Climate Assembly UK
By Paul Homewood
We saw this coming a few months ago:
Climate Assembly UK has 110 members selected through a process known as ‘sortition’ or a ‘civic lottery’ to be representative of the UK population. They include include engineers, health workers, parents and grandparents.
By Paul Homewood
This week’s climate hysteria concerns “dramatic” soil erosion in the Lake District!
The Lake District is suffering from soil erosion at a "dramatic rate" and could look very different in 50 years’ time, an academic has warned.
Dr Simon Carr, programme leader for geography at the University of Cumbria, said extreme weather caused by climate change is stripping the fells.
He argues halting grazing by animals would be a good way to restore the land by allowing vegetation to recover.
However, farmers warn a "blanket ban" could lead to food shortages.
Dr Carr, who helped compile the Lake District’s State of the Park plan in 2018, believes droughts followed by devastating storms in the past few years are at the heart of the issue.
He said: "The conditions are absolutely perfect for causing degradation to the landscape.
"They desiccate the peaks, they dry it, they become very breakable and erode very easily when you have a storm.
"It’s taken 10,000 years to create the soils we see in the Lake District, and the rate of loss is really quite dramatic.
"Within a few decades we’re going to see the areas of bare rock we see on the mountains stretching further and further down slope.
"We’re maybe talking about 50 years. It could be less."
Dr Carr said there is "significant evidence" of erosion on the fells amounting to about 3cm (1.2in) per year.
He also pointed to a rise in organic carbon being found in water as a result of peat being washed into rivers, and increased sedimentation being found in lake basins.
The answer "theoretically" would be to stop grazing which would allow vegetation and blanket bog – the "carbon store in the landscape"- to recover and "lock up the water that stops flooding being transferred to the valley bases".
"We see small-scale restoration attempts being undertaken where they just exclude grazing animals and it’s very, very successful", he said.
"But the scale we need to do that on is really quite substantial, and for an area that depends on upland farming that’s never going to be a popular thing to do."
Sarah Chaplain-Bryce, who runs Low Bridge End Farm, near Keswick, has planted a forest in which she plans to graze sheep in an attempt to produce carbon-neutral meat.
She said: "We are absolutely passionate [about the environment] and we don’t fertilise because we’re environmentally driven, but we’ve all got to eat.
"If you take farming away where’s your food going to come from? I don’t think you can have a blanket policy – a one-size-fits-all doesn’t work."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-51183134
So, what about these “droughts and storms” that were supposedly caused by climate change?
By Paul Homewood
h/t Mike Jackson
I mentioned Sherelle Jacobs earlier. This, I believe, is the second sceptical piece in the last couple of weeks:
There is something sinister in the stiff mountain air at Davos this year. As ever, the spectacle is almost burlesque in its grotesqueness: the world’s elite has descended on the luxury ski resort in their private jets to discuss global warming over pan-seared Indonesian soy cutlets cooked by a celebrity vegan chef flown in from Canada. But underneath the seedy hypocrisy lingers an even murkier mendacity: an unthinking consensus on how to “save the planet”.
Take the speech by Greta Thunberg, who rattled off Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change figures pertaining to requisite cuts in carbon emissions. “I’ve been repeating these numbers over and over again,” she droned as gormless CEOs and UN apparatchiks blinked at the hoodie-clad managtivist standing before them, grinding on about missed deadlines and squandered targets.
Greta’s bland, corporate-friendly strategy is intriguing; it reinforces her ruse – that the science is mind-numbingly clear, the necessary actions are unquestionable, and that her task is simply to “continue to repeat” it until we are bored.
Naturally, Donald Trump was having none of it. He let rip at this paper-shufflers’ PR stunt, dismissing the “predictions of the apocalypse” and “prophets of doom”. In his own ham-fisted way, the president was groping at – if not quite grasping – the disconcerting truth. Global warming is happening, but the climate science itself is messy, mystifying and ambivalent; the certainty with which eco-warriors present their case is thus disgracefully dishonest.
The causal links made between global warming and the Australian bushfires is one example. Greta has tweeted her despair at the world’s failure “to make the connection between the climate crisis and extreme weather events and nature disasters like the #AustralianFires”. But the inconvenient truth is that scientists have not definitively linked the bushfires to climate change alone. It may be a factor among many. The Australian Academy of Science itself concedes: “Population growth, climate change, temperature extremes, droughts, storms, wind and floods are intersecting in ways that are difficult to untangle.”
The misleading bushfires rhetoric barely scratches the surface of the problems with this consensus. “We know perfectly well” that humans are behind the heating of the planet, Sir David Attenborough proclaimed in a recent BBC interview: this is now a “crisis moment”. But Sir David’s onomatopoeically crumbly prose can’t distract from the shaky foundations of his apocalyptic assertions.
You don’t need to dispute that man is contributing to global warming to question whether it is healthy to talk about the issue with such unwavering certainty, or to ask whether the situation is so urgent as to require the impoverishment of billions to fix it. Scientists have not indisputably proved that other factors are not also contributing. Studies of the heat going into the oceans by dissenters like the Israeli physicist Nir Shaviv, for example, suggest the Sun has a large effect on climate change. Eco-catastrophists have not credibly invalidated his findings, published in the prestigious Journal of Geophysical Research.
Such uncertainties matter when people are being asked to make vast sacrifices in the name of reaching net zero carbon. All our efforts may not make a difference anyway. But contrary views are not permitted. Some researchers are chilled by the shift from scientific endeavour based on theory and evidence to reliance on IPCC-endorsed predictive modelling. Here the cult of managerialism and the mania of eco-catastrophism have dangerously intersected – as university bureaucrats push for research projects which pull in mouth-watering computer-based investment.
Like Galileo and Descartes on the eve of the Enlightenment, scholars have found subtle ways to dodge the suspicions of inquisitorial reactionaries. They discreetly publish papers without press releases, or with incongruous “eco-consensus” inserts, even though these often jar with their findings.
When did Western civilisation enter this new Dark Age? The creepy scenes of Greta’s machinic protestations at Davos offer a clue. Managerialism, an ideology that has filled the vacuum created by the collapse of communism and post-Seventies disillusionment with market capitalism, infects every corner of society. The twist is that it relies for its survival on the flagrant denial of the chaotic complexity upon which it feeds. It deems that all problems (like all corporations) share more similarities than differences, and can thus be solved through generic, optimised processes.
Thus activists like Greta reduce climate change to a clearly diagnosed illness that can be treated by meeting precise deadlines, while the rest of us pay the bill. And thus our elites – who share the same arrogant belief that we have all the expertise to address the Earth’s intricacies – cravenly refuse to acknowledge anything that throws into doubt established “facts”. Sadly, until the era of managerialism falls in on itself, we are probably stuck.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/23/davos-doom-mongers-herald-new-dark-age-climate-science/
I particularly like this bit, which has rarely been touched upon in the media before:
Here the cult of managerialism and the mania of eco-catastrophism have dangerously intersected – as university bureaucrats push for research projects which pull in mouth-watering computer-based investment.
DOUGLAS MURRAY: Terrifying children with climate propaganda is abuse
By Paul Homewood
Douglas Murray has that awkward trait of telling home truths, even if they are not politically correct, as his latest piece in the Mail shows too well!
Have your children got eco-anxiety? How would you know if they had?
According to a variety of psychologists and psychiatrists, talk of a ‘climate crisis’ has led to an upsurge in young people reporting feelings of anxiety, helplessness and guilt.
The symptoms of this newly coined syndrome are real enough, according to the Royal College of Psychiatrists – and why wouldn’t they be in a world pumped full of one-sided propaganda?
We saw this over Christmas when Channel 4 screened a special edition of Gogglebox called Gogglesprogs, which featured viewers as young as six.
In recent weeks alone, a number of friends have told me of children feeling depressed or listless because they are falling for the lies of these abusers who claim that young people have no chance of ever growing up .
The children were shown watching as the BBC parroted untrue claims by Extinction Rebellion (XR) that ‘scientists say we have only 11 years to act’. And their response was all too understandable.
One child looked especially pained as she counted on her fingers how many years she had left to live and worked out that, according to the BBC, the world could end when she was just 19.
Later, a little boy reacted to the fanatical claims of XR by saying to the viewers: ‘That’s sad. Why did we have to be born at this time?’
They are growing up, of course, in a world where Greta Thunberg is preaching her gospel of imminent hellfire and in which world leaders queue up to approve her message.
Learning The Lessons From The Waroona Bushfires
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dennis Ambler
It has surely now been established beyond any possible doubt the major role that poor fire hazard management has played in the severity of recent Australian bushfires, despite disinformation campaigns from the BBC/Guardian/Met Office.
Back in 2016, a Special Inquiry was held following the catastrophic Waroona bushfire, just south of Perth that year. Their report not only reemphasised the crucial role of controlled burning, but also gives an insight into the evolution of such practices in recent decades:
https://knowledge.aidr.org.au/resources/bushfire-waroona-yarloop-fire-2016/
Below is the key segment of the report. [The data relates to Western Australia, and P&W refers to the Department of Parks and Wildlife].
John Humphrys Wants Us To Stop Flying
By Paul Homewood
John Humphrys wants us all to give up flying:
A new passport has just arrived in the post. I remember my first one, more than half a century ago, almost as clearly as I remember the arrival of my first child — with one big difference.
The baby demanded responsibility. The passport promised freedom. For a scruffy kid who’d never actually ventured ‘abroad’ this majestic blue document with its gold crest meant a new world opening up.
My ambition was to fill its 24 pages with stamps from ever more exotic destinations.
By my late 20s I was a foreign correspondent and within a few years that’s what I had done. I have no such ambitions for the new passport. Exactly the opposite.
In 2018 one in 12 of all international travellers was British. And we do it regardless of the damage to the planet and to our children’s future. The past decade was the hottest on record and we can’t just bleat: ‘Oh, but temperatures fluctuate all the time’
When it expires in ten years I hope its pages will be as nakedly pristine as they are today. My single exception MIGHT be Greece, where my grandchildren live.
The reason? I have given up air travel. I want to save the world from climate change. Greta Thunberg has a competitor. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself. The truth is rather more commonplace — and a great deal more selfish.
Wind Farms Paid £136m To Switch Off Last Year
By Paul Homewood
Wind farms were paid up to £3 million per day to switch off their turbines and not produce electricity last week, The Telegraph can disclose.
Energy firms were handed more than £12 million in compensation following a fault with a major power line carrying electricity to England from turbines in Scotland.
The payouts, which will ultimately be added onto consumer bills, were between 25 per cent and 80 per cent more than the firms, which own giant wind farms in Scotland, would have received had they been producing electricity, according to an analysis of official figures.
Stranded Whales Were Deaf–Raising More Questions Over Wind Farms
By Paul Homewood
h/t HotScot
Are increasing whale beachings due to wind farms?
"It’s too big a risk to assume that these sensitive, magnificent and ancient creatures will adapt to the clumsy experiments of humankind."
As deaf whales are washed ashore in Taiwan, with hearing loss being the ‘primary reason’ for their demise, I ask the question: are stranded British whales and dolphins casualties of the offshore wind industry in this country?
Practically every day brings new reports of stranded whales and dolphins around the British coast, the numbers are on the rise and nobody seems to know why.
Ever expanding wind farms are beginning to dominate our coastal seas.
Is there a link?
I’ve suggested in previous articles that it might be wise, indeed essential, to halt the further proliferation of offshore wind farms until we have safely established whether or not giant fields of humming wind turbines are causing havoc to sound-sensitive marine mammals – but the industry seems to be oblivious to the signs. Something is definitely awry.
“According to research by the CSIP (Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme), whale beachings in the UK rose by 15% in the period 2011 to 2017, a total of 4,896 whales, dolphins and porpoises died. The actual number of deaths is likely to be much higher as not all carcasses are washed ashore.”
With research showing that beached whales were stranded after becoming deaf, it’s surely time to stop the madness and reassess the wind industry.
Damaged hearing – the ‘primary reason’ for the beaching of whales
In April last year, a headline in Taiwan’s Taipei Times read "Beached whales’ hearing badly damaged". Taiwan’s Ocean Conservation Administration (OCA), discovered that scans on beached Pygmy Killer Whales showed abnormal shadows in their middle ears, concluding that it was a loss of hearing that caused them to become stranded. Indeed a beached Pilot whale that survived was placed under observation and was found to be completely deaf; according to observers the whale appeared to be "anxious and unable to swim normally." It was duly noted that "this was the primary reason for its stranding."
The definite cause of the whales’ hearing loss is not known, conservation specialists have suggested that it might have been caused by ‘some disease’. But it has nevertheless led to renewed concerns about the widespread construction of offshore wind farms in Taiwan, and there have been warnings that critically endangered Humpback Dolphins could be wiped out entirely by human activity, including wind farm development, off the coast of the island nation. The Taiwan conservation organisation MFCU said in statement that "the large-scale off-shore wind power plants along the western coast may also threaten the dolphins’ survival due to low-frequency noise by wind turbines".
Full post here.
There may be other possible causes for this apparent rise in whale deafness and beachings. And it may just be an artifact of increased observations.
But I cannot help thinking if that, it was not wind turbines which were responsible, Greenpeace and the rest would have been all over this like a rash by now.
BBC’s Climate Check
By Paul Homewood
We did not have to wait long for the first of the BBC’s monthly Climate Checks, all part of their indoctrination programme for this year:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/51127701
By Paul Homewood
Ross Clark had a sceptical article in the Telegraph the other day, so it is good seeing him follow it up with this in the Spectator.
It is behind a paywall, but you can easily subscribe for 5 free articles a month to read it:
It wasn’t so long ago that Sir David Attenborough came across as a calm voice of reason. His much-admired documentaries touched on environmental issues but were not driven by them; they were not morality plays. But something seems to have got into Sir David. He has become a Greta of the third age.
The rot set in last April when he narrated a programme on climate change which used the same, tired old trick Al Gore has used: running a commentary on climate change against pictures of hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and floods, as if to plant in the viewer the idea that all these events were caused by, and therefore wouldn’t have happened without, climate change.
Clark’s main argument is that Attenborough seems to believe we are helpless in the face of climate change. In reality there are all sorts of things human civilisation can do to mitigate change, climate or otherwise, just as it has managed to do for aeons.
Well worth a read.
It is certainly encouraging to see the beginnings of a fightback against the ultra alarmism propagated the Gretas and Attenboroughs, and enabled by the likes of the BBC.
