"Landlords cash in with £100,000 Cop26 rentals"

Emailed in by MBK, from The Times:

It is billed the “best last chance to save the planet” but Cop26 has given Glasgow landlords a chance to save for the future by charging extortionate rents. Rates have soared above £100,000 for the two-week summit as politicians, scientists and activists vie for accommodation, in what has been dubbed the Glasgow gold rush.

An investigation by The Times found 20 properties on Airbnb and 30 on Booking.com that are going for more than £20,000 for the fortnight. The average nightly price for a rental on Airbnb during the two weeks is over £600, a threefold increase on the same dates in the following two months.

Well of course. Location rents are determined by what's going on in the area, if there's more going on, then rents go up.

What they overlook is that while this an extreme example of landowners cashing in on the efforts of others, their baseline rents also just represent landowners cashing in on the efforts of others. There's no moral or economic difference.

It takes one to know one and causation/correlation

From MSN News:

The climate activist Greta Thunberg slammed Cop26 as a “failure” and a “PR event”. “The leaders are not doing nothing, they are actively creating loopholes and shaping frameworks to benefit themselves and to continue profiting from this destructive system,” she said.

The last three years of ms Thunberg's life have been a carefully managed and superbly successful PR event.

From the BBC:

Highly shared [Facebook] articles made false assertions that climate change was not confirmed by science or claimed to debunk it with data. Of these, 69% could be traced back to just 10 "super-polluter" publishers - dubbed the "toxic ten" - the campaign group found.

In fact, our understanding of climate change comes from analyses of millions of measurements gathered in different parts of the world. And multiple independent teams of scientists have reached the same result - a spike in temperatures coinciding with the onset of the industrial era. [Photo caption] Flooding in Indonesia has been linked to climate change- yet some online still deny its effects

Hang about here. If the clever scientists and weather forecasters say that the climate has changed over the past few decades, then I'm happy to accept it. I've no strong opinion on that either way.

What bugs me is the false logic that slightly higher atmospheric CO2 levels are the cause. They might well be the result of higher temperatures or it might be entirely coincidental.

The cornerstone of the Alarmist belief system is that the 33 degree Greenhouse Effect (sea level temperature minus Earth's effective temperature) is entirely due to 'greenhouse gases'. This belief is based on selectively ignoring the existence the cloud cover.

When we calculate Earth's (or Venus') effective temperature, what we are actually calculating is the expected temperature of the cloud cover, so a fair comparison is effective temperature vs actual temperature of the clouds.

If you do the like-for-like comparison (on Earth or on Venus) you observe that the Greenhouse Effect is precisely zero. So if 300 ppm CO2 has no measurable effect, then why would 420 ppm have any effect?

That's the line the Climate Deniers should be taking, not getting into pitched battles over whether the climate i.e. weather patterns are changing.