Roamer's column

I'm sorry, but if you are the least bit acquainted with the Old Testament, or watched Beyond the Fringe on stage ("but my brother Esau" - pronounced Easoh - is a hairy man and I am a smooth man") that's a terrible pun. Anyway, more to the point, the government's successful bid to establish the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) in Malta should delight us for a number of reasons, the first being the fact itself.

By virtue of its placement in the Mediterranean, Malta has long been in the centre of the asylum and immigration phenomenon. Cynically, one could remark that we have not lost our strategic position, but whereas this was coveted by others in the past for imperial reasons, it has now tended to be ignored in the context of illegal immigration and asylum-seekers.

Our insistence on keeping these issues firmly on the EU's agenda has finally paid off; landing EASO - against competition - will reverse a lacuna that existed until now.

In short we had a case to make and made it. We should be pleased with EASO's residence in Malta because this means a far greater commitment by the EU to find faster solutions to what has sometimes felt like an intractable problem.

It would not be amiss to remark that agencies like EASO do not fall from trees. The office was set up here because we backed our bid to host it by offering high quality premises on the Valletta Waterfront, parading our excellent conference and hotel facilities, showing off the excellence of our ICT services and the vast spread of our broadband connectivity, pointing to our multilingual capabilities and at an education system for the scores of people 'posted' to this office.

We highlighted the pleasure of living in Malta, the island's accessibility, our excellent human resources, our commitment to the development of the Union's asylum and immigration policy (we've lived with the problem for years) and a world class health service available to EASO employees and others required to attend EASO conferences and briefings. And we lobbied vigorously, from Malta, and in Brussels itself; none more, I imagine, than Malta's Permanent Representative to the EU, Richard Cachia Caruana.

As a matter of mathematical interest, Malta received 6.4 applications per 1,000 inhabitants to the EU average of 0.5 applications last year, and the largest number of asylum applications per capita than any industrialised country in the world.

Relative to its size Malta received 148 times the number of asylum applications per capita than Ireland and Sweden; 80 times more than France and Germany; 250 times more than Belgium and the Czech Republic and many more times than that compared with Bulgaria, Romania and Lithuania.

On top of all the lobbying and yet an essential part of it, we made certain these highlights were rammed home and the statistics read via an impressive brochure for our friends.

CRU hacked to pieces

The British High Commissioner to Malta, Louise Stanton, seems to think, and is not alone in thinking, that the world will warm by a further four degrees Centigrade by 2060. "The future security and prosperity of our countries look bleak, with many more natural disasters brewing on the horizon, like the recent tropical storm in the Philippines... imagine the future effects small island states like Malta could experience," she said. These endless terror tales have become par for the course.

The Times dutifully displayed a map Stanton presented to George Pullicino "illustrating the devastating climatic impacts this increase in world temperature would have on Malta and the world by 2060". Her woeful story may have impressed many, but I wonder why she is going to all this trouble? Let me be generous and think it is the advice of one concerned friend to another. Let me also remark that she ignored altogether what has been appearing on websites everywhere.

There exists in the UK a Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. It is not so much about the CRU itself I aim to write but a hacker's revelation of the sordid goings-on in that august and, it now seems, prevaricating seat of scientific learning. Thousands of e-mails hacked from the portals of the CRU are indicating that research-driven fraud on the subject of global warming has been taking place there on a grand scale for years; on the scale of grand larceny to be frank. These e-mails have been visited by many millions, some estimate 20 million and growing.

One sent by Prof. Phil Jones, director of CRU, moans about sceptics having "been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send it to anyone"; sounds dishonest enough, but anodyne compared with others that are chilling in their deceitfulness. Why would Jones do that, delete the file, I mean?

If it is euphemism you are after, try this; also courtesy of Phil Jones: "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published e-mails do not read well," which is rather like Chamberlain saying that Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia was a tad inconvenient.

Dozens of apple carts have been upset, among these, one groaning under the weight of the UN fruit stand. For if the content of these e-mails is not false - and no evidence has been offered to suggest the contrary - the famed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) Report of 2007, which took on board research carried out by the CRU, should be seriously concerned for being led astray by meretricious data from what has been described as 'the largest archive of global temperature data in the world'. But of course it won't be. The IPPC is, as Lady Macbeth pointed out to her murdering husband, "in it too deep".

No qualms from the CRU heads' department have been noticed. Its reaction to the contents of the hacked data was what mine would be to an invitation to shake hands with a frenzied Rottweiler: reluctance to the point of refusal. In my case I suggest, members of the jury, that my aversion is perfectly normal; Jones's reservations, the CRU's dissimulation, the circumlocutions of the mainstream media (place the BBC at the top of the list) verge on the criminal; in fact, a public inquiry has been set up.

This scandal burst like an over-suppurated wound just before Obama indicated he would join 160 other leaders and make the trip to Copenhagen next week. Follow Copenhagen carefully. Trillions of dollars are at stake and a let's-cool-a-planet-that-needs-no-cooling industry in which I understand the chad-scarred Al Gore has a personal interest, is waiting to pocket the money. Talk of Al Gore, how ironic that his book, The Inconvenient Truth has been overtaken by so many convenient lies.

I trust our Prime Minister has been kept au courant. Malta has enough financial problems without adding a massive GW bill to them. GW sceptics have been challenging the GW consensus for decades. Many in the highest echelons of science (on GW) are now being asked to answer the no-nonsense accusation that they are nothing but fraudsters.

The idea was good

The residents who forced their local council to withdraw its project for an underground car park beneath the picturesque and popular square at Balluta Bay should not assume they had the best of the argument. The local council won that but its choice of site angered too many people.

In Malta we have two options when it comes to structures; to build upwards and attract the ire of those irked by 10-storey buildings, or to go underground. The decision of St Julian's council to dig a deep hole into which cars can burrow was manifestly correct.

So correct that I suggest we should all be thinking underground car parks in towns where roads are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of vehicles they currently carry. Think another 30,000 cars - a mild estimate - by 2020. We need to dig deep into the bowels of the earth so that (a) residents can park in their streets and (b) roads generally will have fewer cars parked on them.

The next step in the modernisation of Malta's infrastructure development is an underground system of rail traffic criss-crossing the island at various levels.

The virtues of such a transport system ought to be self-evident. By disgorging passengers in Malta's town centres and village squares, more of these can become traffic free; pollution from car emissions will be drastically diminished; inter-urban and suburban communications will be swift and clean. And so on.

If I recall, this idea has already been mooted by Angelo Xuereb. It has the virtue of providing the construction industry with work for the next 20 years; we can call on the EU to provide funds-for-tunnels; and the project will create thousands of jobs - to excavate millions of tons of rock, slap tiles at stations, install lighting systems, ditto escalators, set up retail outlets et many other ceterae.

So, yes; the St Julian's council did not get the square at Balluta Bay but it has highlighted an urgent need for new approaches to a traffic problem that will get far, far worse unless we get cracking with those excavators.