Another myth I’d like to scotch, if I may, is the popular greenie notion that the sort of people who don’t believe in ‘climate change’ or ‘man-made global warming’ are sinister, cackling nature-haters who are so addicted to their expensive, metropolitan lifestyles and their carbon-belching death machines that they simply refuse (as a matter of selfishness and lifestyle choice) to listen to all reason. That caricature bears little resemblance to any of the climate realists I’ve met, most of whom are in this game because they love nature too much, not too little. What drives them above all – as it certainly does me – is their absolute horror at what is being done to our world by the green movement in the name of ‘saving’ it. The rainforests are being devastated and people are starving as a result of biofuels policies. Wildlife is destroyed and the countryside is blighted by wind farms. And nature, once a source of endless delight and joy, is now, increasingly, something we are encouraged to feel guilty about by teachers, by environmental campaigners, by elegiac David Attenborough BBC documentaries inviting us to blame ourselves for the (supposedly) vanishing poles…
But hang on just a second. Can it really be true, as I implied earlier, that this bad stuff is all the fault of liberal-left ideology? How does that square with, say, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron wanting to lead Britain’s ‘greenest government ever’?
Well, it rather depends on your definition of ‘liberal-left’, I suppose. I certainly don’t wish to alienate those fine, principled left-wingers who’ve taken what I consider to be the ‘right’ side in the global-warming debate. Among them are Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; Labour MP Graham Stringer; and blogger and destroyer of the Hockey Stick Steve McIntyre: proud socialists all. But the fact remains that left-wing climate sceptics are very much the minority. In Britain, as in America, environmental attitudes align closely with party politics. Climate scepticism is much more prevalent among Republican and Conservative voters than it is among Democrats and Labour or Liberal Democrat voters.
Nor should this remotely surprise us. A left-winger would argue, I suppose, that it’s because right-wing people, being selfish and evil, are that much more likely to put their own needs before those of the planet. But actually what I think it boils down to is this: the ideology of the modern environmental movement and the ideology of the liberal-left are closely entwined. Both believe in a bigger state; both share the conviction that the world can be made a better, fairer, more decent, cleaner, greener place if only we give a bit more of our money away in taxes and if only we allow more decisions to be made on our behalf by politicians, technocrats, ‘experts’ and ‘gentlemen from Whitehall’ who know what is best for us.
As a right-leaning libertarian – or ‘South Park Conservative’ – I personally take the exact opposite view: that there’s no problem in the world that can’t be made worse by a corrupt, meddling, wasteful, politically correct bureaucracy trying to make things better. And nowhere did this truth become more abundantly clear to me than during the dreaded era that first brought me to political consciousness: the dawn of New Labour under Tony Blair.
I think I guessed from the day he entered No. 10 in May 1997 that this perma-grinning snake-oil-salesman was a wrong ‘un. But at the time I was very much in a minority. Vast swathes of the country, even parts which had traditionally voted Tory, were in ecstasies about the new regime. It seemed, through some magical new formula known as the ‘Third Way’, to have created a perfect synthesis between the economic freedoms favoured by the right and the social justice favoured by the left. What was there possibly not to like?
Britain was groovy again. No less an authority than Vanity Fair told us so in its ‘Cool Britannia’ edition. Pop stars came to Downing Street to pay court to Blair. Everyone in the country could now afford an iPod, a state-of-the-art mobile phone, a 50-inch flat screen TV, and at least three or four holidays a year in places they’d never heard of before like Riga, Ljubljana and Plovdiv – now magically cheap, thanks to wonderful new no-frills flights on easyJet and Ryanair.
Well, almost everyone. As one of the unlucky few who wasn’t in the City or a lawyer or in the lavish pay of some government-funded bureaucracy, it was with growing bewilderment that I surveyed Blair’s new ‘young country’. The weekend newspapers were filled with articles claiming that we’d never had it so good. In fact, so one learned, we’d now reached a point of such absurd overabundance that, really, the time had come for us all to start re-examining our lifestyles: to exchange the material for the spiritual, to downsize to riverside cottages where we’d live on organically grown vegetables and bacon, made from pigs we’d personally reared and lovingly slaughtered, while our beautiful blond children, like models from the Boden catalogue, frolicked in the mud (just as they used to, before antibiotics and the industrial age ruined this healthy, natural lifestyle).
And I’d read these articles, thinking: ‘Yep. I’m all up for that. Just as soon as I’ve actually acquired a lifestyle comfortable enough to re-examine, I too will be down-sizing and re-spiritualising and pig-breeding. Until then, though, I’ve got a mortgage to pay and kids to feed and a job to slave away at for next to no money. Soon as that irksome overabundance kicks in I’ll let you know…’
More than feeling poor, though, I was starting to feel uneasy. I could sense that behind all this boom-era optimism lurked something very rotten. But what?
Not the economy, clearly. That was so strong it was obviously going to last forever. But something about Britain was definitely changing. And so quickly the country I’d known under Margaret Thatcher had now all but vanished. Instead of the culture, tradition, reserve, hierarchy, reason and stoicism which had won us the Second World War – and the Falklands War too – we seemed to have turned into a nation of emotionally incontinent, bleeding-heart whingers, with a highly refined sense of what our government could do for us but very limited concepts of what we might offer our country in return.
With Blair, we had entered a new age of ‘political correctness gone mad’. Civic gardeners were banned by Cheltenham Council from planting pansies under trees, lest they sprain their wrists in the root-filled soil. The BBC issued staff with ‘Revolving Security Door User Instructions’ after a woman caught her foot in the door at BBC Birmingham. Paper napkins in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, were withdrawn by the council from the meals-on-wheels service for fear that pensioners and disabled people might choke on them. Simultaneously – like those skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts, only considerably uglier and much harder to slay – an army of bureaucrats and petty officials sprang up unbidden from the soil, ready to police and micro-manage every last detail of our private lives. They wanted to control how much we drank, the kinds of food we could eat, the kinds of jokes it was acceptable for us to tell, when (and when not) it was appropriate to fly a Union flag from our home, and the size of our carbon footprint. To make it easier for the authorities to snoop on us and fine us for any of a growing number of minor infractions, there were spy cameras in our streets, speed cameras on every road, even microchips in our rubbish bins – all paid for by us, of course.
In its thirteen years in power, the New Labour government managed to create over 3,000 new offences. Nearly half of these could land you in jail, including: not having a licence for a church concert, smoking in a public place, selling a grey squirrel, transshipping unlicensed fish, or disobeying a health and safety inspector.
What the hell was going on? And perhaps, more to the point, how on Earth were the bastards getting away with it? What kind of crazed, topsy-turvy world did we inhabit where mean-spirited, controlling, pessimistic left-wingers were seen as the ‘good guys’, whereas those of us who believed in greater freedom for everyone were viewed as the Devil Incarnate?
It was in seeking to answer these questions that I first heard about an Italian Marxist named Antonio Gramsci. He was the man – round glasses, weird sticky-up hair – whose writings i
n the 1920s and 1930s led to the idea of a ‘culture war’. Gramsci argued that in the great ideological battle between left and right, it didn’t much matter what happened in the arena of pure politics. Presidents, prime ministers and political parties may come and go, but if you can capture the hearts and minds of an entire society, then you’ve won the war for all eternity. So it was that the left-wing disciples of Gramsci began their ‘long march through the institutions’. They occupied schools, universities, the media, the arts – anywhere where they could exert their power to shape the way the broader culture (that’s you and me) thinks about the world.
Consider how many university departments around the world are still held mental hostage by French philosophers like Foucault and Derrida, whose rejection of authority, hierarchy and empiricism seeks to undermine and destroy almost everything of value in the Western intellectual tradition. (As we’ll see in a later chapter, not even scientific rationalism was immune from this dismal trend.) Consider how remarkably few books, plays, films, newspapers or TV documentaries do anything other than endorse a view of the world in which capitalism is bad, businessmen are greedy, America is a bully, the West must learn to be more like the East, terrorism is kind of our fault, mankind is a blot on the landscape and, yes, right-wing people are way nastier than left-wing people.
We live in a culture whose values are defined almost entirely in terms set by the liberal-left. Yet because those values have become so commonplace – affecting everything from the language we use to the way we think – we don’t even notice them.
Who controls the language controls the culture. Who controls the culture wins the political argument. George Orwell realised this years ago. In his appendix to 1984, he explained that one of the most effective ways of suppressing heretical thought was to eliminate undesirable words or strip them of their meaning. The example he gave was ‘free’. The word continued to exist in Newspeak, but only in the sense of ‘this field is free from weeds’ or ‘the dog is free from lice’ – not in the old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’.
This is exactly what happened in Blair’s Britain. Freedom, formerly a state of liberty, now came to mean ‘an entitlement to services administered by the state’ – as in ‘freedom to use the National Health Service’, ‘freedom from discrimination’. And there was plenty more where that came from. As observed by Daniel Hannan, journalist and Member of the European Parliament, once-neutral words like ‘discrimination’, ‘diversity’, ‘community’, ‘profit’, ‘public’, ‘elite’ and ‘competition’ became so tainted by association with the value system of the liberal-left that their original meanings almost vanished.
Orwell wrote, ‘Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought…’
All this is a very long and roundabout way of saying that the reason I came to distrust AGW theory is because I recognised it as part of a familiar socio-political pattern: the advance of government through stealth. Sometimes, as we’ve seen above, this was achieved by subtle shifts in the language. Sometimes it was achieved by exploiting popular hysteria, for example in the AIDS scare of the early 1980s, the ‘killer egg’ salmonella scare of the late 1980s, the Mad Cow/BSE scare and the millennium bug scare. As Christopher Booker and Richard North note in their excellent book Scared to Death, all of these scare stories followed an almost identical trajectory. In each case, a potential hazard was identified by scientists, hyped up by the media – in collusion with the scientists who weren’t at all averse to the extra publicity and the possible funding implications – and then ‘dealt with’, incompetently and pointlessly at vast expense by a government keen to show that it was responding to its electorate’s fears. Then – the part that was often not so well reported by the media – it would gradually be recognised that the threat wasn’t as great as previously thought, that in fact it had probably been a most spectacular waste of money. But none of the scientists or politicians would ever admit this publicly, preferring to maintain that whatever the rights and wrongs of the affair, their action had been justified on the grounds of ‘the precautionary principle’.
Ah, but how do I know that global warming – or climate change if you prefer – is not the exception that proves the rule? After all, just because the scientists and politicians were wrong about AIDS and salmonella and Mad Cow disease and the millennium bug and, more recently, the great SARS, bird flu and swine flu non-epidemics, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong this time, does it?
No, it doesn’t. It’s possible that the climate alarmists are right: that the planet really is on the verge of frying, that it’s all man’s fault and that sceptics like me will one day be proved to have been foolishly complacent. But then it’s also possible that David Icke is right and that if you pull hard enough on the hair of the Queen, her human mask will slip off to reveal the hideous green reptilian head that marks her as a member of the sinister master race they call the Babylonian Brotherhood. And it’s possible that the movie Independence Day is right, and that Doctor Who is right, and that the universe is chock-full of evil alien races hell-bent on colonising Planet Earth. And it’s possible that this book you think you’re reading is a figment of your imagination, and that actually you’re a very intelligent duck who just thinks he is human because of the special Distorto Mirrors and Mind Warpo Rays employed by the Cockroach People who grew you in a pod just for the hell of it last week.
And that is the problem with this whole debate on catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW). We have been gulled by politicians and activist scientists and propagandists into thinking that the key question is, ‘is it impossible?’ (to which the answer is ‘no’), when in fact the far more germane one is ‘is it likely?’
This is why it really doesn’t matter who I am, how much science I know, whether I’m in it for the money or because I’m a contrarian show-off or because I’m genuinely committed and sincere. That’s because the onus on me is not to prove whether or not ‘climate change’ is a man-made-disaster about to happen. I never will because it’s impossible to prove a negative.
What I can do – and am indeed about to do – is prove to you the only things that need to be proven in this sorry tale of foolishness and mindless waste as great as any in human history. The people who tell you that AGW is a near-certainty are a bunch of liars, cheats and frauds. Your taxes will be raised, your liberties curtailed and your money squandered to deal with a ‘crisis’ so exceedingly unlikely and so poorly supported by real world data or objective science that it might just as well not exist.
TWO
CLIMATEGATE: HOW IT HAPPENED
By the late tenth to twelfth centuries most of the world for which we have evidence seems to have been enjoying a renewal of warmth, which at times during those centuries may have approached the level of the warmest millennia of post-glacial times.
Professor H. H. Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World, 1982
It was another dreary November morning in 2009 and I was sitting at my desk, wondering what to write next for my Telegraph blog, which I’d been writing for the previous seven or eight months. Into my lap dropped the story – Climategate – which would not only change my life forever, but quite possibly help save Western Civilisation from the greatest threat it has ever known.
It went like this (reproduced here with its original errors, noted in the reference section at the back of this book):
Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming
If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) and released sixty-one megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)
When you read some of those files – including 1,079 e-mails
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br /> and seventy-two documents – you realise just why the boffins at CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be ‘the greatest in modern science’. These alleged e-mails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:
Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
One of the alleged e-mails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L. Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:
In an odd way this is cheering news.
But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of The Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.
Here are a few tasters.
Manipulation of evidence:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last twenty years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 2