A Place to Stand

Spiked article on the anniversary of the Japanese Tsunami (45.9 million items) & Fukushima (62.9 million) comparing deaths.

From the Fukushima radiation "disaster" itself - 0 deaths
Within the reactor site from the tsunami but prior to  and unconnected with the "disaster" - 2 deaths
From the anti-nuclear scare - 48-68 (depending on whether you count 26 who died much later because of electricity shortages)

overreaction to a problem can be worse than the original problem. For example, it was reported that 45 patients died after the botched and hurried evacuation of a hospital in the Fukushima prefecture, and this was not the only such case. One centenarian committed suicide rather than be forced from his home in the exclusion zone.
Most of Japan’s nuclear-power plants were shut down for testing after the accident or kept offline after maintenance for longer than expected. A country with hot summers like Japan has become reliant on air conditioning. With power supplies reduced, more people seemed to be affected by heatstroke. In July, it was reported that 26 people had died from heatstroke in the spring and early summer, compared to six people the year before. These may not all have been down to the problems caused by the nuclear shutdown, but it can’t have helped that people were being constantly nagged to reduce their power usage. Ironically, two workers at the plant, wearing very heavy protective suits to protect them against the radiation, died from heatstroke.

21,000 app on the less newsworthy event of the tsunami itself.
By comparison - 200,000 in the Indian ocean tsunami of 2004, which happened in less technologically advanced countries.

     Proving the Luddites are enormously more dangerous to the human race than nuclear power or any similar anti-technology scare they promote. At least proving it to anybody susceptible to evidence.That they and most of our media aren't susceptible to evidence is the big problem.
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Bishop Hill has an article about one of the "due balance" BBC "reporters" called Gaia Vince, which I assume was not his birth name, pushing a scare story about "peak indium". Andrew also has a graph of long term prices proving it is another evidence free fraud.
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The EU nomenklatura in a tizzy because Hungary has replaced its communist era constitution for something less politically correct. One doesn't hear much about this here - perhaps our nomenklatura are worried that people would approve.
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"We've got to get rid of the Medieval warm period" to quote one of the snake oi salesmen masquerading as "scientists" at the CRU. Quoted from a Climategate email. The fact is

The idea of a medieval warm period was formulated for the first time in 1965 by the English climatologist Hubert H. Lamb [1]. Lamb, who founded the UK Climate Research Unit (CRU) in 1971, saw the peak of the warming period from 1000 to 1300, i.e. in the High Middle Ages. He estimated that temperatures then were 1-2 ° C above the normal period of 1931-1960. In the high North, it was even up to 4 degrees warmer. The regular voyages of the Vikings between Iceland and Greenland were rarely hindered by ice, and many burial places of the Vikings in Greenland still lie in the permafrost.

Glaciers were smaller than today

Also the global retreat of glaciers that occurred in the period between about 900 to 1300 [2] speaks for the existence of the Medieval Warm Period. An interesting detail is that many glaciers pulling back since 1850 reveal plant remnants from the Middle Ages, which is a clear proof that the extent of the glaciers at that time was lower than today

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  During WW2 there was a serious plan to feed Britain from locally grown plankton. It turned out not to be feasible at the time because the technology wasn't good enough (& not very tasty either). However the technology has moved on. The sites were almost all in Scotland. I assume this is because colder water contains more oxygen and can thus grow more.

ten, 30sq m nets could in 12 hours catch enough plankton to feed 357 people

   That equates to 1.18 million people per square kilometre.


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  Startram - linear accelerater to space for $40 billion. So about 25 times the cost of a tram from Edinburgh airport to about a mile from the city centre.
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Bishop Hill again on an academic report on how "environmental science" is done

The idea is that normally you should not propose legislation until you’ve got the evidence to justify it. But there, you had the prime ministers and heads of state signing up to a target that no-one had done any impact assessment at all . . . they got them to sign up to these targets, 20% renewables and 10% biofuels, and then only later in the year did they do the impact assessment. And basically they said they didn’t need to [properly] impact-assess the 10% because it had already been approved by the heads of state! . . .”
As Sharman and Holmes pithily comment:

"The fact that the EC was endorsing a target without having seen a full impact assessment provides the first indication that motivations other than scientific evidence related to environmental sustainability and GHG emissions reductions played a part in the policy decision to establish the 10% target."

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  How the US shale boom will change the world. I see no reason why it will be a purely US boom and no reason other than Luddism why it won't work across Europe.