Seeing red

With each passing year it becomes clearer that the cure for global warming is worse than the disease. While wind power and biofuels devastate ecosystems and economies, temperatures and sea levels rise ever more slowly, just as the greenhouse theory— minus feedbacks — predicts. As James Delingpole acutely observes, the true believers are left with a version of Pascal’s wager embodying a ‘dismally feeble grasp of cost-benefit analysis’: that, however unlikely it is, the potential cost of global warming is so high that anything is justified.

Not only does this argument apply to the cure as well as the disease; it also applies to every small risk of something big happening. Indeed, Delingpole observes, one of his friends from university is now prime minister of a government that is spending £18 billion a year of your money to put giant death-ray lasers on every British hilltop in preparation for alien invasion.