James Delingpole's Blog, page 10

Scotland decides: this can only end badly…

Today the people of Scotland will vote on the most important issue of their lifetime: whether to remain part of a 307 year old Union which has brought them peace and prosperity, encouraged cultural and economic efflorescence and created the greatest empire the world has ever seen…

Or whether to go it alone as an independent nation and brave currency collapse, economic chaos, marginalisation on the international stage, grotesque political mismanagement by a party led by a shyster demagogue, bitter wrangling, messy negotiation of any number of complex agreements, and the grim prospect of picking up a massive welfare bill which, up and till now, has been heavily subsidised by the loathsome Sassenachs of South East England.

Perhaps you can guess from this summary where we at Breitbart London stand on the issue. The dissolution of the United Kingdom, we believe, is a very bad idea which even those who voted “yes” will come to regret bitterly.

As to which way the vote will go, opinion polls suggest that it is too close to call.

That this is so reflects horribly badly on the “No” campaign which has been run with such ineptitude and complacency that it wasn’t until a fortnight ago that it woke up to the possibility that it might lose an argument it had long lazily accepted it would win hands down.

But it hardly speaks better for the ugly campaign conducted by the “Yes” lobby. While it may be true that in psephelogical terms it has been tremendously successful, in moral terms it has been unconscionable. Alex Salmond and his Scottish National Party have run a campaign on a prospectus so riddled with lies, exaggerations and half-truths that if this were business or finance rather than politics they would all likely be serving jail sentences.

Read more at Breitbart London 

Environmental scientists make shock discovery: sustainable, eco-friendly laboratories are combustible

Environmental scientists at the University of Nottingham have made a shocking and expensive discovery: eco-friendly buildings made of “sustainable” wood burn much more easily than eco-unfriendly ones made of stone, concrete, steel or glass.

They made their surprise discovery over the weekend when their new Carbon Neutral Laboratory for Sustainable Chemistry burned to the ground in what local firemen claimed was the biggest blaze in over a decade.

The £15 million building had been erected according to the most rigorous environmental principles, made with a wooden frame and other “sustainable” materials, and powered with “renewable” energy, so that the structure could remain “carbon neutral” throughout its lifetime.

According to Nottingham’s registrar Dr Paul Greatrix this demonstrated the university’s “commitment to sustainability in all its forms”.

Unfortunately, the fire appears to have remained unmoved by the building’s eco-friendly credentials and razed it to the ground in much the same way one of its ancestors did to a third of the City of London in the Great Fire of 1666.

After the Great Fire – and the rebuilding of London by Sir Christopher Wren – an act was passed in 1667 making it illegal to erect buildings using wooden frames.

However, three hundred years on, environmental experts have decided they know better. Timber-framed buildings have become fashionable again because, apparently, they make a “positive contribution to tackling climate change.”

Read the rest at Breitbart London

Reading bits of Naomi Klein so you don’t have to

Green activist Naomi Klein has a new book out today. If past form is anything to go by – No Logo; The Shock Doctrine – it will become an instant bestseller and will be informing liberal arguments for months and years to come. Here’s what you need to know about her latest, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.

1. It’s all about Naomi.

“At some point about seven years ago I realised I had become so convinced we were headed towards a grim ecological collapse that I was losing my capacity to enjoy my time in nature.”

Bomb the global economy back to the Dark Ages right now! We cannot, under any circumstances, allow Naomi’s feelings, mental health or picnics to be jeopardised by prosperity!

2. Even the BP spill is really about Naomi.

“After more tests, my doctor told me my hormone levels were much too low and I’d probably miscarry for the third time. My mind raced back to the Gulf – the toxic fumes I had breathed in for days and the contaminated water I had waded in. I searched on the chemicals BP was using in huge quantities and found reams of online chatter linking them to miscarriages. I had no doubt that it was my doing.”

(Though a bit later Naomi is forced to admit that, no, it was just an ectopic pregnancy which had nothing to do with the sins of Big Oil).

3. Naomi is a watermelon – green on the outside, red on the inside

“What the climate needs now is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.”

and [from an interview in the Guardian]

 “We need an ideological battle. It is still considered politically unthinkable just to introduce straight-up, polluter-pays punitive measures – particularly in the US.” To Klein, environmentalists should have just gone to war on business, and on the whole concept of capitalism.

and [from an interview in Macleans]

“…we must confront the reigning, unquestioned ideology that sees privatization as always good, and doesn’t question the logic of austerity, doesn’t question the logic of pro-corporate, free trade deals that have stood in the way of progress on climate.”

4. Naomi has been watching the way Jay Z and Beyonce use Blue and learned a useful lesson.

“What gets me most are not the scary studies about melting glaciers, the ones I used to avoid. It’s the books I read to my two-year old. Looking For A Moose is one of his favourites. It’s about a bunch of kids who really want to see a moose. They search high and low – through a forest, a swamp, in brambly bushes and up a mountain. (The joke is that there are moose hiding on each page). In the end, the animals come out and the ecstatic kids proclaim: “We’ve never ever seen so many moose!” On about the 75th reading, it suddenly hit me: he might never see a moose.”

Naomi, you and your son live in Canada. The world’s moose population is currently over a million, half of it in Canada. You are more than rich enough to take a long vacation with your family to gaze wistfully at whatever species you want be it the marine iguanas of the Galapagos or the Siberian Tiger. So by what tortured logic do you imagine it is probable or even possible that your son might “never see a moose”?

Read the rest at Breitbart London

In praise of George Galloway and Keith Vaz (no really!)

Yes, the oleaginous, dubious Labour MP for Leicester East and the scruffy-bearded, hard-left, kitten-impersonating, anti-Israel apologist for Islamism will not be many readers’ first choices for “politicians with integrity I most love and respect.”

But the fact remains that this week both Vaz and Galloway played a blinder and reminded us all that, whatever their manifold faults, these men are stellar talents who you’d dearly like to have on side with you in a ruck because they fight hard, they fight dirty and they know how to win.

Keith Vaz distinguished himself as Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee into the Rotherham child rape scandal, grilling the disgraced functionaries who helped make it all possible – among them the South Yorkshire police commissioner Shaun Wright and the Rosa-Klebb-like head of Rotherham children’s services Joyce Thacker.

I noticed one or two commenters on Twitter prejudging his performance by making the somewhat racist assumption that, as an Asian, Vaz would strive to whitewash the whole affair. Which just goes to show the problem with this blanket slur cast on the broader ‘Asian’ community by the wanton use of the ‘A’ word in the context of Rotherham et al. Vaz is a Roman Catholic, of Goan heritage, not a Pakistani or Kashmiri Muslim.

He is also – as he demonstrated – a barrister of considerable style, wit and brilliance. In the course of the committee hearing, Vaz expressed his frustration that there seemed to be no way of ousting Wright or Thacker from the well-paid jobs they had done so badly. But at least he managed the next best thing: with feline sarcasm and inquisitorial ruthlessness, he gave all those of us fortunate enough to have caught these gripping proceedings on the BBC’s parliamentary live-feed the exquisite pleasure of watching some deeply unpleasant people writhing like scorpions on a pin and being exposed as palpable, unconscionable liars.

Find out the other reasons why I’m bigging up these slimeballs at Breitbart London

My amazing Dad

This week I wanted to tell you about my amazing dad.

He hasn’t died or anything. I just thought I’d get in there with my panegyric quick while he’s still got most of his marbles and before he’s lying in a coffin quite deaf to all the nice stuff I’m about to say about him.

So: my dad. What prompted this was a chance remark he made the other day about having left school at 15. Fifteen? ‘Well I wasn’t enjoying it,’ he explained. ‘And Dad said he couldn’t afford the fees. So it made much more sense for me to come and work for the family firm as a lathe operator. I loved it. It gave me independence and I was earning money.’

Now if you were to meet my Dad, you wouldn’t guess his education was so basic. He’s uber well-informed on all sorts of subjects from contemporary China to the Battle of the Bulge to ancient Greece, and at 79 he must be one of the most dedicated silver surfers out there: spending as much as 15 hours a day trawling the internet, mainly for stories about one of our shared obsessions, environmental lunacy. If you had to hazard what he did for a living, you’d probably guess retired professor, rather than Midlands nut-and-bolt manufacturer. And that, for me, is both my dad’s tragedy and his triumph.

For most of our shared life, I didn’t give much thought to this. You know how it is with dads: at about 13, you move on from your adoring, hero-worship phase into thinking he’s a total loser embarrassment prat and please God let you never become like him; then later comes the resigned acceptance stage when you take your dad for granted, expecting him to remember the kids’ birthdays and help out in emergencies and be there on the phone for you when your life is falling apart.

But what you rarely ever do till much later is look at your dad as a person in his own right. You assume, by the time he’s hit 40, that his useful work is done. He probably doesn’t still have a sex life — at least, euugh, you hope he doesn’t — and the best of his career is behind him. His job, from now on, is to put you through university and to make sure there’s enough left in the kitty to give his grandchildren a reasonable inheritance.

Then you hit middle age yourself and — with your own kids viewing you rather as you used to view your dad — you begin to reassess the situation: ‘Hang on. I’m not dead yet and I’ve probably got a good four decades ahead of me. How do I deal with this? Is it going to be OK?’ So you look to your dad’s life for guidance.

Read the rest at The Spectator

Extinct snail ‘killed’ by climate change crawls back from the dead

The world’s first and only species to go “extinct” because of climate change has been found alive and well – and living where it always has for the past 80,000 or so years – on the Indian Ocean atoll of Aldabra.

Since 2007, the Aldabra Banded Snail (Rhachistia aldabrae) has been the chief poster mollusc of climate alarmists across the globe. That’s because – according to a peer-reviewed paper published by an “expert” in the field Justin Gerlach – it was the first extinction directly attributable to climate change.

In his paper, published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, Gerlach claimed:

The only known population of the Aldabra banded snail Rhachistia aldabraedeclined through the late twentieth century, leading to its extinction in the late 1990s. This occurred within a stable habitat and its extinction is attributable to decreasing rainfall on Aldabra atoll, associated with regional changes in rainfall patterns in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. It is proposed that the extinction of this species is a direct result of decreasing rainfall leading to increased mortality of juvenile snails.

Gerlach also ventured to suggest that his conclusion was the result of “exhaustive surveys” and “extensive surveys.”

But not that exhaustive or extensive, clearly.

The snail - quite handsome by molluscular standards, with a conical shell and a natty, black and reddish-pink go-faster stripe pattern – was recently rediscovered in “dense mixed scrub forest on the coastal fringe of Malabar island, Aldabra Atoll, Seychelles”.

This reduces to a grand total of zero the number of species extinctions around the world due to “climate change” – something which will no doubt prove gravely disappointing to global warming alarmists everywhere.

 

Read the rest at Breitbart London

Global Warming jumps the shark. The week in Climate Stupid.

This was the week when global warming jumped the shark. Just like it did last week. And the one before…

1. Soon children will have forgotten what outdoors looks like, claims HuffPo

Doctors at a Washington, D.C. paediatric clinic are increasingly prescribing sunshine and outdoors – “nature time” – for their young clients, reports Lynne Peeples for HuffPo.

But the story isn’t as heartwarming as you might think from the first paragraphs. That’s because stalking this charming scene like a ravening, blood-crazed, razor-fanged death creature with a sinister cowl kind of like a wicked evil monk’s probably concealing a grinning death’s head face and an evil as old as time, is climate change.

Yes, Peeples has managed to find at least two eco campaigners so shameless and utterly desperate that they have been prepared to put their names to quotes suggesting that “climate change” is threatening to make outdoors a no-go zone.

“Nature is critical to health,” says Martha Berger, a children’s health officer with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Climate change, she added, could “further alienate kids from nature.”

“One of the things contributing to [kids not getting enough play outdoors], along with many societal factors, is that some of the conditions are becoming more difficult to deal with,” said Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, during a media call last month for the group’s report, “Ticked Off: America’s Outdoor Experience and Climate Change.”

2. Climate Change will kill your fluffy bunnies

Speaking on Australian national radio climate campaigner Naomi Oreskes warns ABC presenter Robyn Williams of the terrible future the world can expect as a result of climate change. Quoting from her new book The Collapse of Western Civilisation, she prophesies:

“The loss of pet cats and dogs garnered particular attention among wealthy Westerners, but what was anomalous in 2023 soon became the new normal. A shadow of ignorance and denial had fallen over people who considered themselves children of the Enlightenment.”…

Williams, himself an ardent warmist, chips in with some deep insights of his own:

“Yes, not only because it’s an animal but it’s local. You see, one criticism of the scientists is they’re always talking about global things…And so if you are looking at your village, your animals, your fields, your park, your kids, and the scientists are talking about a small world that you know, than it makes a greater impact, doesn’t it…”

Note to future historians trying to write the definitive book on The Decline And Fall Of Western Civilization:

Robyn Williams is one of Australia’s most prominent broadcasters.

Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, where she writes books, teaches impressionable undergraduates, and gets taken seriously.

Read the other three examples of climate stupid at Breitbart London

Happy 18th Birthday No Global Warming!

All right, so we’re slightly premature. By one measure – according to Bishop Hill - we’re still a month away before “no global warming” achieves its coming of age.

But by other measurements, as Matt Ridley notes in the Wall Street Journal, we’re already as much as 19 or even 26 years into “no global warming” “depending on whether you choose the surface temperature record or one of two satellite records of the lower atmosphere.”

Still, whichever measurement you pick, it’s really not looking good for the Warmists – whose stubborn ongoing refusal to acknowledge the failure of the planet’s temperatures to accord with their computer models’ doomsday predictions is starting to look so shameless and desperate it’s really about time they considered a name change. How about “deniers”?

Sure, they’ve found lots of excuses to explain the so-called “pause” in global warming. (“Pause” by the way is a most unscientific term which we really shouldn’t allow them to get away with. It presupposes that they know that continued warming is inevitable. Which they don’t. No one does – and that’s the fundamental problem)…

Read the rest at Breitbart London

Why climate science is far too important to be left to pretty boy celebrity physicists like Professor Brian Cox

Professor Brian Cox is almost certainly the prettiest physicist ever to have appeared on television. A crowded field, I know. But even I would, I suspect, happily married man though I am (and happily married man though he is too), given the right circumstances: those wonderful pouty lips; that winning perma-smile as he delivers his pearls of astronomical wisdom on his charming documentaries; the rock star cool – complete with Charlatans-style, retro haircut – a legacy of his days as keyboard player with Nineties pop band D:Ream.

So yes, I perfectly well understand why the BBC has elevated him to the position of go-to scientist on all matters of import, with TV series like The Wonders of the Solar System, and why he is constantly being invited to deliver TED talks and high profile speeches like the 2010 Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture and the Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture.

The only bit that troubles me – and it is something of a problem, I think you’ll agree, in a leading “science communicator” – is his somewhat uncertain grasp of the scientific method….

To find out what the problem is read on at Breitbart London

The glories of John Betjeman. And why we need more English eccentrics – eg me – on TV

Is it just me or are almost all TV documentaries completely unwatchable these days? I remember when I first started this job I’d review one almost every fortnight. Always there’d be something worth watching: on the horrors of the Pacific or the Eastern Front, say; or castles; or Churchill; or medieval sword techniques. But now it’s all crap like The Hidden World of Georgian Needlecraft or In The Footsteps of Twelve Forgotten South American Civilisations Which All Look The Same or A Brooding, Long-Haired Scottish Geographer Shouts From Inside A Volcano Why Climate Change Is Worse Than Ever.

The presenters have got more annoying too. I mean, I’m not saying some of the old ones weren’t infuriating with their hand-waving and tics and mannerisms and wheezings. But the new ones are just vacuous, unformed squits. They make you yearn for a reverse Logan’s Run world, where everyone under 30 is executed for being so tiresome. A lot of them are women, obviously, chosen mainly for their simpering looks and charming speech impediments and unerring knack for fronting the dullest imaginable subject matter.

No doubt the people responsible for commissioning this drivel think they’re redressing the balance, in much the same way progressive historians do when they demand we empathise with medieval peasants rather than learning about what Edward I did to the Welsh and the Scots. Well, I can’t speak for all oppressed women here, but I think I can for my wife. They’re not going, ‘Oh, good. Finally a documentary with my name on it, about what it was like to be a woman’s maidservant in Elizabethan York.’ They’re going, ‘Who is that irritating little cow? Why is she on the screen putting on that little-girl-lost voice for my husband? And why the hell isn’t this documentary about something actually interesting, like, say, castles, or Churchill or medieval sword techniques?’

Then, of course, there’s the worst thing of all: the journey. All presenters in all documentaries, as we know, have to begin by telling us they’re going on a journey. But as anyone who has ever worked in TV knows, this is a total lie. You know even before your first day’s filming exactly what you’re going to say, what your interviewees are going to say, what your line is going to be. You’re not discovering anything. Even the scenes where you pretend to be meeting someone for the first time are faked.

Something needs to change — and I know exactly what the solution is. We need documentaries to be presented by real enthusiasts, rather than by talking heads who’ve just mugged up on the subject. That way the subject matter will take care of itself because, regardless of what it is, a true enthusiast will make it interesting.

A.N. Wilson showed us the way this week in Return to Betjemanland (BBC4), a shamelessly eccentric, puckish but deeply insightful homage to the poet, architectural evangelist and clown with his ‘infectious toothy grin, the slightly seedy air of a defrocked clergyman, the sharp knowledge and the ready wit’.

Read the rest at The Spectator