How We Pay To Be Indoctrinated on Climate Change

As we all know, climate change is an emotive issue. On both sides of the argument surrounding what is causing it, strong words are uttered. The sceptics have to shout loudly even to be heard, whereas on the other side, an industry has grown up promoting the thesis of man made climate change. A whole host of literature has been written outlining how and why it is taking place, and it is being used to good effect. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you are making a case you want to use the best evidence and the best arguments.

Except... When the government - sorry, taxpayer - funds a leaflet which doesn't concentrate on the actual case, but how to put it over you have to ask if that is what our money should be used for. Especially, when you read THIS leaflet called THE RULES OF THE GAME: Evidence Base Case for the Climate Change Communications Strategy. It is straplined "The Game Is Communicating Climate Change - The Rules Will Help Us Win It."



The tone of the doucment is revealed on its first page...

“Changing attitudes towards climate change is not like selling a particular brand of soap – it’s like convincing someone to use soap in the first place.”

It then moves on to more specific recommendations about how to "sell" the climate change message...

Click on the images to enlarge

Here are a few of those recommendations...

• Forget the climate change detractors: Those who deny climate change science are irritating, but unimportant. The argument is not about if we should deal with climate change, but how we should deal with climate change.
• There is no ‘rational man’: The evidence discredits the ‘rational man’ theory – we rarely weigh objectively the value of different decisions and then take the clear self-interested choice.
• Information can’t work alone: Providing information is not wrong; relying on information alone to change attitudes is wrong. Remember also that messages about saving money are important, but not that important.
• Use both peripheral and central processing: Attracting direct attention to an issue can change attitudes, but peripheral messages can be just as effective: a tabloid snapshot of Gwyneth Paltrow at a bus stop can help change attitudes to public transport.
• Link climate change mitigation to positive desires/aspirations: Traditional marketing associates products with the aspirations of their target audience. Linking climate change mitigation to home improvement, self-improvement, green spaces or national pride are all worth investigating.
• Use emotions and visuals: Another classic marketing rule: changing behaviour by disseminating information doesn’t always work, but emotions and visuals usually do.

This isn't just the use of traditional PR communications methods. It's the use of totalitarian indoctrination techniques designed to manipulate public opinion.

I wonder how much the taxpayer paid Futerra for this advice.

'Warmergate' Crisis Deepens as IPCC Figures Called Into Question

In today's Mail on Sunday there is a very interesting feature on what it calls "Warmergate". It reveals of climate change scientists have manipulated data to provide the answers they wanted. Here's an extract which refers to the infamous 'hockey stick'.


Take the now-notorious email that the CRU’s currently suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, sent to his IPCC colleagues on November 16, 1999, when he wrote he had ‘just completed Mike’s Nature trick’ and had so managed to ‘hide the decline.

The CRU’s supporters have protested bitterly about the attention paid to this message. In the course of an extraordinary BBC interview in which he called an American critic an ‘****hole’ live on air, Jones’s colleague Professor Andrew Watson insisted that the fuss was completely unjustified, because all Jones had been talking about was ‘tweaking a diagram’.

Davies told me that the email had been ‘taken out of context’ adding: ‘One definition of the word “trick” is “the best way of doing something”. What Phil did was standard practice and the facts are out there in the peer-reviewed literature.’

However, the full context of that ‘trick’ email, as shown by a new and until now unreported analysis by the Canadian climate statistician Steve McIntyre, is extremely troubling.Derived from close examination of some of the thousands of other leaked emails, he says it suggests the ‘trick’ undermines not only the CRU but the IPCC.

There is a widespread misconception that the ‘decline’ Jones was referring to is the fall in global temperatures from their peak in 1998, which probably was the hottest year for a long time. In fact, its subject was more technical - and much more significant. It is true that, in Watson’s phrase, in the autumn of 1999 Jones and his colleagues were trying to ‘tweak’ a diagram. But it wasn’t just any old diagram.

It was the chart displayed on the first page of the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ of the 2001 IPCC report - the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph that has been endlessly reproduced in everything from newspapers to primary-school textbooks ever since, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a dizzying, almost vertical rise in the late 20th Century. There could be no simpler or more dramatic representation of global warming, and if the origin of worldwide concern over climate change could be traced to a single image, it would be the hockey stick. Drawing a diagram such as this is far from straightforward.

Gabriel Fahrenheit did not invent the mercury thermometer until 1724, so scientists who want to reconstruct earlier climate history have to use ‘proxy data’ - measurements derived from records such as ice cores, tree-rings and growing season dates. However, different proxies give very different results. For example, some suggest that the ‘medieval warm period’, the 350-year era that started around 1000, when red wine grapes flourished in southern England and the Vikings tilled now-frozen farms in Greenland, was considerably warmer than even 1998. Of course, this is inconvenient to climate change believers because there were no cars or factories pumping out greenhouse gases in 1000AD - yet the Earth still warmed.

Some tree-ring data eliminates the medieval warmth altogether, while others reflect it. In September 1999, Jones’s IPCC colleague Michael Mann of Penn State University in America - who is now also the subject of an official investigation --was working with Jones on the hockey stick. As they debated which data to use, they discussed a long tree-ring analysis carried out by Keith Briffa. Briffa knew exactly why they wanted it, writing in an email on September 22: ‘I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.’ But his conscience was troubled. ‘In reality the situation is not quite so simple - I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.’

Another British scientist - Chris Folland of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre - wrote the same day that using Briffa’s data might be awkward, because it suggested the past was too warm. This, he lamented, ‘dilutes the message rather significantly’.

Over the next few days, Briffa, Jones, Folland and Mann emailed each other furiously. Mann was fearful that if Briffa’s trees made the IPCC diagram, ‘the sceptics [would] have a field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith [in them] - I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!’

Finally, Briffa changed the way he computed his data and submitted a revised version. This brought his work into line for earlier centuries, and ‘cooled’ them significantly. But alas, it created another, potentially even more serious, problem. According to his tree rings, the period since 1960 had not seen a steep rise in temperature, as actual temperature readings showed - but a large and steady decline, so calling into question the accuracy of the earlier data derived from tree rings.

This is the context in which, seven weeks later, Jones presented his ‘trick’ - as simple as it was deceptive. All he had to do was cut off Briffa’s inconvenient data at the point where the decline started, in 1961, and replace it with actual temperature readings, which showed an increase. On the hockey stick graph, his line is abruptly terminated - but the end of the line is obscured by the other lines.

‘Any scientist ought to know that you just can’t mix and match proxy and actual data,’ said Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. They’re apples and oranges. Yet that’s exactly what he did.’ Since Warmergate-broke, some of the CRU’s supporters have claimed that Jones and his colleagues made a ‘full disclosure’ of what they did to Briffa’s data in order to produce the hockey stick.But as McIntyre points out, ‘contrary to claims by various climate scientists, the IPCC Third Assessment Report did not disclose the deletion of the post-1960 values’.

On the final diagram, the cut off was simply concealed by the other lines. By 2007, when the IPCC produced its fourth report, McIntyre had become aware of the manipulation of the Briffa data and Briffa himself, as shown at the start of this article, continued to have serious qualms.

McIntyre by now was an IPCC ‘reviewer’ and he urged the IPCC not to delete the post-1961 data in its 2007 graph. ‘They refused,’ he said, ‘stating this would be “inappropriate”.’ Yet even this, Pielke told me, may not ultimately be the biggest consequence of Warmergate.Some of the most controversial leaked emails concern attempts by Jones and his colleagues to avoid disclosure of the CRU’s temperature database - its vast library of readings from more than 1,000 weather stations around the world, the ultimate resource that records how temperatures have changed.

In one email from 2005, Jones warned Mann not to leave such data lying around on searchable websites, because ‘you never know who is trawling them’. Critics such as McIntyre had been ‘after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone’. Yesterday Davies said that, contrary to some reports, none of this data has in fact been deleted. But in the wake of the scandal, its reliability too is up for grabs.

The problem is that, just like tree rings or ice cores, readings from thermometers or electronic ‘thermistors’ are open to interpretation. The sites of weather stations that were once open countryside become built up areas, so trapping heat, and the type of equipment used changes over time. The result is what climate scientists call ‘inhomogeneities’ - anomalies between readings that need to be ‘adjusted’. But can we trust the way such ‘adjustments’ are made? Last week, an article posted on a popular climate sceptic website analysed the data from the past 130 years in Darwin, Australia.

This suggested that average temperatures had risen there by about two degrees Celsius. However, the raw data had been ‘adjusted’ in a series of abrupt upward steps by exactly the same amount: without the adjustment, the Darwin temperature record would have stayed level.

In 2007, McIntyre examined records across America. He found that between 1999 and 2007, the US equivalent of the Met Office had changed the way it adjusted old data. The result was to make the Thirties seem cooler, and the years since 1990 much warmer. Previously, the warmest year since records began in America had been 1934. Now, in line with CRU and IPCC orthodoxy, it was 1998. At the CRU, said Davies, some stations’ readings were adjusted by unit and in such cases, raw and adjusted data could be compared.But in about 90 per cent of cases, the adjustment was carried out in the countries that collected the data, and the CRU would not know exactly how this had been done.

Davies said: ‘All I can say is that the process is careful and considered. To get the details, the best way would be to go the various national meteorological services.’ The consequences of that, Stott said, may be explosive. ‘If you take Darwin, the gap between the two just looks too big. ‘If that applies elsewhere, it’s going to get really interesting. It’s no longer going to be good enough for the Met Office and CRU to put the data out there.

‘To know we can trust it, we’ve got to know what adjustments have been made, and why.’ Last week, at the Copenhagen climate summit, the Met Office said that the Noughties have been the warmest decade in history. Depending on how the data has been adjusted, Stott said, that statement may not be true. Pielke agreed. ‘After Climategate, the surface temperature record is being called into question.’ To experts such as McIntyre and Pielke, perhaps the most baffling thing has been the near-unanimity over global warming in the world’s mainstream media - a unanimity much greater than that found among scientists.

Read David Rose's full article HERE.

Is the Climate Change Consensus Fracturing?

Over the last few days I have been trying to make sense of the so-called CRU emails. These are a series of emails which have been published following the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit. They purport to show how climate change scientists have deliberately skewed the scientific evidence to their side of the argument and how they are trying to silence scientists who are sceptics about man-made global warming.

Devil's Kitchen has provided the most comprehensive coverage of this subject and you can see a comprehensive list of his postings on the subject HERE. Some of the subject matter is incredibly confusing, but let's just look at a few examples from the data from the UEA climate scientists. Over to James Delingpole...

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. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

Is this all conclusive evidence of a conspiracy by climate change scientists to silence some of their colleagues and suppress evidence which is inconvenient to their case? Maybe, or maybe not. But what it does show is that there are serious questions to be answered by the scientific community. Devil's Kitchen concludes...

What these emails show is that members of The Club have presented, as fact, data which privately they have acknowledged to be, at best, flawed.

Further, many members of The Club are editors of the reports submitted to the IPCC, and the emails show that they have deliberately cherry-picked those that agree with their position—and conspired to discredit or reject those that do not agree with their political position.

The Club has also conspired to suborne journals, and to oust editors of other journals who are perceived as being unsympathetic to their cause. And they have been successful.

The emails show that, whilst claiming that sceptics' papers are not peer-reviewed, The Club have actively and deliberately used blackmail and smears to prevent such peer-review or, when review is unavoidable, to have conspired to skew the review process to discredit their opponents.

All of these actions render the scientific reports produced by the IPCC extremely suspect. At best.

And they most certainly destroy the concept of the "scientific consensus".

None of these emails disprove anthropogenic climate change: but they do shatter the idea that there is no dissent and, crucially, they absolutely annihilate the idea that scientists are impartial and uncorrupt.

And these emails most certainly explode the proposition that we should reorder the world economy because of an impending climate disaster.

I wonder when this debate will actually enter the mainstream media. I admit that I have been very slow to follow this up. But perhaps not as slow as some others.

UPDATE: Bishop Hill has more HERE.

The Independent Front Page Is Fabricated

On last night's 5 Live paper review my co-reviewer Tessa Dunlop got terribly excited by an apocalyptic front page from the Independent, which had news of a ship which had managed to get through the North East passage for "the first time", apparently due to climate change. This was proof, she reckoned, that we are all doomed. She then reckoned that heavy rainfall in Scotland and a drought in Moldova was further evidence. I begged to differ, but she was having none of it.

Today, Richard North on EU Referendum and An Englishman's Castle have blown the whole story out of the water. Here's Richard North...

Front page of The Independent today proclaims: "A triumph for man, a disaster for mankind", heralding the completion of what it claims to be "the first commercial navigation of the fabled North-east Passage."

"It is an epic moment," says the paper, "but also a vivid sign of climate change in the Arctic." The picture caption reinforces the point, telling us: "No commercial vessel has ever successfully travelled the North-east Passage, a fabled Arctic Sea route that links the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific far more directly than the usual southerly cargo route."

And none of this is true. It could not be further from the truth – it is a complete and utter distortion, a fabrication, a lie. An Englishman's Castle sussed it, by the simple expedient of looking up Wikipedia...

Interestingly, the BBC is now downplaying the hype, referring only to "German ships", and admitting that the route has been "passable without ice breakers in 2005", neglecting to tell us that this journey required substantial assistance from ice breakers. So much for global warming.

Not from The Independent though are we allowed to know the truth. Its editorial

There are lies, damn lies, and then there is The Independent. proclaims that, "One hundred years ago, the news of a ship successfully traversing the treacherous North-east Passage would have prompted popular celebrations and wild enthusiasm." Yet, despite the feat of the Vega in 1879, this is now "a confirmation of just how rapidly and dangerously our climate is changing."

It is worth reading the rest of his analysis. It makes you wonder what other climate change wool is being pulled over our eyes.

BBC Caves in to Climate Change Activist?

Anyone who expresses a remote scepticism about climate change is instantly branded a "denier". Nigel Lawson's article in the Mail on Saturday summed things up brilliantly.

With the collapse of Marxism and, to all intents and purposes, of other forms of socialism too, those who dislike capitalism and its foremost exemplar, the United States, with equal passion, have been obliged to find a new creed.

For many of them, green is the new red. And those who wish to order us how to run our lives, faced with the uncomfortable evidence that economic prosperity is more likely to be achieved by less government intervention rather than more, naturally welcome the emergence of a new licence to intrude, to interfere, to tax and to regulate: all in the great cause of saving the planet from the alleged horrors of global warming.

But there is something much more fundamental at work. I suspect that it is no accident that it is in Europe that eco-fundamentalism in general and global warming absolutism in particular has found its most fertile soil. For it is Europe that has become the most secular society in the world, where the traditional religions have the weakest hold.

Yet people still feel the need for the comfort and higher values that religion can provide; and it is the quasi-religion of green alarmism, of which the global warming issue is the most striking example, which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as little short of sacrilege.

Does all this matter? Up to a point, no. Unbelievers should not be dismissive of the comfort that 'religion' can bring. If people feel better when they drive a hybrid car or ride a bicycle to work, and like to parade their virtue in this way, then so be it.

Nonetheless, the new and unattractively intolerant religion of eco-fundamentalism and global warming presents real dangers. The most obvious is that the governments of Europe may get so carried away by their own rhetoric as to impose measures that do serious harm to their economies. That is a particular danger at the present time in the UK.

Now, even the BBC has allegedly caved into the Climate Change zealots, who don't want anyone to even know that some of their views are being questioned, however gently.

On Friday I reported THIS piece about some cooling which is taking place as a result of a phenomenon known as La Nina. The BBC correctly reported some facts about the levels of global warming since 1998. Over the following two days their Environment Editor Roger Harrobin came under intense pressure to change the BBC's report, pressure which he resisted and then, according to climate change sceptic Jennifer Marohasy, caved into. See the full email exchange HERE. Jo Abess, the climate change activist, says at one point...

"I don't think you should worry about whether people [are] suspicious that the full extent of the truth is being withheld from them ... it would be better if you did not quote the sceptics.'

That rather says it all, don't you think?

How the Enviro-Fascists Are Trying to Close Down the Climate Change Debate

A few days ago I emailed Ben Stewart, one of head honchos at GREENPEACE, asking if he would like to come onto 18 Doughty Street and debate Dominic Lawson on the subject of climate change. I have to admit to being totally unprepared for his response...

Iain,

We have a policy at Greenpeace that we no longer debate people who don’t accept the scientific reality of anthropogenic climate change. It’s similar to the policy undertaken by cancer specialists who used to debate the tobacco industry but discontinued doing so. To paraphrase Richard Dawkins, if we debated Dominic Lawson on climate change it would look great on his CV, not so good on ours.

I would make clear that that doesn’t mean I don’t think there should be freedom of speech for people with DL’s view, there should be. He is welcome to write about it and speak on it all he wishes, even though I disagree. But by debating him and his fellow-travelers we perpetuate the myth that this is a ‘he said/she said’ issue, a 50/50 where there is still a debate.

I’d debate Bjorn Lomborg, who accepts the science but disagrees vehemently on the need to take action on climate change. But not Dominic Lawson.

All the best

Ben

That really tells me all I need to know. Anyone who seeks to constrain debate on this hugely important issue is adopting the tactics of crypto-fascists. They act as if scientists are in one hundred per cent agreement. They are not. The hubris and condescension in this email is almost beyond parody.

My intention was to have two 'political' figures and two scientists taking part. Let's hope the Green Party or Friends of the Earth have a more open and democratic approach than GREENPEACE.

UPDATE: There's an interesting article HERE on the subject of closing down the debate.

UPDATE 12.30am: I accept the original language in this post was slightly OTT and have edited it accordingly. Ben Stewart and I have spoken this evening. I wouldn't say we have had a meeting of minds, but that was probably asking too much.

UPDATE: Thursday (this is posted above in a separate post, but needs to be copied here too)

Ben Stewart: An Apology

Sometimes when you write instanteanous responses to things you go over the top - it doesn't matter whether it's on an email or a blog. It happens. I did this on Tuesday in my Greenpeace post HERE. While I don't retract the thrust of the post (that Greenpeace are acting outrageously in seeking to close down the climate change debate) I did indeed use inappropriate and intemperate language regarding Ben Stewart and I'd like to apologise to him for that. He hasn't asked for an apology, but on reflection he deserves one.

Dominic Lawson on Climate Change

This is from 18 Doughty Street's END OF THE DAY SHOW on Thursday when Dominic Lawson and Professor Ivor Gaber clashed on climate change.

Chris Huhne - The Mary Whitehouse of the Climate Change Debate

Janet Daley writes an excellent ARTICLE in today's Telegraph on how the green lobby must not be allowed to stifle the debate on climate change. One parapgraph stood out in particular...

Some of the dissident voices on climate change were rounded up for last week's polemical Channel 4 documentary made by Martin Durkin, The Great Global Warming Swindle (repeated tonight on the digital channel More4). Whether or not you were persuaded by their articulate doubts, you could not help being struck by the McCarthyite persecution (up to and including death threats) which their non-conformist opinions had attracted. Scientists with impeccable
credentials, emeritus professors and acknowledged experts in the field being hounded and professionally discredited for their reservations about an established orthodoxy: not a pretty sight. Hundreds of years after Galileo, we are apparently still prepared to suppress inconvenient intellectual opposition once political interests have become entrenched. Among those who attempted to prevent the film being shown at all was the Liberal Democrat spokesman on the environment, Chris Huhne, who, without having seen the programme, wrote to Channel 4 executives advising them in the gravest terms to reconsider their decision to broadcast it.

This is typical of the way some people are trying to stifle the debate. What on earth did Chris Huhne - who is normally on the saner wing of the LibDems - think he was playing at? He seems to have become the Mary Whitehouse of the Climate Change debate, trying to dictate what the 'little people' may or may not be allowed to watch. I hope to watch the Channel 4 programme in the next couple of days. From what I have heard of it, it was not an emotional programme and tried to look at the facts in a sanguine manner. For Chris Huhne to try to ban this programme from being shown says a lot. It says he's not a Liberal, for starters.

UPDATE. Contrast Chris Huhne’s attempt to get Channel 4 to censor the debate on climate change (whatever you think of the merits of the arguments or not), with Evan Harris – LibDem MP for Oxford – who on the Liberal Democrats national website on 9 March asserted that MigrationWatch must be allowed free expression on their views on immigration…

As Harris states, “I urge the petitioners to debate with or to ignore our opponents, not to try to ban them.”

UPDATE 2: Chris Huhne has just emailed me. He's sent this letter to the Telegraph...

Sir,
Janet Daley is simply wrong to state that I wrote to Channel 4 “advising them in the gravest terms to reconsider their decision to broadcast” Martin Durkin’s The Great Global Warming Swindle (Monday March 12th 2007). I wrote asking for Channel 4’s comments on the fact – not in dispute – that the last time Mr Durkin ventured onto this territory he suffered serious complaints for sloppy journalism – upheld by the Independent Television Commission - and had to apologise. I note that one of his interviewees on this latest programme has already complained about his treatment.
The notion of Ms Daley that Mr Durkin is some latter-day Galileo is absurd: the academic debate on climate change is entirely free, and the editor of Science has said that it is rare to find a debate on which the consensus is so firm. In 923 peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles on climate change in the last ten years, not a single one questioned the global consensus on the man-made causes of climate change though there was plenty of debate about the scale. There is not a single computer model of the global climate anywhere in the world that ignores man-made greenhouse gases in explaining climate change.
Mr Durkin is not seeking to enter into a scholarly debate, but to score points using the mass media to disguise the poverty of support for his argument. Propaganda is not scholarship, as Ms Daley inadvertently reminds us.
Yours sincerely,

Chris Huhne MP (Liberal Democrat shadow environment secretary)

My Stance on Climate Change & Why I Remain a Tory

I suppose if you stick your head over the political parapet, you deserve to get it shot off from time to time. My post on Al Gore BELOW has caused a certain frisson on some blogs. Tom Watson thinks it very rude. Devil's Kitchen wonders why I remain in the Tory Party. More on that in a moment, but let's just look at what I said...

On Thursday US Climate Change hypocrite Al Gore will address David Cameron's Shadow Cabinet. He will no doubt be instructing them all on the art of preaching climate change religion bollocks while at the same time creating a carbon footprint the size of a mammoth's. I wonder how many of them will find they have a subsequent engagement...

Al Gore is indeed a hypocrite. He tells the rest of the world to reduce their carbon footprint, while living in a house which has a carbon footprint the size of Tennessee. Gore's heating bill is dozens of times higher than that of virtually every other American. It's a little known fact that George W Bush's Texas ranch is very environmentally friendly. Bush just gets on and does it without makign a song and dance about it. Gore, meanwhile, flies to Hollywood and collects his ill-deserved Oscar from celebrities who have arrived at the ceremony in a gas guzzling strech limo.

I used the phrase "preaching climate change religion bollocks" for a reason, one which seems to have passed the ninety or so people by who have commented on the thread. It has indeed become a religion to those people who like to jump on the bandwagon of such causes. Their fervour reflects the CND marchers of the 1990s. If you speak out against their creed you're attacked as a 'denier', putting you on the same level as a holocause denier. I dislike the messianic side of those like Gore who treat Climate Change as a pseudo religion which if you deign to question you're considered a nutter.

I do question it, but I do it out of curiosity, not out of dogma. Let me make my position clear. I do believe climate change is taking place, but I have an open mind on the extent to which it is (if at all) man made. I am unconvinced by both the Stern Report and the IPCC report, which seems to change its eveidence according to the conclusion. I am prepared to listen to the arguments of the climate change sceptics, just as I am to those I respect on the other side of the argument. The reason I railed against Al Gore is that he does not fall into that last category. Sometime soon I will watch his film - I won't yet call it a documentary. I will also watch the Channel 4 programme from last Thursday (repeated tomorrow on More 4 I think) called THE GREAT CLIMATE CHANGE SWINDLE. I'll read more on the subject and then make up my mind. My stance at the moment reflects my annoyance at the climate change protagonists who won't brook any argument at all.

No onto the Devil's Kitchen article. He makes a number of assertions in his article as well as using words I don't allow on this blog. Let me repeat some of them...

Can I be the only one who is wondering precisely why Iain Dale is supporting the Tories? Apart from the fact that they are willing to give him a seat, of course... But Iain is a free-trader who is anti-EU. And yet Cameron is pro-EU, and naive enough to believe that he can change it... Iain is also against the state-funding of parties, whereas Cameron is pro.To state this quite clearly and for the avoidance of doubt, Iain Dale is fundamentally opposed to Cameron and the Conservative Party on all of the major issues that the Tories have deigned to pronounce on. And he is not the only one; very far from it, in fact.So what is the motivation? Does Iain know something that we don't; being something of an insider, does he know that the Tories are going to renege on these ideas once in power?... The second option is that Dale and others are merely trying the Matthew Sinclair tactic: they have decided that it is better to try to persuade the Tories of the rightness of their position from within the party... Which leaves us with the third option: that some people will happily support any policies, no matter how wrong they believe those policies to be, in order to gain power.None of those three alternatives fills me with any hope for the future, frankly.

Where to start?! Devil's Kitchen left the Conservatives to join UKIP over one single issue - Europe. He now finds himself out of tune with the Conservatives on any number of issues. On this blog I think I have made fairly clear that I support David Cameron's policy of building a big tent, in the full knowledge that there will be some policy areas where free market, tax cutting Thatcherites like me will have cause to suck our teeth. DK is right that I oppose state funding for political parties, I'm a free trader and that I am a Euro Sceptic. So does this mean, as he implies, that I should leave the Tories and join UKIP? In his dreams.

All political parties are coalitions. And within those coalitions people argue their case. I will argue my case on the issues I care passionately about even if that means that at times I am at odds with the stance of the party hierarchy. I've never once been asked by anyone to tone down my views on this blog.

DK reckons I sometimes pull my punches because I would like to be a candidate at the next election. What they - and others - don't like is when I praise David Cameron for the progress he has made. If I dish out criticism from time to time, then surely I am also entitled to praise Cameron and his team when I really believe they have got something right. Yes, I would like to be an MP, but if I stand at the next election I want to do it in my own way on my own terms. No one likes someone who constantly greases up to the top of the party, but equally, a constant whine of criticism is equally as tedious.

I would never leave the Tory Party. The Tory Party may, on occasion, leave me, but it's then my duty to stay and argue my case. We all know all politics is temporary. Politicians come and politicians go. Policies come and policies go. The one constant are the members of the Party who have to go out and sell the Party on the doorstep. Just because they might disagree with a few of those policies, it doesn't stop them from believing that the Party they have supported through thick and thin will do a damn sight better job of governing the country that the current lot.

I'm a Conservative, a Tory, a free marketeer and a Euro Sceptic. There can be no other Party for me than the Conservative Party. Not now. Not ever.

Is the IPCC Report All That It Seems?

I don't read Melanie Phillips blog that much, but can I point you to THIS post about the IPCC report on climate change? If what she and Christopher Monckton say is true, then some people have a lot of explaining to do.