Author Archives: Robin Horbury

ENSLAVEMENT

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Be afraid, very afraid. The EU is at it again, warning us this time that we need more action (code more laws, more powers to Brussels) because greedy people are consuming too much and damaging the sacred ‘biodiversity’. It’s all part of the same movement; the Royal Society, cheered on by Richard Black, wants to re-introduce rationing, the EU wants to lock us in a cycle of economic contraction and lights-out poverty that is a thinly-disguised return to the Nazi concept of a lost Aryan paradise. As usual, the blinkered thinking misses the key point that despite all the resources and subsidies thrown at them, the so-called green technologies such as solar panels don’t work. The BBC, of course, pushes the EU propaganda with all its might because it fervently endorses (without a scrap of critical reporting)every step we take towards an EU socialist-fascist superstate. The true nature of EU rule is spelled out by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard here. He outlines with masterly forensic skill how the EU and the euro project have forced Ireland into a servitude – if not enslavement – from which it is unlikely to escape anytime soon.

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TIPPING POINT

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This is getting very tedious, but I simply can’t let this go. I think Richard Black has been hit by that nice Cancun sun because yesterday afternoon, he filed a report detailing at length that “scientists believe” that, because we haven’t stamped down hard enough on CO2 emissions, we are facing almost inevitable temperature rises of four degrees centigrade and we had better get used to it. Such baloney does not deserve any effort of rebuttal, though I would mention this dose of inconvenient realism. His real agenda is not hard to find – he and his greenie chums in the Royal Society (who have been having orgasms over the prospect of those four degrees centigrade as their collective cash balances swell from climate change grants) want deliberate, systematic rationing of the kind imposed in the Second World War, with all the misery that it would entail. This ecofascist nonsense is beneath contempt.

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CANCUN HOT AIR

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As we miserable lot in Blighty shiver and freeze, Richard Black is there at Cancun in the nice 79 degrees heat (no doubt in a luxury hotel) at our expense, complaining plaintively that the talks may be to no avail , but at the same time warning that – because CO2 levels are going to start rising again – we are all in dire danger because of our complacency. He (and/or the story sub)are also concerned to warn us that climate change has already done for the mangroves on the Cancun coast, though how they know that with certainty escapes me.

What Mr Black wilfully ignores is the rather more negative reports about Cancun that are impossible to avoid everywhere on the internet. This editorial, for example, from the Washington Times which says the talks are doomed quite simply because AGW was built on a tissue of lies and scientific twisting. I also spotted this, which nails the central Cancun-IPCC alarmist porkie that sea levels are rising faster than in the past. And finally, it escapes Mr Black that one of the core alarmist prediction of warmists/Met Office/UEA – that snow would become a thing of the past in the UK within a few years – has also rather convincingly been found to be hot air. One of my favourite ladies, Jo Nova nails the UK snow lie admirably.

Enjoy the Cancun sun, Richard, and never let inconvenient truth get in the way of your worldview.

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IS THERE A GOD?

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Shock horror and diddums! The BBC New Yorks studios – along with most of the NY UN rat palace – have an infestation of bed bugs. I’ll refrain from the cheapest gibes, but this makes news, of course, only because it’s the usual BBC self-obsession. But actually, bed bugs are a growing problem across the whole of New York. And what you won’t read or hear on the BBC is that many believe that the real cause is America’s obsession with environmentalism. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned the pesticide DDT in 1972 after Rachel Carson’s book Since Silent Spring falsely claimed it was too dangerous to use. DDT is the most effective weapon against the pesky bedbugs. So cleaners can no longer eradicate them effectively when they are found, and now, after years of gradually building up numbers, they are spreading like wildfire. A good account of the saga is here.

What you won’t also read on the BBC is that DDT is still the most effective treatment against malaria. The greenies have hampered its use in many developing countries and the consequence is millions of deaths. Rachel Carson, the EPA, the tranzis – and the BBC for failing to speak the truth – all have blood on their hands. I won’t say I’m pleased that they are suffering bed bug bites but sometimes I think there is a God.

Update: There are those say that bedbugs miraculously “developed resistance” to DDT before Rachel Carson (econuts have an answer to everything). But if you read this post and its responses, you will see why that’s a load of baloney, too.

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SIZE NINE CARBON FOOTPRINT…

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The central part of BBC reporting of climate change is an unquestioning acceptance of the tenets of the green religion. Here David Shukman – enlarging his size nine BBC carbon footprint with a nice trip to Texas in advance of Cancun – admiringly tells us that there are more wind turbines in the southern state than almost anywhere else. Breathlessly, too, he trots out their output as if, without a doubt, these monstrosities are going to be a replacement for the nasty coal and oil and gas. True, he talks to a few of those who oppose both the turbines and the concept of climate change; but his condescending tone implies strongly that these are right-wing Republican nutters.

I note, too, that Mr Shukman omits key issues which I would have regarded as important in a longer-form background story of this kind. He has not a scintilla of curiosity about whether wind farms are actually efficient, or whether they are – as T.Bone Pickens clearly believes – “green”. Matt Ridley (writer of the book The Rational Optimist) posted on this very issue yesterday, and Mr Shukman, had he been at all objective, could have dug it out. What he says is devastating:

Every wind turbine has a magnet made of a metal called neodymium. There are 2.5 tonnes of it in each of the behemoths that have just gone up to spoil my view in Northumberland. The mining and refining of neodymium is so dirty (involving repeated boiling in acid, with radioactive thorium as a waste product), that only one country does it: China. This year it flexed its trade muscles and briefly stopped exporting neodymium from its inner Mongolian mines. How’s that for dangerous reliance on a volatile foreign supply?

Besides, wind does nothing to reduce carbon emissions. As Robert Bryce shows in his book Power Hungry, even Denmark, which can switch off imported Norwegian hydro power when the wind spins its many turbines, has failed to save any significant net carbon emissions through wind. The intermittent nature of the wind means that fossil-fuel power stations have to be kept going, or inefficiently powered up and down. Besides, the total power produced from even the biggest wind farms is so small that, as a strategy for reducing carbon emissions significantly, wind power is a failure

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This lack of inclusion of such key facts is deliberate bias by omission and shows this story up for what it really is – yet another part of the BBC’s endless no-expense-spared green crusade.

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HOT HARRABIN

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With impeccable timing (cold weather is never “climate” to the BBC, only hot spells are), Roger Harrabin rushes to tell us about the alarmists’ pronouncement that 2010 is on course to be the hottest year ever, ever, ever, in the known history of the universe or anything. In usual lapdog fashion, he recycles the claptrap of the Met Office. Shame he did not pause for a second to look at this alternative view of the stats , or to register that – like everything else from the East Anglia econuts – their presentations are as reliable as a three-card trick huckster. They are so desperate to scare us that any old tosh will do – as this item on Met Office re-writing of statistics also shows (the point here is that the measurements were fine when they supported warmism; a re-write is going on now to make sure they do so again). Mr Harrabin, I note, does mention that sceptics don’t accept the Met Office spin, but the main thrust of the subbing leaves no doubt that the BBC wants us to believe that this is AGW in all its awfulness. The Met Office predictions were in yesterday’s Guardian, and I was half hoping that – for once – he would refrain from his usual alarmist Pavlovian response. I should have known better. And this is his lament that Copenhagen did not reach new binding targets on CO2 emissions.

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BEYOND PARODY

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As several B-BBC readers have pointed out, the BBC has spent countless amounts of our money developing a “carbon footprint calculator” – launched yesterday with the requisite worthy pronouncements about saving the planet – which henceforward all its employeees will have to follow. Not only that, the corporation in its wisdom now plans to foist this smug self-righteousness upon the television industry as a whole. My question is why the hell were the BBC not making such economies of energy use anyway? It’s public money and every penny of usage should be tracked. The need for such measures confirms profligacy, and to cloak them in weasel words and nonsense jargon is simply hypocritical, especially from an organisation that has among the most pampered and well-paid employees in the land.

What’s also terrifying about the footprint nonsense is that it underlines that the BBC is a lead partner in spreading the lies about climate change, and that those lies have infected virtually the whole of industry and the political class. I was at a presentation on Monday at big advertisers Ogilvy and Mather; they have a whole “sustainability” unit that peddles such moonshine among its clients. Yesterday, too, BBC eco alarmist-in-chief Roger Harrabin was busy chairing a conference held by the National Environment Agency (no cuts there, then!) of a whole legion of fellow establishment fanatics, ranging from the Bishop of Liverpool to Caroline Spelman from the government. All of them were intoning with religious fervour that our ways are wicked and that we are damned. If they weren’t gobbling billions of our money in their mad zealotry it would be funny. But it isn’t. It’s beyond parody.

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TORTURE TIME

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As we all shiver in the November cold (remember how, according to the BBC, snow in the UK was going to be a thing of the past?), the impact of the government’s insane climate change measures could not be clearer, as is reported this morning by the Daily Mail. Because of artificially-escalating fuel prices (which madman Huhne seems to want to crow about), 3.5m pensioner households are now forced to spend more than 10% of their income on heating bills, and they are terrified of the cost. Not only that, 25,400 English pensioners died of cold related illnesses in the four offical months of last winter, making our death rate from lack of adequate heating the highest in Europe. It makes my blood boil that such injustices are being perpetrated because our political class have sold out to the global warming lie factory.

In the midst of this Everest of human misery, what does the BBC do? Find evidence to show how insane these policies are? Speak to pensioners to see what sort of pain they are enduring? Ask nutjob Huhne why he persists in his policy of torture? Expose the lies told by the energy companies as they rub their hands in glee at the unqualified permission they have been given to extract the maximum amount of money from the most vulnerable? Er, no. It gives maximum prominence without question to the latest UN fantasy handout about how temperatures are going to rise by four degrees this century. Richard North deftly explains why such nonsense should have been treated with a huge dose of salt and then binned. Note how among the weasel words in the BBC reporting is the implied threat that energy prices and taxes must go even higher than they are now. I weep.

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CARBON PUFF

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What turns my stomach completely about BBC reporting of so-called climate change is that reporters systematically ignore the key issues such as that the rise in fuel prices demanded by eco freaks is causing massive hardship. Meanwhile Richard Black goes on reporting the frenzied but trivial outpourings of the world global warming industry scam – those thousands of “scientists” engaged in alarmist frenzy that are paid by governments, multi-nationals and tranzis to jack up hysteria and pump out lies. Today he is focusing on the fears of the Global Carbon Project that even thought we have had a recession, CO2 emissions have only gone down by “peanuts” (such is the eloquence of these brilliant minds). And as Cancun approaches, he naturally ramps up the solemn GCP prediction on that the “carbon” rise is about to start again (according to the models) condemining us all to certain and imminent blistering, heat exhaustion and, of course, death. Mr Black also blatantly misreports the main point of his story; India and China do not give a stuff about CO2 emissions (which rose by an average of a healthy 7% or so) and are getting on with their main tasks of generating wealth and economic expansion. The horror of Black’s reporting is that he wilfully ignores the elephant in the room: the only way out of poverty is through cheap electricity and power. What the greenies want is the reverse.

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