The knee jerk Daily Mail comments on here just demonstrate a total lack of intelligence of some people. It always makes me laugh when people go on about dole scroungers.

Firstly, the welfare system is now so strict for anyone misfortunate to have to claim from it that it is very difficult circumnavigate and sponge.

Secondly, most of our tax goes to pay for the profits of private companies that are parasitical on the public sector. PFI schemes, contracting out of services etc. cost the taxpayer billions each year and as experience has shown these services are oftem poorer or less value for money.

Thirdly, there is the massive corporate tax evasion that the National Audit Office estimates to be £130 billion far greater than the estimated £250 million in benefit fraud that we hear so much about.

Fourthly, we have just seen the biggest transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to UK PLC in living memory – the £1.3 trillion bank bail out. We are all paying for this unless your rich of course through the devaluation of our savings, job losses, spending cuts, wage freezes etc.

So when I hear ignoramuses blurting dole scrounger it makes me very angry.

The above post HuwPeach sums up nicely why it is important that people are up on the Wrekin. Why aren’t we investing in renewable technology like in Germany? Vested interests and huge profits for mining and fossil fuel extraction companies by any chance?

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My main concern is propoganda put up by UK coal supporters such as the twisted melon, who accuse Friends of the Wrekin of lying, when in fact I would expect that when all the coal is mined, that Uk Coal will be the ones found to be lying, when the land is not returned to it’s natural state or improved but used for housing, as the shortwoods site has housing potential for over 300 houses.

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“You’ve admitted previously to being confused – now you’re just attacking people who agree with you.”

Not attacking you Rob, just didn’t want people to assume that twisted melon was 100% accurate by saying that the only area involved is the southern half between candles tip and wrekin golf course, which is what he was implying.

I know they are no where near the wrekin but at the same time they are ruining a lovely ancient wood, i.e the short woods.

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Svante Arrhenius, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, was the first scientist to predict that CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels like coal would cause global warming.

Arrhenius thought, however, that warming would be a good thing and he did not foresee the rapid rise of industrial CO2 emissions of the 20th century.

He thought that it would take 3,000 years for levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to double.

Based on the eye-watering speed with which we are burning up our fossil fuel resources, most scenarios now say it will take about 100 years.

Are you also ‘sceptical’ about Arrhenius’ discoveries, winja?

And if so, on what basis?

The protesters clearly feel the science -whose origins date back to the 1850s and 1860s- is strong enough, and are willing to risk arrest and their physical well-being to influence the way we provide energy for ourselves in future.

It would be great if one climate change denying supporter of open-cast coal mining was willing to risk a response to a couple of rational questions.

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You also referenced Baliunas & Soon.

I quickly discovered a huge amount of information about Willie Soon and his contrarian view that the sun (not CO2) is warming the planet from an excellent online slide-show-audio lecture by a thermal sciences professor at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota, called John Abraham.

(Just google ‘John Abraham’s reply to Lord Christopher Monckton’)

In an exhaustive rebuttal of arguments about anthropogenic climate change promoted by UKIP Deputy leader, Lord Christopher Monckton, (whose position is remarkably similar to yours, winja), John Abraham devotes slides 86-104 to explaining what the overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed academic papers say about the sun’s influence on the earth’s temperature and to who Willie Soon is.

Soon’s published papers have been funded by the American Petroleum Institute, the Mobil Foundation and the Electric Power Foundation (which have a very clear vested interest in this policy debate), and he has also been associated with Western Fuels, Greening Earth Foundation, the Heartland Foundation, the George C. Marshall Institute and Tech Station Central.

I hope Shropshire Star readers find this extra context helpful.

I look forward to hearing from you, winja.

In the meantime, good luck to the protesters!

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