How to Introduce Rationing

Politicians and civil servants have never forgotten the thrill of total war and the power it gave them to direct all the goods and services in the entire economy.  They created artificial shortages to magnify the effects of war so that when rationing was introduced the public saw the coupons as smoothing out supply and accepted them.  It was the manipulation of perception.  

But that war is over.  Without a permanent enemy, how is one to impose a parallel currency such as carbon credits, or manufacture the warrant to reach right in to every household and dictate that they must use expensive complex light bulbs which are not very bright,  or to insist that some irrelevant jobsworth must write an energy performance certificate for every house when it is sold?  How is one to dominate civil society and bring it under central European control?

Easy. Make the effects of bad weather worse by deliberately mis-managing the landscape,  then call it Man Made Climate Change.  Then demand even more power to deal with it.

It may be that Environment Agency simply bungled the management of the Somerset Levels. It may be that the land was inadvertently flooded on the instructions of people who do not understand how waterlands work and that if you drown a newt in sewage, it is just as dead as if you had dried its habitat out.

But it may also be that a perfect disaster was set up deliberately, with the intention it would panic the middle-classes, who tend to live in the prettier parts, in to handing over all the power necessary to 'save' them.

Watts Up With That has been looking in to how bad weather was made worse by the Environment Agency. 

"The real issue has to do with the lack of flow capacity in the Kings Sedgemoor Drain, (gravity drain, not pumped) due to silting and vegetation encroachment, as well as similar issues in the River Parrett...."

Dinosaur farts

Everyone, even the normally open-minded Longrider,  is poo-poohing  this idea for why the climate changed but they haven't looked at the evidence.   I've seen filums with dinosaurs and they are always growling as if their bellies hurt, which is only to be expected if you try to eat whole trees, other dinosaurs and ladies wearing fur bikinis. 

It's all true and here's the film to prove it.  Note they have actually photographed the gas.  This explains megafaunal extinction.



Please can I have a PhD from UEA now for this valuable piece of conclusive research?

Man Overboard - Tallbloke and AGW

The police have been dragged in to the Climate Debacle and have begun to confiscate computers at the behest of the US much to the delight of the University of East Anglia, who can't win their faulty argument any more than the Vatican could when it huffily excommunicated Galileo. The disgraced academics want to know who leaked/acquired the emails which showed them massaging data, suppressing dissent and obstructing FoI compliance.

A spokesman for the University of East Anglia said: "We are pleased to hear that the police are continuing to actively pursue the case following the release last month of a second tranche of hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit. We hope this will result in the arrest of those responsible for the theft of the emails and for distorting the debate on the globally important issue of climate change." (Guardian 15 Dec 2011)

So no sense, then, that disagreeing with a deceitful propaganda exercise is not a criminal offence, despite the availability of the School of Law on campus to explain the niceties.

What matters is that it is in the public interest that the emails emerged purporting to show that the academics at UEA and other places had been cheating to shore up their preferred theory. But it was possible the CRU had a good explanation or that the emails had been misrepresented.  They have always maintained those are their emails which were supposed to be private, not that is is a set of hoax documents. It was possible the CRU had a good explanation for what they appeared to suggest. I settled down to wait for a way to tell whether these emails were private or, more sinisterly, secret.

The intimidation of Tallbloke by the state apparatus decides it for me: the whole AGW must be a fairy story and there may very well be a nasty plot afoot to protect somebody's financial interests in continuing that lie.

Tallbloke himself has been remarkably kind to the police and told the Guardian:

"I am happy to assist the police with their inquiries because I haven't been hiding anything important like some people have. I assisted them with their inquiries, which involved voluntarily answering some questions regarding computer use etc."

He generously over-looked the fact that they turned up with a warrant and didn't need to ask for his cooperation or permission, although they could have had either. He has stuck to the point: what have UEA been hiding?

If getting the science right was what mattered, UEA would have sacked half of its climatocracy pretending to be academics in order to protect the reputation of the university and to avoid all UEA degrees, even the law, medical and humanities ones - becoming a global laughing stock.  The Climate Research Unit is not the only outfit in that very large campus where, let us not forget, it is shortly going to cost over £50k all-in to get a student through a basic degree in geography or what ever. For that, parents will expect a brand which doesn't cause potential employers to fall over laughing.

Let's be clear: this is not for being wrong - scientists are allowed to be wrong if they say 'Hang on, that doesn't look right, are you getting the same results we did'?  It's for refusing to hand over the base data which, apparently, did exist but was left in Phil Jones' jeans and his mum put them in the washing machine. They should be sacked for the cover-up, not the incompetence.

Lord Monckton thinks that if you want to play the criminal law card, the thing to do is to follow the money and ask if there is fraud involved in perpetuating an AGW lie in order to receive money and influence. He wants the police to investigate not just what UEA might have done - which is an issue for robust academic debate - but why, because if it was to enrich themselves by deception, that is definitely within the scope of the criminal law.

UEA issued a load of reports last year, claiming they were independent and they ain't dun nuffink. Here is the index. 
 
I know what I think and decided it the moment the Inquisition rang Tallbloke's doorbell.

Woodstore

A woodstore several days ago.

I keep a lookout for these now and note the rising popularity of wood burners. In a stand of sensible, although superior, new-build houses a small woodstore was provided as a standard next to the dustbin.

This was a grander one cut in to a hill in woodland - presumably contributing the fuel - so it had a bluebell wood just above it.

Stick 'Em With Windmills

The humourist Scott Adams(*) of Dilbert fame illustrated that people tend to see the solution to any problem in terms of their favourite technique, the one they have a special investment in. When Dilbert's office hired a porcupine as a consultant it would unhestitatingly recommend:

"We must stick them with quills! It's the only way!"

The observation is sharp. Ask a school teacher what to do and it will invariably work its way back upstream to how children ought to be educated. A priest will tell you to pray. An accountant, a good one, will venture no opinion until she has managed to put a model in to a spreadsheet.

Little Richard honestly believed there was no problem which could not be solved by dancing, which is the odd-man-out as he is primarily thought of as a rock'n'roller rather than a hoofer. He probably meant "Playing some rock'n'roll loudly and dancing to it until the problem goes away of its own accord". Some truth in that too; a great number of problems are best dealt with by doing nothing, although that's disastrous in a smaller proportion of cases. Wisdom lies in knowing when to do nothing, when to do something, and what that thing ought to be to avoid making the situation worse than if you'd done nothing in the first place.

If an advisor is counselling you against their own best techniques it goes against this powerful human grain. You should at least listen, then, when a person doesn't suggest that a problem can be solved by applying generous amounts of money to their profession.

"I was a marine engineer for 43 years."

It is reasonable to assume The Filthy Engineer knows what he's talking about when he says that there is something hideously wrong with the calculations for what it will cost to maintain wind farms at sea, compared to the energy they will generate.

Also, he's prepared to wade through the documents to get to the heart of the ignorance, for which we should all be thankful. Now, if only we can get people in authority to take notice of his summary.

....

(*) Scott Adams: the strip is on page 103 of "How to Build a Better Life By Stealing Office Supplies", which is nineteen years old now. If you register with Amazon you can use the Look Inside feature to see it (again).

It became one of the best known workings of the theme "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".