Doom-mongers spell trouble for freedom

Friday March 7, 2008

Russell Lewis casts a sceptical eye on global warming

Global warming poses a worse danger than terrorism, said Tony Blair. By the century’s end Antarctica will be the only habitable place on the planet, said chief government scientist Sir David King. It will result in millions, billions of deaths said the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams.

Other “experts” have joined in with threats of rising seas eventually drowning London. Yet others claim that rising temperatures will bring a spread of malaria or perhaps even contemporaneously diverting the Gulf Stream, making England as cold as Siberia. It’s an old trick of tyrants to get eh people to do what you want: Scare them to death!

Robespierre understood this very well. “La Patrie en danger” he cried before despatching thousands of innocents to the guillotine. Now the cry is “The planet in danger”.

Then there has to be a scapegoat. For Hitler it was the Jews. In the global warming scenario it’s the greedy consumers, the owners of gas-guzzlers, speed boats or private jets, those addicted to foreign travel, the profiteers of big oil. Or, more widely, it’s the affluent society using more than its share of fossil fuels in a new form of colonialist exploitation at the expense of the world’s poor and heedless of the fate of all humankind.

Blame game

But, in a way, this blame game is even more subtle, because, though some are held up as more at fault than others it also includes us all. We have seen the enemy, say the environmentalists and it’s you. The background message of the global warming story harks back all the way to Malthus. It is that there are too many people and they are more than Mother Earth can cope with. The ultimate way to manipulate people is to foist on them a sense of guilt.

All of which means, say these panic-mongers, that there is no time to lose, certainly no time for discussion of the pros and cons of climate science but for swift radical action by government. For only the state possesses the moral authority bestowed by its mission to save the planet. Only our rulers have the nous to curb the man-made global warming which will otherwise seal our doom.

This self-righteous approach of the global warming gurus was bluntly put by one of its best known advocates the American Professor Stephen Schneider (who, like our own Sir Crispin Tickell, was equally convinced of the danger of global cooling in the seventies). He said:

“To capture the public imagination…we have to…make simplified dramatic statements, make little mention of any doubts one might have, each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective and being honest” (R Bate and J Morris 1994, Global Warming Apocalypse or Hot Air?, Institute of Economic Affairs).

Puritanical lifestyle

So even lies are OK when it’s in a good cause, but it’s not words that matter but action – radical action. What does this involve? It means dragooning the population into a more puritanical lifestyle. The greedy and self-indulgent must tighten their belts. Motorists must put up with tough restrictions and swinging taxes on petrol and diesel. Industry will have to swallow a carbon tax.

As for the masses it’s a case of – go easy on the telly, the fridge and the washing machine, the hot shower – they use precious electricity. Recycle your paper, plastic and metals, for world resources are scarce. Wasters deserve rough justice and that’s what they’ll get. Big brother will be watching us.

Do I exaggerate these attitudes of the environmentalists? Well consider the pronouncements of Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) who set the stage for the Kyoto Protocol in Rio De Janeiro in 1992. These were his words on “sustainable development”. This, he said, could be implemented by “deliberate quest of poverty..reduced resource consumption…and set levels of mortality control”.

Equally revealing was this further pronouncement: “We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilisation to collapse.” If these sound like merely the ravings of an extremist, remember that the limits on fossil fuel consumption which were agreed in the Kyoto treaty which are only now starting to bite, are generally agreed by its perpetrators to be only the start. For the present batch of control will only have effect of retarding the warming by six years a century hence. So a whole further series of Kyotos beckons which could bring the world economy to its knees and drive the human race back to the dark ages.

Of course I’m not saying that Gordon Brown and the other signatories of Kyoto or would-be green Salvationists like David Cameron are all extremists. Yet they and the rest of the metropolitan elite – the new boss class now running Western democracies – cannot be oblivious to the enormous convenience of climate change as an excuse for uninhibited taxing and controlling while at the same time posing as the saviours of the human race.

Big brother bureaucrats

Meanwhile the whole exercise has already created a monster with a momentum of its own – a veritable army of big brother bureaucrats, contractors, rent-seekers, consultants, computer-programmers, scientists on the lookout for research grants and a host of other neo-serfs and dependents. Nor should we forget the multi-billion pound environmentalist industry professionally dedicated to stoking up fears of catastrophe at every opportunity. For that is what generates the membership fees and charitable donations which keep them alive.

Yet the whole global warming thesis is riddled with doubts at every turn. Its factual starting point was ground thermometer reading which have since been proved wrong by readings from satellites and balloons. The latter show that there has been no warming since 1979. The greens tell us that the warming is unprecedented but there were vineyards in Scotland in Roman times and Greenland, now uninhabitable, was colonised in the middle ages.

The British Antarctic Expedition reported a melting Antarctica after visiting the peninsula which is the only warming part of a continent 90 percent of which has been cooling for thirty years while the sea level adjoining western Antarctica is falling. These are only a few examples of where the global warming scares and the evidence conflict.

Would that George Orwell were alive today. How he would have enjoyed exposing global alarmism, the contempt for ordinary people’s liberties of its sponsors and the juggernaut of deceit and venal interests which propels it.

Russell Lewis is a former leader writer for the Daily Mail, a former acting general director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and former director of the Conservative Political Centre