I decided to put this out soon after making up my mind not to bother with an analysis of the general election result. Only in a FPTP system could a party get a massive majority from a reduced share of the vote. A system designed for Whigs and Tories to fight over rotten boroughs is obviously broken.
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MIND-BENDING BOLLOCKS, CITIZENS’ ASSEMBLIES, MORE BOLLOCKS
This piece took life with an article in Nation.Cymru last Thursday entitled, ‘Climate inaction undermines public support for lifestyle changes‘. A strange title, but when you think about it, it’s revealing.
The suggestion is that because the decision-makers are not doing enough to tackle the ‘climate crisis’ we, the public, are failing to support the lifestyle changes deemed necessary to combat said ‘climate crisis’.
The article begins:
New research into the public perception of climate change initiatives finds that whilst there is strong support for low-carbon lifestyles inaction is limiting public beliefs that a low-carbon future is possible.
Which is absolute bollocks. Outside of OPD circles there’s no ‘strong support for low carbon lifestyles’.
Or rather, support may exist, but only in the abstract. For in the real world, eating, heating, travelling, at reasonable cost, win out every time over the draconian and expensive measures proposed to achieve net zero.
The N.C article quotes Dr Catherine Cherry, of Cardiff University’s School of Psychology and the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST).
Though I’m not sure if Dr Cherry’s really in Cardiff, and if she is, then I’m fairly sure she’s not teaching. Her Linkedin page locates her in Liverpool, but says she’s with CAST at Cardiff University. How does that work?
Call me an old cynic, but here’s how I read it. We, mere hoi polloi, need to be ‘persuaded’ that climate change is happening in order to accept the expensive, behaviour-changing, and freedom-limiting measures demanded of us by the Globalists.
But how is the voice of Dai Public to be heard? The N.C article recommends that old favourite – Citizens’ Assemblies.
We suggest involving the public in co-creating positive and fair visions of a sustainable future through deliberative processes like Citizens’ Assemblies. This could help build a public mandate for climate policies and foster a sense of climate citizenship, weakening the discourse of delay.
Anyone who’s been paying attention will know that Citizens’ Assemblies are as representative of genuine public opinion as a Question Time audience. In practice, citizens’ assemblies are stuffed with activists who tell other activists and politicians what they want to hear.
What those involved might perceive as a virtuous circle; others as an echo chamber.
As Dr Cherry is involved with the CAST, that’s where we head next.
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CENTRE FOR CLIMATE CHANGE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
There’s something very 1984-ish about ‘social transformations’, don’t you think? Rather like ‘nudge unit’ Lynn Global and their ‘Behavioural Sciences’ (BS) work for the so-called ‘Welsh Government’.
CAST looks like another gang of Greta-worshippers agonising over the rest of us. We inconsiderate bastards driving cars, having kids, eating meat . . . basically, just breathing.
Also at CAST we find Lorraine Whitmarsh MBE. Linkedin tells us she was also at Cardiff University, until July 2020. And she seems to have been a lecturer.
And although she’s left Wales for Bath University, Whitmarsh was last year recruited by the Wales Net Zero 2035 Challenge Group. Below is her entry on the WNZ2035 website.
I wonder if her ‘studies of meat consumption’ concluded we should eat more?
Professor Whitmarsh’s CV might appear to be that of an academic, and nothing more, but I suggest caution because, in addition to her links with the highly suspect IPCC, this BBC article from March 2019 tells us:
A new £5m research centre led by Cardiff University’s psychology department, which will explore new ways to tackle climate change, has also been announced.
Prof Lorraine Whitmarsh, who will head up the unit, said it would “address the fundamental question of how we can live differently and better, in ways that meet the need for these systemic, deep and rapid emission reductions”.
Again, note that it’s the psychology department exploring “new ways to tackle climate change“. What can psychology do even if there is a climate crisis?
It’s explained in the following paragraph. And I think we know what is meant by, “live differently and better“. This is another reference to the ‘social transformations’ we read about earlier.
In reality, we are expected to live differently, but it won’t be better. Not for us.
This new department at Cardiff University seems to be a collaboration with CAST, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), which is part of UK Research and Innovation.
So we have a department at Cardiff University, where psychologists are funded by the UK government to, among other things, advise the ‘Welsh Government’ on how to make us behave differently in response to a claimed ‘climate crisis’.
Here’s a final contribution from CAST, which is one of those bodies pushing the idiocy that the countryside is racist, and introduces race into the climate debate with:
People of colour in the UK are disproportionately affected by climate change impacts.
It’s nonsense, obviously. Yet another attempt by leftist academics to introduce race into just about every discussion. (A guaranteed route to funding.)
Before leaving that 2019 BBC article I must comment on the contribution from former first minister, Mark Drakeford:
First Minister Mark Drakeford said the younger generation recognised a failure to act “could have catastrophic consequences for their futures”.
We are talking now of brainwashed young people. Here’s how it works.
Six-year-olds, after being traumatised by drag queens flaunting their junk and telling them they’re in the wrong bodies, are further terrified by hearing the world will end in the very near future – and it’s all the fault of their wicked parents and grandparents!
Politicians then claim to be surprised and horrified by levels of ‘climate anxiety’ among young people. As if the inevitable consequence of brainwashing can be divorced from the brainwashing itself.
This is disgusting hypocrisy. Even for a Labour politician.
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THE UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA
If that establishment’s name rings a bell it’s because about 15 years ago someone released a stash of e-mails suggesting that people involved with the Climate Research Unit there had been ‘imaginative’ with their findings.
Inevitably, those with a vested interest in promoting the climate scam – and of course their media – circled the wagons and dismissed the claims as smears made by ‘climate deniers’. (Who denies climate?)
The BBC even made a drama out of it – 14 years later!
Cherry and Whitmarsh were both there at that time.
Cherry was doing a MSc in Climate Change, after which she worked for a few months for the Norwich Green Party. While Whitmarsh was a senior research assistant at the University of East Anglia from April 2005 until March 2009.
I’m not suggesting that either was involved in fiddling the figures, or indeed that fiddling took place; but there is a cloud hanging over the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia from that period.
I mention this because Cherry and Whitmarsh later came to Wales, to Corruption Bay’s favourite university. Also because what happened in Norwich makes us consider what is often referred to as Plato’s ‘Noble Lie’.
Which is saying things you know to be untrue for (what you perceive to be) the right reasons, or a beneficial outcome. In Plato’s case it seems to have been reminding different classes of their roles in a divinely-ordered system, thereby ensuring the social cohesion of the polis.
Social cohesion and a sense of belonging are entirely desirable, but today, in the age of Globalism, and its use of Wokery, there is nothing noble about the lies we are fed.
We are told that white people are uniquely evil. We are told that men can have babies. In fact, we are told all sorts of lies in order to cause confusion, destabilisation and the very opposite of social cohesion.
In Wales, farmers are blamed for every pollution incident. Blamed by those who covet the farmers’ land. In many cases, those making the claims are lying.
One example came from Rachel Sharp of the (officially defunct) Wildlife Trusts Wales. In November 2021 she told the Senedd’s Economy, Trade and Rural Affairs Committee that Welsh rivers and streams were awash with growth hormones used by Welsh farmers. Here’s a link to the video.
Growth hormones have been illegal in the UK since 1981.
This blatant lie did nothing to damage Sharp’s reputation. For she sits on the ‘Welsh Government’s Hinkley Point C Reference Group. And it should go without saying that she was also recruited to that discredited-in-advance-of-their-‘findings’ gang, the WNZ2035 Challenge Group.
Both of which are chaired by the Green Goddess, and author of the Future Generations legislation, Jane Davidson.
If you really believe that farting cows are destroying the planet, or if you’re a zealous vegan, then you’ll have no qualms about lying when it comes to farmers. Especially when politicians are eagerly waiting to accept and act on your lies.
And of course, fund your purchase of vacated farms and abandoned farmland.
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CONCLUSION
If there really was a climate crisis, then the evidence would be enough to make us change our wicked ways. Psychology would not be needed. But there is no real evidence. As ever, in the absence of evidence, we are subjected to ‘imaginative messaging’.
Which relies on ‘corrected’ records, contemporary temperatures recorded in ‘heat islands’, computer modelling, and influencing organisations such as the Met Office and the BBC into describing sunny days of 20º Celsius as heatwaves. Phew!
Sometimes the deception is so obvious it’s laughable. We had a fine example back in 2022 with Matthew Horwood selling his photos of a tidal creek in Pembrokeshire to media outlets as evidence of a dried up river – due to climate change!
Read it here by scrolling down to the section ‘Someone’s Telling Porkies’.
What I found instructive about this episode was that even after they’d been told the truth, the media made no corrections to their reports. They allowed the lie to stand, because they wanted to promote the lie.
But then, I suppose they have to lie because the headline-grabbing predictions made by Al Gore and other charlatans have all failed to materialise.
Snow still caps Kilimanjaro. The Great Barrier Reef is in rude health. Polar bear populations are thriving. People still take holidays on the Seychelles and other islands we were told would disappear under rising sea levels. Deaths from extreme weather events have plummeted.
All of which explains why people aren’t buying into the ‘climate crisis’ – because it’s just not happening. So those who want us to believe in climate change, in order to control us and our behaviour, must resort to voodoo psychology.
If that fails, then perhaps it’ll be hypnotism next. I can see it now – The Great Gateso, black top hat and cloak, leggy assistant, inviting volunteers from the audience to be mesmerised into eating his lab-made ‘meat’.
This is of course encouraging. It tells us the Globalists are losing. But we must remain vigilant against their emissaries in politics, academia, the media, pressure groups and elsewhere trying to make us accept the lies.
Lies that are anything but noble.
♦ end ♦
© Royston Jones 2024
Vaughan Gething QUITS as Welsh First Minister after Labour revolt sees four of his senior ministers resign in protest against his scandal-plagued leadership | Daily Mail Online
Wendy Lynne Dunne
Why is Natural resources Body for Wales L.T.D invesitgating the scandal about Vaughan Gethin accepting donations from a twice conviced criminal David Neal owner of Resources Management U.K Limited when they are both listed as being share holders owners of – FOREST HOLIDAYS PUBLIC SECTOR HOLDINGS LLP (OC427147) They’re both in bed together,dosent make sense that one should investigate the other does it?
I’ve found Forest Holidays, but there’s no mention of Neal. Why do you think he’s a shareholder?
The term ‘People of Colour’ being fucking irritating and patronising (by virtue of homogenising 80% of the world’s population into one morass) notwithstanding, the claim is bastard ludicrous. How on God’s green earth are people with more melanin in their skin disadvantaged by this in any way? I could sort-of accept the argument were they referring to parts of the world more impacted by flooding and drought, say, but a black guy living in Wales? Sheer bollocks.
But they can only say it, and get away with it, because they have planted their flag on the moral high ground. To contest this bollocka would make someone a racist.
IIRC, “citizens’ assemblies” are Trotsky.
Like the Occupy movement, they’re the authentic voice of the people, unlike all those elected representatives, who aren’t really representative.
Jac, no need to go to East Africa. Just look at the mean high water marks on Swansea Bay according to the OS. Unchanged through various editions over decades.
That’s something I’ve noticed over the years, the worst climate horror stories come from remote locations where few live and to which even fewer travel. Swansea Bay don’t fit that narrative.
Jac. Update below. Response I received 12 December 2023 from Wales Net Zero 2035 Challenge Group. Does this mean their final report is imminent or will their brief be extended I wonder.
Response received 12 December 2023
Good afternoon
Thank you for your patience in awaiting a response and for your correspondence.
Regarding your question on the publication of Group minutes, we will share the minutes of all Group meetings when we publish our final report in summer 2024. May I also draw your attention to our public statements which are available on our website: https://netzero2035.wales/about/public-statements/.
Regarding your question on the evidence base, please can I draw your attention to our Terms of Reference (11.5), which states that all Group members will provide impartial and robust evidence as appropriate. Our evidence base will of course be referenced and presented in our final report to Welsh Government and Plaid Cymru in summer 2024. As you will be aware the Welsh Government are mandated to use HM’s Treasury’s Green Book in developing costed policy proposals.
Best regards,
” . . . all Group members will provide impartial and robust evidence”. Just look at who’s in the group!
I’ve not seen any mention an an intention to reduce the birthrate by TPTB on your blog or anywhere else. But this particular one is a good idea to be honest, as ever-increasing population is to blame for pretty much every challenge we face as a species apart from natural disasters. Environmental damage is about much more than climate change, and we only have the one planet. And you don’t need to be Milton Friedman or John Maynard Keynes (or Milton Keynes) to grasp that ever-increasing numbers of people vying for finite resources is never going to end well. What is the endgame of the globalists’ encroaching control then, is it more wealth, or just power for power’s sake?
Whilst I accept that the world is over populated and that it takes less time, to consume resources, than to create them, a lot of the so called “Green” talk reminds me of Tony Hancock’s “Wild man of the woods”, where he chose to go back to nature, on Clapham Common, so he would be “Near the shops”.
I am sure that a lot of in your face greens are virtue seeking and they will be “Green” so long as it doesn’t inconvenience them or, heaven forbid, cramp their style. How many electric cars are bought because the buyer wishes to keep up with the Jonses, with the so called zero emissions (Remote emission is closer) smokescreen masking this?
How can we claim to be net zero, when we buy mountains of goods made in China, where I don’t believe the government cares one jot for the environment. Like the electric car emissions, they are out of site, out of mind.
Perhaps, again, it’s all under the globalisation umbrella, with Mr Musk and others selling consumable cars, whose service lives are linked to battery life (Because new batteries cost too much and go up with inflation, whilst the car depreciates). It’s not about the environment; it’s about sustaining demand. I’ll stick to my old, sustainable cars, that are simple to maintain and therefore easy to keep going (Not getting them out, simply to put the bin out, is part of looking after them).
As to trans gender, this comes under mental health. So far as I know, medical science is nowhere near being able to alter gender, beyond the embryo stage and to claim that it can, is delusional. It is no more fantastic than claiming to be trans species and I understand that some are now doing just that. We are all here against the slimmest of odds (Ancestors having needed to survive and more eggs go unfertilised, than become people), so having defeated odds, far longer than those of a lottery jackpot, make the most of it and don’t worry about things that cannot be altered. We are human beings; aside from the biological aspects of life, do men and women really live that differently?
I’m not sure the world is over-populated. In the Western countries and Japan populations are falling. China will face a similar problem thanks to the one child policy, with the problem worsened by the abortion of female foetuses. A falling population with a gender imbalance could be a big problem. Good job we change gender nowadays!
Joking apart the imbalance in birth rates is one of the key drivers of global instability. A minor issue in our country is the proliferation of unstable “family units” driven by women who are constantly breeding often with a serial of new partners. Nouveau liberals spin their virtue flags defending this habit which often goes hand in hand with dependency on state handouts. In the emerging nations of Africa and Asia a high birth rate often occurs within fairly stable family frameworks and is possibly down to historic high child mortality and cultural values which may be linked to the history of mortality. 2 way different sets of circumstances presenting a similar challenge.
Here in the West I think we should be brutally blunt with a “you want ’em, you fund them ” stance which will bring howls of anger from the pseudo lefties and their fellow travellers.
In other parts of the world which have been ripped off by global corporates and other state organised actions a more measured series of interventions will be necessary. That will be difficult especially where a more defensive and suspicious form of Islamism prevails. They see attempts to enable mothers to have less arduous child rearing lives and more chances in other aspects of their lives as unwarranted attacks on core Islamic values. Just look at Afghanistan over last 40 years and parts of West Africa where new variants of ISIS and AQ are well dug in. Try changing that through a few well meaning lectures laden with Western liberal platitudes or by sending Diane Abbott out there with Leanne Wood as back up.
The climate crisis is an artificial concept. It’s designed to defund wealthy oil-rich countries who were getting too powerful.
Originating from the USA, like the rest of the nonsense like ‘5 a day’ and ‘butter is bad for you’, it was basically a marketing concept that went wild.
Global temperatures vary naturally. It depends on a lot of factors, including the Milankovitch cycles and the Earth’s magnetic field. The magnetic field is not the fixed bar magnet thingy you were taught about in school, it wobbles about like Jac on his way home from the pub.
That said, putting less pollution into the atmosphere and recycling are basically good ideas. Unfortunately, once the politicians got interested, it became a science free mantra designed to impress the terminably gullible in search of votes.
Bloody hell, Ifor, we (largely) agree. I think I’ll go and lie down.
What about that other bit of do-goodery, more than 10 units of alcohol a week being deadly poisonous? Official wisdom sanctioned by public servants who meet in a debating chamber with a private, subsidised bar.
You can bet your last shirt that there will be even more pointless activity on the “saving the planet” front over coming years. Simply it is so much easier to engage in virtue signaling gestures rather than getting down to the real hard work, the heavy lifting involved in getting an economy and our society back on track. So “wealth” will be “created” by the shuffling of
handouts, loans and grants between various pockets of deserving in-tune bodies populated with pre approved “good people” who can be relied upon to conform to the core messages. The rest of us will continue to exist on the crumbs that fall off the table from time to time.The wheels are coming off for all sorts of reasons. Not least, the fact that the weather isn’t playing ball. Because it’s at the ground level of human experience that it will all fall apart.
Take 20mph. Some tried to sell it to us as a road safety measure. ‘Think of the kiddies coming out of school, you callous bastard!’ Which neglects the uncomfortable fact that the speed limit was already 20mph outside schools. But it’s there in WG publications; 20mph is part of a wider programme to stop us using cars, and it’s being pushed in order to ‘save the planet’.
Then there are the wind turbines. Justified because they’re ‘cheap green energy’ helping Wales meet its net zero obligations. But who decided these net zero obligations? I don’t recall any debate on the subject. Like everything else associated with ‘the environment’ and ‘saving the planet’ it was stitched up between pressure groups and politicians. To make matters worse, Wales is already self-sufficient in electricity generation. Which means that the politicians supposedly representing us and our country allow foreign companies to desecrate our countryside with wind farms and pylons, for no return in jobs or national income.
The latest wheeze is ‘species loss’ and ‘habitat degradation’. I have yet to read a verifiable and independent source proving that this is happening. Again, it’s pressure group propaganda being accepted by politicians. Pressure groups hoping to gain funding and farmland. It’s a racket.
As I say, bullshit can only take a flawed narrative so far. Sooner or later observable facts will hole it below the waterline.
The obligations came from Theresa May and then Boris Johnson
The DESNZ data shows wind power to be cheaper than gas power
The ESO data shows Wales can reach net zero using only offshore wind
Wales only generates twice what we currently consume by burning imported gas which will be stopped by 2035, or now 2030
Onshore wind and pylons are choices the Welsh Government have made on their own, everything else filters down from Westminster. We dont have enough offshore wind as the Crown Estate/DESNZ will not let us have any more yet
I’m not sure I’d trust those sources. But the fact remains that wind power in inconsistent. Unreliable. Which means backup. But why back up an unreliable source with much more reliable sources when the obvious thing to do is to rely on the reliable in the first place?
If you’d not trust the ESO then we’re really in trouble as they are the only reason we have a system as reliable as it is
Wind is variable, but very reliable, and the back up doesn’t have to be fossil fuels. Pembroke CCGT will convert to hydrogen, made from wind power, and that will provide back up
If they ever make nuclear flexible we could use that, but not even the French have fully cracked it yet, so while we have masses of offshore wind potential that will dominate, and nuclear will only ever be baseload (which is very low in summer, so we don’t need much)
Sorry about the ESO. I must have been thinking of the ELO.
To my mind, any supranational organisation genuinely concerned about making a change for the environment would be throwing everything it could at nuclear fusion research. If they could develop the technology to initiate, sustain a fusion reaction in a safe manner then it’s cheap, clean energy for all. Unfortunately that means no rackets or gravy trains anymore though.
The U.K. government and many private organisations are throwing lots (but not everything) at fusion, yet it still remains “only ten years away” just as it was when I left school
Jam (those neutrons together) tomorrow.
I’m old enough to remember when the made up “climate change” was branded as “global warming”. The enviro-mentals then got fed up of people posting pictures of snow in May and laughing at them that they had to quickly rename.
I remember it too. So they decided to be more ‘flexible’. We’re at the stage now where any kind of weather can be claimed as proof of climate change.
I dont think it’s been renamed but overall warming of the globe is causing the climate to change
I don’t think anyone disputes climate change. The issue is the origin and reasoning behind the claim of anthropogenic climate change. It began life with the Club of Rome and took off after the collapse of the Soviet Union when certain interests realised that Joe Public needed something other than MAD to frighten him into compliance. I believe Margaret Thatcher even spelled it out in 1990(?).
We were taught about it at school in 1979, but the big concern then was CFCs which the world collaborated on to eliminate
I remember CFCs, and the campaigns against pesticides. All goes back to ‘Silent Spring’.
Vaguely remember pesticides but not silent spring
The book?
Right now the green electricity industry is colluding, collaborating, call it what you will, to expand the use of SF6, a gas with excellent insulating/ retardant properties but comes with the most unfortunate capacity for atmospheric pollution as a greenhouse gas with an impact several 1,000 times that of the much maligned CO2 . How the dimwits missed that when it’s known that SF6 has been in use for decades is beyond belief but there again these people have immense capacity for ignoring inconvenient facts when it is expedient.
I think grids are bigger users in switch gear, but are working on replacements and have targets on loss reduction
Without grids they won’t get much joy shifting power around the country. Of course a more localised approach to generation could reduce the need for nation wide grid systems but we seem to be way beyond that decision by sticking so much generation into rural Wales.
How about spooky electromagnetic induction at a distance?
Have you ever looked at the DESNZ public attitudes tracker?
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-spring-2024/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-net-zero-and-climate-change-spring-2024-uk
I have never heard anyone bring up the subject of net zero except to say something negative, usually to do with cost. The same applies to climate change.
We obviously move in different circles, but it’s hardly the sort of topic that crops up in everyday conversation. Similarly I’ve never heard anyone bring up the subject of replacing our nuclear deterrent other than to complain about the cost. Achieving net zero is seen as (overall) cash positive, so even without climate change it’s a reasonable basis for a national industrial strategy
” . . . net zero is seen as (overall) cash positive, so even without climate change it’s a reasonable basis for a national industrial strategy”. By whom?
That was the conclusion of the last government
You are trying to crack my ribs. Citing the last government as an authority on anything is tantamount to signing up for the flat earth society.
Well it wasn’t a collective effort and it was scrutinised by all other parties
.. most of whom are card carrying members of the bent buffoon collective.