Climate scientist Kevin Anderson talks to Manchester’s full council about turning climate rhetoric into reality, steady state and why it’s too late in the day to be pinning our hopes on technologies 

Weds Jan 30: Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at Manchester University, was invited to give a 30 minute presentation to Manchester’s full council meeting today. The great hall was packed out with 90+ councillors and over 35 members of the public. Here’s what happened next…

As usual, Professor Kevin Anderson delivered a no-nonsense presentation about what the science is telling us about climate change – that it’s coming faster and harder than even scientists thought – and what we are doing to stop it (very little basically). In fact, we are producing more carbon every year. Anderson kicked off by saying that whilst a 2 degree rise in global temperature was seen as acceptable twenty…

TV’s news comedy show, Mock the Week, has a semi-regular and very funny segment involving Hugh Dennis and one of the other panelists. In this segment, the other panelist will read lines from a senior political figure while Hugh Dennis delivers his interpretation of what the politician really means.

I had the same feeling this morning as I watched David Cameron’s much-trailed speech on the EU. BBC News showed the speech in full, and afterward commentators made much of the obvious and very unsurprising points of the speech, namely that the speech was Cameron’s (rather desperate) attempt to defuse the threat from UKIP and his own backbenchers and to persuade europhobic voters to support him in the next general election by dangling the promise of an ‘in/out’ referendum in 2017.

Some also highlighted the obvious fact that by cravenly giving a 2017 date for the referendum, he was condemning…

I’ve written before about the contempt shown by some executives of the NHS Trusts involved in the South West Pay Terms and Conditions Consortium (SWC), when they think nobody will find out, for the hardworking staff providing healthcare to patients and for the unions that represent them.

As I wrote back in September, Malcolm Cassells, Financial Director at Salisbury NHS Trust, wrote an email to a contact that conveyed a disregard for the wellbeing of health-workers, a sense that they should consider themselves lucky to have such ‘generous’ benefits, and a contempt for unions that are ‘not as stupid as they look’.

It appears that Salisbury may be a hotbed of such attitudes, mixed with a generous helping of greed and hypocrisy. A different FOI request has revealed emails between other executives from that Trust that betray a flippancy about the effects of the cartel’s aims on staff.

Flippant…