Cartoons by Josh Calendar 2013

Updated. They're here!

Above is a mock up of the Calendar which has now been sent to the printers. It should be ready to post out at the end of the week, 23rd Nov. I have emailed most of you who already expressed an interest in the Calendar, apologies to those if the email failed!

You can buy the Calendar via Paypal at Cartoons by Josh.

The Calendar is a review of the year with as many of the cartoons from 2012 as possible. It is approx 33 x 50 cms 44 x 28.5 cms in size, wirebound with a hanger and digitally printed on 170 gsm silk paper with a card back. 

The cost is £9.99 per calendar plus £2.50 postage.

If you want to pay any other way please email me: josh [at] cartoonsbyjosh.com

Update on Nov 17, 2012 by Josh

For anyone who lives or works in London and who would like a calendar sans postage, I will be in South kensington on the 12th December. We can arrange a venue and have a Christmassy drink!

Update on Nov 22, 2012 by Josh

The Calendars have arrived and, I am pleased to say, are looking terrific - the printer has done an outstanding job.

We have already started to print out labels and will be posting the first batch tomorrow. Thank you to everyone who has ordered one. I do have some left so buy now for Christmas!

Josh

Update on Dec 6, 2012 by Josh

I am now running out of Calendars! Any new orders will need to be on a smaller, and slightly more expensive, print run. The cost will be £14.99 and £3.50 P&P for UK orders. Overseas orders on request. See www.cartoonsbyjosh.com

Close DECC

The Department of Energy and CLimate Change really needs to be closed down before it does any more damage to the country's prospects. Just look at this:

Under the government’s Feed-In Tariff (FIT) scheme, which aims to make renewable energies competitive with fossil fuels, the size of a turbine is measured not by height but by power output. If a turbine pumps out more than 500kW, its owners receive 9.5p per kilowatt hour. But a ‘smaller’ sub-500kW one receives a subsidy of 17.5p per kilowatt hour, supposedly to compensate for its lower efficiency. The idea is to lure smaller wind-power producers into the market.

Problem is, while smaller turbines are more popular with the public, those designs don’t produce anything like the 500kW needed to take full advantage of the subsidy. So instead, investors are buying big, powerful turbines and downgrading them, tweaking their components to churn out no more than the magic 500kW. It’s simply far more lucrative to hobble bigger turbines — machines that ought to be capable of producing almost twice as much electricity.

Read the whole story.

And will Ed Davey be fired? Don't hold your breath.

(H/T Roger)

The BBC and the consensus

The 28gate seminar's finding that global warming science is settled and that "due balance" requires dissenting views to be seen and heard less is insidious. In this post I'm going to try to set out why.

What is the consensus? That carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas? Yup. That man's activities are increasing carbon dioxide levels? Certainly. That temperatures went up at the end of the twentieth century and have not gone up since? Definitely. That human beings can affect the climate? Without a shadow of doubt.

Click to read more ...

Science at the crossroads

Christiana Figueres, the UN's climate chief, is interviewed at Yale360. Her views on science and public policy are startling to say the least.

It is the most inspiring job in the world because what we are doing here is we are inspiring government, private sector, and civil society to [make] the biggest transformation that they have ever undertaken. The Industrial Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn’t a guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective. This is a centralized transformation that is taking place because governments have decided that they need to listen to science. So it’s a very, very different transformation and one that is going to make the life of everyone on the planet very different.

Didn't they once call this "scientific socialism"?

More EPA fallout

The story that Lisa Jackson, the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, was using an alias to try to avoid Freedom of Information requests is growing legs.

Yesterday came the news that even Jackson's natural supporters on the left had called for an investigation into her conduct. Then it was revealed overnight that the secret email account in question - in the name of Richard Windsor - had been directly linked to PCs used by Jackson.

Popcorn required.

Art for warming's sake

Tony Thomas was touring the art gallery at Ballarat, Victoria, when his eye alighted on the children's trail around the gallery. It was not a pretty sight. Take this excerpt for example.

In this vision we have poisoned our environment with toxic waste and used up all the natural resources until the earth could no longer support us…In this painting, people are just a memory. The earth has survived and with it some of the plants and animals which lived in harmony with nature, only taking what they needed and adapting….

We have become reckless with our consumption, buying bigger and better things with more and more packaging. [blah blah, insert here more Greens Party boilerplate].

Who should be responsible for the effects of our heavy consumption of resources? How can we reduce the cost of sustaining our natural resources?”.

Read the whole thing.

A slimy article

Leo Hickman has done a rather slimy article looking at Peter Lilley and making much of his interests in an oil company called Tethys.

As a new member of the Commons energy and climate change select committee, Lilley is expected to declare any relevant interests to the committee's clerk upon his first appearance, which took place last week. Next Tuesday, the committee will recommence its inquiry into shale gas. The minutes of any interests or information declared by Lilley to the clerk is not expected to be published for at least a month, but the Guardian understands that, as a committee member, he is not obliged to declare anything beyond that required in the MPs' register of financial interests.

The problem is that although it is headquartered here, Tethys doesn't even operate in the UK. I'm therefore not sure that this represents a conflict of interest. What do readers here think?

Emitting nonsense

The IPCC reports are all based upon emissions scenarios, which are, in turn, based upon economics. Now according to Timmy, that's all about to change.

The next IPCC report will be based upon the updates to the SRES. Great, that’s fine. But note how they’re updating the SRES. They’re not starting with the economics. Ooooooh no, that would be far too sensible. What they’ve actually done is made up some emissions levels.

This really is getting beyond a joke, isn't it?

Without limitations

Martin Rosenbaum notes in a tweet that the statute of limitations relating to Climategate has now passed.

Come out RC, wherever you are!

Orlowski - why 28gate matters

This is a must-read article. Oh yes.

Besides the furore over bungled BBC journalism, 28 Gate - the Beeb's refusal to name the "scientific experts" who convinced the broadcaster to take a firmly warmist position when reporting climate change - is far more profoundly serious than the BBC and its critics yet realise.

What a humble freedom-of-information request has exposed, and called into the question, is the conduct and judgement of the BBC Trust itself. The trust is the BBC's governing body; it's essentially the old Board of Governors given a Strategy Boutique-style New Labour makeover when Auntie's royal charter was rewritten.

The trust is the BBC's firewall: when things go wrong at the Beeb, it could always promise to step in, with talk about new brooms and fresh starts. But when the trust is found wanting, there is no place to go except into the arms of the state or a regulator.

The wily Mr Windsor

Chris Horner has uncovered an extraordinary attempt by the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency to hide her emails from public scrutiny. I mentioned Chris's book The Liberal War on Transparency a week or so ago. However, the story of the manoeuvrings of the EPA has now developed legs:

In response to my book, not one but two former fairly senior EPA officials have contacted me to provide the alias used by Obama’s EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, to keep her mail secret. I was told it was “one of the alternate email addresses she used.”

Ms. Jacks on is the “eco-warrior”, “most progressive EPA chief in history” — pushing Obama’s backdoor march (other ways “of skinning the cat”) toward cap-and-trade.

Or, as you may come to know her, “Richard Windsor.” This morning, we proceeded with a request under the Freedom of Information Act (in-boxes don’t close on federal holidays) in order to find out what she was saying in private about her radical plan to avoid public scrutiny.

“Richard Windsor.” That is the name — sorry, one of the alias names — used by Obama’s radical EPA chief to keep her email from those who ask for it.

In response the House Science Committee has launched an inquiry. Interesting times.

Murphy's paper

Updated on Dec 17, 2012 by Bishop Hill

One of the posts I've been pleased with in recent months was the one on Climate sensitivity and the Stern report. This was based on the premise that economic assessments of the cost of carbon ought to be based on the existing empirical measurements of climate sensitivity rather than the hypothetical estimates from climate models.

I reviewed the climate sensitivity estimates of the Fourth Assessment Report and noted that only Forster and Gregory 2006 was free of the influence of models. I then observed that once one had replaced the IPCC's fiddled figure for the Forster and Gregory estimate with the value those authors had actually calculated one could see that the range of estimates used in the the PAGE model (the one used by Stern) did not even include the range of Forster and Gregory.

Click to read more ...

Down with universities

That is Matt Briggs' provocative theme in his post today.

The idea is sound. Ignore the old system, which hasn’t any hope of being repaired, and start again. Let those who wish pile up debt, collect “womyn’s studies” “degrees”, and be taught by adjuncts at Behemoth U do so. But for those students who actually want to learn, we have to do something different. Nothing radical. Just return to the roots of what a classical liberal education was meant to be. 

The great levelised costs lie

The BBC covered the Energy Bill on Newsnight at the end of last week, looking in particular at onshore wind.

There was much airing of what I now refer to as the "great levelised costs lie" and, with the BBC adopting its usual approach to "due balance", there was nobody there to call them on it.

Video here.

Putting windfarms to the sword

Readers may remember Pat Sword's challenge to the legality of the Irish government's green energy policies on the grounds that the public consultation required under the Aarhus Convention had not taken place.

Pat emails with an update

I was as a lay litigant in Monday in the Irish High Court at the request for leave stage for a Judicial Review of the National Renewable Energy Action Plan and the REFIT funding scheme, in which the relief sought was for (a) an Order of Certiorari (a Judical Review); (b) a Declaration that it was unlawful to grant planning permissions and award funding with the proper public participation in decision-making, namely the Strategic Environmental Assessment and Article 7 of the Convention and; (c) a protective cost order. I explained to the judge in the morning that there was a window of opportunity to lodge an application for a Judicial Review of the Irish National Renewable Energy Action Plan and REFIT funding scheme within three months of the UNECE decision, which so far the Department has ignored. He was very interested, asked me what my interest was in the matter - I explained the major financial costs of the programme, the resulting soaring energy prices and how it would have a very negative effect on inward industrial development, on which I made my livelihood. He was happy with that and requested he be provided with a chance to read the documentation over lunch and that he would see me first thing at 2 O'Clock.

Click to read more ...