After one particularly irritating letter from my children’s school in which contrary to human rights and without even so much as asking if they may, they wrote to say they were taking over the role of parenting of my child, I wrote this letter back to them using much of the original phrases/words in in the same dismissive style of their original (and yes, it wasn’t even addressed personally):

PS. The teachers are actually very good.

(I found this today on my PC, evidently written a good few years ago).
There are well known phases to a project like this “tackling global warming”
1. Politics
Politically active people (within society or a company) seeking to manufacture a power base for themselves pick up on issues from well-intentioned individuals which they then push for their own self advancement, seeking to create the biggest possible project consuming the most resources possible for their own personal gain. The result, totally unrealistic goals which have little to do with the original issue.
2. Enthusiasm
After securing funding from the gullible people who control funding, a new project starts, many enthusiastic consultants, researchers, etc. are hired, because they will tell the managers how fantastic the project is and how much they can achieve.
3. Realism
As the initial enthusiasm turns out to be over-hyped, as goals are beginning to look more difficult, as early work fail to make the anticipated progress, those most responsible for the unrealistic goals see the writing on the wall (from all their other failed projects) and find another issue to push leaving an increasingly disillusioned group having to deal with the fallout.
4. Pistoffeness
The early progress grinds to a halt. The promises of how much will be achieved turn into grate with the reality of how much has been achieved and initial enthusiasm disappears.
5. Search for the guilty
Everyone, including even the extremely gullible, now realises the initial aims are unachievable. Now those involved, spend almost as much effort trying to pin the blame for its failure on others as working on the project and everyone is trying not to be the first to be sacked.
6. The clearout
With the key driver long gone, the blame now falls on the poor project leader (chosen for their enthusiasm not ability to deliver) And when they go, so goes all their expensive hyperbolic consultants and managers. The project goals are severely cut down to match reality, and the now cut-down and functional project team (led by engineering types) at last has some prospect of achieving the more realistic objectives (often bearing no resemblance to the original objectives, but only stated to be the same “project” so as to save face.
7. The Enquiry
Almost without exception, those who pushed the original unrealistic goals (e.g. politicians) have sloping shoulders and they know the best way to avoid taking the blame themselves is to lead the charge to pin the blame on others.
In the mud-slinging that ensues, the functional managers finally making progress usually haven’t a chance against the slick political types (who are really to blame). Dirty laundry is exposed.
8. The “it will never happen again”
Those most responsible now vow to never let the fiasco recur. They pin the blame on the last few good managers on the project, awarding them hugely inflated redundancy packages to keep quiet, so allowing the real culprits to remain in their high offices, who now cynically use the “example” of this failed and the appalling behaviour of the good managers to justify their next massively expensive project, with over hyped goals, etc.

The Scottish highlands was amongst the first to suffer a widespread wind related power outage (obviously denied by our idiot politicians but the change of events clearly indicated wind was the culprit). Then just this week we hear that England nearly suffered the same, and now it also appears to have occurred in Australia:

STT could be forgiven for being just a little smug after events unfolded last Sunday night (1 November 2015) in Australia’s “Wind Farm Capital”, South Australia.
As our post – Wind Power Disaster Unfolds: SA Facing Total Blackouts, Rocketing Power Prices & Thousands More Chopped from the Grid – was being put together for an airing on Monday, unbeknownst to STT – a bit after 10pm on Sunday – 110,000 South Australian homes and businesses were plunged into darkness.
STT’s SA operatives were quick off the mark, informing us of their unscheduled trip to the Dark Ages – with emails and comments on that post.
Without warning, traffic lights were dimmed to dangerous pointlessness; street lights were out, leaving less surefooted and vulnerable pedestrians creeping home nervously in the dark; hotel, cinema and restaurant owners had to show customers the door; service stations were unable to pump fuel for their motoring customers; and TV viewers missed the critical dénouements of favourite crime ‘whodunnit’, NCIS and batty-blockbuster, The Dark Knight Rises.
On a more serious note, those in charge of hospitals, like the Lyell-McEwin, had to cross their fingers in the anxious seconds before diesel generators fired up to produce the power needed to keep life support patients ticking along and other critical infrastructure up and running.
Likewise with supermarkets relying on their own diesel generators to keep perishables and frozen food from perishing. However, those small businesses with no access to backup power generation (Delis and the like) and, therefore, no refrigeration, had to otherwise try to stop valuable frozen goods from melting, along with their profits.
While NCIS fans missed out on the who-got-cuffed-climax, the ‘whodunnit’ of real interest to STT was played out in what passes for media in South Australia. Here’s some of it.
Widespread power blackout hits Adelaide
The Advertiser
2 November 2015
Power fault ‘could happen again’
Read More: Stop These Things

Hopefully no one so far has died, but it is only a matter of time before people do start dying directly as a result of this “insane obsession with global warming“

Note: this was originally posted on another blog specific to Scotland.

The rate of change of power on the grid on the 16th April around 8:30pm. Change of frequency is shown dotted red.

‘whether it has undertaken any further investigation into whether an over reliance on wind turbines as a source of electricity played a role in the grid failure on 16 April 2014′. (S4O-03258)

I decided to reveal what I had found in my comments on that blog. However, without the above graph the comments will not make much sense, so I’ve rushed out this post (apologies for the poor quality graph, click for a larger version). But before the graph, let me quickly look at the big picture:

What is the safe level of wind on a grid?

Continue reading →

A common theme in the replies from #CliamteExtremists is that “if you are suggesting NOAA was doing something wrong you are a conspiracy theorist because why would the people do that?”
This however, always comes from people who have no qualification (and whilst they are mostly anonymous) I doubt they actually have any experience of big organisation and how a lot of well intentioned people can work together to do evil.

Alder Hey organs scandal

The Classic example occurred at Alder Hey. For the Doctors involved, they weren’t doing anything wrong. Young children were dying, their organs could save lives (or to be cynical perhaps be sold to help meet the Doctors salaries). But either way, the public were benefiting and because the parents didn’t know what organs had been stuffed back in the corpse after autopsy, they were none the wiser.
But when it finally emerged this was happening it caused a massive outrage. Because whilst the Doctors didn’t see anything wrong in what they were doing, the parents affected did. And the cause (like NOAA) was a group of people who arrogantly believed that they were right and no one else had a right to tell them what to do. Continue reading →

Climate change agitators love to say the science is settled in their favor, that researchers have irrefutably proved industrial carbon emissions are causing global temperatures to rise to such an extent that irreversible environmental damage already is under way. Considering their conviction, you’d think the research and work product of climate alarmists would be an open book.
You’d be wrong.
…
In fact, scientists employed by taxpayers enjoy no such privilege. More likely, they’re stalling because their “frank discourse” includes interactions that, at a minimum, will highlight bias and political influence.
If we’re going to be regulated into recession for a problem that might not even exist, the public certainly has a right to know whether the numbers might be rigged to benefit a hyperpolitical agenda. NOAA’s records don’t belong to the government. They belong to the public. Let’s see what we’re paying for.
Source Las Vega Review Journal

The full title should be: First time I’ve listened to Climate Academics thinking they know more than me and that they aren’t lying through their teeth to push an eco-political agenda. In other words, climate science warts and all, not eco-fascist clap trap.
Having read many climate articles I’ve formed my own views on what is most important in the climate. For example I knew that CO2 was both an emitter and absorber of IR, that most of the IR effect of CO2 occurred in the very lowest part of the atmosphere. From that I worked out that the real question was what was happening at the top of the atmosphere where IR did have a chance to escape and so a small amount of CO2 could affect radiation, and not the bottom where even massive changes to can’t increase IR blocking when it is already blocked.
Likewise, it’s pretty obvious that clouds form a vital negative feedback component effectively stabilising the planet (during inter-glacials). And that CO2 is a plant food is obvious to anyone who knows anything about biology. So,it’s great to see all this once “mainstream” science, which has now been repressed by Climate Extremists in one video:
https://youtu.be/LV2uld7feqY

This is a quick explanation to follow up a tweet to me from a lady Laura LaRue who goes by the handle of @LaLaRueFrench75
We’ve all seen the image of the “sweating earth” used to portray the effect of “greenhouse warming”, but whilst the actual effect of CO2 is so small it’s probably akin to putting a hanky on your head, the image does show an important part of the earth’s heat control system.
The important thing to understand is that because the earth is in the vacuum of space, the earth can’t lose heat by “sweating”. Instead it must all leave through infra-red radiation. Something we can all experience by going out on a cold cloudless night when the sky feels to be “sucking out” the heat (although what we actually experience is the lack of back-radiation from the clouds.
Around half the heat leaving the surface and going up into the atmosphere (high enough so that it can then lose it’s heat above the clouds) does so from plant evaporation. So, roughly half the heat transport is regulated by plants. As a result, even a small change in local plant cover, and hence local plant evaporation, can change temperature. And if we go from forest with near saturation plant cover to a city with almost none, then the effects are quite dramatic with cities being several degrees warmer.
The problems with water
However, the water still comes down in rain. And because there are no longer the plants to suck up the water, and because many urban areas are concreted and tarmacked, the result is that, unlike the slow trickle from a Forest, in cities, there is a dramatic rush of water down into the rivers every time it rains. And those rivers in turn tend to be straightened, and dredged and measures made to stop flooding forcing more and more water to rush downstream in one almighty surge (which sooner or later means massive flooding lower down the rivers)
But, it gets worse! Because as we move to farmland and urbanised areas, we drain all the bogs. That doesn’t mean less water flows from them. Instead, it means that water that used to be stored in bogs, marshes, ponds, etc. now flushes straight into the rivers. As a result of this, the local water table drops, this in turn means the area is more arid, which often means farmers have to take water from rivers etc. which in turn can drop the water table further.
So, locally, changing farm use, both leads to massive floods down stream, but also arid conditions later. (In the past, we’d have small floods at the top of rivers, now it all gets channelled down to the flood plains – which are often the locations of big population centres!)
The Effect on Global temperature Continue reading →

Tony has come across another great study on Greenland ice in which the supposed “darkening” of Greenland, supposedly caused by “industrial pollution” … was due to a degrading sensor (mind you … “industrial” and not that nasty “green pollution” from dust from plants and soil mind you!)
This might sound to be a bit of a niche subject, but for one small reason: it is the last thing the #ClimateExtremists have. After I checked through the Trenberth report some time ago on climate trends and once I removed all the “what might happen” and focussed on “what has happened”, I realised that they had not one single trend** in their favour.
Likewise, floods, droughts, snow, polar bears, lesser-spotted-goat-toads etc. have no adverse trends. CO2 is rising – however that is leading directly to record world harvests and greening of deserts.
All the #ClimateExtremists had, was the “melting ice” (which proved little except it got warmer after the little ice-age). But as we all know Himalayan ice caused that huge embarrassment for the IPSS, because they quoted some WWF report saying it was disappearing in 35years and not 350 (as I remember). Then when I last looked, there was a mixed picture but it seemed to have recovered (and hence we hear no more about it).
So, that rather left Arctic and Antarctic ice.
This year (or was it last?) Tony  started being able to say “no trend in global sea ice”, because the global level of sea ice had returned to the level at which it had started at the beginning of the record (about 30 years if I remember right). So that left only three anchors that even vaguely supported the #ClimateExtremists

• The supposed rise in surface temperature (as compiled by your eco-politicised #ClimateExtremists)
• “Melting” Antarctic ice
• Melting Greenland ice

I put “melting” Antarctic ice, because when I looked at the studies there were as many saying melting and growing and it’s really not been tenable for a while. However recently we’ve had:

• NOAAgate – which showed the reason temperatures like NOAA contradicted the non-warming of the satellite is because NOAAgate proves NOAA are intentionally upjusting the temperatures (as they will not justify how they got those rises to their oversight Committee which shows they used nefarious means)
• NASA’s study showing Antarctic ice is growing.

Which left … Greenland ice … the #ClimateExtremists last anchor
The only thing at all that might suggest CO2 was having any effect was Greenland ice. However, recently Tony has been able to say “Greenland ice is growing”. I think that’s a relatively recent hange – but nether-the-less given that Greenland is the last anchor holding this scumbag scam, it is very important.
And now we find another study pro-porting to show massive changes in Greenland was down to sensor degradation. On its own, its wouldn’t seem that important. But when its sawing at the last rope holding these scumbags ….
I’m not going to say “Timber” …. because this scam has shown a remarkable tenacity to stay up even though there is absolutely no evidence supporting it … but well I suppose I’ve already said it!

**In case there’s a pedantic green around – yes there was a trend in the maximum intensity of rain. But as this is more than likely due to the prevalence of datalogging equipment which has the memory to store shorter and shorter “buckets” of time, I believe this is a direct result of the improvement in instrumentation rather than any actual trend in the climate.

GMB Scotland Agree With Civil Engineers’ Call For Evidence Led Debate On Scottish Energy Policy

Having access to gas is crucial to tackle fuel poverty because gas is four  times cheaper than electricity says GMB Scotland.
GMB Scotland, the union for energy work, on the call by the Institution of Civil Engineers Scotland Committee for an expert-led debate on Scotland’s energy policy. See notes to editors for copy of the press release dated 29th October.
Gary Smith, Acting Secretary GMB Scotland, said:
” We do need a sober honest debate. We have high levels of fuel poverty in Scotland. Having access to gas is crucial to tackle fuel poverty because gas is 4 times cheaper than electricity. If anyone disputes the case for gas then they should put in their manifesto that they want people to turn off their gas boiler and replace it with electricity at the cost of thousands and then watch the bill to heat t their homes go up four fold.
We need to be honest, that we have been fracking in the north sea for decades. It hasn’t resulted in earthquakes and rigs falling into the sea.
The fact is too we are going to be a using chemicals from fracked gas. They will be imported into Scotland and those chemicals are essential to meeting the needs of everyday modern life, from clothing to food. We also need to face up to our environmental and moral responsibilities. Importing gas across continents and oceans, gas that has been bought from dodgy regimes in the Middle East and Russia is not morally right or good for the environment. We protested about Scotland playing Qatar because of the treatment of workers on the World Cup stadiums yet we are happy to buy gas from the same regime. Do we really believe labourers in the energy sector in Qatar have union rights or enjoy high levels of Health and Safety?
There has been a lack of honesty about energy from Scottish politicians of all parties. We need energy to heat our homes and to power industry. It is about the bitter irony that whilst there has been a frenzied debate about fracking we are losing hundreds of jobs in the steel sector due to high energy prices.
GMB Scotland supports a sensible sober debate about energy, environment, safety and jobs. A debate that is rooted in the real world. ”
Source: http://www.gmbscotland.org.uk/index.php/site/news/gmb_scotland_agree_with_civil_engineers_call_for_evidence_led_debate_on_sco