Scrotland – twinned with North Korea?

(Monday/Tuesday blog – I have decided to write just 3 blogs a week from now on. This is not because there’s little to write about. It’s because our increasingly draconian censorship laws put most important subjects off limits as mentioning them might ‘offend’ a snowflake or two)

Here’s a story from the glorious People’s Democratic Republic of Scrotland twinned with the equally glorious People’s Democratic Republic of North Korea.

There seem to be several similarities between the two countries.

Similarity – 1 Are Sturgeon and Kim Jong-un related?

Here’s a young Nicola Sturgeon and her lookalike – young Kim Jong-un – clearly they both used the same hairdresser:

Or are they related? I think we should be told.

This was, of course, before the lovely Nicola (who I cannot call the “ginger dwarf from the North” as that would probably be a ‘hate crime’ for mocking the fact that Sturgeon is both ginger and vertically-challenged) adopted the more modern Krankie look:

Hopefully, Sturgeon’s North Korean look-alike/brother will also soon modernise his coiffure too

Similarity – 2 Both get 99% to 100% of the vote

There’s another similarity between Scrotland and North Korea – the tendency for opinion polls to give each country’s Dear Leader a score of somewhere between 99% and 100%.

Recently Nichola Sturgeon asserted that the Scottish people, who were supposedly consulted on their views on fracking, were 99% against it. As a result the SNP government decided to extend the moratorium on this shale oil and gas extraction system, indefinitely.

This does indeed seem like a strange decision for two reasons:

• Firstly, on 10^th February 2015 there was a symposium at the Scottish National Gallery, organised by the Scotsman newspaper, titled, “Is Scotland ready for Fracking?”  Back then the answer was a resounding “yes” and the delegates were sent off with assurances from Scottish Government officials of total support for any business that was willing to invest in this cutting-edge technology.  The delegates were assured that fracking was the answer to Scotland’s future energy needs
• Secondly, the SNP’s new-found opposition to fracking seems odd as most of the fuel imported from the USA for refining and use at Grangemouth is extracted by fracking methods. If fracking is so bad for the planet, why do the SNP believe is it ok to use this extraction method in the USA but not in Scrotland?

This wonderfully convenient (for the SNP) result of 99% of Scrots being supposedly against fracking clearly had nothing to do with the fact that, as the SNP have not got a majority of seats at Holyrood, they need the support of Holyrood’s six Green MSPs. So, to guarantee the Green MSPs’ support, the SNP have effectively bribed the Greens by ensuring the fracking consultation was rigged, in as much as only those who would be in opposition to fracking were asked their view.

‘Ban on fracking after 99 per cent reject technique,’ screamed the headline in the Scottish edition of Metro. The ban, or technically ‘extension of the moratorium’, came as no surprise to anyone who follows Scottish politics. The SNP is quite uninterested in economics, adopts every fashionable progressive cause and, of course, needs the votes of the six Scottish Green MSPs to give itself a reliable majority in Holyrood.

What did surprise, though, was the claim that 99% rejected fracking. It turned out that this North-Korean-style figure came from a Scottish government consultation. But how did they do it? A brief internet search, a couple of clicks to get to the relevant page of the report on the consultation, and there was the answer.

Of the 60,535 responses, 34.4% were generated by Friends of the Earth Scotland (FoES). Of these, more than 16,000 were generated online from FoES portals and a further 4,582 were by postcards issued by FoES. A further 50.9% of responses came from three petitions: 38 Degrees (21,000 responses), Scotland Against Fracking (4,000) and Change.org (5,000). Greenpeace generated 2,555 responses and the Scottish Greens a modest 836.

However, this stunning 99% result as announced by the SNP was still a disappointment to many as North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is able to get much better results than that with approval ratings of 100% whenever he organises a vote:

In short, the activist Left organised the vast majority of responses, drowning out more rational voices. There may be reasons to oppose fracking, although the benefits may vastly outweigh any environmental impact. But the figures produced by Kim Jong Sturgeon were a pack of lies.

An even bigger bunch of lies

However, the Scrotties’ claim of 99% being opposed to fracking is a mere white lie compared the the absolute whopper often trotted out by the Greenies and Warmies – that 97% of ‘scientists’ agree that Global Warming (or Climate Change or whatever it’s called this month) is partly due to human activities.

I have explained before on my blog (see link below) how the real figure is just 8% of scientists and how the Greenies and Warmies manage to fiddle the figures to make this very modest 8% into a much more impressive (but misleading) 97%.

The Warmies looked at the abstracts of 12,280 scientific papers discussing supposed Global Warming. They didn’t even read the full articles – just glanced at the abstracts. Of these 12,280 abstracts, 8,269 didn’t take a view on whether human activity was responsible for Global Warming. So the ‘researchers’ took these out of their study. Of the remaining papers, a minuscule 65 (0.5%) endorsed the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) theory and were confident enough to quantify by how much the earth would warm. Then there were just 934 (7.6%) which endorsed the AGW theory, but were not confident enough to make any numerical predictions about the expected warming. So, we actually have a pathetic 8.1% that explicitly backed up the theory of AGW. This is laughable! And it’s rather far away from the claimed 97% or 98%!

Then we have a big bunch – 2,934 scientific papers’ abstracts (23.9%) – which the ‘researchers’ (perhaps creatively) interpreted as “implicitly” supporting the AGW theory. So in total, out of the 12,280 abstracts reviewed, on a very liberal interpretation only 3,933 (32%) explicitly or “implicitly” could be classed as supporting the AGW theory. On a more conservative interpretation, only a tiny 8.1% actually posited that human activity was responsible for Global Warming.

I guess the Warmies couldn’t resist ‘doing a Kim Jong Sturgeon’ with the figures to get the result they wanted.

The lesson we should learn from this is that anyone claiming 90%+ or 80%+ or even 70%+ or even 60%+ backing for their particular cause is probably lying.

The claim that “98% of scientists agree that humans are causing global warming” is a blatant lie