Every so often the world seems to fix on an idea often to the advantage of a single-interest group but, as with the death of Princess Diana, sometimes for no recognisable reason other than group hysteria.  Sometimes it's the first which, caught by the media and "prominent people" with little or no knowledge about what they are talking, turns into the second and off the band-waggon rolls.

Let's face it, just because a person reads the TV news or appears on Have I got News for You, or even Question Time or Newsnight, does not turn them into an environmental genius.  They may still be ignorami but that is the way band-wagons start.   An added shove to the notion is given by the pseudo-scientists from Friends of the Earth before major politicians, see a vote or two - or even in this government's case, a tax or two - in it.

It apparently only takes a government minister in a new department ten minutes to master his brief before he presents himself - or herself, it must be said - as the world's expert on everything pertaining to that department.   How much shorter time for him to become a global warming expert, then, who will speak with political authority, nay, governmental authority on the subject?

It's time to abandon the metaphorical band-waggon for now and to consider the snowballing concept of global warming!  The environmentalists, the pundits of the media and the politicians have all been rolled up in the idea but where did the idea come from originally?

Well, it probably arose from some minor scientist's paper in an obscure publication such as Nature where he wrote that global warming "could" - and have you noted how many times these, so-called scientists use that indeterminate word - could be linked to human activity.   They haven't a shred of absolute proof.  Just a shed load of "coulds" and, as we all know, we "could" all be millionaires next year but it's not likely.

Nevertheless, the media and the aforementioned rag-bag of the ignorant have grabbed onto the idea and it is snowballing downhill with increasing rapidity, gathering up the unthinking as it goes.  Before long, Joe Bloggs from Hartlepool is phoning into 5-Live because he absolutely knows everything about it.  He's heard it on TV and it must be right.  Before we know it, the airwaves are cluttered with self-opinionated but uneducated "experts" persuaded by media "stars" and ex-trade unionist expert MPs that "it's all our fault" and "something has to be done".   Even Tory party leaders are cluttering up their roofs with useless wind-mills but, far worse, the manufacturers of hideous 300 foot high concrete monstrosities have persuaded the politicians that the way forward is to subsidise them to blight the scenic parts of Britain with their hideous products.

OK, I hear you.  What about all the world's scientists who have just banded together on yet another band-wagon to agree that Blogg's theory is correct - or "could" be?  Well, it has now got to the stage that any scientist hoping for advancement will blight his future if he speaks up against the "Coulds" of his community.   Flat-earther, fool, nutter, he would be called.  After all, everybody knows that global warming could be caused by human activities.

But, hold on a bit.   Let's hear a little about contrary evidence and less from scheming American polititians whose personal knowledge could equal that of government ministers over here.  Nobel prize winner or not.

The world is currently being petrified about rising sea-levels.  Maps of post-inundation Britain have been produced and all because the Antarctic ice shelf is melting.   But is it?   The answer appears to be not.  The Antarctic and, indeed the global, ice is either static or even slightly increasing in quantity.

As for sea-level it is not rising any faster than it has done for some thousands of years. Well, it wouldn't do would it?  A mere six inches a century.

And those poor endangered polar bears are actually increasing in number despite careful shots of bears "marooned" on small ice floes.  Bears do swim, you know!

Other scientists, determined to prove global warming in their specialty claim that the Alaskan permafrost is melting but that would be accompanied by an increase in atmospheric methane.  There is no such increase.  In fact, there is a decrease.

As for the melting of inland global glaciers, well, even that is a dubious statement since only 240 out of 160,000 are monitored at all.  And, no doubt, they are carefully chosen by the experts.   Indeed, were these experts to visit New Zealand they would find that some have increased in size and the ones in Greenland cyclically retreat and grow and have done so for millennia.

Turning to the hotter parts of the world, scientists claim that the Great Barrier Reef is being killed, whereas others prove that, to the contrary, the coral is extending.

Using selective statistics, or memory loss, the World Meteorological Organisation claimed that the linear warming trend over the past 50 years has been 0.13%.  That figure is inflated because nearly 70 years ago the global temperature actually fell (in 1940) and did not recover until 1980.

But only last month all the world's politicians huddled themselves together, frightened themselves to death and expounded, not that global warming could be caused by human activities but "is" caused by human activities.   Consequently, the world's population must be scared into calculating their ludicrous carbon foot-prints so they can pay ever more tax, be placed under greater surveillance and controlled.  Even politicians are human (sometimes) and are prone to mass hysteria or fear of standing out in opposition to an accepted theory.

The price of fuels must rise in such a fashion, they deamnd, that people feel that the rises are fully justified.   And where does all that profit go, I wonder?   And what about all that conscience money for carbon-offsets.  Into whose pockets does that vanish?

It's all a load of unproven hot-air.   And how much carbon-offsets will they pay for generating it?

The world has always behaved in a cyclical fashion and this is just another twist of the cycle and I am greatly suspicious of the motives of those who would claim anything else.   Give it another ten years and yet another scare story will arise.   Remember global cooling of 20-odd years ago?   It never happened and nor will this.

David Roberts

(1/1/08)