Rigging the debate

One of the explanations for the unseemly rush to get the Waxman-Markey Bill through Congress is that the warmists are on the back foot. The global warming tide is shifting against them and, before too long, their creed will be consigned to the dustbin of history as yet another of those mad obsessions that periodically grip the masses.

This is certainly the view of the Wall Street Journal which notes with approval how the Australian Senate is giving Kevin Rudd's version of a climate change law a very hard time. Furthermore, it observes, Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public scepticism; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day.

The response of the warmists, however, is nothing if not predictable. Having controlled the agenda for so long, their reaction to the changing tide is to rig the debate, closing down on dissenting voices and suppressing alternative views.

One element of this strategy is recorded by Booker in today's column, where he describes the concerted efforts of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) to prevent one of the world's leading experts on polar bears attending a meeting because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.

The group is meeting in Copenhagen under the aegis of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission, set up – as Booker puts it- "to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming," one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN's major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December.

The excluded expert is Dr Mitchell Taylor who has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. His problem is that, more than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.

To add to his litany of sins, while Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years, he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.

Thus Dr Taylor has been told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – are "inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG".

This is but one example of how the warmists control the agenda, another being offered by Watts up with that, which catalogues measures taken by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to suppress dissident voices within its own organisation.

None of this could happen, of course, without the active participation of the media and, in his second piece, Booker refers to Lord Hunt, who last week "made one of the most absurd claims that can ever have been uttered by a British minister."

Solemnly reported by the media, Booker writes, he said that by 2020 he hopes to see thousands more wind turbines round Britain's coasts, capable of producing "25 gigawatts (GW)" of electricity, enough to meet "more than a quarter of the UK's electricity needs".

Hunt's ideas are so patently absurd that, had a minister announced that the UK was about to launch a series of manned space shots to the moon to mine green cheese in order to solve the global protein shortage, there would be little to compare between the two.

Booker notes though that perhaps the most disturbing point is that the media dutifully reported Lord Hunt's absurd claims without asking any of the elementary questions that could have revealed that he was talking utter nonsense. One cannot of course expect Opposition MPs to take an intelligent interest in such matters, he writes, but if journalists allow ministers to get away with talking such tosh, the slide into unreality can only continue.

This is a broader point that deserves more attention, touching on an effect we see in defence and elsewhere. The media – as a collective – has its own narratives and as long as an utterance fits with those narratives, it is given an airing. That which goes against the grain is buried.

Currently, the media narrative on climate change is that global warming is real and represents a major threat to the planet and humankind. Similarly, all the woes in the military stem from "under-resourcing" and all problems in Afghanistan will be solved by more "boots on the ground". Thus is the debate rigged, through which means our decline into obscurity, poverty and impotence is managed.

COMMENT THREAD

On another planet

For three years running, the met office have been forecasting warmer than average summers. The last two have been wet and miserable and despite the current forecast, this summer so far has seen snow on the Pennines in Scotland. Twice this week, we have had the central heating on, it has been so cold.

That has not stopped The Sunday Times publishing a puff for the Met Office on its front page, with the forecast for 2080. The Met Office is predicting Mediterranean-style summers for Devon, a steamy 41°C in London and the southeast, followed by winter storms and floods in northeastern towns such as Hull.

With that sort of garbage polluting the media, it is not surprising that Booker's main piece today is headed "Global warming and a tale of two planets".

For openers, he takes on board the absurd claim by Kofi Annan Ihe of oil for food fame), who would have it that global warming is already "killing 300,000 people a year," noting that the situation looks a little different in the real world.

Global warming, therefore, has become "the tale of two planets". On one planet live all the Great and Good who have recently been trying to whip up an ever greater panic over global warming, as the clock ticks down to next December's UN conference in Copenhagen when they plan a new treaty to follow the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.

On the other planet, where the rest of us live, all the accepted measures of global temperatures show that their trend has been downwards since 2002, declining at a rate that averages to about 0.25 degree per decade.

Yet such a fall was predicted by none of those 25 computer models on which the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the rest of the Great and the Good rely for their theory of runaway global warming. Their computers are programmed to assume that as CO2 goes up, temperatures inevitably follow.

And, despite the ready flow of propaganda to the contrary, the Arctic ice has failed to disappear – in fact, it is not far off its 30-year mean. Al Gore's polar bears have failed to drown.

With just a hint of irony, Booker thus notes that "our own wonderfully sensible and honest MPs" have already passed the Climate Change Act, committing us to restrict our CO2 emissions within 40 years to a level only 20 per cent of where they were in 1990." And, of course, Obama has committed the US to the same.

Since these targets could only be met by closing down our economies, observes Booker, it is hard to know where we will find the money to pay the rest of the world what it is demanding. The real question we must decide in the years ahead is which of these two planets we are actually living on.

Sadly though, as far as the politicians go, we already know the answer.

COMMENT THREAD

It's snowing all over the world

Ice in the Arctic is often twice as thick as expected, report surprised scientists who returned last week from a major scientific expedition. The scientists - a 20-member contingent from Canada, the U.S., Germany, and Italy - spent one month exploring the North Pole as well as never-before measured regions of the Arctic.

Among their findings: Rather than finding newly formed ice to be two metres thick, "we measured ice thickness up to four metres," stated a spokesperson for the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research of the Helmholtz Association, Germany's largest scientific organisation.

Then we get this from the United States: "Sorry, Al Gore, but Public Cares About the Economy, Not Global Warming".

Gallup Poll Editor Frank Newport says he sees no evidence that Al Gore's campaign against global warming is winning. "It's just not caught on," says Newport. "They have failed." Or, more bluntly: "Any measure that we look at shows Al Gore's losing at the moment. The public is just not that concerned." What the public is worried about: the economy.

He adds: "As Al Gore I think would say, the greatest challenge facing humanity . . . has failed to show up in our data."

On the British front, we get reported by The Daily Mail, "Ed Miliband's global warming law 'could cost £20,000 per family'", with a report stating: "Laws aimed at tackling global warming could cost every family in Britain a staggering £20,000 - double the original forecast."

This follows the Met Office forecast for a "warmer than average summer". It has been cold and wet ever since that report – we even had the central heating on here. And skiinfo.com reports, "It's snowing all over the world", even telling us: "Last week of winter in France, but it's still snowing", with the southern hemisphere ski season starting five weeks early.

Sooner or later, even our loathsome media are going to put two and two together. Then, those idiot politicians who have embraced the global warming scam are going to look even more stupid than they do already. The reckoning may be delayed, but it will come.

COMMENT THREAD

The fog of government

Just a quick scan of the "related articles" (left) tells its own story. On the one hand, we are breathlessly told on 18 April that the Antarctic ice sheet could collapse due to global warming. Then, four days later, we get Antarctic ice is growing.

Forget reading the stories – read instead this analysis which charts some of the convoluted arguments ("squirming" would be a better description) as the warmists try to reconcile reality with the precepts of their religion.

All this would be hilarious sport were it not for the fact that this institutionalised stupidity is embedded firmly in government policy to the extent that, yesterday a chancellor confronting the worst financial crisis in living memory – where the policy response screams for cutting public expenditure – decides to commit additional public expenditure to the moonshine that is global warming.

It would be comforting to think that this fundamental stupidity was confined merely to embracing the dogma of "climate change" but it is not. The only constant in government, it seems, is its endless capacity to make stupid decisions and then, having made them, to repeat them again and again.

The interesting thing (from an analytical point of view) is that the same dynamic pervades at all levels of government, across the board, irrespective of the subject matter.

Thus, the crass stupidity of pumping money into massively expensive and highly inefficient offshore wind farms is in exactly the same league as buying inadequately protected military vehicles and then bolting on increasing amounts of armour in the vain hope of somehow making them better.

In each case, the context may be different but what binds them together is the common factor – that degree of crass stupidity which to an outsider is so patently obvious that one is left staggered that sentient human beings could actually be engaged in such fatuous behaviour.

So consistent is this dynamic that one is thus left to speculate that there must be a grand law of the universe that dictates that governments must behave in such a manner. In anything, the pattern is such that behaviour can only be characterised at two levels – NLOI and RBS.

It would seem that the default value is very much NLOI - "normal level of incompetence". But the second law of the universe would seem to dictate that, as time progresses, governments naturally gravitate to the higher RBS level - "rank bloody stupidity". And, with yesterday's budget, we have arrived there with a vengeance.

This would also seem to explain the dynamics of political change. As a government rises to the upper tiers of RBS, an opposition party afflicted merely by NLOI begins to look distinctly attractive and then increasingly electable. Thus does it assume office until, with the passage of time, it too develops an incurable case of RBS and has to be replaced.

The development of these states could be regarded as all part of the "fog of government", although we are perhaps seeing some changes in the cycle, but only to the extent that the interval between NLOI and RBS seems to be shortening. Arguably, RBS is now becoming the default value and we are having to look to graduations in this state in order to discriminate between the different contenders for office.

There are, however – rather unfortunately – two other driving laws of the universe. The first is that stupid people and institutions can never recognise their own stupidity. Secondly, both intensely resent being called stupid, and deny such a charge emphatically. This means that there can be no corrective mechanism within the ranks of government.

All that brings us to the final immutable law of the universe. Eventually, we have to rise up and shoot them all, in order to restore the NLOI to its rightful place. Unfortunately, that happy state still seems to be somewhat distant which means that, for the time being, the stupid will inherit the earth … or, at least, the government.

COMMENT THREAD

The appliance of science?

If there were any more evidence needed that we are plummeting into a new age of unreason, Reuters has managed to supply if for us.

Having conducted a bizarre poll, which flies in the face of observed evidence, it is reporting that global warming "is likely to overshoot a 2 degrees Celsius rise", a level "seen by the European Union and many developing nations as a trigger for dangerous change.

This stunning piece of "evidence" comes from a "Reuters poll of scientists" where nine of 11 experts, who were among authors of the final summary by the 2007 IPCC report also said the evidence that mankind was to blame for climate change had grown stronger in the past two years.

The agency has thus – amongst other things – demonstrated that, if you ask eleven people who believe mankind is to blame for climate change, in the context of them seeing growing public scepticism, at least nine of them will tell you that the evidence to support their belief system has grown stronger. The other two said it was uchanged.

They will also tell you that summer ice in the Arctic is going to melt faster, that there will be a quicker rise in sea levels and, doubtless if it furthered the cause, that the moon was made of green cheese.

The Reuters exercise, incidentally, was carried out as officials from 175 nations were meeting in Bonn for 11 days of negotiations lasting until 8 April in an attempt to stitch up a deal for the Kyoto treaty replacement, due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December.

But, hilariously (not), the agency sent five questions to 35 IPCC authors and got 11 replies. Thus, its real tally is not nine out of 11 but nine out of 35. Nevertheless, this was good enough for a shock headline, repeated by newspapers and broadcast media throughout the world.

And upon this rock of fatuity founders the last vestiges of rationality in our society. Science we have no longer – just belief systems. But, as the sun continues to show an unusual quiescence, these people are on increasingly thin ice.

COMMENT THREAD

You can't just ignore it

Once upon a time, they used to have men who followed up the horses, shovelling up the droppings – for use elsewhere. With the advent of technology, however, this noble profession was thought to have disappeared.

In fact, the breed is alive and kicking. The practitioners simply moved on to become environmental journalists, depositing their garnerings in the media rather than on compost heaps.

Thus do we see a vivid illustration today with Louise Gray’s finest droppings, delivered fresh and warm for our morning delectation.

One can only admire her dedication. She has happily scooped up with her own bare hands David Pollard of Pennsylvania State University – who has dumped in Nature magazine. He has used computer models to simulate Antarctic ice sheet variations over the past five million years. Ah … computer models.

With these wondrous devices, we now learn that "climate change" could melt the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. But … wait for it (a long time) … these computer models show "it is a distinct possibility but it is not going to happen in the next hundred years it will happen over thousands of years".

Nothing, though can possibly compare with Pollard's blind adherence to his creed. "[But] it is something to be concerned about," he cautions. "You cannot just ignore it because it is happening in thousands of years time."

Right! One can just see the panic in the streets … "the ice is going to melt in a thousand years time!", the crowds shriek. Maidens swoon, grown men weep and they have emergency debates in parliament. Meanwhile, Louise Gray and her cohorts continue to scoop up the droppings …

COMMENT THREAD

Just go away …

Polar bears will not survive without action to tackle climate change and save their rapidly disappearing Arctic habitat, conservationists have warned – so says The Daily Telegraph website today.

Now read your own newspaper: "The polar bear is being used to spur the world to take drastic action against climate change. Facts derail this call to arms. This is the climate change scare writ small.

In the 1960s, there were probably 5,000 polar bears around the globe. Forty years later - thanks largely to a reduction in hunting - the World Conservation Union (IUCN) counts five-times that many.

The world's 25,000 polar bears live in 20 distinct populations. Two populations are growing. Most are stable. Just two are waning.

The declining populations are in areas that have gotten colder over the past 50 years. The habitats of the two thriving groups have actually become warmer."

COMMENT THREAD

The fall of Rome?

Was it the case that most of the great buildings in Rome were constructed after the empire had gone into decline?

If so, there may be hope for us yet. The city of Brussels, we are told, has given the go-ahead for a major facelift of the city's European quarter, which is dominated by EU office blocks. The project aims to mix shops, housing and public spaces with new office buildings, to inject some charm into what has been called an "urban ghetto".

The chosen proposal, put together by a multinational team led by French architect Christian de Portzamparc, will create a "symbolic area for the EU institutions," giving "body and soul to the European political project" and providing the Commission with much-needed office space.

One dreads to think what something that give "body and soul to the European political project" would look like ... something between the wilderness of Antarctica and the deeper reaches of hell? As for injecting "charm" into anything to do with the EU, that is rather like investing in a facelift for a crocodile.

COMMENT THREAD

In need of pity

It was in late January that Booker picked up on the ongoing saga of the "incredible warming Antarctic", the warmists' answer to the previous obstinacy of that region to conform with the creed that requires that we should all fry unless we reduce our carbon emissions.

Notwithstanding that the original figures were, shall we say, the mother of all inventions, extrapolating limited data from a few ground stations to provide "data infill" of the areas not covered, it now appears that even those data were flawed.

Courtesy of Watts up with that and diverse posts on Steve McIntyre's Cimate Audit, there unravels a tale so convoluted as to defy easy description. But it all points to the single observation – that the temperature data on which the original warmist claims were based rely on unreliable sensors. They are not worth the snow they were buried in.

The broader point, however, is that while the findings from the Watts/McIntyre duo – with their expert readers - are hugely entertaining and provide yet more evidence that the warmists are a bunch of charlatans, they will make no difference at all to the warmist creed and will have no affect whatsoever on the body politic.

The problem is that while the warmists jibber about the science being "settled", this is not about science. We are talking here about the scare dynamic, a social phenomenon which obeys its own rules, where science takes the back seat. It provides merely a patina of authenticity to confirm that which the warmists hold, with or without the science.

Such is the nature of the dynamic that the belief comes first and the "science" is then cherry-picked (and distorted) to provide the evidence to support the belief. And, in the nature of things, any "inconvenient truths" are automatically discarded. Watts and McIntyre fall into that category.

Thus, we get one of the High Priests of the belief system UN Sec Gen Ban Ki-moon, preening himself in New Delhi today at the start of a three-day conference on – you guessed it – "sustainable development".

Oblivious to the shaky foundation on which his belief system is based – and entirely uncaring – he trots out the same old mantras, telling us that that "failure to tackle climate change will lead to major economic upheaval".

"Deserts are spreading. Water scarcity is increasing. Tropical forests are shrinking. Our once prolific fisheries are in danger of collapse," he intones. "Failure to combat climate change will increase poverty and hardship. It will destabilise economies, breed insecurity in many countries and undermine our goals for sustainable development."

All this, of course, is bullshit. Credo in unum deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae ..., he might just as well have chanted, only his "god" is global warming, the god above all gods to which the whole of mankind must be subservient.

The problem is, of course, that you cannot deal with other peoples' belief systems by rational argument – or by other means. The Romans tried those, as did many after them, and look where that got them.

Oddly enough, the death of religion is not persecution – faith is strongest where there are attempts to suppress it - but indifference… and scorn. Few faiths survive both, and the latter is perhaps in this case more powerful. We should not resent the warmists, or fight them. We should pity them, in the same way one would the village idiot, for the delusions in which they are trapped, hoping that one day they are cured of their afflictions.

The nightmare is, of course, the damage these people are doing while in the grip of their delusions, which they inflict on all of us. But the derision of the crowd will eventually get through. These people need our pity. We should not stint in giving it to them.

COMMENT THREAD

The last hurrah?

The warmists are getting desperate. As their edifice of "global warming" crumbles like ice sheets calving in the summer, they have gathered their forces and summoned up the remaining tatters of their credibility, assaulting what they feel an insult to their creed – the obstinate refusal of the Antarctic to warm up.

As recorded by Booker today, they have secreted a "paper" into their propaganda sheet, the Nature magazine, claiming that, contrary to all previous evidence, Antarctica is indeed warming up,

In a carefully planned coup, they then spread their tidings of joy to the believers through their media groupies in the BBC and elsewhere. The news had Newsweek's Sharon Begley, whooping with joy, crowing that this would really be one in the eye for the "deniers" and "contrarians".

The study, however, from a team led by Professor Eric Steig, immediately began to attract a good deal of attention from real experts. They quickly found that the conclusions had been produced by yet another a computer model. This one relied on combining the satellite evidence since 1979 with temperature readings from surface weather stations.

The problem the Steigists were confronting was the irritating shortage of weather stations in Antarctica. But, with their magic computer, using an equally mysterious formula, they have conjured up "estimates" to fill in the blanks left by the missing stations. By this magical, mystery process they have managed to show that, if there had been ground stations present, they would have shown that the continent was warming and not cooling – thereby completely contradicting the real data produced by satellite.

Even then, they are struggling, their alchemy stopping short of producing huge leaps. All they have managed to do is come up with a 50-years increase of just one degree Fahrenheit, smaller than the margin of error which they allocate to their own work.

But, while they have been able to rely on their media groupies to lap it up, they have not been able to convince their own. One of the first to express astonishment was Dr Kenneth Trenberth, a senior scientist with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a convinced believer. He wryly observed "it is hard to make data where none exists".

Actually, it isn't – not when one of your team is Michael Mann, author of the infamous "hockey stick", someone who has made a career out of inventing and then manipulating data. He is the "scientist" who, at the behest of the IPCC, managed to lose the Mediaeval Warm Period.

Another disbelieving scientist is Ross Hayes, an atmospheric scientist who has often visited the Antarctic for Nasa. He sent Professor Steig a caustic email ending: "with statistics you can make numbers go to any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage."

The fact, though – says Booker, that Dr Mann is again behind the new study on Antarctica is, alas, all part of an ongoing pattern. But this will not prevent the paper being cited ad nauseam by everyone from the BBC to Al Gore, when he shortly addresses the US Senate and carries on advising President Obama behind the scenes on how to roll back that "spectre of a warming planet".

Therein lies the problem. Idiot politicians unthinkingly imbibe a creed, the scientific credentials of which wouldn't even pass muster amid a gang of Druids praying to their sun god, or whatever it is they do. Until these politicians finally wake up to how they have been duped, what threatens to become the most costly flight from reality in history will continue to roll remorselessly on its way.

If they do not, of course, the tumbrels will roll. That, on the face of it, might even be preferable.

COMMENT THREAD

Now it's our turn!

Front page of The Daily Express (pictured) has a banner proclaiming: "Global Warming: What planet are they on?"

This leads you to an inside-page story headed: "The big chill that is here to stay," telling us that Britain's Arctic start to 2009 "showed no sign of abating yesterday as much of the UK was gripped by a mini ice-age." It goes on to tell us that temperatures in some parts of the country were predicted to plunge to a bone-chilling -10C last night with the sub-zero temperatures set to last for much of the week.

We are then told that the winter of 1962-1963 was the coldest in England and Wales since 1740, but "forecasters already predict this January chill could rival that." Last night the Met Office warned temperatures would plummet to -10C in Scotland with the rest of Britain set to shiver through temperatures little warmer than that.

And then we come to the killer line: "The freezing weather," says the paper, "has called into question the notion of global warming."

This line brought our local BBC radio station into the fray, Radio Leeds, which invited me to do a two-hander slot with a rabid warmist from Leeds University (introduced at the last minute, so I didn't catch his name).

Tackling the subject now is really great fun, taunting the warmists. It's the adult equivalent of pulling the wings off flies and watching them desperately buzzing around. "It's weather, not climate," they splutter.

And, of course it is. But hey! Whenever it gets hot, the warmists are right there, preaching their creed of doom. Now it's our turn!

COMMENT THREAD

Booker – part 2

The column is finally up, with part 2 here - more than twelve hours late, and only after a telephoned reminder. You do really wonder what the website managers think they are doing. Anyhow, you can read it off the link, and enjoy the photograph.

Meanwhile, even the BBC has noticed that it is snowing in North America – and not a word about global warming! Canada is also getting hit and Reuters is reporting on the snow and freezing conditions in China. Greater Kashmir is also having a hard time.

However, never fear, the New Scientist is telling us that the "Arctic melt [is] 20 years ahead of climate models", with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado claiming that the Arctic has reached a "tipping point" - a dramatic and irreversible slide towards ice-free conditions.

The warmists, therefore, can sleep easily in their beds, in the certain knowledge that their religion is safe - while the rest of us freeze.

COMMENT THREAD

This ain't just "weather"

This is the scene this morning … the third snowfall so far this winter, and the worst early December snows in living memory.

Of course, it's only happening in Yorkshire and the North, so, despite it causing absolute chaos it isn't really happening at all. From his nice warm studio in London, Jon Humphries was thus able cheerily to dismiss the "weather" with the quick one-liner, "There's been some snow, but it will clear later" - the classic "London-centric" view.

The point is that, not only is this unprecedented, we predicted it – based on our own personal "climate model". For all the zillions spent on the official models though, none of them did – and neither are the "warmists" at all keen to draw attention to the current state of the Arctic sea ice (below) which is well ahead of last year.


We have charted the emergence of what is quite clearly a global cooling trend on this blog (google "snow" on our dedicated search engine, top-left) and also noted how the "warmist" twitterers have been banging on about ski resorts going out of business because of the lack of snow (they are enjoying a record early season) and the "green Christmas" with the leaves still on the trees because of global warming.

With the Climate Act, as we must now call it, on the statute book, history will doubtless show this to be one of the greatest acts of folly ever perpetrated by our legislators, and another example of the great "disconnect" between our political classes and the rest of the nation.

Out and about this morning, taking photographs of our new ice age (more on EU Ref 2 here), I exchanged merry words with a lady who was taking her dog out for a walk. One mention of "global warming" had her exploding into derision, storming: "They do talk a load of rubbish, don't they!"

This is indeed another sign of that "disconnect" that even Prof King noticed, something which the denizens of the Westminster bubble can't even begin to take on board. They're losing it - to say nothing of the "colleagues" - and they haven't even begun to understand why.

COMMENT THREAD

From outside the bubble

Waking this morning to a coating of snow, with the central heating thermostat control jammed up against the stops in an attempt to ward off the Arctic chill, one greets the news that the great Lord Turner is happily warning us of increased fuel bills to ward off "global warming" with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

A mere 200 miles from London, it really is a different world here, and the further news that, last week, the Climate Change Bill received Royal Assent and thus becomes law of the land, is greeted with a certain amount of incredulity, inviting shakes of the head and a bemused expression normally reserved for the actions of a lunatic.

Incidentally, if you look carefully at the right hand side of the picture – of a not untypical Bradford back street – you will see two old fridges dumped outside one of the houses. We have one of them in our road as well. They are a standard part of the street furniture round here – the Council won't take them away and no one is prepared to pay the small fortune needed to get rid of them.

Mind you, this is a neighbourhood which – away from the frenetic, self-serving bubble of Westminster, and the squawks of indignation at the treatment of Mr Green – rather enjoys the prospect of an MP's pad being turned over by the Old Bill. Most of us here have enjoyed the attentions of Yorkshire's finest and it is nice to see our elected representatives sharing our pain.

Should Green ever be banged up, the most probable reaction will be to ask when the other 600 or so will join him. You will not get any complaints here if the whole damn lot of them are locked up, much less any accusations of a police state, with Stalin-like tendencies. Only the "poofters daan Sarf" expect their police to be anything other than thugs in uniform - and even the dustmen seem better dressed.

Something of this is undoubtedly reflected in the ComRes poll conducted for The Independent. This puts the Tories on 37 percent and Labour on 36, with the Lib-Dems on 17. These figures, we are told, would give Gordon Brown an overall majority of 10 if repeated at a general election.

This, of course, is a rogue poll. Of course it is. But, a week ago, we were suggesting that Labour's pre-budget report might play better with the lower orders – the ignorati as we put it – than the clever-dick chatterati were prepared to admit.

Needless to say, we were shouted down, but an interesting facet of this current "rogue" poll is a strong surge in Labour support among the bottom social group. The DE group has risen from 35 to 51 percent over the past month while Tory support among the same group has dropped from 39 to 25. Labour's backing among C2 skilled manual workers has grown from 23 to 35 percent.

Perhaps significantly, even if it is a rogue poll, the number of "natural Tories" who intend to support their party has also fallen from 95 to 91 percent. And the Tory cause won't have been helped by the appearance of the well-groomed Tory Boy Christopher Galley on the telly last night – so confident of his "cause" that he remained silent and allowed his highly-paid lawyer Neil O'May to do his talking for him.

Thus it was his lawyer who told the world – or that small bit of it that could be bothered to watch – that the information leaked by Galley was "important for the public to know in an open and democratic parliamentary system." We are also pleased to learn that "as a shadow minister for immigration and as a Member of Parliament, Damian Green received the information in the same spirit and used it in his parliamentary duties." And the other one has bells on.

Up here in the sticks, though, we don't understand such subtleties. We ain't clever like what all these other bloggers are, having "lost our marbles" long ago. However, it may come as a shock to them that all the pub-goers see here, as they stand outside in the freezing cold to smoke their fags, is another "Tory prat" getting his comeuppance.

But then, it really is a different world 200 miles outside the bubble. Little Galley's lawyer yesterday burbled about his leaking being a case of "don't shoot the messenger". Here, we're not leaking – just pissed off. And it looks like, according to this totally rogue poll which don't mean nuffink, that the messengers here and elsewhere are shooting back.

COMMENT THREAD

Greenie screams

Eat your hearts out greenies! Whatever you do, do not attempt to recycle them.

With the collapse of the China market for our rubbish, The Sunday Telegraph is telling us that Hertfordshire county council has withdrawn a scheme that allowed residents to recycle everyday items like yoghurt pots, margarine tubs and other types of plastic packaging. It has now become uneconomical to do so. The items will now go into landfill sites and the council has asked residents to avoid buying products with too much plastic packaging.

This is thought to be the first case of a local authority scrapping a recycling scheme but "industry experts" now fear more could follow suit. Worried that this will put additional strain on the remaining landfill system, the Local Government Association (LGA) is writing to all councils urging them to resist the temptation to divert recyclable rubbish into landfill.

Dozens of councils and their contractors, says The Telegraph are understood to have already started storing waste, although few have publicly admitted it, fearing it could undermine public support for recycling schemes. In Oxfordshire, we are told, plastic bottles and card are piling up in depots.

Then we have Community Waste, in Milton Keynes, which works as a contractor for a number of councils. Its director, Richard Cutts said: "The situation is extremely serious. Few realise just how serious." He adds: "We are continuing to recycle rather than store 2,000 tonnes of waste a week – and that is costing us £70 a tonne. Obviously, we cannot continue to do that forever." Looks as if the man will have to make some Cutts.

But "chickens coming home to roost", hardly begins to describe it. Soon enough we will be getting pictures of thousands of tons of waste material stacked up on disused military airfields, and another greenie myth will have bitten the dust. If they are lucky, the stinking mounds will be covered by snow, while we send them all the greenies off to the Arctic to rescue whales trapped by the ice that was not supposed to be there.

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Reality bites again

There is an air of unreality about politics at the moment, which makes it difficult to focus, not least because what goes on in Parliament (and the EU for that matter) seems to have no relationship with what is going on in the real world.

The one thing the politicians do not seem to be able to do, however, is look out of the window, physically or metaphorically. They are trapped in their own little bubble, entirely unable to see what is happening outside.

Looking though my own window this morning, past the denuded trees, bereft of leaves, at a cold, grey sky, one could detect a couple of flurries of snow, while the biting wind on the way to the paper shop told its own story.

That much is confirmed by the media, which is running a spread of stories about the expected "Arctic blast", not least The Independent which is telling us that blizzard conditions and freezing temperatures are predicted to envelope much of Scotland and England.

Several weather warnings are in place and motoring organisations have warned that the snowy conditions could create hazardous driving conditions on the roads. Snow, we are told, was already falling at 10am this morning in parts of eastern Scotland and north east England as the weather front moved in from the Arctic.

What, of course, is missing is any triumphal gloating about "global cooling" – a remarkable omission when the "warmist" tendencies in the media normally on to any unusual weather event to illustrate that we are all going to fry.

But what I am particularly enjoying is the report in the online edition of The Daily Telegraph which tells us that the winter has already arrived and temperatures have plunged below freezing.

Wasn't this the same paper that told us a month ago that, because of global warming, green Christmas was more likely than a white one? It quoted Dr Tim Sparks, a climate change specialist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, saying the warmer winter months mean children have little hope of seeing snow on Christmas day. He added: "I would put money on a green Christmas rather than a white Christmas this year."

Interestingly, The Independent is telling us that bookmakers William Hill have reported record betting levels on a white Christmas. They have cuts the odds on snow falling on Christmas Day in London from 8/1 to 6/1 and Glasgow is now as short as 7/2.

William Hill spokesman Rupert Adams says: "We have never had so much money in the book with over a month to go. If it snows we will be paying out millions to our customers."

Looks like Dr Sparks, "climate change specialist", might lose his money.

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There's no business like snow business

Published by Canada.com is a jolly little tale about how the EU has taken it upon itself to declare the Arctic region part of Europe's "immediate vicinity" and thus invite itself as a party to talks over the future of polar exploitation.

Even though the commission concedes that the European Union has "no direct coastline on the Arctic Ocean", having decided on this fabled, "immediate vicinity" status, it is thus proposing that all nations which do actually have direct coastlines should conform with "binding international standards" to govern offshore oil extraction. And, of course, the EU should have a hand in framing those "standards".

This move, says Canada.com (rather appropriately under the circumstances) is likely to prompt "a cold stare" from Canada and some other polar nations. But, undeterred, the Commission has still gone ahead an issued a report asserting its growing interest in the natural resources and environmental health of "the rapidly melting Arctic Ocean".

This, the commission proudly declares, its "first step towards and EU Arctic Policy", which it believes is "an important contribution to implementing the Integrated Maritime Policy for the EU."

To that effect, it has identified three main "policy objectives", which are: protecting and preserving the Arctic in unison with its population (presumably the polar bears); promoting sustainable use of resources; and contributing to "enhanced Arctic multilateral governance".

To bolster its claims to being a party to this "enhanced Arctic multilateral governance", it has opened a "thematic website", which proudly offers an "action plan" for the "EU and the Arctic region".

There, it tells us that the EU is inextricably linked to the Arctic Region (hereafter referred to as the Arctic) by a unique combination of history, geography, economy and scientific achievements. Three member states - Denmark (Greenland), Finland and Sweden - have territories in the Arctic. Two other Arctic states - Iceland and Norway - are members of the European Economic Area. Furthermore, Canada, Russia and the United States are strategic partners of the EU.

The problem for the ever-ambitious EU is that Finland and Sweden, as well as the EU-associated "economic partner" Iceland do not have Arctic Ocean coastlines. Those three nations were not invited to attend a Greenland summit in May that resulted in the five-nation Ilulissat Declaration - an explicit rejection of any new multilateral frameworks for governing future economic activity in the Arctic.

While noting that Canada and the four other signatories to the Ilulissat Declaration have committed to the "orderly settlement of any overlapping claims" in the Arctic, the commission's report pointedly states that "since then, several of them have announced steps extending or affirming their national jurisdiction and strengthening their Arctic presence."

This, of course, simply will not do for the commission. National jurisdiction, as we all know, is an anathema to the EU, not least because, "Climate change might bring increased productivity in some fish stocks and changes in spatial distributions of others."

Even worse, "New areas may become attractive for fishing with increased access due to reduced sea ice coverage. For some of the Arctic high seas waters there is not yet an international conservation and management regime in place." This, the commission says, with more than a hint of desperation, "might lead to unregulated fisheries." You can sense rather than see the stress on the word "unregulated", the ultimate of all horrors.

One is almost tempted to snigger quietly at the back of the room at the chutzpah of these people, except they are serious. They will keep plugging away in the hope that they wear down the other players and eventually get their way.

However, since much of the new EU policy is predicated on the premise that there is that "rapidly melting Arctic Ocean", perhaps someone might do them a favour and take the commission for a trip into the ice fields and show them what we can all see from the satellite pics – that the Arctic Ocean ain't melting.

Whoever does this kind deed, though, would do us all an even greater favour by leaving them all there.

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March of the morons

The latest daily arctic sea ice extent chart from IJIS (above) shows the current year ice extent at the highest level in the record back to 2002. It is 7.4 percent greater than the same time last year, 44 days before the official start of the northern hemisphere winter and five months before the ice peak (click the pic to enlarge).

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, you moron.

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An Almighty sense of humour

As Booker suggests in his column today, the Almighty must have a sense of humour. Only He could arrange, so fortuitously, for it to snow last Tuesday while MPs spent yet another six hours discussing what is potentially the most expensive single piece of legislation ever put through Parliament … on global warming.

There is no point in going through the debate – the die is cast. Nor is there much point going through the comments on the online edition of the Booker column. There are some good, some bad. All of them are wearily familiar. We have long got past the stage where there is any dialogue (if there ever was). The protagonists have taken their positions and are talking past each other, while the MPs have already made their decision, locked as they are in their tiny self-referential bubble.

But this was also the week, Booker notes, that one of the few specific policy commitments made by would-be president Obama is that he will support last year's ruling by the Supreme Court that the US Environmental Protection Agency should treat CO2 as a "pollutant" under the Clean Air Act.

He writes that the gas that no plant can survive without, and hence all higher forms of life depend on, would be regulated as if it were as dangerous as arsenic or sulphuric acid. Obama also supports a US version of the EU's "carbon trading" scheme, costed at hundreds of billions of dollars. It seems the global warming scare may soon become as crippling to the world's richest economy as anything our own politicians are hell-bent on imposing here.

And this is the man that would be president.

However, this was also the same week - as reported on the admirable Watts Up With That - that nearly 180 places in the US, from Alaska to Alabama, have just recorded their coldest October temperatures or heaviest October snowfalls on record, based on figures from the National Climate Data Center.

It was also the week that we saw Arctic ice continue to rebound and, as significantly, the worst snowstorm in living memory … in Tibet.

Lhunze, the worst-hit region, we are told, had 36 consecutive hours of snowfall from 26 October, causing an average snow cover of five feet. It was reported to be over ten feet thick in some places. "It was the heaviest snow I've ever seen and the snowstorm was totally unexpected," said the Tibetan woman."

Among the 2,158 known stranded, 1,892 had been rescued and evacuated to safe areas, with soldiers, government staff and other rescuers still struggling to evacuate the remaining trapped people. Local meteorologists said the snowstorm was rare in history for the region.

The bad weather in the region is a re-run of last March, at the tail end of winter. This time we have seen it earlier and harder, boding ill for the rest of the season.

Writes Booker, "Declining global temperatures continue to make a mockery of those computer model projections on which the whole global warming scare is based," – his conclusion: "As I have asked before, has there ever in history been such a collective flight from reality?"

If Tibet is a foretaste of reality, the serried ranks of MPs in their centrally-heated debating chamber - prattling on about global warming while it snowed outside - may prove to be one of those historical moments ranking alongside the supposed cry of Marie Antoinette, calling for the starving peasants to eat cake.

They too will need a sense of humour as the tumbrels come to collect them.

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Told you so!

The British snow has struck! The story (and pic) is in The Daily Telegraph.

Forecasters, we are told, are blaming a change in wind direction for the wintry spell with Arctic gusts replacing the mild south-west Atlantic breezes enjoyed in recent weeks. I am truly amazed they haven't put it down to global warming.

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