“we don’t have to tax ourselves back into the stone-age”

If your brain has been battered and bruised by contradictory arguments about global warming, I have good news for you. You don’t have to choose between two sides because there is bottom line for everybody to sign up to.

First though, the bad news. There is no escaping the fact that the price of energy will have to rise. Hydrocarbons used to produce petrol, diesel and heating are a finite resource which will run out one day. So the world must treat remaining supplies with respect and economy.

The good news – we don’t have to tax ourselves back into the stone-age in the process.

Socialist hypocrites like Labour’s Environment Secretary David Miliband and Prime Minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown see global warming hysteria as manna from heaven. They have embraced this discredited theory, which claims rising levels of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) are warming up the world and leading us to a climate disaster, because they see it as tool to exert power over us. It is worth remembering that even with all the increased industrial activity over the last couple of centuries, human activity still only accounts for about 6 per cent of all the CO2 produced. The rest is natural.

These people and their acolytes like environmental bully George Monbiot, you know, the bloke with the Tony Benn eyes, would have us believe that this tiny proportion of added CO2 is so powerful as to out-perform the sun, change the climate and melt the glaciers. But the theory has been taken on board by politicians of the left, (not to mention their Blue-Labour apologists in the “Conservative” party David Cameron and George Osborne), because it gives them the chance to not only order us all about - for our own good don’t you know, (while they travel the world in the front cabin at our expense) – but to raise eye-watering amounts of taxes from us. Incidentally, did you hear shadow-chancellor Osborne’s TV reply to Chancellor Brown’s budget. Osborne talked, straight faced, about CO2 as the “pollution that causes global warming”. No hint of doubt. That’s it. Proven. I bet the man, who has never had a proper job and seeks to run our economy, knows didly about climate science, and has asked fewer questions. Isn’t it amazing how these opportunists will jump on board any vote grabbing bandwagon without checking where it’s going?

“liberal democracy had finally won out against the forces of hereditary monarchy, fascism and communism”
The left lost all the big political arguments in the 2^nd half of the 20^th century. Socialism was shown to be a failure. Market economies produced the wealth and made sure it was fairly distributed. Collective methods of organisation were shown to be incompetent. Militarily, the west eventually prevailed over the East because its superior economic power allowed its technology to win. The hungry and the oppressed looked to America for inspiration and guidance, and the lucky ones managed to emigrate to the City on a Hill. Francis Fukuyama was able to write his book “The End of History”, which argued that liberal democracy had finally won out against the forces of hereditary monarchy, fascism and communism.

Then along came global warming.

During the mid-1990s, I was Science and Technology Correspondent for Reuters, the global, independent news agency which pours unbiased, unadulterated facts and analysis into the news rooms of the world, without fear or favour.

When I took up the job in late 1994, one of the first assignments I set myself was to update Reuters on the theory that human activity was so impinging on the world’s climate, that if we didn’t cease and desist, the planet would come to an untimely end. I expected my story to be scary and uncomfortable. After all, the world’s media was even then, united about the truth of this impending disaster. The BBC was, as ever, leading the charge. Many newspapers around the world echoed this theory, despite the fact that 20 years earlier, charlatan scientists had scared everybody by saying that the world was about to enter another ice-age which would freeze our wotsits off.

Where was the proof?
Imagine my amazement when, using the golden access key which a Reuters correspondent has, I couldn’t find any scientists who would say there was proof of any kind that the link between human activity and the climate was established. I talked to the world’s top climate scientists on both coasts of America, Britain and Germany. The closest any scientist came to saying there was a link came from Professor Stephen Schneider of Stanford University in California and then he was much more equivocal than he is now. Even today, when scientists from the warming side of the argument appear on TV debates, they still refrain from answering directly questions about the strength of the science.  Nobody ever accused me of being anything but unbiased and balanced in my reporting that the link between humans and climate was precarious, to say the least.

Despite this, the world’s media, led by the egregious BBC, still reported human induced global warming as an established fact, without balancing stories with the truth that there were a substantial group of top scientists who disagreed. I believe this is more because of laziness and cowardice rather than some global conspiracy. And it wasn’t just my experience. Novelist and scientist Michael Crichton found almost exactly the same scenario when he did some research into the science of the link between global warming and humans. He was so amazed by what he found, he used this as a scenario for his best-selling novel “State of Fear”.

We have been bombarded with this propaganda for years by organisations like the BBC plying their brand of one-sided reporting.

The Great Global Warming Swindle
But the cat has been let out of the bag, big-time. On March 8, Channel 4 Television broadcast its 1-1/2 hour long documentary called “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, which questioned the conventional wisdom on climate change science, and quoted climate scientists saying that, far from instigating climate warming, increased levels of CO2 are in fact generated by a warming climate. Any warming was probably caused by the sun, these scientists said. The programme also rubbished former Vice-President Al Gore’s Oscar winning film, “An Inconvenient Truth” as the work of a self-seeking, arrogant power seeker, with a carbon-foot print to marvel at.

The scientists included Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, and Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at the University of London.

“Swindle” has shown that there is a powerful intellectual argument saying that human activity does not have a role in changing the climate. It made clear that these experts were not in the pay of big-oil. In fact, they often suffered for their honesty in fighting the conventional “wisdom” by seeing their budgets under attack as they were accused of “climate denial” by vociferous fascists like the Royal Society’s Bob Ward, who are so certain they are right they were determined to stop any research at all.

Stout party collapses
Sometimes, people pushing specious arguments are outed in unlikely circumstances. Remember Tony Blair being undermined by the women in a televised debate on our world-beating National Health Service during the 2005 general election, when she pointed out the sham claim that after 7 years of neo-Labour, access to GPs was so good that anyone could see a doctor within 24 hours? It turned out that it was impossible to make an appointment unless you could take it within 24 hours, therefore excluding all the working population who had to go to work today and couldn’t just not show up for work; collapse of stout party.

I think the following nugget of news comes into the same category for our political leaders, who say we are all going to die unless we pay more tax on our petrol and eliminate our carbon footprints.

If the world is really in so much danger that we have to cut CO2 50 per cent by 2050 (or whatever figure politicians have plucked out of the air today from the Ministry of Guesswork), how come the European Union and the U.S. have just signed an open-skies agreement which is going to generate an extra 25 million people a year according to the E.U. (kerzillions of tons of CO2) on trans-Atlantic flights, from the current just 50 million, within 5 years.

I’ll run that by you again. Yes, the same politicians with dalek-voiced, motormouth Miliband the front runner, are saying that the earth is in so much danger that we must succumb to “green” taxes, slash the use of our cars, submit our houses to carbon foot-print commissars, and have computer chips in our dustbins to make sure that the garbage being sent on a slow boat to China is correctly sorted.

And at the same time, they are planning to hugely boost airports and accelerate jet airliner travel across the Atlantic. That’s great for me, but doesn’t that point to a certain lack of consistency from the political dwarves who lord it over us, or hypocrisy, or perhaps just plain stupidity? Unfortunately, the stupid ones are us, for allowing these cretins into positions of power.

Neil Winton – April 2, 2007