Iranian police shoot at protestors from rooftops

You need to see this. (From here.)

What do these places have in common?

• Monserrat
• Nigeria
• Central Asia
• Thailand
• Burma
• South Africa
• Sierra Leone
• Belarus
• Kenya
• India

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.

Silver linings

If we decarbonise our economy by 80%, as proposed in the climate change act, at least we won't be able to afford all those climatologists any longer.

NedaNet

This looks like a good cause - a bunch of hackers who are arranging secure communications for Iranian dissidents. It looks like they've annoyed President Armanidinnerjacket and his bootboys already.

Climate cuttings 26

I haven't written one of these Climate Cuttings posts since before Christmas, but there have been quite a few interesting stories around this week, which I thought I could usefully point people to.

Anthony Watts caught the US Environmental Protection Agency suppressing dissenting voices on global warming.

Remember all those stories about climate change refugees flooding the developed world? It's now admitted that that they were exaggerated.

The UK's Meteorological Office has had its climate change research budget slashed.

The US Climate Change bill, seen by all outside the green fringe as howling mad, looked likely to stumble in the House of Representatives, with Democrats admitting they needed more support.

Global sea ice levels remain around their long-term average. Forecasters are saying the September minimum will be in line with last year.

The Antarctic ice shelf also seems to be rather more stable than we were previously lead to believe.

Steve McIntyre found that the trend in the UK's temperature record for Hawaii differs from the US's by approximately two degrees per century. Of course one would like to check what adjustment CRU makes to its data, but it's a secret.

Alert readers noticed that one of the graphs in the Copenhagen Synthesis Report had been "adjusted" so that recent temperatures looked a bit cooler.

Burqas

Whether Muslims should be allowed to wear burqas in public seems to be the question of the moment. I watched the views of the panel on Question Time for a few minutes last night with a mixture of disdain and disgust. The panellists were split between those who would reintroduce sumptuary laws (does wearing a sack over your head count as sumptuous? Dumptuous perhaps) and those who would ignore the issue.

Obviously I'm against the former, but it has to be said that I do think there's an issue that shouldn't be ignored.

The problem is that there are vast numbers of people who feel threatened and alienated by people parading the streets in what amounts to a disguise. They don't like it.

I don't take any particular view on whether they are right to dislike burqas or not, but the fact is that they are not allowed to express their dislike, even in non-violent or non-agressive ways. People are banned from discriminating against the burqa-wearers. They can't turn them away from their shops and businesses, saying "I'm sorry I'm not serving you while you are wearing a disguise".  Society, in its wisdom, has decreed that these are crimes, and hate crimes to boot.

The ability to discriminate gives the host culture the ability to gently apply a cost to the wearing of burqa. You will probably still get served in the bank, but you might just have to go a bit further to find one that would rather have your money than enforce a burqa-free clientele. You might have to give up swimming because the pool won't take you. Perhaps the garage won't fix your car if you refuse to show your face.

I've blogged before about how the introduction of authoritarian laws often leads to a spiral of authoritarianism, with all sorts of unpleasant spin offs. The anti-discrimination laws are a direct affront to freedom of association and have encouraged emigrants to refuse to integrate and to develop a kind of apartheid, demanding, for example, muslim-women-only swimming sessions. When this cultural apartheid becomes resented by the host culture, politicians respond the only way they know how, with more authoritarianism - banning burqas and so on. This will no doubt be followed by bans on nuns' habits, no doubt in the interests of even-handedness, but just adding to the downward spiral of resentment.

But won't this lead to signs outside guest houses saying "No moslems" or "No burqas"? Possibly it will, and that would be ugly for sure. But the current approach is ugly too and the result, a downward spiral of apartheid and authoritarianism is vile in the extreme. Better to have an ugly approach with a happy ending than more and more ugliness.

Politicians' responses to the problem will lead only to resentment from Moslems banned from wearing burqas (there are apparently some who do so willingly) or from the host culture, forced to accept and deal with people with whom they want no dealings. Politicians can't solve this problem. They can only stand back and allow society to solve it on its own.

Quote of the day

One for the climate watchers:

Climate research should be as open and transparent as possible

Gavin Schmidt

Bwahahahahahahah!!!!! ROFLMAO!!!!!

Subsidised trough

Some more useful information from the Freedom of Information Act: prices at the Strangers Bar in the Palace of Westminster.  Sample prices for a pint of beer include:

Fosters £2.10

Guinness £2.20

You can't help but wonder if this generous pricing policy is the cause of the quality of the legislation they send our way.

How to be speaker

Here's an amusing little picture. The graph is for the candidates for speaker of the House of Commons and examines the relationship between their expenses - specifically their total Additional Costs allowance for the last five years - and the number of votes they received in the first round. This is the only correlation I can test because it's the only chance people got to vote for the whole field.

Does it look like there's some sort of a relationship there? Looks to me as if money can't buy you love, but unless you are willing to get down and dirty then you're just seen as goody two-shoes.

The trougher-in-chief

So John Bercow is the new speaker. The man who is going to restore our faith in the ancient and venerable institution of Parliament.

The man who had the largest additional costs allowance claims in parliament in pretty much every year since he was elected.

They just don't get it, do they?

Have I been censored?

Richard Black, BBC online's environment bod, has posted an article about the silly Met Office climate model that is apparently going to be used for making policy decisions even though most scientists seem to think it's risibly bad.

In the comments thread someone raised the issue of the non-availability of the CRU's raw weather station data and was met with a deluge of green rant from someone calling themselves "yeah whatever", who provided a link to the gridded (i.e. "corrected") station data. When I pointed out that this was not what was asked for, I was met with the rather bizarre accusation that I was too lazy to look it up myself and a blunt assertion that the data was available. Surprisingly, this was deemed an acceptable response by the moderators.

In the circumstances, I thought my reply was a model of self-control. I pointed Yeah_Whatever to the notorious words of CRU scientist Phil Jones

We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.

I also said that there was a public interest in the release of the data and that Richard Black had a duty to report the refusal of CRU to do so.

And do you know what, twelve hours later it's still in the moderation queue.

Funny that.

Update on Jun 20, 2009 by Bishop Hill

I've done some experimentation. It seems I'm not allowed to link to the evidence. The moderators have allowed me to say pretty much everything I said before, but without the link. I then tried to post to the Phil Jones quote where it appears in a submission David Holland made to the UK Treasury on the Stern report. It's gone for moderation again.

So get that - a document at HM Treasury's website is deemed too dubious to appear on the BBC website!

Update: Now it's even stranger. Another commenter has been allowed to link to a posting on Climate Audit telling the same story. What's different about me?

Marge

Margaret Beckett is now apparently the punters' favourite to become next speaker.

Her parliamentary majority is 5,657.

Could be an interim speaker then.

A volcano from above

Amazing, amazing picture of a volcano in the Kurile Islands, taken from directly above, while it's erupting.

How they do that then? From space...

From here.

Climate Change Act objectives cannot be met

Roger Pielke Jnr has an article out saying that there is not a cat's chance in hell that the Climate Change Act targets will be met. We would have to build 30 nuclear power stations in six years, which I think you will agree is somewhat unlikely.

We knew that, but it's always nice to have your prejudices confirmed. The Climate Change Act is just political mood music.

Trial without jury

The Court of Appeal has passed a historic ruling allowing the first ever criminal trial to be heard without a jury.

Three judges in London, headed by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, gave the go-ahead because of a "very significant" danger of jury tampering.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but the approaches to self-defence of every government in the last fifty years have been predicated on the police being there to protect the innocent. And yet here they are saying that they cannot defend a twelve members of a jury for a short period.

Is the loss of the right jury trial a reasonable price to pay for having a disarmed citizenry?

Discuss.