Back to Global Warming

The global warming brigade is at it again. On the scienceblogs.com website, under the heading ‘The Climate Change Boycott Gambit’, James Hrynyshyn has accused Quartet of fabricating the existence of a boycott in order to cover up for the ‘failure’ of Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth: Global Warming – The Missing Science.

In fact he is wrong in this, as such accusations from his side of the fence usually are.

Heaven and Earth has already had five reprints and its sales are still going strong.  This is despite the fact that it has not had the benefit of any reviews, apart from the now famous article that appeared in the Spectator about three months back.  The rest of the media has by and large ignored the book, except for the Guardian newspaper, which has denounced it in no uncertain terms.

Any claim from the climate fundamentalists that Quartet is conjuring lies in order to boost its sales is quite preposterous. Our response is clear: such tactics are unworthy of any reply.  The facts speak for themselves.

Indeed, here is a sample of one of the emails threatening a boycott of Quartet Books:

From: Gary [mailto: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 14 December 2009 13:35
To: info@quartetbooks.co.uk

Subject: Heaven and Earth – boycotting Quartet books thanks to Ian Plimer

Dear Quartet,

Through a Guardian article today I have been made aware of your promotion of Ian Plimer’s book “Heaven and Earth”.

I am sure you are making a great deal of profit from this deceitful climate change denier. My response is to inform all of my contacts to boycott any books that you publish until you make a public statement distancing yourselves from Ian Plimer and immediately stop printing, promoting and supporting his lies.

There is simply too much at stake here. I would appreciate your positive response in this matter.

Regards,

Gary Evans

If Ian Plimer has, indeed, written a ‘deceitful’ work of fiction, then why not engage him in a head-on debate?  So far no one of any substance has agreed to take him on here in the UK.

Why not? Even the BBC has failed to give discussion space to those who, like Plimer, decline to follow the orthodox government stance on climate warming. It is refreshing to note that the Board of Trustees of the BBC has now asked the corporation for an inquiry into whether its coverage of this very important issue has been even-handed.

Meanwhile, the climate change deniers are being ostracised in a democracy whose foundation is based on free speech. Instead of a healthy debate on the causes of climate change, the public is constantly being fed with all sorts of information, some of it inconclusive, some of it actually wrong. The melting of the Himalayan glaciers has been made into a specially emotive issue, with claims that they could all disappear within twenty-five years, a warning that had been given in a UN report.

As reports in the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail now confirm (17 and 18 January 2010), this vital piece of data has been traced back via a 2005 report by WWF to  a news item in the New Scientist in 1999 that was based in turn on a telephone conversation with an Indian scientist, Syed Hasnain. Mr Hasnain now says that any off-the-cuff remarks he made at the time were ‘pure speculation’. This piece of ‘irrefutable science’ had therefore never been subject to the rigorous peer review normal for scientific conclusions. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had simply accepted it at face value, and now sees its own credibility undermined. In the Himalayas those glaciers most at risk are shrinking at two or three feet a year, but many of them are hundreds of feet thick.

Here both Britain and Europe have seen a winter creating havoc, with the heaviest snowfalls in four decades, yet still we are told that global warming is the reason. Those same informants have been unable to forecast the weather accurately even a week ahead. The claim that ‘climate’ and ‘weather’ are two quite different questions does not carry much weight for the man in the street. He was told that last summer was set to be a hot one for Britain, followed by a mild winter. The prophets could hardly have got it more wrong, but still they carry on with their task the same as before. No wonder experts are so distrusted, yet we are expected to accept anything they say unquestioningly when they predict what climate change has in store for us over the next three decades.

It is a great tragedy that democracy should have seen its worst recent spell occur under a Labour government. A feature of this has been the use of ‘doomsday scenarios’ as instruments of public persuasion. Most notoriously it happened with the spurious claims regarding Saddam’s WMDs, to bring the public on side for the Iraq invasion. It is happening with climate change. It has even happened with the swine flu scare, in which the incidence of infection has fallen to about 5,000 a week, far fewer cases than would be usual in a routine winter flu epidemic. As a result the Department of Health has landed the NHS with 60 million doses of vaccine for which it has no use.

The worst effects of all, however, have been the erosion of civil liberties and the fact that the country is financially bankrupt. Even our gold reserves were sold for peanuts some years ago by our enterprising prime minister when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Yet the government still fantasises that its economic policies, now destined to penalise those whose contribution to the economy is vital, will see us safely through the recession.

Add to these miseries the discrediting of Parliament itself, whose members have brazenly bent their privileges with an expenses bonanza and have in principle got away with it. Who would have thought the day would ever dawn when we saw a Home Secretary claiming a refund for pornographic films for the entertainment of her husband, while others have claimed expenses on bogus or fictitious grounds?

So why should we believe anything the politicians say, even when it comes to global warming? Everything they touch seems to turn to dust, and even the scientist has become a kind of civil servant willing to do the government’s bidding.

Most people of a certain age who have seen better times hanker for the good old days when a government was expected to lead the way in integrity and high moral standards, bereft of greed and free from spin. Mrs Thatcher’s legacy of a money-induced form of capitalism has been brought by Labour to its ultimate form at the cost of fine ideals and the slow erosion of our cultural heritage.

I have been a Labour supporter for as far back as I can remember, but no longer.  The sooner this ‘New Labour’ is out in the wilderness, the better it will be for all of us.

This lot deserve to get the boot.