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Bishop Hill Much rejoicing over Monbiot's apology for having meekly accepted everything the scientists had been telling him for the last twenty years. He goes as far as saying that Phil Jones should retire.
But given that Monbiot has, by his own admission, failed in his primary duty as a journalist, can his own position be very secure?
Bishop Hill Jun 29, 2009 Fake charities Greens The answer is that they are all places we have paid for the RSPB to send its people to work in the last financial year.
Now I can twitch with the best of them, but an organisation that has an income of over £100m per year doesn't actually need taxpayer funding and certainly not to send its staff to exotic parts of the world on booze-ups jollies conservation trips. I mean there are plenty of twitchers who would pay to do this kind of thing.
According to fakecharities.org the RSPB gets £20m a year from you and me, so that's £20m we can save next year at the stroke of a pen. We can't afford it any longer.
Bishop Hill May 29, 2009 Greens Without a doubt it's because they publish stories that are hideous bunk, that are works of fiction, that desecrate the very idea of truth and they do it without blinking, without shame and without remorse.
Like this one:
Climate change is already killing 300,000 people a year in a “silent crisis” that is seriously affecting hundreds of millions more, an influential humanitarian group warned today.
A report by the Global Humanitarian Forum, led by Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary-General, says that the effects of climate change are growing in such a way that it will have a serious impact on 600 million people, almost ten per cent of the world’s population, within 20 years. Almost all of these will be in developing countries.
So what do the experts say about the report? Roger Pielke Jnr takes up the story:
It is a methodological embarrassment and poster child for how to lie with statistics. The report will harm the cause for action on both climate change and disasters because it is so deeply flawed ... The report is worse than fiction, it is a lie.
And how did our green friends work out the figure of 300,000? Pielke Jnr again:
[T]o get around the fact that there has been no attribution of the relationship of [greehouse gas] emissions and disasters, this report engages in a very strange comparison of earthquake and weather disasters in 1980 and 2005. The first question that comes to mind is, why? They are comparing phenomena with many “moving parts” over a short time frame, and attributing 100% of the resulting difference to human-caused climate change. This boggles the mind.
As Pielke points out, when these calculations are done properly the differences in disaster losses are attributable completely to socio-economic factors.
The report is clearly a travesty. Who is going to mourn the newspapers that publish it?
Bishop Hill May 28, 2009 Greens The Times, which was the newspaper of record many moons ago, gives space to someone called Frank Pope today. Mr Pope wants to give us all a good lecture about climate change.
Problem is, in reality Mr Pope doesn't really give a stuff about climate change, as we can see by taking a look at his Wiki page.
Graduating with a degree in Zoology from the University of Edinburgh, Frank began working with Coral Cay Conservation in Belize, Central America...
He subsequently worked on maritime archaeological projects in Uruguay, the Cape Verde Islands, Greece, Italy, Vietnam and Mozambique on wrecks including the San Salvador, Graf Spee off Montevideo and Lord Nelson's flagship HMS Agamemnon in Uruguay, Princess Louisa in Cabo Verde and the San Sebastian Wreck in Mozambique.
With a biography like that it's not too far from the truth to say that Mr Pope is personally responsible for global warming. Why does the Times make us listen to people like this?
Bishop Hill I haven't posted anything on this meme for a while, but Picking Losers has a jaw-dropping article on carbon capture. Our green friends are now proposing to ship liquefied carbon dioxide around the world in search of somewhere to store it.
Bishop Hill Mar 20, 2009 Greens Now I know the world has gone stark raving mad:
The prints we make for our 'daily use' not only use paper, but also ink. According to SPRANQ creative communications (Utrecht, The Netherlands) your ink cartridges(ortoner) could last longer. SPRANQ has therefore developed a new font: the Ecofont.
And it's got holes in it. To save ink. I'm speechless.
And in case any of you wanted to see what it looks like, here's a sample.
Nice eh? Typography is never going to be the same again.
Bishop Hill Feb 11, 2009 Greens The news that the Australian wildfires were made hugely worse by environmentalists is spreading. This from the Sydney Morning Herald.
So many people need not have died so horribly. The warnings have been there for a decade. If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies.
Governments appeasing the green beast have ignored numerous state and federal bushfire inquiries over the past decade, almost all of which have recommended increasing the practice of "prescribed burning". Also known as "hazard reduction", it is a methodical regime of burning off flammable ground cover in cooler months, in a controlled fashion, so it does not fuel the inevitable summer bushfires.
The article also touches upon evidence that big government was responsible for the fires in a different way too:
The poor management of national parks and state forests in Victoria is highlighted by the interactive fire map on the website of the Department of Sustainability and Environment. Yesterday it showed that, of 148 fires started since mid-January, 120 started in state forests, national parks, or other public land, and just 21 on private property.
The implications are clear: big government kills.
Bishop Hill Feb 11, 2009 Greens From the Age
ANGRY residents last night accused local authorities of contributing to the bushfire toll by failing to let residents chop down trees and clear up bushland that posed a fire risk.
During question time at a packed community meeting in Arthurs Creek on Melbourne's northern fringe, Warwick Spooner — whose mother Marilyn and brother Damien perished along with their home in the Strathewen blaze — criticised the Nillumbik council for the limitations it placed on residents wanting the council's help or permission to clean up around their properties in preparation for the bushfire season. "We've lost two people in my family because you dickheads won't cut trees down," he said.
"We wanted trees cut down on the side of the road ... and you can't even cut the grass for God's sake."
Bishop Hill Feb 10, 2009 Greens Here is a report by a bushfire expert on the fire risk in Nillumbik, written in 2003:
The Shire of Nillumbik is living on borrowed time. If the current drought ends the threat for now will end. That would then give the Shire time to improve its fire protection to an acceptable level.
A prohibition on fine fuel removal and the requirement for vegetation close to houses is a recipe for increased house destruction.
The major thereat comes from the high fuel levels in the publically owned lands to the north. Some of the neglect comes from a lack of resources but some comes from a determination to not manage dangerous fuel levels.
Less but still serious threats come from Shire reserves and roadsides that increase the danger to residents and emergency services to extreme levels.
Get that people. The government forbade the residents of Nillumbik from removing flammable materials from near their homes. Forbade. They were told that there was a disaster waiting to happen and they said that nobody was allowed to do anything about it.
Bishop Hill It was the greens:
THE shire council covering some of the areas hit hardest by the bushfires was warned five years ago that its policy of encouraging people to grow trees near their homes to give the appearance of a forest would lead to disaster.
One of Australia's leading bushfire experts, Rod Incoll, warned Nillumbik Shire Council in a 2003 report that it risked devastation if it went ahead with changes to planning laws proposed by green groups that restricted the removal of vegetation.
Bishop Hill
Steve2 in the comments writes (emphasis added by BH):
I found this letter in an archive written by a Nillumbik resident called Mary McDonald in relation to the recent bushfires inquiries in 2003.
http://www.aph.gov.au/HOUSE/committee/bushfires/inquiry/subs/sub290.pdf
She may not be a typical example, but she seems to have an issue with the influence on the council of what she calls "green zealots"
As noted by our host, She starts of by saying "We have failed to learn from the Aborigines."
I hope you dont mind these extensive quotes? among other interesting things she had to say 6 years ago are:
"Nillumbik is recognised as one of the highest fire prone areas in the world. An Environmental Significance Overlay (ESO) covers 67% of the Shire mainly in non-urban areas. This overlay restricts residents on private property from maintaining their properties in a fire safe manner. Now our council wants to place a Significant Landscape Overlay over the entire urban area where no tree can be removed without a permit. This is part of the recent neighbourhood character amendment (C 12). If passed by the panel, will require for example 5-20 gum trees to be planted per 1/4 acre block, to form a canopy over our houses..."
"...The intention is to cover this urban Shire with a native tree canopy. Native trees drop limbs and leaf litter, they are known as fire flora or fire weeds. Their low-water content and high oil content and streamers of bark ensure a "wildfire" develops."
"The Country Fire Authority Act 1958 should allow for safe maintenance and planning, however the country Fire authority (CFA) fails to enforce its own act.
I believe the green zealots have joined the local [Fire] brigades and many of these never fight fires.
Brigades receive part of their funding from local councils, which they now rely on. The CFA Administration is also supportive of the green zealots."
I hope she made it. Ye gods what a mess. A funeral pyre built by big government.
Bishop Hill Interesting fact for today: The Pesticide Action Network, who were interviewed by the BBC yesterday, welcoming the EU's decision to ban a range of pesticides, are funded by...the EU.
Bishop Hill Jan 14, 2009 Greens From a caption at the BBC
Elliot Kannel from the Pestercide Action Network says the ruling will take some time to have any effect, while farmer and Ulster Farmer's Union Vegetable Committee member Robin McKee says food production will be more difficult.
Pestercide eh? Sounds good to me.
Bishop Hill Aug 6, 2008 Greens Iain Dale says that Boris has appointed Rosie Boycott as London's food czar. Rosie, the former editor of the Independent on Sunday, has her own small organic farm it seems, and reckons that if everyone had their own small organic farm then we'd all be much healthier and we'd be helping climate change too. (As Iain points out, we don't exactly want to help climate change, but leave that aside for the moment.)
You have to wonder about the collective intelligence of the journalistic classes don't you? You can tell them till you're blue in the face that small farms are more inefficient than big ones; that this means that they use more resources than small ones, and that this is bad for the environment; and that all of this goes doubly for organic farms.
And no matter how hard you try to ram this simple fact into their dull heads, they just don't get it.
It's amazing. These people - Boris and Rosie - have reached the very peaks of the journalistic profession, with the six figure salaries and the small organic farms that go to those in these exalted positions, and yet to any mildly educated outside observer they appear to be semi-educated half-wits. I'm left wondering who is worse: the dumb journalist who can't understand simple economics or the dumb journalist who appoints her to run a department in London's government.
Bishop Hill Aug 4, 2008 Greens Everybody's piling in on Alex Lockwood, who seems to be one of those "academics" who earn their daily bread by campaigning for left wing causes. And seeing as everyone's having such fun, it seems a pity not to contribute something to the metaphorical kicking too.
Rather than throw brickbats at his current article (calling for censorship of people who don't toe the line on climate change) I thought I'd look through his recent oeuvre to see what else he has had to say.
Here's a goody, in which he takes umbrage at an article of Brendan O'Neill's in which the Spiked man accuses greens of wanting to curb our freedoms. This has got Mr Lockwood riled, and, all flustered, he girds his loins, summons up all his intellectual firepower and unleashes the following salvoes of pure illogic, the like of which can only be launched by journalism lecturers at the University of Sunderland. O'Neill is wrong to say greens want to curb freedoms because....
