Environment

The grey squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis, is a pest

I was going to call this post “Stand up for liberty: drown a grey squirrel.” But I expect the jackbooted social workers at the RSPCA would be on to me like a shot, having me prosecuted under Section 213a of the 2006 Animal Welfare Act for “incitement to cruelty” against our bushy-tailed grey incomer from across the pond. They’ve been on my case ever since I released a killer hamster into the wild, so I doubt I could expect any mercy.

But it has to stop, doesn’t it, this nonsense? £1500 in court costs is an awful lot… Read More

There seems to be some misunderstanding in the news today: it’s reported that a man has been fined £1500 “for killing a squirrel in his back garden”.  The truth is slightly different: he was fined for cruelty to the squirrel while it was alive, rather than for the act of killing the animal.

Under the law, it’s perfectly legal to kill squirrels: they’re not a protected species. But the squirrels must be killed humanely. The law is absolutely correct in its view that drowning is not humane.

I’ve been through this debate many times before. In the past, it was standard practice to use drowning as a method of killing new born puppies. When a doctor friend once told me… Read More

Have you seen the front page story in today’s Times?

It’s a cracker!

Oil giant gave £1 million to fund climate sceptics, it says.

I would give you the online link but then you’d have to pay for it. And I’m not sure you’d necessarily want to do that when I tell you what the story is about. It’s about how blusteringly outraged environment correspondent Ben Webster is about the fact that evil Big Oil company Exxon is STILL funding evil Climate Deniers (though not me, yet, unfortunately) via institutions such as The Media Research Centre.

And how evil is The Media Research Centre? So totally evil that it actually had the evil temerity to refer to the latest Climategate inquiry as a “whitewash”… Read More

It was the morning of the 1992 general election and I was having breakfast for the first – and, let me hasten to say, the only – time with the Prince of Wales. Naturally, I couldn’t help asking him how he would vote, if he could.

No dice. The subject changed rapidly to his latest campaign. In truth, I forget exactly what he said. But I do remember realising, as he spoke of how he had to work up courage before his public interventions, that he did not enjoy making them.

more here

Few politicians understand the countryside

What is it with this Government and the countryside? You’d think a coalition of the traditional party of Britain’s broad acres and one that draws much of its strength from some of the remotest parts of the country would be at least as concerned with what happens in Nidderdale, for example, as in Notting Hill. But it looks as if it is going to be even more metropolitan than its irredeemably urban Labour predecessor.

Take its inexplicably obscurantist attitude to getting high-speed broadband to rural areas. Digital services now account for £1 in every £10… Read More

They call it ‘Iceberg Alley’, which doesn’t take much imagination. It runs from Baffin Bay – where fractured flotillas are constantly calved from western Greenland’s giant glaciers – down along their route to Newfoundland. I sailed down part of it three years ago and it is a dramatically beautiful, if dangerous, place.

Over the past 200 years, some 560 collisions have been recorded there between ships and bergs (though the Titanic went down further south). In 1982 a storm, raising waves up to 65 feet high , sank a giant drilling ship, the… Read More

Is this a first? Blogger extraordinaire Dr Richard North has made a detailed complaint to the Press Complaints Commission, lambasting it for acting in breach of Section 1 of its Editors Code of Practice, viz:
i) The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures.
If the PCC ignores this complaint, it will then effectively find itself sanctioning a breach of the second clause of the same Section:
ii) A significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distortion once recognised must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence, and – where appropriate – an apology published
You can read the great North’s letter in full here.

As we know from his ongoing case against the Guardian’s George Monbiot – who… Read More

They are one of the most valuable ecosystems on earth and yet a fifth of the world’s mangrove forests have been destroyed in just the last thirty years, concludes a new study published today.  The World Mangrove Atlas, commissioned by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) – the first  worldwide assessment of the state of the forests in over a decade – says that they are disappearing three to four times faster than forests on land.

Yet mangroves – mainly destroyed to make way for fish farms and agriculture, and the expansion of towns and cities – act as vital nurseries for fish, provide excellent rot-resistant wood for building, store carbon and provide protection against storms and tsunamis.  Areas around the… Read More

Every now and then – well, pretty much every day, actually – I read comments in the comments section or get impertinent private emails from libtards whimpering about the way I treat them on this blog. The general tenor of the complaint seems to be: “Hear us out. We might have a point. You accuse us of holding the views we do because we’re incredibly stupid or because we’re evil crypto-communists or because we’re misanthropic delusional Malthusian spackheads etc. But actually we have facts on our side too you know. Here are some we found earlier at a site called RealClimate….”

Ah, shuddup, the lot of you! The reason I don’t engage with your arguments is because you haven’t got any…. Read More

Last month, you may remember, George Monbiot and some other libtard journalist I’d never heard of got very excited over a thrilling lecture they’d found on YouTube apparently demolishing climate realism’s greatest showman Christopher Monckton.

As I reported here:
They’ve been crowing because John Abraham a lecturer in fluid mechanics at a Minnesota Bible college has done an 83-minute  Fisking of a speech Lord Monckton – or Chrissy Babes, as I prefer to call him – gave in his city last year. Apparently Monckton is totally wrong about everything and therefore, by association, this demolishes the entire case Evil Climate Change Deniers have against Anthropogenic Global Warming.
Here now is Monckton’s response and it’… Read More