BBC: Peddling lies about power stations, by Matt McGrath

H/T  to Tim Churchill for this latest LIE from the BBC. Whenever the BBC shows a coal fired power station in a climate contextualised story, they use a photo taken with the sun at a low angle which makes the steam coming from the cooling towers appear dark and smoky. It’s a propagandist LIE from propagandist LIARS. These people are not fit to run a news service, the sooner the license fee is abolished, the better.

Cartoons by Josh: 2014 Calendar Available Now

 

Josh just sent me a mail to let us know his roundup of the year’s climate hilarity is now available for pre-order. There’s certainly been plenty to keep us amused, and Josh’s ability to capture the moment with insight, wit and superb graphic art will immortalise the events of 2013. Something to treasure for years to come. I’m planning on binding the old ones into a coffee table book for the amusement of guests.

Click the image to visit Josh’s ordering page

Russia asks for rule of law to be adhered to by the UNFCCC

An important issue is being flagged up by Russian climate negotiators. This report from Ed King at RTCC:

Russia has called for radical changes to the way the UN makes decisions at climate change summits, two weeks before the next meeting opens in Warsaw.

A letter sent to the UN by Alexander Frolov, an official in the country’s environmental department, says “serious procedural and legal flaws” have multiplied over the past few years.Frolov says “many countries” are “dissatisfied with procedural issues and poor transparency” and calls on officials at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to ensure the sovereign rights of countries are respected.

“It is crucial we re-build confidence in the UNFCCC at this year’s COP to provide a strong foundation for the important decisions that countries are asked to make in Warsaw and in the coming years,” he writes.

BBC Bias: What influence does E.U. money have on Climate and E.U. reporting?

I sent a complaint to the BBC today about their bias in climate reporting, text below the break. First though, a viewpoint from Karl McCartney, MP for Lincoln, on revelations about how much money the BBC has been taking from the E.U. It seems to me the two issues may not be unconnected:

MANY people who believe in the need to ensure the impartiality of the BBC, particularly in respect of its news and current affairs coverage, will be shocked by the corporation’s EU loans and grants.

There has long been concern by many at what can only be described as Left-wing reporting, particularly, though not solely, in matters relating to Britain’s relationship with Europe.

Long Green

Willis on top form.

Watts Up With That?

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

The US has some of the world’s most boring looking money—it’s all green. So we have terms like “greenbacks” for dollars, and “long green”, meaning lots of money.

I offer this as context for what I found when I got to wondering what had happened to the United Nations “Green Climate Fund”. You may recall that the Green Climate Fund was set up by the UN as the only result of the recent Rio de Janeiro Cancun conference on climate idiocy. When the Fund is going full throttle, it is supposed to disburse no less than $200 billion ($200,000,000,000) dollars each and every year to the developing countries.

It turns out that, unlike those of us skeptics who are falsely accused of receiving big bucks from big oil, the “Green Climate Fund” has already raked in millions of dollars to spend on fighting the evil…

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Fragile infrastructure: UK rainy gale closes EDF Nukes for a week

If you thought shutting down the railways for Monday morning commute was a poor show, now we find that two of the reactors at Dungemess have been taken offline due to the rainy and windy weather too. This from the Telegraph:

A nuclear power station automatically shut down its reactors after debris blown by hurricane-strength winds fell onto its power lines and led to a loss of supply.

It could be up to a week before the two units at Dungeness B plant in Kent – one of Britain’s nine nuclear power stations – are up and running again.

But a spokeswoman for EDF Energy, which runs the site, said she hoped energy would be restored much sooner and that the public should “absolutely not” be concerned by the shut-down.

Paul Hudson: Mike Lockwood says new Maunder or Dalton type minimum is likely

The Talkshop’s favourite weatherman Paul Hudson has been to see Mike Lockwood. It seems the fragile ‘consensus’ on the inability of solar variation to affect climate is coming apart. Now Lockwood is saying a new Maunder or Dalton type minimum is likely upon us, and could cause a general downturn in climatic conditions. This is what we’ve been telling the mainstream solar science community for the last four years. From Paul’s BBC blog:

It’s known by climatologists as the ‘Little Ice Age’, a period in the 1600s when harsh winters across the UK and Europe were often severe.

The severe cold went hand in hand with an exceptionally inactive sun, and was called the Maunder solar minimum.

Now a leading scientist from Reading University has told me that the current rate of decline in solar activity is such that there’s a real risk of seeing a return of such conditions.

I’ve been to see Professor Mike Lockwood to take a look at the work he has been conducting into the possible link between solar activity and climate patterns.

According to Professor Lockwood the late 20th century was a period when the sun was unusually active and a so called ‘grand maximum’ occurred around 1985.

Since then the sun has been getting quieter.

Govt Issues New Flying Pig vs White Elephant Report on HS2

From the BBC website, the government’s latest argument for giving £42.5BILLION of our money over to a white elephant project designed to reinforce two-speed Britain. The sooner we vote the main parties out of power the better:

A government-commissioned report says the alternative to a new HS2 high speed rail link would see 14 years of weekend route closures and longer journeys.

The report, by Network Rail and Atkins, says upgrading existing rail lines would severely affect the East Coast, Midland and West Coast mainlines.

It says that would double travel times between Leeds and London.

The study will inform the government’s updated business case for HS2, which will be presented on Tuesday. It will be the fifth official presentation given by the government on HS2.

Want to understand why those energy prices really keep rising?

Great post from blogger ‘Autonomous Mind’.

Autonomous Mind

It’s been documented and explained for years by Richard North and Christopher Booker.  But those who have not seen their many warnings about what was in store for us as a result of policies, that so many people cheered for being ‘green’, might benefit from this very quick summary that Booker puts in his column today.

Two weeks ago, in a column headed “It’s showdown time for our insane green energy policies”, I observed that this is the moment when the roof is finally starting to fall in on a collective flight from reality that I have been reporting here for years.

But what few people yet realise is how far this catastrophic mess we are in was not only predictable, but has also been quite deliberately brought about, through the Government’s own policies.

Their central aim, though never openly explained, has been twofold. One leg has been…

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BTO Birdtrack, a resource

“BirdTrack is organised by the BTO for the BTO, RSPB, BirdWatch Ireland, SOC and WOS.” (British Trust for Ornithology, etc.) is an online resource reporting sightings of birds in the UK and Republic of Ireland.

Bird numbers vary for a variety of reasons, particularly seasonally, this resource gives access to the reports. Accuracy relies on the consistency of the many humans watching.

Missing CRU 1000 year plot resurfaces

Surreal time.

I have a large archive here going back many years, been active via networks for longer than most. Some is online.

Trawling looking for useful content to do with a large CET article I am writing I noticed a postscript file (not PDF), open, is the above. (which is bitmap of the ps)

My immediate thought was Climategate followed by clang, not in that disk directory. Timestamp is 2000, plot ceases before 2000.

Roger Andrews: Experimental Fits of Forcings to Data

ANYONE LOOKING FOR THE EU SEED LAW PETITION CAN FIND IT HERE

I haven’t time to edit this properly, so I hope Roger Andrews will forgive me for just pasting his email into this guest post and lobbing in the images. Somewhere in the archives there’s a post From RA in which he used my cumulative solar technique to get some good fits too. I’ll link it  if anyone finds it. You’ve all seen data before, and know what to do…

Here are the results of the empirical models I ran five or so year ago, plotted on the three sets of figures linked to below and accompanied by a writeup, sort of.  The first set of figures allows for both anthropogenic and natural forcings. Results are presented for the 60-90N, 30-60N, 0-30N, 0-30S and 30-60S latitude bands and for the area-weighted global average of these bands. (There weren’t enough data to put together a comparison for 60-90S.)

Coalition set for bust-up: Cameron Pledges to Roll Back Green Taxes

From Benny Peiser at the GWPF a round-up of the days energy news. The Coalition Govt’s energy policy is now in utter chaos as Cameron makes it up on the hoof at PMQ’s.  The truth is finally hitting home; Vote Blue : go blue – with cold.

“We need to roll back some of the green regulations and charges,” Mr Cameron said during Prime Minister’s Questions. —The Daily Telegraph, 23 October 2013

Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron appeared to signal a major shift in energy policy today as he told MPs that the Goverment should “roll back” costly environmental regulations and charges brought in by the last Labour government. In a move likely to put him at odds with the Liberal Democrats, Mr Cameron said that green regulations introduced by Mr Miliband as Energy Secretary, which add to household energy bills, would have to be ditched. “We need to roll back some of the green regulations and charges that push up our bills. We all know who put them in place,” he said. –Philippe Naughton, The Times, 23 October 2013

Milky Way Turns Out to be a Vortex: Challenges Ahead for Astro-Modelers

ANYONE LOOKING FOR THE EU SEED LAW PETITION CAN FIND IT HERE

H/T to ‘Oldbrew’ for spotting this article at PhysOrg. It’s so badly written, I’m only including the (non-attributed) quote from one of the scientists involved, and the abstract from the paper, which is available in full here.

Velocity map of the extended solar neighbourhood as seen by RAVE. Shown is a slice cut perpendicular to the plane of the Milky Way through the position of the Sun. Arrows indicate the streaming motions of the stars, the colour indicates the velocity perpendicular to the plane of the Milky Way. Credit: AIP

The 3D movement patterns obtained showed highly complex structures. The aim was then to untangle these structures, concentrating on differences between the north and south of the Galactic plane. From these velocities it was seen that our Galaxy has a lot more going on than previously thought. The velocities going upwards and downwards show that there is a wave-like behaviour, with stars sloshing in and out. The novel element in our approach was true 3D observation, showing how complex the velocity landscape of the Galaxy really is. Modellers now have the challenge of understanding this behaviour, be it from ripples from an eaten galaxy or the wake from spiral arms. These new findings will make it possible to make 3D models of our Galaxy much more precise.

Greenpeace Activists Reclassified by Russian Courts: Not Pirates – Just Hooligans

H/T to Roger Andrews for spotting this BBC article about the imprisoned Greenpeace Activists awaiting trial in Murmansk:

Russia has dropped piracy charges against 30 Greenpeace activists, replacing them with hooliganism charges, according to officials.

The new charge has a maximum penalty of seven years rather than 15, Russian news website Lenta reports.

The Arctic Sunrise was seized more than four weeks ago by Russian security forces after activists tried to scale an offshore oil platform.

All 30 people on board – including two freelance journalists – were detained.

So far all bail applications in the case have been refused.

New paper finds solar UV varies up to 100 percent during solar cycles, confirms solar amplification mechanism

Big H/T to ‘Lord Beaverbrook’ for alerting us to this new post over at  The Hockeyschtick,. Good to see the lead author of this new paper, Dr Sandip Dhomse,  is working at my home town University of Leeds.

 A paper published today in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics notes that solar UV radiation can vary up to 100% during solar cycles, that it is “well accepted” these large changes in UV significantly affect stratospheric ozone production, and thereby act as a solar amplification mechanism on temperatures.

The IPCC dismisses the role of the Sun in climate change by only modelling the tiny changes of the Total Solar Irradiance [TSI], while ignoring the large changes of up to 100% in the most energetic portion of the solar spectrum, the ultraviolet [UV] region. The UV spectrum also penetrates the deepest of any portion of the solar spectrum into the oceans [up to 100 meters] to heat the bulk of the oceans, unlike longwave infrared radiation from greenhouse gases, which can only penetrate a few millionths of one meter to cause evaporative cooling of the ocean ‘skin’ surface.

Successive Govts Have Been Selling Britain by the Kilo – what to do next?

Excerpt from a good article on Scriptonite Daily. Read the whole thing, it has a wide perspective.

Stupid, Corrupt, or Both

It was announced this week that the government as agreed a strike price for energy produced by EDF Energy’s planned new nuclear power plants.  The strike price is the price the government guarantees EDF will receive per MegaWatt/Hour of energy produced.  The current market rate is£47.50.  The government has promised EDF £92.80.  Yes, you read that correctly – the UK government has guaranteed EDF Energy twice the market rate.

As with Fracking, the government is using recent energy price hikes by the Big 6 energy firms as a case in favour of New Nuclear – implying or explicitly stating that prices will come down.  However, in agreeing this strike price the government has guaranteed that they will not.  They have fixed the price for energy produced by New Nuclear at twice the market rate.

Another bad deal for the taxpayer and the consumer, brokered by a government that consistently delivers for big business.

NAS Space Studies Board Quietly Announces Online Public Access Only After Event Starts

From Nasa-Watch:

By Keith Cowing on October 21, 2013 2:30 PM.

NAS SSB: Committee on Human Spaceflight Meeting

Keith’s note: Only after today’s event began did the NAS Space Studies Board bother to tweet that there was a Webex feed for this meeting – something they only added to the event’s page after the fact. Bill Gerstenmaier is speaking on “Status on HSF Plans and Challenges” from 3:00 – 3:15 pm EDT. Call-in toll-free number: 1-(866) 668-0721 Conference Code: 448 560 9647

Attendees in the audience at the event were unaware that this event was being webcast or available as on dial-in. I asked the SSB ahead of time and they said it would not be webcast or audiocast so I came into town only to learn that I could have listened from my office. Thanks guys.

Sublime Support and Ridiculous Rebuttal of Akasofu’s Natural Variation Paper

Back in May, MDPI’s new Journal, Climate, published a paper by Japanese researcher Syun-Ichi Akasofu entitled ‘On the Present Halting of Global Warming’. The paper proposes the idea that the recovery from the little ice age and the 60 year oscillation evident in the data not reproduced by climate models needs subtracting from the temperature history before the effect(if any) of additional atmospheric co2 can be assessed. This enraged several of the new journal’s editorial panel so much that they resigned. The Chief editor provided this reassurance and reasoning:

What we can disclose about the review process of the Akasofu paper, without violating the confidentiality of the review process, is that the manuscript was reviewed by three specialists affiliated to institutes or universities based in Europe and the USA. The reviewers were not from the same institution as the author and they have not co-authored papers with the author in the last five years…

We hope that this opportunity for debate will be taken up by members of the scientific community, and that Climate can facilitate vibrant discussion around environmental climate topics that can often polarize opinion, but are of vital importance for stimulating cutting edge research.

BBC Grooms Huhne as Celeb Criminal, Attracts Ire of Daily Mail

From the Daily Mail:

Disgraced former minister Chris Huhne was paid to appear on the BBC, apparently in breach of the corporation’s own editorial guidelines, it has emerged.

The former energy secretary, who still has to wear an electronic tag after being released early from his sentence, is thought to have received around £150 plus travel expenses to conduct an eight-minute interview last week.

He told presenter Andrew Neil he was prosecuted and jailed merely to provide a ‘deterrent effect’ to others.

‘It wasn’t a question of changing my character. It was actually about stopping people like you, Andrew, from doing the same thing and swapping speeding points… That was why the prosecution was brought. I had not offended for ten years on this,’

TB – Comment. Well, apart from continuing to pervert the course of justice and waste large amounts of public money by lying at every turn right up to the final court appearance of course.