Snouts in the Trough

Here’s a rather encouraging headline from a newspaper yesterday: “Strong Vodafone puts FTSE in grasp of all-time high”. And here’s another one: “Vodafone helps lift FTSE100 towards new highs”. And another: “2014 could see the FTSE100 reach new highs”.

Seems like pretty good news for anyone with any money in shares, unit trusts or a pension fund. And that’s most of us. After all, it means our savings are going up, up, up. Yippeee, we’re all going to be rich!

But let’s do a ‘reality check on these rather excited headlines.

Here’s a chart of the FTSE100 (the index of Britain’s largest 100 companies) for the last 5 years

Looks great! The FTSE100 really is close to its all-time high.

However, all stock-market indexes are what we call ‘nominal’ indexes. They are not adjusted for inflation. Here’s the FTSE100 for the last 30 years with both the nominal line (red) which goes up, up, up to the supposed “new record high” and a line (blue) showing the FTSE100 adjusted for inflation. This goes up, up, up for 17 years and then down, down, down for 13 years

In fact, in terms of real purchasing power (inflation adjusted) the FTSE100 is nowhere near any record highs. It would actually have to go above 10,000 to reach a new record. Yet journalists get away with writing this misleading garbage and suckers think ‘oh, let’s put our savings into shares, unit trusts and pensions because they’ll grow our money’. And all the stockbrokers, unit trust managers and pension fund managers take a huge cut of savers’ money and become rich beyond most savers’ wildest dreams.

In real (inflation-adjusted) terms, the FTSE100 has lost over 30% of its value over the last 15 years. That should worry anyone with any money in shares, unit trusts or pensions. But it won’t worry the CEOs of the FTSE100 companies that in 15 years they’ve destroyed over 30% of the value of the companies they run. After all, over those 15 years, the average remuneration package for a FTSE100 CEO has shot up from £1.1m to over £4.1m.

It’s a great life – if you’re the CEO of a FTSE100 company, a stockbroker, a unit trust fund manager or a pension fund manager. It’s maybe not so great for the rest of us.

If you want to find out more about THE GREAT SAVINGS AND PENSIONS SCANDAL then why not come along to the talk I’ll be giving in Central London on the evening of Monday 24 February? Details are here: www.ercouncil.org

The picture below features Dame Julia Slingo. She’s quite an important lady in all our lives. She’s the chief scientist at the Met Office. So she has huge influence over government policies regarding Global Warming or Climate Change or whatever it is called this week. Everything from ever-increasing green taxes, windfarms, solar farms, prematurely closing down perfectly good coal-fired power stations, subsidies for “green energy” which are forcing up our power bills and leading to energy-intensive industries closing down in Britain losing thousands of jobs – all this can be traced back to people like the lovely and obviously highly-qualified Dame Julia.

I imagine Professor Slingo must hope we have rather short memories.

On 13th March 2012, Julia Slingo told MPs that the low winter rainfall this country was experiencing was caused by climate change. A newspaper reported: “Slingo told the MPs that there is “increasing evidence in the last few months of that depletion of ice, in particular in the Bering and Kara seas, can plausibly impact on our winter weather and lead to colder winters over northern Europe”.

She added that more cold winters mean less water, and could exacerbate future droughts. “The replenishment of aquifers generally happens in winter and spring … a wet summer does not replenish aquifers. So we are concerned if we have a sequence of cold winters that could be much more damaging,” she told the committee.

As an example of Dame Julia’s influence, the environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, warned farmers that drought might become the new normal for the UK because of climate change.

Right. You all understand what Dame Julia is saying? Climate change is leading to drier winters.

Now spool forward two years. Here’s a newspaper report from the last few days:

“Speaking ahead of the release of a government report on Britain’s unusually stormy winter weather, the Met Office’s chief scientist, Dame Julia Slingo said on Sunday that the U.K. had seen the “most exceptional period of rainfall in 248 years” and called the extreme weather “consistent with climate change”.

“All the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change,” she said. “There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events.”

Right. Got that? Now Dame Julia is saying that Global Warming will lead to wetter winters. Hummph.

Oh and Dame Julia’s claim that this has been the wettest winter for 248 years is, I believe, wrong. From the post I did a few days ago – www.snouts-in-the-trough.com/archives/8475 – you’ll see that 1929/30 winter was wetter than this one. Naughty Dame Julia.

Climate scientists must be the luckiest people alive because whatever the weather, whether it is rain or drought, sun or snow, calm or wind, it can all be attributed to man-made climate change. Or as one newspaper reader wrote “It is increasingly clear that climate change scientist is an oxymoron.  No more scientific work gets done in the climate change department of a university than in the school of Druidic studies.”

(Could somebody please show some support for this website and buy some copies of my book GREED UNLIMITED? You don’t have to read it. There are lots of things you could do with it – pile copies up and use them as flood defences, burn them to provide heat if your electricity is cut off, give them to people who annoy you to depress them……)

Hopefully you all know about a book called SCARED TO DEATH by Christopher Booker and Richard North. In it they examine many of the great scares that the “scientists”, media, politicians and bureaucrats have foisted on us. From DDT, Asian Bird Flu, SARS, Swine Flu, Mad Cow Disease, Satanic Child Abuse, the Millennium Bug to Global Warming, the authors demonstrate how each of these great scares developed and then faded away.

Most great scares seem to go through seven main phases: 1. They appear to be based on scientific evidence which is accepted at the time. 2. They get obsessive, often hysterical media coverage. 3. There is a massive response from politicians and officials. 4. They impose new laws that inflict enormous economic and social damage. 5. The scare then fades away as it is found to have been flawed or wildly exaggerated. 6. Nobody ever admits they got it wrong. 7. The “scientists”, media, politicians and bureaucrats move on to the next big scare and the whole process starts again.

I found quite a nice example of this from a talk given by Michael Crichton. He was looking for a disaster on which to base a novel. But every time he found a supposed disaster which was predicted to kill thousands, when he examined what really happened, he discovered that very few people had actually been killed. The cxample Crichton gives in his talk is Chernobyl. Here’s what he said:

“But the shock that I had experienced reverberated in me for a while, because what I’d been led to believe about Chernobyl was not merely wrong. It was astonishingly wrong. Let’s review that for a minute.

These are the low estimates of immediate Chernobyl deaths as a consequence of the actual incident, and you see here the UPI in 1986, at the time of the disaster, predicted that there would be 2,000 immediate deaths. The New York Post thought there would be 16,000. The Canadian Broadcasting Company in ’91 thought there would be that many, and you see the BBC and The New York Times predicting at the low end 15,000 deaths. Their actual estimates were 15,000 to 30,000 deaths.

Now, there was a UN commission in 2000 that suggested that the catastrophe was nowhere near that proportion, and as you can see, the next UN commission in 2005 doesn’t really show up on the graph, because the total numbers are 56.

Now, to report that 15,000 to 30,000 people are dead when the actual number is 56 represents a very large error.

To get some idea of just how big, let’s imagine that we lined all the victims up in a row. If 56 people are each represented by one foot of space, then that’s probably the distance from me to about the second table here, something like that. Fifteen thousand people is three miles away. It seems difficult to make a mistake of that scale.

But of course, you’re probably thinking, we’re talking about radiation. What about long-term consequences? Unfortunately for the media, their reports are even less accurate here. Here you see CNN in 1996 was predicting future Chernobyl-related illness and death in a large swath that would go from Sweden to the Baltic to the Black Sea. It estimated three and a half million. The BBC, much more conservatively, estimated 50,000. Agence Press thought half a million. The Ukrainian Victim’s Group in 2002 estimated 150,000. The UN commission in 2005 decided that there would be about 4,000. That’s the number of Americans who die of adverse drug reactions in this country every six weeks. Again, a huge error”.

So, next time you see a “scientist”, reporter, politician or bureaucrat hyperventilating about Global Warming or Climate Change or Ocean Warming or whatever – just remember, it’s only the latest in a long line of scares that are hugely exaggerated, scientifically flawed and pushed by those whose self-interest is served by riding on the scare bandwagon.

I thought readers might be amused by something that happened to me in my boring little life yesterday. I am on a list of “approved candidates” for the 2015 General Election for a political party whose name begins with “U”. So, all I have to do now is to attend “hustings” at my local constituencies in the hope that one will choose me as their candidate for 2015. So far, all fairly clear.

Yesterday I attended my first hustings. Or, at least I tried to. The constituency chairman, who was the candidate in the 2010 General Election and who also wanted to be the candidate in 2015, sent me an email last week confirming that the hustings would be held at “12 noon”. But when I turned up at about 11.45, I found that the hustings had already taken place at 11.00, the two other potential candidates had done their pitch and all the party members had already voted.

I was allowed to give my little spiel, but it was pointless. And of course, the guy (the constituency chairman) who had told me the hustings would start at “12 noon” was chosen as the candidate.

When I confronted him about why he had told me the hustings would be at “12 noon”, his excuse was that maybe he had accidentally typed “12” in the email rather than “11”. But hold on a minute. He actually typed “12 noon” and not just “12”. You’d need a pretty big slip of the finger to “accidentally” type “12 noon” instead of “11”. After all, you couldn’t write “11 noon”.

But a further problem is that the party chairman and now the General Election candidate for the constituency is (how to put this politely?) not exactly an inspiring public speaker. Every time he gives a speech, he has to read it from prepared notes on which he has marked in red the areas where he has to show spontaneous passion. You don’t inspire people if your head is bowed while you read your speech. The constituency is a safe Tory seat with the Conservatives getting 48% of the votes in 2010. The party whose name begins with “U” possibly needs someone a bit more colourful, a bit more controversial and someone who can get more press and media attention than our newly-chosen candidate.

Hey, ho. Politics is a dirty business and I’m sitting here wondering if it’s even worth renewing my membership of the party whose name begins with a “U”.

As the “We believe in Global Warming” Met Office gravely informs us that the current storms, heavy rainfall and floods are most likely due to human activity, they probably hope we’ve forgotten the 3-month forecast they originally made on November 21st 2013 for December-January-February. Here it is in all its glory:

“For the December-January-February period as a whole there is a slight signal for below-average precipitation.”

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/m/8/A3_plots-precip-DJF-2.pdf

Please, stop laughing. This is serious. This is the best they can do in spite of their massive investment in bigger and faster computers and the technology that was going to enable better prediction of where the jet stream would be positioned. No doubt all the Met Office “scientists” will be getting their performance bonuses regardless.

The problem at the Met Office is the same as I described at the Environment Agency in yesterday’s blog. All these public-sector organisations have been taken over by Labour-supporting, leftist, politically-correct, bureaucratic, self-serving, incompetent handwringers. They are unable to view any situation objectively and always fall back on pointless Guardianista dogma, however strong the evidence that what they’re saying is a load of b*ll*cks.

No doubt following the floods, our taxes and energy costs will shoot up as the Government claims this is necessary to protect us from Climate Change.

But if we reduced our CO2 emissions to zero, the Chinese and Indians would replace them in just a couple of months. Climate changes, always has, always will, the question is, is it man-made? Probably not.

If even a teeny weeny bit is anthropogenic, can we on our little island do anything to stop it? NO! But we can commit economic suicide by driving all our energy-intensive industries abroad and throwing all their employees out of work.

Here’s the Met Office’s supercomputer which predicted a drier-than-average winter with a worried-looking Met Office “scientist”. Perhaps he’s worrying about whether to suggest imposing a hosepipe ban as the drier-than-average winter predicted by his computer could lead to water shortages?

Maybe it’s time we scrapped the £187m a year Met Office with its £200,000 per year boss and handed a contract for producing weather forecasts to a private-sector company that wasn’t obsessed by the myth of AGW?