Gimme Dem Global Warming Blues

Christopher Booker is the global warming climate change reporter for The Daily Mail And, yes, this about his book. However, Booker's column also focuses on recent events, as well as the not-so-recent.

The devastating book which debunks climate change
Just imagine if we learned we were about to be landed with the biggest bill in the history of the world - simply on the say-so of a group of scientists. Would we not want to be absolutely sure that those scientists were 100 per cent dependable in what they were saying?

Should we not then be extremely worried - and even very angry - if it emerged that those scientists had been conspiring among themselves to fiddle the evidence for what they were telling us?

This is the extraordinary position in which we find ourselves thanks to news reported in Saturday's Daily Mail which has raised huge question marks over the reliability of the science behind the theory of global warming.

Hundreds of emails leaked from the internal computer system of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia show how a small group of highly influential senior British and U.S. scientists have for years been secretly discussing ways in which their evidence could be manipulated to make the threat posed by global warming sound much worse than it is.

To place the significance of these revelations into context, let us recall how exactly a year ago, Parliament passed, virtually unopposed, what was far and away the most expensive new law ever put before it. On the Government's own figures, the Climate Change Act is going to cost Britain £18 billion [US$29 billion ed.] a year - that's £720 [US$1198.13 ed.] for every household in the country - every year from now until 2050.

We shall be paying this through soaring 'green taxes' on everything from air travel to the £3,300 [US$5,490.58 ed.]tax being proposed on each new car; through rocketing fuel bills to subsidise thousands more wind turbines and to pay for removing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations.

In fact, the true cost of the act, if complied with to the letter, would certainly be far higher, because what it lays down is that, over the next 40 years, we must cut our emissions of carbon dioxide by over 80 per cent.

Pretty well every aspect of our lives in today's industrialised society involves emitting carbon dioxide - and short of some technological revolution as yet undreamed of, the only way we could meet that target would be to close almost every part of our economy. Yet, astonishingly, scarcely a single MP even questioned the need for such a law; only three voted against it.
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We all know the basic thesis: that thanks to mankind burning fossil fuels, the world's temperatures are hurtling upwards, and that unless the most drastic action is taken, we can look forward to an unprecedented global catastrophe - droughts, hurricanes, killer heatwaves, melting icecaps, sea levels rising to the point where many of the world's major cities are submerged.

All this is what has been predicted by the expensive computer models relied on by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC), which the politicians tell us we must trust as the ultimate source of authority on the future of the world's climate.

On every side we are told that 'the science is settled', that '2,500 of the world's top climate scientists' agree that these terrifying predictions will all come true unless we take the most drastic action. So carried away have they all been by this belief that scarcely a single politician dares question it.

Yet the oddest thing which has become increasingly evident in the past year or two is the fact that almost none of these things is happening, certainly not in the way those computer models have been predicting. Although carbon dioxide levels have continued to increase, temperatures have not been rising in the way the computer models all agree they should have done.

In the past decade, the overall trend of temperatures has been not upwards, but down.

The hard evidence tells us that there have actually been fewer major droughts, hurricanes and heatwaves in recent years than there were in earlier decades.

There is no less ice at the Earth's poles today than there was 30 years ago. Sea levels may have been rising very slowly, but no faster than they have been for 200 years.

In other words, as a growing army of genuine experts across the world has been trying to tell us, there is not a single item on the list of apocalyptic predictions we have been fed for so long by the IPCC and the likes of Al Gore which is not being called into question by what is actually happening to the world's climate.

The scientists who have been challenging almost every aspect of the official theory on global warming have ranged from world-ranking physicists such as Professor Richard Lindzen, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Professors Will Happer and Freeman Dyson of Princeton University, to 700 scientists of many disciplines.

These include Nobel Prize-winners and former contributors to the IPCC, who signed a 'minority report' of the U.S. Senate's environment committee.

It is beginning to look as though the panic over global warming, which has our politicians so in its grip, may have been no more than a colossal scare story - to line up alongside all those other scares which have raced in and out of the headlines in recent decades, such as the 'Millennium Bug', which at midnight on December 31, 1999, was going to crash the world's computers.

So the real question which arises from this most terrifying of all scare scenarios is: why did the world's politicians get swept along by it?

One of the more suspicious features of the man-made global warming theory is precisely this extraordinary pressure, which has been built up to insist the evidence for it is so overwhelming that it is a moral crime to question it.

For several years, anyone daring to doubt the theory - not least some of the world's most eminent climate scientists - has been vilified as a 'denier', to be compared with those who try to deny the historical reality of Hitler's Holocaust.

Al Gore was one of the first to condemn as 'flat earthers' anyone who was sceptical of his reckless scaremongering, likening such people to the cranks who believe the Moon landings were all somehow 'faked on a movie lot in Arizona' (delightfully, among the scientists who have come out as 'climate sceptics' are two of the U.S. astronauts who did land on the Moon, Dr Buzz Aldrin and Dr Jack Schmitt).

In the scientific world, notably in the U.S. and Europe, it has long been a major scandal that those daring to doubt the official orthodoxy on global warming face ostracism from their academic colleagues, have had research funding withdrawn and have not been allowed to publish their papers in the leading scientific journals.
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It gets better. Read the rest at The Daily Mail

"I agree with Professor Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who said: 'future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age'”. ― Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic

al-Gore's scientists were too busy spinning to comment.