Governing on Eggshells

A minority government is a fragile thing. Nonetheless, the leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party, Alex Salmond, has been eleced First Minister of Scotland.

This means he probably won’t be in power very long – at least not without another election. The SNP is have to negotiate hard for every piece of legislation. They are is a kind of issue by issue coalition with that flakiest of parties, the Greens. I’m guessing they won’t even be hinting that anthropogenic global warming is load of anti-capitalist propaganda.

Not that the SNP would ever decry anything as anti-capitalist. They are to the left of Labour. Strange as it may seem, Scotland had to ditch Labour to get a socialist government.

Warmth

I was going to write about this before I saw the data today. I was think just yesterday that the weather feels more like June than April. Aprils when I was in the UK in the early 90s were nothing like this. Even when I moved here at the turn of the millenium, they weren’t this warm.

In fact, this is going to be the warmest April since records began in 1659. It seems like the temperature has been more than the 3.4 degrees Celcius above normal indicated by the Met Office.

The downside to this warmth seems to be the sunshine associated with it. It’s been warm and dry all over Europe.  While this has been good for businesses like sidewalk cafes, it’s not been so good for crops. There are already signs of drought. It is already evident in Hungary, where April temperatures were 5-6 degrees above normal. We may even be headed for a repeat of last year’s summer heat wave.

The UK is not headed for the same drought conditions as the continent, because whilst the temperatures were quite moderate, we had a rather wet winter.

Of course news like this brings the global warming crowd out.  They want to attribute all of this to anthropogenic sources. What they don’t like to tell you is that even though this is the warmest April on record it’s not that much hotter than some other times on record. It may be 3.4 degrees above normal, but it is only 0.5 degrees above the average in 1865.

These this come and go in cycles. Rather than trying to place blame with whatever capitalist enterprise most irritates the left-wing loony ideology of the global warming activists, more should be invested in predicting the cycles and planning for them.

Religious Intolerance

Some eco-freaks take their views way too seriously. In the spirit of animal rights campaigners who have damaged animal testing labs and threatened staff, scientists who express scepticism over global warming are receiving death threats.

It’s bad enough that they find themselves shunned by the left-wing scientific establishment. Science is a very closed shop these days. Either you toe the party line or you find something else to do.

The battle for the philosophy of science was lost a long time ago.  And that’s what it is. It’s not about science. It’s about philosophy. It’s about religion.

Somehow I missed it last week when Professor Timothy Ball appeared in The Great Global Warming Swindle, a documentary on Channel 4. He was among several scientists who claimed this idea of anthropogenic global warming has become a religion. It has become a very intolerant religion, much more so than the caricature of Christianity portrayed by media-savvy scientists. The global warming religion is forcing any alternative explanations to be ignored.

Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about claims surrounding the degree of anthropogenic climate change. Death threats. I suppose that as a climatology professor, what he says has some clout. Combine that with the fact that he’s from Canada, where much of the evidence is easily accessible, and he could be real trouble.

Now I’m betting whoever is threatening him wouldn’t think of clubbing a baby seal.

Can Hardly Bear It

If there is anything an eco-freak hates, it is when nature is actually doing well. In another blow to the Global Warming brigade, it appears that the rise in temperatures has benefited the polar bear population.

Numbers in the Davis Strait area of eastern Canada, the polar bear population has grown by 250% in the last 20 years. This has been helped by the ban on Harp seal pup hunting. The bears have more food than they can possibly eat. The Inuit hunters had been telling scientist that there were more bears, but they had been ignored.

Still, there are plenty of eco-scientists who refuse to accept the findings. Only people who have an interest in hunting bears would make such claims, according to a spokesman for the World Conservation Union. Of course only the other side has an unterior motive. The WCU and it’s sister organisations have no agenda.