Global Cooling. More Indications.

Record low temperatures ( -13 ) in the Australian mountains. Latest airborne Artic ice measurements reveal much greater than expected thickness. Well, well.

Holland's Next Prime Minister; Geert Wilders.

According to the latest poll, if a general election was held today his party would be the largest. Here is his speech to the Florida Free Speech Summit. In it, on the positive side, he says that while Holland was the first to fall into the swamp of multiculturalism and cultural relativism, it might just be the first to get out.

Lt.Col. Allen West and Islam

Allen West, who is running for Congress, interviewed by Pamela Geller at the Florida Free Speech Summit. The bowing referred to in the interview was when Obama bowed down to knee level in front of the King of the Saudis.This is not how a US President should behave. This is the rather sad and creepy behaviour of a carpet salesman.

Lord Pearson on British Appeasement of Muslims.

Here he is talking about that, Geert Wilder's non-visit and his movie Fitna.

The occasion was today's Florida Freedom of Speech Summit hosted by Rep. Adam Hasner, blog Islam critic Pamela Geller and others. The video is dim because the lighting at the venue wasen't adequate.

Artic Sea Ice Surface Area at a Peak. Antartic Ice Coverage Growing; Global Cooling.

The surface area covered by ice in the Artic Sea is today 13,527,656 km2. This is the highest that it has been at this time of the year since before 2002. After dipping in 2007, the surface area of ice has made a record recovery. In the Antartic the ice coverage is simply growing.
These polar cool offs are probably linked to the generally observed recent global cooling which is perhaps in its turn caused by the current lack of solar sunspot activity. New Maunder Minimum ? Maybe.

Turkish Islamists Wipe Out Their Secular Opponents.

Recep "Democracy is the Bus to Islam" Erdegon, the Fundamentalist leader of Turkey's ruling AK party is rounding up all prominent secularists accusing them of being part of a plot to overthrow his government. This so called Ergenekon conspiracy has already seen 142 secularists charged. Yesterday another 8 were added to the sweep. The latest haul includes Mehmet Haberal, owner of the secular TV station Kanal B and rector of Baskent University Ankara, two other rectors and a clutch of prominent journalists. A neat way of destroying your political opponents. It is probably no co-incidence that Haberal had begun last week to form a new secular political movement to fight Erdogan and his bigots.

Radioactive Waste Disposal in the UK.

Now that the UK has given the go-ahead for
the building of new nuclear power stations,
we need to take a look at what it proposes
to do about the industry's number one problem.
How is the UK going to deal with nuclear waste
disposal? About 5% of nuclear power's waste by
volume produces 95% of its radioactivity. In
2006, the Committee for Radioactive Waste
Management (CoRWM) recommended that this dangerous
"high level waste" should be disposed of underground
It would be fixed in a glass matrix
and sealed in steel canisters. The canisters
would then be buried in clay lined and plugged
bore holes that are drilled out of the rock.
Trusting in the cushioning and screening
of the clay and the stability of the rock,
the hot stuff is left to cool down for
however long it takes.

This sounds kind of O.K. until you realise
that there is no provision for inspecting
the canisters to check that they havent failed.
Out of sight, out of mind. A failure, not too
fantastic a possibility even over a short time
span, would cause leakage into the rock and
water table system. One of the nastier waste products,
plutonium 239, takes 24,000 years to loose
half its activity.

Greenpeace's Jean Sorley has denounced the plan as an
environmental time bomb. If, for security reasons,
the canisters need to kept underground, then they
should be stashed in open racks where they can be
readily checked. This also means that if new safe disposal technology arrives,the stored material can be easily retrieved.
The US Yucca mountain underground repository
project offers a proper model that should be adopted
worldwide. Here, with the waste containers in open tunnels,
their is provision for both monitoring and retrieval.
The British CoRWM proposal with neither is nothing more than a cheap and very dangerous folly. It should not be allowed to go ahead.

Global Warming Catastrophe; Its An Astrological Fantasy.

The Japanese Society of Energy and Resources is a government advising panel. Three of its five members have now broken with the IPCC to declare that, on the available evidence, it is likely that climate is driven by natural cycles and not human industrial activity.

Kenya Kusano, a director at the Japanese Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, says that the IPCC's computer model of an anthropogenic, monotonic and continuous temperature rise owes more to astrology than real science. What is clear is that a small rise in temperature has occured world wide since the Maunder Minimum ( When the Thames froze over ) in the 17th C. What is also apparently true is that despite an accelerated outpouring of carbon dioxide temperatures have not risen since around 2000. The recent lack of solar activity may be a controlling factor. In the absence of the magnetic fields produced by solar activity, cosmic ray particles reach the upper atmosphere to seed clouds and cool things down. A more convincing theory than Gore's blarney.

Turkey in the EU? Sarkozy says "Non".

Obama has now set off on his love tour of Muslim countries telling them in advance how wonderful Islam is and how much it is valued in the US. Lots of folks back home do not seem to be entirely behind him on that one. Anyways, before leaving for his first port of call in Turkey, he told European leaders that they should admit Turkey to the EU as a way of demonstrating how much Europe also cared for Islam. He was immediately and sharply put in his place by Sarkozy who informed him that it was up to the European Union alone to decide on a country's membership. " I have always been opposed to this entry and I remain opposed" He added. France and Austria are committed to holding referenda on this issue. The idea of 100 million Turkish Muslims being part of the EU is not something that the majority of the French or Austrian public are terribly keen on. A no from either country would be a veto and the end of the story. Both Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy favour offering Turkey a special economic partnership. Sounds enough and fair to me which is what most Europeans, including the British who will not be allowed to express an opinion on the matter, probably think too.