Leverhulme is a £50m charitable trust which supposedly fosters academic work. But like so many such bodies, it long since decided that AGW was a certainty, and in 2008 held a symposium on the theme. The blurb declared:
The anthropogenic forcing of climate will be one of the major issues faced by Human society over the rest of this century.
And last year, according to its annual report, one of its main grants went to a no-doubt delighted Dr Ings, who is researching the impact of hot winters (like this year?) on bumble bees in deepest Somerset:
The buzz of foraging bumblebees is a quintessential sound of summer, yet since the 1990s the familiar buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) has been observed visiting garden flowersin the depths of winter!
Well golly gosh. Almost poetic, and hold the front page; no doubt his work will fit in neatly (so that he can keep that grant money coming) with the latest warmist contortionist back-somersault pronouncements from the Postdam Climate Institute about cold winters, that they are definitively caused by global warming. Warming, it has now been established by these gurus, causes extreme cooling, and warming, and cooler warmer winters. All, of course, at the same time in our headlong, unstoppable rush to climate change doom.
So what’s the relevance of this to the BBC? Well, this morning, the website has a prominent story (front page when I looked) about a grant being awarded by the Trust to investigate the log books of discovery and whaling voyages to the Arctic in past centuries. The purpose, of course, in line with the blinkered science which the trust pursues, is already decided, namely “to see if they shed light on climate change”. Dr Wheeler, the very happy and newly enriched research director says:
“The Arctic environmentally is a hugely important area, but we need to know how it’s behaved in the past in order that we can assess how it’s going to behave in the future. You can’t look forward without looking back. This is no longer just a scientific issue – climate change is of global, political concern.”
So that’s it then: what we have is an overtly political exercise paid for by a warmist trust to confirm warmist objectives. All very cosy. And why do the BBC publicise it? Why is it remotely a news story? Dozens of research grants are awarded every day and this is a tiddler in comparison to many of them. Well, could it be that Sir Michael Perry, the chairman of the Leverhulme Trust, has worked for the BBC World Service (already a full advocate of the warmist cause), and also because anything to do with global warming is pushed as hard as possible by the BBC? Even when it’s a non-story.
Everywhere you look on the topic of AGW reveals deeper and deeper links between the BBC and the warmist cause.
Climate myths: Warming will cause an ice age in Europe 17:00 16 May 2007 “While the rest of Earth swelters, might Europe and parts of North America freeze? This scenario was always unlikely, and the latest findings largely rule it out.”http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11838-climate-myths-warming-will-cause-an-ice-age-in-europe.html
I wonder if the BBC will tell us about this little piece of news which is mentioned in the Wall Street Journal here http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703814804576035801933155700.html?mod=WSJEUROPE_hpp_MIDDLESecondStories to the effect that the Spanish government plans to cut subsidies for solar power and institutional investors in the CAGW scam are beginning to panic (H/T Duff & Nonsense http://duffandnonsense.typepad.com/duff_nonsense/2010/12/anyone-know-the-spanish-for-sucker.html ).
Clichéed I know but you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.
Whats that sound I hear? Could it be the sound of the BBC pension fund circling the toilet bowl like last nights bad curry?
Laugh? It warms my heart no end to thinkl that the fraudsters who pimped the raddled old crack whore called CAGW will suffer in the pocket book for it, its called natural justice 😉 .
It’s not just institutional investors who are at risk of losing, many ordinary Spaniards invested their savings, such as for their pensions, in these schemes. They were, from the investor’s point of view, an excellent investment, or so it seemed. Surely it is unseemly to gloat at their loss for purely political reasons when they were simply trying to ensure they had an income in their old age?
One doesn’t have to disbelieve AGW to see that a scheme that produces electricity at 10 times the conventional cost is going to end in tears. It’s a non-starter regardless of the science.
You are of course very correct, the scandal is how CAGW has encouraged gigantic fraud and misapropriation of vital resources, I can suspect and admit that some part of CAGW theory could be correct but I cannot accept or forgive the ruthless cunning of carpet baggers and big money in taking advantage of the theory for their own ends.
Many rich people are making big money, many small ordinary people are going to pay the price, the rich and powerful who have conspired to rip us all off, for what? How much money and power is enough? How can these people live with themselves knowing the crippling damage they are doing?
Wheeler’s project at University of Sunderland has been going for at least 14 months. Previous reports indicated that to date no clear evidence of global warming has been found among the digitised ships weather records studied.
I am suspicious of the BBC’s resurrection of this story at this point.
Have they found some novel way to “interpret” or “adjust” the data in the study in order to keep the AGW hypothesis alive through the cold winter ?
Dr. Ings is going to look pretty stupid foraging among the snow drifts looking for bumble bees.
http://webspace.qmul.ac.uk/tcings/
His research is to last 3 years. Last winter was freezing, this winter is freezing. No doubt he has his fingers crossed that next winter is going be mild enough to prove his ” more bees in winter due to global warming” theory
Leverhulme have got “form” on So-called Climate Change:
“Northern watershed ecosystem response to climate change (NORTH-WATCH). Dr Doerthe Tetzlaff, University of Aberdeen, was awarded an International Network grant in November 2008; providing £122,620 over three years”
You get the picture. Pointless charitable Trust left over from the will of Lever Brothers, soapflakes for the masses. Committee of second division no-bodys agonise over piffling amounts to give keep one pointless academic in a job for three years, who needs to find projects for his pointless students.
Eventually the pointless project will confirm our fears that we are all doomed, but that more research is needed on pinpointing exactly how doomed we are.
As soon as the academic files his interim findings, hold the front page, “new study finds we are all doomed”. Millions of pounds worth of propaganda milked from a trivial investment in scaremongering.
How do we tell Leverhulme to “go poke it”? You can’t Its a Chariddeee, answerable to no-one but its trustees. Including its Beeb-bot. Everyone a snout in the trough, whilst our electricity bills are now 1/3drd Green Taxes.
“The natural sciences have terms for that kind of hypothesis. ‘Unfalsifiable’ is one of them. ‘Unscientific’ is another. An idea may be true, but if it is incapable of being ‘falsified’ or proven wrong, then whatever else that idea is, it certainly isn’t science.”
Sums it up I would say.
Here is the definition of a scientific theory.
“A scientific theory is a deductive statement accepted by a recognized element of the scientific community, and that represents the only possible conclusion of a thorough, rigorous, and disciplined series of scientific testings of successive critically reasoned hypotheses. A scientific theory is often a set of statements that collectively describe how one facet of the universe works. Unlike common theories, scientific theories must be:
1. consistent with all existing scientific laws and constants;
2. consistent with, and supported by, all reproducible scientific observations and experimental results; and
3. self consistent – that is, it does not contradict itself in any way.”
Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_makes_a_theory_a_scientific_theory#ixzz193Z9LDnJ
The key is number 3. What we have now with AGW is many theories rolled into one and all of them contradicting each other.
The same people would laugh at creationism, saying that it is “unfalsifiable”, yet they don’t see the stupidity of their exagerated claims based on a trace gas in the atmosphere