Climate Hysteria Vs Hurricane Resilience
In this newsletter:
1) Germany’s $800 Billion Merkel-Made Climate Policy Disaster
Bloomberg, 21 September 2017
2) GWPF TV: Climate Hysteria Vs Hurricane Resilience
GWPF TV, 22 September 2017
3) Scientists Go After The Media For Highlighting A Study Showing IPCC Climate Models Were Wrong
Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller, 20 September 2017
4) Cut Green Taxes Now! Scientists Admit Overstating Global Warming
Colin Fernandez, Daily Mail, 20 September 2017
5) Graham Stringer MP: Now That’s An Inconvenient Truth
Daily Mail, 20 September 2017
Bloomberg, 21 September 2017
2) GWPF TV: Climate Hysteria Vs Hurricane Resilience
GWPF TV, 22 September 2017
3) Scientists Go After The Media For Highlighting A Study Showing IPCC Climate Models Were Wrong
Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller, 20 September 2017
4) Cut Green Taxes Now! Scientists Admit Overstating Global Warming
Colin Fernandez, Daily Mail, 20 September 2017
5) Graham Stringer MP: Now That’s An Inconvenient Truth
Daily Mail, 20 September 2017
Full details:
1) Germany’s $800 Billion Merkel-Made Climate Policy Disaster
Bloomberg, 21 September 2017
Germany has spent some 650 billion euros ($780 billion) on subsidies for green power in recent decades. But the country’s climate targets “won’t be a near miss but a booming failure.”
By 2030, the eastern German town of Poedelwitz will likely be razed to get at the rich veins of coal beneath its half-timbered houses. The reason: Chancellor Angela Merkel’s effort to steer Germany toward greener energy, which has unexpectedly meant booming demand for dirty coal.
While Merkel aims to wean the country from nuclear power and boost renewable energy, the shift has been slow—Germany’s 140-plus coal-fired plants last year supplied 40 percent of the country’s electricity—and Poedelwitz is flanked by open-pit lignite mines that feed a 2 gigawatt power plant a few miles away.
“This is unparalleled destruction of the environment,” says Jens Hausner, a farmer who has seen 17 of his 20 hectares consumed by digging equipment that looks like something out of a Mad Max movie. In a bit more than a decade, the hulking machines are expected to claw through the town’s 13th-century church and 40 or so remaining homes.
Fine-tuning the shift toward cleaner energy will be near the top of Merkel’s to-do list if she wins a fourth term as chancellor, as expected, in Sept. 24 elections. Germany began subsidizing wind and solar in 2000, but the pace picked up after 2011, when Merkel initiated her “Energy Shift” in reaction to the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima plant.
Merkel aims to cut CO2 emissions by 40 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels, and Germany has spent some 650 billion euros ($780 billion) on subsidies for green power in recent decades. But the country will at best get to 30 percent by 2020, according to Berlin climate researcher Agora Energiewende. Emission reductions “won’t be a near miss but a booming failure,” Agora researchers write. […]
Klaus Schaefer, chief executive officer of German utility Uniper SE, says subsidies have done little to rein in carbon emissions while forcing German companies to abandon valuable equipment. “It’s difficult to see a lot of winners from the energy transition,” Schaefer says.
Consumers bristle at the cost as Germany has the European Union’s second-highest rates for electricity after Denmark. A green surcharge raises German power bills by some 25 percent, to an average of about 29 euro cents (34.6 U.S. cents) per KW-h this year—more than triple the level in the U.S.
Full story
2) GWPF TV: Climate Hysteria Vs Hurricane Resilience
GWPF TV, 22 September 2017
Linking hurricanes to climate change is not based on empirical science and threatens to misdirect policies.
Hurricane Harvey was the first major hurricane to strike the USA since 2005.
The storm made landfall in Houston, causing widespread damage, mostly from flooding.
And then Harvey was followed by Hurricane Irma, which landed in Florida.
The return of hurricanes has excited many climate change campaigners. And even some scientists have blamed both storms on climate change.
But was there anything unusual about these extreme weather events? And can we detect a human influence on these storms, as has been widely reported?
Climatologist professor Judith Curry, says no.
“These aren’t particularly unusual as far as hurricanes go. They’re top-20 kind of storms, but they’re not record-breaking in any way, apart from the overall rainfall from Harvey, which was really more of a fluke from the weather situation that allowed the storm to sit in one place for a very long time. There is nothing particularly unusual about this hurricane season or about Harvey or Irma. The US had an incredibly lucky run of 12 years without a major landfall during this active phase of the hurricane cycle. So we were incredibly lucky. Our luck is now broke. But you know, it’s totally expected.”
The coastal region of the south western US has a long history of hurricanes, the most deadly claiming 8,000 lives in Galveston, Texas, in 1900.
Since then, and in spite of climate change, the human costs caused by hurricanes have fallen.
But around the world, the news media carried stories about climate change worsening hurricane frequency and intensity.
But these claims, too, have no foundation in science.
To watch the full video click here
3) Scientists Go After The Media For Highlighting A Study Showing IPCC Climate Models Were Wrong
Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller, 20 September 2017
Climate scientists have rushed to criticize a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, which found that less warming in the early 20th Century suggests it’s slightly easier — though still difficult — to meet to goals of the Paris accord.
One would think climate scientists, especially those alarmed about warming, would see this as positive, but prominent researchers were quick to express their skepticism of results questioning the integrity of climate models.
Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann told Seeker he was “rather skeptical” of the research. Mann doubted meeting the Paris accord goal of keeping future warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times was impossible without “highly speculative negative emissions technology.”
University of Reading climate scientist Ed Hawkins said media headlines “have misinterpreted” the new study that questioned models relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Hawkins contributed to the IPCC’s major 2013 climate report.
“A recent study by Medhaug et al. analysed the issue of how the models have performed against recent observations at length and largely reconciled the issue,” Hawkins wrote in a blog post.
“An overly simplistic comparison of simulated global temperatures and observations might suggest that the models were warming too much, but this would be wrong for a number of reasons,” Hawkins wrote.
Berkeley Earth climate scientist Zeke Hausfather said the models matched observed global temperatures “quite well.”
Study authors, however, contend the models and observations diverged in the past two decades during what’s been called the “hiatus” — a period of roughly 15 years with little to no rise in global average temperature.
“We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations,” study co-author Myles Allen, a geosystem scientist at the University of Oxford, told The Times on Monday.
“The models end up with a warming which is larger than the observed warming for the current emissions. … So, therefore, they derive a budget which is much lower,” study co-author Pierre Friedlingstein of the University of Exeter said, according to The Washington Post.
The study seemed to confirm claims made by scientists skeptical of catastrophic man-made global warming claims that models were showing more warming than actual observations.
Full story
4) Cut Green Taxes Now! Scientists Admit Overstating Global Warming
Colin Fernandez, Daily Mail, 20 September 2017
Experts call for cost of energy bills to fall after scientists admit overstating global warming
Green taxes on families’ energy bills should be cut in light of a scientific report that said global warming was less drastic than feared, experts claimed yesterday.
Around 10 per cent of a family’s energy bill – roughly £111 a year – is used to subsidise renewable energy, according to official figures.
But critics now say this should be reduced because it is based on outdated information. They point that out the taxes further push up the cost of living as companies and the public sector pass the costs on to consumers. […]
John Constable, [GWPF Energy Editor and] chief executive of the Renewable Energy Foundation, which opposes subsidies to wind farms said: ‘This research has confirmed what a lot of people have known.
‘What is significant is establishment figures are now admitting it. [Policy-makers] should stop panicking and focus on cutting costs to consumers.’ The researchers, in an article in the journal Nature Geoscience, had said the world can emit around 240billion tonnes of carbon dioxide – around 20 years of current emissions – and still meet the 1.5C target.
Michael Grubb, professor of international energy and climate change at University College London, admitted his predictions had been too pessimistic.
‘When the facts change, I change my mind, as [economist John Maynard] Keynes said,’ Dr Grubb told The Times.
‘It’s still likely to be very difficult to achieve these kind of changes quickly enough but we are in a better place than I thought.’
Bjorn Lomborg, author of the Skeptical Environmentalist, said: ‘What we really need to [ask] is how do we spend our money, how much should we spend on cutting CO2, compared to all the other things we should spend on [such as] the NHS. Are we spending too much on achieving too little?’
The Government has ordered a review of energy bills, headed by Oxford academic Professor Dieter Helm, although detailed recommendations of tax cuts do not form part of his brief.
Full post
5) Graham Stringer MP: Now That’s An Inconvenient Truth
Daily Mail, 20 September 2017
Report shows the world isn’t as warm as the green doom-mongers warned. So will energy bills come down? Fat chance, says MP Graham Stringer
Al Gore, the U.S. politician and self-appointed champion of the green cause, famously declared that ‘the science is settled’ on climate change.
It was a claim that revealed far more about the intolerance of the environmental movement than the reality of scientific inquiry.
Research should be founded on critical analysis of the evidence, not on wishful thinking or enforcement of a political ideology.
Now the hollowness of Gore’s assertion is exposed again by a vital new report that shows how the apocalyptic predictions of the green lobby have been exaggerated.
In a study just published by the respected journal Nature Geoscience, a group of British academics reveals that the immediate threat from global warming is lower than previously thought, because the computer models used by climate change experts are flawed.
According to these models, temperatures across the world should now be at least 1.3 degrees above the mid-19th century average, which is taken as a base level in such calculations. But the British report demonstrates that the rise is only between 0.9 and 1 degree.
That discrepancy is ‘a big deal’, says Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University, one of the authors of the study. He is absolutely right.
The importance of this new investigation cannot be downplayed.
It shows that so many of the assumptions behind the imposition of the fashionable eco agenda — such as the creation of vast, subsidised wind farms or the levying of green taxes — are wrong. Yet the environmental warriors show not a shred of embarrassment over these new findings.
The BBC has given a presenter a dressing down and warned him about his future conduct on his social media accounts following comments on Twitter
Arrogance
There has been no word of apology, no sign of humility. Remarkably, they carry on preaching their diehard gospel. With their habitual arrogance, they argue that the lower levels of global warming mean that we now have even more time to implement their radical policies.
They don’t seem to have considered for a moment that we might consider throttling back on the extreme measures we’re told must be carried out to ‘save the planet’. They display such certainty because environmentalism increasingly resembles a religious creed.
That has certainly been my experience as a Labour MP, who, because of my own knowledge of science, has long been sceptical about the climate change doctrine.
This outlook has made me a target for green campaigners, who seem to think that no voices should be heard but their own.
A disgraceful example of this impulse towards censorship came recently from the geneticist and BBC presenter Dr Adam Rutherford, who hosts the Radio 4 programme Inside Science.
Taking on the role of latter-day witch-finder, Dr Rutherford recently launched a campaign to prevent my re-appointment to the Science and Technology Committee of the Commons, on the grounds of my scepticism about climate change.
Through social media, he urged his followers to show their ‘righteous indignation’ by writing to their MPs.
‘It is not OK to have science so misrepresented in a democracy,’ he declared.
It was outrageous for a BBC presenter to behave in this manner. The Corporation is meant to be an impartial broadcaster, not a political lobbyist.
Dr Rutherford has absolutely no business trying to dictate who sits on independent parliamentary committees.
Moreover, I do not accept his accusation that I somehow ‘misrepresent’ science.
I actually have a degree in chemistry from Sheffield University, and before I became a full-time politician I worked as an analytical chemist in the plastics industry.
The BBC has now given him a dressing down and warned him about his future conduct on his social media accounts.
That personalised campaign is not the first time I have had unhappy dealings with the BBC, which has long been a mouthpiece for environmental propaganda.
On one occasion, I made a programme with Conservative MP Peter Lilley and this paper’s writer Quentin Letts about the way the Meteorological Office has succumbed to the green orthodoxy.
Though the programme was broadcast, the BBC Trust subsequently decided it had breached editorial guidelines on accuracy and impartiality, which meant it could not be broadcast again, and cannot be found online.
Scandal
Like so many other public institutions, the BBC has adopted its eco posture without any genuine scientific literacy. Most BBC executives and reporters would be clueless about the second law of thermodynamics.
In this highly politicised field, adherence to the correct dogma seems to count more than an open mind.
But it was precisely my willingness to question received wisdom that led to my interest in the subject of global warming.
I was particularly intrigued by the infamous scandal at the Climatic Research Unit in the University of East Anglia in 2009, when a series of leaked emails appeared to show that scientists there had distorted historical research to suit the green narrative. As a member of the Science and Technology Select Committee, I followed the saga closely.
I was therefore disappointed when my colleagues on the Committee, having conducted an inquiry into the ‘Climategate’ scandal, did not come to a more robust conclusion about the scale of the scientific manipulation at the unit. Too many of them seemed to be following the herd.
But, as the latest report demonstrates, the weakness of the global warmists’ case is now obvious. This is not just a question of misreading data. It is essentially a matter of broken computer models and a determination to ignore any inconvenient truths.
Phoney
If the environmentalists had it right, we would now be facing global catastrophe, a scorched Earth and rapidly rising sea levels. None of that has happened.
The International Panel on Climate Change warned that the Himalayan glaciers were melting away, a claim that it later admitted was false.
Similarly, it was argued that global warming would bring a new wave of malaria sweeping across the world. The opposite has taken place: global malaria rates are falling.
The triumph of the environmentalists has had an enormous and costly impact on our daily lives. Successive governments have brought in green taxes, hiked fuel duties and pushed up energy bills.
The real price is paid not by the eco justice warriors wallowing in their phoney moral superiority, but by people like those in my Blackley and Broughton constituency, who struggle to meet their household running costs.
An extra £100 a year on electricity and gas might not be much to a BBC presenter, but it is a heck of a sum for someone who lives in the Harpurhey ward of Blackley, which was named in 2013 as the most deprived neighbourhood in England.
Experts also told us we should buy diesel cars because they would help us cut our CO2 emissions. Now the same vehicles are blamed for killing thousands a year with pollution.
Crucially, soaring energy costs for businesses thanks to green initiatives, especially in the manufacturing sector, cause real damage to the British economy by driving jobs overseas to India and China, both countries that are building coal-fired power stations at an astonishing rate.
This week’s scientific report should mark a return to environmental sanity in place of the current dangerous green fundamentalism.
But given my own experience, I wouldn’t bet on it.
Bloomberg, 21 September 2017
Germany has spent some 650 billion euros ($780 billion) on subsidies for green power in recent decades. But the country’s climate targets “won’t be a near miss but a booming failure.”
By 2030, the eastern German town of Poedelwitz will likely be razed to get at the rich veins of coal beneath its half-timbered houses. The reason: Chancellor Angela Merkel’s effort to steer Germany toward greener energy, which has unexpectedly meant booming demand for dirty coal.
While Merkel aims to wean the country from nuclear power and boost renewable energy, the shift has been slow—Germany’s 140-plus coal-fired plants last year supplied 40 percent of the country’s electricity—and Poedelwitz is flanked by open-pit lignite mines that feed a 2 gigawatt power plant a few miles away.
“This is unparalleled destruction of the environment,” says Jens Hausner, a farmer who has seen 17 of his 20 hectares consumed by digging equipment that looks like something out of a Mad Max movie. In a bit more than a decade, the hulking machines are expected to claw through the town’s 13th-century church and 40 or so remaining homes.
Fine-tuning the shift toward cleaner energy will be near the top of Merkel’s to-do list if she wins a fourth term as chancellor, as expected, in Sept. 24 elections. Germany began subsidizing wind and solar in 2000, but the pace picked up after 2011, when Merkel initiated her “Energy Shift” in reaction to the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima plant.
Merkel aims to cut CO2 emissions by 40 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels, and Germany has spent some 650 billion euros ($780 billion) on subsidies for green power in recent decades. But the country will at best get to 30 percent by 2020, according to Berlin climate researcher Agora Energiewende. Emission reductions “won’t be a near miss but a booming failure,” Agora researchers write. […]
Klaus Schaefer, chief executive officer of German utility Uniper SE, says subsidies have done little to rein in carbon emissions while forcing German companies to abandon valuable equipment. “It’s difficult to see a lot of winners from the energy transition,” Schaefer says.
Consumers bristle at the cost as Germany has the European Union’s second-highest rates for electricity after Denmark. A green surcharge raises German power bills by some 25 percent, to an average of about 29 euro cents (34.6 U.S. cents) per KW-h this year—more than triple the level in the U.S.
Full story
2) GWPF TV: Climate Hysteria Vs Hurricane Resilience
GWPF TV, 22 September 2017
Linking hurricanes to climate change is not based on empirical science and threatens to misdirect policies.
Hurricane Harvey was the first major hurricane to strike the USA since 2005.
The storm made landfall in Houston, causing widespread damage, mostly from flooding.
And then Harvey was followed by Hurricane Irma, which landed in Florida.
The return of hurricanes has excited many climate change campaigners. And even some scientists have blamed both storms on climate change.
But was there anything unusual about these extreme weather events? And can we detect a human influence on these storms, as has been widely reported?
Climatologist professor Judith Curry, says no.
“These aren’t particularly unusual as far as hurricanes go. They’re top-20 kind of storms, but they’re not record-breaking in any way, apart from the overall rainfall from Harvey, which was really more of a fluke from the weather situation that allowed the storm to sit in one place for a very long time. There is nothing particularly unusual about this hurricane season or about Harvey or Irma. The US had an incredibly lucky run of 12 years without a major landfall during this active phase of the hurricane cycle. So we were incredibly lucky. Our luck is now broke. But you know, it’s totally expected.”
The coastal region of the south western US has a long history of hurricanes, the most deadly claiming 8,000 lives in Galveston, Texas, in 1900.
Since then, and in spite of climate change, the human costs caused by hurricanes have fallen.
But around the world, the news media carried stories about climate change worsening hurricane frequency and intensity.
But these claims, too, have no foundation in science.
To watch the full video click here
3) Scientists Go After The Media For Highlighting A Study Showing IPCC Climate Models Were Wrong
Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller, 20 September 2017
Climate scientists have rushed to criticize a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, which found that less warming in the early 20th Century suggests it’s slightly easier — though still difficult — to meet to goals of the Paris accord.
One would think climate scientists, especially those alarmed about warming, would see this as positive, but prominent researchers were quick to express their skepticism of results questioning the integrity of climate models.
Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann told Seeker he was “rather skeptical” of the research. Mann doubted meeting the Paris accord goal of keeping future warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times was impossible without “highly speculative negative emissions technology.”
University of Reading climate scientist Ed Hawkins said media headlines “have misinterpreted” the new study that questioned models relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Hawkins contributed to the IPCC’s major 2013 climate report.
“A recent study by Medhaug et al. analysed the issue of how the models have performed against recent observations at length and largely reconciled the issue,” Hawkins wrote in a blog post.
“An overly simplistic comparison of simulated global temperatures and observations might suggest that the models were warming too much, but this would be wrong for a number of reasons,” Hawkins wrote.
Berkeley Earth climate scientist Zeke Hausfather said the models matched observed global temperatures “quite well.”
Study authors, however, contend the models and observations diverged in the past two decades during what’s been called the “hiatus” — a period of roughly 15 years with little to no rise in global average temperature.
“We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations,” study co-author Myles Allen, a geosystem scientist at the University of Oxford, told The Times on Monday.
“The models end up with a warming which is larger than the observed warming for the current emissions. … So, therefore, they derive a budget which is much lower,” study co-author Pierre Friedlingstein of the University of Exeter said, according to The Washington Post.
The study seemed to confirm claims made by scientists skeptical of catastrophic man-made global warming claims that models were showing more warming than actual observations.
Full story
4) Cut Green Taxes Now! Scientists Admit Overstating Global Warming
Colin Fernandez, Daily Mail, 20 September 2017
Experts call for cost of energy bills to fall after scientists admit overstating global warming
Green taxes on families’ energy bills should be cut in light of a scientific report that said global warming was less drastic than feared, experts claimed yesterday.
Around 10 per cent of a family’s energy bill – roughly £111 a year – is used to subsidise renewable energy, according to official figures.
But critics now say this should be reduced because it is based on outdated information. They point that out the taxes further push up the cost of living as companies and the public sector pass the costs on to consumers. […]
John Constable, [GWPF Energy Editor and] chief executive of the Renewable Energy Foundation, which opposes subsidies to wind farms said: ‘This research has confirmed what a lot of people have known.
‘What is significant is establishment figures are now admitting it. [Policy-makers] should stop panicking and focus on cutting costs to consumers.’ The researchers, in an article in the journal Nature Geoscience, had said the world can emit around 240billion tonnes of carbon dioxide – around 20 years of current emissions – and still meet the 1.5C target.
Michael Grubb, professor of international energy and climate change at University College London, admitted his predictions had been too pessimistic.
‘When the facts change, I change my mind, as [economist John Maynard] Keynes said,’ Dr Grubb told The Times.
‘It’s still likely to be very difficult to achieve these kind of changes quickly enough but we are in a better place than I thought.’
Bjorn Lomborg, author of the Skeptical Environmentalist, said: ‘What we really need to [ask] is how do we spend our money, how much should we spend on cutting CO2, compared to all the other things we should spend on [such as] the NHS. Are we spending too much on achieving too little?’
The Government has ordered a review of energy bills, headed by Oxford academic Professor Dieter Helm, although detailed recommendations of tax cuts do not form part of his brief.
Full post
5) Graham Stringer MP: Now That’s An Inconvenient Truth
Daily Mail, 20 September 2017
Report shows the world isn’t as warm as the green doom-mongers warned. So will energy bills come down? Fat chance, says MP Graham Stringer
Graham Stringer, Labour MP and member of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. He is a member of the GWPF's Board of Trustees.
It was a claim that revealed far more about the intolerance of the environmental movement than the reality of scientific inquiry.
Research should be founded on critical analysis of the evidence, not on wishful thinking or enforcement of a political ideology.
Now the hollowness of Gore’s assertion is exposed again by a vital new report that shows how the apocalyptic predictions of the green lobby have been exaggerated.
In a study just published by the respected journal Nature Geoscience, a group of British academics reveals that the immediate threat from global warming is lower than previously thought, because the computer models used by climate change experts are flawed.
According to these models, temperatures across the world should now be at least 1.3 degrees above the mid-19th century average, which is taken as a base level in such calculations. But the British report demonstrates that the rise is only between 0.9 and 1 degree.
That discrepancy is ‘a big deal’, says Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University, one of the authors of the study. He is absolutely right.
The importance of this new investigation cannot be downplayed.
It shows that so many of the assumptions behind the imposition of the fashionable eco agenda — such as the creation of vast, subsidised wind farms or the levying of green taxes — are wrong. Yet the environmental warriors show not a shred of embarrassment over these new findings.
The BBC has given a presenter a dressing down and warned him about his future conduct on his social media accounts following comments on Twitter
Arrogance
There has been no word of apology, no sign of humility. Remarkably, they carry on preaching their diehard gospel. With their habitual arrogance, they argue that the lower levels of global warming mean that we now have even more time to implement their radical policies.
They don’t seem to have considered for a moment that we might consider throttling back on the extreme measures we’re told must be carried out to ‘save the planet’. They display such certainty because environmentalism increasingly resembles a religious creed.
That has certainly been my experience as a Labour MP, who, because of my own knowledge of science, has long been sceptical about the climate change doctrine.
This outlook has made me a target for green campaigners, who seem to think that no voices should be heard but their own.
A disgraceful example of this impulse towards censorship came recently from the geneticist and BBC presenter Dr Adam Rutherford, who hosts the Radio 4 programme Inside Science.
Taking on the role of latter-day witch-finder, Dr Rutherford recently launched a campaign to prevent my re-appointment to the Science and Technology Committee of the Commons, on the grounds of my scepticism about climate change.
Through social media, he urged his followers to show their ‘righteous indignation’ by writing to their MPs.
‘It is not OK to have science so misrepresented in a democracy,’ he declared.
It was outrageous for a BBC presenter to behave in this manner. The Corporation is meant to be an impartial broadcaster, not a political lobbyist.
Dr Rutherford has absolutely no business trying to dictate who sits on independent parliamentary committees.
Moreover, I do not accept his accusation that I somehow ‘misrepresent’ science.
I actually have a degree in chemistry from Sheffield University, and before I became a full-time politician I worked as an analytical chemist in the plastics industry.
The BBC has now given him a dressing down and warned him about his future conduct on his social media accounts.
That personalised campaign is not the first time I have had unhappy dealings with the BBC, which has long been a mouthpiece for environmental propaganda.
On one occasion, I made a programme with Conservative MP Peter Lilley and this paper’s writer Quentin Letts about the way the Meteorological Office has succumbed to the green orthodoxy.
Though the programme was broadcast, the BBC Trust subsequently decided it had breached editorial guidelines on accuracy and impartiality, which meant it could not be broadcast again, and cannot be found online.
Scandal
Like so many other public institutions, the BBC has adopted its eco posture without any genuine scientific literacy. Most BBC executives and reporters would be clueless about the second law of thermodynamics.
In this highly politicised field, adherence to the correct dogma seems to count more than an open mind.
But it was precisely my willingness to question received wisdom that led to my interest in the subject of global warming.
I was particularly intrigued by the infamous scandal at the Climatic Research Unit in the University of East Anglia in 2009, when a series of leaked emails appeared to show that scientists there had distorted historical research to suit the green narrative. As a member of the Science and Technology Select Committee, I followed the saga closely.
I was therefore disappointed when my colleagues on the Committee, having conducted an inquiry into the ‘Climategate’ scandal, did not come to a more robust conclusion about the scale of the scientific manipulation at the unit. Too many of them seemed to be following the herd.
But, as the latest report demonstrates, the weakness of the global warmists’ case is now obvious. This is not just a question of misreading data. It is essentially a matter of broken computer models and a determination to ignore any inconvenient truths.
Phoney
If the environmentalists had it right, we would now be facing global catastrophe, a scorched Earth and rapidly rising sea levels. None of that has happened.
The International Panel on Climate Change warned that the Himalayan glaciers were melting away, a claim that it later admitted was false.
Similarly, it was argued that global warming would bring a new wave of malaria sweeping across the world. The opposite has taken place: global malaria rates are falling.
The triumph of the environmentalists has had an enormous and costly impact on our daily lives. Successive governments have brought in green taxes, hiked fuel duties and pushed up energy bills.
The real price is paid not by the eco justice warriors wallowing in their phoney moral superiority, but by people like those in my Blackley and Broughton constituency, who struggle to meet their household running costs.
An extra £100 a year on electricity and gas might not be much to a BBC presenter, but it is a heck of a sum for someone who lives in the Harpurhey ward of Blackley, which was named in 2013 as the most deprived neighbourhood in England.
Experts also told us we should buy diesel cars because they would help us cut our CO2 emissions. Now the same vehicles are blamed for killing thousands a year with pollution.
Crucially, soaring energy costs for businesses thanks to green initiatives, especially in the manufacturing sector, cause real damage to the British economy by driving jobs overseas to India and China, both countries that are building coal-fired power stations at an astonishing rate.
This week’s scientific report should mark a return to environmental sanity in place of the current dangerous green fundamentalism.
But given my own experience, I wouldn’t bet on it.
The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
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