A bit off-topic, but this on the Torygraph about the failure of a defamation case brought against the RSPB by a couple of researchers is interesting, for the judge's finding that courts should not be used for scientific disputes:

Birdwatchers-lose-RSPB-defamation-case

Very off topic..An MP is complaining about BBC bias....

"Tamar's sister, Hadas, three months old, had also been killed. Her head had been sawn off."

from the Telegraph..

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/8402973/A-family-slaughtered-in-Israel-doesnt-the-BBC-care.html

Who is Tamar Fogel? The chances are that you will have no idea. She is a 12-year-old girl who arrived home late on Friday, March 11, to discover her family had been slaughtered. Her parents had been stabbed to death; the throat of her 11-year-old brother, Yoav, had been slit. Her four-year-old brother, Elad, whose throat had also been cut, was still alive, with a faint pulse, but medics were unable to save him. Tamar's sister, Hadas, three months old, had also been killed. Her head had been sawn off.

There were two other Fogel brothers sleeping in an adjacent room. When woken by their big sister trying to get into a locked house, Roi, aged six, let her in. After Tamar discovered the bodies, her screaming alerted their neighbour who rushed in to help and described finding two-year-old Yishai desperately shaking his parents' blood-soaked corpses, trying to wake them up.

I found out about the barbaric attack not on BBC news, but via Twitter on Monday. I followed a link there to a piece by Mark Steyn entitled "Dead Jews is no news'. Horrified, I went to the BBC website to find out more. There I discovered only two stories: one a cursory description of the incident in Itamar, a West Bank settlement, and another focusing on Israel's decision to build more settlements, which mentioned the killings in passing.

As the mother of three children, one the same age as little Elad, who had lain bleeding to death, I was stunned at the BBC's seeming lack of care. All the most heart-wrenching details were omitted. The second story, suggesting that the construction announcement was an act of antagonism following the massacre, also omitted key facts and failed to mention the subsequent celebrations in Gaza, and the statement by a Hamas spokesman that "five dead Israelis is not enough to punish anybody".

There were more details elsewhere on the net: the pain and hurt, for example, of the British Jewish community at the BBC's apparent indifference to the fate of the Fogels. The more I read, the more the BBC's broadcast silence amazed me. What if a settler had entered a Palestinian home and sawn off a baby's head? Might we have heard about it then? On Twitter, I attacked the UK media in general, and the BBC in particular. I considered filing a complaint.

and more.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/8402973/A-family-slaughtered-in-Israel-doesnt-the-BBC-care.html

Dr. Tim Ball received the second of two libel lawsuits from North Vancouver law firm of Roger D. McConchie on Friday (March 25, 2011). Global warming doomsaying professor Michael Mann files the latest writ.

As Ken Cuccinelli, the Attorney General for Virginia has discovered, apologists for academic data fraud have helped to hide junk science for too long; only open court confrontation will now bring a final conclusion to the great global warming swindle.

Thus Tim Ball will nobly pursue an honest legal strategy of merely insisting that Mann disclose his metadata to the court. If he declines then he will have proven yet again his utter contempt for the ethics of scientific practice and prove to the court that his lawsuit is without grounds and thus vexatious.

Thereafter, expect to see Ball’s lawyers move for dismissal and sanctions against Mann and his attorneys.

http://climaterealists.com/?id=7445

Groan, Civil servants say you cannot be a Minister in a UK built car, to save the planet it must be a Japanese Hybrid.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/8408711/Lord-Digby-Jones-how-the-governments-civil-servants-stifled-British-trade.html

Beddington takes on Lawson.

Lord Lawson, the former chancellor, has been privately accused by the government's chief scientific adviser of making "incorrect" and "misleading" claims in his book on climate change.

To Lawson's claims that urbanisation raises near-surface temperatures and might be responsible for the recording of global temperature rises, Beddington said it has been studied and found to have a "negligible effect".

Err wasn't that the study that Jones was going to retract but now isn't, Beddington has got into bed with the wrong bed fellows.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/mar/27/lord-lawson-climate-scientific-adviser

"Monbiot and Lucas have already started hating each other"

That's good, isn't it?

As predicted by -ahem!- yours truly, the nukes have become a wedge issue dividing the greens.

George Monbiot and Carolyn Lucas have just fired shots at each other in the first skirmish of what's likely to become a wasteful and bruising civil war within the CAGW cult.

Don't be misled by the Guardian photo accompanying the debate, Monbiot and Lucas have already started hating each other, and that means worse is to come. Dogmatists being dogmatists, a green schism is a real possibility.

Can anyone confirm or comment on the results here?

In this note I have calculated the real total emissivity of the atmospheric carbon dioxide at its current partial pressure and instantaneous temperature to be 0.002.

Clearly carbon dioxide is not a nearly blackbody system as suggested by the IPCC and does not have an emissivity of 1.0. Quite the opposite, given its total absorptivity, which is the same than its total emissivity, the carbon dioxide is a quite inefficient – on absorbing and emitting radiation – making it a gray-body.

Accepting that carbon dioxide is not a black body and that the potential of the carbon dioxide to absorb and emit radiant energy is negligible, I conclude that the AGW hypothesis is based on unreal magnitudes, unreal processes and unreal physics.

http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2011/03/total-emissivity-of-the-earth-and-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide/

I've just noticed that the motion for the Spectator debate on Tuesday (discussed here - see post at 12:04 PM) has been changed from "The Global Warming Hysteria is over. Time for a Return to Sanity" to "The Global Warming Concern is over. Time for a Return to Sanity". Unfortunately it's not much of an improvement: the issue is not whether the concern is over (it patently isn't), but is it justified?

PS: For those attending, I still suggest that we meet afterwards in The Hoop and Toy at the end of Exhibition Road.

Just came accross this interesting web site:

http://www.claverton-energy.com/

An eclectic mix of interesting papers, with a good sprinkling of detail, particularly on costings of various power generation methods. Looks like a very wide variety of views as well.