Living with Calcutta’s record low temperatures

3 March 2013 Last updated at 00:03  By Rahul Tandon BBC News, Calcutta

‘Dressing for the cold has become a major talking point in Calcutta, where the temperatures are the lowest for a century. One piece of cold-weather gear appears to be de rigueur in this city – the monkey hat.’

Climate advocate Mike Hulme from the CRU, in 1997, edited a book, ‘Climates of the British Isles’ along with Elaine Barrow, also of the CRU…with contributions from many scientists including Phil Jones.

It was dedicated to…

Professor H.H. Lamb, Founder and Director of the Climate Research Unit, 1972-1978.

This is what Prof. Lamb said in 1972:

‘A new ice age is creeping over the Northern hemisphere, and the rest of this century will grow colder, a British expert on climate has claimed.
Prof. Hubert Lamb, director of climate research at the University of East Anglia, had a few comforting thoughts in an interview Sunday:
“The full impact of the new Ice Age will not be upon us for another 10,000 years and even then it will not be as severe as the last great glacial period.
“We are past the best of the interglacial period which happened between 7,000 and 3,000 years ago,” he continued.  “Ever since then we have been on a downhill float regarding temperature.  There maybe a few upward fluctuations from time to time but these are more than offset by the general downward trend..”
Lamb said temperatures had been slowly dipping for the last 20 years.
“We are on a definite downhill course for the next two centuries,” he declared.  “The last 20 years of this century will be progressively colder.  After that the climate may warm up again but only for a short period of decades.”
Lamb said climate  changes come in cycles determined by astronomical and physical factors.  He said one main cause is the amount of radiation received from the sun.
“We know that the behaviour of the sun changes at intervals and these changes have their effect,” he said. “The distance between the earth and the sun also varies through the ages as the earth’s orbit increases or decreases its elliptical path.  The tilting of the earth as it rotates round its own axis also makes the polar ice cap grow, and this effects the air masses around it.”
The last great ice age took place about 60,000 years ago and was the sixth over a period of a bout a million years.  The great ice sheets covered most of the British isles and in America covered what are now new York City, Cincinnati, St. Louis and Kansas City.  The ice was at least 5,000 feet thick.
“I don’t think it will be quite as serious this time,” Lamb said.  “But there will be a lot of glaciers on high ground which do  not exist at present.”’

In 1997  MIke Hulme said this in ‘Climates of the British Isles’:

‘There is a danger that this recent political concern about climate change and its impacts bestows on climate an unwarranted importance as an agent that shapes our lives.

Many studies of the possible impact of future climate change seem, implicitly, to elevate climate to being the major factor that will influence future human activity and welfare.  Little attention is paid to whether or not climate is the main driving factor behind observed changes in such [activities].  Even if recognised explicitly that other factors are involved these are so unpredictable that climate often retains the appearance of being the main controlling factor. [Factors such as Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy for instance]

It only takes a simple thought experiment to realise that other considerations, too, will swamp the effects of climate change on future human and animal welfare…..war, technology, demographics, disease.

To assess the true significance of climate change it must be evaluated against changes that will occur due to other environmental constraints and social constructs.’

I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions as to the significance of either statement….but both bring into question the BBC’s attitude towards climate change…and whether or not any dissenting voices are to be allowed to question the ‘consensus’ on  what the BBC has decided is its own private media platform.

Mark Mardell continues his unrequited love affair with Obama.

The BBC love Baroness Williams. Shirl the Pearl is a regular feature on their political programmes, and she was on Today this morning just before 9am. The item was about disaffection  within mainstream politics across Europe and the BBC flagged up how this had manifested itself across the EU, from Golden Dawn in Greece to UKIP in the UK. Yeah, I know. And just in case there was any residual doubt about the set up nature of this item, Williams was then allowed to venomously castigate UKIP without counter, dismissing those who support that party as “people wanting to live in the past. ”  

The BBC continues its war against the ‘Tory led Coalition’ with yet more invented crises of ‘NHS privatisation’ or specious connections to disasters in the NHS and government ‘cuts’.

The first example is from R4’s ‘You and Yours’ with Winifred Robinson demanding to know if NHS nurses, sponsored by medical manufacturers, are making unnecessary prescriptions to meet the sponsoring company’s targets making NHS costs shoot up.

Unfortunately either the BBC failed to do its research or its determination to dig some dirt on the Government blinded it to the truth.

You can hear that Robinson is absolutely willing the blame to be put onto the private companies but as you hear a senior nurse explaining what is happening it turns out that there aren’t targets, that hospitals are visited by the sponsoring company’s, and others, sales reps, who of course attempt to sell their product but do not have any power to pressure nursing staff into prescribing more….for one thing the prescribing is done by GPs not nurses (ChrisH in comments advises some nurses can prescribe…my mistake…I listened at 23 mins 30 sec where mentions nurses only advise GP on patient needs and GP then prescribes….not the whole picture obviously)

The story of stealth privatisation and rising costs was almost entirely fabricated by the BBC.

A second story conflates two different things in an attempt to damn the government.

A recent survey of hospital staff says many would not recommend the hospitals in which they work to their own relatives to be treated in.

The BBC happily makes the connection between that and low staff morale with mythical Tory led ‘cuts’ in the NHS.

Firstly there are no ‘cuts’ in the NHS…there is a rebalancing of the budget with resources reallocated to different parts of the NHS to ensure high priority commitments are met…but the budget remains the same.

Labour spent £100 billion on the NHS…..and yet thousands died as a result of bad treatment and neglect…..was that a result of ‘cuts’?

Here Tony Livesey, (52 mins in ) sitting in for Shelagh Fogarty, claims that the survey is an ‘absolutely damning indictment’ of the NHS (under the Tories)…before bringing in a health union spokeswoman to give us her considered opinion. No need to wonder what the line was.…a massively pressured financial situation…staff shortages due to cuts.

Unfortunately, for the BBC’s agenda,  Livesey unwittingly brought on a patient, Dan Sencier, who had cancer and had been badly treated by the NHS which, in his own health area, seemed determined not to treat him losing his notes, not replying to letters and emails and removing him from their patient list when he wrote to complain.  He was diagnosed with cancer on the 8th June 2010.…hmmmm…those Tory led ‘cuts’ had a pretty quick effect no?

Eventually he came up with a solution…to ‘shop around’ for the best NHS service available to him.…..when he said this Livesey jumped in and diverted away.…why might he do that?

Shopping around is of course the Tory led Government’s  policy for freedom of choice in the NHS enabling you to assess which hospital can give you the best treatment and allowing you to go there.

And that’s exactly what happened…..this is nothing to do with budget or nursing….just poor admin and NHS bureaucracy……but that doesn’t make for much of a story for the BBC……and look how old Dan Sencier’s story is…..the Daily Mail reported it in 2011…so why has the BBC dug up his story now to illustrate the current state of the NHS?  Are there no more recent stories?

The BBC’s  two stories……. no more than Labour Party propaganda dressed up as journalism.

It does seem Dan Sencier is unlucky with admin….his cancer may be gone but this has got to hurt:
‘I continue at University, now in my third year, but not without problems. Due to a cock up in the admin I was missed out of the students who are allowed access to the main media web site. This meant that I’ve completed 2 years without key information that was available to all other students in my year group. The enquiry is still ongoing, but it looks like I will be doing a fourth year (fully funded) to complete the media module. I don’t mind too much, I love it there and the people are great, so what’s another year? ‘

The BBC’s film ‘Madness in the Desert: Paris to Dakar’  is a fine example of how to make a pig’s ear out of a silk purse….a  race that has all the adventure, drama and excitement that any film maker could ask for turns out to be a dreary, dull and tedious affair in the hands of the BBC.

One thing though that did catch my attention was this phrase from the introduction:

‘How the West took on the continent of Africa and lost.’

That simple phrase captures in one telling comment the BBC’s world view.  It encapsulates everything that drives how the BBC presents the world to its viewers and the pleasure it takes in seeing ‘The West’ ‘defeated’.

The BBC uses ‘The West’ in much the same way as anti-Semites use ‘The Jews’…it is a term loaded with negative, pejorative meanings and references.

For the BBC ‘The West’ is a Society that is guilty for existing, guilty for being successful, guilty for being progressive, inventive and productive.
The BBC likes nothing better than to see what it calls ‘The West’ apparently humiliated and defeated by less sophisticated, backward societies much as George Galloway gloried in the brave Iraqi  rebel rabble waving only their AK47s in the face of Allied tanks and jets encouraging them to kill British soldiers:
‘These poor Iraqis — ragged people, with their sandals, with their Kalashnikovs, with the lightest and most basic of weapons are writing the names of their cities and towns in the stars, with 145 military operations every day, which has made the country ungovernable by the people who occupy it.’

Such a way of looking at the world and ‘The West’ colours how the BBC reports just about every major political, social or cultural event from immigration, Islam, Europe, the British Empire, climate change and the economy…and of course Israel.

‘The West’ is essentially at heart bad, exploiting, oppressing and harming the rest of the World…both the population and the environment.…whilst ‘The Rest’ are either noble savages or brave, admirable peasants grinding out an existence in the face of not just a harsh natural environment but also rapacious Western businesses and governments.

But it raises a couple of questions….what exactly is ‘The West’ and is it really ‘bad’?

Is ‘The West’ a physical place, or a cultural, scientific, industrial depository, is it more an idea, a philosophy than a place or a people…that is, is it more somewhere that values and upholds intangibles such as Liberty, freedom of speech, a particular legal structure, mass education and Democracy?

Is there any such place as ‘The West’ because in reality isn’t such a creature the result of a long period of amalgamating ideas, science, culture and political thought from around the world from every culture?  Such a coalescence may have reached a tipping point in Europe but such ideas and industries that resulted soon spread around the world so much so that it must be almost impossible to define what ‘The West’ is in any meaningful way…unless you are the BBC and use it in a pejorative fashion to mean any country with a white population.
Look at the Dakar Race.….I have never once looked at that and thought there goes ‘The West’.  For the BBC it represents everything it believes the West does…an industrialised, inhuman machine riding roughshod over the lives of hapless native cultures.
But most of the vehicles are probably Japanese or even Korean, running on fuel and oils produced by Middle Eastern countries, riding on tyres made from Far Eastern rubber…competitors themselves come from every country around the world.

Is Japan ‘The West’, or Korea, or Taiwan or China, or Brazil, as they adopt the same industrial and economic policies and slowly move towards political and social ideologies that might be termed ‘enlightened’?

‘The West’ means one thing for the BBC…an Anglo-Saxon, white male using military, industrial, or economic power to exploit and control other Peoples.  There is no upside to having ‘the West’ move into town in the simplistic ideology of the BBC.

Perhaps the BBC might like to reflect on the Rawandans, Black on Black,  slaughtering each other with machetes, knives, clubs and fire.

Or Islam…for one thousand years it has condemned the lands and Peoples it conquered and colonised to a cultural and scientific Dark Ages.…a desert not just of sand but of ideas and technological progress.

The British Empire brought Democracy and the Railway, two civilising features that allow any society to develop and prosper with the rule of law and a transport system to faciliate industry.

Hurrah for ‘The West’.

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian thinks we might be better served by people who had a clearer idea of what British, and world, history was and how it effects us now:

The reason I like Gove’s history curriculum is not just that it seems perfectly sensible but that its narrative holds the key to making pupils argue about the past and thus the present.

The BBC would not then be able to peddle its  propaganda quite so easily to a knowledgeable and more sceptical audience.

Friday arrives and so does this brand new post Eastleigh post papal resignation Open Thread. The floor is yours.

Well then, the Lib Dems narrowly hold on to Eastleigh, with UKIP coming second. The Cons are relegated to third. So a humiliation for Cameron. Or so the BBC has been running all morning.  But there was another major party in this election, erm…can’t quite remember what happened to it, can you? Think they had a comedian as their candidate but again not sure as BBC studiously avoiding any analysis of THAT party! Anyone heard Ed Balls on the BBC this morning? Thought not.

Were your family ‘slave owners’?

On Wednesday the BBC gave publicity to a divisive and dangerous project that seems to have a very specific agenda….hunting down the descendants of long dead slave owners with the intent of publicly shaming and villifying them and shaking them down for cash.

“The most surprising thing is how embedded the whole slavery business is in British society.”

‘Today’ also ran an interview…..This project is not just a chat about History….this has a hidden agenda….just follow the money.

“What we have done is to establish the life-trajectories of some 3,000 absentee slave-owners in Britain, and analysis of this has allowed us to trace the legacies of slave-ownership in Victorian Britain.”

For the descendants of slave owners that means: ‘We know where you live and we’re coming for you!’

and especially him:

‘Other famous names who were distantly related to people involved in the slave trade include the Prime Minister, David Cameron.’

The BBC couldn’t resist mentioning his name.

Whilst there might have been a case for the actual slaves to have been recompensed in some manner that cannot possibly be applied to a world that has moved on 200  years.

Slavery was legal and accepted, if morally questionable, in previous eras…just as many other acts were…..it seems purely a highly politicised and singular attempt to raise this subject that would, if successful, have every man and his dog combing history for an ‘injustice’ and a lawyer to claim on it.

Will the Egyptians be paying off the Israelites for enslaving them?  Will the Spanish be handing back the value of the gold they plundered from the Americas?  Will the Greeks cough up for the destruction of Persepolis by Alexander? Can the Scots claim for the Highland clearances?

This is a money making piece of ‘moral’ blackmail in essence that the BBC is giving airtime to.

Ironically on the same day the BBC publishes this article on Witch hunts:

“Witchcraft is very closely related to  envy,” says Professor Lyndal Roper, of the University of Oxford

It seems the same conditions apply when hunting down descendants of slave owners….the politics of envy….if these people are ‘rich’ it must have been through the use of slaves by their forebears….therefore they ‘owe’  what might be called ‘blood money’.

In other words an invented grievance and connection to the past to justify a spot of blackmail.

The witch hunt article is of course intended to be seen as a parable for our own times and the religious conflicts we see now inside our borders….instead of irrational witch hunts we have ‘Islamophobia’ demonising Muslims, in the BBC’s opinion….however it seems appropriate to suggest that demonisation of entirely innocent people whose only ‘fault’ is to be a descendant of a slave owner is in the making and the BBC is a willing partner.

In the 1640s, East Anglia was mired in the kind of religious conflict in which witch-hunts can thrive – when opposing beliefs could readily be equated with heresy or evil.

There were pockets of Catholic practice as well as areas of intense Puritanism, creating a climate of paranoia and fear….The conditions required for a witch-hunt may be extreme but in the religious and social conflict of East Anglia during the English Civil War, Hopkins and Stearne found exactly that – a perfect storm which bore them through the region on a wave of paranoia, grievance and zeal.

The only people who should feel shame are the people who run this project and those in the BBC who endorse it.

John Humphrys was interviewing Andrew Simms from the New Economic Foundation on Today…no indication at all as to the political ‘leanings’ of this mob despite the fact that they are  a radical, extremist group espousing Marxist economics using the language and symbolism of the Green movement as a ‘Trojan Horse‘.

The NEF is a regular on the BBC:
‘We have just 100 months to act to prevent dangerous climate change, says Andrew Simms. In this week’s Green Room, he outlines plans for a “Green New Deal” that could sort out the pressing problems we have with climate, energy and the financial system.

The answers are going to be economic, political and behavioural. Many countries, not just the UK, are going to need to learn the art of rapid transition. ‘

But rest assured, Simms only wants to help…..

‘The outcomes of our plan, though, are not to be feared.‘

This seems all part of a recent concerted effort by the BBC and friends….regularly giving the oxygen of publicity to these ideas:

The NEF has long advocated a 21 hour week…..and all that paid for by a ‘redistribution of wealth and income’ and more state benefits.

In the Today interview Simms has moderated his demands….as no one would take him seriously before…to just a 4 day week, which he tells us they all work in the Netherlands….except he forgets to mention it is 4 days of 10 hours….in other words the standard 40 hour week.

What sort of lifestyle does Simms expect you to lead on the pay generated by a shorter week?….
‘It’s not only well-paid professionals who can afford to work less. Kathleen Cassidy is a 26-year-old community organiser on a low income who chose to work a 25-hour week. “I didn’t have huge outgoings,” she says. “Rent, food, not much on travel. I’ve never been much of a spendthrift, never really spent on holidays, cars or things like that. It simplifies life, having less money.”’

Sounds more like ‘existence’ than a life.

As said earlier the BBC has had a long relationship with the Marxist NEF….it was one of the groups that attended the infamous CMEP climate seminar in 2006 in which BBC programme makers were persuaded to turn their programmes over to the ‘Cause’ and place climate change references within those programmes in order to try and alter the Public’s perceptions and actions with subliminal messaging.

The NEF, in association with Dr Joe Smith, organiser of that seminar, and the BBC itself also ran the ‘Interdependence Day Project’:

‘Both globalization and global environmental change invite us to extend greatly our notion of who counts in politics. We have arrived at a time that demands change on a similar scale. The carefully marked out boundaries of political community organized around the human members of nation states have begun to break down….in doing so we are forced to revise our notion of who and what needs to be heard in political discourse…..none of us can afford to be too shy in asserting that another world is possible.’

As you can tell the theme of the CMEP seminar is continued here…limiting which ‘voices’ should be heard and campaigning to change the world.

Is that the BBC’s role?  Is it a campaign organisation?

Joe Smith seems to think it is and that he has influenced which direction it takes:

‘For over a decade I have designed and facilitated strategic level seminars aimed at improving coverage of complex environment and development issues, working with the BBC and other partners. This work has been shaped by insights from contemporary social science, and is integral to a programme of action research resulting in academic and policy publications. In the tradition of action research my findings are feeding directly back into decision-making within media and related organisations. The seminars have been publicly credited with catalysing fresh thinking in BBC outputs across platforms and with leading directly to specific and major innovations in programming’

Roger Harrabin showing the incestuously close ties he has with all this bangs the drum:
‘The Interdependence Day project has published the book Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth. A book that the Times called an ace new book and one to perk you up, BBC Environment Analyst Roger Harrabin described as “one of the finest essays I have seen on the predicament we are in”……

Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth? is edited by Andrew Simms of nef and Joe Smith of The Open University.’

Here we see the BBC in action in 2007 after deciding ‘the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus’:

‘Geographer, Joe Smith and Earth scientist, Bob Spicer from the Open University join Quentin to discuss their concept of Interdependence – how our lives and lifestyles are linked to climate change and their ideas on developing workable ways to curb consumption and emissions around the world.’

Quite extraordinary the interconnectedness between the BBC and these campaign groups….Dr Joe Smith is a hard core pro AGW advocate…he is not a ‘disinterested’ scientist…and the NEF is a hardcore left wing group advocating social and economic revolution….in the Stalinist mode but dressed up as concern for the environment.

The close involvement of the BBC with these groups and persons should be raising a few eyebrows…..to have a slight lean to the left in your journalism is one thing, to not only march to the same drum beat but to be beating the drum quite so vigorously is something else altogether.

I think it is something called bias.

Charming piece of pro-Muslim propaganda brought your way by CBBC Newsround;

Non-Muslims are being asked to try wearing a hijab, a type of headscarf, for a day to find out more about why women wear them. World Hijab Day calls on non-Muslim women to try out life under the traditional head scarf. Some people think women should not have to cover their hair or face and think it is unfair because men don’t have to wear them.But for many women around the world, it is an important show of their faith.

Looking forward to CBBC pushing “World Wear a Cross Day” where Non Christians  are encouraged to try out life wearing a crucifix.