Recent Comments

 

These are some comments U have made on various sites:
If the alarmists truthfully believed a word of their alarmist story they would be begging for the building of many new nuclear plants since this is the only way to seriously cut CO2 (wind by comparison barely does anything).
They don’t proving they know it is a total and deliberate lie intended to promote their and government’s parasitism. http://www.johnredwoodsdiary.com/2011/09/20/a-question-for-mr-huhne/#comment-63461
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Harmless Sky on the BBC "Science Policy review"
Altho, as you say, only a few pages are devoted specifically to warming it is clear that is the entire point of having this.
I put in a submission to Professor Jones on the subject of BBC re reporting of nuclear power. It didn’t even get the courtesy of a dishonest dismissal in writing that yours did and I can’t say that was a surprise.
However the conclusions of his report, if taken as the serious consideration of science coverage in general, as it claims to be, rather than a warmist defence, would have a major effect on their reporting of nuclear power.
He concludes that the BBC should only report the “consensus” particularly the consensus of “experts” employed in the business – ie “climate scientists” for warming..
However in the nuclear industry all nuclear engineers employed by the industry without, so far as I know, any exception acknowledge that nuclear power is the safest, most reliable, least polluting and at least in engineering costs, least expensive way of producing power. Indeed I would be prepared to guess that at least “97%” of all qualified engineers across the board willing to express an opinion would say that. You really have to go to “independent experts” employed by Greenpeace and the like or wholly ignorant politicians to hear different.
Of course the BBC have always gone to such “independent experts” and politicians first and even when a real expert is asked they always “balance” it with someone of that ilk.
However if the Jones “review of science coverage” were honestly about science coverage they would now have to be considerably less willing to interview anti-nuclearists than they are catastrophic warming sceptics, since we sceptics do, at worst, represent a serious part of the scientific community (including Nobel Physics winners) and the alarmist “science”us not within orders of magnitude as well tested as nuclear engineering.
Of course that would only apply if prof Jones and the BBC staff, management and assorted hangers on were something other than 100% (… snip …) with a £140,000 piece of anti-science propaganda (… snip – see blog rules …) that serves the politicians.
. So far no change at all in BBC nuclear science coverage.
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Next Big Future on a Siberia/Alaska tunnel
High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) power line.This can move electricity thousands of KMs with relatively low loses and could be the start of a worldwide grid. Electricity prices vary massively worldwide(in China and Russia it seems to be about 1/4 of ours) and are a key factor in growth.
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On the Adam Smith Institute energy discussion
Low price elasticity tends to mean the product is a necessity or that it is cheap. Possibly energy isn't cheap compared to history, since government is busy pushing up the price. However both of these suggest that energy availability is indeed central to economic success and that the correlation of 10% annual growth in electricity supply and in GNP demonstrated over the last 30 years in China could be replicated here if the government would allow it. Conversely that their policy of making electricity ever more expensive is certain to prevent us getting out of recession.
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David Friedman on global warming
There is one way we can be effectively certain of a benefit. Increasing CO2 has a measured effect on plant growth
http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/00-077.htm
This has already increased growth 25%, altho the rate of of increase is starting to tail off. This is highly beneficial to everything that eats food which includes not only us but the entire biosphere the "environmentalists" claim to care about.
A subsequent comment gave this important observation
"World agriculture production is 6% of world GDP. World GDP is about 60T dollars. So CO2 production has increased just the agriculture portion of world GDP by around half a trillion dollars a year. Thats a massive effect."
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Martin Findlay on how winning in Libya will mean oil prices fall
had we not decided to replace Gaddafi with an unstable mixture of his ex-intelligence chief (who would have had to run the Lockerbie bombing in Libya was involved), people who haven't lived there for decades and our former and future al Quaeda allies (one of whom we apparently rendited to Gaddaffi who wasn't smart or brutal enough to kill him), the oil price would never have gone up in the first place.
On the other hand these televised gladiatorial games with the lives of far away people are useful for distracting the plebeians.
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Douglas Carswell says competing currencies should be allowed
I assume that competing currencies would include currencies issued by non-state organisations such as the IMF, Santander, Barclays, Paypal, BT, Orange, you and me. If so I see where you are going and so long as nobody is forced to take any of it and the laws are strong enough against forgery, I agree.
It would reduce the parasitic power of the state and end inflation.
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Spiked article making fun of politically approved writers doing short stories promoting warming alarmism
All one can say, indeed all one ought to waste time saying, is that all those authors from Margaret Atwood to David Mitchell are deluded. The evidence that we are not experiencing catastrophic warming is as unequivocal as that which says we are not experiencing an ice age.
The green lobby have been proven liars time after time and nobody can honestly claim to believe a word they say.
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John Redwood stresses the importance of inequality but
John, in this thread you seem to have accepted the “left’s definition of poverty. Poverty used to be & properly still is lack of money or income. The “left” has redefined it as income inequality. Thus, by their definition North Korea and Cuba have less “poverty” than South Korea and Hong Kong because although people are starving there almost everybody is starving so nobody is “poor”.
A job of government should be reducing poverty by allowing increase of national wealth. ANYBODY, including Guardianistas who says this should take 2nd (or later) place to reducing inequality is, by definition, opposing reducing poverty. The “right” should not be browbeaten into accepting this Newspeak definition of the word and should make it quite clear that we, not they, are opposed to real poverty.
The evidence is quite unequivocal that economic freedom, including freedom in energy production, leads to wealth and state interference, to produce equality or otherwise, tends to reduce this. An extra 1% growth will, in not many years, give even the poorest, more money than any practical redistribution could.
Whether, or rather how much, it is the state’s duty to reduce income inequality is an arguable question. Machiavelli and many other historical thinkers were of the opinion that gross income inequality tends to produce a less effective society (eg the later Roman Empire). On the other hand few have said that total equality is either possible or desirable. Pournelle is clearly right to point out the ultimate dichotomy of what state power used for this objective could achieve – “Free men are not equal and equal men are not free.
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EU Referendum on our corrupt media
I think you are optimistic to think that modern western societies, not being technically totalitarian, are marginally less likely to fall for state propaganda than in Hitler's day. It may well be that the pure amount of centralised "news" we get and the power and immediacy of TV images are much more effective than anything available to Adolf, or Joe.
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Al Fin - can the scientific method be restored
Probably the first such in the modern strain of perversions of science was when the bureaucrats produced the Linear no Threshold (LNT) theory of radiation damage because it made it easy to produce regulations without knowing anything more than arithmetic. With a few years it had become "official" and is now OFFICIAL, without any evidence, indeed against both previous theory (that the dose makes the poison) or evidence (there is massive evidence that at low levels, ie anything well above Fukushima, radiation is beneficial).
There are a number of other cases in which the scientific process has given way to "post-normal science", including catastrophic warming but that is, I believe, the first modern one and the most destructive. World electricity production being 40% and thus GNP under 50% of what it would have been had the geometric growth in nuclear plants not been halted..

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