I am on an assignment in India and blogging will be light for a couple of weeks.
In a rainy and cool Bangalore where I haven’t seen the sun in 4 days — but traffic is horrendous:
New elevated highways provide car parking!!!
Light blogging for 2 weeks
November 30, 2011“the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are” – Alex Kirby BBC environmental correspondent
November 24, 2011As if the lopsided reporting by Roger Harrabin and Richard Black was not bad enough, the email exchange between Phil Jones and Alex Kirby of the BBC puts the BBC’s “impartiality” about global warming firmly in the dock.
Incidentally Kirby’s publicity blurb has this to say about him:
Alex has no scientific education, and is convinced that the widespread distrust and misunderstanding of scientists in industrial societies is a threat to human development.
Alex Kirby
Climategate 2.0 email 4894.txt shows just what Alex Kirby of BBC thinks of climate skeptics as he conveys it to Dr. Phil Jones. Clearly, there an incestuous relationship between climate science and the BBC.
date: Wed Dec 8 08:25:30 2004
from: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.xx.xx>
subject: RE: something on new online.
to: “Alex Kirby” <alex.kirby@bbc.xxx.xx>At 17:27 07/12/2004, you wrote:
Yes, glad you stopped this — I was sent it too, and decided to
spike it without more ado as pure stream-of-consciousness rubbish. I can
well understand your unhappiness at our running the other piece. But we
are constantly being savaged by the loonies for not giving them any
coverage at all, especially as you say with the COP in the offing, and
being the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are, there is an
expectation in some quarters that we will every now and then let them
say something. I hope though that the weight of our coverage makes it
clear that we think they are talking through their hats.
—–Original Message—–Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit
Another gem in the comments by FrancisT reveals that the BBC was in bed with the global warming fanatics but note that Kirby was considered to be not too expensive(!!??)
2011 Email #2403 (1)
Regarding ECF and a media person. You could try Alex Kirby if Roger Harrabin is not free. Joe Smith will have other contacts. The other possibility is for a European link, possibly via a German magazine. Finally, if we try, we could penetrate The Economist as I have contacts there.
2011 Email #3935 (1)1. Media involvement. I would suggest Roger Harrabin might be a better (alternate?) invitee to Alex Kirby. Simon Torok has recently had contact with him about media coverage of Jo’berg and he is also on the Advisory Board of Tyndall.
2011 Email #4028 (1)>> > > phone
>> > > > chat with Alex Kirby, BBC, some time before the conference, where we
>> may2011 Email #4655 (1)
For more mainstream people, I agree that Alex Kirby would make a good job
and is probably first choice. He would certainly come cheaper than Humphreys
Guttenberg buys his way out of prosecution for €20,000
November 24, 2011Paying your favourite charity is apparently sufficient to get German prosecutors to drop prosecution – at least when the offender is zu Guttenberg and the offense is plagiarism.
I had not expected that Germany would still be granting droits de feodalité dominante
Does appear to be “one law for the rich and famous”…
Bavarian aristocrat and former German defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has paid 20,000 euros to avoid prosecution on charges of plagiarism. With the case dismissed, Guttenberg could stage a political comeback.
German authorities have dropped their investigation into plagiarism charges against Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg after the former defense minister agreed to make a donation to a charitable institution.
The public prosecutor’s office said that although 23 passages of Guttenberg’s doctoral thesis possibly violated copyright laws, the monetary damage to the original author was only marginal and Guttenberg had not profited financially.
According to German law, misdemeanor cases can be dismissed if the accused agrees to pay a sum of money, usually to the state or a charitable organization. The court, public prosecutor’s office and the alleged victim all have to agree to the dismissal.
Guttenberg has already wired 20,000 euros ($26,794) to German Cancer Aid, a non-profit organization that supports research into cancer prevention and treatment. The former defense minister can now avoid a criminal record, although the investigation could be resumed if new evidence comes to light.
“It’s a second-rate dismissal, but it’s a dismissal” said Norbert Geis, a legal expert and a parliamentary representative with Guttenberg’s Christian Social Union, a regional ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. ……
Fox News worse than no news! and viewers of The Daily Show are better informed than those of MSNBC
November 24, 2011I am not sure if this says more about those being surveyed or about the media channels or about those doing the surveying! But it should give social psychologists endless opportunities for analysis.
A new survey of New Jersey voters comes to a provocative conclusion: Fox News viewers tend to be less informed about current events than those who don’t watch any news at all.
Perhaps it has to do with New Jersey.
But what may be even more profound is that
On Occupy Wall Street, the survey found viewers of “The Daily Show” were 12 percentage points more likely to say protesters were predominantly Democratic. MSNBC viewers were the most likely to say the protesters were mainly Republicans.
Google abandons its backing of renewable energy
November 23, 2011
Bill Weihl - Google's Green Energy Czar
The “Green Paradigm” is beginning to lose its sheen as realism begins to creep back in. In 2009 Google appointed Bill Weihl as their “Green Energy Czar” and he made a big splash and boasted that within 3 years they would be producing renewable energy cheaper than coal.
He left Google earlier this month.
Reuters reports that Google are abandoning 7 projects including the “Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal” project.
Searchable data base for Climategate 2 emails already online
November 23, 2011I am not quite sure who put this together but its appearance within about 24 hours of the original data dump on a Russian server is pretty impressive.
Climategate 2 | FOIA 2011 Searchable Database
ReadMe:
This website is provided as a research resource for mining the recently leaked climate communications. Every effort has been made to redact personal contact information such as email addresses and telephone numbers. The redaction algorithms are currently tuned to be quite stringent, and they will inadvertantly obfuscate other details as well. We will continue to tune the software to improve the quality of the results.
This database was assembled in a very short space of time, and at present only provides the most rudimentary tools for exploring this vast trove of material. We will be improving the quality of the search tools and adding further metadata to the database over the course of the next few weeks.
The investigative capabilities of the on-line community when engaged is quite formidable (as I have remarked on earlier).
Subsidies for electricity production in the US show that renewables are far from commercialisation
November 23, 2011Data for 2010 is now available from the US Energy Information Administration. Solar and Wind power are still a long way from being commercial with just direct subsidies being equivalent to 7.8 and 5.6 cents/kWh respectively. Indirect subsidies and increased costs for alternate capacity are not included.
My view of subsidies in power generation is that they are usually counter productive and provide windfalls for developers and constructors but rarely lead to benefits for the consumers of electricity.
Factors Affecting Electricity Prices:
The average retail price of electricity in the United States in 2010 was 9.88 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). The average prices by type of utility customer were:
- Residential: 11.6¢ per kWh
- Transportation: 11.0¢ per kWh
- Commercial: 10.3¢ per kWh
- Industrial: 6.8¢ per kWh
Signal received from Phobos Grunt
November 23, 2011On Tuesday, 22 November at 20:25 UT, ESA’s tracking station at Perth, Australia, established contact with Russia’s Phobos-Grunt spacecraft. This was the first signal received on Earth since the Mars mission was launched on 8 November. ESA teams are working closely with engineers in Russia to determine how best to maintain communications with the spacecraft.
Europe has “wasted” €210 billion on carbon trading for almost zero impact
November 23, 2011The Carbon Trading scams around the world are coming undone (though Australia in it’s wisdom and its noble efforts to single-handedly save the world has just introduced a carbon tax). The Swiss Bank, UBS has produced a report for its investors with a devastating indictment about carbon trading “waste” in Europe and its bleak future.
SWISS banking giant UBS says the European Union’s emissions trading scheme has cost the continent’s consumers $287 billion for “almost zero impact” on cutting carbon emissions, and has warned that the EU’s carbon pricing market is on the verge of a crash next year.
