Welcome to Lisbon

By | | , ,
Comments Off on Welcome to Lisbon

Yesterday very late in the day I posted a link to Captain Ranty‘s summary of what we were about to lose under the Lisbon treaty. I like I suspect many other people have never read the 294 pages that make up the Lisbon treaty, and so (much to my shame) wasn’t aware of just what it meant. Now it’s in force so we’ll be fighting to regain what has been lost rather than to defend what we have, which is always a much trickier battle. Archbishop Cranmer as ever provides a nice historical perspective.

To understand just what this treaty means to us, and to the rest of Europe as it isn’t good for anyone except the unelected elite that now rule us, go and read the very succinct (just 6,000+ words) commentary on the Lisbon treaty over at Katabasis, then when you’ve done that and calmed down read it again. The implications of this “rationalising” treaty are really quite troubling (to put it mildly), but I do wonder as have many other people if the treaty is constitutional. I don’t think it makes much difference if it isn’t all the time we just choose between red or blue big statists, but as Leg Iron has often observed we do have alternatives. Perhaps the time has come to form some unholy alliances as Snowolf suggests. It would take a lot of nose holding, but short of who knows how many years of this new state followed by a more violent upheaval a single purpose alliance of many small parties may be our best hope. Elect anyone on a mandate of a chance to get out and the promise that as soon as we’re out another election would follow, it seems like a good option to me.

(I may update this further as I get my head round what’s actually just happened)

0

You’d have thought this would have made more of a stir

By | | , , ,
Comments Off on You’d have thought this would have made more of a stir

From Captain Ranty a list of rights that we’re about to lose.

Go and read it here and then ask yourself the same question I find I’m asking myself. Just how did we let this happen?

-1

Climate change hack

By | | ,
2 Comments

Loads of people have already dealt with this far better than I ever could, notably Bishop Hill and the Devils Kitchen. The response over at Real climate is also quite enlightening, especially as they feature in some of the hacked emails (Oh and claim to be independent of any environmental organizations) .

So go and read what these more informed people have to say, in the mean time I’m going to address just two points which come up in the defence of the scientists on Real climate. Firstly there is the claim that it’s all out of context and it’s vital that scientists e-mails are never seen for fear it will hamper their discussions. Apparently the fact that in business you have to assume that courts may see your mail is irrelevant, as in business I assume they believe that you don’t need a free and open exchange of ideas. This is really just so much nonsense, historically the amount of private correspondence between scientists that has been published as well as “private” notebooks is huge. Also obviously if they’re being funded by the tax payers then all of their work belongs to the tax payer, and how do you misinterpret people saying they’d rather delete a file that release it due to a FOI request? As we’re so often told if they’ve nothing to hide they’ve nothing to fear.

More worryingly from a scientific point of view is the huge and obvious reluctance to share their data and models with other people. Only allowing peer review by select and (presumably) friendly/sympathetic peers is not the way to do good science. The hypocrisy of claiming that they need to be able to speak freely to advance science whilst at the same time looking for ways to avoid sharing their work and data with other academics and talking about hiding behind IPR is somewhat shocking (well it would be if it was new).

The one thing, which I think the revealed data does show is that the science for significant man made climate change is nowhere near as solid as we’re led to believe. The robust debate for which hiding data is vital, isn’t allowed to reach us mere mortals despite the changes that are being insisted on to combat models which are still the matter of such robust debate and seemingly such suspect data. The way that bits of data sets are seemingly casually discarded when they no longer fit the favoured model is quite worrying, why should say tree data suddenly become unreliable? If there’s good evidence of some external change affecting that data fair enough, but if it’s suspect after point X with no such external change why isn’t it also suspect before then. It’s details such as this which I think go beyond “ambiguous at worst”

0