RSPB: We Must Build More Bird-Chopping Eco Crucifixes!

PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty

Britain must build thousands more bat-chomping bird-slicing eco crucifixes in order to stave off “dangerous climate change” says the RSPB.

RSPB stands for Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and, no, this is not The Onion.

Yes, Britain’s oldest and biggest ornithological society really has put out a report demanding the erection of yet more avian Cuisinarts – despite swathes of evidence showing that these monstrosities are responsible for killing many millions of birds around the world every year.

Its rationale:

The way that we currently use energy in the UK is not sustainable. We use too much of it, we use it inefficiently, and our main sources of energy, fossil fuels, are driving us towards dangerous levels of climate change – one of the greatest long-term threats to wildlife.

In order to save Britain’s wildlife from the alleged threat of climate change, in other words, we’ve got to first got to slice and dice it with the turbine blades that, by some estimates, kill 22 million birds a year.

Britain currently has around 5,000 wind turbines. According to the RSPB, it could do with around 20,000 more. More solar panels too. And wave power. And carbon capture and storage. And herds of organic unicorn to harvest all waste and pollution and magically transform it to special fairy energy which can be sprinkled on the cots of every new born child so as to instil in it a true appreciation of Mother Gaia’s beauty. (I may have invented the last one)

Mysteriously no mention is made of the actual cost of this exercise.

We’re shown a triangle at the beginning which illustrates our ‘energy trilemma’ – Environmental Sustainability; Energy Security; and Affordability.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

How Green Activist Scientists Rigged the EU Pesticide Ban Which Has Cost Farmers and Businesses Billions

“‘Victory for bees’ as European Union bans neonicotinoid pesticides blamed for destroying bee population” read a front page headline in the Independent last year.

It was the culmination of an intense burst of campaigning by left-wing pressure groups Avaaz, Change.org, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, BugLife and the Environmental Justice Foundation which erupted from nowhere last year.

One minute, no one had heard of “neonicotinoids”. The next, it suddenly seemed as though everyone knew for certain that this pesticide was responsible for the “colony collapse” devastating the world’s bee populations and that therefore it should be banned by the EU as a matter of urgency.

Among those who lent their weight to the campaign were the fashion designers Vivienne Westwood and Katharine Hamnett, the National Treasure Stephen Fry and dozens of activists charmingly and amusingly dressed in bee costumes. The impression given was that this issue was an absolute no brainer on which the jury of the wise, decent and informed had long since delivered their verdict: anyone who spoke up in favour of these evil chemicals was clearly nothing more than a science-denying bee-hating bastard in the pay of Big Pharma.

So why, almost instantly, did I smell a rat? Well apart from the obvious clue – any campaign involving Vivienne Westwood is, by definition, stupid, silly and wrong – there was also the matter of the unseemly haste with which these campaign groups were trying to force the legislation through. And the fact that the bully-mob tactics being used here were so redolent of the ones I’d seen elsewhere used by environmentalists to justify their scientifically dubious campaigns against everything from the forestry industry to the harmless trace gas carbon dioxide.

Green on the outside, red on the inside: that’s what these Watermelon campaigns are really about. So, with the help of investigative journalist Richard North, I began looking into the true story behind the ban.

What we found was appalling if not altogether surprising. The ban – heavily opposed by Britain’s then-Environment Secretary Owen Paterson – had rather less to do with proven necessity than it did with political horse-trading.

Indeed, the scientific evidence for justifying the ban seemed flimsy to the point of non-existence.

How then, could all these celebrities and campaign groups and environmental activists and EU apparatchiks and progressive media outlets (from the Guardian and the BBC to Huff Po) have been persuaded otherwise? On what kind of science were they basing their claims?

Well, now thanks to a happy internet leak we have our answer. It turns out that the “evidence” was cooked up at the suggestion of a cabal of activist scientists working for a supposedly neutral and independent environmental organisation called the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Read the rest at Breitbart London

Separating Myth from Reality in a History of the Battle of Britain

We all know that the time before we were born was a golden age when men were manlier, women lovelier, civilisation more civilised, culture more edifying, values more valued and so on. But what if it isn’t actually true?

What if, say, it turned out that Winston Churchill was damn near as slippery and unprincipled a politician as David Cameron? What if the Battle of Britain wasn’t actually won by ‘the Few’ — and wasn’t even primarily a fighter battle anyway? What if, damn it, the famously long hot summer of 1940 was in fact mostly overcast with just a hot bit right at the end in September? What if our radar technology really wasn’t that early or special? What if that famous Low cartoon — ‘Very well then, alone’ — was a joke, given that, even before America joined the party, we had an empire of 500 million on our side?

This is the problem I’m having reading The Many Not The Few, Richard North’s revisionist history of the Battle of Britain.

(to read more, click here)

One thought on “Separating myth from reality in a history of the Battle of Britain”

Badlander says:18th March 2012 at 12:54 amWhat matters, of course, is that the Nazis were stopped, and Fighter Command were the sharp end of the spear. Whenever I hear the term “revisionist history”, I have to wonder about the motivation of the revisionist. History, of course, has to be reconsidered in light of new evidence, but there are always those who need no evidence to trash what they consider to be anathema. Even a cursory consideration of the factors that led to British victory in the B of B would require one to acknowledge the contribution of the people who didn’t actually strap on parachutes and go prop-to-prop with the Luftwaffe- those planes actually had to be built by someone, didn’t they?- but war is Drama, and the undramatic is always secondary. Hang on to those myths, James, because they are as true as anything, certainly as true as the plodding, finicky details that historians consider to be The Truth.

Comments are closed.

North reports the Press Complaints Commission to the Press Complaints Commission | James Delingpole

Recursive complaints

Is this a first? Blogger extraordinaire Dr Richard North has made a detailed complaint to the Press Complaints Commission, lambasting it for acting in breach of Section 1 of its Editors Code of Practice, viz:

i) The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures.

If the PCC ignores this complaint, it will then effectively find itself sanctioning a breach of the second clause of the same Section:

ii) A significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distortion once recognised must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence, and – where appropriate – an apology published

You can read the great North’s letter in full here.

As we know from his ongoing case against the Guardian’s George Monbiot – who rather cavalierly accused North of “peddling inaccuracy, misrepresentation and falsehood” over a story which turned out to be entirely correct – North is not a figure to be trifled with. He has spent the last few decades acting as an expert witness in any number of complex court cases (involving everything from eggs to speed cameras) and has an almost trainspotterish obsession with the tiniest detail which, together with a grasp of legal procedure worthy of Tom Denning and crusading spirit worthy of Richard Coeur De Lion make him a truly formidable opponent of any manner of establishment mendacity, cover-up or bullshit.

This case, of course, concerns Amazongate – a complicated but important story which, as I reported on a previous blog (go there if you need all the links) can be roughly summarised thus:

The IPCC made a false claim in its most recent assessment report, passing off the propaganda of environmental activists as peer-reviewed science. Instead of admitting the truth and retracting its false claim, the IPCC and its sympathisers went into entirely characteristic cover-up mode. Activist scientists like Daniel Nepstad obfuscated; other activist scientists like Dr Simon Lewis of Leeds University exploited the ignorance and pro-Warmist bias of the Press Complaints Commission to bully an entirely unnecessary retraction of a true story on the subject by the Sunday Times; activist journalists like George Monbiot then boasted that they had been vindicated – a claim that was excitedly repeated throughout the ecotard blogosphere and among ecotard cheerleaders like the BBC. All of this energy in defence of a great, stinking lie.

I’d say North’s case is watertight. What the PCC did was force the Sunday Times to apologise for running a true story and then force it correct it with an untrue one. At the very least the PCC ought to force the Sunday Times to apologise for its apology.

Will this happen? Well, after three official whitewashes into Climategate I have long since lost what little faith I had in the liberal Establishment’s capacity to do anything other than cover up its incompetence, corruption and skullduggery. So I doubt the PCC will be any different.

One thing’s sure though: if the PCC refuses to act on this entirely valid and important complaint then, in the eyes of all fair-minded journalists and indeed non-journalists, it will have abandoned all claims to be taken seriously as a fair and independent arbiter of truth, decency and balance in the media.

Moonbat + Amazongate = Prize Pillock

Shrill buffoonery

spat-acular

With thanks to Josh @ www.cartoonsbyjosh.com

There’s only one thing more satisfying than being right. That’s when a shrill buffoon you utterly despise dedicates an entire column in a newspaper you loathe to accusing you of being wrong, working himself up into an almost masturbatory lather of slobbering indignation, macheting himself to ever greater heights of ecstatic fervour like some Shi’ite penitent during Ashura, giggling at his jokes, crowing at his own cleverness, earning all sorts of smarmy plaudits from his coterie of sorry eco-fascist brown-nosers – and it turns out, after all that, you’re still entirely right and the buffoon – let’s call him Moonbat – has emerged looking an even bigger prat than ever.

I love you George Moonbat, no really I do. You’ve just made my weekend.

Don’t think George loves me, though. There’s a clue in this par here:

In the Telegraph, James Delingpole, who seldom misses an opportunity to make an idiot of himself, announced that these revelations meant:

“AGW [anthropogenic global warming] theory is toast. So’s Dr Rajendra Pachauri. So’s the Stern review. So’s the credibility of the IPCC.”In reality, as we will see, it’s Delingpole’s beliefs on climate change that the story has reduced to toast.

Anyway, let me explain what this is all about. Someone complained to the Press Complaints Commission about a story Jonathan Leake had written in the Sunday Times about Amazongate. The story concerned yet another piece of dodgy science from that supposed gold standard of climate expertise – the IPCC – which had quoted some statistics about the Amazon’s sensitivity to climate change which were a) inaccurate b) not peer-reviewed c) had been taken from a World Wildlife Fund press release. For some bizarre reason, the Sunday Times decided not to stand up to the Press Complaints Commission – despite the fact that the substance of the story was entirely correct. This, in turn, has given greenies like Monbiot an excuse to prance up and down like Muffin the Mule on angel dust under the insane delusion that this somehow demolishes the entire sceptics’ case against AGW. Which, it doesn’t.

Really, that’s it. If you’re interested in the (mildly dull) details Richard North tells the full story here.

The reason I can’t be bothered to repeat them myself is that I wrote up all these nuances back in January here and here. In the second story, I explain how the great North got his original story slightly wrong but how on closer examination the story turned out to have been even more damning to the IPCC’s credibility than we’d previously suspected. Monbiot clearly missed this subtlety, tee hee. Otherwise he wouldn’t be looking such a prize pillock now.

4 thoughts on “Moonbat + Amazongate = Prize Pillock”

John of Kent says:29th June 2010 at 7:57 amYes, it does turn out that there are no real basis in peer reviewed papers for the claims of the IPCC over the Amazon’s alleged sensitivity to warming. Besides which, this is all besides the point as mankind has no significant influence over the weather or climate, at all!!See the excellent Watts Up With that site for more information on the Amazongate debacle.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/27/booker-north-and-willis-on-the-ipcc-amazongate-affair/

and this more detailled article that looks at the actual data.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/27/out-in-the-ama-zone/

This shows the rainfall has not changed (other than noise in the data) over the last 100 years, in fact the past decade shows higher than average rainfall. So much for alleged warming threatening the Amazon by drought!
Pete Hayes says:2nd July 2010 at 7:37 amNow Richard North has gone through 2 versions of the study and still found no 30/40% will the “Shrill Buffoon” be apologizing to Dr North, Mr Booker and yourself James?Trust me, I will not hold my breath but I bet he goes extremely quite on the subject.
I am actually glad the Times did cowardly retract the article….as you said, “Moonbat – has emerged looking an even bigger prat than ever” LMAO
John of Kent says:3rd July 2010 at 12:33 pmYes, it does turn out that there are no real basis in peer reviewed papers for the claims of the IPCC over the Amazon’s alleged sensitivity to warming. Besides which, this is all besides the point as mankind has no significant influence over the weather or climate, at all!!See the excellent Watts Up With that site for more information on the Amazongate debacle.
h t t p://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/27/booker-north-and-willis-on-the-ipcc-amazongate-affair/

and this more detailled article that looks at the actual data.

h t t p ://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/27/out-in-the-ama-zone/

This shows the rainfall has not changed (other than noise in the data) over the last 100 years, in fact the past decade shows higher than average rainfall. So much for alleged warming threatening the Amazon by drought!
John of Kent says:3rd July 2010 at 12:33 pmremove the spaces between the h the t the t and the p. I had to do that to get the link passed the automatic moderator.

Comments are closed.

There Is Nothing Cuddly about the WWF

Today in the Sunday Telegraph my colleague Christopher Booker breaks possibly the most important environmental story since Climategate: a devious plan, truly Blofeldian in its scope and menace, by a hard-left-leaning activist body to gain massive global political leverage and earn stupendous sums of money by exploiting and manipulating the world carbon trading market.

My cynical prediction is that this vitally important story will gain little traction in the wider media, especially not with organisations like the BBC. Why? Because the activist body in question has a lovely, cuddly panda as its motif, and a reputation – brainwashed into children from an early age – for truly caring about the state of our planet. What’s more, this latest campaign by the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) is very easy to spin as something unimpeachably noble and right. After all, what kind of fascistic, Gaia-hating sicko would you have to be NOT to applaud a delightful heartwarming scheme to buy up whole swathes of the beauteous, diversity-rich, Na’avi-style, Truffula-tree dotted Amazon rainforest to preserve it for all time from the depredations of evil loggers, cattleranchers and other such profiteering scum?

Hence the understandably cautious tone in Booker’s opening par:

If the world’s largest, richest environmental campaigning group, the WWF – formerly the World Wildlife Fund – announced that it was playing a leading role in a scheme to preserve an area of the Amazon rainforest twice the size of Switzerland, many people might applaud, thinking this was just the kind of cause the WWF was set up to promote. Amazonia has long been near the top of the list of the world’s environmental cconcerns, not just because it includes easily the largest and most bio-diverse area of rainforest on the planet, but because its billions of trees contain the world’s largest land-based store of CO2 – so any serious threat to the forest can be portrayed as a major contributor to global warming.

Only after this nod to fashionable concerns is Booker able to stick in the knife:

If it then emerged, however, that a hidden agenda of the scheme to preserve this chunk of the forest was to allow the WWF and its partners to share the selling of carbon credits worth $60 billion, to enable firms in the industrial world to carry on emitting CO2 just as before, more than a few eyebrows might be raised. The idea is that credits representing the CO2 locked into this particular area of jungle – so remote that it is not under any threat – should be sold on the international market, allowing thousands of companies in the developed world to buy their way out of having to restrict their carbon emissions. The net effect would simply be to make the WWF and its partners much richer while making no contribution to lowering overall CO2 emissions.
WWF, which already earns £400 million yearly, much of it contributed by governments and taxpayers, has long been at the centre of efforts to talk up the threat to the Amazon rainforest – as shown recently by the furore over a much-publicised passage in the 2007 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC’s claim that 40 per cent of the forest is threatened by global warming, it turned out, was not based on any scientific evidence, but simply on WWF propaganda, which had wholly distorted the findings of an earlier study on the threat posed to the forest, not by climate change but by logging.

Read the full story here. Then, for even more grisly details – about how, for example, the WWF’s scheme rides roughshod over the interests of native peoples, in way that might rather shock those who think of the organisation purely in terms of that cute panda – turn to Richard North’s comprehensive analysis at Eureferendum. The work North and Booker have done exposing the great AGW scam is quite beyond admiration. Truly they are the McIntyre and McKitrick of British journalism.

But why does the story matter so much? Because it goes to the heart of what is truly the most shocking and evil aspect of the Global Warming Industry: the way democratically unaccountable – but quite astonishingly well-funded – activist groups like the WWF (annual income: £400 MILLION) have been able to subvert the scientific process, and coax and bully politicians into making policies which will benefit the environment barely one jot, but which will fleece the taxpayer, increase energy bills, and make a handful of filthy rich investors even richer. If this scheme ever comes off – and it still might, if Americans are foolish enough to vote for Cap and Trade – then the WWF will have the financial clout of decent mid-ranking economy and a political influence as great as any G8 nation. For WWF, read New World Order.

Great News: The People Responsible for Amazongate, Glaciergate, and Africagate Trousered £3 Million of Your Tax Money

Great news: the people responsible for Amazongate, Glaciergate, and Africagate trousered £3 million of your tax money

Our old friend Jo Abbess BSc is back. And she’s got some searching, pertinent questions which could put paid to my AGW-denying antics once and for all!

Dear James,

I am researching a short article on the possible relationships between financial investments and politics in the Media.

It occurs to me that not only do journalists follow the whims and wiles of their editors, who follow the foibles and fetishes of those who own their media vehicle, and those who advertise in their media; but that journalists may have personal investments, in say, pension funds, estates or businesses that may affect their public pronouncements.

Would you, James Delingpole, be prepared to go on the record about where you keep your money ?

Would you be willing to say publicly whose pension fund(s) you are relying on, and which kind of investments you are prepared to accept in making returns on that capital ?

Is your money ethically invested ? Do you take into account the risks and opportunities of fluctuating conditions when you decide your investments ? Do you follow future projections when making your financial decisions ?

Would you be willing to declare your interests in business and your professional associations ?

Would you be ready to admit which investments you have made, in order that I may ascertain whether this might influence your attitudes and opinions ?

You have the privilege of a very wide readership, and thus an influential platform from which to lead opinion, and so I feel it is important to discover whether your professed political positioning may relate to how you use your money.

Can you, hand on honest heart, declare that your writing is independent of your money, and that your politics is free from the influence of your investments ?

Inquisitively yours,

Now the only reasons I’m rising to Jo’s bait are a) because I know it will give you all so much pleasure and b) because of what it says about the delusions of the Warmist lobby. They really do seem to imagine, bless, that the only reason anyone could possibly have for being sceptical about AGW is if they were being bribed by sinister business concerns (Big Oil, etc) or had some similar vested interests.

The Independent On Sunday had another feeble attempt at resurrecting this myth at the weekend. But the sad truth (sad, that is, for those of us who really wouldn’t mind being funded by Exxon and wouldn’t feel compromised one bit) is that all the big money has long since migrated to the other side. For Warmists, there are fortunes to be made in lavish grant funding, carbon trading, government subsidised green non-jobs, and so on. For us sceptics there’s little more than the satisfaction of having right and truth on our side.

As Richard North points out, the amount Exxon spent over 10 years funding sceptics is as nothing to the quantities of public money which has been splurged on funding climate change alarmism:

Over ten years, the company paid a grand total of $23 million to sceptics (by no means the larger part of which was devoted to climate change) less than a thousandth of what the US government has put in, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in just the single year of 2008.

Against that, over the last 20 years, by the end of fiscal year 2009, the US government had poured in $32 billion for climate research. In 1989, the first specific US climate-related agency was created with an annual budget of $134 million. Today in various forms the funding has leapt to over $7,000 million per annum, around 50 fold higher.

That, of course, is only the US picture – and government funding. To that, one must add the hundreds of millions, if not billions, poured in by the charitable foundations, and the massive funding from industry – much of which ends up in the pockets of advocacy groups such as the WWF.

Then, albeit on a smaller scale, we have other nations around the world adding to the funds. In the UK we have seen that the Met Office has been given £243 million of taxpayers’ money on “climate research”, and that represents just the tip of the iceberg.

Today, the good Dr North has yet another shocking story about taxpayers’ money being squandered on global warming drivel. Turns out that man in charge of discredited Working Group II section (yep: the one which responsible for Glaciergate, Amazongate and Africagate) of the risibly flawed Fourth IPCC assessment report was paid over one third of a million quid for supervising this piece of tosh. His name is Professor Martin Parry.

Dr North reports:

Through his own personal consultancy, Martin Parry Associates, he was paid £330,187 by Defra, for the part-time post of: “Acting as Co-chair of Working group II at meetings of IPCC WG II and associated groups.”

Additionally, his consultancy was paid £10,690, again by Defra to “assess the global impact of climate change on world food supply and global food security” – the very issue in which Parry is supposedly expert.

That was, presumably, separate from the contract in the financial year 2002/2003 for a study on “Global Impacts of Climate Change on Food Security”. For that, Parry Associates were paid £64,020. That was the year, incidentally, that the Global Atmosphere Division of Defra supported 35 research contracts on climate change, in 21 different establishments, at a total of £12 million.

These sums, however, are only a small part of the total which went into preparing the WGII report. Defra also paid £1,436,162 to “provide the scientific and administrative Technical Support Unit (TSU) for Working Group II (WGII) on Impacts and Adaptation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and to provide support for the chair of WGII, Professor Martin Parry and the preparation of the IPCC AR4 Synthesis report,” paid via the UK Met Office.

An entirely separate sum of £1,144,738 was awarded to Working Group II Technical Support Unit under the amorphous title “An international commitment to provide technical support on climate change,” also paid to the Met Office.

This means that the scientists and experts who “volunteered their time” on WGII were paid to the tune of nearly £3 million (£2,921,777) by British taxpayers alone – which does not of course include the sums paid by other nations and the production costs, or the payments by the IPCC directly.

Let me run that one by you again, just in case the full horror didn’t sink in properly. YOU paid £3,000,000 of your hard-earned dosh in order to fund a farrago of nonsense concocted in order to justify still more of your money being spent in the future to deal with a crisis which only exists in the imaginations of corrupt scientists, EU apparatchiks, One-World-governmenters, carbon-traders, third world kleptocrats and hysterical eco-loons.

Just for your amusement, here’s Professor Parry two years ago, boasting on the BBC website about the, er, robust integrity of the IPCC review process.

Several thousand scientists are asked to review the authors’ drafts, at two different stages; and there are also two stages of review by governments.

The purpose of the review is to ensure that the assessments are a fair reflection of the views of the whole scientific community, not just of the authors themselves. Each chapter has two review editors to ensure that reviews are considered and responded to appropriately. The assessments are therefore stuffed with references regarding one tendency suggested by some sets of data, and other tendencies suggested by others.
It is a summary of what we know and – just as importantly – what we do not know.

Earlier he claims:

This is why they err, if anything, on the side of conservatism and have been criticised for not exploring the outer edges of knowledge.

And if you want to make yourself even more depressed have a guess where he is now.

Tag: Richard North

RSPB: We Must Build More Bird-Chopping Eco Crucifixes!

How Green Activist Scientists Rigged the EU Pesticide Ban Which Has Cost Farmers and Businesses Billions

Related posts:

Separating Myth from Reality in a History of the Battle of Britain

Related posts:

One thought on “Separating myth from reality in a history of the Battle of Britain”

North reports the Press Complaints Commission to the Press Complaints Commission | James Delingpole

Recursive complaints

Related posts:

Moonbat + Amazongate = Prize Pillock

Shrill buffoonery

Related posts:

4 thoughts on “Moonbat + Amazongate = Prize Pillock”

There Is Nothing Cuddly about the WWF

Related posts:

Great News: The People Responsible for Amazongate, Glaciergate, and Africagate Trousered £3 Million of Your Tax Money

Related posts: