Cooling it in the Gulf

Obama’s xenophobic ranting ignores the fact that BP was forced to drill in such deep waters because he banned drilling nearer the shore for reasons of political expediency.

America’s profligate use of oil and paranoid need “energy security” mean that deep water drilling will be essential far into the future.

Every President since Nixon has pledged that the US will become self-sufficient in energy so no-one should be holding their breath waiting for that to happen.

The reality is that BP is more technically skilled than any other company at deep water drilling and it has pulled off a miracle in capping the leak so quickly at such a depth.

Finally Hayward was absolutely right to say that oil clears itself up since it is organic material and the long term damage will be done by Obama’s hysterical clean-up.

A silly season story

It is now clear that things will be back to normal in the Gulf within a year – the beaches before Christmas, fishing in two months, and the shellfish industry in two years.

The oil is rapidly biodegrading and being eaten by microbes and half of the 80,000 square miles of federal waters previously closed to fishermen has already been re-opened.

Scientists such as marine expert Dr Simon Boxall say, ‘Tony Hayward was correct when he said the spill was the equivalent of a drop in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

Another marine scientist Ivor van Heerden told Time magazine: “There never was an “environmental disaster”. There was a lot of media hype, but no evidence to justify it.”

The New York Times, Washington Post, and Time Magazine all admit the President’s xenophobic ranting was ludicrous though Hayward should not expect an apology.

A lunatic has just taken over the asylum

The Coalition’s energy minister, Chris Huhne, has said Britain must build thousands more wind turbines because ‘global warming is our greatest challenge’.

In fact our greatest challenge is filling the massive gap in our electricity supplies when the EU forces us to close the stations currently producing half our power.

Huhne seems unaware that all the 3,000 existing windmills together produce less than a single conventional power station – about 2% of the electricity we need.

With the cost of essential back-up plants, these unreliable supplies will be three times as expensive as that produced by conventional gas, coal or nuclear power stations.

With the sole exception of the last Prime Minister, it is hard to recall a minister of the Crown in history who was less qualified for his post than this Lib Dem ultra-green.

Lights in our darkness

The Pentagon Papers revealed that the US government knew from early on that the Vietnam War could not be won and systematically lied to the public and Congress.

The papers also showed a deep cynicism towards the public, a total disregard for safety of soldiers and civilians, and provide a chilling parallel to the Afghan fiasco and Wikileaks.

But Daniel Ellsberg spent months copying the 7000 page Defence Department’s secret history of the war and fought endless court cases before it could be published.

Today as we saw in Climategate, internal whistleblowers simply use a scanner to make the evidence of nefarious activity instantly available to everyone on the internet.

It has its dangers and limitations, but the ability of the web to bypass the gatekeepers of secretive organisations in government and science sheds a welcome light in dark places.

Future Energy Supply in Scotland

Climategate did for Global Warming what the Pentagon Papers did for the perception of the Vietnam War in the USA: it decisively changed the narrative of the debate.

The revelation of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration also cast doubt on the related myth of scarcity in the world’s supply of carbon energy resources.

The Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stone and we will shift away from fossil fuels later in this century without legislation or the micromanaging of our lifestyles by the state.

Our political leaders should make rational decisions about a secure energy mix from fossil and nuclear fuels, binning plans for yet more of the expensive, unreliable devices already littering our beautiful land.

At last, the smoking gun

It had long been rumoured it was company policy on all the US Transocean rigs to switch off vital warning systems to let off-duty workers sleep.

Mike Williams, the chief technician in charge of the Deepwater rig’s electronic systems, has now confirmed these suspicions in evidence to a federal investigation.

He admitted that the crucial safety device designed to shut down the drill shack when dangerous gas levels were detected had been disabled at the time of the explosion.

The rig’s unreliable computer system had also failed to indicate that a vital valve inside the blowout preventer (designed to shut down the well) had been damaged.

This is evidence Obama and the Congress had been dreading because it switches the blame away from BP to routinely lax American supervision and drilling procedures.

Last thoughts on the Russell Review

The Russell review is far from a complete whitewash of the Climategate scientists and provides plenty of evidence that the science remains an uncertain shambles.

Though kind to the CRU and IPCC, it still portrays climate science as a field full of ill-will and uncertainty and marred by data hoarding, destruction, and manipulation.

The “hockey stick” graphic, purporting to show that temperatures in the last half century were the hottest in 1,000 years, launched the hysteria of man-made global warming.

Yet the creators gathered historical temperature date from tree rings, eliminated data from 1960 undermining their theory, and spliced on selective modern temperature figures.

Given the fact that the IPPC tends to make wild claims on the basis of propaganda from the Green lobbies, the review clearly strained to mount a fully credible defence.

Needless Desecration

Of all the nonsense seeping across the Channel from the EU, the target of producing 20% of our energy through renewables by 2020 is the most damaging.

To support this fantastic figure the European Environmental Institute is demanding the government force through decisions on wind farms over the protests of local people.

But even leading environmentalists such as James Lovelock argue that wind turbines are inefficient, ruin the countryside, and have little impact on our emissions.

Rather than the output of 60% claimed, only 8% can be relied upon in winter months, so every wind farm needs to be backed up by a coal or gas fired station.

It is heartbreaking that 400 foot monstrosities will be placed on Clatto Hill overlooking miles of Fife countryside to the benefit of no-one but the venture capitalists.

The real cause for alarm

The Climategate emails, outed by an internal whistleblower, relate to an iconic graph purporting to show that 20th-century temperatures were the highest for 1000 years.

Known as the “Hockey Stick”, it eliminated the Medieval Warm Period and has been promoted by the UN’s IPCC as central to the thesis man-made global warming.

All the secrecy and data manipulation uncovered by the scandal make it clear that, far from being settled, the case for global warming remains weak and unconvincing.

Governments everywhere have thus granted an effective monopoly on advice to a scientific clique now looking corrupt, biased and beset with conflicts of interest.

The wholesale acceptance of this alarmist hypothesis by the political establishment and the popular media is in itself somewhat alarming.

Another “independent” review

Muir Russell’s ‘independent’ Climategate review, commissioned and paid for by East Anglia University, unsurprisingly exonerated East Anglia University.

Last year a whistleblower in its own research unit outed thousands of e-mails suggesting that the world’s leading climate scientists were engaged in jiggery pokery.

These included the plan proposed by Princeton’s Michael Mann to destroy a journal that dared to publish three papers with which he and his East Anglia friends disagreed.

They also detailed data destruction and the use of the system of peer review as a weapon so that it is now impossible to publish anything non-alarmist on global warming.

Of course, Russell did not uncover this scandalous behavior because his committee decided to interview only CRU people and not the people whom they had trashed.