Back to the Dark Ages

I've never found the hysteria about global warming to be convincing. But if the science is sketchy, the methods to reverse the trends are doubly so. And, of course, such methods are idiotic, which means only the government would be stupid enough to insist upon enacting them.

The scare over global warming, and our politicians' response to it, is becoming ever more bizarre. On the one hand we have the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coming up with yet another of its notoriously politicised reports, hyping up the scare by claiming that world surface temperatures have been higher in 11 of the past 12 years (1995-2006) than ever previously recorded.

This carefully ignores the latest US satellite figures showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level - not to mention the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century, with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but 1934.

I keep hearing that the science has settled this: the globe is warming. No one, I am told, doubts the facts; we only differ in what drastic actions we must take to prevent certain doom. Then I read something like the above, and wonder if the so-called scientists have their so-called facts straight.

Look, for all I know, the above data could be rubbish. But so could all of the data that the global warming crowd likes to cite. I'm agnostic about whether or not the the earth is warming; but I'm downright skeptical when I'm told that the internal combustion engine--and by extension human beings, especially those darn Westerners--which has been around for about a century, has caused chaos on a four and a half billion year old planet.

As always, my libertarian blood begins to boil when the government gets involved. The EU, the prototype for the North American Union, is enacting some downright draconian measures. If all goes well, the economy will grind to a halt, and all the human beings will starve to death. After all, humans are bad for the planet.

Few people have yet really taken on board the mind-blowing scale of all the "planet-saving" measures to which we are now committed by the European Union.

By 2020 we will have to generate 20 per cent of our electricity from "renewables". At present the figure is four per cent (most of it generated by hydro-electric schemes and methane gas from landfill)...

Another EU directive commits us to deriving 10 per cent of our transport fuel from "biofuels" by 2020. This would take up pretty well all the farmland we currently use to grow food (at a time when world grain prices have doubled in six months and we are already face a global food shortage).

Then by 2009, thanks to a mad gesture by Mr Blair and his EU colleagues last March, we also face the prospect of a total ban on incandescent light bulbs.

The author, Christopher Booker, concludes:

This year will be remembered for two things.

First, it was the year when the scientific data showed that the cosmic scare over global warming may well turn out to be just that - yet another vastly inflated scare.

Second, it was the year when the hysteria generated by all the bogus science behind this scare finally drove those who rule over us, including Gordon "Plastic Bags" Brown, wholly out of their wits.

Ideally, we would sit back and watch the EU. If these measures somehow don't manage to drive their economy into the ground, we can let one or two of our crazy states follow. Of course, since we haven't managed to learn anything from their senseless immigration policies and their embrace of feminism and the culture of death--or at least no more babies--it's unlikely we'll learn anything here. If anyone writes the Decline and Fall of the American Republic, I hope they highlight all of the times we willingly brought about our own death.