The fourth report of the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) is being finalised as I write. The second-order draft is up on the internet behind the citation ‘please do not cite, quote, or distribute the draft report’. It would be nice to be able to copy the report onto my hard drive and ignore it until the Sexed-up Dossier emerges next year. But nothing is ever quite that simple. Here are my marching orders…and I quote…
‘Because the report is still in draft, distribution of the materials for review will be through a password-protected website. If you are interested in reviewing the report, send a message …with your name and affiliation in the subject line…to ipcc-usgrev@climatescience.gov to obtain the username and password required to access the report. Then follow this link to download the report and to obtain explicit instructions regarding comments formatting.’ Nothing ventured nothing gained so I'll give it a whirl and report back on my success or otherwise.
In my father’s day Trade Unions worried about wage differentials. The idea was that skilled workers should get more than unskilled workers and older workers more than younger workers. Skilled workers had to do a long apprenticeship and older workers had a family to support with the breadwinner’s wage. George Bernard Shaw…one of the principal authors of The Fabian Papers in 1884…didn’t believe this could be done and insisted throughout his long life that socialism was equal money.
When the first Common Ownership company was established by the Wilson Labour Government wage differentials were spelt out in the constitution of the Scott Bader Commonwealth. Nobody was to earn more than seven times what anybody else earned. All this has been forgotten at Scott Bader just as the issue of wage differentials has been forgotten everywhere else.
Nowadays top corporate bosses pay each other several million pounds a year while mad bloggers and whistle blowers like me…in a good year…self-assess at a few thousand pounds. Why this differential? To write well takes years of apprenticeship...and only a tiny proportion make the grade. To run a company is easy in comparison. Your job is to make more and more money for your shareholders. If you don’t the company gets taken over. But this isn’t hard.
All you do to run a company is increase the company’s income and reduce its expenses. You increase income by raising the price of your products and you reduce expenses by getting somebody else to pick up the tab. Oil has shot up in price since the Bilderberg Boys decided to go for it. The bigger you are the bigger the pocket you must pick. The biggest pockets are public pockets. Big corporations have become adept at wheedling money out of taxpayers.
What better way to transfer a sixty billion pound Clean-up Budget from the Nuclear Fiasco Industry to the Public Purse than to roll out the 80 year-old James Lovelock to extol the joys of spent fuel lumps for home heating and reallocating Nuclear Clean-up money to Global Warming?
What better way to get the Public Purse to pay to swap out the petrol in petrol station for some new piped fuel such as hydrogen or cornoil than to invent Climate Change and promote a theory that blames it all on Carbon Emissions? This is probably all you need to know about Global Warming. Adam Smith would have been sceptical too.
Spent fuel rods in your gardens will do wonders for the shrubbery. Wildlife is flourishing inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. In one of Tom Paxton’s song a father is telling his daughter about flowers. It was quite hard for him to explain them to her because she had never seen any. So let us rejoice that bluebells are coming into their own and flooding the woods with ultramarine in long lakes under the trees. They exploit the sunshine before the oak leaves come out and the leaf canopy closes over them.
Our native bluebells are a rich colour…but a paler bluebell is also invading the countryside…the Spanish bluebell. In addition to its colour it can be distinguished by its upright bells, whereas English bluebells nod lightly from the stalk and have a sweet scent…while the Spanish ones have no scent at all. The two species have started to hybridise so the continued existence of the English bluebell is in danger. The Spanish flowers have generally escaped from gardens and parks and gardeners are being discouraged from growing them.
It gets worse. At Kew Botanical Garden the English bluebell is being threatened by a plant invader that Paul Donohoe, the head of wild areas at Kew, and a team of gardeners have failed to repel despite pulling out thousands of the yellow weeds. Kew is recruiting 300 volunteers to help. The five foot invaders Perfoliate Alexanders or Smyrnium Perfoliatum grow in the same forty acre plot as the bluebells and block out the light, effectively smothering the bluebell bulbs. In North Africa, parts of Asia and southern Europe the plant is used as a substitute for celery, which it resembles, and its seeds can be ground up as a sort of pepper. No fun being an English bluebell under New Labour.