Here’s part of the embarrassed kiss-off Prof Plimer received from the RSA’s chief executive:

I am afraid I am writing to you with some disappointing news regarding
the Prince Philip Annual Lecture on 5 May.

As you well know, the debate around climate change has recently become
highly politically charged, both globally and especially in your home
country. Equally, as I am sure you are aware, members of the Royal
Family need to be scrupulous in avoiding any appearance of advocating or
supporting a particular political stance. The RSA’s charitable status
also requires us to maintain absolute political independence in our
programme of events and research events.

After discussion with Buckingham Palace, it is therefore with great
regret that we must withdraw your invitation to give this year’s Prince
Philip Lecture. The Duke of Edinburgh is personally disappointed as he
read your book with great interest and was looking forward to hearing
you speak, but I know that you will recognise that the now highly
controversial debate surrounding this issue would make it inevitable
that he was seen to be taking a particular position.

Actually, no I don’t think that Prof Plimer DOES “recognise that the now highly controversial debate surrounding this issue would make it inevitable that he was seen to be taking a particular position.” Au contraire, he’d consider closer to being a case of bringing a sense of balance and proportion to a hitherto very one-sided debate. After all, if the Prince of Wales is permitted to take such an extremist “100 months left to save the world” approach to AGW, why on earth shouldn’t his Dad be allowed to adopt a more sensible, sceptical position.

As Plimer puts it: “Strange that those who preach environmentalism at The Palace are feted as concerned scientists with no political agenda whereas those that try to speak rationality
are regarded as political.”

Question Time: celebrating the cosy consensus

Watching another dismal episode of the BBC’s Question Time last week, I realised why British politics is in such a dire state. It’s because the language of debate has been hijacked so comprehensively by the liberal left that not even conservatives dare speak up for right-wing views any more for fear of being dismissed as extremist.

By “right wing” I don’t mean anti-semitic, xenophobic, “racist”, “sexist” or any of the other glib caricatures routinely imposed on us by the left. I simply mean believing, as I do, that a society is at its most fruitful, happy and successful when individuals are left free to live their lives unburdened by all but the bare minimum of taxation or regulation, where time-honoured traditions and institutions (be they the family, or the church or the military) are cherished, where politicians are our servants not our masters, and where equality of opportunity may be a desirable thing – but DEFINITELY not equality of outcome.

What liberal-left organisations like the BBC have managed very successfully to do is frame the debate in such a way that such opinions aren’t even up for discussion. On Question Time last week, for example, the first question (given unfeasibly large quantities of impossibly boring airtime by the complicitous chairman David Dimbleby) was about Michael Ashcroft and Tory party funding; another was about one of the killers of James Bulger; another was about the Chilcott inquiry. None of them enabled any of the panel seriously to address any of the major problems facing our country today. The Bulger one was merely an opportunity for a bit of tabloid-columnist-style moral posturing. The other two were essentially about political process.

Political process is solely a left-liberal preoccupation. For libtards it is an article of faith that political activity of any kind must perforce be a good thing because it involves two of their favourite things – government intervention and changing the status quo. What libtards don’t like is big ideas – liberty; empiricism; small state; low taxation . That’s because these are right-wing arguments which they will always lose. Hence their tendency to shut down the debate whenever they can by shifting the argument ad hominem.

I’ve noticed this same technique much in use in the student-rag left-liberal blogosphere, of late, over the small matter of the Young Britons Foundation. Because the YBF’s splendid, funny and ideologically sound chairman Donal Blaney has called his organisation a “madrassa” for young conservatives, Guardianistas and redbrick-junior-common-room-Spartists have seized on it as evidence is that the YBF is some kind of borderline terrorist organisation. Eh? As I mentioned earlier, I addressed the YBF in the Commons last week, and extremist is the very last word I’d use to describe them. “Not nearly extremist enough” would be my preferred definition of these pallid young politicos. These kids have been so effectively brainwashed by the propaganda of socialists like Ken Livingstone, Tony Benn, Ken Clarke, Dave Cameron et al, they actually think “progressive” means something worthwhile and that “investment” is what you do when you squander money you haven’t got on the least efficient healthcare system in the known universe.

As I said to them last week, “Unless you understand why it is that conservatism is the ONLY political philosophy that works, unless you are capable of appreciating – and explaining – why it is not merely the philosophy of self-interest and expediency but also the one which leads to by far the happiest outcomes for by far the most people, then there is NO POINT IN YOUR BEING A ****ING CONSERVATIVE at all.”

There is not much we can do to change the BBC insidious leftism, unfortunately. But what we can try to do is restore some backbone to conservatism and – if this is what the YBF is trying to do then we should applaud it. Until conservatives can learn to stop being embarrassed about their ideology, Broken Britain is never going to be fixed.

But I urge you, go to his Ebay page, think of all the world’s children who are being drowned, starved or bored to death thanks to Man Made Global Warming, and bid, bid, bid!

We also know that alternative energy is a fraud – only viable through enormous government (ie taxpayer subsidy) and utterly incapable of answering anything more than a fraction of our energy needs. As Shannon Love puts it here:

Here’s a fact you won’t see mentioned in the public policy debate over “alternative” energy:

There exists no alternative energy source, no combination of alternative energy sources, and no system of combinations of alternative energy sources that can fully replace a single, coal fired electric plant built with 1930s era technology.

Nada.
Zero.
Zilch.

So why are our political leaders setting out quite deliberately to deceive us?

There have many disgustingly revealing stories this week about the dubious practices of the Climate Fear Promotion lobby, but for me the most damning of all was Chris Horner’s scoop at Pajamas Media concerning high level cover-ups by the Obama administration. Like his soul mate Dave Cameron on this side of the pond, Obama finds the narrative about global warming so compelling and moving that he doesn’t want it spoiled with any inconvenient truths regarding green jobs and green energy.

Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has discovered that when two European reports came out – the Spanish one above; and another one from Denmark on the inefficiency of wind farms – the Obama administration recruited left-wing lobbyists to attack them.

After two studies refuted President Barack Obama’s assertions regarding the success of Spain’s and Denmark’s wind energy programs, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request reveals the Department of Energy turned to George Soros and to wind industry lobbyists to attack the studies.

Via the FOIA request, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has learned that the Department of Energy — specifically the office headed by Al Gore’s company’s former CEO, Cathy Zoi — turned to George Soros’ Center for American Progress and other wind industry lobbyists to help push Obama’s wind energy proposals.

The FOIA request was not entirely complied with, and CEI just filed an appeal over documents still being withheld. In addition to withholding many internal communications, the administration is withholding communications with these lobbyists and other related communications, claiming they constitute “inter-agency memoranda.” This implies that, according to the DoE, wind industry lobbyists and Soros’s Center for American Progress are — for legal purposes — extensions of the government.

We see something similar going on here in Britain. The taxpayer funded Quango The Carbon Trust is continually pumping out propaganda on behalf of the powerful wind energy lobby; as too is the BBC which cheerfully funded a political broadcast (masquerading as a cri de coeur) by Green activist George Moonbat on its The Daily Politics show earlier this week. In December it was discovered that civil servants working for the government had suppressed evidence that wind farms damage health and disrupt sleep.

Do our political leaders think we’re stupid? Or so supine and malleable that we simply won’t mind being lied to if it’s for our “own good”?

“It was a quite aggressive and defensive gesture which was noticeable when he was attempting to dismiss you (talking about peer review). A definite body-language sign of being rattled. He’s definitely uncomfortable about what’s occurring and others will have spotted that as well.”

Monbiot isn’t the only one. Consider the paranoid tone of this email from climate-fear-promoter Paul Ehrlich, during an exchange with fellow members at the National Academy of Scientists on how best to deal with the Denier threat: (Hat tip: Marc Morano)

“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules.”

And consider this tragic response from the editor of the US magazine Skeptical Inquirer when faced with declining readership. Despite its name, the Skeptical Inquirer has tended to adopt a none-too-sceptical position on AGW. This has annoyed one or two readers who have been cancelling their subscriptions in disgust. The editor Kendrick Frazier seems to imagine that this is not a reflection on his editorial policy but on his readership’s ‘false consciousness’ – as he shows in this robust editorial: (hat tip: Philip Thomas)

This is the third SI reader who has canceled his (it’s always a male) subscription over our climate change pieces in the current SI (not to mention the at least six who did so after our first round of articles several years ago). Boy, they don’t want to hear anything they disagree with, do they.

It is clear the anti-GW science crowd have their minds made up, and nothing anyone is going to say, no appeal to scientific evidence, no attempt to place things into an accurate context, no attempt to point out that many media and blog portrayals are not always fully accurate, no facts, no explanations, no attempts to show they themselves are being manipulated, nothing is ever going to change their minds. Very much like the evolution/creationist controversy, except that these are some of our longtime readers.

They do not want to engage forthrightly with factual, science-based statements or arguments. They only want their own views reinforced. There is no attempt at open-minded discussion or even fair argument. Just a determination to maintain their ideological purity and not have it be contaminated with any scientific information and perspective that doesn’t support their presuppositions. They want to draw a don’t-tell-me-anything-I-don’t-want-to-hear cocoon around themselves. Unfortunately, that cocoon is growing ever larger. And they know they are punishing us, because, even more than most publications, which have advertising, we depend mostly on subscription revenue.

Guess we should just go along with the crowd, the lynch mob. Hop on the bandwagon. Slam those damned ignorant climatologists coming up with all that nonsense about changing climate and a warming planet. Who needs science anyway?

All this is a roundabout way of answering one of my editors’ kind suggestions that I respond to this morning’s front page story in which some desperate scientists at the embarrassing, useless and parti pris Met Office have apparently attempted to repair their creaky, wheel-less AGW bandwagon with a hurried new botch job report. Sorry, but I don’t think many of us are going to fall for this nonsense any more.

Monbiot tried it on yesterday with his free two and half minute propaganda broadcast generously funded by the BBC’s The Daily Politics show in which he rehashed all his old arguments (man’s selfishness, rising sea-levels, plight of the poor, wind farms, blah di blah di blah) as though Climategate, Glaciergate, Pachaurigate, Amazongate, Africagate et al had never happened. Now the MET office is having a go.

Sorry chaps, it won’t wash. The debate has moved on. It’s not about “the science” any more. (Not that it ever was). It’s about economics. Politics. Money. The taxpayer versus Big Government.
On all of which, more later….

‘I’m not in the business of appeasement. It is not part of my psyche!’ she declared. ‘You can’t negotiate away an invasion!’ she said. As for her tone when she talked about the FO’s love of ‘compromise, negotiation, diplomacy’: she made it sound more like ‘mass rape, paedophilia, genocide’.

(to read more, click here)

What does bother me, though, is the number of people who imagine that Climategate was only ever just a little local difficulty involving a few men in anoraks at some grim fenland redbrick. Or that the ‘overwhelming scientific consensus’ still stands that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) represents the greatest danger of our time. Or that the integrity of institutions like the Royal Society, the Met Office and the Hadley Centre is not in doubt. Or that there’s nothing wrong or scary or downright suicidal about the Cameron Conservatives’ lunatic green agenda. Or that there must be some truth in this man-made global warming thing — or why else would so many scientists believe in it?

(to read more, click here)

This is what I shall be explaining at the annual parliamentary rally of the Young Britons Foundation in the Commons this afternoon. They’ll probably be quite shocked, as they were by my similarly robust take on “compassionate Conservatism” last year. That’s because, even though the YBF is “notionally a non-partisan, not-for-profit research and training organisation” which “combats bias in the education system and mainstream media, seeking to train and inform young politically charged activists” it seems to me that far too few of these kids are interested in conservative ideology. They just want to get on in the Tory party, which isn’t the same thing at all.

So my job is to try to give the conservative political class of tomorrow the backbone the conservative political class of today is so sorely lacking. Key to this is helping them to understand that “Progressive Conservatism” is an oxymoron, and that the “Compassionate” in “Compassionate Conservatism” is a redundancy.

Conservatism does not need to prettify itself by adopting all-women shortlists or forcing its MPs to spend a Saturday afternoon painting the walls in the new drug rehabilitation centre or claim that a creaking, top-heavy, grotesquely inefficient state healthcare system introduced in the era of rationing and be-grateful-for-what-you-get represents the three most important letters in your ideologically bankrupt salesman’s fantasy world or cosying up to charlatans like the Red Tory or adopting “green” policies guaranteed to wipe out your economy and destroy the British countryside or talk about “equality” and “fairness” as if they were anything other than the dangerous buzzwords of subversive Marxist dialectic. When you do things like this you are not improving the Tory brand or making it more ‘relevant’ for the modern age. You are diluting it; enfeebling it; allowing its policies to be dictated according to the terms of the cultural left.

Progressive Conservatism was a disaster for George W Bush. It will be a disaster for David Cameron too.

The kids of the YBF won’t like being told this. But the sooner they wake up and smell the coffee, the sooner we can awake from this nightmare.

It shows that EVEN NOW as far as the liberal elite is concerned, all public doubts about AGW are merely a question of “false consciousness” in need of correction rather than the result of evidence-based scepticism.

Here is the BBC’s Richard Black:

I’m not surprised at the level of UK scepticism as the main impacts of climate change are decades away and in other places. The problem is poor science awareness. We need to improve science education so people properly understand climate science.

Here is the Guardian’s David Adam:

The meaning of sceptic is very specific. It’s not taxi drivers or people who don’t want to pay higher electricity bills. It’s someone who knows better and takes a contrary view for pathological reasons. No journalists believe that climate science was undermined by the emails.

Here is the Financial Times’s Fiona Harvey:

Sceptics were clever in choosing their name. We do need a new name, denier won’t work because of Holocaust associations.

Later we find Ms Harvey yearning – inna Sir-John-Houghton-stylee – for a catastrophe that will show all us denier/sceptics JUST HOW WRONG WE ARE:

Climate scientists aren’t generally newsworthy; sceptics, IPCC problems and emails are making the news. “Climate – guess what? Still changing” is an unlikely headline. A short-term disaster is needed to guarantee coverage as people aren’t good at processing information about there being no ice at the poles in 30 years.

You couldn’t make it up. By far the scariest contributions, though, come from a Sun editor called Ben Jackson. A notionally right-wing tabloid is not what you’d normally associate with the liberal elite, but his remarks betray exactly the same prejudices as those of the Guardian, the Financial Times and the BBC. I leave readers to speculate why this might be.

Here, for example, is yer Sun man’s remarkable bizarre statement about Jeremy Clarkson:

People listen to Jeremy Clarkson who’s sceptical (although eventually Jeremy will come round).

What’s he proposing? Blackmail? Thumbscrews? Contract withdrawal?

Still, it’s not all bad news. Here’s the Sun editor again on how the public mood is changing:

The other day a Sun driver talked to me about the Medieval Warm Period. That wouldn’t have happened 6 months ago. All climate science will now be tested and people will ask how strong the science really is. There’s been a perfect storm of things going wrong – Climategate, Copenhagen, Met Office predictions – it could only be worse if David Attenborough had been caught in bed with Lord Monckton.

I’ll be honest, when I saw the headline this morning that Gordon Brown was on course to win the next election I felt a small twinge of ecstatic joy. I loathe Gordon Brown as I loathed Tony Blair. I loathe everything New Labour stands for. I think in 13 years they have done more damage to Britain in shorter space than perhaps any government in history. Which speaks volumes for just how little I think of David Cameron’s Conservatives.

I don’t trust David Cameron an inch. I believe that – contrary to the rumours cunningly put about by Tory Central Office – he is instinctively pro-EU; that he will not have the gumption or indeed the desire to roll back the State because, au fond, he is himself a believer in Big Government; that he is not a radical in the Thatcher mould, but rather a complacent Ted Heath Mk II who will preside over Britain’s “managed decline” for four years, be found wanting, end up being booted out after a decade’s faffing around, meaning Britain won’t even begin to receive the rescue package it needs until at least the 2020s.

All that said, his speech at the Tories’ Spring Conference in Brighton was a blinder and it’s going to win them the next election. It was full of inconsistencies: for example, how can you possibly talk about repairing the deficit while simultaneously boasting that you’re going to introduce “a new army of health visitors”? And I loathed his cantish playing to the authoritarian gallery, such as in the bit where he fulminated righteously about supermarkets selling alcohol to underage children. But it was encouraging that he played down the “Vote Blue go Green” line, having perhaps been counselled by wiser heads than Greg Clark that the tide of public opinion is rapidly turning on the AGW issue. And there was just enough Tory meat in there not to leave natural Conservatives so disgusted that they’ll head en masse to UKIP.

Will Cameron learn anything from the fact that the line that got the biggest, most prolonged clap was the one where he had a go at Regional Development Agencies (and, by implication, quangoes generally) and said: “The whole lot is going”?

Frankly I doubt it. But as he almost admitted himself, Cameron’s speech was a bravura exercise in super-salesmanship. From this point, for better or worse, I’m putting my money not on a hung parliament but on a workable Tory majority.