Matt Ridley: Adapting to climate change

Nigel Lawson was right after all. Ever since the Centre for Policy Studies lecture in 2006 that launched the former chancellor on his late career as a critic of global warming policy, Lord Lawson has been stressing the need to adapt to climate change, rather than throw public money at futile attempts to prevent it. Until now, the official line has been largely to ignore adaptation and focus instead on ‘mitigation’ — the misleading term for preventing carbon dioxide emissions.

That has now changed. The received wisdom on global warming, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was updated this week. The newspapers were, as always, full of stories about scientists being even more certain of environmental Armageddon. But the document itself revealed a far more striking story: it emphasised, again and again, the need to adapt to climate change. Even in the main text of the press release that accompanied the report, the word ‘adaptation’ occurred ten times, the word ‘mitigation’ not at all.

Matt Ridley: Global lukewarming need not be catastrophic

My luke-warming column in the Times on 28th September 2013, pleaded in vain for a moderate middle approach to climate change, and drew a parallel with the nature-nurture debate. Here's what I wrote:

In the climate debate, which side are you on? Do you think climate change is the most urgent crisis facing mankind requiring almost unlimited spending? Or that it’s all a hoax, dreamt up to justify socialism, and nothing is happening anyway?

Mike Butler: Reports steam up global warmers

Australia’s new Prime Minister Tony Abbott sacked Australia's Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery, on an A$180,000 a year working a three-day-a-week job, and put paid to Australia's Climate Commission, a multi-million dollar, allegedly "independent", propaganda outlet set up by Julia Gillard to help give her climate alarmist policies a veneer of scientific credibility. A drop of Abbott's realism would be helpful here in New Zealand. (1)