Fake charities nervous

The journalist William Shawcross has been appointed the next head of the Charities COmmission, replacing Dame Suzi Leather, the quango queen whose miraculous path to a position of power has been noted at BH in the past. (I think "miraculous" is the only way to describe a move from trainee probation officer to housewife to head of an NHS trust).

Shawcross seems to be a Conservative man, and according to this article on Third Sector Online, his appointment was challenged unsuccessfully by LibDems and Labour. No surprise there. What is interesting is his attitude to "fake charities" - those bodies who use charitable status to lobby for state funding. In the same interview, Shawcross was asked what he thought of this question:

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Virginia Mann

The story linking attempts by the University of Virginia to recruit Michael Mann to a professorial chair and attempts to get its president to resign refuses to die. Bacon's Rebellion, a specialist Virginia blog, reviews the evidence for and against.

Leveson

Lord Leveson's report is out. I'm afraid I'm not going to have time to say much tonight, but suffice it to say that he has ignored everything Tony N and I had to say. In fact he has even gone as far as to repeat the incorrect statements made by Fiona Fox.

Ho hum.

David Whitehouse has more considered thoughts here.

Henderson on Castles

This is a guest post by David Henderson. It is a commemorative piece prepared for a recent conference on Australia, and celebrates the contributions of Ian Castles to the global warming debate.

First involvement: how it came about

Ian Castles became seriously engaged with climate change issues in the latter part of 2002, and over the rest of his life those issues came to form his main single professional concern. It was through him that I became involved myself, and as with him my involvement has proved to be a close and continuing one. For both of us, life took a new and unexpected course. Within it we acted not only as collaborators, which we already were, but also as joint authors.

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Institutional Bias

I have a new pamphlet out.

In 2007, the Energy Group of the Institute of Physics agreed to invite the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Lawson, to speak to them about his new book on global warming. While all the members of the group's committee were enthusiastic about the idea of hearing from someone so prominent, their decision unleashed a bizarre sequence of retaliatory actions, which left the Energy Group in tatters.

Told through the eyes of group chairman, Peter Gill, this new pamphlet reveals how one learned society has attempted to deal with dissenting voices on the global warming question and paints a disturbing picture of intolerance and bias.

Get it here.

HRO on HTD

Hilary Ostrov writes about Hiding the Decline at her blog.

Like its predecessor, I’m finding that HTD is definitely a page-turner; and while I do have a few quibbles (mostly of the techno-virtual kind and on which I shall elaborate in a future post – when I’ve completed my reading), I would urge all who haven’t done so to buy your copy now!

She also discusses a little unpleasantness with Bob Ward.

Read the whole thing.

28gate in the Scotsman

The 28gate story has hit the Scotsman in an article by Brian Monteith:

IMAGINE for a moment that it was discovered, by chance, that six years ago the BBC had a high-level meeting of its executives and a group of “the best constitutional experts” to determine the policy of the BBC in reporting the ongoing debate about Scotland’s future governance Imagine that body said – unanimously – that maintaining the United Kingdom with Scotland as a member is the only model that should shape its editorial approach.

Even more unbelievable (surely) would be if the group consisted of only those who supported Scotland remaining in the union. It would (surely) be incomprehensible that the BBC would behave in such a way.

Read the whole thing.

Lonely old Mann

A group of prominent paleoclimatologists has written a paper rebutting one of Michael Mann's recent contributions to the scientific literature. The new paper was announced on the ITRBD Forum by Rob Wilson. The list of authors of the new paper is very long. Almost looks like they are ganging up on him. ;-)

In February of this year, Mike Mann and colleagues published a paper in Nature Geoscience entitled, "Underestimation of volcanic cooling in tree-ring based reconstructions of hemispheric temperatures". Their main conclusion was that a tree-ring based Northern Hemisphere (NH) reconstruction of D'Arrigo et al. (2006) failed to corroborate volcanically forced cold years that were simulated in modelling results (e.g. 1258, 1816 etc). Their main hypothesis was that there was a temporary cessation of tree growth (i.e. missing rings for all trees) at some sites near the temperature limit for growth. This implies Dendrochronology's inability to detect missing rings results in an underestimation of reconstructed cold years when different regional chronologies are averaged to derive a large scale NH composite.

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28 gate still running

Tony Newbery has found some more rather startling information about 28gate. He and Maurizio have  been studying the changes made to the website of the International Broadcasting Trust as regards the BBC seminars.

Both the timing of the changes and the words that were changed are...revealing.

In addition, Maurizio (in the comments at Tony's) has been noting that Joe Smith has been editing his website too.

Read it here.

More soft totalitarianism

A couple of other interesting snippets relating to illegitimate attempts by left-wingers to stifle supporters of UKIP.

Firstly, as the news of the Rotherham fostering scandal broke, came this tweet by a UKIP candidate:

Barnardo's would not allow me to be a volunteer befriender of young people leaving care when I told them I was standing for UKIP.

Of course, private organisations should be able to associate with anyone they like, but the problem is that Barnardo's are heavily funded by the government. If I recall correctly the vast majority of their funding comes directly from the state. This being the case, I think someone in the Education Department needs to have a word in Dr Barnardo's ear.

Then there is the decision of the University of Derby students union to ban all UKIP candidates. I'm less clear about the position of a university union vis-a-vis state funding, but it's still a shocking state of affairs.

Howling at the moonbat

Geoff Chambers' magnum opus on life behind the scenes in the green movement continues to a fifth instalment, featuring investigative reporter George Moonbat:

“How are the bonsais?” asked George, in order to break the silence, and peering into the freezer chest where Briffa’s collection of miniature Siberian larches twisted vainly towards the sunlight.

“Whitherin’, replied Briffa, whitheringly. “Whitherin’ nicely, thank ‘ee.”

“Mind you,” he added after a pregnant pause, “There’s one o’ them I sampled t’other day, got a ring on it like a donkey’s bum’ole. Think I might write up to that Nature magazine about it. With a photograph.”

“What fertilizer do you use?” asked George, eager to change the subject. Briffa’s colourful imagery was blending disturbingly with his recent vision of Miranda leading him up the garden path.

“Yuman Yurine”, replied Briffa, “They likes an acid soil.”

“You mean, you – pee on them?” asked George.

“Not directly, of course,” replied Briffa, seemingly offended that he could be suspected of such crude behaviour. “I empties the bucket there behind the door from toime to toime.”

“Mind you,” he added, “I ‘ad that Guardian journalist chap Ben Goldacre in ‘ere once. He tried the direct approach, peed right on them. Lid of the chest came down. Bang! Caught his delingpole a terrific whack!” He broke into a chuckle, which died away in a fit of wheezes and coughs.

George laughed nervously. “I bet that’s the last time anyone tried that trick!” he ventured.

“Funny you should say that,” said Briffa, “Only the other week I ‘ad that writer chap, Ian McEwan in ‘ere…”

More here

Not right, not right at all - Josh 189

See story below

Cartoons by Josh

Update on Nov 24, 2012 by Josh

As Woodentop says, Guido has a good write up here with a link to the Today programme interview with Rotherham Council's Joyce Thacker here. Also a longer Sky News clip here 

Soft totalitarianism

The news this morning that a couple in Rotherham had their foster children removed from them because they were UKIP members almost defies belief.

It seems to me to be symptomatic of a much wider problem with soft totalitarianism. There are now an enormous number of views the holding of which will lead to immediate retribution from left-leaning bureaucrats, not the least of which is global warming scepticism.

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Mad, bad Bernie

There's a fascinating blog by someone called Bernie Bulkin at the DECC website. Mr Bulkin is the chairman of the Office for Renewable Energy Deployment and he's writing about burning wood for energy.

...the impression [is given] that our policy is simply to divert whole, mature trees from construction and manufacturing and turn them into energy. It isn’t. We don’t think this is sustainable, and it is not what our Bioenergy strategy suggests. The evidence gathered for that Strategy shows that the current typical practice of taking the residues from timber production deliver greater GHG benefits than leaving the forest unmanaged.

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It's gas

The news this morning is that the government seem to have plunked once and for all for a gas dominated future. The Energy Secretary Ed Davey has said this morning that we are going to need a lot of unabated gas fired generation.

They're not saying that they're abandoning renewables of course, but it seems clear that the shale gas revolution is indeed going be central to the UK's energy future.

A wildly expensive policy of promoting windfarms is going to be increasingly hard to justify.