Bishop Hill Casual smears at RTCC
Jul 16, 2015 Climate: WG3 Ethics Matt Ridley A year or so ago I caught the people at the Responding to Climate Change website fabricating a story. They had claimed that an island in the Solomons was being evacuated due to climate change but a little research showed that it was due to a tsunami. RTCC had simply tried to appropriate the story for "the cause".
Today I find that RTCC editor Ed King has done a drive-by smear on Matt Ridley, alleging that he is the owner of a coal mine. The insinuation is fairly clear - that Ridley argues against decarbonisation in order to protect this business interest. Of course as readers here know, all subsurface energy assets in the UK are the property of the state so it it is not even possible for Ridley to own the coal under his land. Moreover the mines there are operated by H.J. Banks Ltd: Ridley is therefore neither owner nor operator. In fact he only receives a wayleave from Banks for access to the site.
This does not make him a "coal mine owner".
It's such a stupid smear to boot. Why would anyone seeking to protect an interest in coal argue so forcefully in favour of a shale gas industry being developed in the UK? In the US, coal has been the principal victim of the shale gas industry.
One is therefore forced to step back and consider the interplay between King's ethical standards and his intellectual ones and to consider which has won out in this case.
Reader Comments (69)
Questions for Brendan Montague.
#1 Is Matt Ridley a coal mine owner ?
#2 OK, does he benefit financially from coal mines ?
: Mate you have at least 2 full pages on Desmog Blog about Matt Ridley and coal mines, you must know roughly what Ridley's wayleave is. You detail the actual mine operators accounts like his own turnover, profits and salary; so Ridley's cut must be between that and zero, once take away all the other costs.
#3 Why don't you simply state what that band is ?
Michael Hart:
Why'd anyone take the road to Wigan with so much Orwelll on offer in the Climate Wars?
I do like reading the comments under a good aggro piece. All the false flaggers get debagged.
Pointman
Deben could have chosen Orwell. They are not that far apart.
Presumably Brendan Montague will point out that no dissent has appeared at any blog, and this proves that 97% of climate scientists prefer new Green Whiteness to launder their dirty habits.
I remember you, Brendan, you phoned me up at work, claiming to be an "independent" journalist seeking views on climate change and you had "no particular angle".
I see that your propensity for lying has not diminished.
Quote from Russell
"Why'd anyone take the road to Wigan with so much Orwelll on offer in the Climate Wars?"
A little bit of Northern Soul dancing, is good for the soul Russell. I am sure George would approve and there would be no big brother watching.
If you are not fan please don't bother citing my work as I have enough to deal with from alarmists I don't need it from so-called skeptics.
Don Keiller, I think you are probably correct. Brendan Montague, via google links to some interesting names, but Bishop Hill is a good place to start.
Obviously there is no proof that anything is true, but that is no obstruction to Freelance Journalist (allegedly) Brendan Montague.
When professional soldiers go independent and hire themselves out for money they get reviled as mercenaries, mainly by the press. But when journalists do the same, they call themselves 'freelance journalists' and seem to think that they are holier than their salaried colleagues.
Salopian, some mercenaries get paid good salaries, plus travelling expensives.
Whether any of them get upset to find out that the people who hired them are far worse than those they have been paid to infiltrate and attack, is unclear. The survivors never want to talk about mission morality.
My two deleted posts on RTCC are at:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B180XYZscKhGZDNLamY5NHNfUTg/view?usp=sharing
and
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B180XYZscKhGZ0I4bFV6QzdzV3M/view?usp=sharing
Jack Cowper:
Try to put more bellyfeel in your Newspeak: it depends on where you post:
http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2013/04/doubleplus-ungood.html
Brendan's main point is to obscure the fact that the state
- is the primary funder of climate science, outspending everyone else (including fossil companies) on it put together, by three or four orders of magnitude
- has an obvious and monumental vested interest in fostering climate alarm
And lo! - surprise surprise, the poodle and provably crooked scientists conclude there is a climate problem.
Those with a totalitarian agenda love to obscure all this. Need one say more?
Steve, Harry, Jack, your comments are now up at RTCC, and mine.
Usually comments are posted by RTCC, but they all go into moderation and sometimes take quite a while to appear.
Jul 16, 2015 at 3:47 PM | Uncle Gus
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Quite so. Odd, is it not, that the Left who claims to fight so hard against prejudice and intolerance, are so prejudiced and intolerant of those who disagree with them. One can only applaud such people, who can quite happily hold and manifest opposing behaviours with such ease.
Ah so Matt "King Coal" is only the owner of the Road to Blagdon Pier, and not the owner of the coal mine that he allows on his property. Surely the evil state did not force him to grant that easement. Indeed he himself has written
It is interesting, however, to ask about whether he owns any interest in the company which mines the coal on his land as well as profiting from the easements he grants.
"to ask about whether he owns any interest in the company which mines the coal on his land"
It isn't, because he would be obliged to share it, thus: http://www.parliament.uk/mps-lords-and-offices/standards-and-interests/register-of-lords-interests/?letter=R
"Surely the evil state did not force him to grant that easement."
Coal has been mined at the Blagdon estate since at least the 1940s -- a decade or more before Ridley's birth. Ridley's father died in 2012. We also know that he had no say in the agreement to install wind turbines on the estate. So there's no reason to suppose that the decision to allow access to the coal mining operation was Ridley's to make, was made by Ridley, or that he is the sole beneficiary of any agreement.
You should be more concerned with the lies told by Brendan Montague and Ed King. If you want to make the case that Ridley (and any other 'deniers', for that matter) do not tell the truth, you should be sure to have your own facts in order. The facts pertaining to the Blagdon Estate are far closer to hand than the facts of climate change. Yet even with such straightforward facts as ownership, and the difference between waleaves, royalties, profit and ownership, King and Montague still manage to mangle them beyond recognition. What does that say about their treatment of 'climate science'?
It would all be so much more exciting -- intriguing ,even -- if Ridley had tried to keep the open cast mine a secret. But he declares his interests. If we can't take Ridley's arguments at face value because he has an interest in coal, we should shut down the UK's Committee on Climate Change, and repeal any decision made on the basis of its advice to Parliament (including the goal of cutting CO2 by 80% by 2050), because a number of the lords who have sat on that panel have variously been invested to a much greater extent in the green sector. Ridley is no more conflicted than the CCC's Dame Julia King, who owns shares in BP and Rolls Royce. Yet she thinks people are 'selfish', and their behaviour needs to change such that they drive less.
In response to Bob Anderson and his reply to my post over at RTCC which, along with others, seemed to be delayed in moderation for some time (or banned?)
This post, has not made it through moderation yet.
It is difficult to converse when only one side of a conversation is presented.
RTCC post begins:
It is no more innumerate than the tosh put out by people who 'believe' in manmade global warming.
The data is from RSS.
I used this command:
ftp://ftp.remss.com/msu/monthly_time_series/rss_monthly_msu_amsu_channel_tlt_anomalies_land_and_ocean_v03_3.txt
to get the latest land and ocean lower troposphere temperatures.
I then opened the txt document in openoffice (works with excel as well) and copied the third column of data ( -70 -> +82.5 degrees) into a new sheet.
I added the formula LINEST() --> linear regression (the "least squares" method) as used by Prof. Phil Jones of CRU fame, with the start and end inputs to the regression being the latest temp anomaly and the anomaly of the row that you are on.
You can inspect this by looking at row 678, the regression runs from 678 to the beginning of this data.
Observe the 'result' in row 678 column D, " 7.387633E-006"
This indicates that the slope of the line from 222 months ago to now, is approx +7 micro degrees. This is the furthest we can currently go from NOW back to some time when the temperature is not reducing.
222 months = 18.5 years.
Here is my spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1K18J28vaCcbCflhrWOpQN65rm1-WvTCWlJ559fYo70A/edit?usp=sharing
(Download it, do not run it as a google sheet)
If you don't trust me (and you should not), repeat the process yourself. The steps described here are self explanatory.
On the accuracy of satellite measurements: they are calibrated and QA checked with radiosondes in a very public way.
You could propose that terrestrial data sets be used but I know of no land based system that has sufficient coverage density, that has not been seriously impaired by 'old' measurements being edited.
It works with openoffice, libreoffice and excel and probably others.
If you still feel the urge to stay with terrestrial datasets, you have to justify to yourself why historic temperatures (dust bowl etc) are adjusted.
If you can live with the above decision, you then need to justify to yourself the infilling techniques that governmental bodies use when the assign (make up ) temperatures a thousand kilometres away from a sensor.
Ends: apart from grammar, spelling, layout and content, I can see nothing wrong with the above :-)
vvussell and the rabbit guy smear themselves in dung as usual....wnd they are supposed to be learned....