Alok Sharma appointed as minister for BEIS and COP26

Alok Sharma MP. Image Credit: Wikipedia Commons.

Alok Sharma gets a promotion in the cabinet reshuffle today:

Sharma was born in Agra, India, but moved to Reading with his parents when he was five years old.^[3] He was raised in the Reading suburbs of Earley and Whitley Wood and attended Reading Blue Coat School in Sonning^[4] and the University of Salford, from where he graduated with a BSc in Applied Physics with Electronics in 1988.^[5]

Sharma subsequently qualified as a chartered accountant.

Sharma was appointed Secretary of State for International Development by Boris Johnson following the resignation of Rory Stewart in July 2019. Upon ascending to the role, he said: “I am delighted… We will work across the whole of government to deliver Brexit and make sure UK aid is tackling global challenges that affect us all.”^[20]

Tallbloke talking about climate and energy on PlusNews live TV

Yesterday I got the opportunity to have a relaxed climate conversation with Stephen Place, who presents the ‘Talking Yorkshire’ programme on PlusNews TV, a community based channel going out on 15 live platforms worldwide, youtube and on facebook. Make a pot of coffee and check it out.

Labour pledges to make climate change ‘core part’ of school curriculum

UK schools would have to promote one political party’s policies. Whose climate ‘facts’ would they be relying on? ‘Tackling climate change’ may be a popular fantasy in schools but the reality is somewhat different, to say the least.

It has set out plans to ensure all young people are educated in schools about the social and environmental impacts of climate change, reports Energy Live News.

Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner has set out plans to ensure all young people are educated in schools about the social and environmental impacts of climate change if the party comes into power.

The Cult of Greta Thunberg

Image Credit: Anon twitter account

Partial reblog as Brendan O’Neill at Spiked Online gets stuck into the enviro-mentalists.

It actually makes sense that Ms Thunberg – a wildly celebrated 16-year-old Swede who founded the climate-strike movement for schoolkids – should sound cultish. Because climate-change alarmism is becoming ever stranger, borderline religious, obsessed with doomsday prophecies. Consider Extinction Rebellion, the latest manifestation of the upper-middle classes’ contempt for industrialisation and progress. It is at times indistinguishable from old fundamentalist movements that warned mankind of the coming End of Days. I followed Extinction Rebellion from Parliament Square to Marble Arch yesterday and what I witnessed was a public display of millenarian fear and bourgeois depression. People did dances of death and waved placards warning of the heat-death of the planet. It felt deeply unnerving.

#BBC propagandising our children with pseudoscience, again

The BBC website hosts handy revision notes for our kids. Who vets the information? Some time ago I posted about their claim that melting sea ice raises the sea level, Archimedes be damned. Now we find that the BBC thinks that dinosaurs invented space travel and colonised Saturn’s moon Titan, forming it’s seas of methane after they died. The idiocy is unbounded.

Students at every grade need to learn climate science, expert says

Brainwash them early and they’re brainwashed for life – is that it? It might be better to find out why climate models are so poor at predicting the present, before pumping youngsters full of shaky alarmist ideas. An obvious suspect would be their built-in assumptions about how the global climate system works, which are widely contested.

The National Climate Assessment, released the day after Thanksgiving, offers motivation and opportunity to bring climate topics into the classroom at every grade level, says Phys.org.

Even the youngest students are ready to learn about climate science, according to Michael Wysession, professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and executive director of the Teaching Center.

A conversation with Ken Rice on the causes of the ‘Greenhouse effect’

Rog Tallbloke‏ @RogTallbloke 3h3 hours ago

Yes, adiabatic compression heating is an ongoing process, due to the convection cycle. I’ve tried to illustrate it by modifying NASA’s energy budget diagram. Calcs on right show PV/nR=T gives correct values regardless of radiative transfer.

Ken Rice‏ @theresphysics 3h3 hours ago

This has probably been explained before, but if adiabatic heating is to be an ongoing process then that would suggest the atmosphere is contracting. Since it clearly isn’t, this can’t be the source of the enhanced surface temperature.

Rog Tallbloke‏ @RogTallbloke 3h3 hours ago

Ken. Air convecting upwards every day displaces cold high altitude air downwards through the pressure gradient which compresses and heats it. If it didn’t, that air would be colder at the surface, and would allow much more rapid conduction of heat from surface to the air. Agree?

Ken Rice‏ @theresphysics 2h2 hours ago

Roger, if you want to enhance the temperature on the surface via compression then the atmosphere would need to continually contract.

Tony Thomas: Suffer your children

Of all the green/Left groups badgering schoolkids about human-caused global warming, the most determined is the Australian Academy of Science. It pushes its government-funded campaign to Year 9 students via the ‘Big Systems’ unit in its ‘Science by Doing’ course. About 16,000 Australian science teachers – two out of three – have signed on. The science teachers work in 80 per cent of secondary schools. About 160,000 users are registered, including 50,000 newcomers last year.

‘Big Systems’ is a revision of the Academy’s 2013 course. Here’s from the original (tinyurl.com/nwxj76e):

Lesson outcomes: At the end of this activity students will… appreciate the need to lobby at all levels of government to ignite and lead change – even if it is unpopular with the voters.

Ask [15-16 year old] students if they have ever taken action or advocated for a cause. Do they know of anyone who has? Key vocabulary: advocacy, campaign, champion, environmentalist.

If you were concerned about Earth’s sustainability, who would you vote for?

Is science publishing bad for science?

A long and interesting article about science publishing in the Guardian is largely about the history of Robert Maxwells involvement in science publication, but contains much else of interest besides. A few excerpts:

Many scientists also believe that the publishing industry exerts too much influence over what scientists choose to study, which is ultimately bad for science itself. Journals prize new and spectacular results – after all, they are in the business of selling subscriptions – and scientists, knowing exactly what kind of work gets published, align their submissions accordingly. This produces a steady stream of papers, the importance of which is immediately apparent. But it also means that scientists do not have an accurate map of their field of inquiry.

Environment, Energy and Climate policy forum presentation.

On Sunday I gave a 10 minute presentation at a UKIP policy forum on climate and energy policy. This was well received and in the break-out group sessions during the afternoon, I found myself volunteered to chair the discussion and write-up our deliberations.

Forgive the wobbly video near the start. My cameraman decided to head round the other side of the room so I wasn’t blocking the view of the screen.

Tony Thomas: Teach ‘em Green, Raise ‘em Stupid

According to the latest international comparison, Australian kids are falling further behind, despite ever-larger sums of taxpayer cash being poured into the Chalk-Industrial Complex. One reason we’re raising another generation of dolts: propaganda passed off as wisdom

Green/Left lobby Cool Australia, backed by Labor’s teacher unions and Bendigo Bank, is achieving massive success in brainwashing school students about the inhumanity of the federal government’s asylum-seeker policies, the evils of capitalism, and our imminent climate peril. The Cool Australia’s teaching templates are now being used by 52,540 teachers in 6,676 primary and high schools (71% of total schools). The courses have  impacted just over a million students via 140,000 lessons downloaded for classes this year alone. Students’ uptake of Cool Australia materials has doubled in the past three years.

Teachers are mostly flummoxed about how to prioritise “sustainability” throughout their primary and secondary school lessons, as required by the national curriculum.[1]  Cool Australia has marshaled a team of 19 professional curriculum writers who offer teachers and pupils easy templates for lessons that  include the sustainability mantra along with green and anti-government propaganda.

Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723)

. . . my work, which I’ve done for a long time, was not pursued in order to gain the praise I now enjoy, but chiefly from a craving after knowledge, which I notice resides in me more than in most other men. And therewithal, whenever I found out anything remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof.Antony van Leeuwenhoek. Letter of June 12, 1716

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Antony van Leeuwenhoek was an unlikely scientist. A tradesman of Delft, Holland, he came from a family of tradesmen, had no fortune, received no higher education or university degrees, and knew no languages other than his native Dutch. This would have been enough to exclude him from the scientific community of his time completely. Yet with skill, diligence, an endless curiosity, and an open mind free of the scientific dogma of his day, Leeuwenhoek succeeded in making some of the most important discoveries in the history of biology. It was he who discovered bacteria, free-living and parasitic microscopic protists, sperm cells, blood cells, microscopic nematodes and rotifers, and much more. His researches, which were widely circulated, opened up an entire world of microscopic life to the awareness of scientists.

Matt Ridley: In the name of science, Britain must leave the EU

CapX has a cogently argued piece from Matt Ridley on the reasons why Britains science endeavours would be benefited by #Brexit.

Britain – for its size – is probably the world’s leading scientific country. We have less than 1% of the world’s population, but 15% of the most highly cited scientific papers, and more Nobel prize winners than any other European country. We are world leaders in biotechnology and digital technology and our greatest potential collaborators and potential rivals in both fields are in Asia and America, not Europe.

So it is vital that we remain open to the world, not stuck in little Europe. A regional customs union protected by tariff walls and run from a central bureaucracy is a 1950s idea – an analogue project in a digital era, as Michael Gove puts it. In an age when container shipping has collapsed the cost of intercontinental trade; when the internet and budget airlines and Skype have made it as easy to collaborate with Asia and America and Africa as in Europe, regionalism makes less sense.

Michael Faraday: Thoughts on Ray Vibrations -1854 Letter

A fascinating letter from Michael Faraday to Richard Philips written in 1854.

To Richard Phillips, Esq.

Dear Sir,

At your request I will endeavor to convey to you a notion of that which I ventured to say at the close of the last Friday-evening Meeting, incidental to the account I gave of Wheatstone’s electro-magnetic chronoscope; but from first to last understand that I merely threw out as matter for speculation, the vague impressions of my mind, for I gave nothing as the result of sufficient consideration, or as the settled conviction, or even probable conclusion at which I had arrived.

The point intended to be set forth for consideration of the hearers was, whether it was not possible that vibrations which in a certain theory are assumed to account for radiation and radiant phaenomena may not occur in the lines of force which connect particles, and consequently masses of matter together; a notion which as far as is admitted, will dispense with the aether, which in another view, is supposed to be the medium in which these vibrations take place.

Tony Thomas: Die Grünshirts Parachute Into Parkville

Guest post by Tony Thomas

In a further demonstration that no alarmist undertaking is too improbable for public funds to underwrite, the climate-change careerists at Melbourne University have teamed up with their equally error-prone counterparts in Potsdam. Bear this in mind when the next vice-chancellor cries poor

Two groups that like to out-vie each other on climate catastrophism have linked arms to give the Australian public and taxpayers a double dose of the scares. Melbourne University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) have formed a Melbourne-based joint graduate body called theAustralian-German College of Climate & Energy Transitions. It has 16 multi-disciplinary PhD students, none pondering the 18-year halt to atmospheric warming. Expect lots of Melbourne/Berlin tripping and jetliner contrails.

This is yet another climate institute or centre in academia, one of hundreds interlocked throughout the Western world  (at least a dozen are in Australia, the ANU alone boasting five varieties). It’s a lucrative industry for normally funding-starved academics.[1]

Raif Badawi: On the efficacy of sharia Astronomy

Raif Badawi, the Saudi blogger being given weekly whippings, as an introduction to his ten year sentence, by the oppressive regime it is his misfortune to live under, wrote in praise of the religious scholasticism which characterises islamic science institutions. This from a longer article sampling his writings in the Guardian.

In September 2011 Badawi launched a witheringly sarcastic attack on Saudi clerics after a TV preacher called for astronomers to be punished on the grounds that they encouraged scepticism about sharia law.

Actually, this venerable preacher has drawn my attention to a truth that had been hidden from me and my dear readers – namely, the existence of the so-called “Sharia astronomer”. What a wonderful appellation! In my humble experience and in the course of my not inconsiderable research into the universe, its origins and the stars, I have never once come across this term. I advise NASA to abandon its telescopes and, instead, turn to our Sharia astronomers, whose keen vision and insight surpass the agency’s obsolete telescopes.

Indeed, I advise all other scholars the world over, of whatever discipline, to abandon their studies, laboratories, research centres, places of experimentation, universities, institutes etc. and head at once to the study groups of our magnificent preachers to learn from them all about modern medicine, engineering, chemistry, microbiology, geology, nuclear physics, the science of the atom, marine sciences, the science of explosives, pharmacology, anthropology etc. – alongside astronomy, of course.

JE SUIS CHARLIE? IT’S A BIT LATE

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Excellent article from Kenan Malik which adresses the vacillation of the PC mainstream media and the fundamental error of social thinking underlying it.

Pandaemonium

‘Je suis Charlie’. It’s a phrase in every newspaper, in every Twitter feed, on demonstrations in cities across Europe. The expressions of solidarity with those slain in the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices are impressive. They are also too late. Had journalists and artists and political  activists taken a more robust view on free speech over the past 20 years then we may never have come to this.

Instead, they have helped create a new culture of self-censorship. Partly, it is a question of fear, an unwillingness to take the kind of risks that the editors of Charlie Hebdo courted, and for which they have paid such a heavy price. But fear is only part of the explanation. There has also developed over the past two decades a moral commitment to censorship, a belief that because we live in a plural society, so we must police public discourse about different…

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Scottish Sceptic: The Climate wars – toward a washup review.

This is a partial reblog of a post by the Scottish sceptic. Head on over to his site to read the full article.

The Climate wars – toward a washup review.
the Scottish Sceptic

…………………………..Time…………………………….

As I said a while back (The limits of Climate Hysteria) we’ve now reached the stage in these “climate wars” whereby the climate itself is the main combatant forcing the ranks of the delusional public academia, to be dragged kicking and screaming to the reality of our ever varying climate, as the climate itself now imposes discipline where the idiots in the so called “institutions” of so-called “science” failed.

In other words, when we only had a few years of data and a lot of climate variables, it was far far too easy to “investigate” the most worrying trends and then to further cherry pick the data. Then to write up this cherry picked data and publish in buddy review journals, put on Wikipedia as “settled science” and try to convince the world your religion has a credible basis. But, the more data that is acquired and the more people look into every nook and cranny and not just the short-term worrisome trends, the more the real picture of a continuously varying climate emerges and so the less important any one short-term change appears. The more people who gather data, the less any individual can cherry-pick the data to e.g. claim “snow is disappearing” in a warm winter or “floods are increasing” in a floody year or “droughts are increasing” in a dry year.

Josh: 2015 Calendar of Climate Capers now available in time for Christmas

Get your orders in quickly, Josh’s 2015 calendar is going to run out faster than Mickey Mann’s box of ‘pause excuse chocs’! The indispensable companion to your climate year, every year. Josh’s wry look at the science, culture, media, and politics of Global Warming is out now. Click the image to be whisked away to the order page or use this link.

Einstein papers Digitised

The California Institute of Technology has digitised the writings of Albert Einstein during the first 44 years of his life, translated into English.