Did no one tell them?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11952796

Friday Funny,

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a91_1291951906

Turning Tide:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmtoday/cmdebate/19.htm

I don't see the Hoons name there, either for or agin. It's not a definitive list until the Hansard is published at 0600 tomorrow, and it doesn't list the abstentions, but it would indicate that CH was not there.

Huhne: Did he or didn't he?

Mr Turning Tide was watching Sky News on the telly this evening, which reported that Huhne flew from Cancun to take part in the tuition fees vote, then took a flight back to Cancun, spending a total of 9 hours in the UK.

However, I can't find any mention of this on the Sky News website, and other sources (e.g. The Graun, the beeb) list Huhne among the abstainers, on the grounds that he was in Cancun.

Does anyone have an official source that lists which way MPs voted? - that ought to settle it.

@Lord Beaverbrook

See Piers Corbyn et al on "Public Warning" post at

http://climaterealists.com/index.php

Weather Action thinks the Met Office is underestimating the coming problems of snow and cold

According to
http://www.accuweather.com/ukie/bastardi-europe-blog.asp

the Central England Temperature (CET) for the week December 1st-7th this year is the coldest opening week of December since 1879, and the second coldest opening week of December since CET records began in 1659.

MET office outlook for Christmas:

UK Outlook for Thursday 23 Dec 2010 to Thursday 6 Jan 2011:

For the remainder of December and into the start of the New Year, temperatures look set to remain very cold, well below average for much of the UK, with often widespread frost and the risk of ice. Precipitation amounts are expected to be generally around average for many, with further snowfall a distinct possibility in places. However, western parts of the UK may see more in the way of drier weather. Amounts of sunshine should be around or slightly above average for many.

Updated: 1208 on Wed 8 Dec 2010

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/uk/uk_forecast_weather.html

So much for a mild winter then!

A good piece titled: Cancun: scavenging around for scientific fact

"...What they were sure of, however, was that climate change was still happening, but that 0.08 degrees of climate change had gone missing. In the words of Chris Morris, ‘there’s no evidence for it, but it is a scientific fact’; the world was still warming really."

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9986/

It looks like the Ratcliffe-On-Soar defendants will be acquitted. The prosecutor has allowed all sorts of bogus 'scientific' claims to go unchallenged. She preferred to witter on about composting toilets, secondhand clothes, Zac Goldsmith and Cheryl Cole, seemingly in the hope that this would convince the jury that she was relevant and street-smart and down-with-the-kids. Yo!

One example among many: earlier this week, an expert witness told the jury how flooding has already become more frequent and severe under the influence of GHG-driven climate change and that things are now so bad that in this year's Pakistan floods water levels in one place rose by seven metres within five minutes! If the prosecution knew its business, it would have pointed out that researchers haven't managed to find any correlation between GHG concentrations and the incidence and severity of flooding, that such a rise isn't unusual and that, for example, during the 1952 Lynmouth flood the West Lyn rose by 12 metres within seconds. But apparently Felicity Gerry waved this through and went into a long and irrelevant exploration of the merits of burying poles in East Anglia.

Gerry has yet to sum up but it looks as though the defence will win and the politics of self-congratulatory self-loathing will get another big PR boost. Mystifying and depressing. Such people are bulletproof. In ten or twenty years, these same activists will quietly backtrack on their more extreme claims and adopt positions identical in substance to those of people they currently deride as swivel-eyed fascist maniacs - and yet they won't have been wrong and their opponents will still have been swivel-eyed fascist maniacs. That's the way trendy lefties operate - and are allowed to operate. ('Join the euro? No, we only ever suggested that as a Gedankenversuch, old chap.')

By the way: the expert witness who lectured the jury about floods? His expertise is fish. Coldwater seafish. But he's a scientist, so whatever he says about anything even vaguely scientific must be scientific and correct, right?

Past Actions, Present Woes, Future Potential: Rethinking History in the Light of Anthropogenic Climate Change
A Model University Syllabus for History and Related Subjects (HEA)

Either this paper is an excellant spoof or we should be really worried about the state of our higher education. An excerpt follows:

Points to draw out in discussion

In asking students to compare Holocaust denial and climate change denial, one might explicitly consider some of the underlying political and ethical problems with this undertaking. Appendix 1 illustrates some of the attitudes taken to this comparison and could be used to generate debate within the seminar. The key arguments against making this comparison are:

1. That it may be seen as belittling the Holocaust- This raises the question of whether different instances of suffering can be comparable. Can we, either qualitatively or quantitatively, compare the human consequences in two such different contexts?

2. That it may be seen as an attempt to suggest that those who do not accept the official line on climate change are as bad as Holocaust deniers - This accusation, some suggest, is already implicit in the language. One response has been to distinguish between 'sceptics', who sincerely dissent from orthodox views, and 'deniers', who are politically motivated, but this is a hard distinction to maintain in practice. Could we comfortably apply such a distinction to Holocaust denial? How can we do justice to sincere differences of opinion, while also recognising that other people may have to suffer the consequences of inaction?

These are important points and the seminar should probably begin with an exploration of the problems with this comparison.

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/heahistory/resources/co_Levene_PastActions_20101031.pdf

Not finished going through it yet, 154 pages, but jaw is firmly on the floor!

CONTRIBUTORS
Teresa Ashe is currently studying for a Ph.D. ('The Politics of Climate Change: Power and Knowledge in Environmental Politics') at Birkbeck College, University of London. She also teaches at the Open University

Sharla Chittick is currently completing her doctoral thesis at Stirling University where she teaches British, American, and Environmental History. Her inter-disciplinary and comparative research explores the way in which attitudes, behaviours, and values affect environmental practices and perceptions over time.

Tim Cooper is lecturer in history at the University of Exeter (Cornwall Campus) with research interests in environmental, urban and labour history. He is currently working on the history of waste as a way of exploring the political ecology and environmental ideology of capitalism.

Jim Galloway is a Fellow of the Centre for Metropolitan History in the University of London's Institute of Historical Research. He specialises in the economic and environmental history of the later middle ages, his most recent publications focusing on storm flooding around the Thames Estuary between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Vladimir Jankovic is a historian of climate and environmental medicine and currently is a Wellcome research lecturer at Manchester University's Centre of History, Science, Technology and Medicine where he runs an ESRC project on municipal strategies in addressing urban climate change.

Mark Levene teaches history at the University of Southampton, is better known for his work on genocide but is also founder of the Rescue!History network and coordinator of this project.
Jean-Francois Mouhot is Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham working on the history of UK Non-Governmental Organisations since 1945. His background is as an Early Modern Historian.

Jan Oosthoek is a visiting lecturer in environmental and world history at Newcastle University. His research interests include landscape history, the historical geography of forestry and land use and environmental globalization.

Kate Prendergast runs the research and communications consultancy ISIS. Her research interests include prehistoric architecture, art and ritual and the ways they encode and preserve memory.

Dave Webb is Professor of Engineering, and co-founder and Director of the Praxis Centre for the Study of Information and Technology in Peace, Conflict Resolution and Human Rights, in the School of Applied Global Ethics at Leeds Metropolitan University.