothing to stop the social and cultural revolution that has been taking place in this country since the late 1950s?

Firstly, we have to establish the solid fact that Mrs Thatcher was certainly not a conservative – she was a liberal. Her free market ideology was influenced by the economist Milton Friedman and the author Friedrich Hayek, both of whom described themselves as liberals and explicitly said they were not conservatives.

Furthermore, conservatism has not traditionally supported the ideas of any particular type of economic system, free market or not. Traditional conservatism has sought to maintain social stability through maintenance and gradual progression, rather than rapid transition, of the current social order.

The market system which Thatcher imposed upon Britain radically altered our society in a very short period of time – some of the effects of which we are only just beginning to feel now. It was an economic revolution rather than a slow and gradual process.

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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.

Blogging The Qur’an

I have just noticed on my travels across the internet that the Guardian website has a new section called ‘blogging the Qur’an’. And no, I’m not going to link to their website.

Apparently each week, writer, broadcaster and cultural critic (whatever that may be) Ziauddin Sardar will blog on a different verse of the Qur’an. The blurb in the about section describing the reason behind the site says:

Muslims have been wrestling with the meaning of the verses and words of the Qur’an from the early days of Islam. Non-Muslims, meanwhile, often have wildly inaccurate notions of its content … Through Blogging the Qur’an, we hope to try and untangle some of those meanings and misconceptions.

Can you imagine, for example, the Guardian affording this level of treatment to Christians and the Bible, or indeed any other religion? Of course not, they would be ridiculing Christianity as a backwards, intolerant religion as they have done for decades, and would have no interest in ‘untangling’ some of the ‘meanings and misconceptions’ surrounding the Bible.

The development of this site, along with many other things the Guardian and the likes of the BBC have said, makes you wonder why it is that they are clearly so desperate to appease Muslims rather than shower them with scorn as they do Christianity.

Could it be that hidden behind a hastily constructed façade of reverence, is the fact that those on the left actually rather fear Islam. They know that most Muslims won’t quietly or meekly surrender their beliefs in the face of adversity or opposition as some Christians might, but instead would vocally and sometimes explosively fight back.