Articles Tagged "Lord Lawson"

Many thanks to Nick for sending in this YouTube from the BBC Politics Show on 6th December [LINK]. The BBC link to it could not be found yesterday, and after you see it, it's little wonder why!

The BBC, in determining its policy towards the coverage of global warming, which is of course not simply a scientific issue but an economic and a political issue, too, ought to shred that section of the Jones review and revert to the impartiality laid down in its charter.

In the second half of July, when most of us were preparing to set off on our summer holidays, the BBC Trust published a lengthy review of the impartiality and accuracy of the corporation’s coverage of science, most of which was taken up with what was described as an “independent assessment” by the geneticist Professor Steve Jones.

A substantial section of Jones’s assessment was, understandably, devoted to the important issue of global warming. Regrettably, that section was characterised chiefly by ignorance and intolerance. I was saddened not only by these general defects but also by an unwarranted attack on me personally. So, to be completely fair, I should quote the section in full.

Claiming that there is no longer any scope for serious debate over global warming, and that the media “face the danger of being trapped into a false balance, into giving equal coverage to the views of a determined but deluded minority and to those of a united but less insistent majority”, Jones complains:

“The impression of active debate is promoted by prominent individuals such as Lord Monckton and Lord Lawson. The BBC still gives space to them to make statements that are not supported by the facts: that (in a February 2011 The Daily Politics show) 95% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes from natural sources, while in fact human activity has been responsible for a 40% rise in concentration, or (a November 2009 Today programme) that volcanoes produce more gases than do humans (the balance is a hundred times in the opposite direction). For at least three years, the climate change deniers have been marginal to the scientific debate but somehow they continued to find a place on the airwaves.”

A fatuous obsession: The Coalition's absurd energy policy is damaging industry and adding hundreds of pounds to every family's fuel bills.

Last weekend, some 52 (for the most part little known) economists signed a letter to the Observer newspaper calling on the Government to retreat from its commendably firm determination to reduce substantially, during the lifetime of this Parliament, the appalling budget deficit it inherited.

I am reminded of my own time as a Treasury Minister when, in March 1981, no fewer than 364 (rather better known) economists signed a letter to the Times claiming that ‘present policies will deepen the recession, erode the industrial base of our economy and threaten its social and political stability’ and should be abandoned forthwith.

In fact, from that moment, the economy embarked on eight years of uninterrupted growth.

I have no doubt that Chancellor George Osborne will, rightly, ignore the bad advice of the 52, just as we did of the 364. And indeed the International Monetary Fund has sensibly encouraged him to stand firm.

The economy is already recovering, slowly but incontrovertibly, from the recession.

However, there is a threat to that recovery — and the bitter irony is that this is of the Government’s own making.

It is not the very necessary reduction and eventual elimination of the budget deficit. It is the Government’s so-called climate-change policy of ‘decarbonising’ the British economy — the replacement of carbon-based energy with substantially more expensive non-carbon energy, in particular wind power.

'The Global Warming Concern is over. Time for a Return to Sanity.'

At the sold-out Spectator debate last night at the Royal Geographical Society the motion was carried by a large majority.

For: 428 - Against: 214 - Undecided: 31

SPEAKERS FOR THE MOTION:

Lord Nigel Lawson
Chairman, Global Warming Policy Foundation

Dr Benny Peiser
Director, Global Warming Policy Foundation

Graham Stringer MP
Member of House of Commons Science and Technology Committee

The Delinquent Teenager - Amazon Link

New book exposes climate change panel flaws

Alan Jones speaks to Donna Laframboise, the author of a book that exposes the flaws of the inter-governmental panel on climate change.

CLICK to download MUST LISTEN interview between Alan Jones and Donna Laframboise at 2GB Radio

Also see below, Alan Jones interview with Nigel Lawson

Dear Secretary of State

25 November 2011

We are pleased that you have decided that a public response to growing criticism of your climate policies is now required. We regret, however, that you do not address our main arguments and key concerns. Neither are we impressed by evidently ill-advised assertions.

For a start, you make the mistake of connecting the reality of 20th century global warming, which no one doubts, with the various causes for it. You claim that the evidence for man's influence is getting stronger every year, yet you fail to provide any empirical evidence for this statement.

In reality, over the past few years there has been a growing realisation among scientists that other influences (such as solar, stratospheric water vapour, oceanic cycles, to name but the most dominant) are likely to be more significant than previously thought. These factors have seriously impinged on estimates of the magnitude of mankind's influence.

Your faith in the conclusion of Australia's Garnaut Review - that there has been no change in the rate of global warming in recent years – is wholly at odds with the latest scientific work and even the Government's own Met Office: Most research papers published in the last 12 months confirm that there has been no warming trend in the last 10 years.

Global warming is not causing temperatures to rise as quickly as previously feared, the Met Office has claimed.

Today the weather agency released its revised forecast which was quickly seized upon by climate change skeptics who used the data to claim global warming has stopped.

In turn, the scientific community accused them of ignoring the weight of evidence showing that global warming is a reality, and accused the Met Office of 'falling short' of the standards expected of it.

The UK's national weather service recently changed its projections for climate change through to 2017, known as 'decadal forecasting', to show a marked difference to the rate at which the world's temperature will climb.

Updated below with more media links

Lord Lawson was right to call in today’s Times for an inquiry into the global warming scandal. As noted below, through a set of hacked emails a group of some of the most influential scientific proponents of anthropogenic global warming have been revealed to have been manipulating, suppressing and distorting scientific evidence in order to bolster their claim. They in turn have said the email messages have been taken out of context. And with so much material now in the public domain, it is possible that some of it has an innocent explanation. But in an awful lot of it it is hard to see such innocence. As Lawson observes:

There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. But what is clear is that the integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British Government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay.

The U.S. president is in deep denial.

The world's political leaders, not least President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are in a state of severe, almost clinical, denial. While acknowledging that the outcome of the United Nations climate-change conference in Copenhagen fell short of their demand for a legally binding, enforceable and verifiable global agreement on emissions reductions by developed and developing countries alike, they insist that what has been achieved is a breakthrough and a decisive step forward.

Just one more heave, just one more venue for the great climate-change traveling circus—Mexico City next year—and the job will be done.

Or so we are told. It is, of course, the purest nonsense. The only breakthrough was the political coup for China and India in concluding the anodyne communiqué with the United States behind closed doors, with Brazil and South Africa allowed in the room and Europe left to languish in the cold outside.

Lord Lawson has accused Sir David Attenborough of ‘sensationalism’ as he focuses on the effects of global warming on the Polar regions during the finale of Frozen Planet.

In the final episode of the popular series, which will be broadcast on BBC One on December 7th, Sir David claims that the Arctic could be ice free in summer by 2020 and polar bears are already dying due to a lack of ice.

Already the programme has caused controversy after it was revealed that the BBC is offering broadcasters in countries like the US, where there is more scepticism about global warming, the option of buying the series without the ‘climate change episode’ at the end.

Writing in the Radio Times, Lord Lawson points out that certain populations of polar bears are rising and that sea ice cover is in fact increasing in Antarctica.

“Sir David Attenborough is one of our finest journalists and a great expert on animal life. Unfortunately, however, when it comes to global warming he seems to prefer sensation to objectivity,” he said.

However Cambridge University scientists questioned whether Lord Lawson understands or is even aware of the wider context of the latest peer-reviewed research on global warming.

For example Lord Lawson claims that polar bear populations are increasing in certain areas, although many people believe this is because the animals are spotted more around human settlements because they are hungry.