Sarah Beeney speaks

Greg Barker MP, Shadow Minister for Climate Change, went to see B&Q’s New Malden store on Tuesday, accompanied by TV property pundit Sarah Beeney.

The Conservatives’ home energy retrofit programme, the “Green Deal”, is part of a wider energy and climate initiative aimed at reducing carbon emissions coming from homes.

Ms Beeney said: “As a property investor and entrepreneur, I fully support home energy retro-fit schemes.

“They clearly address the urgent need to reduce emissions from the housing sector and make low-carbon renovation widely accessible to consumers”.

B&Q claims its New Malden “flagship eco store” would become the benchmark for meeting the company’s wider objective of becoming carbon neutral by 2012.

AGW debate pithily summarised by Lord Leach

During an excellent if  too optimistic overview, Philip Stott refers to "a brief, but seminal, critique of the ‘science’ from Lord Leach of Fairford".

Read (both) and enjoy.

Why does the excellent Prof seem too optimistic? The media may be teetering, but the politicians have invested too much in AGW to draw back without loss of face, and foolishly left themselves no exit route. All the frontbenches accept AGW as an article of faith, Brown, Miliband and Cameron especially. They have said in terms that the science is settled. Brown has called AGW doubters flat-earthers, Miliband is actually choosing this moment to bang the drum for AGW.

Government is busy doling out our money to foreign governments, and to domestic projects in the UK. I am trying to follow this in a new blog, Carbonballs, and it is frightening how many ways the government machine is finding to toss away money that we don't have. Looking on the bright side, though, it does suggest that substantial easy savings should be available once those in power can swallow their pride.

Only attacks on the temperature records will hole AGW below the waterline. Vested interests will be desperately baling - this could sink careers. The theory may be on its last legs, but powerful politicians and campaigners will be very, very reluctant to let their latest scare die. They think retraction would make them look stupid.

Too late, guys, I'm afraid!

It's the temperature, stupid

Pachauri will be made to go for the greater good of the global warming cause. As much blame as possible will be heaped on him. He will be painted as a dillettanté, with his silly novel used as evidence. And we will be told the IPCC can now move forward without him.

Just as we are told glaciergate and amazongate don't damage the core case for manmade global warming climate change, so we will be told Pachauri's departure won't damage the work of the IPCC.

So sceptics mustn't concentrate too much fire on Pachauri. Amazongate's in the bag. So is glaciergate. And indeed mountaingate. But the Milibands can say it's only collateral damage, the core case isn't affected.

Of course the extent of CO2's role in any warming is - to put it kindly - unproven. But you can't deliver a simple knock out blow to this theory that can be explained in two simple paragraphs.

The key questions now are: has it been warming at all? And if so, has it been exceptional?

Temperatures are now the key. If it hasn't been warming, global warming climate change is finished. Of course this is where climategate comes in. It looks murky, and why labour to hide something unless you have something to hide?

All the temperature datasets look highly questionable. Keep explaining problems with the temperature data in ways that the lay public can understand. Goodness knows there are enough. One problem at a time. Get one problem into the public consciousness and then move on to the next one.

Make the notion of problems with temperature data familiar. So familiar that people start to shake their heads when they read of a new one.

In politics "it's the economy, stupid". And in AGW, it's the temperatures.

School to waste thousands on wind turbine

Pupils at a Haverfordwest school will be taking a hands on approach to environmental and sustainability education this year.

Mary Immaculate School has been granted planning permission for a 15-metre six-kilowatt wind turbine on site, which will help reduce electricity costs and provide a chance for pupils to learn more about renewable energy first hand.

The site of the turbine, below the school’s hardstanding football pitch, will also be developed into an ecological site with a willow garden, pond and vegetable patch.

Headteacher, Pat Mansfield said: “We are heading towards a silver award (given by Pembrokeshire County Council for sustainability and environmental awareness) and the turbine will also facilitate science lessons.

“In addition it will help us reduce the costs to the school for fuel which is not an insignificant consideration. It is one part of a push towards sustainability and green issues.”

School governor Mike Evans started the project and is delighted to see the plans moving forward. It is hoped that the turbine will be up and running before the summer holidays.

“It is a six-kilowatt wind turbine, which doesn’t sound very big but it will do two things. One, it will reduce our bill marginally and two, it will educate the children.

“The main thing is the education of the next generation and the benefit to the environment,” added Mr Evans.

The school received a grant from the Carbon Trust towards the £37,000 turbine cost and hope to raise the rest through local businesses.

What else could they have dome with £37,000?

Romania to make €1bn+ from carbon allowances

Romania's current quota of carbon dioxide emission allowances could bring the country 1.2 - 1.5 billion euros by 2012, Minister of Environment and Forests Laszlo Borbely has said.

Call for carbon labelling

British consumers could be generating a third more CO2 than they realise because the carbon footprint of imported goods is often hidden, according to the Carbon Trust.

Tom Delay, chief executive of the trust, said in an interview with the Financial Times that consumers must become more aware of the hidden carbon impacts of the goods they buy.

"If people had all the information, they could make genuinely green choices for themselves," he said.

Delay argued that many attempts to measure UK carbon emissions failed to take into account the upstream impact of many goods and services.

Most carbon calculators put the carbon footprint of the average Briton at about five tonnes. But the Carbon Trust estimates that the figure rises to about 11 tonnes if the amenities they rely on – such as public transport, buildings and other infrastructure – were taken into account, and would be higher still if the impact of imported goods was counted.

Large export-led economies such as China have long argued that it is unfair to make them responsible for the carbon emissions associated with goods that are consumed in developed countries. Industrialised nations counter that China and other exporters have been paid for the goods and thus for the emissions.

In the FT interview, Delay said if consumers were properly informed about embedded carbon, they would make different choices. For example, he pointed out that rice has a much larger carbon impact than pasta, a fact that could encourage people to switch to the less carbon-intensive option.

The Carbon Trust is trying to establish a system of carbon labels on products, showing how much CO2 has been generated in their manufacture. To qualify for the label, companies will need to undertake a carbon footprint assessment of their product supply chain while committing to try to reduce emissions.

Companies displaying the label will sign up to a "reduce or lose" clause whereby if they fail to reduce the carbon footprint of the product over a two-year period, they will have the label withdrawn.

Indonesia to get £50m from UK

The UK is to contribute £50m ($80m) to a project in Indonesia "in the hope it will tackle climate change", reports the BBC.

Large-scale deforestation makes the South East Asian country the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the US.

The money will be used to encourage palm oil manufacturers to grow new plantations on land already degraded instead of clearing new forest.

The Indonesian president has pledged to cut carbon emissions by 26% by 2020. ...

London buildings initiative on - yes - carbon

Companies in London are being offered a new toolkit from the Better Buildings Partnership to make their office sites greener, reports energy saving trust.

The initiative has been launched as a means to measure CO2 output generated from construction as well as a system through which energy consumption can be monitored.

It is estimated that more than one-third of London's total carbon emissions are created through office buildings.

The city's mayor, Boris Johnson, said that the new toolkit can also help enterprises reduce their total energy costs.

Martin Powell, project delivery director at the London Development Agency said: "Businesses need to understand how their buildings use energy before they can work out how to cut their carbon pollution.

"The Better Buildings Partnership's new toolkit will help them do that and will help move the commercial property sector toward an agreed set of standards and measurements."

Can we ever be carbon neutral?

It is notoriously difficult to move a muscle without creating a carbon penalty, and mitigating this can be a full-time obsession (as evidenced by No Impact Man, noimpactproject.org). As if our per capita carbon footprint wasn't big enough at 9.7 tonnes each every year (think of it as six hot-air balloons full of CO2) this winter's cold weather could cause it to swell. In the absence of any meaningful low-carbon power generation system, we retreat to burning huge quantities of coal to fulfil increased power demand. Coal use explains why Australians weigh in with a thunderous annual output of 20.5 tonnes of CO2 per person.

In order to neutralise these balloons full of atmospheric gas, you must perfectly balance the emissions created with the emissions removed or absorbed on your behalf. This is easier said than done.

More like this - by the way, the answer to the headline: if we were carbon neutral, probably lots of plants would die.

Miliband declares war on climate change sceptics - Observer

The climate secretary, Ed Miliband, last night warned of the danger of a public backlash against the science of global warming in the face of continuing claims that experts have manipulated data.

In an exclusive interview with the Observer, Miliband spoke out for the first time about last month's revelations that climate scientists had withheld and covered up information and the apology made by the influential UN climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which admitted it had exaggerated claims about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.

The perceived failure of global talks on combating climate change in Copenhagen last month has also been blamed for undermining public support. But in the government's first high-level recognition of the growing pressure on public opinion, Miliband declared a "battle" against the "siren voices" who denied global warming was real or caused by humans, or that there was a need to cut carbon emissions to tackle it.

"It's right that there's rigour applied to all the reports about climate change, but I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it's somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that's there," he said.

"We know there's a physical effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leading to higher temperatures, that's a question of physics; we know CO₂ concentrations are at their highest for 6,000 years; we know there are observed increases in temperatures; and we know there are observed effects that point to the existence of human-made climate change. That's what the vast majority of scientists tell us."

More in this vein

Oh good, more wind turbines

Engineering company Mabey Bridge has unveiled plans to build a £38 million wind turbine tower factory at Chepstow in South Wales, in a move which it claimed will make it the UK's biggest manufacturer of towers for both on- and offshore wind projects. ...

When completed, the facility would be capable of fabricating tower sections up to five metres in diameter and 40 metres in length. ...

Mabey Bridge claimed that it had relationships in place with major turbine manufacturers which meant that the facility would be running at its full capacity of 300 towers a year in "a relatively short time". ...

News of Mabey Bridge's expansion was welcomed by senior Labour and Conservative politicians in Wales.

More

Hull reveals plans to fight climate change

Plans to reduce energy and cut carbon dioxide emissions by Hull City Council have been approved.

Councillors agreed to reduce their emissions by 3% over the next year as part of a national campaign to cut the UK's carbon emissions by 10% in 2010. The council said it hoped to get its carbon output to zero by 2050....

Cllr Dave Woods, of Hull City Council, said:

The council has a responsibility, as do all organisations, to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

We hope that by educating our staff and installing energy-saving devices it will not only help us to achieve our target, but encourage other organisations to look at how they use energy too.

Any changes that organisations in Hull can make, no matter how small, can help to make a difference to climate change.

Just 24 homebuyers have taken advantage of a high-profile scheme devised by Gordon Brown to encourage the construction of environmentally-friendly houses across the country.

In his final Budget as Chancellor, Mr Brown announced that stamp duty would be scrapped on all new properties worth up to £500,000 which are given a zero carbon rating. The average saving per purchase was estimated to be £10,000.

Mr Brown set aside £15m for the tax relief, which he hoped would “accelerate” the building of carbon-neutral homes as a key weapon in the fight against global warming.

More

Sarkozy wants carbon border tax

Nicolas Sarkozy is continuing his fight to introduce a carbon tax at the borders of the European Union.

Of course it's just another disguise for the protectionism he wants.

Miliband: windpower lacks public support

There is still a huge amount to do to win public support for renewable energy, Ed Miliband has warned:

Nobody should be under any illusions of the scale of the challenge facing us to increase six-fold the amount of renewable energy in this country.

In an un-green metaphor, Mr Miliband gave an assurance that the department is not going to take its foot off the accelerator, but is "going to power forward" and future plans include a document at the time of the Budget looking at pathways and policy instruments to reach 2050 in terms of renewable energy and low carbon energy.

In a telling quote, he added: "I don't think the 10-15% who care passionately about climate change in this country have yet been joined by a large enough set of people who think this is in our environmental and economic interests."

Emphasising the positive part of this agenda is absolutely essential, Mr Miliband added, "because our renewable energy targets are so stretching and because they require higher prices from people and because they require our countryside to change, I think none of this is in the bag.

More

Local authorities to lead on cutting carbon emissions

Communities secretary John Denham has revealed nine local authority areas the Government will work with in a new local carbon framework pilot. The councils - in Bristol, Bournemouth, Poole and Dorset, Haringey (!), Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, Northumberland, Oxford and Plymouth - will work with the CLG to set and deliver 'ambitious' targets to reduce emissions.

The frameworks will promote new and more effective ways of meeting the Government's climate change agenda. It is hoped this will eventually incentivise all councils to significantly reduce their carbon footprint.

According to the CLG, local carbon frameworks will set clear targets for action, and develop clear strategy to achieve these, producing a delivery plan for all council partners.

Mr Denham said councils are uniquely placed to drive and shape the low carbon economy:

We want all local authorities to take the lead on reducing emissions in their area.

These nine councils are ready to help identify the support needed for all local authorities to follow the lead of the best.

Balls admits zero carbon target will not be met

The government will miss its target of making every new school building in England zero carbon from 2016, Ed Balls admitted today.

Responding to a technical report from the Zero Carbon Task Force (ZCTF), Balls said the government had a moral duty to get as close as it could to the “aspiration” of zero carbon school buildings.

The government is now aiming at a target of 2018, with at least four pilot zero carbon schools operational in each government region before 2016.

He said: “The independent experts from the ZCTF tell me that although current technology makes building zero-carbon schools expensive and challenging, we have a clear moral responsibility to future generations to get as close as we can to that aspiration – it would be a dereliction of duty if we didn’t".

A new target announced today will be to reduce CO2 emissions from new school buildings by around 80% on 2002 building standards by 2013 – an increase on the department’s current requirement to reduce emissions by 60%.

The government also wants to monitor energy use in schools more closely through the widespread introduction of energy meters.

Schools in England contribute around 15% of the country's public sector emissions, equal to all the energy and transport emissions of Birmingham and Manchester combined. ...

Make your blog carbon neutral!

An stupid initiative, even by Greenist standards

A German company is offering to plant a tree for every blogger that signs up for their “Make Your Blog Carbon Neutral” initiative. Just write a short blog post, like this, about the program, put their badge in your sidebar and email them your blog’s url and they will plant a tree, in the fire ravaged Plumas National Forest in Northern California, in your blog’s name. The tree will be planted by Arbor Day Foundation, the program’s U.S. partner. Arbor Day Foundation is a non-profit, conservation and education organization with the goal of helping reforest 5,500 acres of Plumas National Forest with 792,000 trees. It’s estimated that a single tree will neutralize the emissions of the average blog for 50 years.

Carbon targets dumped on universities

University funding chiefs have bowed to pressure to set less ambitious targets for carbon reduction in the sector.

Universities face financial penalties if they fail to make significant cuts to their carbon emissions, following the Higher Education Funding Council for England's commitment to major reduction targets.

The Government's grant letter to Hefce in January 2009 confirmed that future capital funds would be linked to universities' performance in slashing their emissions.

The funding council's first major policy document on the issue, published on 28 January, states that institutions will be expected to cut their carbon output by 34 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050, based on 1990 levels. These targets are in line with the Government's plans for the UK as a whole.

However, the targets are significantly lower than those mooted in Hefce's initial consultation, published in July last year, which proposed that universities aim for a carbon-reduction target of 50 per cent by 2020 and 100 per cent by 2050.

More

The global warming battle warms up

For now the stately Global Warming galleon sails on.

Admiral Voodoo stands on the deck. No one knows how he came to be the admiral, since he had not worked his way up the naval ranks, but there he stands in his famously splendid uniform.

For years the great ship sailed serenely on, untroubled by the small craft around trying to impede it. But then boats started to appear carrying a small mounted gun. Some took pot shots at the Admiral's regalia, his jacket alone rumoured to have cost a fabulous sum. Others through their loud hailers accused him of lying in dispatches to the politicians back home.

But for all the fire directed at the Admiral, he remained standing. "Mere flesh wounds", he assured his sailors grandly, and his crew loyally rallied round him, apart from a rebellious Indian officer who was whispering that the ship should by all means continue on its mission, but perhaps the Admiral in his resplendent brocade should be cast off.

But then craft with larger guns appeared, and they began to fire at the galleon itself. SS Glaciergate, SS Amazongate and others were firing at the rigging. As fire from Glaciergate ripped one of the sails to shreds, some of the ratings muttered that they had warned the officers not to rig the ship that way. 'Why didn't you say so before?' others replied, as the galleon's smooth glide was interrupted. But the Admiral sent some officers to haul down that one sail, while remaining defiantly on the deck, his gaze still fixed on the destination.

As the Admiral refused to notice the other torn sails, the galleon journeyed on, though less evenly than before.

But then another boat appeared, with a heavier gun - SS Temperaturegate. They did not train their fire on individual sails, but aimed to hole the galleon below the waterline. For if there had been no global warming,  the galleon's voyage would become purposeless and would be doomed. This time it would not be an individual sail that suffered, but the very structure of the galleon itself - damage which the crew could not repair in the middle of a voyage.

Admiral Voodoo sent dispatches saying they had taken a small amount of fire from SS Glaciergate, but there was no damage elsewhere. For, he thought, if his illustrious predecessor Nelson had achieved victory despite having one eye and arm, why should fire trained upon his successor harm the cause? And indeed as he put his telescope to his own injured eye, he could see no damage at all.

News sometimes travels slowly, both from a galleon to its masters at home and from a politician's ears and eyes to his judgement. The Green Tendency, who by stealth had taken over both parliamentary front benches (already themselves green), kept themselves in ignorance of the fire raking their precious galleon. Closing their eyes and putting their fingers in their ears, they continued to chant their green mantras, as their courtiers stroked their suits - which were also expensive. The Green hangers-on around them smiled and applauded, and their minions continued to make plans to spend huge sums of their subjects' money combating a carbon trace gas which was actually in short supply.

Meanwhile, the gunfire continued on the open sea. And the subjects - cast out from influence and discussion -  gnashed their teeth and wailed, for no one would heed their cries that they were more concerned about jobs and education and health and population pressure than with beggaring themselves to propitiate the green deities, when their litany seemed less and less convincing.

For the politicians' advisors had told them that the science was settled, and that the Global Warming galleon was sailing serenely on. And the politicians knew that they knew best. For why would they have been placed in positions of power if they were unable to see further than their subjects?

But the annoying boats kept circling and firing.

Tackling climate change in Lambeth

Cash handouts of up to £500 are being offered by Lambeth Council to help residents set up ‘green’ schemes in their neighbourhoods, as part of the council’s new ‘Big Difference’ environmental campaign, launched this week by Lambeth Council to encourage local people to cut their own carbon emissions.

The funding will help residents start up schemes that contribute to tackling climate change in their local area, such as food growing co-ops and community recycling projects. ...

A zero carbon eco-village

Proposals to transform part of Peterborough's South Bank into an eco-village will go on public show today (Wednesday, 27 January).

The site will become England's largest development of zero carbon homes - the second to be created as part of the Carbon Challenge, a government initiative to boost house building's response to climate change....

Plans to remodel Glasgow and change citizens' behaviour

Plans to transform Glasgow into one of Europe's greenest cities within a decade have been published. The Sustainable Glasgow report sets out methods to drive down carbon emissions and meet future energy needs.

It outlines projects on renewable energy, district heating, sustainable transport, smart grids, biogas, biomass and energy management and efficiency and estimates that green energy projects could bring in £1.5bn of new investment to the city within 10 years.

The project aims to transform the city into a hub of the sustainable energy sector, delivering jobs and training. It will play a major role in attempts to regenerate communities and tackle fuel poverty (partly caused by government renewables imposts) over the next 10 years. Recommendations include initiatives such as the creation of systems to turn the city's sewage and municipal waste into biogas.

There would be a drive to increase the use of biogas and electric vehicles. Moves could also be made to develop district heating system and gradually phase out electric, coal and oil heating. This would go hand-in-hand with the development of natural biogas-fuelled combined heat and power systems and a smart grid system to deliver power.

Other initiatives would see the creation of urban woodlands on vacant city land and projects to encourage "behavioural change" among the city's residents.

Much more. Would this be the best use of all that money?

Council spends £60k to reduce carbon footprint

South Bucks District Council has been awarded £60,000 of taxpayers' money to install solar panels at its offices and to improve “air-conditioning strategies”, along with other measures aimed at reducing emissions by 4% by 2011.

Graham Smith, a former Mayor of Beaconsfield, said: “Most people want our councils to improve the roads rather than keep the council offices at the right temperature".

Roger Reed, the council's deputy leader, said he 'understands and respects' the priorities of many residents but said “we don't have a choice” on how the £60,000 is spent.

He added: “The Government have said that every local authority have to look at reducing their carbon footprint. We were given this money on the condition that we spend it on on just that.”

In July a survey revealed villagers in Gerrards Cross, South Bucks, are the second worst polluters in Britain, and Cllr Reed said the council should be committed to “improving air quality” in the district.

The £60,000 grant was awarded by Bucks Strategic Partnership, which is funded by taxpayers in Buckinghamshire. It will also fund "eco-driver training" and pipe insulation work at the council offices.

An environment boss at Buckinghamshire County Council said there is a business case for councils reducing their emissions. Nigel Sims said: “We should be doing this stuff anyway because it saves money. By replacing all our traffic lights with LEDs we can save energy as well as £64,000-a-year on our electricity bills.”

He said all local authorities had to sign up to the Carbon Reduction Commitment, which means from April they will have to pay £12 in tax for every tonne of carbon emitted through their operations.

Buckinghamshire County Council is responsible for road maintenance and recently pledged £2 million for pot hole repairs, though this was labelled a "cosmetic short term measure" by Liberal Democrats.

Wind farm subsidies top £1bn a year

The Government is subsidising wind farms and other forms of renewable energy with £1 billion of taxpayers' money every year, it is revealed in a new report.

Westcountry wind farm protesters and MPs have reacted angrily to the news that electricity customers are footing the bill for the hefty payout for the renewable energy industry, branding it a "stealth tax".

The levy, paid by energy utilities to the Government, has added £13.50 a year to every domestic power bill.

The study by the energy watchdog Ofgem, due to be published next month, shows that over the past three years, subsidies have added a total of £32.50 to average household electricity bills.

The secret levy is part of a Government scheme designed to force energy firms to fund green energy.

More

More carbon balls

Manchester United's Gary Neville is building a state-of-the-art underground eco-home. He has been involved in the design of the £8million zero-carbon emission super home for the past three years. More (It would be built on green belt land.)

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Scientists wanting to discourage people from making unnecessary trips to the airport to cut greenhouse gases have been awarded £500,000 of taxpayers' money. They will also investigate ways to promote public transport and encourage car sharing.

One of the scientists said: "Travelling to airports has a big impact on carbon emissions, but no one has yet identified how to reduce it. This study will address that gap in our understanding".

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Cheshire East Council has pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 10% by the end of the year. One councillor said: “This is proof of our commitment towards tackling climate change.”

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Lancashire headteachers could face costly bills for green measures after it was revealed schools accounted for 53% of the county council's carbon emissions. Education bosses on Lancashire School’s Forum agreed that every county council school should sign up to the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme. The decision came after it was revealed that Lancashire County Council faces financial penalties if it did not comply with the scheme. More

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Business leaders in London are being targeted by the University of East Anglia as it prepares to launch its MBA programme in "the world's carbon capital". The UEA is also, of course, the world's climategate capital.

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People Power is on a mission to "Unplug for Earth Day 2010" and asks everyone to reduce their personal CO2 emissions on April 22, 2010, and invite friends to join now on this great mission. Unplugging appliances in the home is easy and significantly reduces carbon pollution. Unplugging is important because many appliances continue to draw power even in the standby/off position.

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Steps should be taken to lower the amount of carbon emissions produced as a result of food production in the UK, a new report suggests. Figures contained within the How Low Can We Go research published by the Food Climate Research Network and WWF-UK (yes, it's WWF again) have "revealed" that as much as 30% of the carbon footprint produced by this country can be linked back to its food system.

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The growing maturity of UK woodlands means that carbon sequestration is falling rapidly. An independent assessment commissioned by the Forestry Commission has proposed one way forward: a million new hectares devoted to woodland, generating a reduction of up to 15% of the UK emissions in 2050.

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World leaders must find a way to price the impact of their decisions on biodiversity in the same way that the international community is finding a way of pricing carbon, the environment secretary, Hilary Benn, said today.

Benn was setting out some of the Labour election manifesto thinking before a speech tomorrow in which he will warn that the world may be going through its sixth great extinction event – when many species decrease sharply. But he will warn against pessimism over the failure of the Copenhagen talks, saying a way has to be found to reverse "the collective loss of personal, economic and environmental optimism" - which I rather thought had shot up after Copenhagen.

He said he believed one way to repel the attack on biodiversity was to repeat the success (sic) of the report into the economic consequences of climate change produced for the Treasury by Lord Stern in 2006.

Ivory tower lawyer doesn't get it

The chairman of the Criminal Bar Association says that a change to allow “disproportionate” force would encourage vigilantism, reports The Times. The present law works well, he says: "the balance is properly struck between prosecution and defence and it is easily understood by juries".

This misses the point. Cases where householders act against burglars on their property shouldn't come to court in the first place. The householder's not used to the long legal process, and their liberty is in jeopardy. They don't want to be burgled and then spend time in a police cell, thank you, Mr Mendelle.

First he says the change could make householders less safe because burglars might be more likely to carry weapons themselves or use extreme violence. This is to tell us we must cave into unuttered threats. It's not a complicated judgement, and it's one we can make for ourselves without the condescension of a prominent lawyer telling us what to think.

The other argument is from parallels. If you can defend your property this way, why not your family in the street?

It's much harder to legislate for situations in public areas: it's less cut and dried. Any similar solution there would have to be more hedged with qualifications. And the Klass case has shown how absurd police reactions can be even in such a straightforward situation.

The parallels argument says: we can't adapt this solution for public areas, so the criteria for private areas must remain unjust.

No. That is a complacent and lazy argument in favour of the status quo.

It doesn't work. It isn't just. And Mr Mendelle's arguments don't wash.

Another call to reverse economic growth

The BBC picks up on a report by an environmental think-tank warning that continuing global economic growth "is not possible" if nations are to tackle climate change (htp Alan Haile).

The New Economics Foundation (Nef) said "unprecedented and probably impossible" carbon reductions would be needed to hold temperature rises below 2C (3.6F)....

Tom Clougherty of the Adam Smith Institute said Nef's report exhibited "a complete lack of understanding of economics and, indeed, human development":

It is precisely this economic growth which will lift the poor out of poverty and improve the environmental standards that really matter to people - like clean air and water - in the process, as it has done throughout human history," he told BBC News.

There's only one good thing I can say for the Nef's report, and that's that it is honest. It's authors admit that they want us to be poorer and to lead more restricted lives for the sake of their faddish beliefs.

BBC chases down the hard news

Just to confirm, writes Richard North, that the BBC, with its £700 million news budget, is always on the ball, it comes to us with the very latest in climate change news.

Six school students have been unveiled as climate change "champions" to raise awareness in Wales over the next year.

The six, including three from Gwynedd, were chosen after pitching their own ideas for projects to encourage people to be "greener".

Projects include a documentary on the effects and solutions of climate change, a schools competition and planting 100,000 trees.

The Welsh Assembly Government first launched the competition in 2008.

All those chosen will spend a year "in office" working on their own projects whilst also participating in the Assembly Government's climate change commission, meeting politicians and environmental experts.

And so on and so on. It's Pathé News without the music.

Let's cut car speeds

Average speed cameras could be installed on all the country's motorways to cut carbon emissions under proposals drawn up by the Government's environmental advisers.

The Sustainable Development Commission has called on ministers to bring in the cameras to ensure that motorists stick to the 70 mph limit. This alone would achieve a reduction of of 1.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, the Commission says.

Other recommendations in the Commission's report include a call for all cars to be fitted with speed limiters to cut carbon emissions. The Commission has called on ministers to set a timetable for the introduction of the technology which could make it impossible for cars to break the speed limit.

The idea of installing "time over distance" cameras on all motorways was condemned by Claire Armstrong, who runs the campaign group, Safespeed:

For any organisation to call for any car behaviours to be altered in favour of unproven carbon emissions shows what a total shambles Road Safety has reached in this Country. The arguments are unproven.... Are we to now be expected to offset road safety, against someone's misunderstood concept of Global Weather Patterns? If so this would be a travesty.

Alan Titchmarsh

Alan Titchmarsh:

He said mankind has "exacerbated" global warming but the climate has always changed, for example in the warm periods between the ice ages, and there was a need for a more "grown up" discussion of the subject.

"I am desperate for someone to talk in a reasoned fashion about climate change, rather than running around with a headless chicken saying we are all going to hell in a hand cart and it is all our fault," he said. "Hang on. We all know what we shouldn't do – drive unnecessarily, waste energy – now we want to know the positive things we can do like planting things and improving the environment."

More carbon spending madness

Huge expanses of British town and city centres built in the Sixties and Seventies may have to be torn down to meet carbon emission standards for buildings, reports The Times.

So government would force the private sector to waste lots of money 'upgrading' buildings unnecessarily, in support of a scientific theory which was always tenuous and is becoming discredited.

The Policy Exchange, the public policy think-tank, has estimated that Britain would need to spend about £400 billion on new and refurbished infrastructure by 2020 to address historic underinvestment and to kick-start transition to a low-carbon economy.

Yes, we have so much spare money sloshing around, that must be a top priority.

What planet are these people on? Apparently some planet where minute extra traces of carbon dioxide are definitely causing warming at an previously unknown rate.

That's not planet earth.

Chinese confusion on global warming

China's most senior negotiator on climate change says more research is needed to establish whether warming is man-made, reports The Guardian (htp David Holland).

China's most senior negotiator on climate change said today he was keeping an open mind on whether global warming was man-made or the result of natural cycles.

Xie Zhenhua said there was no doubt that warming was taking place, but more and better scientific research was needed to establish the causes.

Asked to clarify his remarks, he became inscrutable:

Due to the climate change influences, the countries that have been actively impacted most are those developing countries, in particular those small island countries. And the major reason of this climate change issue is the unconstrained emissions produced by developed countries in the process of their industrialisation. That is the mainstream view and we need to make responses concerning these views. There are some uncertain views but our attitude is open, that we need to have more studies. But this shall not impede our efforts in combating the climate change.

So that's clear, then.

The Indian environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, still wants the money to flow: "If $10bn as promised in the Copenhagen accord does not flow to Africa, to small island states and to the LDCs", he said, "we believe that frankly the developed countries are not serious".

Told you, it's about the money.

Why we don't believe in man made global warming

No wonder the Indian government, fed up with outsiders making bogus scientific claims, wants to set up its own IPCC so that it can bring some rationality to policy-making.

We now know that the UN  IPCC work on glaciers was scientifically corrupt. They included thr dramatic 2035 claim from grey literature without checking it, because it would "impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action". And they ignored comments from IPCC reviewers disputing the claim.

Dr Pachauri then employed the self-same scientist who had made the wrong 2035 claim and got grants for his organisation to investigate it. And when the Indian government rubbished the 2035 claim, he dismissed their rebuttal (in a panic?) as "voodoo science".

So no need to panic about Himalayan glaciers then. Can we expect the EU, who threw our money at Dr Voodoo, to stop the project and get our money back? Don't hold your breath.

The UN IPCC was never about science. It was about some people's moral crusade against prosperous industrialised society (which poorer countries want to emulate), and other people's mission to screw as much money out of the industrialised West for themselves as possible.

Mann's IPCC hockey stick became an icon of the global warming movement, and then was discredited. Michael Mann and Keith Briffa suppressed unhelpful data (inconvenient truths, if you will). Climategate also revealed Phil Jones as an incompetent and sleazy scientist, as well as a crook subverting the Freedom of Information Act. And there is no worldwide temperature record with its original data publicly available - an essential requirement you would think - which isn't open to serious question.

So we don't know that there has been exceptional global warming over a meaningful period at all. The computer models, built on fallacies, ignorance and poor data, are unsurprisingly bad at predicting the future.

And on this basis of sand, the warmist fanatics of our detached political class leap to the conclusion that carbon dioxide is somehow harmful (even though there is no scientific proof, and actually more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would not come amiss).

So, say these new religious fanatics, you will pay for wind turbines which would be hugely expensive even if they produced power, which they usually don't. You will pay huge amounts for low carbon so-called solutions even though there is no actual hard evidence that the minute extra traces of carbon dioxide in the air are doing any harm. And if our party's election candidates haven't pledged themselves to the green faith, we will send them to re-education classes so that they will emerge fired with the green leader's trendy blind belief.

But polls show that we the people don't believe the sloppy scientists, the suppressors of truth, the leeches feasting on the fruits of their moral and scientific corruption, or the politicians in the grip of their bogus, self interested preachings.

If the earth is warming, prove it to us. If the earth is warming, prove to us that it is not just another natural cycle in the earth's warming and cooling.

You haven't yet.

Just who does Milord Hutton think he is?

During the enquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly, establishment lackey Lord Hutton not only took on the role of coroner which he was - wrongly - conceited enough to consider himself qualified for; the Mail also has it that he "has secretly barred the release of all medical records, including the results of the post mortem, and unpublished evidence" for up to 70 years.

A letter, leaked to The Mail on Sunday, revealed that a 30-year ban was placed on ‘records provided [which were] not produced in evidence’. This is thought to refer to witness statements given to the inquiry which were not disclosed at the time.

In addition, it has now been established that Lord Hutton ordered all medical reports – including the post-mortem findings by pathologist Dr Nicholas Hunt and photographs of Dr Kelly’s body – to remain classified information for 70 years.

Commenters on the Mail site are rightly outraged. This is not an outrage because Lord Hutton is an establishment stooge - though he is.

It's an outrage because the grand Lord Hutton feels able to subvert democratic enquiry this way - and in secret.

Maybe even the conniving Campbell and Mandelson will be shaking their heads, fearing that poodle Lord Hutton has gone too far this time: his high-handedness will bring the shabby Kelly inquest back to public attention just as we start to think about the general election (on May 6, is it, Bob?).

347 out of 349 Mail commenters want the truth. So do lots more.

Why the NHS can never be value for money

Because this is just one easy kind of waste which politicians have no idea how to stop:

A hospital chief who won a £150,000 payout after quitting his post walked into another top NHS job paying £177,000 just weeks later.

Paul Forden was awarded a ‘compensation payment’ of £70,000 plus six months’ salary of £80,000 when he stepped down as boss of the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital.

But he became CEO of Northampton General Hospital in December 2008, two months after the termination of his previous £160,000-a-year contract.

And the Conservatives couldn't even be bothered to provide a quote. Why did he leave his previous post? Should he have been given any leaving present at our expense at all?

It's our money government are spending - so they don't care.

Pygmies in politics

Baroness Amos is a worthless and rude Australian High Commissioner - are we surprised at a Brown choice behaving in this pointlessly rude and politically correct way?

And Alan Duncan continues to show he's too bumptious and conceited to be a team player.

Costella clarifies climategate

John P Costella has written a cracking analysis of the climategate emails. It's long, at 149 pages, but a very clear read with uncompromising judgements. There's much in there about illegitimate manipulation and suppression of data (aka cheating), but I want to pick out just two themes.

On page 19 Costella discusses Mann's November 1999 email about the trick to hide the decline. The words, he says, "summarize the hoax so magnificently succinctly that the Nobel Committee should consider retrieving their Peace Prize from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore, and re-issuing it as a Literature Prize to Phil Jones". Remember, this was no clever mathematical trick, as the perpetrators' allies tried to pretend at first:

Clearly, Mike Mann’s problems with Keith Briffa’s data—that it didn’t agree with the real temperature measurements from 1961 onwards—had by this time spread to the data for the other “temperature proxies”, albeit only from 1981 onwards. Jones reveals that Mann did not address this problem by making honest note of it in the paper that he and his co-authors published in Nature, but rather by fraudulently substituting the real temperature data into the graphs, for the past twenty or forty years as required.

It was a fraud, because it concealed the fact that the tree data didn't accurately reflect temperature movements.

That Mann did this would be enough on its own to disqualify him and all of his research from any future consideration in the annals of science, says Costella; "but here we have the other leader of the field, Phil Jones, bragging that he admired the “trick” so much that he adopted it himself". Moreover, his email was sent to the major players who dominated this field.

It is the silence of these conspirators over the intervening decade that has forever damned the field of “climate science” to a state of irreversible ignominy, and will almost certainly lead to the incarceration of the principal perpetrators in the near future.

Costella is quite clear: they suppressed unfavourable data. It was fraud.

In conceding that the IPCC's prediction about Himalayan glaciers was flawed, its big chiefs have made much of its (otherwise) robust processes of verifying its contents. Though of course these were the processes that had given Mann's hockey stick such prominence in an earlier version, so that's twice we know of that the IPCC's process has been seriously holed.

Turning to page 21 of Costella's paper, we see an Italian scientist commenting on the IPCC processes back in September 2000:

First let me say that in general, as my own opinion, I feel rather uncomfortable about using not only unpublished but also un-reviewed material as the backbone of our conclusions (or any conclusions). I realize that Chapter 9 of the Report is including new stuff, and thus we can and need to do that too, but the fact is that in doing so the rules of the IPCC have been softened to the point that in this way the IPCC is not any more an assessment of published science (which is its proclaimed goal), but the production of results. The softened condition that the models themselves have to be published does not even apply, because the Japanese model, for example, is very different from the published one which gave results not even close to the actual … version …. Essentially, I feel that at this point there are very little rules and almost anything goes. I think this will set a dangerous precedent which might undermine the IPCC’s credibility, and I am a bit uncomfortable that now nearly everybody seems to think that it is just ok to do this.

And he adds a day later (page 22):

I myself think that material for a document as important as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report cannot be drawn from last-minute barely quality-checked and un-peer-reviewed material (people have barely looked at the Max Planck Institute run that was completed last Friday!).

So much for the IPCC's supposedly robust processes. And - to take one other example - it emerges (p.82) that the 1995 IPCC report included a bogus graph. By 2007 (p.83) scientists are arguing (in Costella's words) that "the only way to salvage any credibility for the IPCC Reports of the 2000s is to reveal that the IPCC Reports of the 1990s were deeply flawed. But they were the reports that the entire climate charge argument was based on!"

Costella's analysis is chock full of interesting points but it's worth pulling out (p.102) this short passage

May 29, 2008:

Phil Jones writes to Mike Mann the email that will provide his prosecutors with their easiest conviction:

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith regarding the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment—minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

This is of course against the law.

Right to the end we see Jones arguing that science should be conducted through peer review - the very process he and his co-conspirators had corrupted. As Prof. Haughton accepts (p.148), the world has moved on.

Costella's analysis brings out many more themes. The overall impression of the emails is that the warming science was very shoddy and has discredited itself. As Costella notes (p.146):

The simple fact of the matter is that the incompetence of these “scientists”—covered up with decades of manipulation and “stacking the deck” of peer review—has left us with absolutely no idea whether the Earth’s climate has been affected to any appreciable degree by mankind.

That is the real travesty.

Update - Bishop Hill has the news that the Commons Science & Technology Select Committee has announced an investigation into climategate.

The Committee has agreed to examine and invite written submissions on three questions:

• What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?
• Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate?
• How independent are the other two international data sets?

They should all read Costella's analysis.

Bishop Hill also has a cracking cartoon.

Catching up

It's excellent news that Andrew Neil is on the Met Office's case. He gave their chief a well deserved hard time on The Daily Politics, and has now sent him additional questions.

1. When did it realise that we were in for record cold and snow in January. Not just a day or a weekend of snow but a prolonged January of cold and snow?
   
   
2. When did it make such a forecast public?
   
   
3. When did it warn the government and local authorities that January was going to be especially bad? In what terms did it make that warning?
   
   
4. Did it advise the authorities that the cold snap was likely to be so severe and long that existing grit and salt supplies were likely in adquate?
   
   
5. If it did not make any of these warnings, why not?
   
   
6. Can you make public the forecasts in 1998, 1999 or 2000 from the Met super-computers, which predict global warming, forecasting that the decade after 1999 would not see temperatures rising? Were they made and were they ever made public?

Tory candidates are being sent on indoctrination sessions to have it explained to them how vital it is for people to be made to spend lots of money to combat global warming. Outside the Westminster bubble, apparently people give it very low priority. Meanwhile, Veggie Benn wants to make it illegal for us to send food waste to landfill. I bet they'll get 100% compliance in northern inner cities.

The IPCC has admitted it was wrong about Himalayan glaciers, without saying sorry.

So what do voters think is important? It's the economy, stupid. In a poll of Labour marginals, 36% of all voters in Labour held seats named the economy as the most important issue, while 13% named immigration. Taxation and the NHS were next at 8% and 6 % respectively. Among those intending to vote Labour at the next election, 42% named the economy. Immigration and the NHS came equal second with 9%.

It's not banning burkhas. Nigel Farage likes this, though, because it's simple enough for him to get his head round. He can't stand anyone who might know more about a subject than he does, which isn't hard. Nigel Farage is not a leader, just an insecure control freak.

Finally, five police officers have been sent to the naughty step for astonishing, basic failings in a serious rape investigation. They looked to me like gross dereliction of duty. They aren't paying a suitable penalty for it.

Pachauri hits the Indian press again

Pachauri has got unwelcome coverage in the Indian press today. The Times of India (TOI) reports that India's environment minister has "slammed the processes" of the IPCC:

The health of glaciers is a cause of grave concern but the IPCC's alarmist position that they would melt by 2035 was not based on an iota of scientific evidence.

Pachauri said to the paper: "Of course, it goes without saying (that the IPCC's reputation has suffered). We have to see that its gold-plated standard is maintained".

An interesting position, as Murali Lal, one of the authors of the chapter on glaciers in the fourth assessment report, has told The Indian Express that a couple of years before the fourth assessment report was published, the IPCC rules were changed to allow the authors to include “grey literature” while making their conclusions:

Authors of the IPCC reports are mandated to go through all available literature, including some grey literature that has gone through limited peer review, while formulating their conclusions. WWF reports come under the definition of such grey literature.

Pachauri told TOI that the IPCC "would move swiftly to verify facts at its own level, work to figure how the `deviation from due process occurred' and act on the situation". Maybe he should start with a call to Lal. It would be interesting to see these changed "IPCC rules", but I don't expect they'll be willingly released any time soon.

Pachauri seems to have made a strategic mistake, by allowing himself to get on the wrong side of the Indian establishment. Labelling an Indian government report "voodoo science" surely hints at previous personal bad blood (as well as suggesting how pleasant and open minded Pachauri may be in meetings exploring the 'science' of 'global warming').

Another clue to the rift is provided by TOI, which notes that "this is not the first time that data on India, often used by industrialised countries to put pressure on Delhi to take actions, has been found to be incorrect". If Pachauri is being portrayed as being on the side of industrialised countries, he is in some trouble. Those are the countries he wants to bleed.

And separately, TOI has picked up the Booker and North pieces in the Sunday Telegraph, reporting that "the British government is to carry out due diligence on New Delhi-based The Energy Research Institute following a local newspaper’s relentless campaign against the organization and its director-general, Rajendra Pachauri, who is also the IPCC chairman".

A British Department for International Development statement said, "As is routine, DFID is undertaking a full Institutional Assessment of TERI as part of our due diligence process."

The paper notes dryly that "The Sunday Telegraph’s persistence seems to have ‘triggered the routine’".

Whither Greece?

Bronwen Maddox writes that "a Greek crisis may well become Germany's problem". She rehearses the horrific Greek economic numbers, and notes that even if domestic politics did allow the Greek government to make the cuts required of it, that would push the country into slump and deflation. But devaluation would be ruled out, because Greece is in the eurozone - as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says with his characteristic gloom, "the pain without the cure".

Maddox suggests that Angela Merkel could deliver political commitment for Germany to bail out Greece by guaranteeing its debt (against the opposition of her own Finance Minister), but then sets off down the blind alley of claiming that eurozone deficit countries will require an upsurge in German domestic demand if they are to clamber out of their holes.

The bias of the German economy towards exports “didn’t cause Greece’s problems, but is an obstacle to a solution. It’s almost impossible to get the economy growing unless you get exports to Germany.”

As Germany wrestles with the question of whether to rescue Greece, it is claiming the moral high ground. But in the end, to ensure the stability of the eurozone in the manner that they say they want, German leaders would have to contemplate big changes at home — not a consequence they appear to have accepted.

It won't happen. Prudent Germans aren't going to start splashing out on imports from the PIIGS in order to support the eurozone.

Ambrose cites a legal analysis issued by the European Central Bank, taking as his theme "ECB prepares legal ground for euro rupture as Greek crisis escalates".

The author makes a string of vaulting, Jesuitical, and mischievous claims, as EU lawyers often do. Half a century of ever-closer union has created a “new legal order” that transcends a “largely obsolete concept of sovereignty” and imposes a “permanent limitation” on the states’ rights.

Crucially, says Ambrose, the author argues that eurozone exit entails expulsion from the European Union as well. All EU members must take part in EMU (except Britain and Denmark, with opt-outs). As well as suffering deflation without devaluation (the classic recipe for depression), Ambrose suggests that the ECB will have to saddle the PIIGS with high real interest rates more suited to prospering north european countries.

The policy is conceptually foolish and arguably cynical. It is to bleed a society in order to uphold the ideology of the European Project. Greece’s national debt will be 120pc of GDP this year. S&P says it will reach 138pc by 2012. A fiscal squeeze – without any offsetting monetary or exchange stimulus – will cause tax revenues to collapse. Debt will rise higher on a shrinking economic base.

This is the problem. The issue is not guaranteeing now the debt of Greece, or even of all the PIIGS. It is that their economies will remain out of balance. Commentators seem unable to contemplate Germany allowing the eurozone to fracture. One feebly writes that:

I don’t believe Euroland will break up: too much political capital has been spent in the past half century for Euroland to allow an outright breakage. However, severe 'stress-fractures’ are quite likely in the years ahead.

The problem for these fence sitters is that most of the problem economies will get worse, not better - could Greece or Portugal or Italy carry austerity measures like Ireland's?

Sooner or later these countries won't be able to pay the interest on their debts or roll them over without support from the ECB - which means Germany. Germany won't do that indefinitely. And the PIIGS - Ireland excepted - can't and won't adopt Germanic austerity policies.

So exits from the eurozone are inevitable But the leavers will doubtless be given optouts so that they can remain in the EU.

Break up the banks

The banks must be split so that taxpayers only guarantee high street, clearing bank operations, and not the gambling so called 'investment' banks. We cannot again allow ourselves to be made poorer by their risk taking.

Almost all economists argue this. Politicians for some reason don't get it.

If the banks are to stay unsplit - big mistake - Fraser Nelson has produced an excellent note explaining why they have to be forced to come clean about their losses.

The time bomb is ticking. Read and worry.

Those puzzling Himalayan glaciologists

The Mail has written a shorter version of today's report in The Sunday Times about the IPCC's incorrect claim over the melting of Himalayan glaciers.

The Mail reports "glacier experts are astonished it has taken so long for the blunder to come to light".

But The Sunday Times tells us:

The report read: "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate."

However, glaciologists find such figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a huge global temperature rise. The maximum rate of decline in thickness seen in glaciers at the moment is 2-3 feet a year and most are far lower.

Professor Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, said: "Even a small glacier such as the Dokriani glacier is up to 120 metres [394ft] thick. A big one would be several hundred metres thick and tens of kilometres long. The average is 300 metres thick so to melt one even at 5 metres a year would take 60 years. That is a lot faster than anything we are seeing now so the idea of losing it all by 2035 is unrealistically high.”

To a glaciologist, then, the claim was ludicrous. So why indeed take it take so long for the blunder to come to light?

Did no glaciologist read what the IPCC had to say about glaciers back in 2007?

Unintentional 'anomalies'

One of the odder aspects of the latest investigations by Booker and North here and here on Pachauri's organisations is a mea culpa from Dr Kumar in the Telegraph's version:

Ritu Kumar, who runs TERI Europe, said in response to inquiries by this newspaper she had called in independent accountants Mazars.

Dr Kumar wrote: "As a result of this, Mazars has advised us that there are anomalies in the accounts filed with the Charity Commission. As soon as we learned of these anomalies, which were unintentional on our part, we informed the Charity Commission and immediately asked the accountant to prepare revised accounts, which will apply the correct accounting treatment."

"Anomalies" are evidently the new "mis-speaking". Who prepared the accounts and return? Was it a professional outsider? Was there any reconciliation to the bank account? Or did Dr Kumar just knock them off on her kitchen table from memory? Either way, the so called anomalies were convenient.

Directors of a company and trustees of a charity have a duty of care. Proportionally the figures submitted seem to have been way out.

These are not stupid people. They surely understood the requirements. When they looked at the return they signed, could they have completely forgotten about their grants and projects?

Too right there were anomalies. The questions need to be asked: how did those "anomalies" arise? Who prepared and signed the documentation with the wrong numbers? Did anyone check it?

Talk of unintentional anomalies is unacceptably bland. Dr Kumar suggests there was an error in the "accounting treatment". Was it a plausible mistake for whoever prepared the figures to make? We shall have to wait and see.

But it'll be worth keeping an eye on.

Cold turkey

Gordon Brown promises "a full review of how the country ... coped" with the cold spell. As usual, it's the wrong question. "The country" got on with it - it was government, local authorities and the Met Office where the shambles was. We all know that.

Of course his 'reviews' are famous. At one point he had around 100 going on, which is especially hilarious considering that he finds taking fresh decisions really hard.

From his point of view a 'review' has the advantage of kicking a topic into the long grass - in this case probably until after our next election.

Will the "full review" study what resources were directed to global warming which should have been focused on local cooling?

Don't hold your breath.

Global warming - the other side

This is a cracking, hour long news special programme from the US, broken up into segments here. You can watch individual segments, and each one is followed by links for further reading.

Enjoy.

BBC science coverage to be reviewed

The BBC Trust is to review the BBC's science coverage, reports the Daily Mail (htp a WUWT comment). It is to carry out the probe into the 'accuracy and impartiality' of its science output.

The review comes after repeated criticism of the broadcaster's handling of green issues. It has been accused of acting like a cheerleader for the theory that climate change is a man-made phenomenon.

The investigation will also focus on coverage of issues like genetically modified foods, the MMR vaccine and the way it reports on new technologies, we are told. "It will scrutinise the way the BBC has handled scientific findings on areas which affect 'public policy' and are 'matters of political controversy'."

Ah - a "scientific expert" will be hired to lead the review. So it depends who we get. Doesn't Prof Jones at the CRU have some spare time on his hands? Then there are all those eminent government scientific advisors ....

The review will be launched in the spring and the findings of the probe will be published in 2011.

It will surely need more than one scientist? Philip Stott is a fairminded man.

Blunkett already whingeing excuses

David Blunkett, who is now chairman of Labour’s election development board (whatever that is), says Labour going into an election at a greater financial disadvantage than any time since 1983, when it suffered a landslide defeat, reports The Times.

Look at us, he whines, we're victims.

Mr Blunkett warned that the Conservatives had an “absolutely clear strategy for buggering us after the next election” if they win power.

He said this involved capping all donations, including those from the unions, Labour’s financial mainstay, at £100,000. (The Tories in response indicated that a cap on union donations would be hard to achieve without political consensus.)

Other measures such as redrawing constituency boundaries to the Conservatives’ advantage (my italics) and banning Scottish or Welsh MPs from voting on English laws, would also help to keep Labour out of power or even “wipe us off the face of the map,” said Mr Blunkett.

The proposal is that constituencies' boundaries would be redrawn to make them more equal in size.

What do these two reforms have in common? That's right, they'll make our system a tiny bit more democratic. Nothing unfair about them at all. Indeed, Blunkett's only argument against them seems to be that they will disadvantage Labour.

Well tough. If you can't carry England at an election, why should you expect to govern it in a devolved union you yourselves set up?

The increasing cost of the state

Richard North has written on the Daily Mail piece I referred to in the previous post.

Tie it in with the way we are mis-managing our energy supplies, he writes, and we are looking at a slow-motion economic catastrophe far greater than the economic crisis we are weathering, the overall costs of which are set to exceed the entire tax bill for the average household.

This puzzles him. The political classes talk about about what he calls "public expenditure" - he means state spending. (And they even in a gingerly fashion mention state waste, though they don't want to admit it's inevitable.)

But they seem to be blind to the eye-watering additions to our private expenditure, forced by governments working to their "green" agendas.

What they do not seem to appreciate it that, in real terms, there is no difference between money coming out of the wage packet to pay taxes, and money having to be paid to meet government requirements. And it is the latter – on top of the former – that is going to drive us into poverty. It is about time our political classes woke up to that fact.

Oh politicians do appreciate that - so very much. Some of these costs are stealth taxes. Hypothecated stealth taxes for sure - but still stealth taxes. They and the other on-costs usually result from policies which are part of the broad political consensus (is that an EU elephant I see in the room?).

Politicians love sneaky levies. They help governments to pay for policies 'off the balance sheet'. Not just in green land - the 50p a month tax on phone lines to finance broadband rollout is another example.

So no politician within a whiff of government is going to add up these stealth taxes and on-costs and condemn them. That would just restrict their scope for action in their turn. Lib Dems believe in a big furry state anyway, while UKIP doesn't have the firepower, and would be incapable of deploying it if it did.

There is no political party with an agenda to make things cheaper for people by cutting state charges - even though our disposable income will probably shrink for the next few years at least.

Totting up these stealth taxes - and the knock-on policy costs - is something the Taxpayers' Alliance should be doing on a rolling basis. But in all their extensive media coverage, I haven't noticed them publicising running totals.

Now that might get some worms turning.

Hm. Maybe that's the point?

Extreme green policies bumping up energy costs

Nigel Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation highlights a Daily Mail suggestion that "household gas and electricity bills are expected to rocket fourfold to nearly £5,000 a year by the end of the decade to meet Government-imposed green targets".

Already energy bills are loaded up by five separate charges to help fund the battle to combat climate change and become greener. They are the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target, the Renewables Obligation, the Community Energy Saving Programme and shortly there will be a levy on investing in clean coal projects.

The spokesman for the Energy Intensive Users' Group comments that "the UK has decided to be greener than any other country". No, "the UK" didn't decide this. It was a small group of officials, politicians and activists. The great majority of MPs did as they were told and voted for it like sheep.

It's not even warm outside.

But what popular mandate does the detached élite have for this economically ruinous policy? None.

The state always wastes your money

Every time you hear Labour politicians parroting their soundbite about "investment in public services", remember

• The state always spends wastefully because it has no discipline
  
  
• That money isn't fairy gold, conjured out of nowhere. The money belongs to the people. It came from you.

In just one day we can learn that

• The Whitehall department in charge of ensuring that the government gets value for money from its public awareness campaigns spent more than £20,000 on a lavish beach-themed staff party that included buying sand to give the event an authentic "tropical island" appeal.
  

• Public sector workers earn 7% more on average than their peers in the private sector — a pay gulf that has more than doubled since the recession began.

• British taxpayers are helping to fund basket-weaving and slapstick acting workshops for young people across Europe.

This is not a passing issue of loose control under a Labour government. Austerity wins no prizes for state sector employees. Better to cajole your workers with bonuses, parties and higher pay.

After all, the money comes from the poor bloody taxpayer. And the taxpayer isn't in the room when these decisions are made.

When the state spends your money, waste is inevitable.

Global warming tosh and dosh

We don't know (yet) what Richard North has said directly to the solicitors who wrote to him, but he has given public notice that he intends to dissect the finances of TERI Europe, which he has started to do here, here and here. He has publicly said his aim is to gather enough material for a complaint to the Charity Commissioners.

Since the income he's been looking at so far came from the UK government, ministers may be asked if they are satisfied with the way their money was handled. They should have questions to answer, but it will probably take a bloody minded backbencher to ask them, since the front benches are all huddled together in their global warming consensus.

Global warming ... how nostalgic it can make you feel. Last year the Met Office forecast a "barbecue summer", and then in October published a so called "long range" forecast of a mild winter. In their time these duff forecasts were scares, re-inforcing predictions of "global warming".

The new scare is that

Britain is bracing itself for one of the coldest winters for a century with temperatures hitting minus 16 degrees Celsius, forecasters have warned.

They predict "no let up in the freezing snap until at least mid-January, with snow, ice and severe frosts dominating". Note that - warming is part of a trend, cold weather is a "snap". So will it turn warm again in mid-January? Er ... "the likelihood is that the second half of the month will be even colder".

And if they can't use threats of warming to stop the economy in its tracks, there's always the cold "snap".

Despite New Year celebrations passing off mostly unaffected by the weather, drivers in parts of the country, particularly areas of Northumberland, Cumbria and the Scottish Highlands, were warned not to travel unless absolutely necessary.

Cancel non-essential driving for a month?

Local authorities can also play their part in bringing society to a halt. "A fleet of gritters in Perth, central Scotland, was grounded this week because it was so cold, leaving roads untreated in temperatures of minus 10 degrees."

Perth and Kinross Council said the gritters were unable to leave the depot after the extreme weather led to difficulties in refuelling.

Hm, some failure in planning here?

It's tedious to lay the Met Office's failings out on a slab for inspection, but it's necessary, since their ropey forecasts are an important part of global warming alarmism. They predict global warming on the basis of concealed temperature data, using computer models based on incomplete scientific theories of the climate which prove poor at predicting the future. On that basis, these social modellers who can't even do weather forecasts tell everyone in the world to become poorer. So they deserve to be attacked and ridiculed.

Richard North also publicises more government spending.

Thus we learn that, earlier this year minister for International development Douglas Alexander launched a partnership with TERI-India, pledging up to £10 million to support the work of TERI over the next five years.

Amongst other thing, the money would enable TERI "to focus on building its own institutional capacity, helping it to become an even stronger organisation than it is already." Dr R K Pachauri was very pleased. And after he had offered his ritual comments about the "removal of poverty", he no doubt retired to his multi-million dollar home at 160 Golf Links – further then to consider the plight of the poor.

"Building institutional capacity" is an objective Sir Humphrey would be proud of. Impossible to quantify, too vague to be checkable, and all behind the scenes anyway. Nothing vulgarly visible that anyone could examine.

But the publicists tied themselves in a knot. Doubtless the recipients wanted to avoid any implication that their organisation was weak. So, in standard corporate-speak, the release said that the money would help TERI India to become an "even stronger" [my italics] organisation.

Uh oh. Why was millions of pounds of UK taxpayers' money being given to an overseas organisation, for invisible objectives, if the organisation was already strong?

Did some disaffected official let the phrasing stand as a signal to the outside world that this was not a good use of UK taxpayers' money? And this is a budget the Tories want to protect.

Douglas Alexander should have some explaining to do.