The problems with global warming (3)

I have said that I do not believe in man-made global warming. I appear to be in good company. There are many who claim that there is no hard evidence for global warming, and even if there were, for the fact that man is responsible.

Melanie Phillips, for instance, points to the 700-plus international scientists who are critical of global warming theory. They have variously said that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is telling lies about the relationship between climate change and hurricanes, that its ice-core research is wrong, and that its statements are "all a fiction" and "the biggest scientific scam ever," with "no evidence to prove that current climate variations are not a natural cycle."

A couple of weeks ago hackers obtained around 1,000 e-mails sent to or received by Professor Phil Jones, director of the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia, and published them on the internet. The unit's work has been crucial in building the case for global warming.

The e-mails appeared to show that climate figures had been manipulated. What appeared to have happened was that scientists, rather than base their findings on the figures, had manipulated the figures to agree with what they thought was the case.

I am not an expert on climate. I want to make that quite clear. But there is one thing I do know.

Many years ago, after a worldwide flood, God said "While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease" (Gen 8:22).

That's God's promise.

The trouble is there are a lot of people who think they know better than God does, and even more people who are ready to believe them.

The problems with global warming (2)

Some 15,000 delegates, 45,000 green activists and 5,000 journalists will be in Copenhagen for the UN's climate change conference over the next 11 days.

It is estimated that the Climate Change Act, passed in the UK a year ago, will already cost Britain £18 billion, or £720 for every household in the country, every year between now and 2050. But that, it seems, is not enough.

A few weeks ago British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said negotiators had until the Copenhagen conference to save the world from global warming. The alternative to united action was a catastrophe of floods, droughts and killer heatwaves. The cost of failing to address global warming, he said, would be greater than the impact of two world wars and the Great Depression.

You might have thought the purpose of the conference was simply to consider whatever was responsible. Not so. A treaty had been prepared for signing at the conference, we are told, which would create a new global organisation with power, under the guise of saving the planet, to transfer money from one nation to another, and to enforce the conditions of the treaty.

The goal of the environmental movement, we are told, was to use climate change to bring the nations under the umbrella of an organisation with global governance.

Lord Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, has argued that global warming hysteria was being advanced by the political left to impose global taxes on the United States in pursuit of international control of the US economy under a one-world government to be administered by the UN.

He told the Americans: "I read that treaty and what it says is that a world government is going to be created. The word 'government' actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity.

"The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to Third World countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, 'climate debt' because we have been burning CO2 and they haven't. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement. . .

"Unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy and your humanity away forever."

It was reported that President Obama was "leaning toward not going" to the Copenhagen conference. Then that he would be there for the first days, but not at the end. Last week it was said he would not be there at the beginning, but at the end, when the decisions would be made.

So what will be decided at the Copenhagen conference? We shall soon know.

The problems with global warming (1)

There always seems to have been someone to tell us either that we are about to enter a new ice age and get ourselves frozen to death or that the ice caps are going to melt, the earth is going to become desert and we are all going to be roasted to a frazzle.

I am old enough to remember how around 1970 Americans like Paul Ehrlich were telling us quite clearly that by the year 2000 there wouldn't be enough food to eat or air to breathe on the planet.

The latest scare, of course, has been man-made global warming. Governments appeared to fall for it. Unfortunately for the environmentalists, the arguments in its favour appear to be losing their potency. The BBC now says that for the last 11 years there has not been any increase in global temperatures. Over the past 11 years, in fact, I believe global temperatures have dropped.

More and more people have begun to see that there is no concrete evidence for man-made global warming, to the extent that environmentalists are no longer talking about global warming, but about climate change. Climate change, of course, includes not only global warming, but global cooling.

An attendee at an environmental conference recently complained that in any other sphere, people wanted to see independent verification of scientific findings; but if environmental organisers said something, it was taken as gospel.

What he wanted to see, he said, was journalists treating "big environmentalism" the same way they treated big politics, big government and big business. By asking the same questions. Like where's the money coming from to promote all this about man-made global warming? And who's channelling it?

Now there are some interesting questions. . .