in his glee ..." - not quite Lewis Carroll
Enough has been and is being said in the press about "Climategate" - the leaking by an anonymous hacker of hundreds of emails and documents stolen from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia - to render irrelevant any comment from the GOS. You all know what he thinks about man-made global warming, the dishonest environmentalists who promulgate it, and the sad geeks who take it seriously.
Suffice it to say that (a) we're delighted, (b) it had to happen sooner or later, because we all knew that eventually this fraud would be exposed (not that the leaked emails are enough to do that conclusively but hey, it's a good start), and (c) we have been unable to post anything on this subject until now because we've been too busy rolling on the floor, cackling with malicious glee.
Anyway, here are three links you might like to follow. We post them purely as a public service, you understand ...
This link will take you to the website Climate-Gate.org, where you can read all the hacked emails in full, and make your own minds up.
This one takes you to a little YouTube video that explains who the main protagonists in the scandal are.
And this one takes you to the same video on the Tigerhawk website, where you will also find some fairly acute observations, including ...
Some of this is a bit over done; not every suspicious turn of phrase in a conversational email hides a conspiracy, and anybody who has worked in a large organization knows that. It is also true that people in all organizations vent about outsiders who threaten to knock down the door as Steve McIntyre, to his credit, does all the time. The emails alone prove nothing.
The problem, of course, is that these emails are not in a vacuum, but are to be read in the context of two wholly unrelated revelations: (1) The deletion, intentional or otherwise, of the CRU's original raw global temperature data, so it is apparently no longer possible to assess whether the "adjustments" to that data were valid or even intellectually honest; and (2) the exposure of code inside the climate models themselves that seems to indicate a direct tweaking of the programming to generate a particular result (i.e., a palpable warming trend). This is really, really, really, really bad stuff, because the entire case for regulatory intervention turns on the predictive power of these models. If the data that is their basis and the the programming itself has been manipulated in any way, shape or form to drive a result intended to influence policy, then all the scientific papers that derive from these models or rely on them in any way ought to be withdrawn.
There you are. That's all we have to say at the moment. Excuse us, but we have to stop now, because we feel another fit of the giggles coming on ...
Right. Better now.
We spotted this article by Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail recently ...
As it happens I was Green before the word came to mean what it does now. From a very early age, I hated the ploughing up of this country for the motor car, and grieved at the mad closure of the railways, a view that has now become much more widespread than it was then. I began bicycling to work before bike lanes had been invented, when Boris Johnson was still at Eton. To this day I get a sort of red mist when I see great trees being cut down by over-cautious councils, and I gaze with limitless regret on the bleak prairies of Southern England, where hedgerows once grew. If I can take a ship and a train rather than a plane, I will do.
So it’s no use trying to dismiss me as some kind of petrolhead polluter who wants to cover the planet with runways and motorways, nor to allege I’m in the pay of Big Oil, when I say that I doubt the existence of man-made global warming. I just doubt it because I am not convinced it’s true. Actually, now that Big Oil has bought into the man-made warming scare itself, I generally get even cruder abuse, being called a ‘denier’ as if I were some kind of Nazi. And if I mention my doubts at public occasions, I can feel the swelling wrath of the unreasoning mob gathering against me. There’s seldom time to make more than a few points before you are howled down by righteous zealots.
And that is why I, and anyone seriously interested in this subject, owes a great debt to Christopher Booker, who has set down all the arguments for doubt in a single, concise book that will no doubt be either ignored or abused. It would be very sad if, as a result, it fails to reach a wide audience. I think anyone remotely concerned about this huge controversy should read this courageous piece of work.
I am not asking you to agree with everything in it, or assuming that you will. I am asking any reasonable person, who is influenced by facts and logic, to consider the case made here. If you have had doubts but suppressed them for fear of being drowned in anger or contempt, buy this book to arm yourself. If you know any global-warming fanatics, buy it for them for Christmas and ask them, even beg them, to study it carefully.
At the very least, it should allow the debate on this subject to be conducted with more fairness and without such expressions as ‘denier’ being used. What you will find out is this. That much of what passes for accepted truth is not. Facts have been ruthlessly twisted, suppressed or invented. Scientists are greatly divided on the subject. Many people – and bodies – presented as experts actually have little or no knowledge of the science involved. Gullible politicians and gullible media men and women have repeatedly fallen for it. Hucksters, profiteers, world-government fanatics and, of course, the EU (always searching for an excuse to increase its power) have latched on to it. Huge public subsidies, including the carbon-trading racket and the tragicomic building of hideous, worse-than-useless windfarms, now depend upon it.
But take, just for example, the famous picture of polar bears on a melting ice-floe, supposedly doomed victims of global warming. The USA’s ex-Vice President, the propagandist Al Gore, got audiences going ‘Aaah!’ by saying the bears had ‘nowhere else to go’. Really? The picture was taken in August, when the Alaskan ice always melts. The polar bears were fine. Think about it. They can swim and they weren’t far from land. Recent studies show that most polar bear populations are rising.
The world was warmer than it is now in the early Middle Ages, long before industrial activity increased CO2 output, a fact that the warming fanatics have worked very hard to obscure.
Oh, and the most important greenhouse gas by far is not CO2 but water vapour, which is not influenced by human activity at all.
Meanwhile, an English court of law (despite buying the CO2 argument) has identified nine significant errors of fact in Gore’s Oscar-winning alarmist film An Inconvenient Truth, ludicrously being inflicted on children in British schools. Among these: sea levels are not going to rise by 20ft any time soon; there’s no evidence that atolls in the Pacific have been evacuated because of rising waters; the Gulf Stream is not going to shut down; the drying-up of Lake Chad, the shrinking of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro and Hurricane Katrina were none of them caused by global warming; the only polar bears that have drowned were four that died in a storm.
Booker also reminds us that even if all the measures demanded by the warming zealots were put into action, according to their own calculations this would only delay the effects they fear by six years.
In my experience, people who employ alarmism, and who turn with rage on their critics, do so because they lack confidence in their case. Watch their behaviour at the coming Copenhagen climate conference, a festival of panic and exaggerated woe.
This particular frenzy, if not checked, could end by bankrupting the West and leaving us sitting in the cold and the dark whistling for a wind to power our dead computers – while China and India surge on to growth and prosperity because they have had the sense to ignore the whole stupid thing.
The book is called "The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is The Obsession With Climate Change Turning Out To Be The Most Costly Scientific Blunder In History?" by Christopher Booker. It is published by Continuum Books at £16.99, but you can buy it cheaper here
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either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
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