Climate change

Fear and libertarianism in Las Vegas

Great God, Vegas is an awful place. I realised this the moment I arrived. My cab driver — who’d been perfectly agreeable en route from the airport — mistook my post-flight sluggishness for reluctance to give him a tip, and drove off angrily cursing me as I fumbled in my pockets. The line just for the check-in desk was about a mile long. Everyone was fat and drunk and dressed for the beach. Outside it was too hot: 105°F at 5 p.m. Inside, it was too cold from the relentless air-conditioning. Everywhere had the style and charm and tastefulness of Redditch. By day three I’d had enough. ‘Don’t stay in Vegas

In apologising for having Nigel Lawson on to discuss climate change, the BBC has breached its charter

Listen to ‘Is climate change a factor in the recent extreme weather?’ on Audioboo It is only a matter of time before Nigel Lawson — if he is allowed on the BBC at all — has to have his words spoken by an actor in the manner of Gerry Adams at the height of the IRA’s bombing campaign during the 1980s. In the case of Mr Adams, whose voice was banned from the airwaves by the government, the BBC stood up for free speech. But it is quite a different story with Lord Lawson. The BBC has effectively banned the former chancellor (and former editor of this magazine) from appearing on its

In defence of Nigel Lawson, and his fellow climate sceptics

Some people find climate change ‘deniers’ the most irritating people on God’s green earth. On her Telegraph blog Martha Gill equates them with flat-earthers, which says a lot for the depth of her analysis. She points to a piece on the Huffington Post by Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (funded by billionaire Greenpeace contributor Jeremy Grantham, who also sponsors an $80,000 prize for environmental reporting – which this article will stand no chance of winning) and says it demolishes the deniers’ arguments. The problem is that it doesn’t. Those who think ‘deniers’ are a problem and seek to put them down are in

There is something very wrong with climatology

In the last few days climate scientists have found themselves back on the front pages, and once again it’s for all the wrong reasons. The furore this time has been prompted by an eminent climatologist named Lennart Bengtsson, who agreed to join the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Nigel Lawson’s sceptic think tank. Within days of his agreement, Bengtsson felt obliged to resign, apparently having been subjected to a wave of protests and threats of ostracisation from colleagues, one of whom publicly insinuated that the 79-year-old Bengtsson was senile. When it also emerged that a reviewer of one of Bengtsson’s scientific papers had recommended its rejection

David Cameron’s sacred cows exposed by Freakonomics

There’s an interesting bit in the first chapter of Think Like a Freak, (Allen Lane, £12.99), from the Freakonomics duo, Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner in which the two Steves get to meet David Cameron and a few dozen of the team just before he takes office. They are there to do what freethinkers do, viz, cut through the guff and muddled thinking that surrounds the big issues. Well, I can tell you for free that Mr Cameron is unlikely to sue for his name check. They observe breathlessly that “everything about him radiated competence and confidence. He looked to be exactly the sort of man whom deans

Spectator letters: How schools fail boys, Jonathan Croall answers Keith Baxter, and why atheists should love the C of E

Why girls do better Sir: Isabel Hardman notes that girls now outperform boys at every level in education (‘The descent of man’, 3 May), implying that this is a symptom of a wider cultural malaise. In fact, boys lost their edge in 16+ exams in 1970, long before their advantages in other areas began to disappear. ‘Child-centred’ reforms were already well advanced when the infamous Plowden report was published in 1967, and informal practices such as ‘discovery learning’ and ‘whole language’ gave girls a decided edge. This was conclusively demonstrated in trials conducted between 1997 and 2005 by the Scottish Office. Children who were taught to read with a rigorous

National Trust trusting in green dogma

Strange happenings at a place that many people think of as one of Britain’s National Treasures: the National Trust. As we point out in our leading article this week, the Trust and their director-general, Dame Helen Ghosh, seem to have done a 360 on fracking. Last year, Dame Helen had an ‘open mind’ when it came to fracking. But in an interview with the Guardian this week, Dame Helen revealed that she has turned her back on shale. She explained that the decision was made because: ‘We don’t believe anyone understands the environmental impacts, and because we as far as possible would want to avoid anything that encourages the continued use

The lefty liberals may be losing their hold over the arts world

If you happen to be reading this column at breakfast, I’d recommend you skip to something more agreeable like Dear Mary and save mine till a bit later. It concerns the ugly details of one of the most revolting mass murderers in US history. His name is Kermit Gosnell — a doctor who ran a particularly dodgy clinic in Philadelphia specialising in late-term abortions for mostly poor black women. When police raided it in 2010, they encountered a scene of quite appalling horror. In a flea-ridden, blood- and faeces-stained basement, Gosnell had been operating on women using unsterilised equipment, killing babies well over the legal term limit, sometimes by sucking

If you really hate wind farms, David Cameron won’t help you

The Prime Minister is planning to cap the total number of onshore wind farms in Britain. But what would limiting the number of wind farms to those in existence or already in the planning system mean? The UK already has 7.1GW worth of turbines spinning away. There are 1.8GW under construction and some 4.3GW approved but not yet built. Once all these are up and running it will bring the total to 12.2GW. The government plans to install between 11GW to 13GW of onshore wind by 2020. If they were to limit turbines to those built or in the process of building, it would make precisely no difference at all.

The potential of shale – in the fight against climate change…

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a report earlier this morning which contains a remarkable insight. Ottmar Edenhofer, head of the IPCC working group, told a press conference that shale gas might work as a bridge between fossil fuel dependence and renewable energy. (The report also mentions carbon capture and storage, nuclear and biofuels alongside shale as alternative energy sources.) The IPCC is not endorsing shale or rejecting renewable energy, far from it; but it is saying that shale could be a short term measure in the long-term battle against climate change. Edenhofer’s statement effectively concedes that renewables are not yet sufficiently developed or cheap to meet our energy needs, and

Podcast: Adapting to climate change, monogamy in gay marriage and new forms of electioneering

Is the world finally realising it has to adapt to, rather than halt, climate change? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Matt Ridley discusses this week’s Spectator cover on the IPCC’s latest climate change report with Fraser Nelson. What do the findings mean for climate sceptics and the green lobby? How has the received wisdom on climate change shifted over the past eight years? And how big of a political issue is climate change? Julie Bindel and Douglas Murray also discuss gay marriage and the new responsibilities that come with it. Should gay marriages follow the same monogamous virtues as heterosexual marriages? Has the gay rights movement been taken

How green policies hurt the poor

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_3_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Matt Ridley and Fraser Nelson discuss the IPCC’s latest report” startat=67] Listen [/audioplayer]Advocates against global warming often frame the issue in terms of helping the poor. ‘You’re right, people dying thanks to climate change is some way off…’ ran one fairly typical advert recently, ‘about 5,000 miles, give or take.’ Indeed, the United Nations agrees that, looking toward the future, climate change ‘harms the poor first and worst’. And the logic stacks up: the poorer you are, the less able you’ll be to afford the resources to adapt to a changing climate. However, climate policies also have a cost, and these predominantly hurt the poor. And if you

The end of snow? Not in Gstaad

 Gstaad The American newspaper that prints only news it sees fit to poison good things recently announced ‘The end of snow’. ‘The planet has warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1800s, and, as a result, snow is melting…’ Bring on the Pulitzers, snow melts! The Big Bagel Times also thundered that Europe has lost half its Alpine glacial ice since the 1850s — yes, the 1850s, when private jets ferried people such as Abe Lincoln around America, Otto von Bismarck polluted German resorts in his supercharged Mercedes-Benz, and young Taki steamed around the Med in a 100 mph speedboat powered by black slaves. Well, I for one don’t believe a

Why has Britain signed up for the world’s most expensive power station?

‘As part of our plan to help Britain succeed, after months of negotiation, today we have a deal for the first nuclear power station in a generation to be built in Britain.’ That was David Cameron in October, announcing that his government had reached an agreement with the French power giant EDF over the construction of two reactors at Hinkley Point in Somerset. The Prime Minister must have a funny idea of success, because the more we learn about the Hinkley deal, the more we can see that it is one of the worst ever signed by a British government. Even the European Union can smell a rat. Last month,

The martyrdom of Mark Steyn

When I first read, many months ago, that the notorious US climate scientist Michael Mann was suing the notorious right-wing bastard Mark Steyn for defamation, I admit that I felt a little piqued. Obviously a libel trial is not something any sane person would wish to court; and naturally I’m a massive fan of Steyn’s. Nevertheless, after all the work I’ve dedicated over the years to goading Mann, I found it a bit bloody annoying that Steyn — a relative latecomer to the climate change debate — should have been the one who ended up stealing all my courtroom glory. What made me doubly jealous was that this was a

How the MPs’ expenses scandal proved the wisdom of Alain de Botton

Whenever I’m tempted to pretend to be nicer so that fewer people hate me, I remember my old friend Alain de Botton. Alain is a genuinely delightful fellow — charming, considerate, wise, modest — but this has made no difference to the degree with which, in some quarters, he remains intensely loathed. This saddens me. There are certainly occasions when I find his utopianism naive, twee, mockable. And, yes, I suppose it’s easy to be jealous of a handsome man with a beautiful wife and a comfortable life which seems to involve nothing harder than pondering philosophically, writing bestsellers and being on TV a lot. But for all his faults,

Who is behind the ship of fools?

As Chris Turney and his colleagues make their way home from their failed adventure, the next question is: who is going to be paying for their folly?  It certainly isn’t the general public. The efforts by Turney and his co-leader Chris Fogwill to crowd-fund money have been an embarrassing failure. They were seeking to raise $49,000 in this way – a small fraction of the $1.5 million overall costs – but they managed to raise a mere $1,000 from 22 people. Not even the promise of a signed copy of Turney’s book, 1912: the year the World Discovered Antarctica was enough to tempt donors into action: not a single one

The moral of the Antarctic ship of fools: never treat a scientific debate as if it is closed

My tweet yesterday – ‘all saved from the ship of fools’ – has turned out to be premature. The havoc created by Professor Chris Turney’s Antarctic expedition  has since increased.  The Xue Long, the Chinese ship which provided the helicopter to airlift Turney and his colleagues from the Akademik Shokalskiy to the Aurora Australis, has itself now become stuck in ice. Meanwhile 22 Russian crew remain aboard the Shokalskiy. Both ships are stronger than the Endurance, Shackleton’s ship whose timbers were crushed in similar circumstances in 1915, prompting his famous voyage and trek to the whaling station on South Georgia, but both ships remain in danger from further movements of

The climate change trip stuck in ice

My favourite quote of the season comes from Tracy Rogers, a marine ecologist who sometime today will be winched from the research vessel the Akademik Shokalskiy and rescued by helicopter.  ‘I love it when the ice wins and we don’t,’ she says. ‘It reminds you that as humans we don’t control everything and that the natural world is the winner here.’ The unintended irony is delicious. If the winner of the fiasco which has been developing in the Antarctic over the past two weeks is the natural world there is little disguising who the losers are, even if, as I suspect, Tracy Rogers can’t quite see it. She and her fellow