The shocking level of fuel poverty - particularly among Northern Ireland’s most vulnerable - has been laid bare in a new report. A recent study by the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) has found that 50% of clients can barely afford to pay their bills, with 77% cutting back on heat.
Just under a third (30%) of elderly people said they had to chose between eating and heating - a figure that rises to an alarming 59% among disabled respondents. This disturbing situation follows an official review into fuel poverty in Northern Ireland, which found 44% of homes are already fuel-poor. The government-commissioned review also revealed that a worrying 13% of households are living in extreme fuel poverty.
Derek Alcorn, chief executive of Citizens Advice, said CAB’s new survey underlines the growing plight of many householders.
“With fuel poverty fast approaching 50% of households as energy companies announce further price increases, the problem is becoming acute,” he said.
“Particularly concerning are the problems that disabled people face when trying to heat their homes.
“Many people with disabilities, such as those with cancer or muscular diseases, have a much greater need for heat but also frequently have lower incomes if they rely on benefits.”
The findings also showed that one in 10 CAB clients have had to borrow from relatives, friends or charities at some point to pay for heating bills.
Fuel poverty is defined as occurring when 10% of a household’s income is insufficient to afford their energy needs. Where extreme fuel poverty is concerned - which affects around 75,000 homes in Northern Ireland - that figure rises to 25%.
In recent times, people have been finding it more and more difficult to heat their homes as the cost of living continues to soar.
This will be exacerbated by the price hikes already announced this year, including the Phoenix Gas increase of 39.1%, the 28.4% Firmus hike and a 18.6% rise by Power NI.
Indeed, customers were dealt a further blow when it emerged that another 12.5% could be added to the cost of electricity as a result of a potential grid update.
That would push electricity up to 17p a unit and result in annual average household bills of £650, which is double its 2005 level.
Oil prices remain high and the cost of coal is predicted to increase by between 4% and 10% bringing families even bleaker news.
The bad news comes in the wake of the UK Government’s decision to reduce winter fuel payments this year - despite forecasters predicting colder weather than ever before at Christmas.
Professor Christine Liddell, who led the recent fuel poverty review, said another bitter winter will only make matters worse. “Already, there are 220,000 fuel poor homes here, but who knows what that figure could rise to,” she said.
“There is a real possibility that more than half of the households in Northern Ireland will be over the 10% threshold at the next count in a couple of years.”
By Steve Milloy, November 2, 2011, Washington Times
It is time for Lisa P. Jackson to resign.
Last Friday at Howard University, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) railed against the coal industry, saying, “In [the coal industry’s] entire history - 50, 60, 70 years or even 30 - they never found the time or the reason to clean up their act. They’re literally on life support. And the people keeping them on life support are all of us.”
This is patently false, of course, as emissions from U.S. coal-fired power plants are quite heavily regulated. Those emissions controls are the reason U.S. air is clean and safe and why, say, the air in regulation-free China is not.
As West Virginia’s Republican Rep. David B. McKinley pointed out, to the extent that the coal industry is “on life support,” it is Ms. Jackson’s EPA and the rest of the Obama administration that has put it there with a slew of proposed and finalized anti-coal regulations.
A week before, Ms. Jackson appeared on “Real Time With Bill Maher,” where she said, “We’re actually at the point in many areas of this country where, on a hot summer day, the best advice we can give you is don’t go outside. Don’t breathe the air, it might kill you.”
But there is no scientific or medical evidence to support this statement - not now or even when the EPA was organized and the Clean Air Act was amended to its current form in 1970.
Akin to shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater, her inflammatory rhetoric actually serves to undermine all the efforts put forth and money spent by government and industry to clean the air the past 40 years.
In an Oct. 21 Los Angeles Times op-ed, Ms. Jackson essentially accused congressional Republicans of attempting to kill Americans.
“Since the beginning of this year, Republicans in the House have averaged roughly a vote every day the chamber has been in session to undermine the Environmental Protection Agency and our nation’s environmental laws. … How we respond to this assault on our environmental and public health protections will mean the difference between sickness and health - in some cases, life and death - for hundreds of thousands of citizens.”
But the bills the House GOP has passed would do nothing more than delay a few proposed and recently issued EPA regulations pending a cost-benefit analysis, including input from other federal agencies. Long-standing, pre-Obama administration emissions standards would remain in effect without any changes.
An Oct. 16 USA Today op-ed co-signed with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius stated, “There shouldn’t be a single neighborhood where parents have to worry about letting their kids play outside for fear they might get sick. Yet today, one in every 12 Americans - and one in 10 children - suffers from asthma, which is worsened by air pollution.”
The good news is that there aren’t such neighborhoods. In fact, there is no American adult or child whose health is compromised by ambient air quality. Yet reality doesn’t temper Ms. Jackson’s vitriol.
At a September House hearing, Ms. Jackson told Rep. Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts Democrat, “[Airborne] particulate matter causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should.”
And how many people does Ms. Jackson claim suffer avoidable deaths from particulate matter? She told Mr. Markey, “If we could reduce particulate matter to healthy levels, it would have the same impact as finding a cure for cancer in our country.”
But last year, about 570,000 people died from cancer amid a death toll of about 2.2 million. So Ms. Jackson is misleading Congress into thinking that 25 percent of deaths in America are caused by air pollution. The real toll from ambient air, however, is zero - and there is no scientific or medical evidence to the contrary.
All this shrillness is a sign that Ms. Jackson is feeling tremendous political pressure from her efforts to use junk science to shut down the American economy.
She has overreacted by borrowing from the playbook of Clinton EPA administrator and former Obama environment and energy czar Carol M. Browner, who ran roughshod not only over congressional Republicans but also over Al Gore in ramming through costly air-pollution regulations in 1997.
Whatever the reason, however, Ms. Jackson’s nonsensical Earth First!-like scaremongering is hardly befitting of a responsible senior government official who is in charge of a supposedly independent agency that regulates much of the nation’s economy.
Ms. Jackson wants to be unaccountable for her actions and is trying to intimidate her critics into silence and resignation with flagrant falsehoods.
An EPA administrator whose rhetoric is as apocalyptic as that of the most strident environmental extremists - and whose agenda matches - isn’t serving the public. At a time when it is more important than ever to avoid damaging the economy, Ms. Jackson’s actions prove she isn’t fit to serve.
Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them” (Regnery, 2009).
Scientists Discover Arctic Temperature Dataset Seriously Flawed - Significant Fabricated Warming Is The Result
Read here. Over 2,000 previous peer-reviewed studies are severely tainted with bad data from the often used ERA-40 Reanalysis regarding Arctic region temperature trends. Researchers Screen and Simmonds concluded that this dataset should no longer be relied on in future studies, which implies that many past studies indicating Arctic warming are robustly in error.
Essentially, group-think consensus science by “experts” at its worst: “Hey...why don’t we all use the same computer output for every Arctic study.” Brilliant.
“This study explicitly documents a discontinuity in the 40-yr European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Re-Analysis (ERA-40) that leads to significantly exaggerated warming in the Arctic mid- to lower troposphere, and demonstrates that the continuing use of ERA-40 to study Arctic temperature trends is problematic...Decadal or multidecadal Arctic temperature trends calculated over periods that include 1997 are highly inaccurate...It is shown that ERA-40 is poorly suited to studying Arctic temperature trends and their vertical profile, and conclusions based upon them must be viewed with extreme caution. Consequently, its future use for this purpose is discouraged."....."Such an error not only affects the Arctic troposphere, but necessarily must effect the entire northern hemisphere jet stream."[James A. Screen, Ian Simmonds 2011: Journal of Climate]
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New paper finds some Antarctic temperature measurements show false warming of up to 10C (18F)
A paper published today in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology finds that temperature measurements on the Antarctic plateau “are shown to be significantly warm biased by solar radiation,” resulting in temperature measurements up to 10C (18F) warmer than actual temperatures. The authors find that the summer Sun heats the housing for the electronic thermometers causing the warming bias during summer, which is also exacerbated by low wind conditions. Surface temperature measurements are particularly important at the poles, because satellite measurements of temperature do not include data poleward of 82.5 North and 70 South and the only available measurements in these areas are from surface temperature stations. Considering the tiny change in global temperature over the past 161 years of only 0.7C, this newly-discovered large warming bias of up to 10C calls into question data from areas critical to the AGW debate.
Abstract
Observations of atmospheric temperature made on the Antarctic plateau with thermistors housed in naturally (wind) ventilated radiation shields are shown to be significantly warm biased by solar radiation. High incoming solar flux and high surface albedo result in radiation biases in Gill (multiplate) styled shields that can occasionally exceed 10°C in summer in case of low wind speed. Although stronger and more frequent when incoming solar radiation is high, biases exceeding 8C are found even when solar is less than 200 Wm-. Comparing with sonic thermometers, which are not affected by radiation but which are too complex to be routinely used for mean temperature monitoring, commercially available aspirated shields are shown to efficiently protect thermistor measurements from solar radiation biases. Most of the available in situ reports of atmospheric temperature on the Antarctic plateau are from automatic weather stations that use passive shields and are thus likely warm biased in the summer. In spite of low power consumption, deploying aspirated shields at remote locations in such a difficult environment may be a challenge. Bias correction formulae are not easily derived and are obviously shield dependent. On the other hand, because of a strong dependence of bias to wind speed, filtering out temperature reports for wind speed less than a given threshold (about 4- ms- for the shields tested here) may be an efficient way to quality control the data, albeit at the cost of significant data loss and records biased towards high wind speed cases. See more here.
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This is how ice ages begin
By Robert W. Felix
November 4, 2011
Look at this weekend’s Halloween snowstorm. Headlines across the U.S.A. called it “historic.” Historic because it dumped record snowfall on at least 20 cities from Maryland to Maine. Historic because it was the most snow - and the earliest - in many areas since the end of the Civil War.
And we’re not talking mere tenths-of-an-inch here. This snowfall shattered the old records, it obliterated them.
The 14.6 inches of snow that fell in Worcester, Mass., almost doubled its previous single-day October record of 7.5 inches set in 1979, while Hartford’s 12.3 inches crushed the previous single-day October record of 1.7 inches, seven times more than its earlier record.
But with 32 inches (81 cm) of snow, Peru, Massachusetts, won the prize. Two-and-a-half feet! Waist deep! Before Halloween!
This is how ice ages begin.
Not by huge glaciers slowly grinding out of the north, not by temperatures plunging to Siberian levels, but by more and more snow.
Unfortunately, we’re getting that snow.
According to Rutgers University Global Snow Lab, three of the four snowiest winters in the Northern Hemisphere have occurred in the last four years.
Three of the four snowiest Northern Hemisphere winters have occurred since 2008. http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=1
Look at last winter.
Last year’s blizzard-filled winter and unusually cold, wet spring left record snowpack at more than 90 measuring sites across the western United States.
By Memorial Day, epic snowpack had been reported in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington and California.
On California’s Mammoth Mountain, the snowpack measured an incredible 728 percent of normal.
At Oregon’s Mt. Bachelor Ski Resort, snow totals reached 650 inches, far eclipsing the previous record of 606 inches.
In Washington, Crystal Mountain broke its all-time snowfall record for the second time in only 11 years.
And the snow kept coming. In early June, Utah’s Snowbird ski resort reported snowpack at 525 percent of normal
“There are places on the mountain that will probably retain snow all summer long,” said Emily Moench, Sunbird’s communications manager.
Read that again. “There are places on the mountain that will probably retain snow all summer long”!
This is how ice ages begin!
And lest we forget, just a few months ago the Missouri River suffered its second 500-year flood in 15 years. Why? Because of heavy rains and melting record snowpack.
But the news gets even worse.
Glaciers are growing in the United States.
Even though last winter’s historic snowpack has not yet melted, new snow is already piling up in the Rocky Mountains.
In Montana’s Glacier National Park, in Colorado’s Front Range, in Wyoming’s Grand Tetons, the glaciers and snowfields are actually gaining volume.
When Bob Comey, director of the Bridger-Teton National Forest Avalanche Center, compared photographs of Wyoming mountain peaks, he found “significantly” more ice in the Teton Range compared with two years ago.
“I’ve never seen a season with a gain like we’ve seen this summer,” said Comey.
And when scientist Nel Caine checked on Arikaree Glacier 20 miles west of Boulder, Colorado, he measured between 2 and 3 feet of snow from last winter and spring still remaining in late September.
Meanwhile, scientists have measured a “very modest” increase on Sperry Glacier in Montana’s Glacier National Park.
Mind you, these are not the only glaciers growing in the United States. Glaciers are also growing in California, Alaska and Washington state.
This is how ice ages begin.
And our leaders keep screaming about global warming.