Trump and Li'l Kim show how it's done.

From the BBC:

A summit between Donald Trump and the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un ended without agreement after the US refused North Korean demands for sanctions relief, the US president has said.

Yup, both sides make demands unacceptable to the other, that's it, call the whole thing off, no hard feelings and better luck next time.

Trump and Li'l Kim have thereby achieved more in two-and-a-half days than the EU and Theresa May have achieved in two-and-a-half years of grinding pettiness, without all the associated loss of goodwill.

Global Cooling vs Global Warming

As anybody interested in history knows, periods of global cooling, even by a degree on average, lead to food shortages, spread of disease and 'social unrest'. There's no recorded instance of global warming leading to anything bad - those have been times of recovery, expansion and discovery. The people in Doggerland just waded ashore and did the same thing somewhere else.

As anybody interested in pre-history knows, for the last million years or so, planet earth has been in Ice Ages most of the time, interspersed with brief inter-glacial warm periods in approx. 100,000 year cycles. If the pattern persists, we'd assume that temperatures today are as high as they will get (give or take a degree) and will start gradually going down again. We might get a mini ice-age in the next century or a proper Ice Age in the next millennium, who knows what and when. Both will be bloody awful.

Hey ho, say the contrarians, it's global cooling we should be worrying about, not global warming.

The Warmenists blow hot and cold on this, pun intended, and haven't quite worked out which is the scarier scare story:

According to The Guardian:

Roughly every two years we’re treated to headlines repeating the myth that Earth is headed for an imminent “mini ice age.” It happened in 2013, 2015, and again just recently at the tail end of 2017.

Pots, kettles.

The most important takeaway point is that the scientific research is clear – were one to occur, a grand solar minimum would temporarily reduce global temperatures by less than 0.3°C, while humans are already causing 0.2°C warming per decade. So the sun could only offset at most 15 years’ worth of human-caused global warming, and once its quiet phase ended, the sun would then help accelerate global warming once again.

Which is what you expect the Guardian to trot out, fair enough.

Slightly more radically, according to thoughtco.com:

Some scientists believe that an increase in global temperature, as we are now experiencing, could be a sign of an impending ice age and could actually increase the amount of ice on the earth's surface.

The cold, dry air above the Arctic and Antarctica carries little moisture and drops little snow on the regions. An increase in global temperature could increase the amount of moisture in the air and increase the amount of snowfall. After years of more snowfall than melting, the polar regions could accumulate more ice. An accumulation of ice would lead to a lowering of the level of the oceans and there would be further, unanticipated changes in the global climate system as well.

Yup, global warming causes global cooling. So if we actually do enter a mini ice-age, the Warmenists won't accept that it was caused by volcanic eruptions, lack of sun spots, planetary alignments, the shape of the earth's orbit etc, the usual explanations, oh no... That's a win-win argument, and a scarier scare story IMHO.
---------------------------------------------------------
As ever, I wish the Warmenists would agree between themselves what their story is, rather than pushing mutually exclusive arguments. They are just as bad as Home-Owner-Ists.

Inevitably...

From the BBC:

Labour has said it is prepared to back another EU referendum to prevent a "damaging Tory Brexit".

Jeremy Corbyn has told Labour MPs the party will move to back another vote if their own proposed Brexit deal is rejected on Wednesday.

Labour's Emily Thornberry said if the parliamentary process ended with a choice of no deal or the PM's deal, the public should decide.

Theresa May is under growing pressure to delay the 29 March Brexit date.

Labour are not yet making clear what their proposed referendum would be on.

When asked to clarify this, a spokesman for the leader's office said: "We've just said we'd back a public vote to prevent a damaging Tory Brexit."

City AM has lucid moment - shock.

City AM is normally a cheerleader for rent seekers everywhere, so today's editorial (second page of pdf) on Persimmon being "stripped of its right to participate in Help To Buy" is a remarkable turnaround:

However, the case of Fairburn was always uncomfortable - an executive compensation scheme imposed without a sensible cap, the folly of which was exposed when housebuilders' shares soared thank to a government policy that doped up the sector in a flawed bid to fix an affordability crisis. 

The aftermath appears even worse - a mega-rich boss whose company is accused of profiting from unfair leaseholds and shoddy workmanship. This is more like corporate cronyism than capitalism, and proponents of free, fair markets should call it out.

"Green House Gas Effect Experiment - Climate Change and Modeling"

There are several such videos on YouTube, I like this one best because they give the fullest explanation of their methods etc.

In summary, the bottle with 100% CO2 ended up 2C warmer than the bottle with normal air under a very bright light (giving off at least twice as much radiation as the sun does, from the point of view of the bottles).

Given the, I hope, undisputed logarithmic effect of increasing CO2 concentrations, I don't see how the increase from "pre-industrial levels" to current levels, from 0.03% TO 0.04%, could possibly have had any measurable effect.

But hey...

Yokohama ECOS Blue Earth ES31 175/65 R14 82S tyres for sale

Update 25 May, now sold. For £20.
----------------
Yokohama ECOS Blue Earth ES31 175/65 R14 82S tyres.
Full matching set, vgc, 6mm tread.
Suit MX5 mk1/mk2.
£50 ONO.

Leave a comment or email me gmwadsworth@gmail.com

Nobody move or commuters in the Home Counties get hurt!

Spotted by TBH in The Guardian:

Rail passengers commuting into London could have services disrupted by freight trains if a no-deal Brexit causes logjams at the Channel tunnel, it has emerged.

Go-Ahead, the company behind the rail operator Southeastern, said it was working with the government to try to ensure commuters were not affected...

No, Gove! Just no!

From the BBC:

Environment Secretary Michael Gove has promised that the government will apply tariffs to food imports in the event of a no-deal Brexit, to provide "specific and robust protections" for farmers.

His remarks come as the government is poised to release details of tariffs (taxes on imports) that would apply to thousands of products coming in from around the world, if the UK leaves the EU without a deal.

Many supporters of Brexit argue that tariffs on food and other items should be scrapped in order to lower prices for consumers.

The logic is perverse:

But farmers fear that cheap imports and lower standards would destroy many parts of British agriculture.

"Your concerns have absolutely been heard," Mr Gove told a conference of the National Farmers' Union (NFU). "It will not be the case that we will have zero-rate tariffs on food products. There will be protections for sensitive sections of agriculture and food production." He added that an announcement on a no-deal tariff schedule "should be made later this week".

"If you obliterate the tariff wall… we would be massively undermined by food produced to standards that would be illegal to produce to in this country," NFU president Minette Batters told the BBC. "It would decimate British agriculture - it is quite honestly as simple as that."

Let's follow the logic as far as we can.

1. The UK has a fairly similar climate to other European countries and the same standards, so there is a level playing field [sic] for things like potatoes, wheat, beef, milk etc. So that's no argument for UK tariffs on food from other EU Member States, i.e. no change to current situation.

2. The UK does not have a similar climate to much warmer countries outside the EU, where you can grow bananas, olives, oranges. Quite possibly these countries have lower standards, but there aren't UK banana, olive or orange farmers to be protected, so there is no reason to "protect" them by imposing tariffs on bananas.

3. "But chlorinated chickens!!" shouts the crowd. That's a different topic, if these are proveably unhealthy, the UK government should just ban the import thereof.

The relentless logic of the fraudster

From Nautilus:

What Dark Matter Needs Are New Kinds of Experiments

After 30 years and no results, it’s time to support more entrepreneurial physicists.

The "hunt for dark matter" might seem to be a harmless prank when compared to "climate science", but it's still a scam, and those taking part must know it.

"Young people living in vans, tiny homes and containers"

From the BBC, following the journalistic guideline "Don't mention land or access to land! It's only about the physical building!":

Case One

Harriet Baggley, 24, her partner, Tom Offen, 25, and their son, Ruben, two, live in a van fitted with a log-burning stove, insulation and a makeshift kitchenette.

The 2008 Volkswagen Transporter 4, nicknamed "Iggy", has been their home since they left rented accommodation in April last year. They move their home-on-wheels to different spots every few days, spending two to three nights a week at a relative's more conventional home while helping them with child care.

They appear to be doing it the hard way, and I hope it works out for them.

Case Two

For Aubrey Fry, 37, and his wife, Clare, 34, life in a repurposed 40ft shipping container was only meant to be short term.

Three years later and the steel box is still home, sweet home. The pair moved to Hay-on-Wye, where Aubrey's family own a farm, after growing frustrated with London property prices. They wanted to keep their costs low, while building their new home and business premises on the land, and Aubrey had an itch to try something different.

Yes, the couple have access to free land. On her parents' farm.

Aubrey would also appear to be stupidest man in the UK:

"I've always wanted to develop a shipping container and make it into a home," Aubrey said. "There are millions of them all over the world, they get used once and then get taken out of action; and I think they are a good space to live in."

Correct, he actually said "they get used once"

Case Three

Tom, who lives in Porthleven, Cornwall, is hoping to build his [tiny home aka caravan], mount it on a trailer and then move it between his friends' smallholdings.

So he's an intermediate case between the Baggleys and the Frys. What will happen when his friends get tired of him, or some officious planner tell him that he's not allowed to live on a smallholding semi-permanently?