Situation remains foggy

Both the Times and ConHome headline the latest Populus poll as showing, most importantly, that Labour's class war attack on David Cameron and his background leaves voters cold. Peter Riddell in the Times says: "David Cameron rides out Labour's 'toff' attack", while Jonathan Isaby on ConHome gets garrulous: "Tory lead 8% in new Populus poll which shows voters unenthused by Labour's class warfare". Well, yes. The only problem is that this does not show voters enthusing about the Conservatives either as a number of commenters have pointed out.

At this stage of the game, six months or so away from the election, in the middle of a serious financial crisis, towards the end of the third term of a highly unpopular government, the official opposition cannot muster more than 40 per cent and often, as in this case, less.

It is true that the majority seems remarkably unfazed by the hardly secret fact that Cameron was at Eton. Blair had been at Fettes and the Labour Party has a few public school boys and girls. Harriet Harman, for instance, comes from a very posh background and was educated at St Paul's Girls' School, which is not your average comprehensive. She just does not seem to have done much with the excellent education that school provides.

So it is official: class war resonates with very few people these days. That's the good news. The rest of the news is a little hard to analyze. In fact, it is all befogged. Opinion polls move one per cent here, two per cent there but none of that detail is important. These are all within the error margin. The fact that 12 per cent said that they would vote for some other party ought to cause some concern to the big guys, particularly, as I suspect a majority of that is talking of voting UKIP.

As things stand, Conservatives will probably be the largest party in the House of Commons after the next election. Whether that will mean an overall majority is now questionable, particularly as that gap is likely to narrow even more with the approach of polling day. Will there be a hung Parliament or a minority government? Anything is possible on the basis of recent figures even a surge in Tory support. Possible but not very likely unless the Conservative leadership abandons its self-righteous vacuity and comes up with some reasons why people should vote for them. A referendum on the European Union or, at least, the Constitutional Lisbon Treaty would be a start.

Guilt not proven

Readers of this blog will know that I am always ready to blame the Russian government or its enforcing organization for most things that go wrong in the world or, at least, those that go wrong in Russia's vicinity. But even I was taken aback by the strange suggestions that because those e-mails (hacked or leaked by an insider who would, in other circumstances, be called a whistleblower) must have been stolen and release by the Russian security services for various complicated reasons of their own. The evidence is slender to put it mildly and relies on the odd notion that if they were loaded onto a Russian server, that must have been done by the Russians themselves.

I am glad to say that the Boss at EUReferendum is on the case and has posted a detailed analysis of the story.

And another thing

The Copenhagen Climate Summit is going to be quite an event. Apart from all the other problems like people adding up the carbon footprints, green prostitutes, Al Gore's absence, President Obama's presence there will be one insoluble problem: the great divide between the rich countries of the West and the poor, developing countries of Africa, Asia and, now and for ever, South America.

Richard Tren and Franklin Cudjoe outline the problems and make it clear that the developing countries should not surrender to the hypocritical and oppressive pressures of the developed world.

Iceland is too small to be treated honourably

Over on Brussels Journal there is a long article by our friend, Hjörtur J. Guðmundsson, on the complicated saga (pun intended) of the Icesave dispute, in which Iceland, its government and its people have been put under intense pressure by the Dutch and the British governments in order to salvage EU regulations. A sorry tale and well worth reading in full. The one good thing is that it has helped to militate the people of Iceland against the EU.

What's in a name?

Peter Whittle has an excellent article in Standpoint and on the New Culture Forum (full disclosure: I am proud to say that he is a very good friend of mine) about “vigilante” films, why the critical establishment is sniffy about them and why audiences, particularly conservative ones, love them.

This set me off thinking (I do that sometimes but not too often) about the importance of what you call plotlines and characters. Vigilante has rather a horrible sound; it reminds us of lynching gangs, the Ku-Klux-Klan and other kinds of nasty gang rule. But, actually, a vigilante is a man (or, perhaps, a woman though I have not heard of any films outside the superhero ones that had a female vigilante) who rebels against the corruption and inefficiency of the establishment, the criminal society that develops as a result of that, and the cowardice of everyone around him. A man like, for example, Marshall Will Kane in High Noon a film much loved by all left-wing film critics is there any other kind now that Alexander Walker has sadly passed away?), though a number of us think it is a truly conservative film. (I have never quite worked out how those critics feel about Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.)

Or a man like the lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Or, coming a little closer in time, a woman like Karen Silkwood as played by that perennial Hollywood leftie, Merryl Streep, or like Erin Brockovich as played by Julia Roberts.

These are all films and characters loved by the leftish or “liberal”, in the new American sense of the word, commentators love. Why don’t they like Dirty Harry or Michael Caine’s latest character, Harry Brown, or Clyde Shelton in Law Abiding Citizen?

Need one ask? Individuals who fight the big monster, the establishment, illegal behaviour that protects criminals are called whistleblowers or heroic rebels if that establishment is big business, old-fashioned Tammany Hall (though perhaps not these days with Chicago politics elevated to the White House) or just the rich who do not spout liberal platitudes. The moment the establishment against which our hero and heroine rebels becomes a liberal one (as it is both in Britain and the United States) said hero(ine) is described as an evil, murderous vigilante who should be bunged up in prison and the key thrown away.

You know who are the goodies and baddies in an old-fashioned western by the colour of the hat; you know the good whistleblowers and the evil vigilante by the name, which is the result of the kind of establishment the person in question takes on.

There is a parallel with journalists and their heroism. The New York Times, for instance, refused to publish those CRU e-mails at first because they had been stolen and had not been meant for publication. Admirable restraint, one might say. But do I hear the words Pentagon papers? Do I hear Watergate? It all depends from whom they were stolen, I suppose, and who was doing the covering up.

According to James Taranto [second story down], the NYT is still having problems with the whole issue of whistleblowers on the wrong side who should really be vigilantes.

Meanwhile, we noticed something missing from this New York Times editorial:

“From revealing accounting shenanigans at Enron to uncovering fraud at WorldCom, whistle-blowers have exposed some of the most egregious cases of corporate wrongdoing. Yet too many remain vulnerable to employer retaliation.”

The editorial goes on to call for new laws strengthening the protection of whistle-blowers. But we guess the editorial praising the East Anglia whistle-blowers will have to wait for another day.

Which reminds me: most people here can recall the heroically portrayed journalists who uncovered Watergate in All the President’s Men. Will there be any equally heroically portrayed bloggers and website editors, not to mention purveyors of unpublishable e-mails about Climategate? I think we all know the answer to that.

This may be an old joke ...

.... but it is new to me and I found it on today's episode of Day by Day.

Amateurs built the Ark, professionals built the Titanic.

And, let me add, professionals gave us man-made global warming as well as Climategate.

Just two stories on "Climategate"

Much as I hate that expression "Climategate", I am forced to use it as it has become the normal way of referring to the ever growing scandal to do with those dubious scientific practices that have tried to impose the fear of eternal hell fire man-made global warming climate change on us.

I have left it to others in the blogosphere, particularly to the boss over on EUReferendum to deal with the story as it unfolds but I cannot resist posting two links to articles from the other side of the Pond.

The first one is by Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal: "Climategate: Follow the Money". And why not? After all, we hear a great deal from the warmists about all the sceptics (who are as bad as Holocaust deniers) getting large sums of money from companies that provide us all with fuel to stay warm in the winter, not to mention petrol for travelling around, especially for hundreds if not thousands of climate change beneficiaries to fly to Copenhagen.

Why not have a look at who has been funding the CRU in East Anglia

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

This dwarfs ExxonMobil's donation last year of

$7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change "consensus".

Let us not forget that all that money donated to people who produced dubious evidence in order to pile more taxes and regulations on the rest of us came from the taxpayer without as much as a by-your-leave.

The other story is hilariously funny and concerns those glaciers in the Himalayas that are due to disappear in the next 25 years. Except that they are not. Setting aside the fact that there is still a great deal of research to be done about those glaciers, there is also the unfortunate point that a really slapdash error was made when information was taken from a scientific paper as Charlie Martin explains on Pajamas Media.

IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri reacted angrily citing the IPCC 2007 climate change reports which asserted that the (Himalayan) glaciers are receding faster than in any other part of the world and if the present rate (of melting) continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps even sooner is very high if the earth keeps warming at the current rate. …

[Where] did this number 2035 (the year when glaciers could vanish) come from? According to Prof Graham Cogley (Trent University, Ontario), a short article on the future of glaciers by a Russian scientist (Kotlyakov, V.M., 1996, The future of glaciers under the expected climate warming, 61-66, in Kotlyakov, V.M., ed., 1996, Variations of Snow and Ice in the Past and at Present on a Global and Regional Scale, Technical Documents in Hydrology, 1. UNESCO, Paris (IHP-IV Project H-4.1). 78p estimates 2350 as the year for disappearance of glaciers, but the IPCC authors misread 2350 as 2035 in the Official IPCC documents, WGII 2007 p. 493!

That's very reassuring. We are relying on people who cannot even proof-read their own supposedly scientific papers. It is, though, a little worse than that.

One of the comments (no. 13) on Charlie Martin's piece explains:

As hard as this is to believe, it’s worse than you report. The IPCC quote is in the section about Asia, talking about glaciers in the Himalayas “receding faster than in any other part of the world”. However, the Kotlyakov article is about glaciation in the entire world. The statement about the reduction by 2350 is about the entire world, but notes “Glaciers will survive only in the mountains of inner Alaska, on some Arctic archipelagos, within Patagonian ice sheets, in the Karakoram Mountains, in the Himalayas, in some regions of Tibet and on the highest mountain peaks in the temperature latitudes.”

Not only is the concern off by 200 years, but the Himalayas are where the glaciers will survive.

It gets worse. The IPCC cites a WWF report as the source, but they actually quoted Kotlyakov (except for botching the year) without even crediting Kotlyakov in the references.

Can we take away their Nobel Prize and give it to the person who leaked those e-mails?