Three years ago I was chairman of North Somerset Council’s planning committee. I was invited to a Civil Service training seminar on how to assess applications for wind farms, held in Taunton.
We were shown a film which included the Boscastle floods as an example of the impact of global warming. Several of us wanted to know whether those floods were different from the Lynmouth floods of 50 years earlier. The experts had never heard of the earlier floods.
We were given an exercise involving five 400ft turbines, taller than Salisbury Cathedral spire, to be built within sight of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. When their impact on the landscape was raised, we were told to put a hedge around the turbine. A 400ft high hedge perhaps?
These applications are being refused because local councillors now know the experts are talking rubbish.
The military were controlling the weather for several reasons, as detailed in minutes of an Air Ministry meeting held on 3rd November 1953.[1] They included:
"bogging down enemy movement";
"incrementing the water flow in rivers and streams to hinder or stop enemy crossings";
On 16 August 1952 a severe flood occurred in the town of Lynmouth in north Devon. 9 inches (229 millimetres) of rain fell within twenty-four hours[2] and the East Lyn River rose rapidly and burst its banks. Thirty-four people died and many buildings and bridges were seriously damaged.
Although there is no direct evidence, there has been speculation[3] that Project Cumulus contributed to the conditions that caused this flood. A few days before the disaster a seeding experiment was carried out over southern England. Alan Yates, an aeronautical engineer and glider pilot who was working with the operation, sprayed salt in the air and was "elated" to learn of a heavy rainfall in Staines shortly after.[1]
Other writers deny that the experiments could have caused the accident. Meteorologist Philip Eden claims that "it is preposterous to blame the Lynmouth flood on such experiments".[4]
The project was closed down in 1952. There are rumours that the official documents were deliberately destroyed; certainly some classified documents are missing.[3]
"The Day They Made It Rain" was the provocative and inaccurate title of a recent Radio 4 programme. Its aim was to show that cloud-seeding experiments may have been responsible for the disastrous Lynmouth flood in 1952. That flood destroyed much of that north Devon village on the night of August 15-16, leaving 34 people dead and 420 homeless.
The radio programme presented evidence of rain-making experiments in southern England in the early-1950s thanks to the detailed recollections of RAF personnel, now long retired. These airmen remembered meteorologists supervising the seeding of selected clouds, and the great satisfaction of the scientists when rain was subsequently reported. It was also claimed that these exercises were conducted in secret.
All this falls into the "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story" category. Far from being secret, rain-making experiments were talked about all over the place in the early-1950s. The Royal Meteorological Society's popular magazine, "Weather", devoted a whole issue to the subject in July 1952 - just a month before the Lynmouth disaster. One article by E.G.Bowen described a systematic research programme of artificial stimulation of rainfall in Australia which had begun in 1947, while one of Brita in's foremost atmospheric physicists of the day, Frank Ludlam of Imperial College, described in detail the physical processes underpinning cloud-seeding research in the UK.
Any meteorologist with a rudimentary knowledge of cloud seeding could explain why it is preposterous to blame the Lynmouth flood on such experiments. The key to understanding why this is the case is that completely different rain-making processes are involved. Scientists involved in rainfall stimulation were only interested in seeding individual cumulus clouds - those cauliflower-shaped clouds, usually less than a mile across, which sometimes produce showers which may last 10 or 20 minutes. Injecting modes t amounts of dry ice or silver iodide into such a cloud stimulates the production of ice-crystals in the cloud which in turn accelerates the rain-making process. But the cloud has to have sufficiently vigorous updrafts to spread the chemical throughout the cloud. This in turn means that the cloud may have eventually produced rain in any case, and the seeding merely caused it to happen earlier. For this reason there has never been unequivocal evidence of how successful these rain-making programmes have been.
The storm which caused the 1952 disaster was not confined to the Lynmouth district. Heavy rain fell over the whole of the West Country and south Wales, and it was caused by a depression which had stagnated in the Southwest Approaches for two days. Similar depressions have triggered serious flooding in southwest England at regular intervals, and previous devastating floods hit Lynmouth in the 18th and 19th centuries. The August 1952 depression was several hundred miles across, and the prolonged heavy rain associated with it was caused by the large-scale lifting of very moist air. A fleet of RAF Hercules stuffed with dry ice wouldn't have made a ha'p'orth of the difference.
Rudolf Elmer, a former Swiss banker, has handed over two data discs containing sensitive details of the accounts of 2,000 prominent people to Julian Assange, the boss of Wikileaks.
Wikileaks has not yet published the data on its website, but Assange promised full disclosure once the data had been vetted.
"Once we have looked at the data... there will be full revelation," said Assange, who is currently out on bail and confined to the UK due to an extradition request from Sweden, International Business Times says.
Mr Elmer, 55, is a former executive at Bank Julius Baer, one of Switzerland's top private banks.
He said that many of those identified in the CDs have exploited bank secrecy laws to avoid taxation. However, he said he could not - and would not - reveal names contained in the CDs due to the complexity of the systems used to hide money and the difficulties in unravelling the real beneficiaries, according to Sydney Morning Herald.
NOAA: 2010 Tied For Warmest Year on Record
According to NOAA scientists, 2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest year of the global surface temperature record, beginning in 1880. This was the 34th consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th century average.
NOAA Satellites Help Track Major Snowstorm in Northeast
An image captured by NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-13 (GOES-13) shows a major winter storm as it continues to hit the northeastern United States with heavy snow and high winds on Jan. 12. Additional views of winter storms as seen from space can be found at: www.nnvl.noaa.gov.
Image Source
Leading US Physicist Labels Satellitegate Scandal a ‘Catastrophe’
Respected American physicist, Dr Charles R. Anderson has waded into the escalating Satellitegate controversy publishing a damning analysis on his blog.
In a fresh week of revelations when NOAA calls in their lawyers to handle the fallout, Anderson adds further fuel to the fire and fumes against NOAA, one of the four agencies charged with responsiblity for collating global climate temperatures. NOAA is now fighting a reargaurd legal defense to hold onto some semblance of credibility with growing evidence of systemic global warming data flaws by government climatologists.
NOAA Systemically Excised Data with ‘Poor Interpolations’
Anderson, a successful Materials Physicist with his own laboratory, has looked closely at the evidence uncovered on NOAA. He has been astonished to discover, “Both higher altitudes and higher latitudes have been systematically removed from the measured temperature record with very poor and biased interpolated results taking their place.”
Like other esteemed scientists, Anderson has been quick to spot sinister flaws in official temperatures across northern Lake Michigan as revealed in my earlier articles.
I had proven that the website operated by the Michigan State University had published ridiculously high surface water temperatures widely distributed over the lake many indicating super-boiling conditions. The fear is that these anomalies have been fed across the entire satellite dataset. The satellite that first ignited the fury is NOAA-16. But as we have since learned there are now five key satellites that have become either degraded or seriously comprised.
In his post Satellite Temperature Record Now Unreliable Anderson’s findings corroborate my own that NOAA sought to cover up the “sensor degradation” on their satellite, NOAA-16. The U.S. physicist agrees there may now be thousands of temperatures in the range of 415-604 degrees Fahrenheit automatically fed into computer climate models and contaminating climate models with a substantial warming bias. This may have gone on for a far longer period than the five years originally identified.
Anderson continues, “One has to marvel at either the scientific incompetence this reveals or the completely unethical behavior of NOAA and its paid researchers that is laid open before us.”
CLICK to download PDF file and read FULL report from John O'Sullivan
US Government Foresaw Satelligate Failures Mounting
But it wasn’t just a handful of skeptical climatologists sounding the alarm.The National Academy of Sciences, in its 2007 455-page report concluded that because of degradation in the U.S. satellite network, the country’s ability to monitor the climate and severe weather was “at great risk.”
By coincidence, in the same week my article led to the shut down of NOAA-16, Susan Bohan published her excellent article here in which she exposes the broader systemic failures in the wider satellite network. Among the calamities Bohan reported, “the satellite, Landsat 7, is broken. And it’s emblematic of the nation’s battered satellite environmental monitoring program.”
The term ‘satelligate’ was coined by the CO2insanity.com blog after it diligently picked up on the piece.
People! People! I have some great news!
Scientists - you know those nerdy girls and boys from high school who went on to spend 8 to 12 more years studying? (Geesh, why would anyone want to do that?)
Anyway, they have been caught in a scandal someone lacking originality labeled - Satelllitegate.
Wow! Someone named "Editor" has a blog called "CO2 Insanity" and wrote a blog post titled, "Satellitegate: Scientists Speak"
Fortunately for us, Editor has all the answers. A lot of those people that like to ridicule scientists don't have the answers, so listen up . . . because someone has to have the answers and just because someone is an expert and has dedicated their life to studying a phenomena - Pfffft! - they don't necessarily know anything.
Listen to what Editor wrote, "US Government admits global warming satellite sensors "degraded" - temperatures may be out by 10-15 degrees. Now five satellites in controversy. Top scientists speak out."
Hey, thank goodness they figured out something any 1o year old could tell you, scientific instruments degrade over time (even in outer space) and (so we assume) the degradation must be taken account when studying the temperature data.
But, where is the solution given? I can't find it now. Where will the money come from so the instrumentation can be kept upgraded? When will this be done? (And by the way, will NASA channel show the film of the repairs?)
Thank goodness, Editor told us about this!
Because these last three weeks I thought Russia had been covered by wildfires and one third of Pakistan had been flooded and landslides were still suffocating people in China and Mongolia has so little water the people there had to migrate and the tundra has been thawing and glaciers have melted, Tuvalu will soon be an underwater tourist attraction and water was causing huge tensions between neighbors due to lack of water and that people were starving because of drought, floods and disease.
http://richpaki.tripod.com/briefhistory.htm EXCERPT: In April 1989, within four months of coming into power, Benazir govt. employed N.M.Rothschild & Sons to undertake study of privatization strategy and selection of projects suitable for privatization. The consultants who submitted report on 22nd May, 1989 suggested a strategy of widespread ownership and identified 14 units for privatization in two phases. These units were Muslim Commercial Bank, Habib Bank, PIA, PSO, Sui Northern Gas Pipeline, Sui Southern, Pakistan National Shipping, Pak-Saudi Fertilizer, National Refinery, Pak-Suzuki Motors, Gharibwal Cement, Al-Ghazi Tractors, Millat Tractors adn Mustehkam Cement. In its first term, Benazir govt. tried to privatize Sui Southern Gas Company and engaged a British Consultant
http://pkonweb.com/2010/12/us-embassy-cable-on-benazir-will-wikileaks/ EXCERPT:
Zardari also dumps “Roti Kapra Makan” populist concept and talks about privatization, economic expansion, broadening of middle-class base. “…he supported increased privatization and economic expansion to build the middle class. The PPP, he insisted, had evolved beyond the days of Zulfakir Bhutto’s slogans to give the people "roti, kapra, makan" (bread, clothing, shelter)”, Patterson’s cable said.
After separation of India, now there are only two partners of pipeline project, so it has been renamed as IP Iran-Pakistan Pipeline Project. Iran and Pakistan signed Gas Sales and Purchase Agreement on 06 June, 2009. Some of the key points of this agreement are:
Iran will supply 750 MMSCFD gas to Pakistan for 25 years.
Project was to be started in September 2009 and target date for completion is June 2014.
Route for Iran Pakistan Pipelines will be Iran-Gwadar-Bhong.
Total length of the IP Pipeline is 2100 kilometers. Iran has completed its 1100 km pipeline and Pakistan has yet to start.
Diameter of pipeline has been reduced to 42 inches. Pakistan has to spend an amount of approximately 3.5 Billion Dollars. Sui Northern Gas Pipeline Limited Pakistan, Sui Southern Gas Company Limited Pakistan, The National Iranian Gas Company Iran and Khatam ol Anbia Company Iran are responsible for the erection of pipeline.
250% increase in gas consumption in Pakistan is expected. Iran has to support its week economy and Pakistan is in need of natural gas.
Director of BHP Billiton Limited and BHP Billiton Plc since 6 June 2006. Appointed Chairman of BHP Billiton Limited and BHP Billiton Plc with effect from 31 March 2010. Mr Nasser was last re-elected in 2008.
Independent:
Yes
Skills and experience:
Following a 33 year career with Ford in various leadership positions in Europe, Australia, Asia, South America and the US, Jacques Nasser served as a member of the Board of Directors and as President and Chief Executive Officer of Ford Motor Company from 1998 to 2001. He has more than 30 years’ experience in large-scale global businesses.
Other directorships and offices (current and recent):
Director of British Sky Broadcasting Ltd (since November 2002)
Non-Executive advisory partner (since March 2010) of One Equity Partners 'JPMorgan Chase & Co's Private Equity Business' (Partner from November 2002 until March 2010)
Member of the International Advisory Council of Allianz Aktiengesellschaft (since February 2001)
Former Director of Brambles Limited (from March 2004 to January 2008)
Marius Kloppers BE (Chem), MBA, PhD (Materials Science)
Term of office:
Director of BHP Billiton Limited and BHP Billiton Plc since January 2006. Mr Kloppers was appointed Chief Executive Officer on 1 October 2007. He was appointed Group President Non-Ferrous Materials and executive Director in January 2006 and was previously Chief Commercial Officer. Mr Kloppers was last re-elected in 2009.
Independent:
No
Skills and experience:
Marius Kloppers has extensive knowledge of the mining industry and of BHP Billiton’s operations. Active in the mining and resources industry since 1993, he was appointed Chief Commercial Officer in December 2003. He was previously Chief Marketing Officer, Group Executive of Billiton Plc, Chief Executive of Samancor Manganese and held various positions at Billiton Aluminium, including Chief Operating Officer and General Manager of Hillside Aluminium.
Other directorships and offices (current and recent):
Appointed a Director of BHP Billiton Limited and BHP Billiton Plc in September 2008. Mr Boeckmann was elected at the 2008 Annual General Meetings.
Independent:
Yes
Skills and experience:
Alan Boeckmann is currently Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Fluor Corporation, USA, having originally joined Fluor in 1974. Mr Boeckmann has extensive experience in running large-scale international industrial companies and experience in the oil and gas industry. He has global experience in engineering, procurement, construction, maintenance and project management across a range of industries, including resources and petroleum.
Other directorships and offices (current and recent):
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Fluor Corporation (since February 2002)
Former Director of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation (from September 2001 until February 2010)
Former Director of Archer Daniels Midland Company (from November 2007 to November 2008)
Malcolm Broomhead MBA, BE, FIE (Aus), FAusIMM, FAIM, MICE (UK), FAICD
Term of office:
Appointed a Director of BHP Billiton Limited and BHP Billiton Plc with effect from 31 March 2010.
Independent:
Yes
Skills and experience:
Malcolm Broomhead was Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Orica Limited from 2001 until September 2005, where he oversaw a strongly performing global business that controlled interests in more than 45 countries. Prior to joining Orica, Mr Broomhead held a number of senior positions at North Limited, including Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer and prior to that, held senior management positions with Halcrow (UK), MIM Holdings, Peko Wallsend and Industrial Equity. Mr Broomhead has extensive experience in running industrial and mining companies with a global footprint and broad global experience in project development in many of the countries in which BHP Billiton operates. Mr Broomhead is currently non executive Chairman of Asciano Limited and a non executive Director of the Coates Group Holdings Pty Ltd.
Other directorships and offices (current and recent):
Chairman of Asciano Limited (since 2009)
Director of Coates Group Holdings Pty Ltd (since 2008)
Director of BHP Billiton Limited and BHP Billiton Plc since February 2003. Dr Buchanan has been designated as the Senior Independent Director of BHP Billiton Plc since his appointment. He was last re-elected in 2008.
Independent:
Yes
Skills and experience:
Educated at Auckland, Oxford and Harvard, John Buchanan has broad international business experience gained in large and complex international businesses. He has substantial experience in the petroleum industry and knowledge of the international investor community. He has held various leadership roles in strategic, financial, operational and marketing positions, including executive experience in different countries. He is a former executive Director and Group Chief Financial Officer of BP, serving on the BP Board for six years.
Other directorships and offices (current and recent):
Chairman of Smith & Nephew Plc (since April 2006) and former Deputy Chairman (from February 2005 to April 2006)
Chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce (UK) (since May 2008)
Senior Independent Director and Deputy Chairman of Vodafone Group Plc (since July 2006) and Director (since April 2003)
Member of Advisory Board of Ondra Bank (since June 2009)
Former Director of AstraZeneca Plc (from April 2002 to April 2010)
Director of BHP Billiton Limited and BHP Billiton Plc since February 2005. Mr Cordeiro was last re-elected in 2009.
Independent:
Yes
Skills and experience:
Carlos Cordeiro brings to the Board more than 30 years’ experience in providing strategic and financial advice to corporations, financial institutions and governments around the world. He was previously Partner and Managing Director of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Other directorships and offices (current and recent):
Non-executive Advisory Director of The Goldman Sachs Group Inc (since December 2001)
Non-executive Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs (Asia) (since December 2001)
http://www.fenchurchadvisory.com/News/2010/3/Profit-from-turmoil EXCERPT:
For example, Ondra Partners, an advisory firm set up by Michael Tory and other former Lehman Brothers bankers, completed its first significant IPO mandate with the listing of Gartmore, the UK fund manager, in December last year. Hawkpoint, an advisory house linked with Collins Stewart, the stockbroker, is advising Fairfield Energy on its planned London IPO.
Ondra Partners, the boutique founded by ex-Lehman Brothers executives Benoit D’Angelin and Michael Tory in 2008, is fast establishing a name for itself as the A-team of investment banking.
Ondra Partners, the advisory boutique set up by former Lehman Brothers UK investment banking head Michael Tory, has hired a senior restructuring specialist from Rothschild. The hire comes ahead of what bankers believe will be a big year for restructuring in 2011.