Tuesday
Feb282012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill In the news today
Feb 28, 2012 Climate: other The Guardian reports on the vast risk-free profits made by wealthy titled landowners as a result of the windfarm revolution that the Guardian itself has done so much to bring about through its incessant harping on about the dangers of climate change.
In unrelated news, I understand that Mike Kelly has an article a letter in the Times today. Richard Horton (of Russell inquiry fame) tweets:
A Cambridge Prof of Technology writes in The Times today that climate change "science has been consistently over-egged to produce alarm."
Prof Michael Kelly writes, "All real-word data over the past 20 years has shown the climate models to be exaggerating the likely impacts."
Update on Feb 28, 2012 by
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill
The letter is here.
Reader Comments (57)
The cynicism (hipocrisy?) is completely lost on them...
And the Guardian does not have comments activated, so no chance to comment on the article ... at the Guardian anyway!
They will be reading them here.....Their mods will be having a spaz attack for sure.
But the target was for the whole UK including Scotland.
http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/archives/010260.html has Sir Michael's letter.
cAGW only exists in modelled assumptions.
AGW currently only exists in the lab.
GW exists in the real world.
We have no Hot-Spot, the CO2 enriched atmosphere is not trapping heat. The physicial mechanism of the AGW hypothesis is missing
The oceans are not storing heat that the AGW hypothesis requires, neither in the upper layers nor in the deeper layers, no heat transfer has been detected.
Modern increases in temperatures are not unprecedented, neither in magnitude nor in rate.
This planet has never experienced runaway Global Warming.
Current GW is both modest and beneficial, and likely to remain so.
Finally, the environmental movement have practiced a great deceit on humanity.
\"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad\"
It is also noteworthy that the environmental editor makes the fundamental error of confusing power with energy.
I seem to recall that he is against Solar in the UK, so perhaps there is some hope already?!
In the side bar, thermal lined trousers are the best sellers in the Guardian shop. Fleeced every which way while the earth boils over.
Maybe you should have a tea party.
After posting this I will have black SUV's with dark tinted windows patrolling my street. LOL
Retitled to \"When the Wind Doesn't Blow\"
Showing an elderly couple, endlessly assured that the weather is getting warmer, and wind will produce all the power needed, slowly freezing/starving to death....
''From what I remember the people let the government disarm them 15-20 years ago.''
Brits never were 'armed' - it's only the USA where the handgun is regarded as a household utensil.
O whaur hae ye been
We maun pay the Earl o' Moray
Because we're ganging green.
Someone scrape me off the floor!!!!
There is a real tipping point ... it is the point you realise that the evil capitalist conspiracy isn't against wind energy ... but are pushing it to the hilt,
The point you realise that \"evil BIG-OIL\" are very very very very happy that gullible greens have been telling the world that these eco-capitalists (aka BIG-OIL) are the good guys.
He doesn't make himself too clear on this point. Can someone with a little <i>gravitas</i> email him to find out?
I love your idea about a revised ‘green’ version of Raymond Brigg’s book. I wonder if he’d endorse it? He’s an old man now, but it would be interesting to know his views.
I think Wordpress is having an off day...
You say we are getting screwed. Well according to my research, the key event that led up to the Americans breaking from the UK, was when American juries refused to convict under British law.
In effect, British law was rendered totally ineffective by the refusal of American juries to enforce British laws. This right of juries to refuse to obey the judge's direction to convict was won by a certain William Penn ... the founder of Pennsylvania. The result was that the British authorities had no option but try to get people shipped to Britain to be tried, but that so infuriated the Americans that they revolted.
This is in fact the origin of the \"Not Proven\" verdict in Scotland ... or more accurately the origin of \"Not Guilty\" which is the assertion by the jury of their right not to judge the facts, but to apply justice (irrespective of the law).
Guns had nothing to do with it. However, you will notice that very quietly and stealthily, both the UK and US legal systems have been repressing the right not to convict, till we have reached the stage where almost no one is aware of this key right and how it led directly to US independence.
In other words, the people who are really getting screwed are you in the US who have all but lost your independence.
Of course, the real irony these days, is that the US now demands British \"wrongdoers\" be sent to the US without any right to a trial by their peers.
Testing -
<i>italics</i>
<b>bold</b>
<blockquote>blockquote</blockquote>
<stupidity>Gleick</stupidity>
sigh...All HTML will be escaped
There's a bug somewhere at the moment. Plain text comments only until fixed.
I am sure the medicine will sort it out very quickly.
http://www.climateconversation.wordshine.co.nz/2011/06/prof-kelly-shows-the-middle-way/
I have a feeling he wouldn't approve. The original was (rightly) ridiculing the \"Protect & survive\" government booklet. I've always had the feeling that P&S had been written sometime in the 1950s then filed away, as having been useless since the time fusion weapons were invented. Then in the 1980s, with escalating nuke fears, the government thought it would bring a bit in of loose change by reprinting it. No point in revising it, shove it out unchanged .
But the overall impression I got from WTWB was of Briggs being a Grauniad reader, so no chance of anything questioning wind subsidy farms...
I haven't been able to locate an authoritative source for this number -- just blogs pointing to blogs. Anyone know where it originated? I hope it's not just all those water pumpers on abandoned farms.
It's almost as though climatism only appeals to relatively thick people.
Of course the correlation between low IQ and religiosity is quite well attested:
http://hypnosis.home.netcom.com/iq_vs_religiosity.htm
Tilbury Power Staion, having converted from coal (horrible, nasty stuff) to biomass (hooray..! lovely and renewable) only last DECEMBER - caught fire spectacularly yesterday as I'm sure you all saw - and will be off-line for weeks..
Now, this is a facility which ACTUALLY powers 1.5m homes - so this is not a few wind turbines grinding to a halt due to lack of fairy breath.
It really is going tits up for the 'Reinventing the wheel because the previous one worked too well' brigade, isn't it..?
It is actually worse than I thought! The Guardian's figure of 4.5 gigawatts of installed wind power capacity did not include off-shore. The total capacity including off-shore (according to Wikipedia) is 5.9 gigawatts. So at midday on 6 February the UK's wind power stations were producing 0.763% of total installed wind capacity.
BTW, the excellent neta website may be found at http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp.php Just scroll down for the table showing generation by fuel type.
Despite their 'satisfying' shape and appearance, and comfortingly expensive raw materials and components, wind turbines are quite evidently not yet 'fit for purpose' as a reliable source of power, and furthermore lack any effective means of storing such energy as they actually DO produce.
An analogy that comes to mind is to imagine that Henry Ford had started to mass-produce copies of Bleriot's cross-channel plane instead of his simple motor cars; I doubt if he would have survived commercially for long.
And when I see a picture of a turbine 'lighting up' I recall the similar chronic problems encountered with early helicopter gearboxes in the 1950's (my father's experiences, not mine!).
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/28/cambridge-professor-michael-kelly-on-deniers-and-climate-change-science-has-been-consistently-over-egged-to-produce-alarm/#comment-907522
It seems Professor Kelly did NOT start with a genuflection: the Times edited his words. Here's what he actually said:
\\\"Andrew Motion (report, Feb 23) is correct to castigate climate change deniers, as the climate has always been changing, but he is profoundly mistaken in linking all those who oppose the current climate science orthodoxy into one group.\\\"
The Times removed the words \\\"as the climate has always been changing\\\" thereby completely altering his meaning. Amazing.
(See story - and Professor Kelly's comment on WUWT.)
Even so, it's worth asking the question how one defines climate change denier and how many people fit the definition. Over at Englishman's Castle I quoted the classic comment from Steven Mosher when someone tried to define the term on Judith Curry's: 'In 4 years on the web I do not think I have met a single person who rejects “out-right” and “without thought” “ALL” climate “Science” To be precise. Watts is not a denier. Willis is not. Monckton is not. Lindzen is not. Spencer is not. Nobody here rejects outright without thought all of climate science. No one. The worst reject most of it after considerable amounts of confused thought.'
Other than that it's a brilliant letter, a sign of real progress at the moment.
" ...if the models cannot account for the near term, why should I trust them in the long term?"
Just how slow do these people's brains work? They couldn't see that 5, 10, 20 years ago?
Where was their mental capacity then? If they can think of these failures of models now, why on Earth did they not think of them long ago?
And the others! Like Oxburgh's panel members - If this question was PUT to them, and they blew it off, then this question they knew about and yet did nothing with it, and they intentionally did nothing. They were faced with it and buried it, covered it up - obviously hoping it would go away.
This is all such an indictment of their mendacious cover-up scam on the U.K. public and the world.
And why was Kelly not screaming bloody murder back in 2010? If he can write now about it, why not then?
This is not even a "shame on them" thing - this is "Let's lock 'em up and throw away the key, for attempted robbery from the public till."
* * * * * * Let us not lose sight of the fact that this demonstrates that the momentum is against the Hockey Team and CAGW - and growing, * * * * * *