Climate change

Thursday

Nigel Lawson

Nigel Lawson’s diary: My secret showdown with the Royal Society over global warming

The long-discussed meeting between a group of climate scientists and Fellows of the Royal Society on the one side, and me and some colleagues from my think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation on the other, has now at last taken place. It was held behind closed doors in a committee room at the House of Lords, the secrecy — no press present — at the insistence of the Royal Society Fellows, an insistence I find puzzling given the clear public interest in the issue of climate change in general and climate change policy in particular. The origins go back almost a year, to a lecture by the president of the

Thursday

Will Straw

Why the Right is wrong about ‘the green crap’

The Conservative flirtation with environmentalism was never much more than a branding exercise. Now it is over. Today David Cameron wants to ‘cut the green crap’. Perhaps the Prime Minister has been influenced by David Rose’s cover piece in last week’s Spectator — which encouraged the government to repeal the Climate Change Act, abolish its targets, and stop the Energy Bill coming into force. Strong stuff. But let’s suppose the government really were to follow Rose’s strategy, what would happen? A shale gas revolution? Don’t bet on it. As the energy company Cuadrilla has admitted, domestic fracking would have an ‘insignificant‘ impact on prices. The US, which has seen prices fall,

Saturday

James Forsyth

There’s no point in just outsourcing our CO2 emissions

The global warming question is back on the political agenda with David Cameron likening cutting greenhouse gas emissions to house insurance. His argument is that if there’s a risk that they may be harmful, you want to guard against it. But given that ‘global warming’ is no respected of national boundaries, one thing that isn’t sensible is to simply send energy intensive industries and their jobs and profits overseas. But this is just what the EU is doing, according to Bjørn Lomborg. He reports that: ‘From 1990 to 2008, the EU cut its emissions by about 270 million metric tons of CO2. But it turns out that the increase in

Thursday

Louise Gray

Are climate change talks getting dirty?

Warsaw – As reports flood in of devastation in the Philippines,  pressure is growing on ministers attending United Nations talks in Poland to prove that on-going climate change talks are not a waste of money. While it is impossible to blame a single event on climate change, the World Meteorological Organisation has warned that warming oceans and rising sea levels make the impact of ‘super storms’ like Typhoon Haiyan far worse and, perhaps, more frequent. So, what are our leaders doing about it? Well, 10,106 people have gathered in a football stadium in Warsaw to produce more hot air discussing a global deal to cut emissions. The annual UN jamboree is not

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 31 October 2013

Not fair on cops Sir: Nick Cohen (‘PCs gone mad’, 26 October) claims that the police are deliberately attacking the press and fundamental liberties because, in light of the overall reduction in crime, they are now underemployed and ‘many are surplus to requirements’. This is an inventive conspiracy theory by any standards, but lacking any link to plausibility. In 2006, as the head of the Anti-Terrorist Branch, I called a halt to the first phone-hacking investigation because we had other priorities such as the 7/7 and 21/7 attacks, and stopping the killing of several thousand people with liquid bombs on aircraft over the Atlantic. We really did have better things to

Friday

Matt Ridley

A response to my critics on global warming

My Spectator cover story on the net benefits of climate change sparked a lot of interest. There was an explosion of fury from all the predictable places. Yet not one of my critics managed to disprove my central assertion, that climate change is probably causing net benefits now and is likely to continue doing so for some decades yet. I’ve written responses to some of the critical articles and reproduce them here. 1. Duncan Geere in the New Statesman. Four paragraphs in his piece in turn begin with ‘He’s right…’ so I am glad that Geere confirms that I am right about all my main points. If you read my

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 24 October 2013

Ridley’s wrong Sir: In last week’s issue the former Northern Rock chairman rejoiced in the ‘good news’ that climate change would not start to damage our planet for another 57 years (‘Carry on warming’, 19 October). I am not a scientist. As a minister, I rely on the opinion of experts including the government chief scientist, the Meteorological Office and the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They do not share Lord Ridley’s views. The latest IPCC scientific analysis from 259 climate experts in 39 countries, reviewed by another 659 experts who dealt with 53,000 individual comments, is clear about the very real threat that dangerous man-made climate change poses

James Delingpole James Delingpole

James Delingpole: Why can’t the BBC be impartial in the climate change debate? 

 ‘Well, you’re arguing facts against opinions. OK, I mean, the fact that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has rocketed up since the Industrial Revolution, and continues to rocket up, is a fact. Now, it’s so much a fact that even the climate change deniers look away from it and don’t deny it.’ — Professor Steve Jones, Feedback, BBC Radio 4, 18 October Have a look at that last sentence. It represents such a cherishably stupid, rude, fatuous, crabby, bigoted, ignorant, petulant, feeble, fallacious, dishonest and misleading argument that if it turned out the speaker in question was a professor of logic or philosophy you really might want

Saturday

Benny Peiser

Ed Davey’s energy fantasies

As energy prices continue to — with British Gas imposing a 9.2 per cent rise — the government is under growing pressure. The tragedy is that any genuine solution to the largely self-inflicted energy fiasco will not be considered let alone enacted any time soon – as we can tell by the recent outings of the climate change secretary Ed Davey. The controversy about the proportion of green taxes on energy bills looks trivial compared to the tornado that is going to hit parties in coming years – as the government’s self-imposed decarbonisation targets drive energy prices up relentlessly. If the rise in wholesale gas prices is seen as a crisis,

Thursday

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 podcast: is climate change good, Tommy Robinson and another Tory/Lib Dem pact

Are there any upsides to climate change? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, author and columnist Matt Ridley discusses the economic impact of global warming with Fraser Nelson, and whether there are any benefits to a rise in temperatures. Will there be a tipping point for disastrous effects? Are we taking the right precautions to deal with that point? Douglas Murray also looks at his encounter with ex-English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson, and what lies ahead for the far-right movement in Britain. Will the EDL wither away without Robinson? And are all far right parties finished in this country? Plus, Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth examine the prospects for another Conservative coalition

Matt Ridley

Why climate change is good for the world

Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this. Whenever I make the point in public, I am told by those who are paid to insult anybody who departs from climate alarm that I have got it embarrassingly wrong, don’t know what I am talking about, must be referring to Britain only, rather than the world as a whole, and so forth. At first, I thought this was just their usual bluster. But then I realised

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Greg Barker: BBC gives too much coverage to climate change sceptics

If you asked most people about the BBC, few people would describe it as a hotbed of scepticism about global warming. But the coverage that the BBC gives to those who have doubts about the orthodoxy on the subject is too much for Barker. He, as the Press Association reports, told the Science and Technology Committee, ‘In the case of the BBC they have a very clear statutory responsibility. It’s in the original charter to inform. I think we need the BBC to look very hard, particularly at whether or not they are getting the balance right. I don’t think they are.’ Barker did say, ‘I’m not trying to ban

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: On quitting Facebook, and putting down Nigel

Why we joined Sir: I was astonished by the assertion made by Wyn Grant (Letters, 21 September) that ‘the postwar surge in Conservative party membership was due to people rebuilding their social lives after the war’. Where did that idea come from? I grew up in south London before and during the war. I recall that social contact increased during the war and friendships made then endured when the war was over. Of course the nature of social activities gradually changed after the war, but the suggestion that most people joined the Conservative party purely for social reasons is wrong. It should be remembered that the Labour party’s clause 4 was central

Monday

Andrew Montford

Climatology’s great dilemma

Climate science is, once again, on the horns of a very uncomfortable dilemma. Whatever the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chooses to do in the next few weeks its decision looks set to explode in its face. Crises are something of a feature of the IPCC. Since its First Assessment appeared back in 1990, each of the panel’s periodic pronouncements on the global climate has plunged it into controversy. In the Second Assessment of 1995, the report’s headline claim – that a ‘fingerprint’ of manmade global warming had been detected – caused uproar when it was discovered that it had been inserted into the text at the last moment.

Thursday

Camilla Swift

The View from 22 – Ed Miliband’s last laugh, the IPCC’s latest climate change report, and Lib Dem party conference

Are the Tories right to see Ed Miliband as a joke? On this week’s Spectator cover, Peter Brookes has drawn Miliband as Wallace, with Ed Balls as his ‘Gromit’ sidekick. And on this week’s View from 22 podcast, presented by Fraser Nelson, he and The Telegraph’s Dan Hodges discuss whether people are right to dismiss him as a cartoon figure. Do Labour have any hope of winning the next election with Miliband as their leader? Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be publishing their latest report next week, which appears to show that there has been no statistically significant rise over the past 16 years. Benny Peiser, of

Monday

David Blackburn

Government fights misinformation over shale planning process

The government is busy quelling worries about the planning process for exploratory shale drilling, following this disobliging article in yesterday’s Observer. The government stresses that its planning guidance document, which was published last month, contains a list of environmental risks that planning officers ‘should address’, together with an explanation of the competences of other relevant government departments and agencies. The government rejects any insinuation that it is placing shale above renewables. Indeed, aides have taken the opportunity to reiterate the coalition’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. For instance, paragraphs 97 and 98 of the National Planning Policy Framework suggest that, despite the government’s commitment to a varied energy supply, renewables and low carbon alternatives

Monday

Sebastian Payne

An inconvenient interview: Andrew Neil defends his grilling of Ed Davey

Andrew Neil’s interview on Sunday Politics the other week triggered much reaction – and protest from those who do not believe that there is a debate to be had. Andrew has replied at length today, and we thought you might be interested in what he has to say. First, the offending interview: The viewers included one Dana Nuccitelli, who works for a private Californian environment company and blogs at the Guardian. He objected to the Sunday Politics graph showing the absence of warming and said it should be ‘should be totally disregarded and thrown out’. His conclusion: ‘Throughout the show Neil focused only on the bits of evidence that seemed to

Friday

Charles Moore

So where is the ‘ecosystem collapse’ that Prince Charles warned us about?

It is traditional for me, at this season, to remind readers of the Prince of Wales’s prophecy, spoken in Brazil in March 2009. His Royal Highness warned that the world had ‘only 100 months to avert irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse’. So only four years now remain. But as I write, the Met Office is meeting in Exeter for an unprecedented summit to work out why it has predicted for the past 13 years that the British climate will get warmer only to find, in 12 out of the 13, that it has got colder. No one is admitting, of course, that the end of the world is not nigh,

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

Met Office in crisis meeting as sun comes out

The Met Office is apparently holding a ‘crisis meeting’ today to discuss why Britain’s weather refuses to behave itself these days. No sooner had the camp, pirouetting, forecasters told us that we were in for weeks and weeks of gale force winds and torrential rain, stretching into July, better wear your wellies etc, than the sun came out, the birds began to sing again and the wind became a vague, if pleasant, caressing of the senses. Their meeting is really to ask the rhetorical question, the only question they know – is it global warming or what? – rather than the more immediately relevant question: why are we always completely

Thursday

Charles C.

Energy special: Get ready for the ‘fire ice’ revolution

On Saturday, 8 June, the research vessel Kaiyo Maru No. 7 left the port of Joetsu, in western Japan, to begin a three-year survey of the Sea of Japan — the latest step in a little-known research programme that in a decade or less could profoundly change the international balance of power. Kaiyo Maru, a 499-ton trawler, is hunting for beds of methane hydrate, a cold, white, sherbet-like substance found off coastlines in Japan and much of the rest of the world. The United States Geological Survey estimates that as much as 2.8 trillion cubic metres of this mixture of frozen water and natural gas may exist. Although only part