Climate change

Barometer | 12 January 2017

Black background A Morris dancing troupe with blacked-up faces had to abandon its performance in a Birmingham shopping centre after being heckled and accused of racism. — There are several explanations for the tradition of Border Morris groups blackening their faces, but it was certainly established by 1509, when a Shrovetide banquet for ambassadors featured torch-bearers with blackened faces. — Some believe it to have derived from Spain and Portugal, where dancers blacked up as Moors. Others believe that it derives from the practice of poachers blackening up to conceal themselves in darkness. — Blacking up is punished more mildly now than in the 18th century: a 1723 anti-poaching law

James Delingpole

How the Donald will beat the Green Blob

Just before Christmas I popped over to Washington DC to test the waters of the Trump administration. I spoke to key members of his transition teams; I hung out with thinktankers, journalists, scientists, conservative activists; I wangled an invitation to a top-secret lunch hosted by card-carrying members of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy; I drank cocktails, lots of cocktails, from the Four Seasons in Georgetown to the new Trump Hotel in the Old Post Office; I went to that Americans for Tax Reform meeting that Grover Norquist hosts every Tuesday. And I came back feeling very positive indeed. Why? The fact that I even have to ask this question in a

The death of the global warming ‘pause’ has been greatly exaggerated

The global warming ‘pause’ never existed, say the headlines. It’s a claim that has been made before, only to be refuted, yet now it’s back again. If there is one topic that sends a small subset of climate scientists’ temperature into the stratosphere, it’s the topic of the global warming ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’. This is the idea that global surface temperatures haven’t changed much for almost 20 years. Never in my experience of science have I come across a topic like it, and that’s because it means nothing, and everything. Global warming is about energy imbalance. Greenhouse gasses stop heat leaving the earth, so the planet is getting warmer. This is fundamental

In Trump’s Texas, the oil men awaken to hope of new prosperity

 Houston, Texas It’s hard to find anyone in polite society here who admits to having voted for Trump, even among the oil men. But 4.7 million Texans did so, giving him 53 per cent of the popular vote. In redneck rural counties the Donald carried four fifths of the ballot, but Hillary Clinton was ahead in urban Houston, whose citizens pride themselves on good relations between white, black and Latino communities and on the welcome they offer to newcomers — including, a decade ago, a quarter of a million refugees from hurricane-hit New Orleans. But still this is predominantly an oil town, and an industry that has suffered losses and slashed

James Delingpole

The moral arc of the universe bends towards me

So I made £250 betting on Trump to win the presidency. It would have been more, except that every time I got close to topping up my stake, this boring, mimsy, responsible voice in my head kept saying: ‘Now, now James. Don’t be silly. All your sensible friends who know much, much more than you do about politics have been telling you that President Trump just isn’t going to happen.’ One of them was m’learned colleague Toby Young. Until recently we used to do a podcast together. Because it was partly aimed at a US audience, we’d usually chat about the presidential race and I’d go into my crazy spiel

Blinded with science

We’re continually assured that government policies are grounded in evidence, whether it’s an anti-bullying programme in Finland, an alcohol awareness initiative in Texas or climate change responses around the globe. Science itself, we’re told, is guiding our footsteps. There’s just one problem: science is in deep trouble. Last year, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, admitted that “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.” In his words, “science has taken a turn toward darkness.” Medical research, psychology, and economics are all in the grip of a ‘reproducibility crisis.’ A pharmaceutical company attempting to confirm the findings of 53 landmark cancer studies was successful in only six

The Spectator’s notes | 20 October 2016

Vote Leave was the most successful electoral campaign in British history. Against the opposition of all three political parties, it won, achieving the largest vote for anything in this country, ever. But voting to leave is only the essential start, not the fulfilment, and now there is no Vote Leave. After victory, the campaign’s leaders went their various ways. Some were lulled into a false sense of security by Mrs May’s clear declaration of Brexit intent, and by the fact that one of their top colleagues, Stephen Parkinson, is now installed in 10 Downing Street. Nick Timothy, now all-powerful in Mrs May’s counsels, was running the New Schools Network during

Climate of ignorance

Global greening is the name given to a gradual, but large, increase in green vegetation on the planet over the past three decades. The climate change lobby is keen to ensure that if you hear about it at all, you hear that it is a minor thing, dwarfed by the dangers of global warming. Actually, it could be the other way round: greening is a bigger effect than warming. It is a story in which I have been both vilified and vindicated. Four years ago, I came across an online video of a lecture given by Ranga Myneni of Boston University in which he presented an ingenious analysis of data

Breach of Trust

Ever since it was founded in 1895, the National Trust has been considered a good thing. That oak tree sticker on the windscreen isn’t just a passport to some of the country’s finest heritage. It is a middle class status symbol declaring that you are cultured, a lover of the bucolic, someone who’d rather their children went out collecting tadpoles and tramping round nature reserves than staying in glued to an iPad. But the Trust, originally set up to ensure ‘the preservation for the benefit of the nation of lands and tenements of beauty or historic interest’ seems to have abandoned at least one of the laudable aims that made

The Spectator’s Notes | 29 September 2016

Mathias Döpfner, the extremely tall, extremely intelligent head of Axel Springer, is unusual in the generally conformist German business elite because he is not an unqualified believer in the German economic model. I have known him slightly for about 20 years and have always been interested by his questing, speculative mind. We have had conversations about the freer, Anglosphere model of economic life which he admires. Although he is not anti-EU — that is still almost against the law in Germany — he is sceptical of its direction. Now he has blasphemed in the EU’s main church in Britain — the Financial Times — by telling the paper that within

Sarkozy is sceptical about climate change? String him up

Prepare the stake, stoke the fire: someone has blasphemed against climate-change orthodoxy. The speech criminal in question is Nicolas Sarkozy. Yes, the former president of France, a man who really ought to know better, has wondered out loud if mankind is solely responsible for climate change. Cue media fury. Cue eco-outrage. Cue accusations that Sarkozy has gone ‘beyond the limits of decency’. Cue an atmosphere that’s almost medieval, which basically tells Sarkozy, and by extension everyone, that you cannot say things like that. You probably shouldn’t even think them. The swiftness and ugliness of the response to Sarkozy’s comments confirm that questioning climate change is to the 21st century what

Power failure | 21 July 2016

Fracking is a British tradition. Since 1969 more than 200 sites have used hydraulic fracturing ‘without environmental catastrophes’ according to Dick Selley, an emeritus professor of geology, writing in the programme notes to Fracked! by Alistair Beaton. The satire takes the opposite view and regards fracking as a wicked novelty inflicted on rustic innocents by Big Oil, which hopes to steep the country’s aquifers with radioactive water and massacre all its customers at the same time. That’s the business plan, apparently. We meet a pootling granny (Anne Reid), who reluctantly leads a campaign to stop Deerland Energy from plastering southern England with horrible drilling platforms. Deerland hires a firm of

The Spectator’s notes | 5 May 2016

The comparison between the referendum questions — that asked in 1975 and the one which we shall be asked on 23 June — is interesting. In 1975, the question was ‘Do you think that the United Kingdom should remain part of the European Community (Common Market)?’ (Answer: Yes/No). Today, the question will be ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of European Union or leave the European Union?’ (Answer: Remain/Leave). The modern question is the fairer, and it also brings out how things have changed. In 1975, it seemed almost obvious that the answer was ‘yes’: even many who did not like EEC entry could see it was strange to leave only

James Delingpole

The slow death of environmentalism

Would you describe yourself as an ‘environmentalist’? I would, mainly to annoy greenies, but also because it’s true. If your definition of an environmentalist is someone who loves immersing himself in the natural world, makes a study of its ways and cares deeply about its future, I’m at least as much of one as David Attenborough. But I can see why many fellow nature lovers might balk at the term, especially now that it has become so grievously politicised. That would explain the recent Gallup poll — it was taken in the US but I suspect it applies to Britain too — showing how dramatically this label has plunged in popularity. In

Acid trip

There was a breathtakingly beautiful BBC series on the Great Barrier Reef recently which my son pronounced himself almost too depressed to watch. ‘What’s the point?’ said Boy. ‘By the time I get to Australia to see it the whole bloody lot will have dissolved.’ The menace Boy was describing is ‘ocean acidification’. It’s no wonder he should find it worrying, for it has been assiduously promoted by environmentalists for more than a decade now as ‘global warming’s evil twin’. Last year, no fewer than 600 academic papers were published on the subject, so it must be serious, right? First referenced in a peer-reviewed study in Nature in 2003, it

The Great Barrier Reef is dying. Why does nobody seem to care?

We seem to be wilfully blind when it comes to nature. Right now, Australia is in the grip of an unprecedented environmental disaster. The largest living structure on Earth, the Great Barrier Reef, is mortally sick. Across hundreds of miles of ocean, from Papua New Guinea and all the way southwards along the east coast of Australia, the reef is dying. Famously, the GBR is the only living structure visible from space – almost two thousand miles long and about the size of Germany. It’s suffering what the scientists call ‘bleaching’, a process where corals eject the algae that give them their bright colours, and turn white. They do it

The Amber express

Amber Rudd isn’t a flashy politician; her office at the Department for Energy and Climate Change has almost no personal touches. She has a poster on the wall for the new Edinburgh tram (she was a student there). Her one concession to vanity is a framed ‘Minister of the Year’ award from this magazine: awarded for uprooting the legacy of the Liberal Democrat energy policy and being (in the words of the commendation) the ‘slayer of windmills’. It was, perhaps, an exaggeration: she hasn’t brought down any of Britain’s 5,215 onshore wind turbines. But she has been busy pruning back the green subsidies that her department had become used to

A new paper in a prestigious journal proves a 15-year hiatus in global warming. Why is it being ignored?

This article, in Nature magazine, ought to have been front page news – and might have been, had it suggested that global warming was worse than we had thought.  Instead, it underlines the sound science behind an inconvenient truth: that there has been a 15-year hiatus in global warming. To those of us who have been following the debate, this is no surprise. In 2007 I pointed out that it was curious that in recent years the global annual average temperature had not increased at a time when greenhouse gasses were increasing rapidly and when the media was full of claims that the earth’s temperature was getting higher and higher. I proposed no explanation

Time to put my money where my mouth is

‘As oil crashes, is it time to short solar stocks?’ Gosh, I wish I’d read that headline a year ago. The solar stock it tipped for doom in January 2015 has since plummeted from $19 to $2.65. Yes, hindsight can be a wonderful thing. But what if there were an area of the markets which you knew to be grotesquely overvalued as a result of ignorance, dishonesty, and false sentiment? You’d be mad not to bet against it, wouldn’t you? It would hardly be gambling: more like plain common sense. This is how I’ve felt for quite some time about the climate change industry. Very often when I read the

Yes, the Paris climate deal was toothless. But it’s the EU we need to worry about

Reading the Sunday newspapers, you could be forgiven for thinking an earth-shattering agreement was reached in Paris – one which outdid even the Kyoto Protocol in the way of binding agreement across the world on climate action. The deal was heavy on political will and ambition (or at least expressions thereof) but as many experts are now queuing up to say, offered little in the form of hard targets and binding commitments around reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This is of course a pragmatic approach to doing policy at the global level, particularly given the extreme variation in capacity and priorities between countries operating at vastly different levels of development. If the