Can of worms

Spectator, The ,  Mar 10, 2007   by Delingpole, James

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Just to remind you, this is the week my splendid anti-Left polemic How To Be Right is published and if you Speccie readers aren't its natural constituency I don't know who is. So buy it, please, or I'm never going to be able to put Boy through that brilliant prep school I mentioned a few weeks ago, and instead of Latin and Greek, all he'll ever be taught about is Diwali, Mary Seacole and global warming.

Talking of which, I should like to thank two ideologically disparate institutions for having saved my bacon this week. The first is the Centre for Policy Studies, which published Martin Livermore's timely report on climate-change science rebutting the more hysterical claims of the eco-lobby. The second is Channel 4, which broadcast terrestrial British television's first major exposé of the international 'man-made global warming' conspiracy.

Before these two lifelines appeared, I don't mind telling you, I was absolutely bricking it. You see, one of the major strands in the book is that all this talk of impending man-made eco-disaster is a load of old guff. What worried me was that it seemed for a time -- especially when all the newspapers went big on the shock findings of the latest IPCC report -- as if almost nobody out there in the big wide world agreed with me. I just couldn't stop thinking about the hideous radio interviews and round-table debates I was bound to find myself embroiled in as a result.

'So, Mr Delingpole, despite having had no scientific training whatsoever, you think you know better than the 2,500 international experts on the International Panel for Climate Change, do you? And how, pray, do you explain the melting icecaps and shrinking glaciers? And what about the polar ice-bores showing an intimate relationship between CO 2levels and temperature?' Those ice-bores had been bothering me a lot. They're the central plank of Al Gore's argument in An Inconvenient Truth, and the way he puts it they're pretty incontrovertible. How can you look at that terrifying graph he shows -- the one in which temperature levels mirror almost perfectly the shocking, exponential rise in CO 2levels -- and not be convinced that the time has come to act NOW?

The Great Global Warming Swindle (Channel 4, Thursday) smashed this argument in a trice. Yes, there is indeed a precise correlation between CO 2levels and temperature, it agreed, but here's the thing Al Gore forgot to mention: it works the other way round. CO 2levels rise AFTER the earth's temperature rises (the time lag is about 800 years), not before. So a big chunk of the CO 2level rise we're experiencing now is the result of what the earth's climate was doing almost a millennium ago, in what is known as the Mediaeval Warm Period.

In fact, the programme went on to point out, man-made contributions to CO 2levels are relatively insignificant. Volcanoes, for example, produce more CO 2than all the world's cars and industries put together; animals release 150 giga tons of CO 2per year, while man-made CO 2amounts to a measly 6.5 giga tons.

It's worth dwelling on these trainspotterish scientific details, I think, because so few in the eco-lobby want to do so. They'd much prefer to silence all those scientists around the world who have come up with alternative theories on global warming, such as the ones at the Danish Space Centre who think it has much more to do with cloud vapour, which is in turn the result of cosmic rays caused by increased solar activity.

Yes, this documentary shockingly revealed, the reason the world is getting warmer is mainly because of a great, big, glowing object called the sun. The more sunspots there are (i. e. , the more active the sun is), the hotter it gets. It really is that simple.

Why, then, has this conspiracy arisen to persuade us otherwise? The programme offered numerous explanations, one being the vast sums of cash sloshing around and available to any scientists who can demonstrate on their grant application that their research relates to climate change. In the US alone, global warming research funding is running at $2 billion a year.

Scientists need to earn a crust, just like the rest of us.

Weirdly for a movement which has been hijacked by all those disaffected lefty activists who needed a new cause after the death of communism, one of the early progenitors of the great global warming scam was Margaret Thatcher. Her government, it turns out, was the first to fund research in this field -- not so much because Mrs Thatcher was a closet Greenie as because it fitted in with her plans to promote nuclear power. Concerned about vulnerable Middle East oil supplies and Britain's decreasingly economic coalfields, she understood that nuclear was the only real answer. But she also knew that, to get a new generation of nuclear power stations, she would first have to find a way of persuading a sceptical public that actually nuclear was a much healthier, nobler thing than the alternatives.

Crikey, what a can of worms she opened.