Articles Tagged "James Delingpole"

The ecotard media – led, naturally enough, by the Guardian – has been making great play of “Skeptical Environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg’s apparent Damascene conversion. Where once Lomborg was a card-carrying evil climate-change denier he is now an ardent worshipper at the Church of Al Gore, supposedly.

This is a great story – and works, provided you haven’t read a word of Bjorn Lomborg and don’t know anything about his views or his background. If you do, it looks very much like a pathetic little spoiler designed to distract attention from the IAC’s reasonably damning report on the IPCC.

Lomborg is not and never has been anything other than a Warmist. Which is to say – as I wrote when I interviewed him for the Spectator two years ago – “his views on global warming are broadly in sympathy with those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” But I suppose “Danish statistician still believes in Man Made Global Warming, as he has done for ages” doesn’t make quite such a good Guardian headline.

I have just been listening to Uncertain Climate, the first in BBC “Environment Analyst” Roger Harrabin’s two-part Radio 4 investigation into the politics of climate change. The announcer introduced it as a programme “on an unusual aspect of global warming that you won’t have heard in the news headlines”. This was touching, but would only have been accurate had it added the phrase “if your only source for those news headlines is the BBC website”.

Anyhoo, I listened to it so that you don’t have to. The programme was rather what you would have expected the BBC and Environment Analyst Roger Harrabin to make on global warming – which is to say apparent sweet reasonableness and noble questing-for-truth disguising a deal of disingenuousness, special pleading, (presumably) unconscious bias, and economy with the actualité. (Hat tip: Nick Mabbs)

Its slipperiest trick, to my mind, was giving so much space – almost unchallenged but for some (heavily edited) interpolations from an underrepresented Nigel Lawson – to former UN ambassador Sir Crispin Tickell.

When the final lofty analysis of the CAGW scare gets to be written up by Sir Christopher Booker’s or Lord Delingpole’s grandson in about 2050 (by which time it will have become superabundantly clear, as polar bears maraud outside the freezing walls of Carlisle, and Mount Kilimanjaro becomes the favoured skiing destination of Boris Johnson’s descendants, that global cooling is and always was the far greater threat), at least one chapter will be dedicated to the deleterious influence of this pompous, insufferable mandarin in skewing the climate debate with his hysterically overblown claims of the eco disasters awaiting us. (In the 1970s he wrote a book worrying we were all going to be done for by Global Cooling. But Sir Crispin doesn’t much talk about this any more.)

I’m writing this in Salcombe, Devon on a rainy, miserable summer’s day which, I fear, may be all too symptomatic of the climatic rubbish we can all expect for the next 30 years as – thanks to changes in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation combined with a solar minimum – we enter a period of global cooling. Let’s hope I’m wrong, eh?

Well, among those who seems to be hoping just that is an amiable fellow called Sir Paul Nurse, the Nobel prize winning geneticist and president-to-be of the Royal Society, who came round to my house last week to film part of a BBC Horizon documentary on why it is that people are losing their faith in scientists.

I told him people aren’t losing their faith in “scientists”. Just the “scientists” who are behind the junk science being advanced in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s four increasingly tendentious and misleading assessment reports.

I notice that the Daily Mail’s science editor, Michael Hanlon, has now turned and accepts man-made climate change, leading to dismay from his readers and a certain smugness from Left Foot Forward.

But why must a conservative oppose the idea of man-made climate change? I’m Right-wing and I believe in it, and so do many others of my tribe.

I should add the caveat here that I know almost nothing about climatology, and on this subject I’m not going to argue with someone like James Delingpole, who knows a lot. But James is clearly in a minority of people knowledgeable of this subject, and the majority of scientists take the view that mankind has made a significant impact on climate. So why should I side against them? Because the likes of Al Gore are wrong about everything else? That doesn’t sound very, er, scientific.

There’s no reason why conservatives should be opposed to a particular scientific belief, and there’s absolutely every reason why conservatives should be in favour of protecting the environment. As Roger Scruton wrote, caring for environment appeals to our “love of country, of territory and love of that territory as home”. Conservatives are opposed to radical, upsetting change, and there can’t be one more radical or upsetting than a change in the earth’s climate.

So why do so few conservatives go along with a theory overwhelmingly backed by scientists? Largely because of the way that believers give off a religious air, treating sceptics like heretics who are morally corrupt or in the pay of big oil, the secular equivalent of Satan.

Tonight at 8pm I’m going to be on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions. I welcome all the support you can give me but don’t get your hopes up: I can pretty much guarantee I’m going to be rubbish – as I have been on the four or five previous occasions I’ve submitted to this ordeal.

Why am I so rubbish on Any Questions? Well one reason, obviously, is that I’m not a sufficiently experienced or quick-witted broadcaster. I’m not as silvery and slippery and avuncular a politician as my fellow panelist Tony Benn, nor yet as loveable a wag as my second fellow panelist John Sergeant, nor yet as straight-down-the-line bright, informed and likeable as my third fellow panelist Ruth Lea.

So, yes, I’m rubbish – I fully acknowledge that. But I don’t think my rubbishness is the only – or indeed the main reason why I always seem to come across so badly on Any Questions. If it were, then I would also be rubbish when I do US talk radio or shows like Glen Beck and Fox & Friends and, without wishing to blow my own trumpet, I’m not. On US shows I come across as likeable, self-deprecating, witty, informed, honest, funny. I can even come across that way on British TV productions, such as the oft-repeated Channel 4 documentary When Boris Met Dave.

What is it, then about Any Questions that brings out the worst in me?

Well, in three letters: BBC.

One of the great lies told us by our political leaders in order to persuade us to accept their swingeing and pointless green taxes and their economically suicidal, environmentally vandalistic wind-farm building programmes is that if we don’t do it China will. Apparently, just waiting to be grabbed out there are these glittering, golden prizes marked “Green jobs” and “Green technologies” – and if only we can get there before those scary, mysterious Chinese do, well, maybe the West will enjoy just a few more years of economic hegemony before the BRICs nations thwack us into the long grass.

This is, of course, utter nonsense. The Chinese do not remotely believe in the myth of Man-Made Global Warming nor in the efficacy of “alternative energy”. Why should they? It’s not as if there is any evidence for it. The only reason the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming myth has penetrated so deeply into Western culture is….No. I’m going to save that stuff for my fairly imminent (Nov?) book on the subject which I hope you’re all going to buy.

What do the Chinese think about CAGW? Well, until now it was largely a question of educated guesswork, based on inferences like the fact that it was the Chinese who derailed the Copenhagen negotiations. But thanks to a new book called Low Carbon Plot by Gou Hongyang we know exactly what the official view is.

Is “climate change” to blame for the smog in Moscow and the peat fires which have swept across Russia and devastated 30 per cent of its wheat harvest?

But of course, says a man from the Met Office, as reported in a BBC bulletin so predictably skewed towards AGW alarmism it might just as well have been taken from a press release by the World Worldlife Fund. (And which is the other expert the BBC decides to quote on this issue? Why none other than the Russian head of “Climate and Energy Programme” at the WWF, who – quel surprise! – sees the fires as a clear sign that greenhouse gases must urgently be reduced).

For a more balanced perspective, try this interview with Pat Michaels on RT.



Or this interview with Piers Corbyn.

Driving back from our annual two-week red-kite shooting holiday in deepest Wales with our friends the Monbiots (George, Mildred, and their delightful daughters Anthropogenina and Arrheniusa) this weekend, I tuned into BBC Radio 4’s Any Answers. (This is the show where ordinary members of the public phone in to give their views on matters arising from Any Questions – which I’m on this Friday, of which more anon.)

One of the questions had been about climate change and three callers were offered the chance to air their views. The first believed Man Made CO2 was definitely going to drive global temperatures up by between 4 degrees and 6 degrees C by the end of the century, that it was going to be catastrophic, but there was nothing we can do. The second and third disagreed violently: not with with the assumption of Man-Made Eco Disaster – they took that part as a given – but with the outrageous suggestion that something couldn’t be done to avert climate change. Of course it could: these people were angry and they wanted urgent action by yesterday at the very latest.

Where does the BBC find these people and are they representative of the country as a whole? Well we know the answer to the second part is “No.” Contra BBC Radio 4’s Any Answers, 100 per cent of British people do not believe in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW). An IPSOS Mori poll in February found that 31 per cent of those surveyed believed the “Climate Change” problem had been exaggerated, while six per cent said it wasn’t happening at all.

“Energy prices may rise by a third,” says our disastrous secretary of state of energy and climate change Chris Huhne. Rubbish. They’re going to rise by a hell of a lot more than that before he is finished. Alternative energy, let us never forget, is just that: an alternative to energy. Wind power and solar power are so risibly inefficient that the only way they can ever be economically viable is with lashings and lashings of taxpayer subsidy. Nuclear power would be much more effective but Huhne has effectively ruled it out. Why? Because in Huhne’s bizarre Weltanschauung, it’s OK for the taxpayer to subsidise low-carbon energy that doesn’t work (wind, solar) but not low-carbon energy that does work (nuclear).

But it’s not Huhne’s breathtaking hypocrisy, ignorance and eco-fanaticism I want to talk about today. Rather I want to focus on just one aspect of it: his plan to carpet Britain in wind farms. What I should like to know is how many of you are with me on this one. It seems to me that at the moment we are sleepwalking towards the greatest environmental disaster of our lifetimes: in the name of alleviating something distant and imaginary – “Climate Change” – our government is now committed to the destruction of the British landscape. And what I’m not sensing, yet, is any kind of serious, concerted resistance.

We need a figurehead. (Not me, unfortunately. I ain’t got the time or the fame or the diplomatic skills.) We need somebody who can galvanise ordinary British people into saving their countryside before it’s too late. Ideally that figurehead would have been the Prince of Wales. But as I explained in last week’s Spectator the Prince has rather ruled himself out of that one. Alan Titchmarsh? He’s the only name that immediately springs to mind, but perhaps you can suggest others.

ONE of the world's largest oil companies has broken its pledge to stop funding groups that promote scepticism about man-made climate change.

ExxonMobil gave almost £stg 1 million ($1.75m) last year toorganisations that campaigned against controls on greenhouse gas emissions.

Several made outspoken attacks on climate scientists at the University of East Anglia and argued that their leaked emails showed the dangers of global warming had been grossly exaggerated.

The scientists were exonerated this month by an independent inquiry, but groups funded by Exxon have continued to lambast them. The Media Research Centre, which received $US50,000 ($57,500) last year from Exxon, called the inquiry a "whitewash" and condemned "climate alarmists".

Some of Exxon's largest donations were to groups that lobbied against a global deal on emissions being reached at last December's climate summit in Copenhagen. The value of Exxon's oil and gas investments could fall sharply if governments adopt aggressive plans to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels.