A Place to Stand

On Monday I wrote about the BBC Radio Scotland phone in on all those previously un-scarified nuclear sites in Scotland like Dalgety Bay & um er. My part in the phone in was arguably won by the SEPA (Scottish Environmental Protection Agency) by saying that the radiation there couldn't be natural but must have come from radium paint on the dials of bombers left there in 1945 & this had been proven by tests showing the presence of radium, which does not occur even in submicroscopic quantities in nature & that the submicroscopic particles had been identified as paint.

I emailed SEPA asking where the results of the tests had been published & for figures for the overall radiation level detected there & on adjoining beaches. Getting no response I did so twice more mentioning the Freedom of Information Act. This got a message assuring me that this email had been sent to me, but had apparently got lost in the electronic post?

Good morning

Various reports on Dalgety Bay have been published on the the radioactive substances pages of the SEPA website. There has also been press releases on the news pages. In case you have problems finding them here's the links: http://www.sepa.org.uk/about_us/news/dalgety_bay_monitoring_%e2%80%93_final.aspx ;
http://www.sepa.org.uk/radioactive_substances/rs_publications/dalgety_bay_reports.aspx

Not quite as informative as I had asked for but replied

Having had a look at your Dalgety Bay Risk Assessment Report on http://www.sepa.org.uk/scotlands_environment/data_and_reports/radioactive_substances/dalgety_bay_reports.aspx (pdf) I note that the nearest to a reference to the alleged proof by scientific testing & finding of paint forming these particles was in section 7:1 saying "The radium contamination at Dalgety bay is believed to have originated from historic MOD operations", going on to explain what type of paint was used at the time. "Belief" is clearly at variance with the claim by the SEPA representative on the radio that it had been proven by scientific tests.

I note also that contrary to the stated word of the SEPA representative that the fact that what was alleged to be radium radiation had been detected & that this proved it was artificial "
Radium-226 is a decay product of the natural uranium-238 decay chain. It is present in all rocks and soils in variable amounts."
http://www.doh.wa.gov/ehp/rp/factsheets/factsheets-htm/fs29ra226.htm

While I would not, under any circumstances wish to suggest that what the gentleman said represented anything other than the very highest standard of honesty to which the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency aspires it must be obvious that the evidence you have so far presented points to both the claim that paint had been found & that the material could only be of artificial, rather than natural in origin because of the presence of radium being in no way whatsoever truthful.

If you wish to maintain that you have evidence of such chemical proof that the particles were paint I must ask you to provide it by return. If not, the assumption must be that notwithstanding it being as honest as you aspire to the claim is in no way truthful. Equally if you wish to claim that the government factsheet is wrong & the material does not occur naturally the same applies

If so journalistic integrity would require the BBC to prominently acknowledge the inaccuracy on air, presumably at the end of Monday's programme.

with a copy to the BBC & a follow up letter to them asking for a correction on Monday at the end of the programme just before 10AM.

Obviously SEPA have not replied & it seems certain that they did indeed merely assume the "belief" that the radiation was artificial & have made no attempt whatsoever to carry out the chemical tests they gave their word to the people of Scotland they had carried out. Since we are talking about particles far too small to see the question of whether they could be chemically analysed as promised was always dubious. Since SEPA declined, both here & on the radio, to give figures for tha radiation level there & on adjoining beaches the assumption must be that it does not exceed what might occur naturally.

In other words this whole exercise, including site examinations & 60 page reports, likely to have cost millions, is a corrupt eco-fascist empire building scam, likely to induce hysteria & get SEPA more money. The effect on the local community & tourist industry is a matter of indifference to these liars.

This is typical of taxpayer funded "environmentalist" claims.

The BBC if honest journalists would, certainly wish to correct this lie. However since they have previously been happy state that windmills provide cheap electricity, that sea level rise has already flooded out a major river estuary, that 17,000 children are hospitalised annually with passive smoking, that they have no responsibility to produce "balanced" reporting of alleged warming, on a different subject that they have lied continuously over the so called Srebrenica Massacre, about the alleged rape camps in Bosnia, about the Bosnian ex-Nazi leader being a "moderate" & censoring any mention of the massacres, genocide, & child sex slavery in Kosovo & the censorship of our "police" kidnapping thousands of Serb teens & dissecting them, while still alive for our hospitals.

In all these cases there is no question whatsoever that the BBC have deliberately lied & censored, and maintained these lies & censorship in the face of undisputed proof that that is what they were. I'm not even counting normal spin or ridiculous nonsense like "Al Gore is a climate scientist." This was done to support the state manufacturing of "hobgoblins to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led" in an undeniably fascist & pro-Nazi direction. That being the case the chances they will tell the truth on Monday morning seems slight.

I will let you know.

UPSATE - Well guess what the BBC didn't correct the lie. They did do a short item an hour earlier about newspapers printing stories that are untrue & the Press Complaints system being inadequate. They havem't replied to my email either.

From CCNet Professor Eric Steig last month announced in Nature that he’d spotted a warming in West Antarctica that previous researchers had missed through slackness - a warming so strong that it more than made up for the cooling in East Antarctica.

...The paper was immediately greeted with suspicion, not least because one of the authors was Michael Mann of the infamous “hockey stick”, now discredited, and the data was reconstructed from very sketchy weather station records, combined with assumptions from satellite observations.

But Steve McIntyre, who did most to expose Mann’s “hockey stick”, now notices a far more embarrassing problem with Steig’s paper.

Previous researchers hadn’t overlooked the data. What they’d done was to ignore data from four West Antarctic automatic weather stations in particular that didn’t meet their quality control. As you can see above, one shows no warming, two show insignificant warming and fourth ...is a problematic site that was buried in snow for years and then re-sited in 2005. But, worse, the data that Steig used in his modelling which he claimed came from Harry (the name of the site of the readings - or not) was actually old data from another station on the Ross Ice Shelf known as Gill with new data from Harry added to it, producing the abrupt warming. The data is worthless. Or as McIntyre puts it:

Considered by itself, Gill has a slightly negative trend from 1987 to 2002. The big trend ... arises entirely from the impact of splicing the two data sets together. It’s a mess.

It seems these alarmist scientists not only regularly fake their facts, albeit conceivably accidentally, when real scientists (ie sceptical ones because scepticism is intrinsic to science) point out their errors they attempt to lie about who spotted the error:

Due to an inadvertent release of information, NASA's Gavin Schmidt (a
"real scientist" of the Real Climate blog) admits to stealing a
scientific idea from his arch-nemesis, Steve McIntyre (not a "real
scientist" of the Climate Audit blog) and then representing it as his
own idea, and getting credit for it. (Details here and here.)

In his explanation why this is OK, Gavin explains that he did some work
on his own after getting the idea from Steve's blog, and so it was OK to
take full credit for the idea. I am sure that there are legions of
graduate students and other scientific support staff who do a lot of
work on a project, only to find their sponsor or advisor, who initially
proposed the idea, as first author on the resulting paper, who might
have empathy for Gavin's logic. And of course researchers in many fields
try to keep their work secret lest an unscrupulous colleague steal the
idea. You just don't get to see such things in action when you are
outside of the academy. Well through the magic of the Internet everyone
can see the less than noble side of scientific practice.

But lets be clear, in science, the ethical thing to do is to give full
credit to the origination of an idea, even if it comes from your
arch-enemy. Gavin's outing is remarkable because it shows him not only
stealing an idea, but stealing from someone who he and his colleagues
routinely criticize as being wrong, corrupt, and a fraud.
To add definite lies to something conceivable as a stupid error Gavin Schmidt said on the alarmist site Realclimate that Steve McIntyre's discovery had been duplicated hours earlier by somebody else & so McIntyre was not entitled to be credited by them for discovering it.

Gavin claimed "BAS were notified by people Sunday night who independently found the Gill/Harry mismatch. SM could have notified them but he didn’t"

I was interested in who was the scientist that, unbeknowst to me, had "independently" identified the problem with Harry (the site of the wrong readings) - a problem overlooked by BAS, NASA GISS for a year or so anyway; and a problem which had been missed by his realclimate coauthors, Steig and Mann, during their preparation of Steig et al 2009, and which had been missed by the Nature peer reviewers. And remarkably this had been "independently" identified just after I had noted the problem at Climate Audit and Climate Audit readers had contributed ideas on it, even during the Super Bowl.

Yesterday, I inquired about the identity of Gavin's "mystery man"? Today (Feb 4) the British Antarctic survey revealed the identity of Gavin's "mystery man". It was…

GAVIN.

Now that one is fraud - there was no 2nd source that corrected the "error" - Gavin did it himself as soon as McIntyre went public & lied about it. Nature, having given such prominent coverage to the "discovery" that Antarctica was warming, as the alarmists requite, rather than cooling, as the evidence previously showed, must, if it is scientifically ethical, give even greater prominence not only to that fact that the new "discovery" was rubbish but that alarmist "scientists" have lied to hide their culpability.

On the other hand I have already crossed swords with a former Nature editor, Jeff Harvey & it turned out that not only did he have no ethical commitment but was also incapable of recognising that he was firing his broadside not at me but at a Britain's former chief science advisor (& alarmist obviously since he got the job) whom he, correctly, said was only capable of "kindergarten" science.

My guess is that Nature will have nothing more than a very token mention, & the MSM none.

I mentioned yesterday that Labour MP Dawn Butler had faked a letter from Obama & somebody suggested that it wasn't really important. The same argument may be made here. I disagree - I think it is important that we know that those in power have proven willing to tell absolutely any lie & that when it is proven there is neither surprise nor opprobrium for doing so. People who are totally corrupt in little things where the gain is small(& actually realclimate's act is not a little one) must be assumed to be at least equally so in big ones, as must those who support them in it.

Opening of 500th Jobcentre Plus

The parasite in question being the state sector of the British economy which not only mostly produces nothing but, by its regulatory function, reduces productivity by £20 for every pound the regulators "earn".

According to the Centre for Economics & Business Research government now takes up 49% of the economy (or at least it did on Jan 25th).

Experts believe the recession will tighten the state’s grip still further as benefit handouts soar and Labour directs public sector organisations to create jobs to soak up unemployment....

“Labour has failed to encourage private sector investment across the country. Instead of supporting enterprise and small businesses, Gordon Brown has used the public sector to cover up his failures,” said Theresa May, the shadow work and pensions secretary.

The CEBR reached its estimates for 2008-9 by applying the 6.68% state spending increase announced in November’s prebudget report evenly across the country, although in practice some regions will receive more than others.

Across the whole of the UK, 49% of the economy will consist of state spending, while in Wales, the figure will be 71.6% – up from 59% in 2004-5. Nowhere in mainland Britain, however, comes close to Northern Ireland, where the state is responsible for 77.6% of spending, despite the supposed resurgence of the economy after the end of the Troubles.

They don't give the figure for Scotland but since we have been consistently about 10% more than the UK average I assume 59% (58% if we are lucky & the business rates cut is counted).

The state now looms far larger in many parts of Britain than it did in former Soviet satellite states such as Hungary and Slovakia as they emerged from communism in the 1990s, when state spending accounted for about 60% of their economies.

Which is not a remotely fair comparison because the state owned a large part of productive industry & was thus a producer. We have got rid of almost all nationalised industries but unfortunately this does not seem to have much slowed the increase in government size merely moved it into totally non-productive areas.

But never mind

Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said that the state’s grip on the regions was likely to soften the impact of recession there.

“Newcastle and areas like that have a large public sector which will at least shield traditionally very depressed areas from the battering that southeast England is going to get."

Which will simply make things worse overall. What an economic illiterate.

Recession is supposed to shake out the unproductive enterprises by "gales of creative destruction" & they end whenroom has been made for the productive ones to grow. Here & in the US what we are seeing is that the productive enterprises are being destroyed, or sent abroad, & the massive unproductive one is growing like a tumour. We will never get out of recession this way.

UPDATE On the news last night I saw that the economy is shrinking 2.1% a quater. This makes the economy now just under 98% of what it was back in October & therefore the 49% then equal to over 50% now. I realise that measurement of what GNP actually is isn't really precise enough to be sure to within 1% & you have to be a real nitpicker to say that it passed 50% at the end of January. What matters is the direction of the trend & that is bad.

Iain Dale put this up this picture 10 days ago so it is hardly news except in the MSM. What can be quite clearly seen here & was dissected by Liberal Conspiracy is that it is clearly a fake. The white around the signature, particularly the early part of the signature shows it has been lifted from a different, white, piece of paper & added to the Houses of Parliament manuscript paper the adulatory bit is written on. It is thus an obvious forgery. Ms Butler MP has changed the story a bit since she started it & the official line is now that he signed it at a 10 minute meeting she wangled in downing St with him. Her people & his people agreed the wording in advance & then her people wrote it for him to sign. Exactly how stupid would that make him to agree to sign a paper saying that he had met her & he had met her & that she was both bright & intelligent! No lawyer he to sign such stuff before in advance.

In my naivete I thought that this that this piece of stupid fraud would get picked up by the MSM. Even though no fivers changed hands we are, after all talking about as open, obvious & blatant a fraud as any MP could engage in. That her party would have to, at the very least, discipline her & probably disown her. My comment on Iain's blog was

I assume Obama's office has been emailed about this. After all if there were any truth to it it would make Obama look like a complete idiot. I think he is going to have to say something about even if it is "Mr Obama has no recollection of the incident".

I found Unity's review convincing:

The signature was originally written on a white piece of paper & electronically added to the rest of the letter, which Dawn now admits writing.

I'm not sure whether to be more appalled by the complete dishonesty or complete stupidity.

I also emailed Obama's office for such a something. But no - not a chirp from Obama, from her party & barely one from the media - with the exception of this extremely chirpy piece from the BBC "Labour MP gets Barack's backing" which treats it as unquestionably genuine. Exactly who do you have to kill to be unfit to be a Labour MP? The only thing we can conclude from this is that there is absolutely no sort of obvious lie that is beneath that party, that Obama has relatively little self respect & that our media can be relied on not to report anything embarrassing.

To SEPA

This morning your representative on the BBC Radio phone in stated that radioactive particles found at Dalgety Bay had, beyond dispute, been identified, presumably by chemical or spectroscopic means, as consisting of paint. Can you please confirm where these results have been publicly published & how many of the particles, in numbers & as a proportion of total particles found, have been so positively identified. I would also be interested to know by how many mSv or portions thereof, the radiation level at Dalgety Bay has been pushed up by these particles & what it does measure compared to the adjoining stretches of coast.

Radio Scotland's phone in today was a disgraceful scare piece about "Scotland's unknown radioactive contamination sites" which we were told exist in abundance though only 2 were mentioned - Dalgety Bay & a place at Balloch where a factory using radium once existed. I phoned in & was on after science writer Steuart, a regular in the Scotsman's letter columns on things nuclear. We both said pretty much the same though I was perhaps less restrained.

I said that this was a disgraceful example of the sort of eco scare stories the BBC so often present & that the total lack of figures gave it away. I mentioned that background radiation existed everywhere (approx 1.5 mSv in Ayrshire, 2.5 in Grampian & 50 on Guarapari beach in Brazil) & that there was no evidence that this low level radiation harmed anybody indeed that the hormesis theory was better. The SEPA representative refused to say what background radiation at Dalgety Bay was saying it was all about the particles which were artificial & more dangerous. I said that all background radiation is made up of particles & that all reports merely referred to them being found in bits of rock which sounded like natural ones. He replied that they had been identified as radium which doesn't occur in nature (this could be done by reading the proportions of types of radiation given off) & chemically identified as paint (which seems at best on the edge of possibility since it would first require a sub microscopic piece of matter to be extracted from the surrounding rock & then analysing it). Hence the questions I just sent to them. I have asked for the response to be by email (of their listed alternatives) & will, of course, publish it.

I was sorry I did not get to push the point about radiation hormesis further - there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support the official linear no lower limit to damage theory (LNT) & a lot to support Hormesis but the latter doesn't keep eco-scare investigators in jobs.

Graham admitted that in their research of the programme they had been unable to find conclusive evidence either way. In fact, as I replied, that just means there is no conclusive or indeed actual evidence of any risk whatsoever - inherently there is no sort of evidence that can prove the absence of risk, apart from an absence of measurable deaths & there is quite certainly such an absence, but if there is no evidence of it one should assume it doesn't exist, in which case the environmentalists have to depend on rubbish like the Precautionary Principle. Graham called me on my claim that the Precautionary Principle was "rubbish". I gave as an example that if I were to say that Radio Scotland's airwaves might conceivably induce cancer, without any evidence (I can conceive of a possibility that a particular wavelength might resonate with some body molecule that way) the Precautionary Principle would require them to close down, which isn't going to happen.

Interestingly Graham was able to dispute another caller's point by giving, off the cuff, the half life of radium which shows he has researched his stuff & therefore presumably does know what scare mongering rubbish he is being told to put out.

However he said I must be a scientist from the way I was talking which makes me willing to forgive am awful lot.

Perhaps, for balance, the BBC would be prepared to do a discussion on the evidence for Hormesis (that low level radiationn actually improves health). Perhaps not.

This is an email I sent to several of the "great & good" including all 3 party leaders & in a slightly shorter from to several of the serious papers:

"I understand Gordon Brown is "fighting the recession with every weapon at our disposal". May I suggest we treat the size of government & the massive regulatory burden it puts on the economy (not least by ensuring electricity prices are 4 times what they could be) as something that could be disposed of.

We face a financial crisis which only gets worse, indeed we are now on the abyss of national bankruptcy. Government action is not improving things & there is a reason for that. Government is only massaging the symptoms it is not facing the underlying problem. Government is the underlying problem.

The cause is not a housing bubble, that is only the effect of money looking for something to invest in. It is not America - they are doing better than us. It is not the "global recession." There is no global recession - according to the World Bank the world economy grew 2.5% last year & will do 0.9% this year - there is a recession only in Europe, America & Japan. This gives us a clue - it is not something inherent the Crunch is caused purely by these governments.

For 4 decades we have seen our government bringing in ever more rules & restrictions on our lives. This has made our economy ever more uncompetitive.

We know that if the market were allowed to work freely, we could have unlimited nuclear electricity at 1/4 the current cost & sufficient cheap power is the underlying engine of economic progress. We know that in a free market housing would be available at 1/4 the present price because they have gone up 4 times faster than the RPI. We know that most of our public works cost 13 times their natural cost because that is how much the new Forth bridge has risen since the previous one was built, that is how much Richard Rogers has said the Millenium Dome was overpriced & that is how much more expensive Crossrail is than equivalent tunnel projects elsewhere in the world. We know that our best & brightest scientists are being driven to Singapore to work on GM & to California to do bio-medical research. We know that what remains of our steel industry is being forced to relocate to China by our government regulations. We know that our business taxes are high & that that is why we have achieved a growth rate half the world average while Ireland's was 3 times greater. We know that enforcing regulations costs industry 20 times as much as it costs the enforcers & thus that the 200,000 Health & Safety inspectors costs the work of 5 million British workers. We know that that we cannot build for our Olympics, anything as technologically innovative as China's Birds Nest Stadium because the H&S regulators won't let us. We know that should you wish to invest £1 billion in our economy you will, like Mr Trump, have to spend up to 4 years working through the bureaucracy, even if all party leaders support such investment. We know that government was just under 50% of the economy & is probably now over & that most of it produces no economic benefit & much of it (the regulators) has a heavily negative value.

It is because government has so assiduously prevented investment in our economy & in the new industries which would be springing up if they were not being stifled that there has been an investment bubble in houses. The fact that government, by preventing builders building, produced an artificial scarcity also encouraged panic to 'get on the housing ladder." We have spent a decade in a comfortable illusion that because prices were going up we were wealthier, while the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India & China more than doubled their GNP).

The solution is obvious. Government must end the regulations & taxes that prevent progress. Scientists & engineers must have the freedom to produce new industries & entrepreneurs the freedom to build them. We must allow the building of sufficient new nuclear plants to stop the lights going out shortly. We must cut the £200 billion in new government bureaucracy, above & beyond inflation, which we have had in the last 11 years & use the money to invest in the future. We are still technologically far ahead of most of the world. We can easily not only get out of recession but at least match the world's recent average growth of 5%. We only have to stop strangling ourselves in government Luddite red tape."

So Gordon has not written back to me to say "Neil, that is absolutely brilliant, you are totally right & I will get moving on abolishing all these parasitical breaks on our economy right away". Indeed he hasn't replied at all - nor has anybody else - nor has an paper published it.

So OK I'm having fun & don't really expect the entire country to defer to me.

But on a deeper level I think they should. At the very least if I am wrong somebody, somewhere among the G&G should at least be able to give a coherent reason why. Gordo tells us he is "using every weapon" so he should be able to explain why deregulation isn't a weapon. The Tories seem equally bereft of any idea what to do. Iain Dale quotes Widdicombe on it - "Haven't a clue," she said. "And the trouble is, nor has anyone else." which shows not that she disagrees with the other MPs but is merely more honest.