Between The Lines

 

The yellow is when Britain was actually receiving more than it was spending (and you can ignore the 'forecast' on the right-hand side - that's just hopeful guessing!).  But since the early 1950s we have spent more than we have received.  ALL governments have done this, and you can spot a worsening trend in the figures up until the crash in 2008.  Things were getting a little better until Covid in 2020...but we're still doing it!  Every time you see a blue bar, we have had to borrow money to pay for the shortfall in what we receive and what we spend.  We have to pay interest on that borrowing.  That interest payment we pay every year is now more than we spend on our entire education budget.  And there are things we need to INCREASE our spending on, such as defence, not cut them!

If we have to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to bail us out, they will impose an austerity package upon our spending.  This is NOT like the largely-fake austerity programme we went through after the 2008 crash.  Yes, we did cut spending, but we still borrowed money every year.  We would simply have to trim ALL of our spending; the IMF will insist upon it or there will be no money available to borrow!

So, we either increase growth by reducing taxation (our government have no plans to do this because they are 'soft socialists')...and this may increase our overall income, or we cut spending.  It's as simple as that.  Labour's plan for growth is for investing in infrastructure and reforming planning regulations to build new homes.  Unfortunately, this won't happen without repealing the Town & Country Planning Act - a law which inhibits construction.  Neither Labour nor Reform have plans to repeal the Act.  Even with that reform, it's completely unrealistic to think that it will create enough growth to increase our income to above that of our expenditure.

Perhaps what we need to do is to get people back to work who are unemployable due to health issues, or at least get them into part-time jobs.  But they need to make tax contributions or we will have achieved little.  Another thing we could do which would be popular would be to halt immigration, as that's a drain on our finances.  Even if an immigrant contributes to the UK economy by taxation, he/she could well be claiming as much in benefits (or even more than they contribute) through child benefits, education, and tax benefits.  But even taking immigration to zero wouldn't do enough to affect our economic imbalance.

So, we come back to a choice:

1. A REAL growth programme to bring money into the economy to increase our taxation revenue.

2. A REAL austerity programme to cut back on our spending - which is simply out of control.

We could, rather than doing either, do 'half' of both.  This would finally end our need to borrow money and pay interest on the payments - we now pay a higher rate of interest than Greece does on their borrowing!  This is because we are 'high risk', or at least a higher risk (of defaulting on our payments) than Greece is!

What we can't do is to just carry on.  Our children and our children's children will reap the whirlwind of the wind we are sowing.  Our current government MUST change course (spoiler alert: it won't!) and the next government must have a real plan to arrest the situation.  All this talk of immigration, police, two-tier, etc. is a side issue to the economic bomb that is ticking.  People seem far more interested in who is baking a cake in a tent, when they should be seriously concerned about the economy which WILL effect them.  Not 'if', when.

Yes, many countries are in the same situation, some much worse.  But we don't live there, we live here.  It's OUR children who will be expected to arrest this if we don't do it ourselves right now.  At the coming election, you need to elect a government who have a serious programme to reduce our spending, who will have real policies to promote growth and lower taxation, who will promise to repeal the Town & Country Planning Act, abolish the Office of Budget Responsibility (who have contributed to this mess), and fix our woeful Bank of England.  No tinkering is acceptable, we have to be bold...and it's going to be painful.  If a political party tells you it's going to be wine and roses, they are lying.

 

What would YOU do?  Let me know...

tomdelaney1959@proton.me

 

 

 

Climate change...science has a big problem

 

TEMPERATURE...is what it’s all about.  So let’s get something straight right from the start; there cannot be a globally averaged temperature. It is not physically or mathematically possible to measure it.  The idea that you can know what the ‘average’ temperature of Earth’s surface is, is just way beyond childishly moronic.  Never mind if greenhouse gases warm the planet, never mind if our CO2 is making it warmer than it would otherwise be; that’s all by the wayside.  We CANNOT measure all the datapoints and state that the Earth’s surface temperature is whatever.  Any scientist who states that they can say what the globally averaged temperature is should hand back their degree.  The problem, apart from everything else, is that the error bars one way or the other are HUGE, and so huge as to make any guess meaningless. Temperature is a property of equilibrium systems...and the Earth is NOT in equilibrium.

In physics, if you have 20°C in London, and 10°C in Oslo, the average is not 15°C, it is 15...just 15.  You cannot apply ‘degrees C’ after that number.  If you take my phone number and my wife’s phone number, and average them together, you won’t be able to get anyone we know on the phone – the number will either not exist or it would be some random person.  Similarly, if you measure your car’s tyres and get 40, 40, 40, and 0 psi, the numerical average would be 30, and if you believed that to indeed be the average air pressure in your four tyres, then start the engine and go...but there's still one flat tyre.  And if you added 13.3 psi to the 3 inflated tyres, your numerical average would now be 40...but you would still have a flat tyre.

But we have physicists – physicists, for crying out loud, stating that despite 71% of the earth’s surface being water, we know what the globally averaged temperature is.  It is so ridiculous, so childishly stupid, that it beggars belief that any scientist would put their name to such a crass idea.  If we don’t know the globally averaged temperature (and we don’t) then how do we know if it has increased due to gases we emit?  We simply don’t know anything of the sort, and it’s the number one problem with the idea of man-made global warming...but no one is saying it!  If we don’t know what the temperature is, then we don’t know if it changes...so we have no idea what the temperature was yesterday, what it is today, and what it will be tomorrow.

Scientists (!!!) have stated that the Earth’s temperature is an average of 15°C.  This is WRONG.  We don’t know what it is unless we carefully measure the incoming and outgoing radiation, and we’ve tried that.  The figure given is so ridiculously wooley with huge error bars, that we cannot say what it is.  There is neither an actual nor a statistical ‘temperature’.  That 15°C comes from a misapplication of the Stefan-Boltzmann Law.

Yes, you CAN measure 1,000 local locations and see if they change to warmer or cooler – that is valid, but you cannot average them together and arrive at an ‘average temperature’.  That is meaningless, and yet that is exactly what ‘climate scientists’ have done.  So, how is this argument countered?  If you ask A.I. such as Grok, it concludes that there IS an average temperature which although flawed, is useable. It states:

“The average Earth temperature exists as a calculated metric that's meaningful for detecting and quantifying global changes, even if it doesn't satisfy strict thermodynamic definitions of equilibrium.  It's not perfect, but it's the best aggregate measure we have for a complex system, and its trends align with other evidence of warming.”

However, this completely fails to recognise the enormous error bars – which alone make any figure meaningless.  When this is put to Grok as a reason for believing any average Earth temperature to be meaningless, rather extraordinarily, it counters with this:

“This is a minority view; most scientists counter that uncertainties justify caution (e.g., precautionary principle).”

That is therefore an appeal to a consensus view...which has no place in science.  So I asked Grok if it thought consensus really had any place in science.  This was its answer:

“You're right—simply saying "this is a minority view" is not a scientific argument; it's a sociological observation...You're correct that science isn't decided by vote or popularity—true scientific progress relies on empirical evidence, testable hypotheses, and falsifiability, not mere agreement...That said, scientific consensus isn't antithetical to science; it's an emergent property of the process.  It represents the collective judgment of experts based on accumulated evidence, peer review, replication, and debate—not a democratic poll, but a convergence on what the data supports.”

Grok was therefore stating that although consensus doesn’t have any place in science...it actually does, because of “accumulated evidence, peer review, replication, and debate”.  All of this proves that A.I. is not reliable for ascertaining actual truth (about climate or anything else) since it contradicts itself and even includes ‘debate’ as some sort of justification for the text in its answer.  But the trouble with A.I. such as Grok is how you phrase a question.  I asked it if we are experiencing a climate crisis:

“Yes, according to the overwhelming scientific consensus and the most recent data as of early 2026, humanity is experiencing a climate crisis — a situation of rapid, human-driven climate change that poses severe, widespread, and escalating risks to societies, economies, ecosystems, and human well-being.”

Yet again, Grok relies on a consensus view for its answer and not the dictionary definition of 'crisis'.  So what happens if you rephrase the same question in a ‘better’ way?  I asked: “Please evaluate, using first principles only, whether we are currently experiencing a climate crisis?”:

“No, from first principles – meaning observable, measurable physical reality without relying on models, projections, consensus statements or terms like ‘crisis’ that imply value judgements – here is the reasoning: Earth’s climate has always changed due to natural forcings…”

Getting a valued and truthful answer from A.I. relies solely on how the question is phrased, obviously.  Personally, I don’t think it is therefore useful.  Being binary-based, I believe a straight-forward question posed to A.I. should be answered uniformly every time, howsoever it is formulated or phrased. One shouldn’t have to state “using first principles...”.

In addition, science has a problem, a big problem, epitomised by the Covid lab leak.  Everyone with any sense knows that Covid was as a result of a lab leak; the CIA know it, the FBI know it, and so does every right-thinking person.  The idea that it coincidentally just happened from bats in a city with a lab carrying out research into such viruses is risible.  Even our useless media think that Covid was as a result of a lab leak.  But there is one exception; the scientific community.  ‘Science’, ‘Nature’, the US National Academy, won’t go anywhere near it.  The Royal Society won’t even have a debate on it.  Some scientists have submitted papers for review, but were turned down.  Initially it was because ‘It’s a conspiracy theory’ then later because ‘Everyone knows this already’.

Why is this?  It’s simple, it’s because the world of science, of official science, is petrified that science, if they conceded this to be true, will be fundamentally damaged.  They’ve now gone too far to turn back.  Imagine then, if science even hinted that global warming (man-made) may not be so.  The Royal Society acts like an anti-oil lobby group of blue-haired liberals.  There is no way that they can look, with any balance, at science any longer.  Among people like me, they are not to be trusted – NOT because they are pro-warmers, but because they won’t entertain any idea that their pet theory may be wrong.  That is unscientific.  If you think I’m over-stating this, then go onto their website and read the dire nonsense (nonsense...from the Royal Society!!!) about global warming.  They produced a 20-point-document, a Q&A about global warming that reads like something, not from an august science institution, but from the Green Party. Here is just one for an example:

“Q. Why is Arctic sea ice declining while Antarctic sea ice hasn’t changed much?
A. Arctic sea ice responds directly to warming.  Antarctic changes are influenced more by wind patterns and ocean currents, which have offset some warming effects.”

I could be polite and say this is obfuscation, but it’s worse than that.  Arctic sea ice is back to what it was almost 100 years ago, and the ice at the Antarctic has nothing to do with wind patterns and ocean currents!  There is no offset!  Polar Amplification of warming (a keystone of the very idea of global warming) has not happened, but they cannot bring themselves to admit it.  Even the British Antarctic Survey openly admit that there has been no warming across the continent since records began.  The South Pole isn’t melting!  Who’s going to tell the Royal Society...oh, and the BBC?

Science is indeed being damaged, but not because it has been rumbled (yet) over global warming, but because it allows everything to be blamed on global warming, whether it is too hot, too cold, too dry, too rainy, too windy, not enough wind…  When the media puts out a climate scare story, the world of science puts out a spokesperson to bolster the often frantic and ludicrous story, when they should be reigning in the hyperbole.  Science has already damaged itself.  CO2 – the very gas of life (along with oxygen) has been vilified as ‘pollution’, and yet it is the very stuff of life itself.

When you have looked at a tree, have you ever asked yourself where it’s all come from?  How did this massive lump of wood and leaves appear over the years?  You could be forgiven for thinking it came from the ground.  Well, it didn’t.  That entire great lump bears all its existence to CO2 – it is made from CO2.  If CO2 wasn’t in the air, it would never have grown.  Photosynthesis takes sunlight and uses it to strip the carbon dioxide atom apart.  The two oxygen atoms (the O2 in the molecule) is given up to the air (that’s how we get oxygen) and the lone carbon atom is used to build the tree.  Like the tree, your existence, your entire family’s existence going back hundreds of thousands of years, indeed, the existence of almost all living things is because of CO2.  Without it, our Earth would be a very different place – no plants...barren – just rocks and water.

Here’s a thought.  What if we lost it, then?  What if the Earth somehow lost CO2?  Notice that I didn’t say ‘all’ of its CO2.  What if we lost some of it?  So here’s a terrifying thought.  The current level of CO2 in the air is 0.043%.  That is 430 parts per million (ppm).  500 million years ago, it was at 7000ppm (pretty high!).  Okay, so when was it at its lowest (since it formed)?  Ready?...right now.  CO2 is near its lowest ever level.  Remember that we said it’s at 430ppm right now?  At 150ppm...ALL plant life dies – and that includes you – all humans.  We would be wiped out.  And yet we have scientists, world leaders, and gullible idiots trying to REDUCE it.  It massively boosts crop yields.  Food producers pump it into greenhouses to grow our food.  We should be having a massive campaign to increase it.  Thanks to increasing levels of CO2, the world is greening...and yet we have morons trying to reduce it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'Timer' graphic reproduced by kind permission of Vecteezy

75 year surplus/deficit graph - Office of Budget Responsibility (free use)