Articles Tagged "Christopher Booker"

Even the UN and the EU are wising up to the greenhouse gas scam, "the biggest environmental scandal in history"

It is now six months since I reported on what even environmentalists are calling "the biggest environmental scandal in history". Indeed this is a scam so glaringly bizarre that even the UN and the EU have belatedly announced that they are thinking of taking steps to stop it. The essence of the scam is that a handful of Chinese and Indian firms are deliberately producing large quantities of an incredibly powerful "greenhouse gas" which we in the West – including UK taxpayers – then pay them billions of dollars to destroy.

The key to this scam, designed to curb global warming, is a scheme known as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), set up under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and administered by the UN. It enables firms and governments in the developed world to buy "credits" which allow them to continue emitting greenhouse gases. These are sold to them, through well-rewarded brokers, from firms in developing countries that can show they have nominally reduced their emissions.

Easily the largest and most lucrative component in the CDM market is a peculiar racket centred on the manufacture of CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons, classified under Kyoto as greenhouse gases vastly more damaging than carbon dioxide. The way the racket works is that Chinese and Indian firms are permitted to carry on producing a refrigerant gas known as HCF-22 until 2030. But a by-product of this process is HCF-23, which is supposed to be 11,700 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. By destroying the HCF-23, the firms can claim Certified Emission Reduction credits worth billions of dollars when sold to the West (while much of the useful HCF-22 is sold onto the international black market).

Last year, destruction of CFCs accounted for more than half the CDM credits issued, in a market that will eventually, it is estimated, be worth $17 billion. Of the 1,390 CDM projects so far approved, less than 1 per cent accounts for 36 per cent of the total value.

The Methodist Church is adopting the IPCC's report on global warming as holy writ

Anyone who has observed the way the belief in man-made global warming has become for many a new religion might be intrigued by a lengthy document published by the Methodist Church, in the hope that next year it will become official Methodist policy.

Entitled Our Hope in God’s Future, it kicks off by proclaiming that “the theological task is to reflect on modern scientific accounts of the threats posed by climate change in the context of affirming the triune God as creator and redeemer of the universe”. “What is required of God’s people,” it goes on, “is repentance.” The first step must be “confessing our complicity in the sinful structures which have caused the problem”.

The document makes it clear that all good Methodists must take as their new Bible the latest report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, along with the famous report by Lord Stern. Inspired by this holy writ, like any Old Testament prophet it reels off all those familiar apocalyptic warnings of the catastrophes sinful mankind is bringing on the planet – floods, droughts, hurricanes, killer heatwaves, melting ice caps, sea levels rising by 20 feet (although they did get that one from the prophet Gore).

To the colourful Daily Telegraph blogger James Delingpole, it was winner of the coveted award for the "Biggest front page non-story in history of journalism". What he was referring to was a tale published a week ago under the by-line of The Times's enviromment correspondent Ben Webster which led the paper, covering virtually the entire front-page and with a whole further page inside, beneath the huge headline "Oil giant gives £1 million to fund climate sceptics."

Everything about this story was bizarre. Its essence, based on information which as Webster told us was had been supplied by Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Institute on Climate Change, was that Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, last year gave "almost £1 million" to four US think-tanks.

These hired lackeys had then shamefully gone on to describe the various official inquiries into the Climategate emails scandal as "whitewashes", apparently citing them as evidence that the dangers of global warming had been "grossly exaggerated".

The story concluded by suggesting that Exxon Mobil had clearly corrupted these four venal think tanks into giving "the oil company at least another year of freedom to reap the profits of its high-carbon strategy".

The penny is fast dropping that by far the most disastrous appointment made by David Cameron to his Coalition Cabinet was that of the ultra-green, Lib Dem millionaire Chris Huhne as our Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

Yesterday, after Mr Huhne issued his first annual statement on Britain's energy future, it was clear that we should all be very, very concerned about the future of Britain.

As was only too predictable, the overall theme of Mr Huhne's message was that 'climate change is the greatest global challenge we face'.

We must do everything we can and more to cut down very drastically on our 'carbon emissions', as we are now legally committed to do by the Climate Change Act - at a cost of £18 billion a year.

But in the real world, the £100 billion-plus energy question that confronts us all in Britain today is how we are going to fill that massive, fast-looming gap in our electricity supplies when the antiquated power stations which currently supply us with two-fifths of the power needed to keep our economy running are forced to close.

The headline answer given by Mr Huhne is that we must build thousands more giant wind turbines.

Warmists may be winning the big grants, but they're not winning the argument.

Herding cattle in Chile as South America suffers one of its coldest winters for years Photo: Reuters
Ever more risibly desperate become the efforts of the believers in global warming to hold the line for their religion, after the battering it was given last winter by all those scandals surrounding the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

One familiar technique they use is to attribute to global warming almost any unusual weather event anywhere in the world. Last week, for instance, it was reported that Russia has recently been experiencing its hottest temperatures and longest drought for 130 years. The head of the Russian branch of WWF, the environmental pressure group, was inevitably quick to cite this as evidence of climate change, claiming that in future "such climate abnormalities will only become more frequent". He didn't explain what might have caused the similar hot weather 130 years ago.

Meanwhile, notably little attention has been paid to the disastrous chill which has been sweeping South America thanks to an inrush of air from the Antarctic, killing hundreds in the continent's coldest winter for years.

In America, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been trumpeting that, according to its much-quoted worldwide temperature data, the first six months of this year were the hottest ever recorded. But expert analysis on Watts Up With That, the US science blog, shows that NOAA's claimed warming appears to be strangely concentrated in those parts of the world where it has fewest weather stations. In Greenland, for instance, two of the hottest spots, showing a startling five-degree rise in temperatures, have no weather stations at all.

In the war for the truth about “Man-Made Global Warming”, the Amazongate batttle won by Christopher Booker and Dr Richard North represents the most significant victory since Climategate.

It has been a long time coming. These last three or four months have been a pretty desperate time for us climate realists. Time and again we’ve shown the IPCC process – supposed “gold standard” of the scientific “consensus” on AGW – to be riddled with flaws; we’ve revealed how the scientists at the heart of the IPCC have broken FOI laws, conspired to shut out dissenting voices, and tried to distort and manipulate and even hide evidence that doesn’t suit their nakedly political purpose. Yet on the word of these charlatans we are being expected to commit an estimated $45 trillion, an annual £50 billion in Britain alone, doing the thing they call “Combatting Climate Change.”

And what has been our reward? A string of official inquiries, including three into Climategate, a Penn State one into Michael Mann, a Dutch one into the IPCC, plus the Press Complaints Commission one which led to climbdown by the Sunday Times over its reporting of Amazongate – and every one a white wash. (For the clearest summation of the key point these whitewashes overlooked, read the excellent Andrew Orlowski here.)

It’s no wonder that the promoters of climate change alarmism have been crowing that they have right and truth on their side, and that their enemies are just vexatious kooks with no evidence to support their outrageous claims against decent, hardworking honest scientists like Michael Mann and Phil Jones.

Big mistake.

The IPCC's attempts to hide the truth about its exaggerated claims on the deforestation of the Amazon have ended in defeat

Last week, after six months of evasions, obfuscation, denials and retractions, a story which has preoccupied this column on and off since January came to a startling conclusion. It turns out that one of the most widely publicised statements in the 2007 report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a claim on which tens of billions of dollars could hang – was not based on peer-reviewed science, as repeatedly claimed, but originated solely from anonymous propaganda published on the website of a small Brazilian environmental advocacy group.

The ramifications of this discovery stretch in many directions. First, it seems to show that the IPCC – whose reports governments rely on to justify presenting mankind with the largest bill in history – has been in serious breach of its own rules.

Critical evidence from climate change sceptics continues to be ignored by the political and scientific establishments

What are we to make of the efforts by the political and academic establishments to hold the line against all those revelations, such as "Climategate", which last winter rocked the authority of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? The most obvious feature of the four official inquiries into the "Climategate" emails (a fifth report is due this week from Sir Muir Russell), is that not one has engaged with the central point at issue. This is the evidence from the emails and other documents confirming that the key IPCC scientists involved had been manipulating data to show temperatures having lately shot up to levels unknown in the past 1,000 years.

A familiar example was the IPCC's "hockey stick" graph, created by the American scientist Michael Mann, but shown by the statistics expert Steve McIntyre to be no more than a statistical artefact. Last week, a second inquiry by his own university cleared Dr Mann, again making no attempt to discuss the central issue. Instead, it merely asserted – while acclaiming him as "among the most respected scientists in his field" – that the techniques used to compile his graph were wholly acceptable. Similarly, McIntyre was startled last week to get a dismissive email from Lord Oxburgh, whose Science Appraisal Panel also avoided the crucial issue in its perfunctory five-page report, bizarrely claiming that "the science was not the subject of our study".

Also defending the establishment line was last week's Panorama, with its "inquiry" into Climategate. This example of BBC propaganda at its most childish purported to be impartial, by pitching two advocates of man-made global warming against two "sceptics", who turned out to be believers in man-made warming. Its centrepiece was yet another vindication of the "hockey stick", including a sycophantic interview with Dr Mann. Again, this gave not the faintest idea of how devastatingly the methods used to compile this graph have been challenged (for full accounts see A W Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science, or my book The Real Global Warming Disaster).

The story of the IPCC's claims about threats to the Amazon rainforest takes another bizarre turn.



Information about logging and fire risks in the Amazon ended up in the IPCC?s 2007 report on global warming Photo: Sipa Press/Rex Features

Last week the beleaguered global warming lobby was exulting over what it took to be the best news it has had in a long time. A serious allegation, which last January rocked the authority of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was “corrected” as untrue by The Sunday Times, the newspaper which most prominently reported it. The reputation of the IPCC, it seemed, had been triumphantly vindicated. The growing tide of scepticism over climate change had at last been reversed. But this episode leaves many questions unanswered.

The “correction”, gleefully quoted by everyone from the WWF and The New York Times to The Guardian’s George Monbiot related to what was known as “Amazongate”. This was one of the series of controversies which exploded round the IPCC last winter, when it was shown that many of the high-profile claims made in its 2007 report had been based on material produced by environmental activists and campaigning groups rather than on proper, peer-reviewed scientific evidence.

One example, also reported in The Sunday Telegraph, was the IPCC’s much-publicised claim that climate change, leading to a reduction in rainfall, was threatening the survival of “up to 40 per cent” of the Amazon rainforest. The only source the IPCC could cite for this in its report was a document from the environmental advocacy group WWF. But last week The Sunday Times, in its prominent “correction” to its own story, conceded that the IPCC’s claim was “supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence” after all. Not identified, however, was the nature of this peer-reviewed evidence. Where is it?

Cuts announced last week to finance castings needed for nuclear reactors were deeply revealing of the Coalition’s priorities

The fact that the largest of the £2 billion public spending cuts announced last week was an £80 million loan to Sheffield Forgemasters – to finance a 15,000-ton press for the huge castings needed for nuclear reactors – was deeply revealing of the Coalition’s priorities. It would have helped Britain to build the new generation of nuclear power stations that we desperately need (but which our “green” energy minister Chris Huhne so dislikes). It would also have made Britain a world leader, with the potential to generate billions of pounds of exports, enabling the loan to be swiftly repaid.

Still in place, however, is a £200 million loan to Nissan (£20 million from our Government, the rest from the European Investment Bank), to enable its Sunderland plant to build thousands of Leaf electric cars, which will only be able to drive 100 miles before they need recharging – with electricity from CO2-emitting fossil fuels.

What puts the £2 billion cuts into depressing perspective, of course, is the fact that our public debt is now rising by £3 billion a week.