Alan Johnson

The news of Alan Johnson's release from captivity is obviously very welcome. However the BBC's blanket coverage, while understandable, was horrible and made my toes curl. The BBC rather revealed their discomfort at their own excesses by the embarrassed mention of the five British hostages in Iraq at the end of the Johnson piece. This was probably the first that most people had heard of them since the day they were seized.

When you think about it, isn't it just wrong that Alan Johnson got a slot on the BBC news and on the front of the website, pretty much every day for the last four months, while the other hostages were all but forgotten? It rather nicely encapsulates the problem with the BBC, or even the public sector as a whole.

It's run for the benefit of its staff, rather than for the public who pay for it. 

Harrassment of bloggers

Lurch, the author of a blog called Gun Culture has been visited by the police as part of the renewal for his firearms licence. During the visit they raised the subject of his blog:

It seems that my crappy little corner of the blogosphere has come to the attention of the police, and they don’t like it.  Specifically mentioned was the piece regarding the British Association of Women in Policing, where the woman wanted smaller guns for women officers, this didn’t go down well apparently despite my admission in the piece that my comments were flippant.

[...] 

The officers (who were very polite) were quick to point out that they couldn’t force me to remove posts or dictate my freedom of speech but the fact is that I am being watched. 

It's worth taking a look at the original post which must rank as one of the most innocuous imaginable.

It's hard to comprehend just how daft this makes the police look. I've no idea which force Lurch has the misfortune to be harrassed by, but it is absolutely staggering that they have time to monitor postings on obscure blogs for people making fun of them. The Chief Constable wants to have his priorities pointed out to him in no uncertain terms by someone in power. This kind of threat must be illegal, surely.

It just looks like another example of the police taking the easy option of harrassing the innocent rather than dealing with criminals. 

Via The England Project 

Lonely Libdem voice of sanity

Today's must-read post is by Tom Papworth of Liberal Polemic.

Democracy is not an end in itself, but a tool we created to promote freedom. 

A fact that is now largely forgotten. 

Climate cuttings 3

In the last edition of Climate Cuttings, I noted that NOAA was trying to stop the Surfacestations project by hiding the names of the volunteer station managers in the reference database. They now appear foolish as well as disingenuous as it's been revealed that they already publish photos and names of many volunteers, thus ruling out any claim that the data was hidden on privacy grounds.

Over at Real Climate, Gavin Schmidt is all in favour of Surfacestations and documenting how well the stations are sited. He just thinks that people are jumping to conclusions (who? where?). We also learn that the models don't need to square with the temperature record because they've got physics in, and that even if the stations are sited next to AC exhaust outlets, it won't materially affect the temperature record. Roger Pielke Sr shoots back.

Al Gore was in town to deliver a gentle reminder, just in case we'd forgotten that we're all about to burn. Nobody believes him though. 

Henrik Svensmark, a bad man who reckons that climate change is all caused by cosmic rays, is interviewed in Discover.   

Environmentalists damaging environment again

Via the ASI, Michael Munger's excellent summary of why recycling is, in general, damaging to the environment.

There is a simple test for determining whether something is a resource (something valuable) or just garbage (something you want to dispose of at the lowest possible cost, including costs to the environment). If someone will pay you for the item, it's a resource. Or, if you can use the item to make something else people want, and do it at lower price or higher quality than you could without that item, then the item is also a resource. But if you have to pay someone to take the item away, or if other things made with that item cost more or have lower quality, then the item is garbage.

Bill of Rights

Gordon; about the Bill of Rights you want to introduce. Don't worry yourself about it - I've done it for you.

(Comments on this thread please) 

There is no data

One of the criticisms often levelled at the bureaucracy is their inability to measure success and failure properly. They might set targets, but these are usually later found to be unsatisfactory measures or susceptible to corruption.

According to this article on the Nature Newsblog, a similar problem exists in the development world. Reporting on an (unidentified) conference, Emma Marris tells us

[Ghanaian conservationist, Yaa] Ntiamoa-Baidu looked at 50 random World Wildlife Fund programs in Africa. While 92% of project managers felt that their projects were helping develop the community, very few of these projects had built in any way to measure or show this. There is no data. And, according to Ntiamoa-Baidu, to convince politicians, donors and local people, you need the data.

Of course people find others measuring their success or failure a profoundly uncomfortable experience. The absence of data is therefore probably more by design than by accident. Which is why the free trade route to development is far more likely to be successful than hand outs or development projects run by well-meaning westerners.

Protecting our delicate sensibilities

In this YouTube clip of a TV report about the recent bombings, the address where one of the Mercedes cars was found - Cockspur Street - has been tweaked so that it comes out as "----spur Street"! (It's near the end, about 2 mins in).

Is this deliberate? Was it excised by whoever posted it to YouTube or was it on the original report? We need to know.

And given the state of that doctor chap, wouldn't Cockburn Street have been more suitable?

Sodden summers, sodding weather forecasts

So, the weather is crap. It's been crap for two months, and now the Met Office is forecasting that there may well be no summer at all this year.

Great. Just great. Exactly what I need in a summer when we're not going away.

But are they right though? The Met Office publishes a forecast for the summer months, and updates it through the months of April, May and June. Let's take a look and see just how reliable they are.

When they started out back in April, this is what they were saying:

The latest seasonal forecast from the Met Office issued today, reveals that this summer is, yet again, likely to be warmer than normal. Following the trend set throughout 2006 and the first part of 2007, seasonal forecasters say there is a high probability that summer temperature will exceed the 1971-2000 long-term average of 14.1 °C. They also suggest the chances of temperatures similar to those experienced in 2003 and 2006 are around 1 in 8. The forecast for rainfall is less certain, and currently there are no indications of an increased risk of a particularly dry or particularly wet summer.

In other words it looks very much as if they got it 100 percent wrong. They essentially repeated this forecast in May. By the start of June they were standing by their temperature forecast, but said of the rainfall:

Current rainfall indications suggest that over the summer as a whole southern parts of the UK are more likely to experience average or below-average rainfall, while the north is more likely to see average or above-average rainfall.

Given the fact that June was pretty average, temperature-wise (78th hottest on CETR), and that the rainfall has been rather different to what they forecasted too (the numbers are not published yet, but I think it's fair to say that anything in the ballpark of "average" just didn't happen) it seems reasonable to conclude that they haven't the faintest idea what is going to happen.

RTWT

Doesn't matter what your view of the war in Iraq is, you should still read this - Michael Yon's latest dispatch. (Warning: graphic photos)

Butthead bombers

Well it's pretty crazy - bombs in London last week, nutters in Glasgow today. Sky is reporting that Blackpool airport is closed and that there is a (pretty questionable IMHO) report on LGF of the evacuation of the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, where the perpetrators of the Glasgow attack were taken.

The recent attacks appear to have been more or less entirely incompetent - the current bunch appear to be rather less technically adept than the IRA of old. This suggests that the panicked reaction of the government is rather overdone.

Update:

I was wrong - the BBC is confirming the evacuation of the Royal Alex and says that a device was found there. (No story online yet - just a headline in the ticker). 

Quote of the day

Climate cuttings 2

Anthony Watts and his volunteers continue to find startling bad practice in the siting of weather stations in the (allegedly) high quality USHCN network. The latest survey, of Waterville, Washington reveals a station with broken slats and peeling paint, and which is located on cinder chippings next to a car park.

This is obviously very embarrassing to the bureaucrats involved. They've retaliated by placing a major barrier in the way of the surveyors. Many weather stations are located at private homes, and surveyors had been telephoning ahead to ask for permission to visit. Our friends in the bureaucracy have now removed the contact details for the site operators from the public database. It's shameless, but was probably to have been expected.

Data integrity (or the appalling lack of it) seems to be a developing theme in the world of climate science. Cloud researcher Robert Maddox points out to problems with RRS (weather balloon) data. Our friends in the bureaucracy have moved the Tucson weather station (to a completely unsuitable location) and at the same time have replaced the instrumentation. This effectively prevents researchers from isolating the two effects. They also haven't been letting on that there are problems with all the new kit.

In the face of Freedom of Information requests, the IPCC has finally put the reviewers comments on the Fourth Assessment Report online. As part of the conditions for looking at the comments they demand that you agree not to reproduce them in part or in full!  It's flabbergasting to see the IPCC say that it would be "inappropriate" to show the missing Briffa data (you know, where the tree rings suggested falling temperatures in recent decades). The truth is apparently inappropriate for the IPCC.

Climate trends at the BBC

I was pondering the usage of the term "climate change" and how it seems to have taken over from "global warming" as a shorthand for the crise-du-jour. Is it really taking over, or have I just imagined it.

After searching around for a suitable tool to test the theory, I discovered that Google News now has an archive facility. This will let you do a search on a particular site and for a particular year. (If anyone knows of a better way to do this, do let me know. Google Trends won't do it because that's searches, not mentions on a site).

This is how things are at the BBC:

 

Which pretty much confirms what I'd thought. The growth in the BBC coverage is also startling. AGW has been a news issue for a long time now, so it's hard to come up with a rational explanation of these figures that is not conspiratorial.

Then, on the offchance, I thought I'd compare the growth of the total of the two terms in the BBC to all news organisations. This was quite interesting too:

 

You'll notice that the two lines are plotted on different vertical axes, but what it shows is that the two phrases were relatively more prevalent much sooner at the BBC than they were at other organisations.

So is this evidence of the BBC pushing an agenda? Perhaps. Probably, even. In order to prove it we would have to discount the possibility of a growth in the number of news organisations, or perhaps even the BBC getting having a relatively larger internet presence sooner than its competitors.

Gut feel says that this chart confirms my belief that the BBC has been acting as the publicity arm of the environmental movement.

BBC balance - Humphrys style

But if our elected representatives now regard global warming as the greatest threat to the world, the idea that they should ban nothing is a joke. You'll explain to your little boy in 15 years' time, "No, of course we didn't ban anything because we were liberals, we were libertarians ... and we wanted to enjoy ourselves ... Fuck you!"'

"Oh," ministers - of all parties - say. "Encouragement works best." Does it bollocks! Regulation works best: you order them to reduce the salt content of these foods by 50 per cent by next Thursday week ... The whole thing is scandalous, but we've allowed them to get away with it because, by and large, government is scared of the big supermarket chains and always has been.'

Source: The Graun 

It's interesting to think of these beliefs when you next hear Mr Humphrys interview an oil company executive or someone from a supermarket. I also remember him interviewing Ross Clark on the subject of red tape - a quite astonishingly aggressive interview for a book launch. Clearly his love of regulation momentarily (well, for the duration of the interview actually) got the better of his ingrained BBC balance on that one.

The guy is a deep green nutcase, paid for by you.

(As an aside, I've categorised this post as BBC and Greens. Is that tautological?)