WHAT UTTER ROT!

Do your bit Ruth. Don't fly to and from London/Manchester. Go by train.

The brilliant Christopher Booker posted this article in yesterdays Sunday Telgraph. He has got it right, whereas Ruth Kelly as usual, hasn't a clue what she's talking about.

quote

Retreat of the warmists begins to accelerate

Just as we begin to see the colossal price we are being asked to pay for measures to combat climate change, ever more of the evidence adduced to support the global warming scare crumbles away.

A key article of faith for the "warmists" is a supposed increase in the incidence of extreme weather events, such as droughts. As Al Gore claimed to a US Senate committee in March, "droughts are becoming longer and more intense".

But US researchers, led by Gemma Narisma, have now shown that, far from becoming more frequent in recent decades, serious droughts have in fact become rarer than they were a century ago.

In a paper (reported on the website CO2Science.org) they identified the 30 most "severe and persistent" drought episodes of the 20th century.

Seven of these occurred before 1920, seven between 1921 and 1940 and eight between 1941 and 1960, dropping to five between 1961 and 1980.

The last two decades of the century, when the world was supposedly hotting up more than ever, saw just three. The worst drought affecting the developed world was the US Dust Bowl disaster of the mid-1930s.

This corresponds with the recently revised figures for US surface temperatures published by Gore's leading scientific ally, James Hansen of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

Last month, when Steve McIntyre, an expert statistical analyst, spotted a fundamental flaw in the method Hansen had used to calculate his figures, GISS was forced to publish a new graph, showing that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998, as generally accepted, but 1934. Of the 10 hottest years since 1880, four were in the 1930s, only three in the past decade.

This in turn followed the latest satellite figures from the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration showing how global temperatures in recent years have flattened out at about 0.2 degrees below their 1998 level, and that this summer's figures have been lower than they were in 1983, despite a continuing rise in CO2.

It is clear that 2007 is proving quite a turning point in the climate change debate.

Only last year one of the fathers of warmist alarmism, Professor James Lovelock, predicted that, by the end of this century, climate change would have been responsible for billions of deaths, and that the only habitable places left on Earth would be the polar regions.

Last week, however, significantly retreating from his apocalyptic view, he told the World Nuclear Association that, even though temperatures might rise by a further five degrees, nature and humanity would learn to adjust. The Earth was in "no danger".

Yet it is at this very time that, to combat the supposed threat, our political leaders are upping the ante in all directions.

At the recent UN conference in Vienna to discuss "Kyoto Two", the EU stood conspicuously alone with its plan to cut carbon emissions by up to 40 per cent, and its ruling that by 2020, 20 per cent of our energy must be generated from renewables, such as windpower and biofuels. British civil servants have advised ministers that these targets are wholly unreachable.

Already, not least in response to the new pressure on farmland to grow biofuels, wheat prices have soared to record levels and world grain stocks are plummeting, pushing the price of a loaf of bread for the first time over £1.

The Taxpayers Alliance last week calculated that "green taxes" now cost us £21.9 billion a year, equivalent to nearly £1,000 for every home in the country.

Yet scarcely a single politician in Europe dares question this collective flight from reality.

China, now building a new coal-fired power station every four days, last year added 102 gigawatts of new generating capacity, 25 per cent more than the entire capacity of the UK. As ever more pointed question marks rise up over the global warming thesis, who is to say it is the Chinese who are mad?

Climate change has been exaggerated and hijacked by often ignorant politicians to serve other agendas.

Like the NIMBY tag for those who quite legitimately have concerns about over-development and loss of green space; anyone who questions the current climate change hullabaloo is condemned.

I've no problem with saving energy and sensible recycling (as opposed to the Hitlarian version favoured by Councils)...

However, the bigger threats to the planet are over-population (never mentioned?) and unfettered consumerism, which is eating up resources, and is funded by debt, itself based on the illusionary house price boom.

Debt, being another means of keeping the masses under the thumb.

You can lead a horse to water and you CAN make it drink it.

Give it ten years we'll be back to the ice age story from the seventies.

Useless MP's emitting large quantities of hot air won't help the climate.