Ahead of the curve…

I’m a fucking trailblazer me. A visionary, no less.

Have been doing it for yonks… ;-)

http://aljahom.wordpress.com/2009/01/14/did-i-mention-that-i-piss-in-the-garden/

AJ

Don’t have a cow, man…

Or something…

People will need to consider turning vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming.

In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”

Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.

Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases.

Perhaps he doesn’t understand that this whole global warming scam is a tax raising hobgoblin, with the intended side-effect of weaning us all off fossil fuels?

Vegetarian. Hah. As if those precious cunts need to feel any more righteous.

AJ

Animal Crackers…

.. or “denormalising pets”

I’m obliged to SteveShark for pointing out this piece in the New Scientist (Ha!).

How green is your pet?

SHOULD owning a great dane make you as much of an eco-outcast as an SUV driver? Yes it should, say Robert and Brenda Vale, two architects who specialise in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. In their new book, Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living, they compare the ecological footprints of a menagerie of popular pets with those of various other lifestyle choices – and the critters do not fare well.

:sigh: orly?

As well as guzzling resources, cats and dogs devastate wildlife populations, spread disease and add to pollution. It is time to take eco-stock of our pets.

Nature is red in tooth and claw, not green, fuckwits. Now to compare apples to quasars.

An SUV – the Vales used a 4.6-litre Toyota Land Cruiser in their comparison – driven a modest 10,000 kilometres a year, uses 55.1 gigajoules, which includes the energy required both to fuel and to build it. One hectare of land can produce approximately 135 gigajoules of energy per year, so the Land Cruiser’s eco-footprint is about 0.41 hectares – less than half that of a medium-sized dog.

But why stop there, with this valid, insightful and oh.. completely fucking barmy analysis.

Doing similar calculations for a variety of pets and their foods, the Vales found that cats have an eco-footprint of about 0.15 hectares (slightly less than a Volkswagen Golf), hamsters come in at 0.014 hectares apiece (buy two, and you might as well have bought a plasma TV) and canaries half that. Even a goldfish requires 0.00034 hectares (3.4 square metres) of land to sustain it, giving it an ecological fin-print equal to two cellphones.

But what kind of muongs are going to take this shit seriously?

Ah…

This kind of analysis appeals to David Mackay, a physicist at the University of Cambridge and the UK government’s new energy adviser.

Fuck it. Calculate the carbon footprint of traffic wardens I feed to my pteradon, motherfucker.

He believes we should put as much thought into choosing a pet as we do into buying a car.

Actually, I always have done. I don’t care what colour my car is. But do you think I want a blue, green or silver cat? (actually a silver cat would be kinda cool).

"If a lifestyle choice uses more than 1 per cent of your energy footprint, then it is worthwhile reflecting on that choice and seeing what you can do about it," he says.

Okay then. Here’s what I can do. I can look at my bank account and decide “Yup, I pay for what I use. I can afford to use more if I fucking want to, you self-righteous cunts.”

"Pets definitely deserve attention: by my estimates, the energy footprint of a cat is about 2 per cent of the average British person’s energy footprint – and it’s bigger for most dogs."

So let me get this right. You’ve opened the door for sneery cunts to judge me for having cats. Well, fuck you very very much, David Mackay.

Back to the tooth and claw thing though.

Then there are the other environmental impacts of pets. Every year, for example, the UK’s 7.7 million cats kill over 188 million wild animals (Mammal Review, vol 33, p 174). That works out at about 25 birds, mammals and frogs per cat. Similar figures have emerged from surveys in the US and Australia.

Oh noes!! Perhaps we should regulate wildlife. You know, all squirrels have to carry an ID card. Cats will have a ration card for mice. Dogs will only be permitted to chase hybrid cars.

There is also a knock-on effect because cats feasting on wildlife can leave wild predators such as hawks and weasels short of food.

I think not. The local raptors and corvids love to mop up the remains of what my cats kill, be it rabbits, mice, rats, or other birds. I also put all waste meat out in the garden for them. I also spend circa £25 PCM on peanuts, for everything from squirrels, to deer, to peacocks, finches and woodpeckers.

Back to talking shit:

Cat excrement is particularly toxic. In 2002, it emerged that sea otters along the Californian coast are dying from a brain disease caused by Toxoplasma gondii. The parasite, which is found in cat faeces, ends up in rivers and estuaries thanks to cat owners who flush their cat litter down the toilet or allow their cats to defecate outside. Dolphins and whales are also affected (newscientist.com/article/dn14037).

So what’s the answer? (As if I give a tin shit)

So what is an eco-friendly animal lover to do? If you already have a pet, then changing its diet can help. Meat is the key, since its production is so energy-intensive.

Uh-oh.. here we go.

As well as quantity, think about quality. "If pussy is scoffing ‘Fancy Feast’ – or some other food made from choice cuts of meat – then the relative impact is likely to be high," says Robert Vale. "If, on the other hand, the cat is fed on fish heads and other leftovers from the fishmonger, the impact will be lower."

Uh.. right. Fish-heads.

Cat owners could consider keeping Tiddles indoors. "Cats are nocturnal, so the single most important thing people can do to reduce predation is to keep cats in at night," says Michael Woods of the Mammal Society in Southampton, UK.

See, here’s the thing. That’s deliberately and obviously cruel and unnatural. So it contravenes the legal obligation to care properly for one’s pet. You cunts.

And if you are thinking of acquiring a pet? "Shared pets are the best – the theatre cat or the temple dogs," says Robert Vale. But if you must own your own,

Exfuckingscuse me. If I “must own my own”? Hang on a motherfucking moment, you swallowers of goat semen. How fucking dare you.

Think about getting an animal that serves a dual purpose. He recommends hens, which partly compensate for their eco-footprint by providing eggs.

Yeah, because there’s nothing more comforting for an elderly person living on their own than a chicken curled up at the bottom of the bed.

And if you really want to gouge your own eyes out, read their editorial.  Cute, fluffy and horribly greedy

Cunts.

AJ

UPDATE: In this reductio ad absurdum world, it should come as no surprise that Dunkeegin’s earlier spoof is an alarmingly accurate parallel.

Payback for Filthy Hippy Scum…

Today, of all days, this is worth a re-run…

WHEN 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail.

What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement.

“We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,” one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”

Another said: “I took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot.” Behind him, on the balcony of the pub opposite the IPE, a bleary-eyed trader, pint in hand, yelled: “Sod off, Swampy.”

Greenpeace had hoped to paralyse oil trading at the exchange in the City near Tower Bridge on the day that the Kyoto Protocol came into force. “The Kyoto Protocol has modest aims to improve the climate and we need huge aims,” a spokesman said.

Protesters conceded that mounting the operation after lunch may not have been the best plan. “The violence was instant,” Jon Beresford, 39, an electrical engineer from Nottingham, said.

“They grabbed us and started kicking and punching. Then when we were on the floor they tried to push huge filing cabinets on top of us to crush us.” When a trader left the building shortly before 2pm, using a security swipe card, a protester dropped some coins on the floor and, as he bent down to pick them up, put his boot in the door to keep it open.

Two minutes later, three Greenpeace vans pulled up and another 30 protesters leapt out and were let in by the others.

They made their way to the trading floor, blowing whistles and sounding fog horns, encountering little resistance from security guards. Rape alarms were tied to helium balloons to float to the ceiling and create noise out of reach. The IPE conducts “open outcry” trading where deals are shouted across the pit. By making so much noise, the protesters hoped to paralyse trading.

But they were set upon by traders, most of whom were under the age of 25. “They were kicking and punching men and women indiscriminately,” a photographer said. “It was really ugly, but Greenpeace did not fight back.”

Mr Beresford said: “They followed the guys into the lobby and kept kicking and punching them there. They literally kicked them on to the pavement.”

Last night Greenpeace said two protesters were in hospital, one with a suspected broken jaw, the other with concussion.

Glorious…

AJ

There are bad dog bites, and good dog bites…

Hole-in-one from Leg-iron:

I have no sympathy at all for the protestors who were bitten by police dogs. The dogs were on their leashes throughout which means that the protestors could have avoided them with ease. They didn’t because in their bubble-wrap world, dogs aren’t allowed to bite them. Unfortunately, dogs don’t do political correctness and they don’t avoid fights with reasoned arguments. Dogs are a lump of muscle with teeth on the end and that’s the only tool of argument they know. Consider from the animal’s point of view – no matter how well trained, that dog is still a dog. The dog sees a howling mob threatening himself and his handler. He is going to react like a dog under pressure because that is exactly what he is. It’s not the dog’s fault. He didn’t start the fight.

In the past I have railed against police idiocy, against the arrest of the victim and of those who have committed no real offence at all, and all of that stands. In this case, I am one hundred percent on the side of the police. Taking down a power station at this time of year is something terrorists do. It’s an act of war. This is not some power outage caused by a surge that trips a transformer and can be fixed in a couple of hours. This is the whole power station, and if these ragged terrorists succeed, a whole swathe of the country can look forward to a few days, at least, with no power at all. How many pensioners are the Green God’s acolytes willing to see freeze to death for their cause? How many businesses are they happy to see close? How many families with no heat, hospitals lit by candlelight, operations cancelled, broken bones unset and cancers undiagnosed because the scanners are off…how much death is enough for them?

Do read the whole thing… and if you’re on twatter, follow the tag #swoop to get a taste of the fantasyland these filthy hippy fuckwits inhabit.

AJ

I totally fucking DID IT, dude…

Cockbleeders….

Die.

AJ

Blog Action Day – Teh climate: Oh noes.. it changes…

Once again, today, it’s all about global war, Ming. Some random thoughts.

I was alerted to this latest exercise in futility, mendacity and self-absorption by @KerryMP, so I naturally felt obliged to contribute.

In my household, which is me, myself and I, there are two cars, with a combined CO2 rating of 570g/km. I am taxed for this every time I buy petrol. Of which I buy enough to do nearly 30000 miles a year. Not complaining – I made that choice. Let me live with it, like an adult. Can I?

I fly from London to the north of England for a 1 hour sales meeting about once a week. Aside from the hell that flying has become, I don’t mind. It brings plenty of money into the company, which we pay out in corporation tax, national insurance and other taxes. The remainder is paid to staff, who pay income tax and national insurance. They then spend the money I’ve made on shite, on which they pay VAT. Is that okay with you?

I leave the tap on when I brush my teeth. I have a bath, not a shower. I have a water meter so I pay for that. Can I make that choice? If it makes any difference, I preserve water by pissing in the garden.

I burn all of my household waste, because the council are prevented by law from providing me with the service I am paying them for. Perhaps you could persuade them to start collecting my rubbish at proper intervals?

My local pub runs patio heaters every evening. They’re not cheap to run and the prices have risen in that pub. But there’s no choice, because the smokers all stay at home if they can’t smoke. What did you expect?

Last October, it snowed in London for the first time in 70 years. This January, it snowed in Dubai for the first time on record.  December, Chicago had most consecutive days of snowfall since records began in 1884… and for the UK is was the coldest in more than 10 years, with new year temperatures lower than in Iceland. Yup – it’s definitely warming up, isn’t it? Or perhaps snow is consistent with global warming?

Nobel prize winner Al Gore (who has made millions from emissions trading & carbon credits) says the ‘science is settled’. Nobel prize winner Barry Obama says ‘the science is settled’. The Cato institute doesn’t agree. The signatories to the Manhattan Convention don’t agree. Now not even the BBC agrees.

"Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, said … climate change was a “weapon of mass taxation.” “All the political parties want to use climate change as an excuse to raise taxes," he added.

Senior executive Tim Nicholson claimed he was unfairly dismissed by a property investment company because his views on the environment conflicted with other managers’ "contempt for the need to cut carbon emissions". In the first case of its kind, an employment tribunal decided that Nicholson, 41, had views amounting to a "philosophical belief in climate change", allowing him the same legal protection against discrimination as religious beliefs.

Thanks to global warming believers, the UK is going to experience severe power shortages over the next 3-8 years.

Thanks, to all you fucking idiots who had to find some other shit to beat us all with after the collapse of international socialism in the 90s.

Further reading:

http://aljahom.wordpress.com/category/global-warming-my-arse/
http://wattsupwiththat.com

AJ

Desperately short of shit to protest about…

Why no arrests, plod? Why no baton charges and invocation of Anti Terrorism powers?

See, if I were going to protest about something, I would choose something that (i) were real and (ii) humanity could actually do something about.

They might as well protest that the fucking sun comes up. Dicks.

I hope it starts to snow and they all slip off to their icy deaths.

AJ

H/T @TimMontgomerie

Kicking Swampy in the Balls…

Regular readers may recall that I’m not always in agreement with Hugo Rifkind. But today, he puts forward a sensible argument for abolishing such Swampies as I referred to ‘t’other day.

Picture a climate criminal. What does he look like? Mine is a white bloke, in his twenties, and with dreadlocks. He was in this newspaper yesterday, and on his naked chest were written the words “No New Coal”.

I doubt he’d much like to be called a climate criminal. I suspect, in fact, he might be a bit miffed. But it’s thanks to the likes of him that the energy company E.ON has shelved plans for a new coal power station at Kingsnorth in Kent. Is that, unequivocally, a victory for the environment? I’m not so sure. I’m worried it might be the exact opposite.

You see, Dreadlocks Man, logically, there are two possible scenarios for the future of coal. In one scenario, nobody burns any more coal, ever again. Not E.ON, not anybody. Not even in the developing world, where they’ve got access to vast amounts of cheap coal and a rapidly expanding appetite for power, and an opinion on man-made global warming that is, roughly speaking, analogous to our opinion on the tooth fairy. The other scenario is that people do continue burning coal, but just not here.

Tell me, Mr Dreadlocks, which of these scenarios do you consider to be the more likely?

Read on…

AJ

Fuck off Bono…

AJ

When the lights go out…

We’ll all know who to go looking for. This dog-on-a-string cunt:

Environmental activists claimed a major victory last night when plans for Britain’s first new coal-fired power station for 30 years were shelved after a sustained campaign.

The announcement by E.ON that it would delay a decision on Kingsnorth for three years is a serious setback for the Government’s principal environmental policy of supporting the capture and storage of carbon emissions from coal plants. The delay also heightens the risk of power cuts after 2015, when EU rules will force Britain to close nine of its largest and most polluting power stations.

E.ON’s decision was greeted as a victory by Greenpeace and will encourage activists to redouble their efforts to block other controversial schemes, including the planned third runway at Heathrow.

Fuck off swampy, you cunt. Where do you think the electricity is going to come from? Solar? Wind? Not a friggin’ chance.

AJ

Global war, Ming?

Great bit of work from Mad Mel on AGW…

Yet another scientific scandal has come to light which knocks another whopping crater in the already shattered theory of anthropogenic global warming. Eight peer-reviewed studies, which for years have played a significant supporting role behind the IPPC’s claims of AGW, have been shown to be fraudulent.

As Andrew Orlowski reports in The Register, the issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy in order to ‘reconstruct’ past temperatures.

Read on…

AJ

Follow me on Twatter… or don’t

I’ve tried playing with Twatter before and found it an insufferable tidal wave of tedium and pointlessness.

Now, however, I’m using it to follow gossip at the Tory Party conference via #con09 and #cpc09.

And therein, I’ve discovered an inexhaustible seam of chippy, miserable, despairing lefties to bait. It’s proving to be rather good fun. They despise Dan Hannan, which brings me great joy.

Watch the fun in the above links or follow me at http://twitter.com/AlJahom

Once the conference is over, I’ll probably abandon the whole sorry enterprise, but it does seem to work quite well for this particular event.

AJ

Winter to be coldest for 100 years…

Heh.

AJ

Saving the planet…

It’s just occurred to me, as I went to forage for Chablis, that I’ve been saving the planet for years.

My fridge hasn’t had a light in it for 3 years. My people have run the numbers.

I’ve saved enough carbon to feed a polar bear and a seal for a year.

I’m going to sleep like a baby tonight.

God bless Chablis.

AJ

Useless Government Propaganda Brass-necked Dickheads…

Back in December 2008, for posterity, I relayed to you the Met Office’s assurance that 2009 would be one of the warmest on record.

But long range forecasts suggest that next year will be among the warmest.

The average global temperature is expected to be more than 32.7F (0.4C) above the long term average, making next year warmer than this year and the hottest since 2005, researchers from the Met Office and the University of East Anglia said.

They issued a press release in April 2009 confirming their earlier prediction.

The coming summer is ‘odds on for a barbecue summer’, according to long-range forecasts. Summer temperatures across the UK are likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or below average for the three months of summer.

Chief Meteorologist at the Met Office, Ewen McCallum, said: "After two disappointingly-wet summers, the signs are much more promising this year. We can expect times when temperatures will be above 30 °C, something we hardly saw at all last year."

Well, now they’ve annouced that this will (no shit motherfucking Sherlock) no longer transpire. Perhaps ermbarassed? Apologetic? Contrite?

Not on your fucking nelly.

The Met Office refused to apologise today after admitting that the “barbecue summer” they had predicted was no longer likely.

As rain lashed down on most of Britain, a revised forecast was published suggesting that the weather in August would be changeable with more rain as well as sunny periods.

…

The revised forecast will come as an embarrassment to the Met Office who published a press release in April detailing news of a hot summer. Ewen McCallum, the chief meteorologist, said the wet summers of 2007 and 2008 were highly unlikely to be repeated.

“This year will be much drier than normal,” he predicted. “Get the BBQ out. Probably with spells of weather with the temperature reaching 30 degrees Celsius.”

Philip Eden, vice president of the Royal Meteorological Society, criticised the Met Office for publicising such an optimistic prediction when they had relatively little evidence of how the summer would unfold.

“The key is that these are experimental forecasts. That’s fine by me – it’s exactly what they should be doing,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

“They should be doing research into long-range forecasts. The problem is that we don’t actually know very much about the forcing factors, the outside influences which affect the weather during a period of, say, a month or three months ahead.

“The big problem with these forecasts was the spin that was put on it by the Met Office’s press office – the ’barbecue summer’ bit.”

He pointed out that the wording of the forecast was actually “unambitious” and had a “very wide target”. “They simply predicted that temperatures for the summer quarter would be above average,” he said.

The Times imply that Gordo was behind this piece of distracting “barbecue summer” bollox. Which is just fucking typical.

Put a team into the met office. Sack all the AGW true believers. Break it up and sell it off to the private sector.

Why am I paying for any of these cunts?

AJ

Corporate Responsibility….

This just about sums up corporate greenwash nicely:

AJ

Where’s Al Jahom?

Can you see me in this charming vignette?

I’m already a dedicated recycler anyway:

And look what becomes of your recyclables. Complete waste of time effort and money, as well as turning half the fucking population into unpaid part-time bin-men. Wankers.

AJ

Sainsbury’s discover ‘free’ electicity…

Or so the Tellygiraffe would have us believe, in their global warming section…

Now, I know journos (and greenies) aren’t renowned for their robust scientific knowledge and method, but, you can’t fucking make free energy and you can’t have a real-world system which is zero-sum – you can’t beat entropy.

This ‘kinetic road plate’ they talk about seems to be one of these things:

The bold claims made in this video, by the inventor, in 2005, about this solution providing free energy have been repeated since on the official website.

FAQs

Q1. Doesn’t the ramp just steal pennies from our petrol tanks?

A1. The ramp is designed to be situated in parts of the roadway where vehicles are having to slow down, for example on downhill gradients, when approaching traffic lights or roundabouts as well as replacing sleeping policemen and traditional traffic calming measures.
In the these situations, the kinetic energy of the car is being dissipated into heat (i.e. through the braking system) anyway; the ramp at this point scavenges a degree of kinetic energy as the car passes over it, but this is far less than is lost through other mechanisms.

This is, of course, bollocks of the most blatant kind. Let’s look at it in more detail:

The ramp is designed to be situated in parts of the roadway where vehicles are having to slow down, for example on downhill gradients,

On the over-run (whereby I’m using zero fuel), on downhill gradients, do I really want to be going over a fucking speed-bump, you cunts?

when approaching traffic lights or roundabouts

I’m not always slowing down approaching traffic lights or roundabouts – i.e. when the lights are green. If you make me slow down when the lights are green, or there’s an opening on the roundabout, and I therefore miss the green light or the opening, I will dig up this piece of shit and insert it up your ringpiece sideways.

as well as replacing sleeping policemen and traditional traffic calming measures.

Ah – so where you said (at 2:30 in the vid above) ‘unlike the speed bump, the ramp produces no discomfort to the car occupant’ you actually meant ‘except where we’re flogging it as a replacement for speed bumps’. Furthermore, you’re advocating putting a speed-bump replacement on the approach to roundabouts and traffic lights.

They’re clearly making shit up as they go along. How do these people get funding? (I’m looking at you, government.)

Anyway.. none of this matters just now, as I’m willing to bet these things will never see the public highway.

The point it: where is the magic electricity coming from? From you car, of course. You’ll be giving the gas pedal an extra prod to get over it, with all the associated fuel usage and CO2 output.

So Sainsbury’s will be taxing its customers to power its tills and, of course, to cover the capital outlay of this Wile E Coyote piece of shit.

It may only be 0.1p it costs you to drive over this thing but, as these supermarket cunts may say, ‘every little helps’.

As an aside, looking at the fucking waders you’ll find in supermarkets, maybe a better idea would be for each till to be powered by an exercise bike with a dynamo attached.

AJ

Recycling scheme declared a failure:

AJ