Margaret Thatcher was the first leader to warn of global warming - but also the first to see the flaws in the climate change orthodoxy
A persistent claim made by believers in man-made global warming – they were at it again last week – is that no politician was more influential in launching the worldwide alarm over climate change than Margaret Thatcher. David Cameron, so the argument runs, is simply following in her footsteps by committing the Tory party to its present belief in the dangers of global warming, and thus showing himself in this respect, if few others, to be a loyal Thatcherite.
The truth behind this story is much more interesting than is generally realised, not least because it has a fascinating twist. Certainly, Mrs Thatcher was the first world leader to voice alarm over global warming, back in 1988, With her scientific background, she had fallen under the spell of Sir Crispin Tickell, then our man at the UN. In the 1970s, he had written a book warning that the world was cooling, but he had since become an ardent convert to the belief that it was warming, Under his influence, as she recorded in her memoirs, she made a series of speeches, in Britain and to world bodies, calling for urgent international action, and citing evidence given to the US Senate by the arch-alarmist Jim Hansen, head of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
She found equally persuasive the views of a third prominent convert to the cause, Dr John Houghton, then head of the UK Met Office. She backed him in the setting up of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, and promised the Met Office lavish funding for its Hadley Centre, which she opened in 1990, as a world authority on "human-induced climate change".
Hadley then linked up with East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to become custodians of the most prestigious of the world's surface temperature records (alongside another compiled by Dr Hansen). This became the central nexus of influence driving a worldwide scare over global warming; and so it remains to this day – not least thanks to the key role of Houghton (now Sir John) in shaping the first three mammoth reports which established the IPCC's unequalled authority on the subject.
This article from the Daily Mail in 2009 was posted on Twitter yesterday, you may want to also have a read in light of the current temperature changes going on with the Jet Stream ....lets all hope this is just an exaggeration or a figment of the authors imagination......
It took just six months for a warm and sunny Europe to be engulfed in ice, according to new research.
Previous studies have suggested the arrival of the last Ice Age nearly 13,000 years ago took about a decade - but now scientists believe the process was up to 20 times as fast.
In scenes reminiscent of the Hollywood blockbuster The day After Tomorrow, the Northern Hemisphere was frozen by a sudden slowdown of the Gulf Stream, which allowed ice to spread hundreds of miles southwards from the Arctic.
Geological sciences professor William Patterson, who led the research, said: 'It would have been very sudden for those alive at the time. It would be the equivalent of taking Britain and moving it to the Arctic over the space of a few months.'
There have been repeated claims that this past year’s hurricane activity [2005-2006] was another sign of human-induced climate change. Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes?
The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. After all, who puts money into science–whether for AIDS, or space, or climate–where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today. It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies, as well as on other energy-investment decisions.
But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.
Those of you who follow Piers Corbyn solar cycles and remember his comments regarding 132 year repeats, may find it of interest as to what happened 66 years (132/2) ago in New York - 1947.
CO2 levels were lower in 1947 but somehow those "man made" weather changes you read about today must have been there as well!
So record winter snow storms only happen in New York when the co2 level is high?......or is there an influence of a solar/lunar cycle that can explain this:)
It is illuminating to watch the CH 4 UK documentary Green House Conspiracy from 1990. We see that the hoax of CO2 global warming was effectively deconstructed twenty years ago, by media which then turned into one-sided propaganda machines for CO2 alarm leading up to its peak at the beginning of the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009. Media which were unable to counter the collapse of CO2 alarmism that followed the collapse towards the end of the conference.
Thanks to a recent article from Steve Goddard - 1921 : Earth Had A Fever, I came across this gem weather report and others from 1921, I am not sure how much "man made" co2 was around, but it was lower then today, so it goes to show the lower the co2 the more the world warms up. Or maybe world temperature and co2 don't follow afterall.
DROUGHT IN BRITAIN.
Unparalleled Heat Wave. LONDON. July 19. The serious drought in Western Europe continues. The rivers of France and Bel- gium are lower than they have previously been for 50 years, and the crops are suf- fering so severely that disaster is threat- ened. In some districts water for man and for cattle is being carted for miles. The mountain torrents of Switzerland are not one-third of their usual volume, and many of the Alpine slopes are bare of snow.
The drought in Great Britain has now lasted 86 days. Although there have been occasional light rainstorms in some districts, the gene- ral record of heat and drought eclipses all recent droughts, such as those of 1911, when for 24 days, and 1893, when for 30 days, there was no rain. Many holiday- makers, instead of doing their walking in the daytime are tramping through the night to avoid the heat. At least a dozen bathing fatalities were announced to-day.
History Channel - Nature's Fury: New England's Killer Hurricane (2006)
The New England Hurricane of 1938 (or Great New England Hurricane or Yankee Clipper or Long Island Express or simply The Great Hurricane of 1938) was the first major hurricane to strike New England since 1869. The storm formed near the coast of Africa in September of the 1938 Atlantic hurricane season, becoming a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale before making landfall as a Category 3 hurricane[1] on Long Island on September 21.
....However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".
"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.
The effects of snow-free winter in Britain are already becoming apparent. This year, for the first time ever, Hamleys, Britain's biggest toyshop, had no sledges on display in its Regent Street store. "It was a bit of a first," a spokesperson said.
Click source to read FULL report from Charles Onians, 20 March 2000
The climate campaign always tries to downplay the fact that the global cause du jour in the mid-1970s was the prospect of a new ice age. It was only a handful of marginal scientists (though Newsweek reported the scientific community was “almost unanimous” about the threat of cooling, almost as though it was a “consensus”), and a few scattered media reports.
The indispensable WattsUpWithThat website of Anthony Watts has done a public service by collating a large number of the press accounts of the issue from the time, and offers a list of 65 stories between 1970 and 1980. Keep in mind that these only represent the ones that are retrievable on the Internet today; there are likely a multiple of this not available online.
And then there’s this fabulous one-minute snippet from the late 1970s featuring the late Stephen Schneider, one of the leading warmists of the last two decades, plumping for the new ice age hypothesis back then
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