Unthreaded
SandyS
'scuse me! What I said?
I agree I can live without phones or newspapers. I also agree I can't live without energy. It's at least five years since I tried to make the case that there were elderly people who were going to have to make the choice at Christmas as to whether they had a Christmas lunch or keep warm because they couldn't afford to do both.
Nobody appeared to be listening then though it seems that some are listening now. DECC's response appears to be to re-define fuel poverty.
Nice one!
Mike Jackson
Mike Jackson
That's you told then
sandyS
Mike sorry iPad correction of your name,
sandyS
Mickey
You can live quite happily without a phone and newspapers. The same cannot be said about energy.
sandyS
Stewgreen
I often just put a link without commenting on the context and let others decide how to take the information.
It was a bit surprised that the IPCC chose to hold a conference in Poland around their national day, Poland's history since before John Sobieski has been a long struggle with neighbours. So they are an independent lot and something like that was quite likely
sandyS
Interesting bit of context for the vexed issue of utility costs: a note in the paper quoted a charitable debt-advice outfit saying that it gets many calls about debts due to smart phones. They said that families with 2 teenage kids can easily spend £140 per month on their phones. A bit of rigorous research (30 secs on google) revealed that the average mobile phone bill was £430 per year in 2011 so £1300 per year for a family with 4 phones seems plausible.
That’s about the same as the “average” energy bill but there is no outcry over phone costs.
In the same vein, anyone who routinely buys a "quality newspaper" (oxymoron?) probably spends more on that per year than on their water & sewerage bill. I am not trying to defend the water industry but I would say they provide rather more value-for-money. They should work on their PR.
mikeh
This posting by Tim Ball at WUWT is worth a read.
Mike Jackson
The BBC on ocean acidification.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24904143
Note the use of extravagant language of the sort we are accustomed to in environmental scare stories, such as ‘unprecedented rate’, ‘very high confidence’ and the general prediction of doom and gloom.
The understanding of pH and buffers seems to escape them too: no Chemist would describe anything as being ’26% more acidic’. I wonder whether they even know what a buffer does, or have any experience of precise measurement of pH. I have visions of untrained people using badly calibrated pH meters with absence of good temperature control collecting data, then coming to misleading conclusions.
FM
Is there a climate conderence coming up? There must be as we have more scary propaganda from the BBC Emissions of CO2 driving rapid oceans 'acid trip'.
Phillip Bratby
Can Paul McCartney save the day for the Greenpeace activists?
(See my reply to Daniel Beilinson a few minutes ago.)