“God, you should seriously stand for election. You’d be a shoe-in with Dave Cameron’s new all-female shortlists,” I told her.

“I already tried and they rejected me,” she replied. “I think what swung it was when a question about the environment came up. I told them I didn’t believe all that nonsense about Man-Made Global Warming.”

How depressed does that story make you feel?

Here are some of the things I think any prospective Tory candidate should believe in:

1. A commitment to lower taxes, both corporate and personal.

2. An immediate repeal of the Climate Change Act of 2008

3. Cancellation of all alternative energy projects – most especially of wind farms, because of the damage they will do to the British landscape – and an accelerated nuclear programme.

4. Tougher stance on immigration.

5. Tougher stance on Islamist extremism, particularly on Foreign Office collaboration with extremist groups.

6. A real bonfire of the Quangos – as in, actually destroying them, rather than simply replacing favoured Nu Lav apparatchiks with favoured Nu Tory ones.

7. A radical rethink of the NHS (as opposed to Dave’s current we’ll-spend-the-same-as-if-not-more-than-Labour-but-we’ll-be-a-bit-more-efficient non policy)

8. Withdrawal from the European Union (except as part of a trading bloc)

9. Repeal of all PC or nannying social legislation such as the Human Rights Act and the Independent Safeguarding Authorities “all adults are paedophiles”

10. Repeal of the ban on foxhunting.

You probably suggest a few more of your own. How many of the above would Cameron’s current Conservative lot pass?

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

“In an odd way this is cheering news.”

But perhaps the most damaging revelations  – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.

I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.

Only 41 per cent accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made. Almost a third (32 per cent) believe that the link is not yet proved; 8 per cent say that it is environmentalist propaganda to blame man and 15 per cent say that the world is not warming.

Even more interesting than the result, though, is the Thunderer’s appalled reaction. In a leader that might have been easily have been written by the Great Moonbat himself, the Times quite simply refuses to accept that the growing band of sceptics may have a point. Instead, it accuses these ‘deniers’ of being idiots:

It is possible that the collective expertise of brilliant scientists could be wrong. The best minds in the world once held a geocentric theory of the solar system. Before the discovery of sub-atomic particles they believed that everything was made of earth, air, fire and water. Right up to the 19th century, serious scientists wrote recipe books for making animals. But no previous process of scientific trial, error and progress has ever overturned such a well-attested thesis. Lord Rees has reminded us that we now live in a global village and it is, he pointed out, probably inevitable that there will be some global village idiots.

The Times’s approach is not unlike that of a Marxist theorist berating the bourgeoisie for their “false consciousness”; or indeed, a Eurocrat deciding that when sovereign nations keep voting “No” in Euro referendums it doesn’t mean that the EU is an oppressive and unpopular construct but that the voters need working on a bit harder so that they come to the correct “Yes” conclusion next time. It is, in fact, another perfect case of what Jonah Goldberg calls Liberal Fascism.

It is also an example of just how increasingly out-of-touch the MSM is with the views of the wider reading world. Recently, the Times launched a poster campaign boasting that it offered more extensive eco coverage than any other newspaper. Some of the claims made on these posters – such as the one about the North East passage being used as a commercial shipping route for the first time (when actually it has been used since 1934) – have been shot down by the excellent Andrew Orlowski on The Register.

But even if these claims were true, are wall-to-wall horror stories about impending man-made eco-doom really what readers of the quality newspapers want to read these days? My suspicion is not. I’m presuming that the audience which reads and comments on blogs isn’t totally different from the one that reads newspapers in print form. And if that’s the case, then the MSM’s obsession with AGW is looking increasingly out of date.

If you don’t believe me, check out the comments below one of George Monbiot’s columns, or indeed, either of the two Times articles listed above. Commenters who take the Al-Gore-approved line are vastly outnumbered by commenters who believe the whole AGW thing is a load of crock.

And it will take a bit more than bullying accusations that they’re “idiots”, I suspect, to swing them round.

Monckton believes that climate change hysteria is being exploited by the green liberal left – watermelons, as they’re nicknamed: green on the outside; red on the inside – to usher in a form of one world government. He claims to have seen evidence of this in a draft treaty due to be signed off by world leaders at this December’s Copenhagen climate change conference.

It will, he believes, in rich nations having as much as 2 per cent of their GDP diverted to third world countries – supposedly to compensate them for the evils wrought by two centuries or so of Western industrialisation; and tough new climate change rules to be imposed on Western economies by UN bureaucrats over which sovereign nations (and their electorates) will have no control.

I don’t know how accurate he is on the specific details, but Monckton is certainly right in principle. The climate fear industry is, I believe, the single greatest threat to national sovereignty (as we’ve already seen under the EU, with its directives on carbon emissions, landfill etc) and individual liberty of our era. It is financed by business interests so powerful that they have even suborned Big Oil (to look at most oil multinationals’ adverts these days, you’d think their main trade was wind-farming); its propaganda is spread by a supine mainstream media and subscribed to wholesale by glib politicians, few of whom have bothered to familiarise themselves with the growing body of evidence against AGW but who think sounding caring and touchy-feelie about “climate change” plays well with the voters.

I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, the Climate Fear Industry isn’t a theory.

Oh dear. Then it’s Outer Darkness for you, my friend.

Or so reckons the Archbishop of Canterbury. Apparently, according to a speech he gave in Southwark Cathedral the other day in a talk sponsored by the Christian environmentalist group Operation Noah, you are living “inhumanly.” (Hat Tip: Philip Foster)

Here’s how the celebrity Muppet-/Druid-/The-Master- impersonator (and sometime spiritual head of the Church of England) put it in his sermon.

In his splendid book, Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition, Alastair McIntosh speaks of our current ‘ecocidal’ patterns of consumption as addictive and self-destructive. Living like this is living at a less than properly human level – McIntosh suggests we may need therapy, what he describes as a ‘cultural psychotherapy’ to liberate us. That liberation may or may not be enough to avert disaster. But what we do know – or should know – is that we are living inhumanly.

Yes, I suppose in a very real sense, this is just the sort of achingly worthy, anti-materialistic line you would expect a preachy churchman to take. But why, in God’s name, does it have to be yoked to the scientifically-dubious, Al-Gore-sponsored narrative about Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW)?

One of the reasons the celebrity Muppet-impersonator still has his attractive day job – with way-cool perks including his very own Palace and the ability to really wind up Tony Blair in Iraq war memorial services – is that it is quite impossible, even in an age of science and rationalism, for anyone to disprove the existence of God. Not so AGW. Every day, more and more scientific evidence emerges to suggest that mankind’s contribution to the ongoing, natural process of climate change is negligible and that AGW is the biggest money-making scam since the South Sea Bubble.

Is the Archbishop of Canterbury really sure he should still be nailing his colours to the mast of this rapidly sinking ship?

“Is it because I is green?”

Earlier this week, the director of another eco-body – the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research – grabbed the headlines with a similar loopy claim. Britain, said Kevin Anderson, simply isn’t doing enough to combat climate change. What it needs, he argued, is a “planned recession” – with a ban on petrol-driven cars, coal-fired power stations and new airports. Only if Britain reduces its carbon emissions by at least 70 per cent by 2020 can eco-catastrophe be averted.

Gosh I don’t half enjoy news stories like this. They remind us that for all the modern green movement’s claims to sweet reasonableness, scientific integrity, and good, old-fashioned planet-saving commonsense it is in fact stuffed to the gills with activists madder than a giant pantechnicon from Mad Max III with “I’m completely mad” written in ornate golden lettering on the front and on the back “No really I am, madder than you could ever imagine.”

That’s how mad they are. Which would be fine if no one took their ramblings seriously. But unfortunately many people do, and quite a few of those people have control over our lives and our purse strings. President Obama, for example. He believes all this “cut carbon emissions or the world will die tomorrow” drivel. As does our future king. As does pretty much every political administration in Europe, save possibly Poland and the Czech Republic. As does your and my local council. As do most of the teachers filling your kids brains with eco-propaganda at school. As indeed, I’m sorry to say, do lots and lots of your friends, and if you were ever to try to put them right over dinner one night they wouldn’t swing round to your point of view you know, they’d think you were evil and uncaring and very possibly in the pay of Big Oil.

Why do so many people think this way? Well, largely, I think because of a meme which has been spread very successfully by the MSM that the “science is settled” and that the real crazies are the ones who don’t believe in AGW. Earlier this week, for example – on the same day that Kevin Anderson was urging us to bomb our economy back to the Dark Ages in order to save the planet – a story broke which drove a coach and horses right through one of the AGW movement’s most sacred cows. (Yes, can’t you just imagine the mess that mixed metaphor crash made?).

This was the claim made by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth – with the help of his scary, dramatically upward-ticking graph – that the last decades of the 20th century were the hottest in modern history. Even hotter, apparently, than the Medieval Warming Period when grape vines grew even in the north of Britain.

As I reported earlier in the week this graph – known as the Hockey Stick, used on two occasions in the IPCC’s reports – has now been debunked beyond all credibility. It’s a complicated story – way too complicated for me, because I got several technical details wrong. If you want chapter and verse try this piece by Andrew Orlowski in The Register, or this by Ross McKitrick – one of the scientific analysts who broke the story – in the National Post. Or, get every last pornographic scientific detail from the Man Who Broke The Hockey Stick , Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit.

McKitrick sums up the problem very well:

“I have been probing the arguments for global warming for well over a decade. In collaboration with a lot of excellent coauthors I have consistently found that when the layers get peeled back, what lies at the core is either flawed, misleading or simply non-existent. The surface temperature data is a contaminated mess with a significant warm bias, and as I have detailed elsewhere the IPCC fabricated evidence in its 2007 report to cover up the problem. Climate models are in gross disagreement with observations, and the discrepancy is growing with each passing year. The often-hyped claim that the modern climate has departed from natural variability depended on flawed statistical methods and low-quality data. The IPCC review process, of which I was a member last time, is nothing at all like what the public has been told: Conflicts of interest are endemic, critical evidence is systematically ignored and there are no effective checks and balances against bias or distortion.”

Or, if you want it put even more succinctly:  AGW is bunk; the scientific “consensus” a figment of Al Gore’s imagination. The only reason anyone could possibly have for believing otherwise is because of the extraordinarily one-sided way the story is reported in the MSM.

Apart from Canada’s National Post – whose editor Lawrence Solomon has written a splendid editorial arguing that “the global warming scare is all over bar the shouting” – the Hockey Stick story has been given next to no coverage in the mainstream media.

This, it seems to me, is a scandal almost as big as the scientific conspiracy just exposed by Steve McIntyre. Every time a climate fear promoter opens his mouth – be he the Prince of Wales, Al Gore or some nutty prof from the Hadley Centre and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research – he is quoted in the Dead Tree Press as if he were the Delphic Oracle. But when evidence emerges to prove them wrong, it’s as if the story just didn’t exist.

Bellamy: weally, pwoperly GWEEN

This all came back to me when I read about Bellamy’s latest plan – under the auspices of the Conservation Foundation – to restore the English elm by planting 10,000 saplings. Grown from the  cuttings of some of the few hundred apparently disease-resistant elms that remain in Britain, they will replace the victims of one of the greatest British ecological disasters of our lifetime: the Dutch elm disease which killed around 25 million trees and changed our landscape forever.

What a hero! And I don’t just mean regarding the elm. David Bellamy is the British equivalent to one of those dissident scientists they used to persecute in the Soviet Union for refusing to follow the acceptable political orthodoxy. In British science’s case, of course, that orthodoxy is Anthropogenic Global Warming. Cast doubt on AGW, as Bellamy has done, and you are considered anathema by the “scientific community”. This is why he lost his 15-year long presidency of the charity Plantlife and also why he was booted out of his job as president of the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts. You’ll notice he doesn’t get used an awful lot by the BBC these days either. Gee, I wonder why that could be.

Yet when it comes to loving the planet, Bellamy is the real deal. He cares so passionately about nature that he got himself arrested in 1983 for blockading the Franklin River in Australia to try to stop a proposed dam. In the Eighties, he did more than anyone on British television to communicate the joys of botany. This man genuinely believes what all naturalists should believe  that nature is something to be cherished, preserved, and perhaps above all enjoyed. No doubt this is why is he is such a fierce opponent of wind farms on sites of natural beauty.

But how many scientists involved in the field of nature and conservation actually do think this way any more? Passing few. Look in the papers: almost every story involving nature you will ever read has been skewed to accommodate the prevailing meme that it’s all dying off due to climate change and it’s mostly our fault. Look at how the subject is now taught in schools: not “hello trees, hello sky” but “Eeek! We’re all doomed!”. Zoos are no longer jolly places for kids to gawp at unusual beasts while Johnny Morris does the amusing voiceover, but thinly disguised animal concentration camps; butterflies are no longer to be differentiated for all that really matters is that you know that species are in catastrophic decline thanks to ‘climate change (quite untrue incidentally: habitat loss plays a far more important role in this); nature is no longer a pleasure but a stick with which to beat ourselves because of our carbon emitting sins.

So three cheers for David Bellamy – unlike so many of the green movement’s hair-shirt miserabilists – a true lover of nature.

Three cheers too for the Conservation Foundation. If you’ve a second, go and visit its website and see some of the things it does. (Alright so there’s a bit of guff about ‘diversity’ but then, how else can a charity get on these days?). It has helped turn an old sewage treatment plant into a wildflower meadow; it has restored the roach to the Hampshire Avon; it tries to protect Britain’s ancient yews; it wants to preserve the large blue butterfly; now it’s bringing back the elm.

One of the more poisonous myths put about by the International Climate-Fear-Promotion Movement (prop: Al Gore) is that if you’re not with them, you must perforce be some kind of crazy, Gaia-raping, nature-hating scumbag in the pay of Big Oil. Bellamy is living proof that this just is not so. More power to his elbow!