And it's still snowing. It was about 20 cm from yesterday afternoon to this morning, and the way its coming down at present suggests I'll have to clear the drive again this evening so Mausi can get in! I somehow doubt I'll get to my language course tonight!

I wonder where the IPCC and EAU, NASA and Greenstrife are actually measuring this Global Warming? Venus perhaps?

Words of Wisdom

Over the years I have had to listen to a variety of 'experts' - usually expensive 'consultants' - telling me that "bigger is better" or talking about "economies of scale" while ignoring the waste that usually arises when organisations get too big. So it is pertinent at present to consider the problems when an organisation becomes to large or answerable only to itself. FIFA is just such an organisation and so is the ICC. Then you have organisations like Greenpeace, Frieds of the Earth and Earth First, to name but a few who feed into the epitome of corrupt and unanswerable organisation - the UN.

The early American President, Thomas Jefferson, had it right when he commented -

Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants, at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite the public agents to corruption, plunder, and waste.

As soon as the 'people' begin to feel they have no voice and no say in the direction or organisation of a state or even a company, they become detached and it isn't long before the functionary begins to feather his or her nest and play the 'rules' to their own advanatge. The chances of being caught are remote - since usually the 'management' have no idea of what is really going on below their ivory tower. Nor do they care, as long as it appears to be operating smoothly and their own expensive tastes and coffers are constantly in receipt of their 'perks.'

If this is true of a single people, connected one to another by language, culture and history, how much truer is it of gigantic multi-national units?

Aristotle noted:

“To the size of a state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and implements, for they can none of them retain their natural facility when too large”.

History has proved his words more than once - and our own age has a long list of proofs -

The UN and all its "agencies"
The EU bureaucracy
Washington's bureaucrats,
Whitehall and its legions,
Beijing and its Central Organisations,
Moscow ...

Revealing the lack of "concensus?"

I finally tracked down an interview on CNN that brings one of the "hide the decline" scientists (Who incidentally is quick to accuse everyone who disagrees with his Man is Causing the Planet to Die view of being in the pay of "Big Oil" while raking in the taxpayers money for their indefensible stance on the leaked emails and other sensational claims for their "models.") up against one of the scientists who disagrees. The sad thing is that the disagree lobby has proof that there is something fishy about the EAU CRU and IPCC claims, but they are being ignored and sidelined by the Greenpeace/Fiends of the Earth controlled "Climate Community."

The claim by the NASA apologist that the "quote 'hide the decline' and 'Nature trick' are taken out of context" is pathetic. I've read the relevant email in full. It is not out of context, it says exactly what they meant. The "Tree Ring Proxies" they had constructed their entire case on, had shown a different trend at an "inconvenient point" and caused the model to show something other than what they were wanting - so the "trick." Simple, exclude the data you don't like and run the model again until it shows what you want to see. Sadly, what no one seems willing to admit is that almost all the "data" they use comes from an ever decreasing number of actual weather monitoring stations, almost all of them in heavily built up areas and therefore subject to background warming from buildings (In one case the exhaust fans from an airconditioning plant for a very large building), tarmac and 'concrete canyons' in which they are located. OK, so they claim they "know" how much extra heat is being measured and compensate for it in their model. Really? How do they do this? With real measurements taken in a more natural setting?

No. They 'calculate' it... Now, I'm no mathematician, but one thing I do know, to make any calculation give an accurate and reliable result, you need all the factors to be accurate measurements - not numbers pulled from thin air...

Worse, they 'interpolate' data to fill in gaps for places they don't have data from directly. So, for a place you may have data showing an upward trend from - say - forty years ago, you average the rise and add this to 'plot' an extension to the graph. This 'extrapolation' of data allows you to fill in the gaps, but it is, at best, a good guess, not fact or 'hard' data which is what you get from actually going out with the instrument and measuring whatever it is. But in the CRU/Greenpeace world it is taken as fact and tweaked until it shows the 'right' trend. Viola! The upward trend continues, even though it may not be doing anything of the sort in reality at the actual location.

There is quite a discrepancy between the actual surface measurement of temperatures and those taken by satellites (and no one is exactly sure what the satellites are actually measuring) so one set shows a "flat line" since 1998 and the other shows anything but a clear picture of either increase or decline. So the answer for the AGW mob is simple - add in anything which can be claimed to show an "increase" and spin it and hype it up - but watch out the skeptics don't get a chance to show just how unreliable your Bristle Cone Pine Tree Ring evidence is. And when it doesn't do what you want it to show - exclude it.

The climate is changing, it has been since the last Ice Age and yes, it is speeding up slightly, but wedon't know whether this is due to western society's emmissions (Which have been reducing steadily since the 1980s) or to something else. Yes, we do need to keep looking, but if you look a little wider than simply trying to destroy western culture with punitive transport policies, taxation and driving industry abroad so we can all go back to subsistence farming and a pre-industrial culture, you find that before the last Ice Age, the climate warmed suddenly and quickly.

Maybe our early ancestors caused that as well... With Greenpeace's lunatic fringe 'science' I'm sure it won't be long before they 'prove' that in an IPCC report.

Saint Nicolas

Saint Nicholas, Sinta Klaus, Santa Claus, the old Bishop of Smyrna has certainly gathered names and legends, and, sadly, become confused with a number of pagan figures and legends along the way.

Today is his feast day, and the day on which, traditionally, gifts were given and exchanged - until the great captains of commerc discovered the gold mine and turned acts of love and charity into opportunities for excess. Yes, I know, I'm sounding curmudgeonly, and I've no desire to spoil anyone's fun, but I'm getting very tired of the constant attempts at this season to 'take Christ out of Christmas' and replace His feast with "Winterval" or some other meaningless reason to 'celebrate' spending vast amounts of money.

This came home to me last year amid the dire predictions that "High Street Sales figures were down and showed that profits would not recover..." Christmas is not about 'profit' it is about the birth of a baby who, whether you believe the Gospel or not, has shaped the history of the last two thousand years. Even Muslims celebrate His birth, though, in their canon, He is named Isa and rated a mere 'Prophet' - something the Politically Correct ignoramuses of our society do not know - and if they do - don't understand.

So, today, I will remember the real Saint Nicolas, Bishop of Smyrna, benefactor of the poor. His anonymous gifts to those in need are the foundation of our tradition of giving and exchanging gifts with friends and family. Perhaps we should consider a return to a simpler way of marking this season. It might make a difference to the attitudes of the ignorant and the greedy.

Advice to our Leaders...

"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."
- Cicero - 55 BC

Cancun - the desperate dance of lunacy?

I managed to find a copy of the Executive Summary for the Mexican proposals for the latest Anthropomorphic Global Warming funfest. (It's embedded and difficult to read ...) It would be funny if it weren't so serious. Several bloggers have already picked up some of the more extreme utterances and policy demands, and so have a number of the mainstream news media. Several things stand out to me as being the ultimate in lunatic or authoritarian proposals. The debates can be found by following this link. I'm afraid this is little more than the usual "Blame the West; they have to go back to the Stone Age so everyone else can have everything they have at present."

The theme in this summary seems to run to "Since people no longer believe us, we have to take desperate measures and impose our will." Frankly I can't see any democratic government - at least any government that isn't dominated by left-wing "internationalist" champagne socialists living in total isolation from the effects of their decisions - falling for some of these proposals. Mexico falls into a different category, but just looking at their proposal to reduce CO2 output by 50% in an unbelievably short time span, the equivalent of removing all traffic from Mexico City for four and a half years according to their own figures, is not just utterly impractical, it's economic suicide. An item on the Daily Telegraph Blog probably sums this up better than I can even though it is a spoof, it is based on what is actually being said at Cancun...

Then there are proposals for the introduction of rationing (Actually only one complete nutter - but he's a 'scientist'...) of resources to the developed world. I'm sure that's a huge vote winner anywhere that claims to be democratic. In fact the response by a teacher who has had enough is a must read! But it gets better, there's a proposal to forcibly relocate "populations at risk" - a way to overcome the voting problem I suppose, just relocate a whole bunch of people to an area that is resisting the "save the planet" juggernaut in the polls. Of course, what that is also likely to do, since they seem to be admitting at last - at least the Mexicans are - that overpopulation is part of the problem, is simply move the pressure off one ecosystem and push it onto another.

Reading up on archaeological studies of the Pueblo culture in the US, one of the things that killed it off was the ecological change caused by a massive expansion (reatively speaking of course) in the population once they began a settled agricultural life. The farming practices they used, coupled with the need to feed an expanding population and linked with the changing climate as the ice retreated, caused contamination of their water supply, impoverishment of the soils and ended in famine, civil war and ....

Probably more worrying are the hysterical demands from the German Green Party and the former East German Communists, now called "Der Linke" (The Left) for the punishment of scientists who "dare" to question AGW. It suggests that, as usual, the left wing and the ideologically driven fanatics, having failed miserably to convince the populace that they are the "Saviours of the World" are restorting to the usual tactics. If we can't persuade you, we'll bring back the nasty guys in Black Shirts and skull and crossbones badges - and make you do as we demand. Though the German Greens are being public about it, Greenpeace, Fiends of the Earth and all their surrogates and supporters are no less draconian in their visions f the "Utopia" they wish to create - and even less open about it.

I think the blog, Watts Up With That? has possibly the best set of comments and links on this subject.

Personally, I'm enjoying my mini-Ice Age here on my mountain top in Germany...

Working Harder

My language course has finally started. It is putting a new perspective on language learning as the group is about as diverse as you can get! Three from Turkey, two from Afghanistan, one from Kryzkistan, one from Poland, one from the Cote d'Ivoire, one from Kenya, one from the US, one from Colombia, another from Ukraine, a lady from the Czech Republic and myself... All at different levels, with different learning styles and different cultural behaviours.

It is proving interesting and, though challenging, I feel I might be making progress. I guess time will tell...

In the meantime I had better go outside and break up the ice in the water butts and make sure they don't burst. It's currently minus 7*C outside and the wind is getting up from the North - not a good sign. More snow is predicted for tonight and I'll post a picture when I get around to downloading the camera!