MSM response to those leaked climate change emails

You will no doubt have read all about this on The Air Vent, Climate Audit, Watts Up With That, Bishop Hill, Englishman's Castle and so on. One of my favourite sceptic blogs, World Climate Report hasn't mentioned it yet.

I wondered how and whether the MSM had responded, so I Googled climate change emails east anglia. The five articles that I can find are scattered among the top hundred results or so, and can be summarised as follows:

On the left, The Grauniad and The New York Times at least go to the trouble of desperately trying to keep the myth going and The BBC mentions the incident but not the contents of the emails.

In the centre, The Times mention an email which "contained a sentence about temperatures and referred to a 'trick' that could be used to 'hide the decline'". They invite a response from one or two of the authors, but the authors remained tight-lipped.

On the right, The Daily Mail have an article titled "Hackers 'expose global warming con': Sceptics claim that leaked emails reveal research centre massaged temperature data" but which is otherwise fairly neutral.

So in other words, unlike the bloggers, none of them really saw the emails as front page news. The best comment was by Patrick J Michaels: “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud.”

It would be fun to go and visit all the warmenist blogs and see how they are spinning it, but that's for another day...

UPDATE: Buggeration. I now realise that James Delinpole has already done this exercise on his Telegraph Blog. Ah well.

Frontline Fun

Disclaimer: I am using the expression "frontline" in the modern British political sense, which means teachers, nurses etc, not in the traditional sense of soldiers on active duty, whose plight out in Afgh is far from "fun".

Republic of Ireland: public sector employees 300,000 divided by population 4,460,000= 6.7%.

United Kingdom: public sector employees 8,145,000* divided by population 61,113,205 = 13.3%

I'd be grateful if readers who have lived in both countries could leave a comment saying whether 'public services' in the UK are twice as good as in the Republic of Ireland? A bit better, a bit worse, much the same?

* See Table 5(2), column l-n, includes all taxpayer-funded jobs. Even taking the narrower definition, there are 6,020,000 public sector employees, which equates to 9.9% of the population.

Updates From a JP Perspective

JP here. Not been posting on this blog for a while, just thought I'd give a run-down of my opinions on the news over the past few weeks and some other things that have popped up in general debates...

Let's do 'democracy' at work first shall we? The EU president - So Herman van Rompuy is the new president. I couldn't really care less to be honest. People seem to be of the opinion that Van Rompuy will hold the same sway over Europe as Obama does over America, which is a load of rubbish. He's little more than a puppet for the collective leaders of the EU member countries (the Council), and will have virtually no influence over policy. Hell, he already sits on the Council as PM of Belgium. Very little will change.

Global Morality Index of 2009 - An organisation has recently ranked countries based on their 'morality'. Apparently, "Over 70 sources were scoured for information on the attitudes of the public and legal standing against morally reprehensible actions viewed negatively by all civilized and honourable beings. Interviews were conducted through various media and adjustments made to reflect differing viewpoints on immorality in these regions." Want to see the list? The highest possible score is 10, the lowest is 1...

1. Saudi Arabia 9.03
2. Iran 9.01
3. Oman 8.99
4. Mauritania 8.98
5. Bahrain 8.81
6. Qatar 8.80
7. Brunei 8.75
8. Afghanistan 8. 75
9. Togo 8.70
10. Somalia 8.57
11. Guinea 8.43
12. Iraq 8.36
13. Sudan 8.23
14. Palestine 8.19
15. Bangladesh 8.15
16. United Arab Emirates 7.67
17. Kyrgyz Republic 7.43
18. Cameroon 7.25
19. Lebanon 7.11
20. Malaysia 7.03

Right. First of all, Palestine is not a country. Second of all, Saudia Arabia still mandate that women are not allowed to sit in the front seat of a car if a man is driving, amongst other things. But what is most interesting are the bottom 5... (Only 67 countries were in the survey)

63. United Kingdom 1.24
64. United States 1.06
65. Israel 0.32
66. Netherlands 0.15
67. Denmark 0.14

Notice anything? All of these countries have been attacked by Islamic extremists in the past decade! And the top 20 are all breeding grounds for terrorism! What a crock of shit, eh?

The police - I recently had to write an essay on the role of the state police in modern society. My opponents seemed to favour a powerful state police force, I do not. However the subject quickly ran onto on-the-spot fines. Now, I feel summary justice is simply wrong. There is no way of knowing if the person in question was even guilty of anything, let alone if the sentence is proportionate (eg. someone fined £100 for throwing away a letter they took to read on the way to a bus stop in a public bin). What's more, since levying these fines is increasingly being farmed out to contractors who are paid on commission, they represent a corrosive effect on society: these 'police' are no longer "only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence," but state mercenaries given special privileges and set against the public for their own enrichment.

As to the police themselves: I do not see how being an employee of the state can justly entitle someone to greater powers over others. Either arresting people in particular circumstances (or whatever) is moral and just, in which case anyone ought to be able to do it, or it is not, in which case no one should. The growth in such powers has gone hand-in-hand with the summary punishments and 'victimless crimes' for the enforcement of which they are necessary. To return to that great Peel quote: 
"Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence."

So it should be. So it was meant to be. But it isn't, at least, not any more.

Having conceded that, though, you could well ask what the purpose of a government police force is. People certainly did when the state police were first introduced in the mid 1800s. Since the government police have no special powers in my desired new libertarian world, it hardly seems fair to, eg. pay for the policing of property crimes against large businesses out of the public purse, since they can obviously afford it themselves. And similar logic can be applied to residential areas. Each person in the UK, for instance, pays about £200/year for policing. So my street (for instance) could, for the same money, afford to employ a constable on a full time basis just to guard our street. This may not even be the best use of the money, but it's hard to see how the present government solution would provide better protection. Decentralisation of police, and taking the powers out of the hands of the state, would be more beneficial to how crime is fought, I feel.

Anyone who feels that the streets would descend into anarchy with private police, I ask, can you apply your same logic to your own side, and ask yourself: "Why don't the police, as they hold a very privileged position legally, and are by far the largest and best armed enforcement agency in this country, take over the government, shoot suspected criminals without trial, and ignore the law wherever it pleases them?"

To an extent I would say that they have done the latter two things. But that they do not do these things to the extent that society descends into anarchy as you describe, it is in the final analysis only because they either do not believe this personally to be just, fear the adverse reaction of their colleagues, or fear, in the last resort, the army suppressing such a coup. In the first and final case, the same applies to private policemen. They would still have their own moral code, and fear of the ultimate measures that may be taken to restore order. In the second case, however, and I think the dominant one in actually preventing the majority of potential police criminality, the private system is far stronger, because it invests in no particular organisation the powers of policing. A corrupt policeman or a 'vigilante' would have to fear not just the response of his friends and colleagues, but the response of other, possibly competing, organisations, the aggrieved man and his own guards, and even the response of private citizens.

Sorry to quote this again, but Peel has very elegantly summed up almost all my views on this into a single sentence (shame he founded the Met):
"Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence."

In other words, under a private system there is no dichotomy of "the police", who are above and beyond the citizen, and thereby owe him some sort of partial duty to not abuse the powers that he has claimed. There are merely individuals, some of whom are paid full time to do what is the equal right and duty of all.

Cathy Ashton

More Harriet-Harman-crashing-car-while-using-mobile-phone-hilarity

From The Evening Standard:

Harriet Harman was given strong backing by Gordon Brown today after she denied breaking the law by crashing her car while using a mobile.

The Prime Minister rang her last night to express his support...

Agglomeration Of The Decade

From The Evening Standard:

Five years ago it was the West End's “cashmere alley,” a tired collection of Scottish knitware shops, airline offices, high street chains and faux “England-land” heritage stores.

The arrival of the Apple Store - the first outside America - exactly half a decade ago today - has transformed Regent Street into one of Europe's leading retail shopping destinations with an enviable and growing collection of global brands. Retail experts say the arrival of Apple - where takings are a remarkable £60 million a year - acted as a catalyst that allowed Regent Street to throw off its spinsterish image as Oxford Street's tartan clad maiden aunt...

Even in the depths of the recession Regent Street has no empty space “from Circus to Circus” and only 2000 sq ft on its northern stretch, Mr Shaw said. That gives it an overall vacancy rate of 0.03 per cent compared with 4.5 per cent across the West End as whole and 11 per cent nationally.

The “Apple effect” has also had a dramatic impact on rents, which have risen around 25 per cent since then compared with 0 to 10 per cent in the West End as a whole. While rents, which range from around £275 to £450 per square foot are still at a discount to Oxford Street, the gap is closing...

OK. Breathe in, relax, breathe out, think ...

Apple operates in a free-ish market, it looked at the cost/benefit of various locations for its new shop and went for Regent Street, invested a shedload of money in refurbishment, fancy glass staircase etc. This attracts more shoppers, so at first, tenants of surrounding shops benefit as well. So more stores want to open up there, so the landlord can put up the rents, by 25% (if the article is to be believed).

The less profitable shops can't keep up with the new rents and go out of business, and other, more profitable shops (who generate sufficient profits to be able to afford the new, higher rents) move in. Which attracts more shoppers, so rents get nudged up a bit more etc.

As a result of all this, by the time Apple's lease comes up for renewal, they'll find that their rent has gone up by fifty per cent, in other words, they'll have the privilege of paying over the odds to be near people who are themselves paying over the odds to be near Apple, and so on ad infinitum.

Seriously, which party has benefitted most from Apple's decision to move there while putting in least effort? It's a simple question with a simple answer, you just have to be honest.

Friday night gear change

1982's Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Nicole, a semi-tone up at 1 minute 50 seconds into "A little peace", combined with some of the most atrocious miming ever. Quality.

Another jolly bash at the IPPR

Announced here:

07 December 2009, 10:00am - 11:30am

30-32 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7RA

Speakers:
Harriet Harman, MP, Minister for Women and Equality
Dr Dalia Ben-Galim, ippr
Samantha Smethers, Grandparents Plus*

Demographic changes mean that more and more people are taking on caring responsibilities. Carers are a diverse bunch who have a variety of different needs that depend on a range of factors that include the needs of the care recipient, gender, age, labour market position and family status. As four generation families are becoming more common and many more of us becoming carers, innovative policy reform is needed if we are going to meet the future demand for care... [yadda yadda, blah, waffle].

Interestingly, they don't say that Harriet will be attending via video-link from HMP Holloway, so presumably she's expecting a non-custodial sentence?

* In 2007, Grandparents Plus received half its funding from the Basic Skills Agency which appears to be part of the Department of Education (or whatever it's called this week); they appear to have received only private donations in 2008 (see Note 9 in their 2008 accounts) but are back on the Big Lottery drip again by now.

A triumph of free(ish) markets!

From a whiney-moaney article in The Daily Mail:

More than 50 oil tankers are anchored off Britain - pieces in a game in which the only winners are market speculators. The losers are the millions of British motorists paying over the odds for their petrol and diesel...

Let's crunch the numbers and then look at the facts again:

54 tankers x 150,000 tons x 7 barrels/ton = 57 million barrels
UK daily oil consumption = 2 million barrels
Hence, UK oil consumption being stored offshore = one month's worth of UK oil consumption. That seems a staggeringly large figure, but let's assume it's correct. Isn't that A Good Thing from a supply security point of view?

I've not noticed rationing and queues at the petrol station, so there's no reason to assume that they are deliberately undersupplying the UK with oil. Seeing as there is a fixed supply of oil tankers in the world, and global production/consumption is fairly constant, we have to assume that demand for oil has fallen slightly (which is why we havn't noticed a shortage), or else those tankers would have offloaded their oil and be chugging back to the Middle East to refill.

This has a disproportionate impact on the daily cost of chartering a tanker (elastic demand, fixed supply), so what's happening here is that somebody is taking advantage of the fact that it is at present relatively cheap to buy oil and store it offshore in a tanker - but from the point of view of the customer, they are doing it for free; the price they will eventually sell it for has nothing to do with how long it was on the tanker.

From here, "A super tanker [300,000 tons capacity] currently rents out at about $90,000-95,000 a day on the spot market. When hired out for a year, it can fetch daily rentals of between $70,000 and $75,000..."

Q: If you're carrying 300,000 tons (= 2 million barrels) and it's costing you $80,000 a day, by how much would the price of oil have to rise, each and every day, to make the exercise worthwhile?

A: $80,000 ÷ 2 million = 4 cents/barrel, which isn't much of a daily movement, but after six months the oil price would have to have risen from $80/barrel to $87/barrel. If evil speculators really thought that the price would go up that much (which it might well do, or it might fall back to $40/barrel, who knows?) then they could save themselves the faff and expense and just buy oil futures (which price in the storage costs to some extent, but you don't have to worry about pirates etc). And if 'Britain's hard-pressed motorists' are worried about petrol prices going up, then they can club together, open an account with a futures broker for a modest deposit and buy a few oil futures of 42,000 gallons per contract.

H/t HPC.

Completely F***ing Insane Idea Of The Day

This is wrong on so many levels, it's difficult to know where to start.

Enjoy.