Insulate, Insulate 401


Politics in the mainstream media is entirely seen through the prism of the relentless race to the right of the Tory leadership election. The only people who can vote are two football crowds worth of overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, comparatively wealthy, mostly pensionable, overwhelmingly southern, people.

Brexit and the folding of UKIP into the Tory Party has changed the membership profile of the Tory Party. There are not many Dominic Greive comparative liberals still hanging in there. The typical Tory member used to be somebody like Miss Marple and her friends at St Mary Mead. It is now the St Mary Mead racist pub bore with a Jaguar.

The racist is of course key. People here get very upset every time I point out the exhaustively documented fact that the major motive of those voting for Brexit was anti-immigrant. I certainly accept that not all Brexiteers are racists. But all racists are Brexiteers.

The farce of the Tory leadership contest is that the inane Liz Truss is bound to win because of her skin colour. It is an entirely pointless exercise.

The prism of the Tory leadership contest has led the media to devote many column inches to the question of whether the massive energy bill increases should be tackled in part by tax cuts (Truss) or “handouts” (Sunak). Actual solutions, like renationalising the utility companies and imposing a 4% price increase cap as in France, are scarcely mentioned. These need to be adopted now to cope with the immediate emergency and provide the long term way forward.

Mentioned even less is the most obvious and urgent part of the solution – to consume less energy, as climate change roasts the planet.

A massive emergency mobilisation of resource to insulate existing buildings is the obvious first step. Every building should be insulated, at government expense, to the maximum practicable level. The homes of the poor should be the first priority – and are in general the worst insulated. Such a programme, on a wartime scale of mobilisation, would pump demand into the economy as it plunges into recession and provide massive employment opportunity.

This is true of every stage – the tooling up of production facilities and creation of raw materials as well as the actual installation. It seems to me so obvious a move that it is beyond me why the only people pushing it have to glue themselves to roads to get attention.

There are obvious other things to do, like reinstate attractive feed-in tariffs for domestic solar energy backed by government loans to cover installation costs, and make conversion to heat pumps free for those on benefits.

The Overton window has shrunk so small, the intellectual reach of public discourse is so enchained by neo-liberalism, that there appears no ability of the mind to respond appropriately to crisis. No solution can be attempted unless it makes some billionaires immeasurably richer. Society needs to awaken; people need to shed their chains.

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401 thoughts on “Insulate, Insulate

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  • fonso

    The EU itself is one of the most racist institutions on the planet. That was already very evident before 2016 in its hostility to both Turkish accession and refugees from Syria and Libya. There was also a clear racist dimension to its sadistic beating of the “lazy, feckless” Greeks before the referendum.

    You also seem to forget the presence at the forefront of the “People’s Vote” campaign of the most murderous racists this country has seen since the high noon of Churchillism. And not just Sir Tony and Alistair but all the centrist ghouls who supported the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, the demonization of domestic Muslims and the whole panolpy of anti-asylum seeker legislation between 1997 and 2010.

    I know by the time of the referendum and PV campaigns the liberals had reinvented themselves as anti-racists, but surely you could see their true nature in the ferocity with which they were simultaneously attacking leading anti-racist Jeremy Corbyn?

    Maybe you didn’t, but it beggars belief that after your close readings of the Labour Leaks and Forde Report you are still trying to represent these EU fanatics as anti-racists. What do you make of Sir Keir Starmer’s shunning of Diane Abbott, Apsana Begum, Zarah Sultana and the Muslim community in general? What do you think informs that? Or the EU’s brazenly different attitude to white Ukrainian refugees?

    Come ON, Craig.

      • SA

        I have never been a Brexiter but now can see that the EU is just another arm of the western greedy hegemonic imperialist globalist complex. Brexit no longer matters as it is a rearrangement of deckchairs under the auspices of the US.
        Success for the EU would have been to manage an independent line from the US and for the benefit of Europeans and would have ended in not taking sides with the US against European Russia against its own interests and those of human prosperity. It would have realised that NATO is a colonising and not a defending force. It would have stood its grounds on Minsk 2 and on the Iran deal and nordstream 2. It would be a leader in climate change. But hey what is the meaning of brexit when we are all hurtling to war and extinction? Great success, Laguerre, eh?

        • Laguerre

          Don’t judge the EU by the idiots who are its current leaders. The EU is not neo-liberal; that’s why UK left, as they found the controls on businessmen too severe (e.g. Truss policy). If the regulations are too severe, the institution is not neo-liberal. There is some superficial neo-liberalism, but it hasn’t penetrated deeply. Supervised liberalism is what the EU is about.

          • SA

            I am judging the EU by the drift it has taken towards a road to disaster. The EU may not be neoliberal fully but is dependent of the US foreign policy. Where the EU became corrupted was when it decided to become the political arm of NATO. This has led to expansion to most of Europe without the initial rigorous accession criteria for the sake of expanding NATO. The EU was not a passive party in this plan. Witness the haste by which they have now offered Ukraine an accelerated membership. Irrespective of Russian action, Ukraine from 2014 onwards was a corrupt country ruled by oligarchs and irrevocably divided by ethnic divisions. There is hardly any democracy in Ukraine and if the current Ukraine government was to win the war there would be a massacre of Russian ‘collaborators’and the EU will standby telling us how wonderful Saint Zelensky is.

          • Johnny Conspiranoid

            “Don’t judge the EU by the idiots who are its current leaders.”

            What are the chances of the next set of leaders being different? I voted remain but the gap between the EU and Washington concensus is ever narrowing. Now they commiting suicide on the orders of the US.

      • Peter Moritz

        This statement is only possible because of a complete lack of awareness. After this winter, let us see what will be left of the EU.

      • Laguerre

        As nearly everyone on this blog is a brexiter, it is not surprising that you are just as offended by the success of the EU as fonso is.

        • Bayard

          If by “success” you mean having a “sanctions” policy towards Russia that has resulted in huge losses to EU businesses and looks like resulting in many EU citizens having a very cold winter indeed, then yes, I am offended by such “success”. There’s little point in being in the EU if you get the same idiocy, just in a different language. Now if the UK was alone in rewarding Russia with “sanctions” that made it richer and industrial facilities sold at rock-bottom prices, I could sort of see your point.

          • Laguerre

            You should know the rule not to judge an institution by the personalities who currently occupy the leadership positions. The former round of EU leaders handled Brexit brilliantly from the EU point of view; it’s just the new lot who are incompetent idiots (except Macron). It’s rather the exception that proves the rule, if Johnson succeeds in finally provoking Scottish independence. It’s Brexit and Johnson that’s putting UK down the khazi. it would n’t happen under any other circumstances.

          • Goose

            Bayard

            It certainly did – there was the EU’s Charter of Fundamental rights and the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The Tories hated the very idea of pooling sovereignty or being constrained by the EU and especially by the EU’s court. The silly recent talk of even leaving the (non-EU) European Court of Human Rights just illustrates how extreme their views have become.

            As for Craig’s hope that society will somehow undergo a great awakening. It can’t realistically be expected to awaken when the alternative models and ways of organising society are deliberately excluded from the realm of public debate/discourse. The establishment, including the colluding big two Westminster political parties, along with the establishment owned media (nearly 100% establishment owned), have been very meticulous in keeping that Overton window narrow, both here, and in the US.

            Societies ultimately reflect their ruling elites, and are as good or bad as the ruling elites choose to make them. And for some reason, we have a particularly selfish elite. As for that reason; nature or nurture? It’s probably a bit of both. Certainly in the UK context, the class system and aristocracy, and the inequality and snobbery therein are part of it. A society that doesn’t even believe people are born equal inherently lacks solidarity and is less inclined to look upon egalitarian solutions to problems favourably. On which, the Tories would privatise the NHS in a moment if they thought they could get away with it. Instead they’ll probably allow Starmer’s Labour to do it for them.

          • Squeeth

            Really, how so? Did the EU prohibit mass unemployment, mass destitution, wars of racial extermination, police state terrorism, the expropriation of public assets….

          • Laguerre

            The European working class has done pretty well under the EU. If Britain’s hasn’t, that’s because of Thatcher and following Tories with their ideology.

          • Goose

            Squeeth

            I see your point and broadly agree.

            It was more a case of it had the potential to frustrate the UK, rather than it actually doing so. The UK had a role in appointments and policy of course, and was constantly threatening withdrawal and generally stymieing social policy harmonisation, so the EU never really showed its value.
            It’s still got unrepresentative officialdom to this day. And it may never become what it should and could become. That could even be because of the fact it was a creation of elites and not something that emerged through the popular will of the European people?

    • Kimpatsu

      Turkish accession to the EU is blocked because Turkey does not meet the minimum democratic standards required for membership.

        • Shardlake

          The UK left the EU because the Westminster Conservative Party treated the referendum result as a mandate rather than the advisory vote that it was meant to be. It was a scam hence the reluctance to publish the 50 something impact assessments.

      • Laguerre

        I don’t know why people insist on bringing up the Turkish application to the EU (only Brexiters do it). Turkey no longer desires to join the EU, and hasn’t done so since Erdoğan came to power in 2003, 19 years ago. Erdoğan prefers his Muslim relationships. The only reason it hasn’t been formally dropped, I would guess is not to alienate the westernised Istanbul elite, who pushed the policy in the first place, or more likely to leave a degree of ambiguity. The only country that has suffered from the application being left in place is Britain, as the Brexiters have been able to use it as a powerful weapon to bring Britain down.

  • pasha

    A noble idea, Craig, but what makes you think the Tories wouldn’t come up with some scheme like the cladding on the Grenfell Tower? In fact with the current crew of petty crooks, not-so-petty crooks, grifters, spongers, liars, and general idiots, such a scheme is almost guaranteed, with an even bigger disaster waiting in the wings. Personally I wouldn’t trust Truss or Sunak to run a whelk stall without, oops, accidentally poisoning thousands of customers.

    • Bayard

      Indeed, existing subsidised insulation schemes already have proved a disaster, with houses running with condensation and freezing cold.

  • Wally Jumblatt

    The Party in Government in Westminster opted the change their leader, that’s all that happened.
    The fact that out of the 650 or so MPs in London (and the rest in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Stormont), there are barely a handful capable of making any sensible decisions for the benefit of the rest of us, is the main problem.
    Liz Truss was being bigged-up for this position the minute the first post-Brexit inernational trade deal was announced.
    Of course she is hopeless. They all are. Whoever they choose will still be useless. Boris could have been better than most, but he couldn’t help himself from being the shallow lout that he is by nature, and never owned the job or did the hard work.

    As to your second part, how presumtuous of you to assume that all of us who thought the EU was a corrupt, absolutely undemocratic dictatorship and we should get as far away as possible as fast as our legs could carry us, must either make us racist or anti-immigrant, or anything else with negative connotations. Those of us that I know who are anti-EU and pro-independence, want Scotland to be in charge of our own destiny, and cannot for the life of us understand that the minute the rest of you gain independence (which will only be with a broad church of poltical views or you’ll never find a referendum majority) you are desperate to sign straight back into Brussels’ control.

    What kind of independent bravehearts are you?
    And what chance do you think you’ve got of getting any kind of vote on independence if you don’t have all the sympathy of all political colours in Scotland.

    -and another thing ha ha,
    The energy ‘crisis’ was caused by a stream of useless Westminster governments failing to put in place the construction of new power stations (not that I like nuclear), allowing offshore gas storage to lapse, shut down all on-shore gas storage and then all signing up to a childishly naive Net Zero commitment, without the foggiest notion how to achieve it. It’s a simple case of government incompetence, as always.

    I predict that one day soon, the BBC will stop talking about ‘climate change’, stop talking about zero carbon, stop talking about pathetic ethanol in fuel being green, stop talking about ridiculous electric vehicles, stop talking about killing agriculture in the name of methane and CO2, and will start demanding cheap energy, start demanding more jobs in manufacturing, more investment in road, rail and air, and less power cuts. Don’t see Greta around so much these days.

    Plant more trees if you want CO2 levels to drop.

    • Bayard

      “pathetic ethanol in fuel being green, “

      Petrol has ethanol in it because ethanol is an anti-knock additive which replaces tetra ethyl lead. Ethanol could always have been used instead of lead, but lead was slightly cheaper as so much less was needed.

      “Plant more trees if you want CO2 levels to drop”

      Trees aren’t very good at consuming CO2, as they are comparatively slow growing. Plants can only remove CO2 from the atmosphere to the extent that they increase their mass, otherwise what do they do with all that carbon, it doesn’t just vanish. There are huge swathes of the plant kingdom that grow faster than trees, grass, for instance.

  • Brian Sides

    “as climate change roasts the planet.” ?

    Two thirds of the planet is water
    Then you have the Arctic the Antarctic the frozen tundra , Siberia etc
    And lots of the planet that would like a bit of roasting.
    Here in South Wales it is nice to have a bit of hot weather makes a change from all the rain.
    It is summer now but will soon be winter. It is the cold that kills far more than the warm.

    Insulating an old house is very expensive £10,000 or more. What you save on energy bills would take a long time to be equal to the cost over two decades .
    To insulate just 100,000 houses would cost billion.
    It would take a number of years to complete.
    This would not address the doubling tripling and possible quadrupling of energy bills to come.

    But once people are in enough debt they will be glad to accept the new Tokenised money that they are calling Central Bank Digital Currency.
    Programmable money would be a better description. Limits can then be set according to the scare of the day. Be climate or health or your last blog.

    Maybe it is time to reverse the deal that William the third did in 1694 with a group of individuals incorporated by the name of the Governor and Company of the Bank of England. They were given exclusive possession of the governments balances and was the only limited liability corporation allowed to issue bank notes.
     

    • Marc T

      “And lots of the planet that would like a bit of roasting.
      Here in South Wales it is nice to have a bit of hot weather makes a change from all the rain.
      It is summer now but will soon be winter. It is the cold that kills far more than the warm.”

      Wow. The good old denial, with a nice layer of fake ignorance.

      Really?

      • Bayard

        Yes really. The deniers are those who try to pretend that the UK didn’t enjoy a warmer climate than the present one twelve hundred years ago.

        • pretzelattack

          No Bayard they are the ones who claim that the climate is not changing, overall. Not cherrypicking, to the extent even that is valid.

          • Bayard

            That is another distortion of the truth. The number of people trying to pretend the climate is not changing is very small. The climate has demonstrably always changed and always will do. The number of people who challenge the assertion that such change is not 100% natural is much larger, but they are still tarred with the same brush as the other group. All of which doesn’t change the fact that there are those who deny that the climate we currently enjoy is not as warm as that enjoyed by our ancestors many hundred of years ago, a fact that can be demonstrated through historical records.

          • pretzelattack

            God, no the climate is not “always changing”. It stays stable until something forces it to change. That something, this time, is humans. We should be cooling slightly. We aren’t. It’s getting hotter, bigger and longer droughts, more danger of wildfires, loss of fresh water, the evidence is massive, and no stale corporate talking points are going to change that. Again you double down on the cherry picked medieval warm period. The climate has changed massively, the projections have understated the pace of the change, and things are getting quite dire. The fossil fuel companies know the truth themselves, else they would fund followup to the B.E.S.T. study, by skeptical scientists. The reason they didn’t is they did not like the conclusion, which supported mainstream science. Their own scientists told them of the danger in the 70’s and 80’s, and after considering the matter, they decided to follow the lead of Big Tobacco and lie a lot.

            If your position depends on some of the wealthiest and most powerful companies on the planet being helpless victims in our system, it is self-evidently absurd.

          • Bayard

            “God, no the climate is not “always changing”. It stays stable until something forces it to change. “

            Ok, how do you account for the ice ages? Did humans cause them?

          • glenn_nl

            B:

            “Ok, how do you account for the ice ages? Did humans cause them?

            Before anyone answers this, could you – Bayard – tell us what research you’ve done yourself? Or are you _yet again_ just coming at the subject with blustering incredulity, convinced that your own ignorance on a matter is proof enough?

            I did a search on “cause of previous ice ages” and found a lot to read and learn from. You simply do not bother even trying, that much is absolutely clear.

          • Bayard

            “Bayard – tell us what research you’ve done yourself? “

            Are you suggesting that I do some research to establish the claim that “the climate is not “always changing”. It stays stable until something forces it to change.”? I am afraid that I’d be wasting my time as the historical Ice core records show the opposite, that the climate IS always changing. I was not asking to be enlightened on the cause of the ice ages, simply curious as to what the author of the claim thought them to be.

          • pretzelattack

            uh Bayard you forgot to read the next sentence. “that something, this time, is humans”. this time.

      • Roger

        @Marc T

        Wow. The good old denial

        Did you actually read the comment you replied to? Nothing in Brian Sides’ comment suggests denial of climate change. It merely suggests that global warming might not necessarily be a disaster.
        Now, I happen to disagree with Brian Sides. Global warming may increase sea levels enough to submerge some islands in the Pacific – a disaster for the people who now live on them – and have a negative impact on places like Bangla Desh and Holland.
        On the plus side, a big enough increase might submerge central London, thus forcing the politicians to notice the existence of the rest of the country. As with most changes, there are “swings and roundabouts”. 🙂

      • tom welsh

        Marc, your comment consists of nothing but “denial”. You offer no facts, no figures, and no logic. You merely hurl mud, perhaps hoping that some of it will stick.

        Have you anything at all with which to controvert Brian’s statements? If so, please tell us about it.

    • Clark

      Brian, so you think we “might like it bit warmer”? Be careful what you wish for.

      Human activity has already raised the global average surface temperature by over 1 degree Celsius. Sounds mild, until you consider that the last ice age was only 4 or 5 degrees colder – see here (how fast can palm trees grow?).

      The temperature is rising orders of magnitude faster than anything found in the geological record. This graph places that in the context of civilisation, and this cartoon adds a human face and various historical landmarks.

      And this is not reversible. Just as stirring sugar into your tea takes seconds but removing it again just ain’t gonna happen, emissions cannot be removed from the atmosphere. They act like a blanket that can’t be removed, so even if emissions stopped right now, the temperature would continue to rise. How much? Well, that would involve complicated climate projections and computer models, but almost everyone who works with them is screaming to curb emissions.
      – – – – – – – –

      Please, the validity of the climate and ecological crisis is not dependent upon the unfair shenanigans perpetrated by banks and governments. Half of the Great Barrier Reef is already dead. That is in no way a hoax to raise prices or taxes, whether it gets used that way or not.

      • Clark

        And Brian:

        “Two thirds [of the planet’s surface] is water”

        If we don’t want that to increase to three quarters, we need to stop global heating. From Florida to Bangladesh, people are already being displaced by rising sea level.

      • Clark

        Brian, sorry for yet another afterthought, but I think global heating is likely to bring you more rain in South Wales. Warmer air can hold more moisture, until hills force the air higher where it cools, causing rain. Your prevailing winds bring moist air over Wales from the Atlantic, where the hills cause it to dump much of its water, so global heating increases the likelihood of devastating flooding in Wales.

        • Bayard

          “Warmer air can hold more moisture, until hills force the air higher where it cools, causing rain.”

          The amount of rain that falls is dependent on the amount by which the air is cooled by it being lifted by the hills. If the whole atmosphere is warmer, then the temperature difference will remain the same and so will the amount of rainfall.

          • Clark

            “If the whole atmosphere is warmer, then the temperature difference will remain the same and so will the amount of rainfall.”

            Spherical cow. You have taken the term “global temperature” far too literally, and completely disregarded the meaning of the word “average”.

            A warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapour, so the potential for catastrophic flooding increases.

          • glenn_nl

            An atmosphere with increased water content also has a more powerful greenhouse effect.

            https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3143/steamy-relationships-how-atmospheric-water-vapor-supercharges-earths-greenhouse-effect/

            Unless this is all lies and BS of course, because Bayard doesn’t know nuffing about that, so it’s obviously all rubbish.

            This is the real problem with the Bayards posting their ignorance-based denialism. If we were talking about a piece of art, or if a section of the M1 needed resurfacing, or if this or that is a more efficient teaching method, it would be one thing.

            But here, we’re talking about the most serious subject on Earth – how we are in the process of eliminating its ability to sustain life.

            Bayard is the person saying, “False alarm! Just carry on”, as our apartment building is on fire. He doesn’t bother checking, no need – he doesn’t think there’s any reason for a fire and knows nothing about one.

            The degree of irresponsibility is quite shocking.

          • Bayard

            “Spherical cow. You have taken the term “global temperature” far too literally, and completely disregarded the meaning of the word “average”.”

            Are you suggesting that your original statement “Warmer air can hold more moisture, until hills force the air higher where it cools, causing rain.” is an oversimplification as to what happens? If not. what do you think is happening?

            Rain occurs when moist air is cooled to below its dew point, the point at which its humidity reaches 100%. The more humid the air, the higher the temperature of the dew point. Therefore the same warming that will enable the warmer atmosphere to hold more water will also warm the cooler air over the hills, and since the temperature difference due to height is governed by the difference in height (air cools as it rises, as it is exchanging heat energy for potential energy in order to conserve energy), the amount of cooling and therefore the amount of rain will remain the same.

            “A warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapour, so the potential for catastrophic flooding increases.”

            True, but the difference is pretty marginal and a glance at the history books shows that catastrophic flooding is not something that has only occurred recently.

          • Bayard

            “An atmosphere with increased water content also has a more powerful greenhouse effect.”

            True, as water is a greenhouse gas (indeed it is the greenhouse gas), but that says nothing about the role of CO2.

            As for the rest of your post, insulting assertions have never been a very convincing form of argument, and have not suddenly become so.

          • Clark

            Bayard, you’ve contradicted yourself. Again.

            “water is a greenhouse gas (indeed it is the greenhouse gas)”

            Yet elsewhere you have stated that the greenhouse effect is entirely down to clouds: “it is obviously a mechanism entirely caused by clouds” (final sentence of linked comment).

            Clouds are not gas; they are tiny droplets of water, or particles of ice. Water vapour is a gas, and a greenhouse gas, and it is present in the atmosphere, retaining heat, even where there are no clouds.

            Your understanding seems confused, and rudimentary at best.

      • Bayard

        “Human activity has already raised the global average surface temperature by over 1 degree Celsius. “

        There is no evidence for this. Yes, the temperature has risen by 1 degree in the past few years and yes, humans have been on the planet during that time, but a glance at the historical record shows that a 1 degree rise is nothing out of the ordinary, even long before humans had evolved, therefore it is more likely that the temperature rise is casued by something else, totally outside our control.

        “And this is not reversible. Just as stirring sugar into your tea takes seconds but removing it again just ain’t gonna happen, emissions cannot be removed from the atmosphere.”

        Again, the historical records show that the CO2 levels in the atmosphere have gone up and down together with the temperature since the records began, many millions of years ago. Nature has successfully removed large quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere many times. Why should exactly the same mechanism happen again? In any case, our bodies are just as capable of removing the sugar from your tea as a plant is capable of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

        “Half of the Great Barrier Reef is already dead. That is in no way a hoax to raise prices or taxes, whether it gets used that way or not.”

        The Great Barrier Reef has not been there since the Earth was formed. Almost nothing has. Everything changes. Everything living has a finite lifespan. Just because the Great Barrier Reef is dying now, doesn’t necessarily mean that we are responsible, or even that we can do anything to stop it.

        • Clark

          “a glance at the historical record shows that a 1 degree rise is nothing out of the ordinary”

          A glance at the geological record shows that neither temperature nor CO2 have ever changed nearly as fast as now.

          “CO2 levels in the atmosphere have gone up and down together with the temperature since the records began, many millions of years ago.”

          Yes, atmospheric CO2 and ocean temperature are in positive feedback with each other. This makes both emissions and global heating even more dangerous, because they both provoke each other.

          “Nature has successfully removed large quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere many times. Why should exactly the same mechanism not happen again?” (my correction)

          Well it clearly isn’t, or the Keeling curve of atmospheric CO2 concentration wouldn’t be rising relentlessly. It’s the rate of change issue again; nature has never drawn down CO2 at even a fraction of the rate that humans are emitting it. Which is really not a surprise when you think about it. In just a century we’ve burned carbon deposits that took nature millions of years to lay down.

          • Bayard

            “Yes, atmospheric CO2 and ocean temperature are in positive feedback with each other. “

            Do you actually understand what a positive feedback is? If the atmospheric CO2 and ocean temperature really were in positive feedback with each other, the CO2 would warm the oceans and the oceans would increase the amount of CO2 until the oceans boiled. It is exactly the lack of this positive feedback that shows that any warming is not caused by increased CO2 levels. No-one is disputing that warmer seas hold less CO2 , therefore more CO2 cannot cause warmer seas.

            “Well it clearly isn’t, or the Keeling curve of atmospheric CO2 concentration wouldn’t be rising relentlessly. “

            I didn’t say it was, I said that the historic reduction in CO2 shown in the ice core data showed that the machanis is not irreversible, as you claimed, otherwise the level of atmospheric CO2 would never had decreased since the Earth was formed.

          • glenn_nl

            Bayard condescended:

            Do you actually understand what a positive feedback is? If the atmospheric CO2 and ocean temperature really were in positive feedback with each other, the CO2 would warm the oceans and the oceans would increase the amount of CO2 until the oceans boiled.

            Wow.

            If I wired my thermostat the wrong way around, so it turned the heating up instead of down when it got warm enough, the resulting feedback loop would soon make my house the temperature of the centre of the sun.

            That’s your idea of ‘logic’.

            Not surprising then, that you come to such idiotic conclusions.

          • Clark

            Bayard:

            “No-one is disputing that warmer seas hold less CO2 , therefore more CO2 cannot cause warmer seas.”

            This is not so; the second statement does not follow from the first.

            The feedback loop is – rising average surface temperature raises ocean temperature. Rising ocean temperature forces the ocean to give off CO2 into the atmosphere. More CO2 in the atmosphere gathers more heat, raising the average surface temperature. Rising surface temperature raises ocean temperature, and so on.

            You are right that various natural processes remove CO2 from the atmosphere, but the process is extremely slow compared with the rate that human activity is emitting CO2 , as confirmed by the rising CO2 concentration. I should have specified that releasing CO2 is not reversible by humanity, not at anything like the necessary scale ie. comparable with the rate of emissions. This means that we can’t stop the temperature rise immediately just by stopping emissions.

    • squirrel

      Brian do you know when limited liability corporations started in law?

      I have wondered if it coincided with the introduction of fractional reserve banking.

  • Squeeth

    You’re right about everything but your guilt-by-association smear against those who voted “outez!” from the billionaires’ masturbation club. The trouble is that the fascist electoral system guarantees minority rule, not that the members of the tory partei are as racist, fascist and religiously bigoted as the (remaining – ha! geddit?) members of the nu-nuLiarbour Partei.

  • Bayard

    Everyone seems to be forgetting that we lived in uninsulated houses for hundreds of years, everyone, the rich and the poor. If that led to people having a miserable time every winter, would not the rich, at least, have done something about it? The difference was that people wore more clothes indoors and heated their houses to a lower temperature. 55°F (13°C) was considered a reasonable temperature and 60°F (16°C) was considered warm. This was the case even in living memory.
    So, what’s changed? What has changed is that, in the 60s, the oil companies, against considerable scepticism, started to sell householders oil-fired central heating. Critics said that no-one would take it up, the UK wasn’t cold enough, it wasn’t like Germany. However, sales took off and, gradually, the internal temperature we expected started to creep up. By the 90s it was 18°C and now it’s 23°C. Heat loss is directly proportional to temperature difference, so we have more than doubled the heat loss of our houses to no appreciable gain whatsoever. Yes, we are warmer, but we don’t feel warmer as the human body adapts to the change in temperature in a matter of minutes, as anyone who goes outside for any time in the winter realises, you feel cold when you first go outside, then you feel OK, then you feel hot when you return indoors, then you feel OK again.

      • Bayard

        I think gas central heating came later as the gas boards were already selling gas for heating via individual gas fires located in fireplaces. For them, it wasn’t a whole new market.

        • Laguerre

          I thought the split was town/country. If you had gas mains you installed gas-fired heating. If no gas then oil. After the smog act in 1962, when coal fires were largely forbidden, my parents installed electric fires, and only later, when they had the cash, did they put in gas-fired central heating. The only permanently warm room was the kitchen.

          • Bayard

            Yes, the split was town-country, but when people in the country were installing oil-fired central heating, people in towns were, by and large, installing gas fires (or electric) and, like your parents, only later installing central heating. Many country folk simply installed a oil-fired AGA and possibly a boiler for the hot water and that was it.

      • Peter Moritz

        Maybe gas-fired central heating, not oil-fired. I never remember seeing fuel-oil deliveries when I was a kid.

        Maybe not in the UK, but oil fuelled central heating, stoves (heaters) and furnaces were common in Germany, and also Canada.

    • glenn_nl

      Sure, we lived in uninsulated homes for hundreds of years. People – the poor, anyway – sewed themselves into their clothes in Autumn, not taking them off again until spring. Those were the days, right?

      The rich had nice big fires, heating pans for the bed, and servants to get up early to get the fire(s) going. The poor had miserable, short and uncomfortable lives. When they did have fires, they also had problems caused by the pollution, and one crowded room while the rest of the house froze. If they had more than one room.

      Read “The Road to Wigan Pier” sometime if you want to know how the poor enjoyed their winters.

      And please try not to generalise quite so much – it is never 23 degrees in my place during winter. Go into any non-rich pensioner’s home over winter and it is likely to be decidedly cold. So much so, that thousands of them die of hypothermia each winter.

      This denialism is causing you to really have to stretch these points.

      • Bayard

        “sewed themselves into their clothes in Autumn, not taking them off again until spring. “

        Where do you get such tosh from? Do you make it up?

        “The rich had nice big fires, heating pans for the bed, and servants to get up early to get the fire(s) going.”

        Yes, but those fires still only heated the house to 13°C. Your house may not be 23°C in the winter, but so what? neither is mine. However 23°C is still the design temperature that is used to calculate how big radiators you need and how big a boiler you need and there are plenty of people who do heat their houses to that temperature. Are you trying to deny that houses are heated more now than in the past or that the human body has the ability to adapt fairly quickly to changes in ambient temperature or possibly both?

        • Fat Jon

          I know a few people who do have their thermostat set at 23°C in winter, and they spend their time indoors wearing t-shirts. This is one of the main problems; people have got used to not wearing thick clothes inside their homes.

          I believe it is not trendy to look like the Michelin Man these days, and lots of people seem only able to follow the majority.

          The other problem is that many do not have thermostats on radiators, and whenever they switch on the heating they are needlessly warming up empty bedrooms.

        • glenn_nl

          B: “Where do you get such tosh from? Do you make it up?

          From a history lesson, please don’t over-excite yourself. You do know that people rarely washed or changed their clothing back then, particularly during winter…right? I don’t wish to shock you, apologies in advance if that got you all pearl-clutching again.

          B: “Yes, but those fires still only heated the house to 13°C

          No, it did not. It got the immediate area in front of the fire reasonably warm; the rest of the house remained stone cold. This was _not_ central heating. The house did not get to a steady temperature throughout.

          __
          So some people today set their central heating too high. There are people – irresponsible idiots, in my view – who think it is just fine to get patio heaters too. This has absolutely nothing to do with the fact of climate change, and the necessity of insulation to avoid the unnecessary waste of energy through winter.

          You blow a lot of smoke, Bayard, I’ll give you that. But you’re not changing the fact that we have a climate crisis, and a very urgent need to reduce energy consumption.

          • Bayard

            “You do know that people rarely washed or changed their clothing back then, particularly during winter…right?”

            Yes, people rarely washed themselves, it was thought to be bad for you to do so, nor did they wash their outer clothing as it would have ruined it. However that didn’t mean they didn’t change and wash their underwear on a regular basis. In any case, the “tosh” I was referring to was the idea that people sewed themselves into their clothing.

            “No, it did not. It got the immediate area in front of the fire reasonably warm, the rest of the house remained stone cold. This was _not_ central heating. The house did not get to a steady temperature throughout.”

            You’ve obviously not lived in a house heated only by open fires. Nor did I say it was central heating. The clue is in the word “central”.

            Do try to be a little less hysterical when people start questioning your pseudo-religion.

          • Clark

            “…people rarely washed themselves, it was thought to be bad for you…”

            It was bad for you, when you had little hot water, nowhere warm to get dry, and no antibiotics for the pneumonia you might subsequently develop!

        • Blissex

          glenn_nl (13/8/22 @6:28pm):

          «sewed themselves into their clothes in Autumn, not taking them off again until spring.»

          Bayard (13/8/22 8:09pm):

          «Where do you get such tosh from? Do you make it up?»

          http://www.aohg.org.uk/twww/health4.html

          «However, in some North country villages, washing the children in the winter months was unheard of because they were sewn into their clothes from autumn until spring: “They used to sew their children in during the autumn. They had a sewing-in day. They sewed them into their clothes and left them there till spring. They were sewn in for warmth. They thought they would die of cold otherwise.»

          http://www.johndclare.net/wwii4_evacuees_longmate.htm

          «Another common complaint was of the inadequate and unsuitable clothes in which many children had been sent away. Some had been sewn into their clothes for the winter or encased in a layer of brown paper near the skin as a substitute for warm underclothes. A nurse living in the Rhondda was surprised on preparing to give her five-year-old evacuee a bath to be told by his mother, ‘Bill don’t want a bath, as I’ve plastered him up for the winter.’ … To some unlucky foster-parents it began to seem in those first, disillusioning weeks that life in the back streets of London and other large towns could hardly have changed since Dickensian times. It was, perhaps, the beginning of that great movement of opinion towards socia l reform that was to gather momentum throughout the war. At the time, however, the predominant emotion was horror. Soon everyone in the reception areas had an evacuee story, just as later everyone in the blitzed cities had a bomb story»

          https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=710178.0

          «I am presently re-reading a favorite book of mine ‘Good Night Mr Tom‘ .. .which is all a London lad named William Beech who is evacuated to the Country in WW2, and had the good fortune to be billetted with a kind old gent Tom Oakley. In William’s belongings is a letter from his mother ‘hoping that he is being a good boy etc.. and that she has ‘sewn him in for winter’… (sewn his vest to his under pants for winter warmth ) […]
          On a teaching practice in 1958 in a poor area of Gateshead I had a boy in a remedial class who had been ‘sewn in’. I believe he was not the only one in the school – juniors. Lily M […]
          A relative wrote of a teacher at a school on the border near Oswestry in the 1930s “… where she found that some of the children were sewn into their clothes for the winter. ” […]
          My father joined a Scottish Division of the Army in 1943 and many of the chaps had been “sewn in” the Sergeant had his work cut out to explain to these lads that it was not going to be acceptable in the British Army, and they were to be “cut out” :- ) […]
          I seem to remember reading that a good smearing of goose grease (or something similar) was also an ingredient in sewing children into their clothes in winter . […]
          One of the first schools to introduce (from charitable funds) health checks and free school meals (c 1907) was Green Lane School in Bradford, West Yorkshire. It was quite a deprived area and children had been fainting in class from hunger. They also started bathing the children and noted that children had been “sewn up” by parents for the winter. I found this history info a while ago, when I was researching some of a branch of mine The Story of School Meals in Bradford

          http://greenlane.talmos.neat/historyhub/schoolmeals/SitePages/Home.aspx

          “… Dirt was a problem. Right up to the early part of this century some children were ‘sewn up’ for the winter – wrapped in flannel which was then sewn into place and not removed until the warm weather came. Some parents thought that this was necessary because there was not enough food to keep a child warm otherwise”.»

          • Bayard

            OK, fair enough, but the expression “sewed themselves into their clothes” suggests that everyone did it, rather than the adults sewing the children into their clothes.

          • glenn_nl

            Blissex : I am indebted, I really couldn’t be bothered to respond to someone when they cannot be bothered to do any research, or a few simple checks, before declaring someone a liar – based on nothing but their own ignorance.

            __

            Bayard : Read the piece that Blissex was kind enough to produce for you, just above. You didn’t bother, right? It shows that recruits arriving in the army (i.e. NOT children) were also sewn into their clothes. So it wasn’t just children.

          • Bayard

            glenn_nl, your implication was that it was a widespread practice for people to sew themselves into their clothes. That implication was and still is tosh. If we are going to pedantic about it, you could say that it doesn’t matter how rare the practice was, it still happened, but if we are going to be pedantic I could also say that no-one sewed themselves into their clothes, so the statement is still false. Indeed, how could you, unless you had arms like a gibbon?

          • glenn_nl

            Just a minute, Bayard.

            You started off saying, hey – people have things ridiculously hot these days (and there is some truth in that, in some instances).

            Furthermore, everyone was happy in the old days! Yes, your body soon adjusts to any temperature, so it’s all some con by the fuel people (or whatever) since central heating was installed. Nobody suffered from the cold (I notice you completely ignored all the other points I made to the contrary).

            Then you went off on a side-track for an off-hand comment I made about the practice of sewing oneself into clothes (and that doesn’t mean cocooned in it FCS).

            So nice distraction there. I notice you do that a lot, shift the argument and even when you’re on the wrong side of that you don’t admit it, you keep shifting it.

            If I didn’t know better, it would be looking to me like you’re a rather slippery customer.

          • Bayard

            “Furthermore, everyone was happy in the old days! Yes, your body soon adjusts to any temperature, so it’s all some con by the fuel people (or whatever) since central heating was installed. Nobody suffered from the cold”

            Either you are deliberately misquoting me or you have difficulty understanding English. Is it not your first language? I neither said everyone was happy in the old days, nor did I say that nobody suffered from the cold.

          • Gaia

            I knew someone who when starting teaching in mid /late1970s met children in Lancashire in a poor but not the poorest town who were sewn into their clothes and had lice and scabies.

            My parents were first to buy their own home, my mum first to go to Uni as a mature student full time plus full time mum and commuting in gales an hour and a half each way on a moped.
            I havent been able to get a career in my profession or paid for my work at all. I have had to move constantly because of short assured tenancies unheard of in Europe. I freeze in a Victorian tiny flat, my landlords are unlikely to replace the roof which would allow proper insulation. I am not allowed to benefit from insulation or any grants for improvements at all including double glazing or a modern front door. In fact Home Energy Scotland treated me very rudely when I made enquiries as if I was a scammer. If the government doesn’t enforce replacement of ancient water pipes we will be back to typhoid days. Chlorine induced cancers….

            I have been backwardly mobile unable to engage socially, or culturally or polotically from where I began. And my generation are the same unless they had wealthy parents who could help them with housing. We could have in many places especially cities community heating.

            On global warming it is not as simple as parts of the planet heating, it is the sudden change in environments all of the planet, extremes of everything, many of which are obvious.

            But what people don’t see is the damage to the oceans from rapid melting and desalination. That for example affecting the Atlantic will reverse the Conveyor … and our warming seas that keep us from freezing like Hudson Bay on the same latitude or central Russia has already started interfering with the Equatorial winds both warming and drying some areas, dragging Arctic air south to Scotland and depriving many African countries of seasonal rain. Plus the obvious drying and heating temperatures and winds that set fire to parts of Europe on a scale not seen before.

            Someone asked what caused the last ice age … Meteorite strike!

            And the cooling later in the 1500s was a volcanic erruption. Don’t quote me in the date of that, look it up for exact years.

            Our current situation is acceleration caused by human activity.

            And greed is the top driver of this.


            [ Mod: This person also posted a comment as ‘Cara‘. From the moderation rules for commenters:

            Sockpuppetry.
            …. the adoption of multiple identities within the same thread is not to be allowed.

            Please use one identity only. ]

  • Njorl

    “racist … anti-immigrant”

    You are conflating different things, sir!

    First, people are, in general, anti-immigration, not “anti-immigrant”. Perhaps you are clear that you are discussing, specifically, those who are the latter, but I cannot believe other than that you are aware most of your readers will attach your point to the former.

    Then, there is nothing racist about opposing immigration, though, of course, such a sentiment may be a motivation for doing so.

    Finally, as you, probably, know, race is a hoax. Your mention of racism perpetuates that hoax and, in consequence, actually bolsters racism, a negative attitude that afflicts some of those who’ve fallen for the hoax.

    However, you just seem to having an off day. I greatly appreciated your points about Graham Phillips.

    • Courtenay Francis Raymond Barnett

      Njori,

      ” Then, there is nothing racist about opposing immigration, though, of course, such a sentiment may be a motivation for doing so.”

      So, if on an empirical basis the UK needs immigration to fill gaps in the employment landscape – then that leads to the second question.

      ” Finally, as you, probably, know, race is a hoax. Your mention of racism perpetuates that hoax and, in consequence, actually bolsters racism, a negative attitude that afflicts some of those who’ve fallen for the hoax”

      A hoax indeed – yet – notwithstanding – is it not factually verifiable that the UK/Europeans more readily welcome Ukrainian refugees than say – African, Iraqi, Syrian etc. (all the non-Whites have a harder shake under the prevailing realities). Reality! Correct?

      • Njorl

        I don’t know how you would gather the statistics for your claim about readily welcoming.

        The welcoming of people may well be influenced by their economic, educational, and cultural, characteristics, and, particularly, their command of, in our case, English. It is a challenge to control for these, when assessing the relevance of “race”.

        Additionally, specifically regarding the Ukrainian arrivals, is it not the case that most of these have been young women, with children, whereas most of those arriving on our southern shore, to seek asylum, here, from France, are teenage males? It would not astound me were there to be greater sympathy for the mothers.

        I do not doubt that, unfortunately, some people do make judgements on the basis of what they perceive as racial differences. However, I believe that, in the present day, the aggregate effect of such instances is significantly less than is presented to us. People are inflating “racism” to stoke division, and because it’s a nice, little, earner for many of them.

        The only way to eliminate the effects of racism is for everyone to escape the illusion of race. Once people recognise that there is no such thing (other than the human race, of course), they can hardly continue to be influenced by it.

        I read of an interesting experiment, a few years ago:
        A chap whited up (I think that’s still permissible, even now) and travelled to a West Country public house. Though a stranger, he found the people in the pub, regulars in the main, very convivial.
        A week later, he returned, without the make-up and prosthetics, and found the people in the pub just as friendly.
        It has occurred to me that the people might have subconsciously recognised him, and hence he could have been drawing upon goodwill built up by his lighter-skinned manifestation, but I lean towards taking the result as genuine.

        The great tragedy is that, if people fear they will be perceived as alien, they often tend to act in a way which encourages their perception as such. I guess I’ll now be accused of blaming the victim, but I’m actually just describing a psychological phenomenon.

        • glenn_nl

          Edward De Bono wrote about some chap of Indian origins who lived in the UK. I don’t remember which book, it was years ago.

          The fellow suffered from a most unfortunate skin condition which turned him effectively white – from a brown coloured man into someone indistinguishable from a white man.

          He discovered that what he had assumed to be racism was – in fact – just everyday rudeness which all people experience.

          • Njorl

            That is a great anecdote.

            The seductive thing about racism is that it eliminates the possibility of changing oneself, as well, of course, as dispelling the idea that one should.

            When we cannot simply ascribe our reception to racism, we are forced to entertain the thought that we might actually be being a dickhead.

          • Laguerre

            Most of the channel-crossers are Kurds in my experience. I never saw a report of an Albanian.

        • Courtenay Francis Raymond Barnett

          Njorl,

          “Well over 70% of migrants arriving in small boats are eventually found by the British state to be genuine refugees seeking asylum”

          Per: Craig Murray

      • Roger

        the UK needs immigration to fill gaps in the employment landscape

        With about 1,300,000 people unemployed, the UK does not need immigration to “fill gaps”. That’s the CEO-class approach: bring in cheap labour to increase profits, and let taxpayers pick up the cost of the unemployed. The human cost of high unemployment – hopeless lives, permanently dependent on the State – is ignored of course.
        What the UK needs is:

        1. Higher wages for unpleasant jobs
        2. Better training and education

        These cost money in the short run, which is all politicians care about. But the long-term benefits are huge, not only to the taxpayer, but also to the quality of life of those 1,300,000 people currently on the scrap-heap.

        • Bayard

          “With about 1,300,000 people unemployed, the UK does not need immigration to “fill gaps”.”

          There are other reasons to be unemployed than the simple inability to find work.

        • Cara

          [ Mod: Sockpuppet – aka ‘Gaia‘. From the moderation rules for commenters:

          Sockpuppetry.
          …. the adoption of multiple identities within the same thread is not to be allowed.

          Kindly use one identity only. ]

          Many people like myself were not allowed the career foot in the door because we were competent. The working class not having ideas above their station.

          Instead institutions and employers want people they can push around. There is no clamour for the competent and innovative in most UK workplaces.

          Middle of the road, don’t rock the boat is what they want. And male.

          Which is why we have now got about a third generation about to graduate to make coffees.

          Even those jobs were unavailable under Thatcher.

          The Higher Education sector has got rid of hundreds of thousands of posts, and are riven with the government-approved now censoring what is taught and who teaches.

  • SA

    Catastrophic climate change is no longer a background problem to be dealt with in 2030 or beyond, it is here and now. But you wouldn’t know it if you listen to the Tory leadership debates. Little mention of immediate action other than the shelving of the green levy, which reduces bills by an infinitesimal amount and probably more to the benefit of the rich by the demented Liz. And meanwhile the obtund Starmer has just woken from his slumber after an orgy of decimating Labour membership, to tell us what Labour policy would be. There is only one relevant answer: Labour must commit to nationalise energy and water, whatever it takes.

    • Brian Sides

      Despite the near constant caterwauling from climate alarmists that we are in a “climate emergency”, real-world data, released at the end of 2020 shows that climate related deaths are reducing by 99.6% . The data spans 100 years of “global warming” back to 1920
      Back in the 1920s, the death count from climate-related disasters was 485,000 on average every year. In the last full decade, 2010-2019, the average was 18,357 dead per year or 96% lower. In the first year of the new decade, 2020, the preliminary number of dead was even lower at 8,086 — 98% lower than the 1920s average.
      But because the world’s population also quadrupled at the same time, the climate-related *death risk* has dropped even faster. The death risk is the probability of you dying in any one year. In the 1920s, it was 243 out of a million people that would die from climate-related disasters.
      In the 2010s, the risk was just 2.5 per million people — a drop of 99%. Now, in 2020, the preliminary number is 1 per million — 99.6% lower.

      The reason for this is better tracking of the weather and better communication. In the Philippines they often have to evacuate thousand’s ahead of incoming storms. The storms wreck the shanty towns . the people return and rebuild them.
      The deadliest overall tropical cyclone to affect the Philippines is believed to have been the Haiphong typhoon, which is estimated to have killed up to 20,000 people as it passed over the country in September 1881

      • Clark

        Brian, you mean “weather related deaths”, not climate. Your comment confirms this itself – “The reason for this is better tracking of the weather…'”

        The very fact that you used “climate” where you meant “weather” indicates that you have been reading deliberately misleading sources. Ripples on the bathwater tell us nothing about whether the bath is emptying, or likely to overflow.

        • SA

          Better still. Atomic bombs have become infinitely safer in the last 70 years. The death toll from atomic weapons since 1945 has been reduced from more than 100,000 to zero, a reduction rate of 100%. There is no logic in nuclear disarmament as nuclear weapons have such a massive safety record.

      • SA

        Brian
        If you wish to present data could we please have some details. First, where is the data from? A link would be useful. Second there is no mention whether this data is from one country or several or global. Third even if the data is correct and robust it does not negate the fact that the model for action is based on a spirally pattern that becomes unstoppable after reaching a tipping point.

        • Brian Sides

          the website does not like links
          but google and you will find

          as for the tipping point I think the end of the world was mentioned in the Bible so must be true.
          Climate change is a religion for true believers
          It is also a multi trillion dollar scam to convert the worthless derivatives into carbon credits.
          The result of trying to follow climate change goals is people will die in the winter as they can not afford energy bills.

          • Clark

            “Climate change is a religion for true believers”

            Certainly for some, but not for me. From the age of four I was indoctrinated as a Jehovah’s Witness – meetings an hour each Tuesday, two hours each Thursday, two hours each Sunday, an hour per week of home bible and Watchtower study, as much time out on the doors as possible, no Christmas, no Easter, no birthdays – so I have direct personal experience of escaping indoctrination. On dragging myself free in my late teens I realised that I’d believed it because I was in a bubble surrounded by other believers, and I determined never to let my beliefs be captured again.

            These days I believe no one. Evidence, logic and critical thinking are my guides.

            “It is also a multi trillion dollar scam…”

            There is no way that a scam could cause the polar ice to melt away; only additional heat could do that. And the melting of the Arctic must be real because shipping companies are advertising the new ice-free routes, fossil fuel companies are lobbying governments for extraction licenses in regions where ice cover used to make extraction too costly.

            “…people will die in the winter as they can not afford energy bills.”

            Keeping people poor is political policy, not anything advocated by climate scientists. You seem to have been tricked into shooting at the wrong target.

          • Bayard

            ”   – “It is also a multi trillion dollar scam…”

            There is no way that a scam could cause the polar ice to melt away; “

            You miss the point. The scam is not to cause the polar ice to melt away, it is to maintain that the melting of the icecaps is not just part of a natural process that has been going on since the Earth formed. It is a very old scam, scaring people with a threat of disaster, then getting money out of them for the ostensible purpose of averting that threat.

          • Clark

            But Bayard, that emissions would cause global heating was predicted, from general scientific principles.

            And it was you, Bayard, who posted the comment claiming that Fourier withheld data in the 1800s…

            So let’s just unpack what you’re asking other readers to believe here. You’re effectively claiming that science is a conspiracy which, centuries ago, correctly worked out that natural causes would lead to detectable and sudden global heating in the 20th century (hence the accurate prediction), and presumably on behalf of the elite, concocted and promoted a lie that greenhouse gases would be the cause.

            So science can’t take place in the publicly available scientific literature, as we have been duped into believing. The real science must go on in secret. And as well as doing their real, secret scientific research, scientists also coordinate to make up the cover story, to be published in Nature and all the other journals. Either that or they got extremely lucky, and the Arctic just happened to start melting right on cue.

            That’s the reason this stuff is called conspiracy theory.

          • Bayard

            “But Bayard, that emissions would cause global heating was predicted, from general scientific principles.”

            People were wrong about stuff in the past, too.

            “And it was you, Bayard, who posted the comment claiming that Fourier withheld data in the 1800s…”

            If you care to look back you will see that I didn’t. It was one of your co-religionists that claimed that I had. The person I was alluding to was Phil Jones of the Hadley CRU.

            “You’re effectively claiming that science is a conspiracy which, centuries ago, correctly worked out that natural causes would lead to detectable and sudden global heating in the 20th century (hence the accurate prediction), and presumably on behalf of the elite, concocted and promoted a lie that greenhouse gases would be the cause.”

            Now you are getting silly. You yourself pointed out earlier that the planet has always warmed up and cooled down. By far the simplest explanation of what is causing the present warming is that it is exactly the same mechanism as in the past. However we are being asked to believe that, despite the planet being warmer a millennium and bit ago, that this time it’s different and caused by humans.

            Nor is there any need for a conspiracy of any kind. The history of religion shows that humanity has a problem with blind chance. They prefer to believe that someone or something is making good things and bad things happen, be it other people or supernatural beings. It is hardly surprising then when people were told that the planet was warming (and were told, into the bargain, that this was a catastrophe, which was pure speculation) and given the choice between believing it was due to natural causes and that it was due to evil and greedy oil and coal companies, they plumped for the latter. Not only does this idea fit comfortably into the ancient belief system, but it hold out the false hope that something can be done to avert this alleged catastrophe and dish the evil-doers into the bargain. Really, what’s not to like?

          • Clark

            “You yourself pointed out earlier that the planet has always warmed up and cooled down”

            That is not what the geological record shows. It shows long periods of climactic stability, punctuated by relatively rapid climactic change to a new stable state. These changes are the boundaries of the geological ages; be warned that several of them coincide with mass extinctions, and all the mass extinctions coincide with changes in climate. Feeling lucky, human?

            I emphasised “relatively” because of your next false assertion:

            “By far the simplest explanation of what is causing the present warming is that it is exactly the same mechanism as in the past.”

            Wrong again; the temperature is rising much, much faster than anything seen in the geological record, so presumably some much faster change is causing it. Oh look, CO2 concentration is rising even faster than the global average temperature. Fancy that!

            “….despite the planet being warmer a millennium and bit ago,”

            As I’ve already pointed out, the planet wasn’t warmer then; those were regional variations.

            “Nor is there any need for a conspiracy of any kind.”

            You yourself called global heating a “scam” just above. A scam implies intention. “Phil Jones of the Hadley CRU” is just one person; many thousands of scientists have contributed to climate science. The broad consensus on global heating was emerging in the 1980s, decades before CRU’s e-mails were broken into; James Hansen testified to the US government in 1988, and Shell Oil’s film Climate of Concern was released in 1991.

            Readers can tell that my position is not religious by the way I keep referring to evidence, but what are they to make of yours?

          • Bayard

            “That is not what the geological record shows. It shows long periods of climactic stability, punctuated by relatively rapid climactic change to a new stable state.”

            Are we looking at the same geological record? Is there another one different from this one: (graph – jpg)? In any case, if that is so, why did you make the comment, “The climate has changed for aeons ” to which I was referring and which you are now challenging?

            “Wrong again; the temperature is rising much, much faster than anything seen in the geological record, so presumably some much faster change is causing it.”

            1. You don’t know that: we only have detailed data for the recent past; 2. That is only a presumption without proof that the previous causes are not capable of producing such a rate of change and; 3. Even if it is a different cause, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s CO2. In fact there is a perfectly plausible alternative explanation, which is that the thinning of the ozone layer has allowed more of the sun’s energy to reach the earth in the form of ultra violet radiation.

            “You yourself called global heating a “scam” just above. “

            That was Brian Sides. I was pointing out that global heating was a natural phenomenon being used by scammers to get money. The fact that scammers have been conning people out of money for centuries by pretending the money is going to charity doesn’t make charity a scam.

          • Clark

            Bayard, the graph you linked is not the geological record. It is less than half a million years of Earth’s four thousand six hundred million year history, ie. it is about one ten thousandth of the geological record. As such it shows only one climactic regime, the one I mentioned in the comment of mine that you linked to – “ice ages punctuated by interglacial periods is the current climate – or rather was, until humans changed it”.

            Your comments lack the consistency of honesty, and you play fast and loose with facts – like your misleading claim for the graph you linked above, and when you linked a graph of the El Nino / La Nina oscillation claiming it to show global temperature. You have denied temperature rise, but defeated by the undeniable melting of the Arctic switched to denying that human activity is causing it.

            You display only one consistency – denial of AGW.

        • Brian Sides

          [ MOD: Caught in spam-filter, timestamp updated ]
          ___

          This is the link

          https://climaterealism.com/2021/01/after-100-years-of-climate-change-climate-related-deaths-approach-zero/

          plus

          https://nypost.com/2022/04/30/deaths-in-climate-disasters-declined-99-from-a-century-ago/

          there are many more . My favourite site for debunking the climate lies is

          https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/

          Then there is mythical tipping point.
          Yes the world is going to end . It must be true I read it in the Bible.
          Better safe than sorry. Yes lets all return to the stone age that will save the planet.
          Michael Moore is a believer in climate change (yes it is a religion).
          But his honest documentary Planet of the humans looked at the supposed solutions for climate change and found they were just another way for people to get rich.
          The result is energy charges that people can not afford.
          People will die in the winter who can not afford heat. Thanks to the climate change lie.

          • Clark

            “People will die in the winter who can not afford heat. Thanks to the climate change lie.”

            That is directly back to front. Had governments begun taking action in, say, 1988 when Hanson testified to the US government, we would now be far less dependent upon fossil fuels.

            Tipping points are real; have you never knocked anything over? All physical systems have tipping points, and by their nature they’re hard to predict, eg. how much weight can this stick take without breaking?

          • pete

            Thank you for supplying the sources of your wisdom, The Heartland Foundation, a ‘think tank’ dedicated to the ideal of the Republican party, the New York Post, one of the Newscorpse dead press, Murdoch organs and some geezer on the internet. They all seem to agree with you, do you know why that is? I’m guessing it’s confirmation bias, you can find a helpful chart here. If you do choose to peruse it you should soon find where you are going wrong in understanding man-made climate change and why you choose only to look at simple-minded articles that misrepresent the debate.

          • SA

            Limborg is not a scientist let alone a climate scientist. His arguments based on economics discounts a lot of actual human and societal experience. Some of his work has been shown to be misleading.

            When I read these posts I had a sense of déjà vu. The covid deniers use the same argument about cost effectiveness and whether a few thousand deaths of pensioners really makes economic sense. Many covid deniers happen to also be global warming skeptics.

          • Bayard

            “Tipping points are real; have you never knocked anything over? All physical systems have tipping points, and by their nature they’re hard to predict,”

            What is the tipping point of a football? How long do you have to stir a glass of water before you cannot stir it any more? Only unstable systems have tipping points, that’s a tiny minority.

            “The Heartland Foundation, a ‘think tank’ dedicated to the ideal of the Republican party, the New York Post, one of the Newscorpse dead press, Murdoch organs and some geezer on the internet. “

            As far as it is known, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Rupert Murdoch and yourself all believed or believe that the Earth is round. Does this not alarm you, sharing a belief with those monsters? Better to realise that ideas are not responsible for the people who believe in them.

          • Clark

            Bayard, tipping points of a football include when it bursts due to excess internal air pressure, and when it is punctured by the localised pressure of, say, a dog’s tooth. Stir water fast enough and it will fly out, and if you contain it so you can stir it faster it will eventually boil. All physical systems have tipping points.

          • SA

            Bayard
            Your examples are fallacious. These are think tanks and organisations devoted to light government which means that money making trumps human suffering.

          • Bayard

            “All physical systems have tipping points.”

            Well yes, Humpty Dumpty, they do under your definition of “tipping point”. However, that is not the usually accepted definition of the expression. I think you are confusing “tipping point” with “point of no return” or “breaking point”.

          • Bayard

            “Your examples are fallacious.”

            I’m sorry you should think that, but you do accept my point that only unstable systems have tipping points and not everything is unstable, don’t you?

            “These are think tanks and organisations devoted to light government which means that money making trumps human suffering.”

            Are you claiming that everything that they believe in is therefore wrong, even down to mundane things like the roundness of the Earth?

          • SA

            There you go again. Surely you understand that believing that the earth is round is now shared by most of mankind so is rather a non discriminatory example of looking at other nuanced situations.
            Just to give you an example of how someone like Liz Truss thinks. She will suspend the green levy in order to help struggling households. Yes she does mean us to believe that reducing the green levy will help poor households. And Sunak wants to cut VAT on fuel to help the poor. As
            this article shows, these amounts do not shift the dial by much and shows how your round earth believers can also show disregard for the poor despite their great knowledge.

          • Bayard

            I think you have missed the point of my original reply to Pete above. He was suggesting that a belief is somehow contaminated by the sort of people who believe it, i.e. if they are wrong about some things they must be wrong about everything. However “everything” includes whether the Earth is round or not. So if wrongness is contagious, people like Rupert Murdoch, since they are wrong about so many things, must also be wrong about the shape of the Earth, which means that if they believe the Earth is round, then it must be flat. Since this is absurd, it is therefore the case that wrongness is not contagious and therefore the fact that I might agree with say, Liz Truss, on something (hopefully not on anything that is not completely trivial), doesn’t mean that that something is wrong.

    • SA

      Bayard
      But this is to state the obvious and you are indulging in sophistry. Pete was referring to links posted by Brian Sides as proof of aspects of climate change to prove a specific point and that therefore this was hardly unbiased evidence for the argument that is under discussion. Nowhere did Pete infer that everything the think tanks or publications write, is wrong. In any case think tanks are devoted to tackle controversial or difficult subjects and I do not know of any think tank that has recently been discussing the roundness or otherwise of the earth. Note that Pete himself is wiser than me as he just ignored your silly comments.

  • Rob

    Agree with your comments. But make sure it is not the landlords who take the profit from free heat pumps and insulation – many families relying on benefits will be in private rented accommodation.
    The era of homes for profit should end. Rent control will temper the greed of the rentiers. Coincidentally, a less fevered property market will make productive and useful investment more attractive to capital.

    • Bayard

      “Rent control will temper the greed of the rentiers”

      Rent control will simultaneously increase the demand for rented accommodation and decrease the supply, exactly as it it did in the middle of the C20th. The difference between then and now is that then we had a reasonable amount of social housing.

  • Ultraviolet

    “But all racists are Brexiteers.”

    They most certainly are not. The Forde Report shows that the right wing of Labour, the part of the party that was most rabidly supportive of Remain, is absolutely riddled with endemic racism.

      • Brian Sides

        Not all your comments have a reply option this may not be under your control.
        I was interested to read about how you overcame your religious indoctrination.
        It is important to look at both points of view.
        You mention the ice-free routes being advertised, but other than a few exploratory trips I can not find any. Most are talking about possible routes in the future. This is one speculative quote from 2019 that may not come true:

        “Estimates say they will be navigable two months a year by 2030 and, one decade later, ships will have 150 days of sailable waters. This new sea trade route would shorten travel time between main ports in Asia and northern Europe”

        As for cause and effect this is very hard to establish as there are many variables.
        I live in South Wales in the UK. All our coal mines were closed. This had a knock-on effect to many other industries. The coal was used in the local steel works. The steel produced was used in the ship building and many other industries. The coal-powered energy plants have closed or converted to gas.
        We have a lot of older house stock that is not well insulated. All though the winters are not that hard, many die due to the cold and not being able to afford the heat.
        Vast sums have been spent on wind farms and solar parks. There are offshore oil fields that have not been explored. Instead energy is imported. This all adds to the energy bills.
        The trillion-dollar carbon-credit markets are continuation of the derivatives market that caused the 2008 crash. The vast sums involved corrupted both the politics and the science.

        • Clark

          Brian, the comments stop having a Reply button at the fifth level of indentation. To reply to a comment without a button, scroll up to the next comment above that has one, and to avoid confusion start your comment with the name you’re replying to.

          Firstly, I hate the way the UK is run. During the 1980s miners strike I was a van driver’s assistant making deliveries and collections all over the country. We were frequently stopped and the van searched by police looking for “secondary” pickets. These were not criminals, they were just miners fighting for their future. They had done the most dangerous, dirty and gruelling work that there is, many of them for decades. Many of them had lost comrades to industrial illness or in mining disasters. Any decent government would have guaranteed them and their families a secure and comfortable future for the effort and sacrifices they had made, but instead they were to be cast into the “jobs market” amid mushrooming unemployment.

          It is utterly disgusting that the government leave the old to die of the cold in winter after they have spent their lives working for the economy. This country could easily afford adequate pensions for all, with a basic energy allowance. Instead, fossil fuel companies are subsidised while making exorbitant profits, pension funds were raided, while the rich have second and third homes, which they often let out via AirB&B, raking in yet more heaps of cash.

          https://www.change.org/p/energyforall-everyone-has-a-right-to-the-energy-needed-for-heating-cooking-and-light

          I don’t have direct experience of South Wales but I do know of the deprivation there due to the closure of industry. The government now use this lack of industry to claim that the UK’s emissions have fallen, and instead point the finger at both China, who are merely doing the work that used to be done in the UK, and the unemployed. It is rank hypocrisy.

          – “You mention the ice free routes being advertised , But other than a few exploratory trips I can not find any. Most are talking about possible routes in the future.”

          I should probably have said ‘planning’ rather than ‘advertising’, but many trips have already been made. From the article you quoted, “On 16 August 2017, the LNG tanker Christophe de Margerie owned by Russian shipping line Sovcomflot completed the journey between Norway and South Korea along Russia’s northern coast. It was the first time a ship of this sort had traversed these waters without icebreakers”. A later voyage of the Christophe de Margerie is mentioned below; note that this trip was in the middle of winter:

          https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/environment/arctic-shipping-routes-new-suez-canal/

          – In February 2021, a large commercial cargo ship completed the Northern Sea Route (NSR) for the first time in the middle of winter. The Russian natural gas tanker Christophe de Margerie, sailed from Jiangsu, China to a port in Siberia along the NSR, the Russian segment of the Northeast Passage linking the Bering Strait with Norway. Earlier, in the summer of 2018, the Danish company Maersk had sent a container freighter through the NSR for the first time. Russia is keen to develop this route, as it falls under its control and considerably shortens the crossing between Asia and Europe compared to the current route through the Suez Canal. China has also announced its intention to open a “Polar Silk Road” through the Arctic.

          – The growth of this maritime traffic is already a reality today: in 2020, 32.97 million tonnes of cargo moved along the NSR, 1.5 million tonnes more than the previous year, and the Kremlin intends to boost this figure to 80 million tonnes by 2024 and 130 million tonnes by 2035. Currently these routes are only accessible for a short period in late summer. But on its mid-winter journey, Christophe de Margerie only found ice formed during the year, not old ice built-up over several years.

          Various links can be found from these Wikipedia articles:

          https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arctic_shipping_routes&oldid=1104340727#Future_projections

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpolar_Sea_Route

          Brian:

          – “As for cause and effect this is very hard to establish as there are many variables.”

          Assessing this science is part of the job of the IPCC Working Group 1, and it indeed took years and involved a lot of work. Temperature variations from many different sources had to be considered and accounted for – solar variation, cycles in Earth’s orbit, cyclical variation such as El Nino; far more than I know. But it resulted in a good understanding. The Working Group1’s papers are available online, based on citations to swathes of papers from the scientific community in universities all over the world. These source papers are also available to the public; though many are behind expensive paywalls (another scandal of neoliberal capitalism) they are not secret.

          https://www.ipcc.ch/working-group/wg1/

          “The vast sums involved corrupted both the politics and the science.”

          They have indeed, but in the opposite direction than you’ve been led to believe. The fossil fuel companies’ own scientific divisions started warning about global heating as early as the mid 1970s. Shell even released a documentary called Climate of Concern which you can find online. But the companies decided to cover up their own research and fund massive disinformation campaigns instead, just like the tobacco and asbestos companies had before. They even employed some of the same PR companies to do it. The BBC currently has a three-part documentary about this, with interviews of some of the scientists and policy directors involved:

          https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0cgql8f

          https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0cgql8f/big-oil-v-the-world

          I don’t automatically trust this just because it’s on the BBC – far from it, the BBC is a British propaganda organisation – and in the second episode, BP (i.e. British Petroleum) comes out of it far too well. No, I trust what I know to be consistent with the pattern I’ve been discovering over the years.

          • Brian Sides

            You did not address the carbon trading

            “Green and ESG bonds are already well established, with sales headed for a record $1 trillion this year. But Wall Street’s embrace of sustainable finance in more exotic markets shows that a field once considered niche has now become mainstream. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates that ESG products will make up well over a third of the world’s $140 trillion of assets by 2025.”

            The billions and trillions that are connected to climate change pervert the political decisions.
            The BBC decided the climate change science was settled and would no longer debate the subject after a single meeting with climate change converts. They tried to keep this secret.
            Boris Johnson was also convinced by a single meeting where he was shown some slides.
            Donal Trump is one of the few who is a climate change sceptic. But is just as likely to approve climate projects if the money or politics is wright.

            Michael Moore is a climate change believer. But his documentary Planet of Humans took an honest look at how climate change policies were being implemented. Finding that they had many faults that ended up costing a lot but delivering very little.

          • Bayard

            – “The vast sums involved corrupted both the politics and the science.”

            “They have indeed, but in the opposite direction than you’ve been led to believe. “

            It seems very unlikely that the vast sums involved would have only corrupted one side of the debate. Are you seriously trying to imply that the oil companies are universally staffed by evildoers, whereas the green energy indiustry draws its employees from the ranks of the angels, forever benign and incorruptible? Where there is money to be made, however that money is to be made, the unscrupulous, the evil and the greedy gather. Pretending this doesn’t happen just makes it worse. “Oh, it can’t be a scam, it’s about renewable energy and saving the planet!”

          • Clark

            Brian:

            “You did not address the carbon trading”

            I didn’t address it because financial markets are not my thing; they seem to have little connection with physical reality. But Craig addressed it; yes, they’re designed to move yet more money to those who already have most. But this applies to everything; it’s called neoliberalism. Earthquakes, hurricanes, the pandemic; they all make the rich richer because the financial system is set up to do so. It’s not evidence against the disasters.

        • Clark

          Brian, it is not a coincidence that I support Craig and his blog (I used to be a moderator at this site). His understanding is deep, and he says what the corporate media prefer to keep quiet. He has blogged about energy, insulation and political priorities before:

          https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2021/12/concentration-of-power/

          – Consider this. If you insulated every home in the country, and put solar panels on every roof, non-local energy usage would be greatly reduced and people’s energy bills would fall. But insulating homes, especially older ones, is much more labour intensive than it is capital intensive. It would create hundreds of thousands of jobs. But material costs are comparatively small, and then after insulation consumers will not be paying big energy bills. This is not in the least a fatcat friendly policy.

          – But what if you leave homes pumping heat into the atmosphere, forget local generation and instead build a new network of nuclear power stations? There is nothing more conducive to the concentration of economic and social power than the nuclear industry, with its inextricable links to the security state. Electricity can still be sold to the helots [serfs], whose self-sufficiency and freedom will in no way be enhanced.

          – Nobody should be surprised the government is showing much more interest in nuclear power than in home insulation or domestic solar panels.

          – Similarly expect to see much government support given to “blue hydrogen”, which liberates more CO2 from natural gas than does burning the gas in a power station. It employs fossil fuel and the promises to continue the economic centralisation of the current energy market, so is very attractive to the ruling classes. Green hydrogen, however, requires wind turbines (or potentially solar power in Africa) and water, and is therefore potentially susceptible to production by large communities rather than by oil giants.

          – Nuclear power, blue hydrogen – expect to have these and other high centralisation, high energy schemes foisted on us now as “solutions.” They are in fact solutions, in this sense. In Glasgow the people were shut out while the global super-wealthy asked themselves this vital question:

          – “The planet is heading for environmental destruction: how do we make money out of that?”

          • Bayard

            “– “The planet is heading for environmental destruction: how do we make money out of that?””

            Easy, by 1. claiming we can do something about it and 2. asking for money to do that thing. You don’t make any money out of trying to point out that the planet is not heading for environmental destruction, or at least not in that particular way.

          • Clark

            “Easy, by…”

            I thought what you’d actually been arguing was that “they” had started forty or fifty years ago and not just corrupted an entire field of science but actually reversed it, and then got lucky when Earth’s temperature suddenly shot up entirely by lucky (for them) coincidence.

            Pull the other one mister, it’s got bells on 🙂

          • Bayard

            “I thought what you’d actually been arguing was that “they” had started forty or fifty years ago and not just corrupted an entire field of science but actually reversed it, and then got lucky when Earth’s temperature suddenly shot up entirely by lucky (for them) coincidence.”

            It’s hardy my fault if you fail to grasp what i have been trying to point out, however, to address the points you have mistakenly attributed to me, forty or fifty years ago takes us back to the 1970s, by which time (see this graph –
            jpg ) warming had been happening for sixty to seventy years. Between the war and the mid seventies, the temperature was pretty stable (what happened there? Did we really cut back on CO2 emissions compared to the thirty years before the war, which included the Great Depression?), but by the end of the 70s it had started to rise again, so no-one “got lucky”. People noticed a rise in temperatures and started looking for a reason. Nor did the temperature “shoot up”, the rate of change being scarecly greater than it had been pre war. Something else shown on this graph is the halt in rising temperatures since 2000, which cannot be explained in terms of rising (or falling CO2 levels).

  • Vivian O’Blivion

    It’ll take a great deal more than independence to address our soaring energy costs. This is not to degrade the importance of independence. Independence is a prerequisite without which even the possibility of change is beyond reach. Rather, this is a caution that we will enter our new, independent state with a default permanent managerial class that’s ideologically wed to finding “market” solutions to every problem. Under Westminster this issue is insurmountable. In an independent Scotland the problem is solvable but we’ll need a revolution to address the issue of our permanent managerial class.
    The specific example of Hinckley Point C doesn’t relate exclusively to nuclear power. Rather, the problem relates to a fundamental imbalance in the relationship between State and private sector where major public infrastructure projects are concerned. As long as State ownership of infrastructure is ideologically off the table, the whip hand lies with the private power company during contract negotiations.
    At Hinckley Point C, EDF dragged negotiations out for years ‘till a looming, projected blackout of the grid forced the State to cave to outrageous generating tariffs. I believe the same tactics may be being deployed here with pump storage. Six schemes in Scotland are at planning stage (perhaps five and a half as Cruachan II uses the same header reservoir (and halves the “battery” storage time)) but as far as I’m aware none have broken ground. Glenmuckloch on the Buccleuch estate has had planning permission since 2016 but remains permanently stalled.
    In a previous thread, I attributed the imbalance in negotiations to our politicians, Civil Servants and SPADS being exclusively drawn from the ranks of humanities graduates while the generating companies are represented by scientists and engineers. There is some truth to this, but fundamentally, even if the State was represented in negotiations by technically competent people, the whip hand remains with the private sector until State ownership is reintroduced as at least a possibility.
    Don’t underestimate the scale of the revolution required to address this problem. Our permanent managerial class of humanities graduates are a self sustaining Mafia. They recruit and promote amongst their own little clique. They are ideologically wed to “market” solutions because they’ve never known (or conceived of) an alternative. They’re ideologically wed to the “market” solution because their education leaves them unqualified to assume responsibility for operating a real business. They’ll scream blue murder at the thought of a two tier civil service where a chartered engineer is paid substantially more than a “gender politics” graduate. But them’s the rules of the market economy, technical competence comes at a price. Should’a done a proper course at Uni.

    • Goose

      Scotland seems to be well placed, both in terms of energy and water compared to England and Wales.

      Scotland is just short of 100%, with 97% of all the electricity Scotland uses now met through renewable sources.

      Scottish water isn’t privatised either, is it. Reading only 3% of Scottish households have a private water supply. As for water bills; Scottish Water customers pay less than customers of all the private English and Welsh water companies. In 2021-22 the average charge in Scotland is £375, compared to £408 in England and Wales.

      With baking hot temperatures here in England and runaway right-wing ideological market dogma, the idea of an Independent Scotland is looking more and more attractive.

      • DiggerUK

        @Goose, you argue,

        “Scotland is just short of 100%, with 97% of all the electricity Scotland uses now met through renewable sources”

        ….. I’m asking that you come up with the supporting evidence for such a claim. I’ll hold my waters till the facts to back your claim are produced.

        Nationally there is no case for such a claim; with the biggest electricity supplied normally coming from gas generators…_
        https://gridwatch.co.uk/

      • Johnny Conspiranoid

        “With baking hot temperatures here in England and runaway right-wing ideological market dogma, the idea of an Independent Scotland is looking more and more attractive.”

        Except that you’ll still have both those things post independence.

      • Vivian O’Blivion

        Scotland is real estate ideally suited for power companies to operate on and generate their profits. The Scottish people accrue no benefit from this in terms of energy bills and in time of shortage, no benefit in terms of uninterrupted supply. This is the point of my original post.
        The auction of seabed plots for offshore wind farms this year garnered a less than eye watering £700 m this year. That won’t go far when Sturgeon and her menagerie of humanities graduate clowns can go £150 m over budget on the construction of two ferries.

  • Ian Smith

    Insulation needs a massive upfront addition to energy usage and CO2 release and it would be madness to do it right now while energy costs are artificially high due to geopolitical and supply/demand issues.

    It is not just waving a magic wand and having it put in place, it requires resources to be mined, factories to be powered, goods to be distributed, men to drive to locations and fix it, preceded by any number of designers and administrators, and followed up by painters, decorators, and maintenance men.

    It is at least a decade before there is any net gain, and that is only if it is done right. It did not work out well for the residents of Grenfel Tower.

    It is just a lazy response to an artificially created problem.

    • jordan

      It depends on where/how far you want to go. There are certainly quick wins to improve your insolation and lower your heating bill. The most leaking spots need to be found. Sometimes a curtain will improve the situation, or insulating the ceiling might help. Builders might use some infrared camera-like device to find out.

    • squirrel

      Ian Smith, do you mean, a decade before there is a net reduction in terms of monetary expense by a household, or a decade before there is a net reduction in energy expenditure by the country overall?

  • Paul Rooney

    overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, comparatively wealthy, mostly pensionable, overwhelmingly southern, people.

    Just like you

  • Peter Moritz

    Insulate, insulate, a cry hat is rather missing a few points. I lived in Canada for 35 years, and followed, as a heating system installer and designer (among other trades), the development of technology.
    Insulation without air exchange is the problem; houses get stuffy over winter, and when not properly fitted, vapour barriers can permit water vapor to enter through the walls, fungus can actually grow on drywall and worse, between insulation and drywall. I am speaking mainly about frame-hose construction.
    So, over the years (one always had exhaust fans in bathrooms) the heating installations included rather more complex air exchange systems that were mandated for new construction, including intake and exhaust pipes for the various rooms, in kitchens both at different locations in the room. With timers to have the bathroom fans switch on at certain times calculated for 3 air exchanges per hour afair, the rest of the system usually running the air exchanger controlled by humidity, or is also switched by a timer for the number of exchanges demanded by code. Of course, this adds to the electrical costs – although those exchangers (in the 2k$ range depending on the house size) remove the heat from the exhaust air to preheat the intake air to some degree.
    A properly designed efficient heating system based on underfloor heat (the most comfortable imho), and the exchange system, can cost over 5% in a new house, depending on how complex your system is, the cost of your boiler, etc., including the water heater.
    I installed in a 600k$ house in the 2010s (today’s cost likely over a million) a system that excluding labour cost about 30k$ in material, and not the most expensive ones.

    Today high-efficiency systems are on the market, and often demanded by the building code, that push to over 95% efficiency, but of course are rather costly. A “simple” hot air furnace at >90% will set you back about 3k$, and it goes up from there.

    • Bayard

      “Insulation without air exchange is the problem; houses get stuffy over winter,”

      This is exactly the problem with so many houses in the UK. The quickest way to cut down on your heating bills is to “get rid of draughts”, i.e. lower the air change rate, but in most cases this is taken to a point where it is insufficient to cope with the much moister air that arises from our elevated heat levels. The answer is not to insulate the house, but insulate yourself, i.e wear more clothes, and live at a lower temperature. In the matter of personal insulation, as well as building insulation, modern technology has made things more convenient. No longer do we need to resemble the Michelin Man.

      • tom welsh

        I remember, as a child in Rothesay, wearing heavy sweaters and thick trousers and socks in winter. In the morning I (or someone else) would get up early and go round the fireplaces collecting the last night’s ashes and (very carefully) tipping them into the outside bin. Any half-burnt coals were prized, as they would catch light quickly. Then it was time to make paper spills – one really good use for newspapers, even The Guardian – pile sticks on top, then some slack and finally small lumps of coal. I had to be very careful not to make spills from anything Dad hadn’t yet read, or there might be ructions.

        Light it, apply bellows when necessary, adjust the flue, and soon you have a nice warming coal fire. And all the exercise does more to keep you warm than fire or clothes.

  • Vivian O’Blivion

    Our host’s oft-stated equating of racism with the motivations of Brexiteers is simplistic and substantially wrong. What we should be interrogating are the differentials in voting across the four constituent elements of the UK.

    England voted Leave by a 7% margin of victory. Wales voted Leave by a 4% margin of victory (Prof Danny Dorling, Oxford, contends that the majority of autochthonous Welsh voted Remain). Northern Ireland voted Remain by a 12% margin of victory. Scotland voted Remain by a 24% margin of victory. The contrasts are stark. A compound differential of 31% between England and Scotland. There’s something peculiar about the collective psyche of the English in comparison to that of the Celtic nations.

    For the English, membership of the EU was a “foreign entanglement” – to quote Washington. An affront that impinged on the freedom to conduct the British / English “way of life”. This is understandable; what requires enquiry is why this sentiment isn’t shared by the Celtic nations.
    The peculiarity of the “English way of life” (from a Celtic perspective) is that it incorporates the concept of hereditary, hierarchical, class superiority and deference. The spontaneous, organisation of street parties by the English working class to celebrate Royal weddings, anniversaries and Coronations is viewed with baffled bemusement in working-class Scotland.
    The imposition of EU Law was not viewed as a threat to individual “freedom” in the Celtic nations because those societies are (perceived as being) inherently egalitarian.
    “We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns.”
    As the (perceived) effect of EU Law was egalitarian it could only be hostile to an inequitable social contract. The extent to which the English working class subconsciously reinforces hereditary class “superiority” accounts for the friction between that polity and the EU and hence the Brexit outcome.

    • Bayard

      “Our host’s oft-stated equating of racism with the motivations of Brexiteers is simplistic and substantially wrong.”

      So often what is simple, easy to understand but wrong is preferred over what is complex, difficult to understand, but correct.

      That is an interesting argument, however I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire 7% in England and 4% in Wales were simply people voting against the government and who would have voted Remain if the government had supported Leave. Since the Scots are no great lovers of English Tory governments either, it suggests that the margin of victory for Remain voters over Leave voters (as opposed to Whatever The Tory Government Doesn’t Want voters) in Scotland was much larger than 24%.

      • Vivian O’Blivion

        The margin of victory for Remain amongst autochthonous Scots can be estimated from 2011 census (country of birth figures) and 2016 mid-census estimate (population shifts, National Records of Scotland). Assuming a 81% rate of voter registration (among UK nationals) and a 67.2% rate of voter turnout across the board, autochthonous Scots voted Remain by est. 28% margin of victory.

        • Ian Smith

          Remember that there was no mainstream high level politician in current office in Scotland campaigning for Brexit. Every party, every media organisation was in favour of the EU. It was a completely empty debate.

          At the same time Scots were actually significantly lower in all measures of actually interacting with the EU, speaking EU languages, moving to the EU, doing erasmus, etc.

          It was hard to detect any genuine support for the EU, other than not wanting change or letting the rest of the UK get what it wanted.

          • R.McGeddon

            ‘All measures’ – including exporting food and drink; including the food and hospitality sectors’ reliance on European labour?
            Didn’t the well just run dry spectacularly – I am aware of both businessmen and politicians who predicted such a calamity.

          • Bayard

            “It was hard to detect any genuine support for the EU, other than not wanting change or letting the rest of the UK get what it wanted.”

            Yes, I can see that that might trump the desire not to let the UK government get want it wanted (which was, let us not forget, to remain in the EU).

    • Squeeth

      I fear that you are practising what you criticise. English way of life my arse! The boss class fought a greatly intensified class war from the late 60s and spent the proceeds of North Sea oil to defeat the English working class. If there was ever an English way of life, by about 1970 it had gone the way of the Weimar Republic.

    • Mr Lee 2

      Dear Craig,

      You have managed to gather on these pages more drivel on “climate change” than I have seen for a while. Well done!

      • Mr Lee

        If they could predict the weather next week it would be nice. In the meantime, given the abysmal record of climate predictions so far, it would seem sensible to assume what they say is NOT what we are going to get.

        • zoot

          I think it’s cool to let climate change ravage us until there’s nothing left because giving a shit about it is woke or something.

        • Clark

          Weather is not climate.

          “I wish they could predict the precise pattern of ripples in the bathwater so that we knew when the bath would be full or empty”.

          • Mr Lee

            Another one complaining about something insignificant because they have no answer to the repeated failures of climate predictions.

          • Bayard

            “Weather is not climate.”

            I would agree and the current hot summer is just weather, is it not?

          • Clark

            Bayard:

            “the current hot summer is just weather…”

            So now you’re back to saying that climate isn’t changing. You again sacrifice personal consistency to your greater objective of sowing doubt – any doubt will do.

            Yes, southern England’s hot summer is weather. As are the Canadian heat dome, the Californian and Australian wildfires, the two Indian heat waves, the two European heat waves, the central European floods, the record-breaking temperatures in one place after another, etc. etc. etc. These are all weather.

            But considered together, they indicate a rapidly changing climate.

            It’s like watching the tide come in, wave by wave. Hey, those last two waves fell short of the one preceding them, therefore the tide tables must a hoax; we all know that science is merely an exercise in follow-the-leader, right?

        • glenn_nl

          For goodness sake, Mr Lee – learn the difference between climate and weather.

          This is very, very basic stuff. I hate to say it, but this is a serious blog and this is a serious issue like no other. Contributions like yours above, benal, childish, unwitty… that’s what I would expect from drive-by trolling rather than a contributer expecting to be taken seriously.

          • Mr Lee

            How about addressing the real issue: multiple failed climate predictions. Being rude doesn’t hide these failures.

            This is basic stuff, and I am surprised that you don’t research both sides rather than just listen to the propaganda.

            P.S. It is spelled banal – or is that too basic for you?

          • glenn_nl

            Mr Lee: What failed predictions would these be? Those that severely understated the problems we’re seeing now, right? No, no – that can’t be. You’re only interested in one side of the argument – denialism.

            ML: “P.S. It is spelled banal – or is that too basic for you?

            I’d say pathetically trivial, but if it’s the best you’ve got, go for it…

          • Mr Lee

            @glenn_nl
            No, no you have things back to front. No, no – that can’t be, oh yes it can, because the failed predictions have consistently OVERSTATED the expected change.

            Am I only interested in denialism? If that is where the science points – and it does most clearly – that is what I must support. Have I looked at both sides? Yes, and the claims of climate change are clearly not scientific. I guess if these claims were scientific, we wouldn’t have proponents of climate change altering historical data – cheating in other words.

          • glenn_nl

            Well of course there’s no need for you to prove your extravagant claims of massive fraud – all you need to do (like Trump) is claim that it’s there.

          • glenn_nl

            And I see nothing from you concerning evidence about this supposed massive fraud.

            Don’t worry, you don’t disappoint – I wasn’t expecting to see anything except your dicking around like this.

            Don’t expect any further reply unless you decide to start being serious.

        • Johnny Conspiranoid

          ” given the abysmal record of climate predictions so far”

          What are these failed climate predictions then? Can you give an example?

          • Bayard

            “What are these failed climate predictions then? Can you give an example?”

            No increase in the long term average of global temperature since 2000. Yes the climate has been changing, but it’s not actually been getting warmer. (see here: graph – png) (Incidentally, why is it so difficult to get up-to-date info on global temperatures?)

          • Clark

            Ice doesn’t melt without a supply of heat. Ocean water doesn’t expand without a supply of heat. Both sea level rise and massive ice loss are directly observable.

            Therefore we don’t need to make choices between anyone’s scientific integrity. We don’t need to cherry-pick any obscure graphs hosted in obscure caches, in case the entire scientific community is coordinating to promote a lie; we have obvious proof of additional heat.

          • Bayard

            “we have obvious proof of additional heat.”

            but not that that additional heat has been caused by increased levels of CO2, any more than it raining following the tribe doing a rain dance means that the rain dance caused the rain.

          • Clark

            Bayard

            “why is it so difficult to get up-to-date info on global temperatures?”

            Er, because you visit only denialist sites and they don’t like to show the latest ten years?

            That graph shows the El Nino / La Nina oscillation, not global average temperature. And polar ice cover continued to plummet, ocean water continued to expand, so Earth must have continued to gather additional heat, no matter what graph you cherry-pick.

        • pretzelattack

          the record of projections has not been abysmal, so it would seem reasonable to assume that you are another shill, or perhaps a dupe.

      • tom welsh

        Says the “Financial Times”, for heaven’s sake! It’s supposed to fous on economics and finance, and it’s very unreliable even there. Those people know nothing about future climate – if indeed anyone does.

        The null hypothesis is that current trends will continue, meaning that it will be getting very slightly warmer until this interglacial ends and we go back to nice fresh Ice Age conditions. Then all the people who are running around like headless chickens will start moaning about the cold.

        • Clark

          Do the maths.

          Time until next ice age: 50,000 years.
          Temperature increase over last 100 years: about 1° centigrade.
          Temperature increase by next ice age = 50,000 / 100 x 1 = 500° centigrade.

          Conclusion: ignore tom welsh on climate.

          • Bayard

            “Time until next ice age: 50,000 years.
            Temperature increase over last 100 years: about 1° centigrade.
            Temperature increase by next ice age = 50,000 / 100 x 1 = 500° centigrade.”

            Conclusion: ignore Clark on climate. A glance at any graph of historical temperatures shows that 100 years of warming is no guarantee of 100 more years of warming. Extrapolation is unreliable in any physical system.
            Whatever we do, the climate will continue to get warmer until it starts getting cooler, as tom welsh said. This is true whether the halt in rising temperatures is due to natural causes or man’s own efforts. The only question is when the planet will stop warming. Are you seriously maintaining that it will be 500°C hotter when that happens?

        • glenn_nl

          Tom – The writers in the FT might not be climatologists themselves, no more than you would expect an article on space in the Guardian to be written by astronauts. But they do talk to experts.

          Do you think the FT is playing up some ‘hoax’? They couldn’t possibly be talking to rich people and businesses about what they really ought to be concerned about – right? Because it is all nonsense according to you!

          Do you actually think that the FT and the WSJ, and the US military for that matter, are all just dupes or working a scam when it comes to climate change? Of course they are, according to you! You see right through it!

          Or are they both dupes AND working a scam, despite this being mutually exclusive?

          Just how far are you willing to stretch credibility when it comes to denialism? As far as it takes, to any length and beyond, by your current record.

          • Johnny Conspiranoid

            “But they do talk to experts.”

            Are you sure about that? Time is money and standards have slipped in my lifetime.

          • tom welsh

            Johnny, my concern is precisely that they “talk to experts”. Such “experts” may, in theory, be dedicated idealists seeking only the truth. But nowadays they are often careerists seeking remuneration, prestige, and job security.

            Mathematical models say whatever they are programmed to say – both by their logic and by the selection of data that is input to them. A model that is (very crudely speaking) programmed to extrapolate future temperatures from past temperatures will give radically different outputs depending on when the time series of past temperatures is begun; and this of course is entirely in the control of the “experts”. Choose the right start date and all the model will see is a smooth rise, which it extrapolates as it is programmed to do.

            Give it everything that is known about past temperatures, on the other hand, and (depending on its logic) it is likely to see an interglacial which is slightly overdue to end any time now.

            Or one could think. This whole controversy reminds me of Alan Turing’s comment on a slightly different topic.

            ‘Turing was thoroughly dismissive of the EDSAC. He wrote: “The ‘code’ which he [Wilkes] suggests is however very contrary to the line of development here, and much more in the American tradition of solving one’s difficulties by means of much equipment rather than by thought”’.
            — David Leavitt “The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

            It seems to me that the whole AGW hysteria has arisen from foolish reliance on “the American tradition of solving one’s difficulties by means of much equipment rather than by thought”.

            I find it refreshing to imagine what Turing, if he were alive today, would say about AGW.

          • Clark

            Tom, the melting of the Arctic is NOT a computer simulation. Neither are the heatwaves, the record-breaking temperatures, the wildfires, the floods, the droughts, and the need to upgrade sea defences.

            Scepticism is commendable; bloody-mindedness is not. Your suspicions are all aligned in one direction; some might find that suspicious, given the circumstances.

          • Bayard

            “Tom, the melting of the Arctic is NOT a computer simulation. Neither are the heatwaves, the record-breaking temperatures, the wildfires, the floods, the droughts, and the need to upgrade sea defences.”

            No, but their reality doesn’t necessarily mean that they are caused by anything us humans have done.

          • glenn_nl

            B: “No, but their reality doesn’t necessarily mean that they are caused by anything us humans have done.

            You mean, like cutting down virtually all of the world’s forests, pumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually for decades at an ever increasing rate….

            Nah, couldn’t possibly have a thing to do with it.

  • Clark

    To Bayard, and others of this “next generation” of deniers of anthropogenic global heating:

    “Naturally” does not mean “magically”, as in “of unknowable cause”.

    Your core claim is that climate has changed “naturally” before, and is therefore changing “naturally” now. The polar icecaps are rapidly melting, and that requires some massive additional source of heat. Ocean level is rising which can only be due to thermal expansion; this too requires some massive source of additional heat.

    So where is all this extra heat suddenly coming from?

    The scientists that study the sun aren’t jumping up and down warning us that the sun’s output is increasing. The scientists that study orbital dynamics aren’t warning that earth has suddenly started spiralling towards the sun. The geophysicists don’t say there’s extra heat coming out of the ground. Earth doesn’t seem to have encountered a massive increase in meteors or asteroid strikes. There doesn’t seem to have been an unexplained increase in nuclear decay.

    You denialists attempt to hide humanity’s predicament behind a veil of time by equating it with climate change aeons in the past. But science didn’t exist then to witness it, whereas now it does. You attempt to isolate climate science from science as a whole to accuse climate scientists of corruption, but which other field’s silence has been bought, and how on Earth would anyone have known to buy them out?

    Anthropogenic global heating denial is therefore conspiracy theory; dismiss it.

    • Clark

      By “conspiracy theory” I mean that new objections to your theory force you to widen the supposed conspiracy to cover it; your conspiracy has to expand without limit.

      • Johnny Conspiranoid

        “By “conspiracy theory” I mean that new objections to your theory force you to widen the supposed conspiracy to cover it; your conspiracy has to expand without limit.”

        So are theories involving a conspiracy, but which do not have to expand without limit, not conspiracy theories?

        • Clark

          The word ‘theory’ has two uses, which leads to a lot of confusion, eg. the theory section of the driving test doesn’t mean it might be legal to break the speed limit, and gravitational theory doesn’t mean that Newton’s apple might have stopped and hovered just above his head.

          So yes, and to clarify the linguistic ambiguity: a theory an hypothesis involving a conspiracy is not a conspiracy theory.

        • Clark

          More generally, I think limits must be considered when we hypothesise about a proposed secret conspiracy. Our explanations for successive challenges to our hypothesis must entrain less and less conspirators, tending towards a limit. If the opposite is the case such that our successive explanations entrain larger and larger groups, the “conspiracy” can’t be secret and must be more like a custom or a widespread cultural behaviour.

    • glenn_nl

      Clark – what really bugs me is the intellectual laziness of this current crop of denialists. People who really ought to know better, and are quite capable of learning, but they simply don’t make the effort.

      Ok, that’s fine – stick your head in the sand. Good for you, enjoy your life.

      But that’s not what they’re doing. They’re going around, peddling the same disinformation that has been thoroughly debunked for decades now. The science is _in_.

      But denialism is evergreen.

      “It’s all a hoax!” – despite no evidence for such a ludicrously large conspiracy.
      “They’re in it for the money!” – whereas the $2Billion/day oil industry isn’t. And no evidence.
      “Climate changes!” – despite it never having done so this drastically quickly.

      And so on. It just goes round and round, the silliness of the arguments should shame a self-aware 12 year old.

      I really like it when the Bayards try getting all ‘scientific’ on the subject, and then scurry away when confronted by any single point, every single time. Like CO2 doesn’t cause warming – Look at Mars! (His own special, ‘gotcha’ example, which he probably enjoys using to bamboozle the unwary frequently, and will continue to do so).

      Except for the fact that Mars has a tiny atmosphere, but even then, its CO2 content warms Mars several degrees. How about Venus? Nah, no reply. No retraction. No intellectual honesty. Just move on, circle around, and repeat it sometime later.

      I’m afraid that all this proves that humanity is irredeemably stupid, or willfully ignorant when it chooses, and there is no hope. If people reasonably smart and with access to information are still positively working in the wrong direction now, here, what hope for the rest of humanity which is far less privileged.

      • Bramble

        The objective of the denialists is to suck all the energy into contesting their statements – thus diverting our attention from the real problem, which is what to do about the actual crisis. Just what they want – and more importantly, what those who profit from the current situation want. They are still pouring CO2 etc into the atmosphere, day after day after day, and nothing is going to change that, because we are still too busy arguing about whether and why climate change is happening. That’s more than 40 years after I, for example, first became aware of what was going on. But saving the economic system that caused the problem must come first. Ditto with the pandemic. Ditto with the cost of living crisis. Money must rule.

        • Bayard

          “The objective of the denialists is to suck all the energy into contesting their statements – thus diverting our attention from the real problem, which is what to do about the actual crisis.”

          whereas the objective of the alarmists is to suck all the energy into combatting climate change – thus diverting our attention from the real problem, which is what to do about the actual change.

          • pretzelattack

            we know what we need to do, find other sources of energy. which the fossil fuel companies want to delay as long as possible. that’s the real problem, shills and dupes and bought politicians dragging their heels, pretending this isn’t all based on solid science. fear, uncertainty and doubt, the end goal to delay, delay, delay, and repeating stale old propaganda – like “the climate is always changing”, and “it’s not getting hotter”, “how do we know humans are causing it anyway” – will serve as well as any other horsecrap.

          • glenn_nl

            Bayard: Do you have some active interest in promoting denialism? Your posts on the subject seem ideologically driven by an agenda of denialism.

          • Clark

            Bayard:

            “…the objective of the alarmists is to suck all the energy into combatting climate change – thus diverting our attention from the real problem, which is what to do about the actual change.” (my emphasis)

            Sorry; what are the “real problem” and the “actual change” that you just referred to?

          • Bayard

            I can only repeat ” the real problem, which is what to do about the actual change” (in the climate). What is so hard to understand about that?

          • SA

            Bayard
            As the real problem is that we are pumping more CO2 that is the cause of the climate change then any solution has to be aimed primarily at pumping less CO2. We could also use other means to combat this, but there is nothing at the moment we know of that will ameliorate it. When you have found this alternative way, then we can also use it.
            The underlying cause of all of the problem is, of course, capitalism – and sadly there is no capitalist answer to climate change. Capitalism will not survive the effects of climate change, but unfortunately neither will mankind.

          • Clark

            Bayard, what made your remark so hard to understand is your lack of consistency.

            Even if some other external cause of global heating had been found (which it hasn’t, despite thorough research), humanity’s best method of countering it would still be by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

    • Johnny Conspiranoid

      “The scientists that study the sun aren’t jumping up and down warning us that the sun’s output is increasing. The scientists that study orbital dynamics aren’t warning that earth has suddenly started spiralling towards the sun. The geophysicists don’t say there’s extra heat coming out of the ground.”

      But those things do vary. Scientists who study those things would be happy to tell you about and might have published studies but you would not hear about them in the FT etc..

      “Anthropogenic global heating denial is therefore conspiracy theory; dismiss it.”

      Since Anthropogenic global heating and natural global heating are independent of each other, natural global temperature fluctuations are going to continue at the same time as any anthropogenic heating.
      Have people stopped conspiring yet? What appears in the FT or anywhere else in the MSM is not a result of due diligence driven by a thirst to know the truth but rather a result of recycling handouts from interested parties under pressure of workplace culture, management and owners biases and financial restraints, so contrary evidence doesn’t have to be ‘fixed’ it just has to be avoided. Its called managing the narative and there’s a whole industry dedicated to it. Managing the narrative is necessarily a conspiracy since it wouldn’t work if its targets new they were being managed.

      • Clark

        “Scientists who study those things would be happy to tell you about and might have published studies”

        Hundreds of such studies have been published in the scientific journals, and reviewed and documented in excruciating detail by the IPCC Working group 1.

    • Bayard

      “So where is all this extra heat suddenly coming from?”

      Where did it come from last time the Earth warmed up by 1.5°C?

      “The scientists that study the sun aren’t jumping up and down warning us that the sun’s output is increasing. The scientists that study orbital dynamics aren’t warning that earth has suddenly started spiralling towards the sun. The geophysicists don’t say there’s extra heat coming out of the ground. Earth doesn’t seem to have encountered a massive increase in meteors or asteroid strikes. There doesn’t seem to have been an unexplained increase in nuclear decay.”

      So there is another cause. That doesn’t automatically mean that cause is human emissions of CO2. It could be the thinning of the ozone layer.

      “You denialists attempt to hide humanity’s predicament behind a veil of time by equating it with climate change aeons in the past. But science didn’t exist then to witness it, whereas now it does.”

      So all the ice core data is made up is it? All archaeology, all pre C19th history is bunk, because “science didn’t exist then to witness it.
      Why is humanity’s predicament any more real by being caused by humanity? Climate change is real. The illusion, comforting though it is is that we can do anything about it except adapt, as we always have done. I know you like to dismiss the Mediaeval Warm Period and the subsequent Little Ice Age as “regional” rather than global, but that climate change was very real to the people living through it and they adapted in the same way as we will have to adapt. Why is suggesting we waste resources that could be used to adapt to climate change on uselessly trying to halt or reverse it such a good idea. It’s better to move further up the beach than try to hold back the sea with a rampart of sand.

      • pretzelattack

        It could be what you are emitting at the moment, Bayard but it isn’t. There is a subfield called attribution studies. It’s more than clear what the cause is: fear, uncertainty and doubt – as revealed decades ago in “Merchants of Doubt“.

      • Clark

        Bayard, your comments are becoming increasingly confused and self-contradictory. In various places you have argued that global heating is real, but when evidence for it is posted you dispute it. Now you’re speculating that some mechanism other than emissions is the cause. The most notable consistency in your position is your dismissal of the strong scientific consensus that current heating is driven primarily by emissions. You’re accepting palaeoclimatology while dismissing contemporary climatology, even though the latter has a far larger and far more directly available base of evidence.

        Please excuse this personal observation but I think you need to reflect; there seems to be some sort of contradiction confusing what you write.

        There is already a large body of scientific work that addresses your speculations about the cause of current global heating, and it has led to a strong consensus that emissions are the cause. You clearly have a strong suspicion that this consensus is wrong, yet you seem unfamiliar with the evidence and reasoning that led to the consensus. So what is the cause of your suspicion? It can’t be the scientific case itself, because you don’t know what it is. It’s not a few casual sentences cherry-picked from the tranche of exfiltrated personal CRU e-mails, is it?

        • Bayard

          ” In various places you have argued that global heating is real, but when evidence for it is posted you dispute it.”

          I have never disputed that the Earth has been warming, only the reason why that happened.

          “The most notable consistency in your position is your dismissal of the strong scientific consensus that current heating is driven primarily by emissions.”

          This so-called consensus derives entirely from a study which showed that 97% of the papers published on global temperatures said that recent heating has been caused by emissions. However this proves nothing except that the vast majority of scientists who published papers on global warming believed that such warming was caused by emissions, it does not prove that such scientists were a majority of scientists, or even a majority of scientists who were studying global temperatures. There is bound to be consensus amongst a group who all think the same.

          “You’re accepting palaeoclimatology while dismissing contemporary climatology, even though the latter has a far larger and far more directly available base of evidence.”

          Unfortunately, scientists are just like other humans and therefore are just as capable of being wrong or even lying, especially in something as emotionally, financially and politically charged as climate change; nor is science immune from the principle of “he who pays the piper calls the tune”.

          “So what is the cause of your suspicion? “

          My main cause of suspicion is evident from a brief perusal of these pages. Normally scientists welcome scepticism, indeed the “Scientific Method”, by which all science is supposed to progress, is based on it. A theory is proposed and then other scientists set out to disprove it. If no-one succeeds in doing so, then the theory is accepted as the best understanding of that phenomenon until a different theory is proposed, when the whole business starts again. “Climate Science” is not like this. Scepticism is deplored and met with pejorative names like “denier” and worse. The motives, intelligence and even the sanity of the sceptics and questioners are called into doubt. The theories behind AGW are not offered as something to be tested and possibly disproved, they are handed down like holy writ as truths to be believed. When scientists stop following the scientific method, it’s not surprising that people start to think something is wrong. Similarly when the adherents of a theory start citing its importance as evidence that it is right and can’t be challenged, then again that’s a red flag. If anything, the more important an issue is, the more important it is that the theories are tested and tested again, that people are sceptical about it. Instead we are told “stop questioning, the science is settled”. Science should never be settled.

          • Clark

            Bayard:

            “I have never disputed that the Earth has been warming…”

            Er, here you wrote “No increase in the long term average of global temperature since 2000. Yes the climate has been changing, but it’s not actually been getting warmer”. You’ve denied that the greenhouse effect even exists, even claiming that there is no greenhouse effect on Mars, despite the greenhouse effect being completely mainstream, interdisciplinary science. You’ve agreed with commenters calling global heating a “scam”, and tried to encourage them in that belief.

            Yet here you are saying you haven’t denied global heating. As I said, your thinking seems confused. If you can’t recognise your own confusion, despite it being pointed out to you element by element, you have some intellectual housecleaning to do. Then you continue…

            “This so-called consensus derives entirely from a study which showed that 97% of the papers published on global temperatures said that recent heating has been caused by emissions.”

            This is entirely untrue; for a start, there are a couple of other similar studies that have produced similar results, but the consensus started to form in the 1970s, decades before any of those studies. Hansen testified to the US government in 1988. Margaret Thatcher lectured the Tory Party conference about it the same decade. Systematic reviews of the scientific literature of the 1970s show that even then, while the corporate media was wittering on about a “coming ice age”, the majority of scientists with an interest in climate were more worried about emissions and heating. The Stern Review in 2004 was based upon the consensus. Every scientific institution in the world endorsed the findings of the IPCC.

            “Science should never be settled.”

            Classical mechanics is going to be correct about the movement of billiard balls for the rest of eternity, even though classical mechanics has been superseded by quantum physics. Anyone seriously questioning whether water at STP really boils at 100 centigrade is going to get laughed out of the arena. Anyone challenging the existence of the elements and the validity of the periodic table is a nutter. Anyone saying that optics is so wrong that corrective spectacles and binoculars can’t work and their perceived effects must be psychological is not going to get their paper into Nature. If every scientist treated every crank challenge as good-faith scepticism they’d never get any science done, especially when there’s a well funded denial industry promoting every doubt that can be exploited. I’ve wasted masses of my time just trying to talk sense with you.

            What has happened is that scientists have become pissed off and desperate. They really believed that science had some status in society, some weight and authority with governments. But for decades they’ve been trying to impart an urgent warning, and found themselves ignored, accused of dishonesty, greed, corruption, conspiracy and professional misconduct, because their warning was politically very inconvenient. They’ve found that well-funded, deliberately corrupted antiscience is actually more influential within government and media than their own honest efforts. And so some of them snap when they hear the charlatans’ narratives and tell the narrator to have more sense; they’re only human.

          • Bayard

            “Er, here you wrote “No increase in the long term average of global temperature since 2000. Yes the climate has been changing, but it’s not actually been getting warmer”. “

            Well perhaps I should have added “since 2000”, but I thought that was obvious since it is in the previous sentence. In any case, the Earth has not been constantly warming, even over the last 150 years. There was another period where there was no warming, directly after WWII. Yes, the long-term trend is warming, but the “flat spots” don’t sit well with your theory of what is causing it, which should produce a constant rise.

            “You’ve denied that the greenhouse effect even exists, even claiming that there is no greenhouse effect on Mars, despite the greenhouse effect being completely mainstream, interdisciplinary science. “

            Yes there is a greenhouse effect, but it doesn’t operate in the way that you claim it does. The way that you claim it does arises from a fairly elementary error in the assumptions behind the calculations as I explained
            here and here.

            “This is entirely untrue; for a start, there are a couple of other similar studies that have produced similar results, “

            Presumably for the same specious reasons as the first studies, that the group being studied was one that was already selected for agreement with the proposition. It’s like claiming that there is consensus that God exists after a poll was conducted amongst the Catholic priesthood.

            “Systematic reviews of the scientific literature of the 1970s show that even then, while the corporate media was wittering on about a “coming ice age”, the majority of scientists with an interest in climate were more worried about emissions and heating. “

            All that tells you is the same as my earlier point. It was, mostly only those who were convinced that 1. the Earth was warming, 2. this warming was man made and 3. that something could and should be done about it, that produced papers on the subject. Those who realised the Earth was warming but thought that it was completely natural had little incentive to publish, because that was the current thinking, exactly in the same way as no scientist is going to publish a paper on why a dropped object falls towards the centre of the Earth.

            “Classical mechanics is going to be correct about the movement of billiard balls for the rest of eternity, even though classical mechanics has been superseded by quantum physics. Anyone seriously questioning whether water at STP really boils at 100 centigrade is going to get laughed out of the arena. “

            It would be better if you tried to answer my point having learned the difference between a phenomenon, like the behaviour of billiard balls or the boiling point of water, and a theory which seeks to explain what is going on, why do the billiard balls behave as they do, why does a liquid undergo a phase change to a gas at a particular temperature and pressure (and no, STP is not 100°C, water at standard temperature and pressure does not boil, it freezes).

            “If every scientist treated every crank challenge as good-faith scepticism they’d never get any science done, especially when there’s a well funded denial industry promoting every doubt that can be exploited. I’ve wasted masses of my time just trying to talk sense with you.”<=p>

            If every scientist writes off every challenger to their theories as a crank, as the AGW believers do, then they won’t actually be doing any science, because science consists of challenging theories. I also have wasted masses of my time trying to talk some grasp of scientific principles into you, but I am afraid you are not interested in what is actually happening, you just want to prove that you are right and get others to believe it to. All very evangelical, but not science.

            “What has happened is that scientists have become pissed off and desperate. They really believed that science had some status in society, some weight and authority with governments. But for decades they’ve been trying to impart an urgent warning,”

            It’s only an urgent warning if they are correct, otherwise its scaremongering. Their loss of status is a direct result of their abandonment of the scientific method, the arrogance of their insistence on being right and their behaving like shills, churning out papers that seek to prove a point rather than challenging a theory.

            “found themselves ignored, accused of dishonesty, greed, corruption, conspiracy and professional misconduct, because their warning was politically very inconvenient.”

            No, because they have been guilty of dishonesty, greed, corruption, conspiracy and professional misconduct. You wear the mantle of the martyr well, but I am afraid it is but borrowed robes. Anyone who talks about “well-funded, deliberately corrupted antiscience” is in no position to complain about accusations of conspiracy.

            I am going to leave the last word in this to Oliver Cromwell, when he was faced with a similar group of people convinced of their rightness and brooking no argument, ““I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

          • Clark

            Bayard, I have read your “explanation” that you linked to twice. I find it too vague and incomplete to understand, or even check. It also looks too simplified and basic even to be relevant, first approximation stuff undergrads might be given to play with. Lapsed Agnostic’s replies, by contrast, seem clear and concise.

            You’d need to tell me your description of the prevailing consensus theory, then point out the assumptions you claim to be wrong and what discrepancies with observation they cause, then show how your preferred theory puts those discrepancies right. What is the name of this alternative theory you adhere to? It’s not yours personally, I take it?

            So do you think that all science is as corrupt as you claim climate science is? And it’s not just climate science either, is it? As Lapsed Agnostic pointed out, the theory you’re promoting would raise eyebrows among molecular spectroscopists too, wouldn’t it? Are they all making stuff up as well, to suit the climate scientists?

          • glenn_nl

            Clark: I believe that you’re wasting your time. My conclusion about Bayard’s denialism (https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2022/08/insulate-insulate/comment-page-1/#comment-1023633) means you will never get anywhere, no more than you would convince a fundamentalist out of their delusions.

            There is another side to this, of course. The likes of Bayard, who can _sound_ like he’s making an arguable case (due to the confident delivery), convinces others that there’s no problem. The assuring figure states there is no shark out there, the building isn’t on fire, the reactor is perfectly safe, so just ignore that alarm bell and carry on.

          • Clark

            I find it quite surreal, while being berated as a religionist by The (apparently self-appointed) One True Voice of Science, to be “beseeched in the bowels of Christ” in the voice of Oliver Cromwell 😐

            Bayard, you’ve made some quite unpleasant accusations; I think you should either back them up with facts, or retract them.

          • glenn_nl

            Maybe you should consider “what if you’re wrong?”, Clark.

            Because if you were, and the policies you’d like to see get enacted, then imagine the horror…

            We would have end up with more sustainable energy, less waste, fewer of our resources going to filthy oil dictatorships, and a less polluted, less noisy, healthier environment – with people using decent public transport, cycling and walking – instead of sitting in traffic jams at huge costs of time, money and even more pollution. And that’s just the traffic part of it.

            And we definitely wouldn’t want that!

  • Ewan2

    Science is a mode of inquiry, it only becomes authoritarian when combined with govt. and corporate interests, which today are the same.

    Due to funding, scientists, need to get paid, there is a phenomenon called ‘scientific renting’ when ‘ The Science’ writes whatever suits its employer.

    This article by Richard S. Lindzen: ‘Science in the Public Square: Global Climate Alarmism and Historical Precedents‘.

    What about humans, we’re part of the environment. What use is screaming criticism, blaming everyone for destroying the planet etc etc. How the hell is that going to encourage people to ‘save’ the planet. They’re not? They’re going to escape to the screen with headphones on and ignore the outside world, which they do, especially the young. They are programmed to buy stuff, lifestyles but not able to do anything practical about environmental problems. They can blame and go on demos with their corporately designed ‘action group’ with its own logo, flag, t-shirt etc. A cartoon in the New Yorker noted that ‘protest’ was $15 billion a year industry.

    Cars are getting bigger, machines are still built with built-in obsolescence, solutions such as solar panels and wind-farms a repairman’s paradise. These and other things were noted in Vance Packaard’s book ‘The Waste Makers‘, published in 1960.

    In 2019 plastic was the death-knell of the world and when the so-called pandemic came along we bathed in plastic tests kits, masks and syringes – all one-use throway products. Not a whimper from the previous years ‘plastic people’.

    Then the pandemic ended , with the disease going away, injected people still catching the it, we had the Olympics and then war – wow! That will really help with Global whatevering.

    It reminded me of the chapter in ‘The Waste Makers’ – Progress through Planned Chaos.

    ” The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in
    Engines stop running, the wheats growing thin
    A nuclear era but I have no fear……….”

    The ClashLondon’s calling

    • Johnny Conspiranoid

      Here’s a clue that ‘the environment’ is being commoditised. Perhaps there’s money to be made from climate panic. That’s not a clue as to whether man made global warming is real or not though. The reality of it would only increase the money to be made. Under schemes like this capital could disguise its environment destroying activities and make moaney out of greenwash (that’s a conspiracy theory).

      https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2021/10/13/wall-streets-takeover-of-nature-advances-with-launch-of-new-asset-class/

      • Clark

        I wouldn’t class that as conspiracy theory; I’d call it the cultural norms of neoliberalism. “The environment” is being commoditised, because the dawning realisation of environmental catastrophe is increasing the money to be made.

    • Clark

      Ewan2, August 16, 09:45 – I think you should be sceptical about the Richard S. Lindzen article you linked; jpands.org is the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons:

      Wikipedia: Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (id=1104602163)

      Not to be confused with the Association of American Physicians or the American Association of Physician Specialists.

      • Founded: 1943
      • Type: Political advocacy group
      • Tax ID no: 36-2059197
      • Legal status: 501(c)(6)
      • Focus: Opposition to abortion, Medicare and Medicaid, universal health care, and government involvement in health care

      The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a politically conservative non-profit association that promotes conspiracy theories and medical misinformation, such as HIV/AIDS denialism, the abortion-breast cancer hypothesis, vaccine and autism connections. The association was founded in 1943 to oppose a government attempt to nationalize health care. The group has included notable members, including American Republican politicians Ron Paul, Rand Paul and Tom Price.

  • Ewan2

    Thank you for the link Clark.

    One idea to help would be to remove all external advertising. In the recent pandemicon the metro station near me had no advertising in it . I walked in as usual and felt something was different and I felt quite happy. I looked around and there was no advertising and it felt palpably good. So not just the waste of advertising, paper, hoardings, some of them massive but the relief from the images and messages which are generally negative, inducing feels of inadequacy [ so that one buys……anything ]. I have no proof but I reckon it would alleviate a lot of mental stress. It’s never mentioned by the MSM, corporations and governments because they rely on it. Maybe the TV ads could be shelved and money put to good use. Perhaps they could take them off every webpage so that the computers etc run more economically and effectively. Maybe without all that ‘noise’ we could tune into each other more and bring about environmental improvement as a natural effect of being freed from the ‘ You’re crap, buy this ‘ ads.

    Mod: Thanks for linking to article in previous post, I AM crap at that!

  • Lapsed Agnostic

    Seeing as this comments section seems in parts to have descended into one of Newman & Baddiel’s old ‘History Today’ sketches, here’s a bit of light relief at the expense of The Hate on Sunday’s Dan Hodges, who’s been asking questions on Twitter again:

    https://nitter.net/SamuelOrwell/status/1559275772686237705#m

    Yes, the chief political columnist of Britain’s best-selling mid-market Sunday tabloid really does appear to think that companies that extract gas from the UK sector of the North Sea – who over the past two years have seen the market price of their wares increase ten-fold, with further increases predicted – are having to be ‘bailed out’ and propped up by the government.

    • Pears Morgaine

      It’s not the companies that extract the oil and gas who are being subsidised: it’s the utilities. They buy gas on the international market and sell it on to you and me. If the wholesale price of gas along with their other expenses is greater than the price they’re allowed to sell to customers then they run at a loss and need to be subsidised. The same would be true if the utilities were nationalised, if they’re forced to sell at a price below their costs they will need subsidies.

      • Lapsed Agnostic

        Thanks for your reply Pears. The utility companies aren’t being subsidised.* The energy price cap is being allowed to rise by very large amounts so that they don’t have to endure massive state-imposed losses which would otherwise drive them out of business, but that’s not the same as being subsidised. At the minute, it’s households that are getting a subsidy later in the year through Rishi’s £400 handout.

        * assuming you don’t count the costs of educating their workforces, who will have mostly gone to state schools, etc.

        • Bayard

          “The utility companies aren’t being subsidised.”

          You are right, it is the customers who are being effectively* subsidised, with the entirety of the subsidy being captured by the producers. The producers are, and always have been, a cartel, which is why sensible countries have state ownership of natural resources. Being a cartel, supplying an essential need means that they can charge the maximum the market can bear, which is a lot more than you or I would like to pay, hence the price cap. However the price cap doesn’t apply directly to the producers, it applies to the utilities and thus only indirectly to the producers in that, if the producers charge more than the utilities are able to pay because of the cap, the utilities will go bankrupt. Thus they provide a useful human shield for the producers when the producers want to force the government to raise the price cap, knowing that every penny of that extra income will be accruing to them.

          * but not, I would agree, actually. A price cap is not a subsidy.

          • Lapsed Agnostic

            Thanks for your reply Bayard. I don’t think that the North Sea gas producers are a cartel because I haven’t seen any evidence that they’ve been acting in concert to fix prices. The price increases have been largely caused by reductions in the European gas supply coming from Russia and from fears that it will soon end entirely. I think the question should be: Is oil & gas extraction a natural monopoly? The story of Standard Oil would suggest that it is.

            P.S. I’ve replied to your comment about the Stefan-Boltzmann law and the greenhouse effect on the previous page.

          • Bayard

            “I don’t think that the North Sea gas producers are a cartel because I haven’t seen any evidence that they’ve been acting in concert to fix prices.”

            We buy our gas on the “spot market”. The price on the spot market is the same whoever is producing the gas. Therefore the producers are in a de facto cartel, whether they have been colluding or not. They don’t need to, because the mechanism of the spot market does it for them.

          • SA

            There is a certain anomaly here that requires explaining. The cost of producing oil and gas has not suddenly increased but events have produced an artificial scarcity that has meant that both the energy companies and the middlemen have made a massive profit. This is causing harm to society everywhere. But the rules that have been made to run this system have not been ordained from heaven they are man made and are part of an organised worldwide conspiracy called capitalism. There is no need to have spot markets intrinsically. Trade can quite efficiently take place by the buyer directly be approached by the seller. Spot markets and derivatives and so on are just creations of the extractive economy. These middlemen produce nothing. It’s speculative parasitism. But these extremely rich parasites also happen to own powerful governments so we are are not allowed to talk about them, but distract ourselves by talking about ‘handouts’ to the destitute as opposed to big handouts through legalised larceny.

          • SA

            And what are the events that have produced the relative scarcity? Prices of energy started to rise before the Ukraine war but of course got much worse after the war began. The components of this are supposedly the post-covid recovery and then the extreme sanctions from the west on Russia, a major energy producer. It is naive to think that these sanctions have had the desired effect, and in fact some analysts have stated that Russia has benefited from the massive rise in energy crises and so produces less. Again the main sufferers are ordinary people in Europe, Africa and elsewhere. It is bizarre then to blame this entirely on Russia, I thought the sacred rule of the market is that you respect your supplier of vital goods: notice how we treat all the gulf monarchies.
            So we have self-defeating self-inflicted sanctions and spot markets and extractive capitalism, all man-made, together with climate change, and we pretend that the real problem is that these destitute scroungers are the problem because they require ‘handouts’.

          • SA

            And the West’s answer to the Ukraine war?! It is also good for business, a more lethal type of business. It is too hazardous to have a head-to-head weapons trial or armies trial between the West, NATO and Russia, that could have very serious consequences for us. So why not prolong the war and test our weapons against theirs? We can do this by supplying the weapons and support, and maybe also some personnel as long as they are not positively identifiable. We also supply surveillance, intelligence and propaganda. This is such a win-win. In addition, war also provides an opportunity to somehow find huge amounts of money suddenly becoming available that can be spent without objection or scrutiny. Any money flow finds its way to the pockets of the rich. What is there not to like?

  • Al Dossary

    Interesrlting to see the topic come up. We have gotten used in the West to the world of “cheap” energy, centrally heated homes and ever increasing ambient temperatures in the home.

    Are the new homes well insulated – yes they are, but gas is soon to be yesterdays fuel for home heating. Efficient heat pump systems are one way (on a well designed system you can get as much as 5kw heat for every 1kw power put into it). However that has to be tied in a heat recovery system that will recover the heat from “hot” air leaving the house in winter. I’m sure there are plenty of us older readers who can remember Jack Frost on the window panes every winter.

    As to global warming – the effect of humans on this earth whilst large in our present little time frame of a few hundred years is nothing compared to the cycles of previous changes. One recent episode was roughlt 12,500 years ago (Younger Dryas, followed by meltwater pulse 1a, 1b). At this poin North America was largely covered in an ice sheet 1.5 MILES deep, which suddenly and mysteriously melted in rapid time, to the extent that sea levels rose by 400 feet. Strangely enough the “flood” is a myth that exists amongst the varying peoples of every major land mass in the world.

    What caused it – who knows. A huge comet, multiple comets, vulcanism, runaway global warming are theories.

    If you have the time and the interest, I would recommend looking out for Randall Carleton on Howtube – his chosen topic is the American Scablands, catastrophism and the widespread melting of the ice sheets and subsequent flooding of the American mid-west.

    https://www.howtube.com/channels/RandallCarlson

  • Goose

    You’re right in suggesting the problems are all political.

    Alas, people are relatively powerless to change anything in the UK. Due mainly to FPTP and irremovable (safe) seat-for-life MPs we’re stuck with. When Tory and Labour collude, as they are largely doing now, there is no democratic avenue or route to meaningful change. Look how re-nationalisation of these utilities is completely off the agenda, despite still being incredibly popular with the general public in all conducted polling..

    The US showed a possible solution last night; namely, in the form of the Wyoming primary, and Liz Cheney’s loss. Wyoming is republican stronghold: 70% vote for Trump in 2020’s election. Yet as I understand things, since winning her congressional seat there, Cheney has spent most of her time assisting the Democrats in their anti-Trump witch hunt. Acting more like she was on a mission is to drive out the MAGA wing. Many there believe Liz Cheney is from the swamp wing of the GoP – people who despise the threat Trump poses to the establishment, MIC and US global hegemony.
    Were I a US citizen, I’d certainly be no Trump supporter, I believe he’s the wrong person to lead any sort of democratic revolution in accountability and transparency in Washington, more likely to be consumed by the swamp than drain it. But I fully understand his ‘outsider’ appeal and of messages like “drain the swamp” and the idea Washington and ‘Deep State’ are full of corrupt players putting themselves and their careers first. Leading Dems and Republicans do undoubtedly collude to some extent to protect each other and the status quo, acting more like a one-party state; and they justify it all, by claiming they are acting in ‘the national interest’ or for the greater good. What they really crave is a return to the pre-internet, less polarised days of bipartisanship. Liz Cheney, like her father before her, is only a hero to those who believe in all-powerful untouchable elites doing as they please, and justifying it all by wrapping themselves in the flag and claiming they, and only they, are the true patriots. They arrogantly assume they have a monopoly on all the right decisions.

    We certainly need primaries in the UK, or their equivalent, to mitigate FPTP, since we appear to be stuck with this voting system. Had we had such elections in 2015-2019 the Labour party would be a different creature entirely today, offering a real alternative. The only people who fear such local democracy are those that are unrepresentative and/or out-of-touch.

    • SA

      Any political change that gets us closer to the US defunct model is going to be worse than FPTP. The only way that true democracy can progress is by removing big money out of politics and elections. If you were listening carefully Nadine Dorries gave the game away that getting rid of Boris was against the wishes of the big donors.

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