GWPF Newsletter: Government backs down on gas boiler fines after Steve Baker warns of consumer revolt

 

Banning all gas boilers by 2035 is 'simply not going to happen' 

In this newsletter:

1) Government backs down on gas boiler fines after Steve Baker warns of consumer revolt
Daily Mail, 25 May 2021

2) Banning all gas boilers by 2035 is 'simply not going to happen'
Daily Mail 25 May 2021

 
3) Government Net Zero plans could make millions of British homes unsellable 
The Daily Telegraph, 25 May 2021 

4) Ministers reject calls from Climate Change Committee to return to EU carbon market
The Daily Telegraph, 24 May 2021
  
5) Poland refuses to comply with EU order on coal mine
The Daily Telegraph, 25 May 2021

6) Solar power's decade of falling costs is thrown Into reverse
Bloomberg, 23 May 2021
  
7) New EPA Climate Change Indicator is deceptive
Ralph Alexander, GWPF 25 May 2021

8) Environmental threats based on invisible, remote subjects to create fear: Greenpeace co-founder
The Epoch Times, 22 May 2021
 
9) Fritz Vahrenholt: Climate Dawn
Tichys Einblick, May 2021

Full details:

1) Government backs down on gas boiler fines after Steve Baker warns of consumer revolt
Daily Mail, 25 May 2021
 
The Government has ruled out the idea of fining those who refuse to get rid of their gas boiler.
 

Former minister Steve Baker MP, pictured, warned that the ban on gas boilers could spark consumer anger
 
Gas boilers will be banned within 14 years under the Government’s plans to tackle climate change.
 
Ministers are discussing a cut-off date of 2035, after which the installation of conventional gas boilers will be outlawed.
 
The target date, to be included in a new Heat and Buildings Strategy next month, comes amid growing concern about the impact of domestic heating systems on the UK’s carbon emissions.

Under one proposal designed to accelerate take-up, homeowners could be required to switch to a ‘green’ heating system in order to sell their house.

Another idea could see a surcharge on gas boilers in order to subsidise the production of greener heat pumps. Oil-fired systems will also be phased out and there will be another push to insulate homes.
 
If hydrogen is part of a zero-carbon future, it could have to be produced by electrolysis (as shown above), which sees electric currents passed through water.

A source said the Government had ruled out the idea of fining those who refuse to get rid of their gas boiler.
 
The 2035 target date will dismay hardline climate change campaigners, who argue that much swifter action is needed. But ministers fear a consumer backlash if they move faster.
 
Eco-friendly heat pumps, which extract warmth from the ground or air, can cost more than £10,000 to install. There are concerns that some may struggle to provide enough heat to keep the UK’s draughty housing stock warm.
 
A Whitehall source told the Mail: ‘There are people calling for a ban in 2025, but that is just ridiculous. We have to take people with us. Setting a target date is the right way to drive change.
 
‘But it has to be affordable and practical and that means doing it over a reasonable timescale to give time for technology to improve and get cheaper.’
 
Tory former minister Steve Baker warned that the move could spark consumer anger.
 
He said:
 
"The policy elite have persuaded themselves there is a consensus for net zero without anyone bothering to explain the implications to the public.
 
‘When people do work out the cost and impact on their lives there is going to be a huge backlash. If we go down the road of forcing people to replace their boiler at a cost of thousands of pounds it will make the cladding scandal look like a walk in the park.’
 
[…]
 
Privately, ministers warn that the UK is not ready for an overnight transformation. Around 85 per cent of homes currently rely on gas for heating.

 Full story
 
Editor's Note: This Daily Mail article has generated more than 3700 comments, clearly hitting a raw nerve ....

2) Banning all gas boilers by 2035 is 'simply not going to happen'
Daily Mail 25 May 2021

Experts condemn ministers for 'scaring the public to death' with threat to force homeowners to switch to green alternatives costing up to £19,000

Plans for gas boilers to be banned in Britain within 14 years under the Government's plans to tackle climate change will 'scare the public to death' and are 'simply not going to happen', experts have warned.

Ministers are discussing a cut-off date of 2035, after which the installation of conventional gas boilers will be outlawed. Gas boilers are already due to be banned from new homes by the fast-approaching date of 2025.

But the alternative eco-friendly options are hugely expensive, with ground source heat pumps costing up to £19,000, solar panels or water heating at £5,000 and biomass boilers at between £5,000 and £19,000.

Air source heat pumps come in at £11,000 while the cost of hydrogen boilers is still unknown but estimated at anywhere between £1,500 and £5,000. The devices are not even on sale yet and are still in the prototype phase.

The target date for the end of gas boilers, to be included in a new Heat and Buildings Strategy next month, comes amid growing concern about the impact of domestic heating systems on the UK's carbon emissions.

Experts said there was a huge amount of work to do before gas boilers could be replaced across the board - and there are also fears that some alternatives may not provide enough heat to keep houses warm.

Peter Thom, managing director of Cambridge energy efficiency specialist Green Heat, said: 'It's good they are saying 15 years' time, it means everybody will get cracking, but what I fear is that it will scare the public to death.

'They will be thinking, 'Where am I going to get £15,000 for a heat pump?' They don't work unless you insulate your home, and any house built before the Second World War isn't well insulated and probably can't be.

'The headlines are good, but the substance isn't there. I can't see how they are going to deliver any of it. The piggy bank's empty, so they can't fund anything. So it's probably going to be hydrogen boilers in my view.'

And Charlie Mullins, boss of Pimlico Plumbers, told MailOnline today: 'Whether it's the International Energy Agency wanting new gas boilers banned or our government pretending it has a plan to make the UK greener by an outright ban on gas boilers by 2035, the problem is both targets are so unobtainable that consumers and businesses like Pimlico can't begin to take them seriously.

'We need targets that relate to the real world, targets that when you look at the technology and infrastructure available are realistic. That's what will get the UK greener, and if we keep up paying lip service to pie in the sky stuff it will take longer because nobody will engage with the issue.

'Heat pumps cannot currently produce the energy to heat water sufficiently, and there is even the suggestion that they may increase the risks from Legionnaires Disease, and as far as hydrogen boilers are concerned, they are only in the prototype stage, so you can't just go out and get one.

'And even if you could there's the small problem of the lack of a hydrogen pipeline so that the green gas would be available to households and businesses.

'And finally the massive effort it would take to get the UK's 30 odd million dwellings swapped out from old gas to green energy on the government's timetable would keep the country's current crop of heating engineers busy for a hundred years.

'We already have a massive skills shortage in this area as a result of decades of undertraining and sending everyone to university to study English or sociology rather than signing up more apprentices in the building trades. So my message to ministers is – get real if you want anything to change.' [...]

Tory former minister Steve Baker warned that the move could spark consumer anger. He said: 'The policy elite have persuaded themselves there is a consensus for net zero without anyone bothering to explain the implications to the public.

'When people do work out the cost and impact on their lives there is going to be a huge backlash. If we go down the road of forcing people to replace their boiler at a cost of thousands of pounds it will make the cladding scandal look like a walk in the park.'

Full story
 
3) UK Net Zero plans could make millions of British homes unsellable 
The Daily Telegraph, 25 May 2021 
 
Fears of people becoming ‘mortgage prisoners’ under government climate change plans for homes to achieve an EPC rating of C or above by 2030

 

Banks would be discouraged from lending to owners of draughty homes under Government plans to tackle climate change. 

 
Homes will be expected to achieve an energy performance certificate (EPC) rating of C or above from 2030, under plans to be set out within weeks from the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. 
 
To achieve this, the Government has outlined plans to require mortgage lenders to attain higher EPC ratings across the average of their portfolio from 2025. Homes that do not reach higher ratings could face more expensive mortgages, or losing value on their property. 

“The natural extension is more favourable mortgage terms for those living in more energy efficient homes,” said Lucian Cook, director of residential research at Savills. 
Several lenders are already rolling out “green mortgages” which give favourable rates, including Barclays and Natwest. 

There are around 19 million homes across the UK rated EPC D or below, some 4.5m of them mortgaged. Estimated costs range from £3,000 up to £18,000 for measures including double or triple glazing, and insulating walls and lofts.
 
"Just because you have a mortgage, doesn't mean you can actually afford to improve your home,” said Dhara Vyas, the head of future energy services at Citizens Advice. 

The Government has said it wants all homes to reach EPC C by “around 2030” although it has indicated that there will be exemptions for dwellings that are difficult or prohibitively expensive to treat. 

But the policy could risk leaving people as “mortgage prisoners” when they come to refinance their home, or cut the value of their property, even for those who are exempt, which could impact particularly on larger, older, and more rural properties.
 
Full story 

4) Ministers reject calls from Climate Change Committee to return to EU carbon market
The Daily Telegraph, 24 May 2021
 
Ministers are reluctant to give up their new-found autonomy on the carbon trading scheme.

The UK’s top climate change adviser has urged ministers to link the country’s new post-Brexit carbon market to an existing European Union scheme amid fears that firms will otherwise face an uneven playing field.

Officials at the Climate Change ­Commit­tee (CCC) said the new Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) should be tied with Europe’s as soon as possible after the UK carbon market kicked off last week.

However, it is understood ministers are reluctant to give up their new-found autonomy on the carbon trading scheme as the country targets world-leading emissions cuts.

The committee – which is the ­Government’s official independent adviser on climate change – also said the new “cap and trade” system will likely need to get tougher to help the UK meet its emissions aims.

Britain was part of the EU’s ETS until Brexit but now has its own scheme and held its first auction of carbon permits on Wednesday. The ETS puts a price on carbon emissions to force big polluters to cut back.
 
5) Poland refuses to comply with EU order on coal mine
The Daily Telegraph, 25 May 2021

Prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki says suspending the mine would harm energy security

Poland has refused to comply with an order from EU judges to suspend operations at a major coal mine, saying it would put the country’s energy security at risk.

The country’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, rejected the order given on Friday, in a case which highlights Poland’s ongoing reliance on coal even as the EU tries to go green.

“We do not foresee the closure of the mine and we will not allow it,” he told reporters.

The 52-year-old pledged to make a new case to the Court of Justice in favour of the Trurow mine and also seek talks with his Czech neighbours.

On Poland’s border with the Czech Republic and Germany, the open cast mine provides lignite coal for a local power plant that generates up to 7pc of national electricity. Its licence has recently been extended to 2044.

The Czech Republic complained that it drains ground water away from residents, arguing it amounts to a breach of EU law and an environmental hazard.
 
Full story (£)
 
6) Solar power's decade of falling costs is thrown Into reverse
Bloomberg, 23 May 2021
 
The price of key raw material polysilicon has surged, and that could impact projects in India and the U.S.

A key selling point that made solar energy the fastest-growing power source in the world—rapidly decreasing costs—has hit a speed bump.

Solar module prices have risen 18% since the start of the year after falling by 90% over the previous decade. The reversal, fueled by a quadrupling in the cost of the key raw material polysilicon, threatens to delay projects and slow uptake of solar power just as several major governments are finally throwing their weight behind it in an effort to slow climate change.
 
“The disruption to solar hasn’t been this bad in more than a decade,” said Jenny Chase, lead solar analyst with clean energy research group BloombergNEF. “Developers and governments are going to have to stop expecting solar to get much cheaper quickly.” BNEF slightly lowered its forecast for solar buildout this year in a report last week, citing rising prices of materials including polysilicon as one reason. 

Higher prices are affecting demand and may delay some large-scale projects, panel-maker Canadian Solar Inc. said on an earnings call on Thursday. In India, about 10 gigawatts of projects may be impacted, equivalent to more than a quarter of the country’s current capacity, Mint reported, citing unnamed developers. Large-scale projects in the U.S. could also get postponed, analysts at Cowen & Co. said.
 
Rising prices might force state-owned power giants in China to push projects into next year, according to analysts at industry portal Solarzoom. The delays may be large enough to make 2021 the first year of negative growth in global solar installations in 17 years, they said.
 
Global projects that haven’t signed price agreements with utilities that buy the power might get delayed unless the customer is willing to pay a higher rate for the electricity, said Xiaojing Sun, an analyst at Wood Mackenzie Ltd.
 
For the solar industry, the timing couldn’t be worse. Renewable energy finally has a champion in the White House and ambitious climate goals have been announced across Europe and Asia.
 
At the center of the crisis is polysilicon, an ultra-refined form of silicon, one of the most abundant materials on Earth that’s commonly found in beach sand. As the solar industry geared up to meet an expected surge in demand for modules, makers of polysilicon were unable to keep up. Prices for the purified metalloid have touched $25.88 a kilogram, from $6.19 less than a year ago, according to PVInsights.
 
Polysilicon prices are expected to remain strong through the end of 2022, according to Roth Capital Partners analysts including Philip Shen. 
 
And the problem isn’t limited to polysilicon. The solar industry is facing “pervasive upstream supply-chain cost challenges,” panel manufacturer Maxeon Solar Technologies Ltd. said in April.
 
Full story

7) New EPA Climate Change Indicator is deceptive
Ralph Alexander, GWPF 25 May 2021

New climate change indicators on the U.S. EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) website are intended to inform science-based decision-making by presenting climate science transparently. But many of the indicators are misleading or deceptive, being based on incomplete evidence or selective data.
 
A typical example is the indicator for heat waves. This is illustrated in the left panel of the figure below, depicting the EPA’s representation of heat wave frequency in the U.S. from 1961 to 2019. The figure purports to show a steady increase in the occurrence of heat waves, which supposedly tripled from an average of two per year during the 1960s to six per year during the 2010s.

 

Unfortunately, the chart on the left is highly deceptive in several ways. First, the data is derived from minimum, not maximum, temperatures averaged across 50 American cities. The corresponding chart  for  maximum  temperatures, shown in the right panel above, paints a rather different picture – one in which the heat wave frequency less than doubled from 2.5 per year in the 1960s to 4.5 per year in the 2010s, and actually declined from the 1980s to the 2000s.

This maximum-temperature graph revealing a much smaller increase in heat waves than the minimum-temperature graph displayed so boldly on the EPA website is dishonestly hidden away in its technical documentation.

A second deception is that the starting date of 1961 for both graphs is conveniently cherry-picked during a 30-year period of global cooling from 1940 to 1970. That in itself exaggerates the warming effect since then. Starting instead in 1980, after the current bout of global warming had begun, it can be seen that the heat wave frequency based on maximum temperatures (right panel) barely increased at all from 1981 to 2019. Similar exaggeration and sleight of hand can be seen in the EPA indicators for heat wave duration, season length and intensity.

A third deception is that the 1961 start date ignores the record U.S. heat of the 1930s, a decade characterized by persistent, searing heat waves across North America, especially in 1934 and 1936. The next figure shows the frequency and magnitude of U.S. heatwaves from 1900 to 2018.

 

The frequency (top panel) is the annual number of calendar days the maximum temperature exceeded the 90th percentile for 1961–1990 for at least six consecutive days. The EPA’s data is calculated for a period of at least four days, while the heat wave index (lower panel) measures the annual magnitude of all heat waves of at least three days in that year combined.

Despite the differences in definition, it’s abundantly clear that heat waves over the last few decades – the ones publicized by the EPA – pale in comparison to those of the 1930s, and even those of other decades such as the 1910s and 1950s. The peak heat wave index in 1936 is a full three times higher than it was in 2012 and up to nine times higher than in many other years.

The heat wave index shown above actually appears on the same EPA website page as the mimimum-temperature chart. But it’s presented as a tiny Figure 3 that is only 20% as large as the much more prominent Figure 1 showing minimum temperatures. As pointed out recently by another writer, a full-size version of the index chart, from 1895 to 2015, was once featured on the website, before the site was updated this year with the new climate change indicators.
 
The EPA points out that the 1930s heat waves in North America, which were concentrated in the Great Plains states of the U.S. and southern Canada, were exacerbated by Dust Bowl drought that depleted soil moisture and reduced the moderating effects of evaporation. While this is undoubtedly true, it has been suggested by climate scientists that future droughts in a warming world could result in further record-breaking U.S. heat waves. The EPA has no justification for omitting 1930s heat waves from their data record, or for suppressing the heat wave index chart.

Although the Dust Bowl was unique to the U.S. and Canada, there are locations in other parts of North America and in other countries where substantial heat waves occurred before 1961 as well. In the summer of 1930 two record-setting, back-to-back scorchers, each lasting eight days, afflicted Washington, D.C.; while in 1936, the province of Ontario – also well removed from the Great Plains – experienced 43 degrees Celsius (109 degrees Fahrenheit) heat during the longest, deadliest Canadian heat wave on record. In Europe, France was baked during heat waves in both 1930 and 1947, and many eastern European countries suffered prolonged heat waves in 1946.  
 
What all this means is that the EPA’s heat-wave indicator grossly misrepresents the actual science and defeats its stated goal for the indicators of “informing our understanding of climate change.”
 
8) Environmental threats based on invisible, remote subjects to create fear: Greenpeace co-founder
The Epoch Times, 22 May 2021
 
The co-founder of Greenpeace says in his new book that alleged environmental catastrophes and threats are based on subjects that are either invisible or extremely remote in order to create fear, forcing people to rely on experts to tell them the truth.
 
“It dawned on me that the great majority of scare stories about the present and future state of the planet, and humanity as a whole, are based on subjects that are either invisible, like CO2 and radiation, or extremely remote, like polar bears and coral reefs,” wrote Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, in his book titled “Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom.”
 
“Thus, most people have no way of determining the truth of these claims of alleged catastrophes and doomsday threats. Instead, they must rely on the activists, the media, the politicians, and the scientists—all of whom have a very large financial and/or political stake in the subject—to tell them the truth.”
 
Moore, also a senior fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, said he left Greenpeace after 15 years when he realized the movement had taken “a sharp turn to the political left.”
 
During a webinar on May 20, he said the main purpose of writing the book was to show that those narratives are “just a big hoax.”
 
Language is manipulated to invoke negativity, fear, and compliance in order for proponents of environmental catastrophes to push their narratives, Moore said.

“A classic example of propaganda is ‘dirty oil,’” he noted. “That’s how we grow our food—in dirt. So what’s wrong with dirty? But they’re not using it to mean dirt as in soil. They’re using it to mean ‘dirty rotten scoundrel.’ In other words, it’s purely an epithet—a negative epithet.”

Moore said that kind of wording has nothing to do with scientific description or the actual quality of oil. Rather, it’s an example of a propaganda technique where a normal concept is merged with an undesirable idea in order to make something seem bad.
 
“Much of propaganda is about associating negative words with normal words, and therefore turning them into a negative,” he said.
 
“This welcomes the opportunity to invent narratives such as the claim that ‘CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels are causing climate emergency,’” he writes in his book.
 
Full story

9) Fritz Vahrenholt: Climate Dawn
Tichys Einblick, May 2021

Frank Hennig, known to many readers of Tichys Einblick as a commentator on German energy policy, has produced a book on the fundamentals of energy supply and the conflict between nature and climate protection. A review by former Hamburg Senator for the Environment Fritz Vahrenholt

Anyone who has read this book by Frank Hennig will be shocked. Due to the detailed review of the wrong paths taken by energy and climate policy in Germany, the reader comes to the conclusion that this policy will end in disaster – with disastrous consequences for citizens, jobs, companies and economic power.

The prosperity of all of us is in great danger. In contrast to the numerous commissions from the ethics commission to the coal phase-out commission, in contrast to the ministers, party executives, almost all members of parliament, here someone who knows what he is talking about provides the precise energy analysis. He knows, unlike a candidate for chancellor, what a gigatonne of CO2 is. He knows why reactive power is needed to transport electricity, and he knows the difference between electrical work and the output of wind turbines.

The energy transition will fail due to a power shortage economy that will lead to rationing of electricity as we know it from developing countries. It will lead to a crash of German prosperity through the explosion of local energy prices; because already today Germany has the highest electricity prices in the world thanks to the energy turnaround , the double exit from coal and nuclear energy.

The good thing about this book, which I hope will be widely read in Germany, is that no politician or journalist will be able to say later that they could not have known what was coming. Even if there will be underground power lines from north to south towards the end of this decade, there will have to be a necessary electricity import of 16 gigawatts in southern Germany due to the elimination of nuclear and coal-fired power plants. However, there will be nothing to transport during the periods of dark doldrums, which can sometimes occur for five days at a time in winter. To illustrate the size of the task: 16 gigawatts is considerably more than twice the electricity consumption of our neighbouring country Austria.

Germany demonises nuclear energy, but is happy to take nuclear power from the Czech Republic, France, Sweden or Switzerland. For example, Baden-Württemberg, where a year ago the Green Minister for the Environment celebrated the demolition of the 35-year-old cooling towers of the Philippsburg nuclear power plant, is supplied by the world’s oldest nuclear power plant, the 50-year-old nuclear reactor in Beznau, Switzerland.

Without a secure power supply
 
A secure power supply, the seal of approval of the German industrial society, is a thing of the past. Germany relies on wind, whose 60 gigawatts of capacity to date have an assured output of one percent. And the 55 gigawatts of capacity of photovoltaic plants, the highly praised second cornerstone of future energy supply, have a secured capacity of zero – which can easily be seen at night.

Many politicians and journalists are calling for the multiplication of wind and solar energy. Because transport and heat are also to be built on these unreliable pillars in the future. The Academy of Science and Engineering in Munich (acatech) estimates that this will double electricity consumption. With 100 percent electricity from wind and sun, a sixfold increase in current capacity would be required.

If one also wanted to base the industrial energy supply in Germany on wind and solar energy, the current electricity consumption of 600 terawatt hours (TWh) would have to be added. We are then talking about a tenfold increase in renewable capacities with extreme surpluses in windy and sunny periods and major shortages in periods of darkness.
 
Hydrogen, produced in times of surplus, is supposed to bridge the doldrums. However, with the current state of technology, two thirds of the energy generated is lost – an unaffordable solution for the foreseeable future.

How great is the need for storage in Germany? Today’s electricity consumption amounts to 1.6 TWh per day. It will triple rather than double if the German government’s 2050 targets are to be met. A ten-day lull will then require storage of an unimaginable 32 to 48 TWh. This is roughly equivalent to 800 to 1200 times the pumped storage capacity currently installed in Germany.
 
But we will be provided with new narratives. We will already get the hydrogen from North Africa, because solar energy supposedly has a future there. Meanwhile, Morocco itself, for example, imports ten million tons of coal from Russia and South Africa to fuel, among other things, its 1400-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Safi, which went into operation in 2018. We are getting out of coal, the opposite is happening globally. China will build around 200 coal units by 2030.

Destruction of nature is accepted
 
Germany is betting on wind. Many now suspect that this will mean the greatest destruction of nature in Germany since the Second World War. The sixfold increase in wind energy leads to the adventurous plan to erect a wind turbine every two kilometres, even if the wind turbines become much larger and higher than today. On an ever-increasing scale, German forests are being turned into industrial areas for wind turbines, are being cut up, parceled out and deprived of the nature that lives in them.
European species protection law still protects against the extinction of numerous species. However, the German government’s energy transition think tank(AGORA) is already calling for the ban on killing species in the Nature Conservation Act to be abolished in the interests of wind power expansion. What are a few rare birds of prey against saving the world!

Already today 12,000 birds of prey and 250,000 bats are killed annually by wind turbines. Protected species are now getting unexpected support from citizens who feel cheated out of their homes and have joined forces in more than a thousand initiatives. If it turns out to be true that a large part of the insect mortality is due to the huge wall of rotors that has spread across Germany, it could be a tight squeeze for a policy where nothing is green. For the growing realization that wind energy fields produce a local temperature increase of about 0.5 degrees Celsius in their area of impact and cause soil dryness will also get around, as will growing concerns about serious health damage from infrasound.
 
Even wind energy, which – where the wind blows – is a thoroughly elegant form of energy generation, must be measured against the requirements of nature conservation, environmental protection and health protection. Like any other form of energy.
 
Propaganda through fine words
 
The propagandists of the energy turnaround are still succeeding in throwing sand in our eyes by using fine words. Hennigs book brings numerous examples. For example, forced shutdown becomes “demand smoothing” and rationing becomes the “smart grid.” Wind turbines are suddenly “cathedrals of the energy turnaround” (Federal Minister of Economics Peter Altmaier).

Alongside semantic artifice comes the lie, which is no less reprehensible when uttered with good intentions. For example, Altmaier promised that no job would be lost in the lignite mining areas without a replacement job being created first. Nevertheless, 600 employees of the power plant in Jänischwalde were left out in the cold after the closure. They will not be the last.
 
Frank Hennig, an energy expert from the former GDR, introduces us to the future security of energy supply, which will become more and more similar to that of the real existing GDR. He reminds us of what planned socialist systems have caused in terms of destruction of nature, environmental pollution and inefficient energy use.
 
Politicians and the media have succeeded in creating a climate of fear, so that a large proportion of young people are seriously convinced that the end of humanity is imminent in the next twelve years – unless immediate action is taken and CO2 emissions are brought to zero. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that climate models are running too hot, that the effect of carbon dioxide on global warming is overestimated, and that natural variations in climate, such as those documented in the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, are being ignored.
 
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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.