The global warming propagandists are plying their trade again with the BBC more than happy to spread their propaganda for them.
According to this piece of startling, in your face reporting, the Wilkins Ice Shelf “hangs by a thread” and this huge piece of ice the size of the Isle of Man is on the brink of coming loose from the rest of the continent.
Amazing. I can’t find the BBC report on it re-attaching itself to the rest of the ice which is what must have happened because the Wilkins Ice Shelf collapsed in 1998 breaking off the 1,100km2 piece of ice. Unless there happens to be another Wilkins Ice Shelf that is co-incidently about to face the same fate of course.
The climatologist using this piece of 10 year old “news” to perpetuate the global warming myth is Dr David Vaughan, Lead Author of the IPCC’s report on climate change – the “independent” group of climatologists and scientists paid by governments to “prove” climate change is caused by humans and that excessive taxation and deliberate, co-ordinated suppression of the global economy is the only way to stop it happening. He is also the recipient of grants from DEFRA and Federal Europe, both of which are part of the global warming scam.
The BBC, demonstrating it’s usual unbiased style of reporting, says:
A chunk of ice the size of the Isle of Man has started to break away from Antarctica in what scientists say is further evidence of a warming climate.
No mention of Duncan Wingham, Professor of Climate Physics at University College London who is not paid by world governments to say humans are causing climate change who, in February 2005, talked about the Wilkins Ice Shelf and other ice shelves collapsing and gave his considered opinion (based, ironically, on Federal Europe’s own satellite data) that it wasn’t because of global warming. He pointed out, in fact, that using data covering the whole of the Antarctic and not just the sticky out bit that’s easy to get to and subject to a different climate to the rest of the continent, you can see that the amount of change to the continent is roughly balanced out continent-wide and as expected for natural climate change. “The Antarctic Peninsula is exceptional because it juts out so far north”.
He went on to point out that the US monitoring station at the South Pole had recorded a one degree drop in temperature since 1957 and that the ice cap covering Greenland is a left-over from the last ice age and the only reason it’s still there is because Greenland is so far north.
Wingham finishes by saying:
Sparse data from subs in some parts of the Arctic do seem to show a thinning trend, but our preliminary observations using satellite data point to large growth and decay from year to year and place to place, by as much a meter in just a few years. Here too natural variability is considerable. No one doubts that the ultimate fate of Arctic ice looks a grim one, but I believe we have too few data to be confident of how fast it will meet its fate.
So, the north is warming and the south is cooling. The unnatural – perhaps naturally unsustainable – ice cap over Greenland is receding but still nowhere near the much smaller surface area it covered when the Vikings named it Greenland after the general greenness of the island rather than the whiteness of the ice cap that … erm … wasn’t there.
Whatever happened to the “consensus” of the “scientific community” that showed “unequivocal” and “undeniable” evidence of man-made climate change? I thought the argument was won and wasn’t open for debate any more?
Technorati Tags: BBC Bias, Climate Change, Propaganda
I find it hard to understand this theory of “man-made climate change as deliberate hoax” – for one, why would the ruling class, whose continued hegemony depends upon economic growth, want to restrict the global economy in any way?
On the issue of climate change as a whole, I’ve always thought it an irrelevant question to what degree industrial development has impacted environmental stability – the issue is surely what are we going to do when the fossil fuels are too expensive too buy or too scarce to be productively extracted from the ground.
That’s the million dollar question Charlie. One theory I have – and you won’t like this one – is that it’s a left wing conspiracy; a huge social engineering exercise, the aim of which is to spread socialism around the world by destroying the global economy and forcing everyone to rely on state-organised collectivism. That would certainly fit in with the aims of Liebour and Federal Europe. Making the populace utterly reliant on the state costs serious money and the only way to get that money is to tax the population as highly as possible to pay for the state provision of everything they need. If you’re not going to have a “glorious revolution” then you need some other justification for abandoning capitalism and moving toward socialism/communism and the crippling taxation associated with it and the “threat” of climate change fits the bill.
It doesn’t have to be a deliberate conspiracy to be false. There is no doubt some evidence for the greenhouse effect and high CO2 levels due to man made effects. The problem is where science meets politics, which doesn’t understand the importance of doubt and error in science.
We also get so called ‘confirmation bias’ where by once you are convinced of your case, you only see evidence that supports you. The tempting narrative of brave heroes opposing global warming against evil (American) capitalists destroying the world for profit makes it easy for people to dismiss evidence against the MMGW theory as denial.
There is no denial in science, and there should be no sides. All evidence should be weighed up and looked at sceptically, but this issue has become so politicised it distorts that. And of course politicians are happy to have a morally justifiable tax rise. “Its for your own good, its not about making money I am saving the world!”.
Charlie is right though, regardless of the exact extent of man’s influence on the climate, oil and gas are running down, are becoming more expensive and we are reliant on the Middle East and Russia, hardly stable environments. There are plenty of good reasons for investing in local renewable (or coal and nuclear for now) energy resources whether you believe in MMGW or not.
And if the predicted catastrophes occur despite reduced carbon emissions, or if China for example puts so much in our efforts make no difference, we should be looking at how to cope, as well as how to prevent climate change. And the answer is probably not an above inflation rise on petrol duty.
My take is it is just an Apocalypse Theory, that has turned out to be very popular.
Remamber, Nuclear Winter, Acid Rain, meteorite strikes, russian invasion, aids et al.
I think they are just variants of JUdgment day and using your world view, just encourage us to fuck like bunnies and buy presents for our girl.
But because most things are cheap, THEY need to get us to buy expensive things like fair trade coffee and eco friendly crap lke that
I don’t like your left wing conspiracy idea Wonko, but for this reason – i prefer to concentrate on class. You might just as well say it’s a ruling class conspiracy – but to perpetuate the rule of the capitalist class… I know George Soros has read Das Kapital, but I don’t think he’s using the Communist Manifesto as some kind of guide book!
Socialism has nothing to do with high taxes on working class people – it’s high taxes on corporate profits that would be described as socialist. Federal Europe acts in the interests of big business, New Labour cuts corporate taxes and makes workers pay more tax…
My worry about nuclear power, by the way is that we end up with another dependency. I wouldn’t mind the nuclear option if it was being used in order to keep us going while a shift to renewables is taking place, but I fear the aim will be to provide more corporate welfare at the expense of working people.
I warned you you wouldn’t like it.
Socialism is about collecting as much tax as possible from people to pay for the state provision of everything the populace needs. The ultimate aim is to have everyone working for nothing and the state provides everything – socialism is a stepping stone to communism. Tax Credits is a perfect example of that ethos – the British government took away pretty much every personal tax allowance there was and then set up a system to give it back. The tax burden increased and the state provided to make up the shortfall. I’m not saying that social security is wrong but it’s gone beyond simply helping those in need.
Nuclear power is cleaner than fossil fuels, cheaper to produce and in some respects is safer than traditional coal plants. If something goes really wrong with a nuclear plant then it’s a major disaster but coal plants have been pumping out fumes for decades and that has associated health risks – there’s a coal power station near me and the instances of cancer, asthma and other lung diseases are abnormally high. It’s never been proven to be the power station but people old enough to remember it say that it coincides with the power station being built. Nuclear waste can be disposed of very safely now by turning it into a type of inert glass. It’s an expensive process but would be cheaper if it was used more. Renewable energy is expensive, inefficient and can’t support our energy needs.
Wonko – tax credits are basically a way of helping reduce labour costs. If workers claiming tax credits didn’t have them, they’d be forced to organise to demand higher wages…
I take your point about the innovations in nuclear technology – but I still think it’d help an awful lot if all buildings were equiped with solar panels and were better insulated.
As for your definition of socialism, it’s not one myself or any of my comrades would recognise. Socialism is the extension of democracy into the economy – which is why parties around the world set up to represent the interests of working people have always called themselves socialist.
Recall that New Labour – which has governed for the last decade – was all about rejecting Labour’s socialist heritage.
Clause 4, famously scrapped by Blair because it commited the party to socialism entailed “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service”.
You used to get a tax allowance for being married and a tax allowance for having children. There were some others, they escape me at the moment. They’ve all been taken away and replaced with a system where everyone pays the same high rate of tax and then thousands of civil servants administer a system that gives back roughly what was lost from the abolition of tax allowances. A rather simplistic view I know but it’s a shit system.
So, how does the socialist state fund the state provision of everything the citizen needs if it’s not through nationalisation and extreme taxation? For the record, I don’t have a problem with nationalisation of essential industries but I don’t want to see the communist system of nationalisation which is where it will end up. The tax burden is much higher now than it’s been for a long time but the perception is often different because of tax credits and other benefits.
No, the tax system, worked and works, it was slightly anorchistic and thats why it cahnged so radically, it will swing back the way, soon enough.
Remember, tyhe whole point anout HMIT is not to raise money for the government but to keep an otherwise unemployable miscreants off the street, I know, i was one.
When the energy utilities, rail, etc were publicly owned they cost less to consumers – no need to generate an ever greater profits for owners, no need to subsidise the contractors to ensure they provide a service (like now with the railways).
Under capitalism you have speculatively driven commodity price rises – as we’ve seen over the last year. In other words, price rises have not been linked to actual scarcity but rather perceived future scarcity. Or to put it bluntly, shameless profiteering…
Under socialism costs can be determed by counting labour in terms of hours and intensity, raw materials consumed in the production process, etc. Boom and bust can be avoided – unnatural economic crises would not occur because the economy would be planned in a democratic fashion.
Now imagine if we had to pay for more things ourselve – like healthcare (the propaganda in the US is that the NHS is “socialised medicine” which sounds a bit like socialist medicine, whatever that might be). So taxes could be cut – but there would be an illusion that we’d be better off. Are the American people happy with their free market healthcare system? Not those millions going without healthcare…
Incidentally, I’m not sure what you mean by communism. Do you mean it like in the technical sense – a classless stateless society existing far in the future, perhaps never – or as in one party state, planning by bureaucrats, as typified by the USSR? I certainly don’t want a system of planning by bureaucrats here in England, I’d like to see workplace democracy – which would unlock tacit knowledge and increase efficiency.