The Guardian

Somebody in the spineless UK Government has woken up to the Green Taliban propaganda that has been force-fed to school-children over the past ten years, and the left, championed by their MSM supporter The Guardian, is having a fit:

“Debate about climate change has been cut out of the national curriculum for children under 14, prompting claims of political interference in the syllabus by the government that has failed “our duty to future generations”.

The latest draft guidelines for children in key stages 1 to 3 have no mention of climate change under geography teaching and a single reference to how carbon dioxide produced by humans impacts on the climate in the chemistry section. There is also no reference to sustainable development, only to the “efficacy of recycling”, again as a chemistry subject.

The move has caused alarm among climate campaigners and scientists who say teaching about climate change in schools has helped mobilise young people to be the most vociferous advocates of action by governments, business and society to tackle the issue.”   Read more »

James Lovelock is the inventor of Gaia theory and the father of modern environmentalism. The Guardian interviews him and finds that he is recanting. He discusses nuclear (good), wind power (bad) and why fracking is the future.

On sea level rises:

After more than three decades living amid acres of trees he planted himself by hand, he and his wife Sandy have decided to downsize and move to an old lifeguard’s cottage by the beach in Dorset. “I’m not worried about sea-level rises,” he laughs. “At worst, I think it will be 2ft a century.”

Read more »

Another left wing rag is heading down the dunny…because even though pinkos like to whinge about quality journalism, they simply aren’t prepared to pay for it.

LAST year the Guardian newspaper was riding high, having triumphantly exposed phone-hacking at the News of the World. But good journalism is not the same as a good journalism business. On September 15th the Guardian Media Group closed a voluntary redundancy scheme, which had failed to attract the 100 takers the company had hoped for. A nasty fight with its union could follow.

That is an uncomfortable prospect for a left-leaning outfit, but these are uncomfortable times. Last month the firm reported an annual loss of around £76m ($121m). Its newspaper unit lost £54m. Andrew Miller, Guardian Media Group’s boss, wants to cut £25m in costs by March 2016, and has sold businesses, such as the radio division.

In one respect the Guardian is better off than most. It is backed by the Scott Trust, which is designed to ensure it survives “in perpetuity”. The Guardian Media Group probably has around £250m in cash and an investment fund, as well stakes in companies, notably the publisher of Auto Trader, which it could liquidate for at least £500m. The newspaper could survive for more than a decade even if its losses continue at the current rate. But not in perpetuity.

While the argument over Global Warming still has some life in it, there is no doubt at all about the cures that Green economists have devised.

From ethanol production destroying rainforests, to inefficient windmills blighting the landscape and the solar industry going bankrupt, they are all utter failures.

Now the biggest rort of all, the mad carbon trading scam, is on the brink of collapse.

And the news doesn’t come from sceptic blogs – it is reported by The Guardian, the left-wing UK newspaper that is one of the most passionate advocates of the watermelon cause.

It might be from The Guardian but it is a great ad. It is just a pity The Guardian doesn’t follow their own hype on issues like climate change where they ignore both sides of the issue.

On Red Alert, in a post by Trevor Mallard, where he disingenuously suggests without mentioning it that Labour may look at rethinking the welfare state.

Cactus Kate leaps in and passes comment which in turn attracts more comments particularly one from SPG who suggests:

The poor must exist to either provide votes or cheap services to their betters.

Cactus Kate responds:

SPC they do, in third world countries providing cheap goods and services to NZs poor. Most earn less working 60 hrs a week than NZ beneficiaries do by sitting on the couch. That’s why even the left in the UK admits they have to look at welfare. It’s not working.

Which brings me to this image which was sent through the tipline:

It is the Emma Maersk, the largest ship in the world. By way of comparison the Emma Maersk is rated at 14,770 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) and the MV Rena which is currently aground the Astrolabe Reef off Tauranga is only 3,351 TEU. There are eight of these ships. They are so large that they cannot go through the Panama canal.

This ship is bigger than an aircraft carrier, and only has 13 crew. An aircraft carrier has more than 5000!

Anyway, I post this to show that Cactus Kate has a better idea about international trade, poverty and the realities of life than some book taught socialist commentator at Red Alert, or indeed the fool administrator who posted the article from the Guardian in the first place. It is a magnificent example of man’s conquest of nature, design and physics. Unfortunately people like SPG and Trevor Mallard would have us believe this represents the free market gone bad.

It matters not a bit that Trevor cut/pastes some thoughts of a leftwing journalist in a left wing newspaper about an irrelevant Labour party in the UK. Labour here will have to do more than wring their hands about welfare, as Cactus Kate noted in an earlier comment:

I thought you’d had an ephihany and we’re going to tell us all how Labour planned to stop welfare for families (who don’t need it), remove long term beneficiaries from eligibility and cut the welfare spend vote so it could be spent on more deserving areas.

Boring liberal elite rubbish doesn’t sell.

Guardian News & Media is to shrink the Guardian, axe its Film & Music supplement, and reduce its sport supplement to a two-days-a-week publication as it battles to stem pre-tax losses of more than £40m a year.

The Pakistan Telecommunuications Authority has issued a list of 1500 you must not txt:

Officials at the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) have issued a list of 1,500 words that must be automatically censored from text messages by celphone service providers. The list includes “more than 50 phrases using the word “fuck” and 17 involving “butt”.

The list includes several apparently innocuous words and phrases, including “flatulence”, “deposit” and “fondle”. Others would likely only make sense to frustrated teenagers. Among the more printable terms are “strap-on”, “beat your meat”, “crotch rot”, “love pistol”, “pocket pool” and “quickie”.

The Guardian has more:

Among the more printable terms are “strap-on”, “beat your meat”, “crotch rot”, “love pistol”, “pocket pool” and “quickie”.

The officials’ flair for the task was apparent, with prohibition embracing more figurative language, such as “flogging the dolphin”, and 51 terms with the suffix “ass” – although only one variation of the word ‘arse’. There were 17 variants on “tit” and 33 on “cock”, with officials managing to produce eight obscenities involving the word “foot”.

Mobile phone firms were ordered to stop messages including the offending words this week, although tests by the Guardian suggested the blocking technology was not 100% effective.

Two years ago warmists declared that the Arctic would be ice free inside 5 years.

‘When we did the first climate change computer models, we thought the Arctic’s summer ice cover would last until around 2070,’ said Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University. ‘It is now clear we did not understand how thin the ice cap had already become – for Arctic ice cover has since been disappearing at ever increasing rates. Every few years we have to revise our estimates downwards. Now the most detailed computer models suggest the Arctic’s summer ice is going to last for only a few more years – and given what we have seen happen last week, I think they are probably correct.’

The Guardian – 2008

The Arctic summer is almost over this year so how’d that melting go? Not so good by the looks of it. Poor Professor Wadhams computer models have screwed up again. Instead of disappearing at ever increasing rates the ice is growing at ever increasing rates.

Ice Free arctic? Not any time soon

Not even remotely like being ice-free. See those instruments, they are sitting on ice, they haven’t floated off, nor sunk without trace and at the height of the Arctic summer too.

But it gets worse for the warmists.

It has been the coldest summer on record north of 80N, and temperatures have dropped below freezing ahead of the average date.

Only three more years till the Arctic is ice-free…can’t wait.

The Times has lost almost 90% of its online readership compared to February since making registration mandatory in June, calculations by the Guardian show.

Unregistered users of thetimes.co.uk are now “bounced” to a Times+ membership page where they have to register if they want to view Times content. Data from the web metrics company Experian Hitwise shows that only 25.6% of such users sign up and proceed to a Times web page; based on custom categories (created at the Guardian) that have been used to track the performance of major UK press titles online, visits to the Times site have fallen to 4.16% of UK quality press online traffic, compared with 15% before it made registration compulsory on 15 June.

These figures can then be used to model how this may impact on the number of users hitting the new Times site. Based on the last available ABCe data for Times Online readership (from February 2010), which showed that it had 1.2 million daily unique users, and Hitwise’s figures showing it had 15% of UK online newspaper traffic, that means a total of 332,800 daily users trying to visit the Times site.

This is a No Sh*t Sherlock moment. Almost everyone except Rupert Murdoch could have predicted this result. Losing that much audience in such a short time would bite. Now their advertisiers will be questioning the premium rates they are being charges because the traffic numbers are a fraction of what they used to be.

Nice of them to take one for the team.