Can we trust the doom-laden eco-loonies on global warming?

By DEREK LORD

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THERE are more than a few red faces among the climate scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) after computer hackers allegedly revealed the contents of e-mails that the scientists sent to each other on the internet. In fact, it is estimated that if their faces get much hotter, their noses will melt like the polar ice caps that they’ve been banging on about for so long.

One of the e-mails that caused the climatic scaremongers the most embarrassment was the one that reads: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps for each series for the last 20 years and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Professor Phil Jones, the university’s CRU director, dismisses any notion that this e-mail suggests that there was any attempt to cover up the fact that, far from getting warmer, the Earth’s temperature has actually been dropping for the last 10 years. He and others of a like mind would have us believe that it was just an unfortunate choice of words. Although, to the neutral observer, it is difficult to see how the words “trick” and “hide” could be quite as innocent as the good professor would have us believe.

The story caused barely a ripple in the British media. I caught one item on one of the TV channels that featured a climate scientist sitting on a beach with a lot of black and white shells. He explained, rather unconvincingly, I thought, that we have always had hot spells and cold spells and argued that the hot spells were getting more frequent while the cold spells weren’t.

As he spoke, he threw away the black shells, representing the cold spells, until he had only white shells left. As a piece of scientific mumbo-jumbo this was hard to beat.

I was more impressed by historic climatologist Tim Ball, who was interviewed on YouTube on the subject of those e-mails. He claimed that the exposure of the said files was confirmation of the collusion that has been going on between scientists who have a vested interest in promoting the global warming theory.

He pointed out that a small group of 43 scientists have been publishing their doom-laden tomes and reviewing each other’s work in a cosy “I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine” set-up.

He revealed that one of the leading lights in the eco-loony campaign had suggested to another scientist who had managed to infiltrate their ranks that they bury the mediaeval warm period in order to give their global warming argument more bite.

Tim Ball points out that Greenland was actually warmer 1,000 years ago when Vikings strutted their stuff. What seems to have upset him as much as anything else was the blatant contempt the e-mails showed for anyone who dared to question this cabal of scientists.

There are too many people making too much money out of this climate-change business, and too many politicians climbing on the global warming bandwagon in order to curry favour with the sandal-wearing beardies for anybody to dare to challenge this new religion.

And it’s not just the likes of Al Gore, who has picked up an Oscar for his documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, and become rich by investing in windmills and such like, who are profiting from this message of doom.

A neighbour of mine used to sell ships, but he had the sense to get out of that business a few years ago when he saw the way the wind was blowing and now he’s making money hand over fist flogging windmills all over Scotland.

He has every reason to be grateful to Mr Gore for spreading his global-warming gospel, although some critics of Gore’s award-winning propaganda piece have pointed out that he used graphs linking CO and temperature that have since been discredited scientifically.

The shots of drowned polar bears that plucked at the heartstrings of millions of schoolchildren who were exposed to the documentary have since been revealed to have been of bears that were killed in a storm. The latest survey on the polar bear population shows that their numbers are greater than they have been for years.

In his book Real Global Warming Disaster, Christopher Booker says: “The world’s politicians are poised to impose on us far and away the most costly set of measures that any group of politicians has ever proposed in the history of the world – measures so destructive that even if half of them were implemented, they would take us back to the Dark Ages.”

If you think this is all a bit academic, consider how much your gas and electricity bills will increase by over the coming years in order to pay for all this so-called renewable energy.

Billions of pounds will have to be spent covering the countryside in those windmills, and then there’s the wave power project to be paid for.

Meanwhile, Scotland is sitting on 10% of all the coal reserves in Europe and will continue to sit on it while our leaders are still persuaded by the argument put forward by a bunch of scientists who are feathering their nests with the largesse handed over to them by the windmill manufacturers and their ilk.

But what do I know? So let’s give the final word to Professor Richard Lindzen, a leading atmospheric scientist, who writes: “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st-century’s developed world went into a hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature of a few tenths of a degree and . . . proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age.”

Well, we might be contemplating such a rollback in this neck of the woods, but you can bet your life that China and India will be harbouring no such notions. Nor will any other country with a titter of wit.