When future generations come to look back on the alarm over global warming that seized the world towards the end of the 20th century, much will puzzle them as to how such a scare could have arisen. They will wonder why there was such a panic over a 0.4 per cent rise in global temperatures between 1975 and 1998, when similar rises between 1860 and 1880 and 1910 and 1940 had given no cause for concern. They will see these modest rises as just part of a general warming that began at the start of the 19th century, as the world emerged from the Little Ice Age, when the Earth had grown cooler for 400 years.
They will be struck by the extent to which this scare
relied on the projections of computer models, which then proved to be
hopelessly wrong when, in the years after 1998, their predicted rise in
temperature came virtually to a halt. But in particular they will be amazed by
the almost religious reverence accorded to that strange body, the United Nations’
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which by
then will be recognised as having never really been a scientific body at all,
but a political pressure group. It had been set up in the 1980s by a small band
of politically persuasive scientists who had become fanatically committed to
the belief that, because carbon dioxide levels were rising, global temperatures
must inevitably follow; an assumption that the evidence would increasingly show
was mistaken.
Five times between 1990 and 2014 the IPCC published
three massive volumes of technical reports – another emerged last week – and
each time we saw the same pattern. Each was supposedly based on thousands of
scientific studies, many funded to find evidence to support the received view
that man-made climate change was threatening the world with disaster –
hurricanes, floods, droughts, melting ice, rising sea levels and the rest. But
each time what caught the headlines was a brief “Summary for Policymakers”,
carefully crafted by governments and a few committed scientists to hype up the
scare by going much further than was justified by the thousands of pages in the
technical reports themselves.
Each time it would emerge just how shamelessly these
Summaries had distorted the actual evidence, picking out the scary bits, which
themselves often turned out not to have been based on proper science at all.
The most glaring example was the IPCC’s 2007 report, which hit the headlines
with those wildly alarmist predictions that the Himalayan glaciers might all be
gone by 2035; that global warming could halve African crop yields by 2050; that
droughts would destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest. Not until 2010 did
some of us manage to show that each of these predictions, and many more, came
not from genuine scientific studies but from scaremongering propaganda produced
by green activists and lobby groups (shown by one exhaustive analysis to make
up nearly a third of all the IPCC’s sources).
Most of the particularly alarmist predictions came
from a report by the IPCC’s Working Group II. This was concerned with assessing
the impact on the world of those changes to the climate predicted by the
equally flawed computer models relied on by Working Group I, which was charged
with assessing the science of climate change. The technical report published
last week was its sequel, also from Working Group II, and we can at once see,
from its much more cautious treatment of the subjects that caused such trouble
last time, that they knew they couldn’t afford any repeat of that disaster.
crop failures and so on, although little of this is
justified by the report itself, and even less by the evidence of the real
world, where these things are no more happening as predicted than the
temperature rises predicted by their computer models.
This latest report has aroused markedly less
excitement than did its hysterical predecessor in 2007. They have cried wolf
once too often. The only people still being wholly taken in, it seems – apart
from the usual suspects in the media – are all those mindless politicians still
babbling on about how in Paris next year they are finally going to get that
great global agreement which, if only we put up enough wind farms and taxes,
will somehow enable us to stop the climate changing.
They can dream on. But alas, the rest of us must still
pay the price for their dreams.
Nigel Farage misses an open goal
What was most terrifying about how Nick Clegg and
Nigel Farage came across in their second shoot-out on “Europe” was the
realisation that such a sad, and not particularly pleasant, little muppet as
Clegg could actually be our Deputy Prime Minister. What was most disappointing,
however, was how, when Farage was yet again given the chance to put forward the
only practical alternative to Britain remaining in the increasingly
dysfunctional EU, he muffed it.
He allowed Clegg to get away with seriously misrepresenting
the position enjoyed by the two most prosperous countries in Europe, Norway and
Switzerland, as members of the European Free Trade Association (Efta) outside
the EU. Instead of correcting Clegg’s errors, Farage’s response was such waffle
that David Dimbleby gave him a second chance to put across a clear and simple
message: that by invoking Article 50 and joining Efta, freed from the rest of
the EU’s increasing political baggage, Britain could not only continue to trade
as freely with the single market as we do now, but have much more influence
over shaping its rules, too. This would give us all what so many people say
they want.
But, offered this open goal, Farage simply kicked the
ball gently and rather clumsily into touch. If Ukip wants Britain to leave the
EU, why doesn’t Nigel explain the only practical way that this could be done?
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