James Delingpole's Blog, page 16

Jeremy Clarkson's critics should be taken out and shot

Jeremy Clarkson got into tremendous trouble last night for suggesting on BBC's The One Show that the public sector "workers" who took part in yesterday's strike should be shot.

This is silly. It should be patently obvious to anyone who is familiar with his style or has seen one of his programmes – ie: everyone in the world – that Clarkson didn't mean it. For one thing, being an informed fellow he would be perfectly aware that the government simply hasn't the money to spend on bullets right now. For another, he must know that it's perfectly possible that among all the diversity outreach consultants, renewable energy/recycling advisers and union reps who spent their day on the picket lines/early Christmas shopping in Bluewater yesterday at least a handful might actually have jobs which make some tiny contribution to…

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Climategate 2.0

Last week, 5,000 files of private email correspondence among several of the world's top climate scientists were anonymously leaked onto the Internet. Like the first "climategate" leak of 2009, the latest release shows top scientists in the field fudging data, conspiring to bully and silence opponents, and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory in private than they ever admit in public.

The scientists include men like Michael Mann of Penn State University and Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, both of whose reports inform what President Obama has called "the gold standard" of international climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The new release of emails was timed to coincide with the second anniversary of the original climategate leak and with the upcoming United Nations climate summit

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Climategate 2.0: Lawson squishes Huhne

Have you noticed that whenever our beloved Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne speaks his lips never move, only his butt cheeks? It was the same again on BBC Question Time last night. "But Huhne, this is just arrant nonsense," you kept wanting to scream at the TV. "And either you know it's nonsense in which case you're a liar. Or you don't know it's nonsense, in which case you're more incredibly stupid, more badly informed and more ill-advised than any Minister of the Crown has any decency to be."

Anyway, now he's been called on it by two heavyweights – ex-Chancellor Lord Lawson and former Cabinet Secretary Lord Turnbull, writing under the auspices of the increasingly feisty and effective Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Here's their smackdown and it's so brutal (in the…

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Climategate 2.0: the not nice and clueless Phil Jones

Ever since Climategate whenever the UEA's Phil Jones has appeared on television or been interviewed, he has always come over like a particularly gloomy bloodhound who has just been denied his Bonio. Obviously one can understand this. a) it can't be fun when your once lavishly funded, globally respected science department is suddenly associated with FOI-breaching, data-losing, evidence-tweaking, scientific-method-abusing junk  and b) it of course elides perfectly with the narrative so assiduously and cynically promoted by the science establishment since Climategate: that these poor scientists are men more sinned against then sinning; just honest men trying to do their job while fighting off vexatious FOI requests by nasty strangers like Steve McIntyre and being sent death threats and driven almost to suicide by horrid bloggers and…

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A refreshing weekend of real conservatism

Conservatism is dead in Britain — as it is in Europe, as it is in most of the world — and if you want to know what the problem is, a good place to start is the one where I've just been: the David Horowitz Restoration Weekend in Palm Beach, Florida.

Horowitz is a prominent US activist, author and intellectual whose Freedom Center, if you didn't know better, you might assume was a conservative think tank. But it's not. As Horowitz reminded us on the first night of our three-day palm-fringed extravaganza of cocktails, fine cuisine, and sound conservatism courtesy of Mark Steyn, Ann Coulter, Herman Cain, Allen West, Baroness Cox, Bernie Goldberg, Douglas Murray and, ahem, James Delingpole, 'We're not a think tank. We're a battle tank.'

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Climategate 2.0: the most damning email of them all

"What was the most damning email in the entire Climategate saga?" future historians will no doubt ask. "Was it the Hide the Decline one? Was it maybe the one where Michael Mann tries to recruit private detectives to spy on Steve McIntyre for the crime of debunking his Hockey Stick? Was it the one where Kevin Trenberth describes it as a "travesty" that he and his climate conspirators can't account for the lack of warming?"

Nope. None of the above.

The worst, most toecurlingly awful, damning, vile, reprehensible, stomach-churningly dreadful email – the one that shows the Warmist junk-scientists in a light of such festering syphilitic repellance they can never possibly recover is this, the Christmas ditty specially written by Kevin Trenberth in celebration of the Nobel  committee's comedic…

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Climategate 2.0: the Warmists' seven stages of grief

Climategate 2.0 – the gift that goes on giving. And you know how good it is from the reaction of the trolls. They're going mental. On the one hand they'd like to insist it's a non-story. On the other hand, the more shrilly they shriek it's a non-story the more evident it becomes just what a great story it is.

Here's an amusing analysis of the warmist trolls' various lines of defence, which I picked up from the comments at Watts Up With That: (H/T Alix James – and a big thanks to all those of you who helped me find him)

Stage 1: they aren't real emails

Stage 2: they are real emails but they aren't in context

Stage 3: they are in context, but that's how scientists work

Stage 4: ok, this isn't really science, but you guys stole the…

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Uh oh, global warming loons: here comes Climategate II!

Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the "scientists" at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they'd like it to be.

In other words, what these emails confirm is that the great man-made global warming scare is not about science but about political activism. This, it seems, is what motivated the whistleblower 'FOIA 2011′ (or "thief",…

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A girdle too far

Fact: in 1963, air travel was so new and exciting that the awed gasps of the passengers as the plane took flight frequently drowned out the noise of the jet engines.

Fact: in 1963, air travel was so comfortable that passengers emerged from long-haul flights even more refreshed, relaxed and cheerful than when they boarded the plane. Instead of taking their suits to the dry cleaners, canny travellers of the day would often just take a plane journey instead, knowing that their clothes would emerge at the end more pressed and immaculate than before.

Fact: in 1963, every woman looked and dressed like Jackie Kennedy, especially air stewardesses, all of whom could have doubled as models because they were just so hot.

Well, at least it's all true if you believe the BBC's new…

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Goldman Sachs rules the world

"The governments don't rule the world. Goldman Sachs rules the world," claimed a shockingly outspoken trader, Alessio Rastani, on the BBC two months ago. "The savings of millions of people are going to vanish," he said, warning viewers they should "get prepared" because "economic crisis is like a cancer, if you just wait and wait thinking this will go away, just like a cancer it's going to grow and it's going to be too late."

What was interesting about the media response to this was that, rather than focus on the substance of what the trader was saying, it instead went on a wild goose chase trying to decide whether or not he was a hoaxer belonging to a group called the "Yes Men". But on one point at…

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