Goodbye Global Warming

Only a few weeks ago, the Met Office, an organisation not particularly well known for their ability to accurately predict next week’s weather let alone that of the next decade or century, claimed that temperatures are set to rise by 2014.

Unsurprisingly, for organisations that already firmly believe in the politicised pseudoscience theory of global warming and wish to present evidence to justify their beliefs, it’s not really all that difficult to do.

First you select the outcome you desire – in this case higher mean temperatures in the next couple of decades. Next you take your data (usually carefully hand picked or manipulated in some specific way) and then adjust the output graphs until you obtain your end-goal result – ie. predictions that ‘prove’ temperatures will rise, and thus global warming ‘must’ be happening. Simple.

Gordon Brown in his tenure as Chancellor used similar methods to forecast and present favourable economic growth. The most valued statisticians at the Treasury were those that, regardless of the data, managed to fiddle around with economic models and arrive at the ‘best’ figures – usually 2.5% growth or more.

However, what’s really interesting about the Met Office report is highlighted in an online article by the Guardian. It says the forecast reveals ‘natural shifts in climate will cancel out warming produced by greenhouse gas emissions and other human activity until 2009, but from then on, temperatures will rise steadily’.

So, what exactly does that mean? Well, it’s basically saying that the climate will cool slightly due to ‘natural variations’, meaning that any evidence of rises in temperature caused by us humans will be cancelled out – but that despite this, global warming still exists. How convenient.

For the next few years the global warming pseudoscientists will have no basis for their claims and it’ll all be a matter of blind belief – it’s just that they’re getting their excuses in early.

Where Does The Law Stand?

Sometimes you really do have to question where the law stands in this country, and just whom it aims to serve.

Over the weekend in Bristol, a batch of pure heroin reportedly caused the deaths of two drug addicts while leaving another two seriously ill in hospital after near fatal overdoses.

Subsequently, the police issued a city-wide warning to help raise awareness by calling for all Bristol drugs users to remain vigilant and take extra precautions when injecting themselves.

Since, in fact, the use of heroin is illegal, why are the police calling for criminals to be ‘careful’ when breaking the law? Perhaps the police should also be warning people to pay special attention when they speed on the motorway, or advising would-be murders to take extra care with knives or firearms in case they accidentally injure themselves in the course of a criminal act?

Will either bed-ridden Bristol addict be prosecuted for drug abuse? Highly unlikely, since the law no longer seems to condemn individual users, and quite often indulges them in their ‘illness’ as if it were similar to a common cold which can be caught without any individual responsibility.

Comparably, if you wish to break the law by using or selling drugs, then the likelihood of any retribution is so slim as to be almost negligible. On the other hand however, should you wish to stage a peaceful protest outside the home of Government in the nation’s capital, then you’ll be met with unbridled force and the full fury of the criminal legislative system.

So long as the authorities and the Government continue to believe that drug abusers, like criminals, are themselves victims of social problems caused by relative poverty and the state’s inadequacy to nanny them into submission, then Britain’s drugs problems will only grow, and public trust in the police will only decline yet further.

Failing Labour Economics

On Friday there was a very interesting and rather revealing interview with the Chancellor Alistair Darling on the BBC.

The discussion related to the Conservatives’ economic competitiveness policy review headed by John Redwood, and the fact that, unsurprisingly, the Chancellor didn’t agree with the proposals.

In the interview, Alistair Darling suggested to listeners that if George Osborne was going to be a ‘responsible’ Shadow Chancellor, then ‘What you can’t do is sign up to a program which John Redwood has come up with today, which talks about over £21bn worth of cuts without actually saying how you’re going to pay for that’.

As the Chancellor well knows, neither George Osborne nor David Cameron have endorsed the proposals found in the Redwood report (I wish the party had, but the fact remains that they have not).

The Chancellor then went on to add, ‘Because, the only way you can pay for that sort of money coming out the system is by quite savage reductions on things like transport’. Again, as Alistair Darling knows, this is not the case – but to admit so would not suit his and the Labour party’s argument.

Click here to continue reading the article…

Heathrow Eco-loonie Camp

The CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) flags fluttering in the breeze signalled the arrival of the unwashed and matted-hair brigade gathering for their latest climate change camp on the outskirts of Heathrow.

Yesterday, fifty of its filthy occupants decided to march towards the airport, banging their drums like primitives and protesting loudly about the supposed current and future environmental impact of air travel.

Okay, so I generally do not agree with the neo-hippies’ claims of impending doom and disaster. However, what really vexed me about this particular protest was not the sight of a group of left-wing nutters masquerading as a friendly bunch of tree-huggers, but the fact that three hundred police officers were posted to supervise their protest and squalid anti-capitalist camp.

This seems to me to be overly excessive, especially at a time when most people in Britain will probably never see that many police in their entire life. I bet the grieving families of poor Garry Newlove and Evren Anil, who I mentioned yesterday, are wishing that at least one of those officers had been patrolling nearby when they were most needed.