Launch of my election campaign for UK parliament 2015

Posted on 24 October 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

I have today worked out that one would only need £1100 to stand at next years election and that mean with funding I could stand against Jo Swinson, Lib Dem Minister so utterly pro global warming that my sides ache laughing listening to her.

Jo Swinson car crash interview with Andrew Neil (07Oct14)

The costs break down as follows:

  1. Deposit: £500 deposit (which as a sceptic I expect to lose)
  2. Leaflets: Whilst delivery is free, printing ~40,000  single side A5 leaflets to deliver to each household will cost around £500 to print
    Street posters: £100
    Website: A domain name and website can be secured for £30.

In addition I will need 10 signatures from people registered to vote in the constituency. I will obtain these by knocking on the doors of as many people as it takes (up to 40,000)
If however I want something suitably “sceptic” to go on the ballot paper, I will need to form a party. For this I will need:

  1. One other person willing to be an officer
  2. £150

However, whilst I can put in the time, I cannot put in the money. So I need £1000 of additional funding plus £150 if we form a party.
For this funding you will get:

  • 40,000 leaflets delivered to East Dunbartonshire, a commuter area around Glasgow which is filled with Scottish civil servants, journalists and other influential people.
  • The sceptic message on each ballot paper.
  • A say in the name of the party and the “description” that goes on the ballot paper.**
  • A say in the party emblem.**
Posted in Climate, Politics, Scotland, Wind | 11 Comments

The Death of Kyoto and the lies about a replacement

Posted on 23 October 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

On 31st December 2012, the sceptics won the war on global warming nonsense as the Kyoto protocol commitment faded into history as it ended without any realistic prospect of a replacement.
However, the world was lied to. We were told that a magical fairy had come along, created a magical replacement called “Doha” and that somehow the magical mystery bus of global warming nonsense was still merrily trundling onlong on its acid trip.
Well coming up to two years after Kyoto died, can you name a single country that has committed to this replacement:

Name the countries that are delusional about global warming.

Name the countries that believe in the global warming scam.


Oops, I should have said. It’s not the grey countries or the white. Look carefully – those aren’t greenflies on your monitor. They are actually the “overwhelming” support for the supposed replacement to Kyoto which we were told came into force on the 31st December two years ago.

Posted in Kyoto | Tagged | 1 Comment

Does internet scrutiny improve academia?

Posted on 23 October 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

For much of the last decade as the internet allowed people outside universities to not only have access to the same data but to comment on what academia was doing and even propose their own ideas.
Personally, that process has revealed some horrendous failings in academia with appalling standards seeming to be everywhere from climate to archaeology. In other words, people were just making up history (e.g. the “celts”) and making up “science” (e.g. “global warming” after 18years without any).
The one thing that defines sceptics is that they demand high standards. And like a dog with a bone, once we find areas where absolute rubbish is being printed daily and poured into the ears of students, then we have outed this nonsense.
And yes, we are still finding many instances of absolute nonsense from academia and rightly those who standards are so appalling are being heavily criticised on the internet.

However

What about everyone else? Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Climate, Media, Sceptics | 7 Comments

Stonehenge, pyramids + Glastonbury – but can anyone tell me the probability of seeing the sun?

Posted on 23 October 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

I’ve written three articles suggesting how ancient monument could have been used to calibrate a calendar:

But some key data is missing: how often can we see the sun?

Campbell–Stokes recorder measures sunshine

Campbell–Stokes recorder measures sunshine

Midday sun

There are two separate figures I need. The first is one to work out the probability of seeing an observation when the sun is high in the sky during the middle of the day. The reason this is important, is that if solar observations are being of “the equinox”, then unless it is almost certain the sun can be seen each and every day, then you would build an instrument that could calibrate a calendar with the sun’s position on several days. And the number of sun calibration alignments would increase as the probability of getting a good observation decreased. Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

The Decline and Fall of the British University

Posted on 21 October 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

I found this at: Here The email given has bounced so I publishing it without permission.
The goal of widening access to education is a noble one and very much in line with the motivations of the post-war British governments. One way of implementing it would have been to investigate why so few students went to university, and, having constructed a careful social analysis, to have increased the percentage of entrants by improving the educational qualities of the average school leaver. Of course thats the hard and genuine route and it takes a generation. An easier way is to water down the educational system to a lower standard and then peg the university income to the number of students accepted while reducing the funding per head. In that way universities are given the happy choice of losing money and enforcing redundancies or watering down their requirements. No prizes for guessing which route the government took and how the universities responded. Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, UK | Comments Off on The Decline and Fall of the British University

Power resilience

Posted on 20 October 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

Hearing this morning of the major fire at the Didcot B Power Station, and learning that due to several other problems on the UK grid, we are already likely to have problems if there is a cold spell in January, I thought it was time to stop trying to change the mind of our deluded politicians who never listen to anyone but themselves and instead it’s now time to prepare.
So, I would welcome feedback on the following – particularly comments in [square brackets]:-

 Warning – Now is the time to prepare for Electricity Power cuts

Likelihood

The evidence strongly suggests that a large part of Scotland has already experienced a wind related power outage. So the growing level of wind is likely to be the key factor triggering a large power outage. So, the most likely time will be when wind is a problem to the network. This occurs in two scenarios:

  1. High pressure/low wind: When the wind is not blowing and it is cold, dark and everyone is trying to cook the demand may at some point exceed available supply- so about 6pm typically on a Saturday during high pressure (sunny, frosty).
  2. Low Pressure/high wind: From my analysis of the previous wind power outage. This is most likely to occur when the wind is scheduled to be strong and conventional power stations are shut down to cope with the excess electricity from wind. As these conventional power stations stabilise the grid, the grid becomes progressively less stable. Then even a modest problem or a sudden mismatch of wind supply and power demand could cascade through the grid causing it to effectively crash. Last time this occurred at 8:40pm on a windy night as the power demand dropped forcing more and more of the “base-load” to come from unstable wind leading to instability.

This means Scotland has a “reasonable” chance [I guess 50:50] of at least one major conurbation facing an evening without power typically in January – March.
However, there are now suggestions that: Winter 2014 set to be ‘coldest for century’ Britain faces ARCTIC FREEZE in just weeks if these are true, then I would suggest that there is a strong chance of [75% ?] of at least one major conurbation facing an evening without power, perhaps [50%] of most of Scotland being without power and perhaps [50%] of remoter areas being without power for several days and perhaps [33%] chance of some major conurbations being without power for more than 24hours.

Therefore all of us face the potential of being without power for days.

Enhanced risk

Continue reading →

Posted in bbc, Politics, Scotland, Wind | 1 Comment

Why do academics get involved with policy?

Posted on 8 October 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

I was reading an article and came across this:

Sid Richardson College senior Maddie Camp said she thinks it is important to examine skeptics’ viewpoints to make progress on climate policy.

Why is this academic getting involved with policy at all?

You are either an impartial scientist- in which case you cannot also be advocating particular policies. Or you are advocating particular policies and so are not a scientist.

“Because climate change is really a policy issue, skeptics bottleneck the whole process of beginning to address climate change, so it makes sense to understand that barrier and think about how we can move past it,” Camp said.

Yet again, another academic (and I’m not even bothering to check as they all are) who wants to have their cake and eat it. They want to be seen as “impartial” and dispassionate at the same time as passionately advocating a particular point of view.

Or to use other analogies:

  • They want to stand in the election AND count the result
  • To play football AND be the referee
  • To be in the play AND write the critique.

etc.

Posted in Academia, Politics, UK | Comments Off on Why do academics get involved with policy?

A view inside the public sector academic mind

Posted on 8 October 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

Lord of the Rings - industry is seen as a facet of "mordor"

Lord of the Rings – industry is seen as a facet of “mordor”


For all Tolkein’s good points, he like so many of his generation of public-sector academics shared a hatred of industry. And this is easy to see in his portrayal of “Mordor” above. Compare that to the typical portrayal of the Industry in the Blackcountry. Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, UK | 8 Comments

The dog's been sick – but no heat!

Posted on 6 October 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

When you use the excuse that the dog ate your homework, the last thing you want is for some smart alec to pump the dog’s stomach looking for it or worse, for the stupid mut to spew up all over the teacher!
But that’s what NASA have just done!

“ocean depths have not warmed measurably in the last decade.
The cold waters of Earth’s deep ocean have not warmed measurably since 2005, according to a new NASA study, leaving unsolved the mystery of why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years.” (Tallbloke)

Posted in Climate, Fails | Comments Off on The dog's been sick – but no heat!

The limits of Climate Hysteria

Posted on 6 October 2014 by Scottish-Sceptic

Answering a post today, I realised that I no longer cared about trying to educate the nutters in academia, not because they don’t need educating, but simply because nothing we sceptics have done has ever been listened to – so why should I, who is not paid, waste my time trying to educate people who have been each paid a small fortune – and who won’t listen anyway?
And then I realised, it no longer matters what these climate academics and other nutters think!
limitsmadnessSo, to explain this (to sceptics – it’s above the nutters), I drew the above graph. In the middle, we have the sceptic viewpoint which is as we all know, just plain common sense. The red line represents the academic view – which amongst other off the wall ideas has embraced global cooling and then global warming. And the black outer line represents is the constrain imposed as one gets more and more data.
The point is that I don’t seriously think academics have changed their views because of their exposure to sceptic common sense. Instead, it appears to me that finally the reality of the data is forcing them to tone down their rhetoric. And yes, we could see another “flip” and the academics go all nuts about another aspect of climate, but fundamentally (as we engineers know) as you get more and more data, the room for their kind of lunacy gets smaller and smaller … until perhaps in 100-200 years there will be almost no room at all for the kind of non-science we get at the moment.

Posted in Climate, science | 7 Comments