A Place to Stand

  The "Precautionary Principle" is not a scientific principle, nor one with any sort of logically discussed merit it is simply a phrase used by eco-Nazis*. Indeed the imprecision and meaninglessness of the term is proven by the fact that it has so many definitions:

The precautionary principle states that if an action or policy has suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action. ...en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

Assumption of the worst case scenario with respect to actions whose outcomes are uncertain.
www.environment.gov.za/Enviro-Info/sote/nsoer/general/glossar…

 The concept that precautionary action can be taken to mitigate a perceived risk. Action may be justified even if the probability of that risk occurring is small, because the outcome might be very adverse.
www.dfpni.gov.uk/eag-glossary
The view that when science has not yet determined whether a new product or process is safe or unsafe, policy should prohibit or restrict its use until it is known to be safe. Applied to trade, this has been used as the basis for prohibiting imports of GMOs, for examplewww-personal.umich.edu/~alandear/glossary/p.html

a moral principle used to guide decisionmaking and prevent harm: When there is an activity or product that could threaten human health or the environment, precaution should be taken, even before there is scientific proof that the activity or product is harmful. ...
www.womenshealthmatters.ca/centres/environmental/Glossary.ht…



This principle establishes that a lack of information does not justify the absence of management measures. On the contrary, management measures should be established in order to maintain the conservation of the resources. ...
www.fao.org/docrep/006/X8498E/x8498e04.htm
Where significant environmental damage may occur, but the knowledge on the matter is incomplete, decisions made and measures implemented should err on the site of caution.
www.kentbap.org.uk/glossary/
The obligation to take preventive action when a chemical is suspected of causing harm to human health and/or the environment in the absence of conclusive scientific evidence in order to ensure a high level of environmental protection and of human, animal and plant health.
www.chemicalshealthmonitor.org/spip.php
It is a fundamental component of the concept of ecologically sustainable development (ESD) and has been defined in Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration (1992) United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Rio, 1992 (the "Rio Declaration"): Where there are threats of serious or ...
www.vcc.vic.gov.au/2008vcs/glossary.htm
where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.
localplan.westoxon.gov.uk/document.aspx
The best environmental policy is to protect the environmental systems as a priority, in particular where the results of an action/procedure are unknown.
www.tipperarynorth.ie/countydevelopmentplan/glo.html
Taking action now to avoid possible environmental damage when the scientific evidence for acting is inconclusive but the potential damage could be great.
www.planningportal.gov.uk/england/government/glossary/p
The principle that when information about potential risks is incomplete, decisions about the future policies should be based on a preference for avoiding unnecessary environmental or health risks.
www.sinauer.com/groom/article.php
an approach to the management of risk when scientific knowledge is incomplete.
www.croplifeasia.org/biotechnology-glossary.html
The approach whereby any possible risk associated with the introduction of a new technology is avoided, until a full understanding of its impact on health, environment etc. is available. ...
www.bioportal.gc.ca/English/View.asp


Usage examples


"We're living through a crisis with the changes to our environment," Blair said. "The fact is, just on the precautionary principle, it'd be sensible to act. And the truth is, if we don't act, and in a way that binds the main countries in...


Jan 26, 2007 - Forbes - Tony Blair
"We want to work in this environment on a precautionary principle," Kuneva said.


Apr 22, 2008 - Scientific American - Meglena Kuneva

Sturgeon said: "This is the first occasion we have had to take the step of closing a school in Scotland. But we are doing it on the basis of the precautionary principle and our containment strategy so far has been successful."


May 13, 2009 - Scottish Daily Record - Nicola Sturgeon

  None of these make any attempt to quantify such risks. In the worst cases it is simply enough that somebody, or at least some approved eco-fascist, claims tom believe their is the possibility of some sort of risk, at some time, possibly only decades or centuries away and refuses to accept any proof otherwise, sometimes even saying that there are no circumstances whatsoever that they would ever accept evidence. [This is not hyperbole it is precisely the position adopted over GM foods, the claim that low level radiation is dangerous and indeed "catastrophic global warming".

  It also involves bringing in other slippery, undefinable terms such as "scientific consensus" and "ecologically sustainable development". It should be noted that even what looks like a precise term "burden of proof" has 3 ditinct meanings - beyond reasonable doubt; clear evidence; preponderance of evidence". Thus no "definition" which includes that without specifying the meaning used is anything other than spin.

 My preferred definition is from Yes Minister's Sir Humphrey Appleby. This came before the "principle" had been adopted by ecofascism and was just referred to as civil service policy - that "'many, many things must be done, but nothing should ever be done for the first time'.

   Of course all actions or indeed inactions have more effects than just one. For example not growing GM foods means less food and more starvation worldwide. This effect can be estimated with some accuracy and set against any benefit of inaction. Usually the benefit of inaction is remarkably close to zero. However supporters of this "principle" actively eschew any such calculations which suggests they know perfectly well that they would prove they are on the side of killing people not protecting them.

  Invoking the "precautionary principle" itself is, for this reason, likely to be extremely risky and, if it were a real principle rather than spin invoking the precautionary principle could not be done by anybody who supported the precautionary principle.

  Basically anybody who invokes that so called "principle" to give themselves a veto over people's right to do things is, by doing so, proving themselves to be an eco-Nazi*.

* In this case eco-Nazi, rather than ecofascist, is the correct term since they are demonstrating a willingness to kill people.

UPDATE Al Fin has a longer article on this same subject.

  Professor Wolff has emailed me to dispute what I said on 2 of the seven points recently discussed and of which I said that if the warming scare is justified, all 7 must be completely wrong.

He told me, correctly, that (on question 5) it is sulphur crystals not sulphur dioxide crystals, as I said, that must be put into the stratosphere to produce cooling. He also points out that, since such crystals only stay up for about 2 years this needs to be practiced continuously and indeed, were catastrophic warming to keep rising the amount of crystals would have to be increased. However should we continue the war on fire that must also be continued indefinitely and  because the loss in economic growth is a cumulative, indeed geometric, growth process it's cost will also rise geometrically. Since the annual cost of putting up such sulphur crystals is well under 1,000th the cost of Kyoto, I do not see that as a major problem.

   On point 1 (that there has been no significant warming since 1995) the Professor has also sent me a graph, from the Met Office, of warming back to 1850, which he believes
 
shows a long term trend of  0.6C degree of warming, over the last 150 year, correlating with the time manmade CO2 started its steep rise. This, rather than the experience between 1979 and 1998, which was at the time promised by Hansen would show a 0.5 C decadal increase in his evidence to Congress, or the 0.2 C decadal increase Hansen later said, on oath in a British court, was the case, being the multidecadal increase he referred to.

Note that while there is an overall correlation over the period the steepest proportional rise in CO2 was from 1950 to 1980 - when temperature, at worst, flatlined.

On the other hand, as we can see from the Greenland ice Sheet, the rise, while real, is nothing outside human experience and indeed we are still cooler than normal..




I am glad he still maintains there is a  scientific consensus, excluding only "very few scientists"that the political claims of "catastrophic global warming" are clearly false.

UPDATE Professor Fred Singer has sent comments here

Chernobyl compared with normal background radiation and illness


The real lesson of this graph is that, any nation which greatly increases its power supply, as any nation able to install nuclear reactors can, it will become much wealthier.

Molten salt reactors - operate at near atmospheric pressure and thus can't explode catastrophically


Al Fin on Thorium reactors
 
Vietnam to build 30 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2030 which is about 60% of AL Britain's electric power now
 
"In modern times the main driver of economic growth has been, and continues to be, energy" - Jim Mather, SNP minister


Unregistered nuclear reactors with no safety measures whatsoever up to 1.8 billion years ago

Nuclear costs

The WSJ explains some of the various measures of radiation

Radon levels in Scotland

and by what is clearly a very different shading, in England and Wales

  Last week I said I would respond to Professor Wolff's response to my 7 questions, each one of which individually, if it cannot be answered in a way supportive of the hypothesis of dangerous warming, essentially disproves it. They have also been discussed on Bishop Hill here and here, with him replying on the latter of these.

  So here they are again with my responses highlighted this time.

1 - Do you accept Professor Jones' acknowledgement that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995?
*I have not heard this statement. However, because the climate system is inherently noisy, with alternating short runs of cold years and of warm years, there could NEVER be a statistically significant trend over just a few years. One can only determine a multidecadal trend by looking at the gradient over multi-decades. If you insist on taking trends over a decade, you will find periods with a positive gradient, a negative gradient or flat, but none of them significant. This was exactly my point about the analogy with months. There will quite certainly be a warming trend in temperature between January and July, but you will certainly find periods of 10, perhaps even 20 days, that have no, or even a negative, gradient.

However the warming period from which this theory was derived started in 1979. Up till then the environmental alarm had been cooling “

The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”



• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist 1970

So the multidecadal trend was cooling for about 30 years, followed by warming for 16 years followed by flatlining for 16 years (or you can class it as warming for 19 years to 1998 and cooling for the next 13 years). If there is no "multidecadal" warming trend stronger than that there is nothing worth worrying about.

2 - Do you accept that the rise in CO2 has improved crop growth by around 10% & that the consequent influence on world hunger is more beneficial than any currently detectable destructive action of alleged global warming?

*I am not an agricultural scientist, and have not looked into this, but yes, in general increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are likely to increase crop yields. The second half of the question asks me to make a moral and economic value judgement. While I may have a view on it as a citizen, this has nothing to do with the science.

I would respectfully suggest that anybody saying that alleged warming is in any way bad is making a moral and economic value judgement. If CO2 rise considerably alleviates world hunger I do not think that it is a controversial value judgement that this is a good thing. Certainly if there is no evidence of any harm comparable to the benefit the dangerous warming claims are false. I would also point out that the Climate Optimum, 9,000-5,000 BC was "up to 4 degrees warmer" and not only was it not catastrophic it produced such fertility that ""Green Sahara" was dotted with numerous lakes containing typical African lake crocodile and hippopotamu". So even ignoring the CO2 benefit any warming up to 4 C is overwhelmingly likely to produce not catastrophe but benefit.

3 - Do you accept that the Hockey Stick, as originally presented by Mann and the IPCC contained calculations that were inconsistent with good science and that Mann's refusal to make calculations and algorithms available for checking were inconsistent with scientific principle?

*The Mann reconstruction was a first attempt at doing an exceptionally difficult job. There are now numerous other attempts (shown in IPCC AR4) which all tell roughly the same story, but that have suggested better ways of doing some aspects of the job. This is how science works - someone does their best, then someone else comes along and shows you how to do it better.

The best single short article on Mann's Hockey Stick is this one from Orson Scott Card. It includes this which proves unequivocally that Mann was not only wrong but fraudulent

....it includes "extrapolated" data, which means that sometimes, where there were holes, Mann just made the numbers up and plugged them in. This is sloppy and lazy -- but it's just the beginning.



What's crucial is that Steve now understands why the "censored" data sets are smaller than the ones Mann used. The full source data includes those misleading results that shouldn't have been used. But the "censored" data sets leave it out.


This means that Mann knew exactly what he was doing. This was not an accident. Mann ran the program on the data without the misleading numbers, and then he ran it with the misleading numbers. What he published was the results that made his ideological case.

4 - Do you accept that many claims from people and organisations on the alarmist side, from Al Gore's claim that South Sea islands had already been abandoned due to rising sea levels and Pachauri's claim that any dispute that the Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 was "voodoo" are wholly untruthful.
*There was clearly an error in the IPCC WGII report regarding Himalayan glaciers. This has been acknowledged as soon as the error was recognised. Even one error in 3000 pages is unacceptable, no disagreement from me on that. I am less clear why you are asking a scientist to comment on a film by a politician; I have never cited this film as a source for my science and I don't plan to.

The Professor is wrong here. The IPCC did not acknowledge this error as soon as they found out about it. Instead Dr Pachauri publicly denounced the people who said the Himalayas weren't going to melt by 2035 as practicing "voodoo science". It took considerable time to get the OPCC to change the report and Pachauri has never apologised for refusing to discuss the science and adopting the approach of using such ad hominem and lying tactics. Nor is this the only error in the IPCC's report it is simply the most egregious. Gore is the recipient of a Nobel Prize for an allegedly scientific work and was once described by BBC news as "a climate scientist". Of course this was a total and deliberate lie but I think it is incumbent on scientists to point out when science is being traduced, particularly by people claiming their support -  and the failure of individual scientists and even moreso their professional organisations, often funded by the state (eg Royal Society gets £45 million) has greatly harmed the reputation of science. "For evil to triumph it is only necessary that good men do nothing" Burke.

5 - Do you accept that there are a number of geoengineering solutions which arithmetically can be shown would work (including stratospheric dust, the geritol solution or even just replacing CO2 burning with nuclear power) which would work at a small fraction of the cost of the war against fire, or in the case of nuclear, at negative cost?

*There are definitely geoengineering solutions that might theoretically work. Much more research will be needed to assess whether they can be implemented at reasonable cost and without excessive side effects. But yes, they are certainly among the options that have to be considered. My view is that all different energy options should also be considered, and may be needed: but this is again a personal view not a scientific one.

The cheapest option is putting sulphur crystals into the stratosphere. This has been costed at $100 million a year - well under 1,000th of what Kyoto costs. The engineering of this involves nothing new and we know it would work because Krakatoa and Timbora produced "years without a summer" by this method. The degree of certainty about this solution is far greater than that about any aspect of anthropogenic warming itself. We should not do it unless we know it is solving a real problem since cooling is not inherently desirable. However if the problem, if it exists, can be solved at a reasonable cost hysterical calls to destroy our economy are clearly unjustified.

6 - Do you accept that the refusal of alarmists to denounce fraud on their side, or even its active support or covering up, detracts from the credibility of the entire movement?

*No scientist I know would accept fraud. Luckily so far no fraud has been proven in climate science. I don't know many alarmists, and I don't know what movement you are referring to.

#3 above shows clear evidence of Mann's fraud. There have been others such as the IPCC's Himalayas claim and refusal to retract it when informed. and Jones'"hide the decline". Perhaps the worst aspect of #3 was Nature's repeated refusal to publish Stephen McIntyre's criticisms of Mann's paper, while publishing ad hominem attacks on him for daring to question, and the abject failure of any of the alleged 2,500 scientists at the IPCC to check his figures before the IPCC adopted his graph, many times, in their report. Certainly no scientist should accept fraud. I believe the existence of a climate alarmist movement is difficult to dispute. So long as fraud is winked at the entire movement cannot reasonably be trusted.

7 - Of the alleged "consensus" - can you name 2 scientists, out of the roughly 60%, worldwide who are not paid by the state, who support catastrophic warming & if not can you explain how something can be a consensus when no member of a subset of 60% of the alleged consenting, consent?

*There are several problems with the question as written. Firstly, I assume you are asking whether people support the idea that significant warming will take place (not whether they want it to happen). I also can name only a very few scientists who would say "catastrophic". I don't really know many private companies that carry out climate science, so I am not sure how one should compare these two groups. However, I frequently speak to ordinary scientists in private companies who seem happy to accept the points I made in the left hand column of the original post on Bishop Hill, including the warming range projected in the studies cited by IPCC, which I assume is what you are asking. They are not however people who consider themselves experts on climate, so they would not expect to be making public pronouncements, nor to be asked to be part of a consensus. However, if you really want two names of people who have had a major stake in the oil industry in particular, then Lord Oxburgh (formerly Shell Chairman) and Bryan Lovell (formerly Chief Sedimentologist and Exploration Manager with BP) would be a good start.

Lord Oxburgh gets a substantial amount of government money through his windfarm company. Checking Bryan Lovell online I find that he has indeed written this pdf on how higher temperatures 55 million years ago can be deduced from stone formations and at the end takes this as evidence of catastrophic warming, other environmental scare and the need to accept the "small is beautiful philosophy. Despite it having apparently also been published in the Times I do not find that argument convincing. However he now works for the University of Cambridge and is presumably thus paid out of public funds so we still have not one instance of a scientist, not funded by government supporting claims of dangerous warming. With the majority of the world's scientists not being government employees and 31,000 of them having signed the Oregon Petition saying there is no cause for alarm there clearly can be no question of any honest politician, journalist of scientist claiming the existence of a "scientific consensus" for catastrophic warming (though it would be possible to claim a "consensus of independent scientists" against it)

    With millions of scientists worldwide the statistical chance that all.the scientists supporting catastrophic warming are government funded and all the ones prominently opposing it are independent being an accident is statistically far less likely than the odds of winning the national lottery jackpot twice running. I regard this as absolute proof that the source of this scare story is government, doing so because "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."(Henry Louis Mencken). However if somebody has evidence to the contrary I would be interested.

   I am very pleased that Professor Wolf says that "very few scientists" would describe any warming trend as catastrophic. I entirely agree.

  I consider that on all 7 fences the case for warming alarmism has fallen and on most of them broken a leg.


   If it isn't catastrophic and indeed is likely to be significantly beneficial I see no justification whatsoever for spending trillions in what are said to be attempts to ameliorate this non-problem.

   But again if somebody can give any reason why we should I would be interested. So far the silence from all the other alarmist scientists, politicians and media controllers, worldwide, seems to conclusively show they know they can't.

   Once again I thank Professor Wolff for, alone, having the integrity to try.

from treehugger.com  - their "most terrifying global warming" photoshop

UPDATE Professor Wolff has replied on 2 of the 7 points. I made a small error on point 5 which is now corrected

  I recently realised that the Linear No Threshold theory of radiation damage, since it does posit a very very simple relationship between radiation and death, so that government employees can calculate it, must have a simple formula but I didn't know it.

   The Wikipedia article on LNT didn't have it either which is really strange.

   Eventually I found it on page 6 here

Garwin claims that world data are described by the relationship in a linear no-threshold model of

                       Rcancer = 0.04 deaths/Sv

  Well that's nice. Taking average world background radiation as 2 mSv (2 thousandths of an SV) and world population as 7 billion we get [7 billion  X 0.00004 X2] 560,000 annually.

   Of course it shows the entire claim, no matter how "officially approved" is a lie. That figure is roughly a 1/3rd of malaria deaths - something which we have no trouble noticing, so finding statistical proof of this would be relatively easy if it existed. Malaria even varies over time as drainage, weather and other conditions do - malaria was a major killer in Britain in the 18thC but is unknown now.

  Here is a map of world background radon radiation.
  So background radiation varies a hundredfold across large areas of the globe and so such cancers must also, if the story is not a scam. Good news for Scotland and Japan then where nobody ever suffers from cancer? 

“The discussion was rather heated and I said some uncomplimentary things about making math into a fetish without understanding it.  At issue was the reference to a linear relation between dose and effect, which I still believe is entirely unnecessary for the definition of the current radiation guidelines, since they are pulled out of thin air without any knowledge on which to base them.”  President Eisenhower’s science advisor, George Kistiakowsky, noted in his diary for May 13, 1960

  BBC News last night led on how dreadful FIFA, which gave the World Cup to Qatar and Russia but not to Britain must thus be deeply corrupt and should put the British in charge of cleaning it up.

   Of course this isn't about corruption, FIFA gas always been corrupt, it is about Britain no longer having the money an clout to ensure it is corrupt in our interests.

   In 1974 when following the Pinochet coup, when the Chilean national stadium had been turned into a concentration camp the USSR was disqualified, not for refusing to play them bit for refusing to accept a change of venue.

Chile qualified for the 1974 World Cup after a controversial play-off with the USSR. Following a drawn first leg in Moscow, the Soviets refused to play the second leg at the Estadio Nacional in Santiago, which had been used as a concentration camp by the military dictatorship of Pinochet. However, FIFA refused to switch the match to a neutral venue, so the Chilean players kicked off on an otherwise empty pitch, and scored into the unguarded USSR net, and because there was no opposition to restart the game, the referee awarded the match to Chile, ensuring they qualified for the 1974 finals.

On the other hand when NATO started carving up Yugoslavia was banned from competing at Euro 92. They had finished top of their qualifying group, but were unable to play in the competition due to United Nations Security Council Resolution 757. Their place was taken by Denmark, who went on to win the competition. Yugoslavia had also been drawn as the top seed in Group 5 of the European Zone in the qualifying tournament for the 1994 World Cup. FRY was barred from competing, rendering the group unusually weak. Then during NATO bombing of the country that started on 24 March 1999, and the NATO refused countries to go there Yugoslavia played its home fixture against Malta in Thessaloniki, Greece, winning 4 – 1.

   Now clearly the 2 choices cannot be reconciled with integrity. Either the USSR should not have been excluded because they refused to play anywhere but the national stadium or the NATO countries should have been excluded because they refused to even play in the country. FIFA gas always been corrupt but the BC never thought to mention it when they were corrupt in "our" interest.

   Lets take another comparison. The ICTY "court" has brought to "trial" almost exclusively Serbs despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing are Serbs. They issued their "indictment" without any evidence, against Milosevic, 2 weeks after the US, which was engaged in a blatantly aggressive, war, primarily targeting civilians for the deliberate purpose of promoting genocide (hence unquestionably a war crime and crime against humanity) had demanded it. They issued a similar openly fraudulent indictment against Vojislav Seselj because he was about to win the Yugoslav election. The NATO funded "court" obviously failed to indict, or even investigate any western leaders. Is this possible without the entire NATO paid "court" being thousands of times more corrupt than FIFA.

   We see exactly the same corruption in the western funded ICC where, once again an "indictment" has been issued, without evidence, against Gaddafi as soon as NATO asked for it but none has been issued against any western supported leader, from the US President who started an arguably illegal war against Iraq (certainly illegal in Britain because the nominal reason, WMDs, was a deliberate lie) through to the attempted genocide in South Ossetia by NATO supported Georgians through to the continuing dissection of living people to steal their body organs by NATO police in Kosovo. If anybody were to doubt that the ICC were wholly corrupt see:

witnessed with my own eyes and ears when attending the 2001 Preparatory Meetings to establish an newly emergent International Criminal Court, the exact caliber of criminal corruption running so very deeply at the Hague, that it was a perfectly viable topic of legitimate conversation in those meetings I attended to debate trading verdicts AND judicial appointments, for monetary funding.


Jilly wrote:*The rep from Spain became distraught and when her country’s proposal was not taken to well by the chair of the meeting , then Spain argued in a particularly loud and noticably strongly vocal manner, “Spain (my country) strongly believes if we contribute most financial support to the Hague’s highest court, that ought to give us and other countries feeding it financially MORE direct power over its decisions.”

  So these "courts" are, according to all the evidence, 1,00s of times more corrupt than FIFA.

  Since they are dealing with human lives and indeed world peace they are 1,000s of times more important than FIFA*

   So if the BBC is hionest it must kave given 1,000,000 times more coverage to this than to FIFA. And incidentally every UK judge who is not equally corrupt, must have publiclydissociated themselves from the corrupt racist murderers among their colleague who got nioce earners at the ICTY.

  In fact they haven't given 1/100th as much.

   Therefore it cannot be disputed that the BBC is not  one hundred millionth part honest and that, due to their participation in this "joint criminal conspiracy" not a single employee there can be anything other than an obscene, racist, lying, murdering, child rapin, organlegging, cannibalistic, Nazi monster, who, after a fair trial, deserves to hanf from a lampost. Ditto our entire legal profession. No offence to any of them.

  The real point of what the FIFA debacle means is that we can no longer afford to buy such institutions and Qatar, Russia and China can. ICC gives a specific right of countries to finance "investigations" and "trials" as NATO did against Yugoslavia. It is inevitable that at some stage they will be the ones who, as the Spanish demanded "contribute most financial support to the Hague’s highest court, that ought to give us and other countries feeding it financially MORE direct power over its decisions".


* I know Bill Shankley said "Some people say soccer's a matter of life or death, but it isn't.  It's much more important than that" but I don't think he really meant it.
 

From TV-licencing blog by way of Autonomous Mind

BBC Confirm Detector Vans Never Used in Court


Despite being very reluctant the BBC has finally confirmed what we all knew anyway - detector van/portable detector evidence has never been presented in court...

"I can confirm that TVL has not, to date, used detection evidence in Court.


"You may be interested to understand why this is the situation. Under TVL’s current prosecution process the presentation of detection evidence in court is unnecessary. This is because TVL uses detection evidence when applying for search warrants

 Which is disingenuous because:

its agents have no special rights and, like any other member of the public, rely on an implied right of access to reach the front door. The occupants of a visited property may deny an agent entry to the premises without cause and are under no obligation to answer any questions or enter into any conversation. If an agent has evidence that television is being watched or recorded illegally but is denied entry by the occupants so that (s)he cannot verify the suspicion without trespassing, then TV Licensing may apply to a magistrate for a search warrant, but the use of such warrants is rare. The BBC states that a search warrant would never be applied for solely on the basis of non-cooperation with TV Licensing and that in the event of being denied access to unlicensed property will use detection equipment rather than a search warrant. The assumption by TVL is always "guilty until proved innocent" and in 2008 the BBC Trust launched an enquiry in to intimidating behaviour by TVL.


According to Wikipedia (yes, I know) the law allows a fine of up to £1,000 be imposed on those successfully prosecuted and this figure is frequently publicised by TV Licensing to maximise deterrence. In reality, magistrates rarely impose the maximum fines allowed to them by law. During the year 2005-6, the average fine including costs was approximately £153, so only slightly more than the cost of a licence.

Moving further down the process... let's assume that TVL reckon that you have a working television in your home and one day there is a knock on the door. You open the door and the man from TVL introduces himself. Now, if you were to engage in conversation with him and/or invite him in to your home then they have succeeded in their task and they would attempt to sell you a licence and they may try a prosecution if you refused. However, what happens if you tell him to get off your property and close the door in his face? At that point he becomes no more important and have no more authority than a double-glazing salesman or peddler of religious virtues. If he leaves quietly then fair enough, but another visit will probably occur. If does not leave and bangs on the door, shouts through the letterbox, etc., then he is then guilty of aggravated trespass. From what I can find (http://www.lawiki.org/lawwiki/Aggravated_trespass) a person is guilty of aggravated trespass if he trespasses on another's land and carries out any act with the intention of disrupting a lawful activity being carried out on or adjacent to that land. That, to me, describes the banging on the door situation exactly.

So, what happens next? The research I have done suggests: Not Much.

The visits may continue, but by not responding to such visits there is not a lot TVL can do. Warning (almost threatening) letters will also be sent, but they can be ignored.

  If having a front door gives an "implied right of access" I suggest telling the person when you close the door on them that you are rescinding any implied right of access and that they are forbidden to return would deny them any right to return without a warrant. Whether you chose to explain to the gentleman that the BBC is a fascist propaganda organisation which by breaking its Charter duty to "balance" has vitiated it and that in any case under the European Convention of Human Rights it is forbidden to try and force you to pay for coverage which is unbalanced against your views depends on how argumentative you are. If you also choose to explain that every single person in the BBC or associated organisations is, through a "joint criminal conspiracy" to promote criminal activity is personally a lying, murdering, child raping, genocidal, organlegging Nazi war criminal, before wishing him good day, is again up to you.