Here is how he describes it in a letter:

Sir

Corus’ steelworks at Redcar, near Middlesbrough, “Teesside Cast Products”, is to be closed (”mothballed” is the euphemism). It is Britain’s last great steelworks and an essential national resource. Without it, we are at the world’s mercy.

Corus is owned by Tata Steel of India. Recently, Tata received “EU-carbon-credits” worth up to £1bn, ostensibly so that steel-production at Redcar would not be crippled by the EU’s “carbon-emissions-trading-scheme”. By closing the plant at Redcar – and not making any “carbon-emissions” – Tata walks off with £1bn of taxpayers’ money, which it will invest in its steel-factories in India, where there is no “carbon-emissions-trading-scheme”.

There’s more. The EU’s “emissions-trading-scheme” (ETS) is modelled on instructions from the “International Panel on Climate-Change” (IPCC) of the United Nations Organisation. The Chairman of the IPCC is one Dr Rajendra K.Pachauri, a former railway-engineer, who obtained this post by virtue of his being Chairman of the “Tata Energy-Research Institute” – set up by Tata Steel.

UKIP’s leader in the EU’s “parliament”, Nigel Farage, revealed these data in a speech at Strasbourg, on 10th February, and was due to appear in the BBC’s “Question-Time” programme, from Middlesbrough, on 18th February, where the closure of the Redcar-plant was inevitably discussed. Almost at the last minute, his invitation to join the “Question-Time” panel was cancelled, without explanation.

An article, on the subject, by Neil Hamilton, which was due to appear in this week’s Sunday Express, has also been “pulled”.

Yours etc

The Corus scandal has been covered before, of course, by Booker, North et al. What bothers me, though, is how remarkably little traction it has had in the MSM. The sums of taxpayers money being squandered are stupendous; the pointlessness of the exercise beyond all reason; yet somehow – a bit like the fact that thanks to EU regulations on landfill waste disposal we’re now all supposed to put up with having our stinking, rat-infested trash collected just once a fortnight – it’s being treated as yet another of those government impositions about which we’re merely supposed to shrug our shoulders and tamely accept as just another of those things.

The mighty Booker reported on another example of this at the weekend. Gordon Brown has secretly blown another £60 million of taxpayer’s money the nation can ill-afford to spend on “buying carbon credits from the Third World for the use of government buildings and other official purposes – so that our civil servants can continue to benefit from the CO2 emissions needed to keep their offices warm and lit.”

To acquaint yourself with the full grisly details read it here. Alternatively, just torture yourself gently by reading the conclusion:

Thus we pay billions of dollars to the Asian countries for the right to continue emitting CO2 and other greenhouse gases here in the West, including the £60 million contributed by British taxpayers to keep our civil servants warm. As a result we enrich a small number of people in China and India, including Maurice Strong, who now lives in exile in Beijing, having been caught out in 2005 for illicitly receiving $1 million from Saddam Hussein in the “Oil for Food” scandal. He played a key part in setting up China’s carbon exchange, to buy and sell the CDM credits administered by the UNFCCC – of which Strong himself was the chief architect.

The net result of all this trading and jiggery-pokery is that, after billions of pounds and dollars have changed hands, with a hefty commission for those bankers and other carbon traders along the way, there is no reduction in greenhouse gas emissions whatever. But at least our political class can continue to work in warm offices and fly righteously round the world on our behalf – while the rest of us foot the bill.

Meanwhile our prospective next prime minister David Cameron has come up with a whizzo new scheme to make our inflated electricity bills even more painful than before:

He said: ” We need to apply gentle social pressure on people to bring down their energy use.

“So just as they’re doing in California, we will make each energy bill come with an illustration of how much energy people’s neighbours are using in comparison to their own usage, inspiring them to consume less in competition.”

The Booker is right. With honorable exceptions – such as UKIP and, on the environment at least, the BNP – our political class seem to have absolutely no understanding of the grotesque injustices being inflicted on their electorate in the name of the non-existent threat of “Climate Change.”

What will it take, I wonder, for these imbeciles to wake up and smell the coffee? Will a hung Parliament do? Or will it have to be bloody revolution?

Enjoy!

The Science Museum has examined the evidence. We’re convinced climate change is caused by humans and requires urgent action.

To help visitors to its website reach the correct view on all this, it makes a series of bold but largely unsubstantiated assertions:

The climate change we are experiencing cannot be explained by natural causes. It is only when we allow for increases in temperature caused by human greenhouse gas emissions that the current warming can be explained.

If we don’t reduce global emissions, the world is likely to warm by 2–5 ^oC by 2100 compared with the end of last century. The temperature difference between today and the last ice age is only about 3–4 ^oC.

Sea level will rise as the oceans warm up and expand, putting low-lying areas at risk of flooding and coastal erosion. Some small islands are already making plans to evacuate their populations. Many major cities, including London, are under threat.

and, in its section on economics, it offers this bravura piece of sub-Marxist, ultra-Green theorising:

Conventional economics assumes that our prosperity depends upon economic growth. Recently, some experts have begun to question this. They argue growth, which relies on a society producing and buying ever more stuff, cannot be sustained forever. Crucial resources such as fossil fuels and metals will eventually run out.

Instead, these experts propose a sustainable economy which doesn’t measure success by growth. Although people would consume less, they could still flourish. Wealth could be more fairly shared between people. And importantly, our prosperity would not come at the expense of the environment.

You paid for all this, by the way, through your taxes.

But there is some good news. At the end of all this propagandising, the Science Museum asks you to vote for what it clearly believes is the only sensible solution:

PROVE IT! gives you the evidence to decide where you stand…

“I’ve seen the evidence. And I want the government to prove they’re serious about climate change by negotiating a strong, effective, fair deal at Copenhagen.”

Despite having “seen the evidence” however it seems that the majority of contributors to the survey are still not convinced. When I checked just now the number of people voting “Count Me In” was 6396; but the number voting Count Me Out was 8551.

Expect to see a great deal more public disgust at this kind of officially-sanctioned eco-bullying over the next few weeks. Climategate was a game changer. We’ve had enough.

Jo who? The name rang a vague bell so I Googled her.  Abbess, it turns out, was the blog bully who last year demanded the BBC censor a true story on its website about global cooling. She didn’t like the way it gave succour to evil Global Warming Deniers.

So she wrote to the BBC’s science editor Roger Harrabin a series of finger wagging emails, one of which went:

“It would be better if you did not quote sceptics. Their voice is everywhere on every channel.” [Really? She should try watching BBC sometime]. “They are deliberately instructing the emergence of the truth. I would ask: please reserve the main BBC Online channel for the emerging truth.”

When Harrabin replied, not altogether unreasonably, that there were no factual inaccuracies in his story, Abbess made a threat:

“I am about to send your comments to others for their contribution, unless you request I do not. They are likely to want to post your comments on forums/fora, so please indicate if you do not want this to happen. You may appear in an unfavourable light because it could be said that you have had your head turned by the sceptics.”

Harrabin got the message. (Not as though he is exactly the most neutral of reporters on AGW anyway, as anyone familiar with his  “polar bears melt and Tuvalu sinks while the coal-fired power stations of cigar-smoking capitalists belch unprecedented quantities of CO2 into Mother Gaia’s lungs” style of eco-reporting will know).

He caved in and amended his story so that it accorded more correctly with Fraulein Abbess’s particular weltanschauung.

You can read the full story here at the Register.

And now the woman’s on to me, Lord help us. No, Jo, love – unlike you I am not blessed with a physics degree from Warwick University. But does my humble arts degree really disqualify me from commenting on the wilder excesses of the self-flagellating, misanthropic, tendentious, dishonest and hysterical “green” movement?

Does anyone really need a science degree to understand that a five fold increase in the polar bear population between the 1950s and now does not constitute a catastrophic decline?

Is it really that scientifically demanding to work out that if computer models show global temperatures rising inexorably with CO2, and we suddenly enter a ten- or twenty-year period of global cooling, then there’s something a bit untrustworthy about those computer models?

Fortunately, as an English literature graduate, there are at least some areas of the green debate on which I am unquestionably fit to comment. Take this piece of  doggerel I found on the Guardian comments pages the other day, on the kind of thinking we all need to embrace if we are ever to heal the world:

The new thinking has to be something like this :-
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
The only way we make it out of here alive is if we believe, and act as if
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies.

The author of this poem, I would say, makes William McGonagall look like Keats, has a lightness of touch that makes Polly Toynbee look like Noel Coward, and a depth of political insight which makes Tinky Winky Teletubby look like Thomas Jefferson. I’m sure the author of the piece who signed herself “Jo Abbess” cannot possibly be any relation of the distinguished Warwick University physics graduate who wrote asking about my academic credentials.

Australia’s Senate – the Government’s upper house – has just voted by 42 to 30 to defeat the cap and trade legislation bill proposed by their premier Kevin Rudd.

Why did those Senators reject Rudd’s scheme, despite their prolonged drought and their bush fires? Well some – the green ones – did so because they didn’t think its emissions cutting targets went far enough. But the majority did so – duh – because they didn’t want their coal-dependent heavy industry hamstrung by still more pointless taxation and regulation, their consumers fleeced and their economy ruined in the middle of a thwacking great global recession. And, in at least the case of Senator Steve Fielding, because they’d done their research and discovered that Anthropogenic Global Warming is a figment of Al Gore’s imagination.

Having consulted scientific experts including Ian Plimer [whom I interviewed in the Spectator a few weeks back and whose views are neatly summarised here] Sen Fielding was inspired to visit the US to assess at first hand what evidence the Obama administration was using to justify its radical Waxman Markey cap and trade measures. He was not impressed and issued a challenge, emailing graphs to one of the US president’s energy advisers showing that, despite rising CO2 levels the globe has not warmed in over a decade.

He concluded: “Until recently I, like most Australians, simply accepted without question the notion that global warming was a result of increased carbon emissions. However, after speaking to a cross-section of noted scientists, including Ian Plimer… I quickly began to understand that the science on this issue was by no means conclusive….As a federal senator, I would be derelict in my duty to the Australian people if I did not even consider whether or not the scientific assumptions underpinning this debate were in fact correct.”

Or, as another Aussie senator, more succinctly put it when criticising Rudd’s climate change bill: “It is a dog of a plan.”

Where Australia leads, we can but hope and pray, the rest of the world will follow – especially Obama’s would-be Socialist One World Government (formerly known as the USA). While it’s true that Nancy Pelosi managed to railroad the Waxman Markey cap’n’porkbarrel’n’trade bill through the US House of Representatives, it looks set to have a much tougher ride in the Senate. Especially given the growing strength of feeling among US voters that cap n trade is no more than a massive scam which will enrich one or two green vested interests – Al Gore’s, for example – while impoverishing ordinary Americans to no useful purpose whatsoever.

Here, is what the latest Gallup polls say:

“The number of Americans who say the media have exaggerated global warming jumped to a record 41 percent in 2009, up from 35 percent a year ago. The most marked increase came among political independents, whose ranks of doubters swelled from 33 percent to 44 percent. Republican doubters grew from 59 percent to 66 percent, while Democratic skeptics stayed at around 20 percent.”

“What’s more, fewer Americans believe the effects of global warming have started to occur: 53 percent see signs of a hotter planet, down from 61 percent in 2008. Global warming placed last among eight environmental concerns Gallup asked respondents to rank, with water pollution landing the top spot.”

“Another recent Gallup study found that, for the first time in 25 years of polling, more Americans care about economic growth than the environment. Just 42 percent of people surveyed said the environment takes precedence over growth, while 51 percent asserted expansion carries more weight. That reverses results from 2008, when 49 percent of respondents said the environment was paramount and 42 percent said economic growth came first. In 1985, the poll’s first year, 61 percent placed a bigger priority on the environment, while 28 percent ranked economic growth highest.”

Methodically, rigorously and above all scientifically, it carefully demonstrates to the lay reader truths that to large swathes of the scientific community are  already quite obvious: viz that “climate change” has been happening for 4,567 million years, regardless of man’s presence on earth; and that “climate” will go on changing regardless of what idiotic, ineffectively and mind-boggling expensive ploys man adopts to try to stop what is in fact a perfectly natural process.

Enough detail: read the piece; then read the book; then make up your own mind.

The climate change alarmists, though, do not even want you to do that. What they’d much rather you did was go onto the internet, find a page of nit-picking quibbles put up by a parti-pris computer modeller from the “man is doomed,  it’s all our fault and we must spend gazillions on windmills now” brigade, write Professor Plimer off as a complete crank.

It’s what they do to Christopher Booker; its what they do to Professor Pat Michaels at the University of Virginia; its what they do to Marc Morano at the marvellous Climate Depot website; it’s what they do to Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick who exposed the “Hockey-Stick curve”; it’s what they to do anyone who produces inconvenient truths which undermine their cause and threaten their claim that there is any kind of scientific “consensus” on climate change.

It’s a classic ploy of eco-fascists and libtards alike: if the facts are against them – as they usually are – they’ll always try to shut down the debate by taking the argument ad hominem instead.

The response of the Guardian’s resident eco-moonbat George Monbiot was a case in point. He sputtered that I knew about as much about the environment as he knew about F1 racing; and wrote a huffy piece effectively saying that Plimer too far beyond the scientific pale to be taken seriously.

Plimer’s response? To offer to fly from his native Australia at his own expense and publicly debate with Monbiot at the time of his choosing. The event would be conducted under the auspices of the Spectator and would, I’m sure, be informative, exciting and sublimely entertaining.

I say “would” because I don’t think it’s ever going to happen. Here is George Monbiot’s response to the challenge:

“Sir, Ian Plimer challenges me to debate his claims about climate change. I accept.

In fact I accepted a fortnight ago, when I began this debate by taking him to task. Along with other critics, I have laid out a list of specific errors of fact and misrepresentations, which he uses to support his argument.

The ball is now in his court. To participate in this debate, he should answer the points I listed, as well as the other issues raised by Tim Lambert, Ian Enting and David Karoly. Then we can reply.

But Plimer, as far as I can discover, has yet to produce any specific response to the very serious allegations made by his critics, preferring to heap insults on them instead.

These are all scientific matters, some of which are complex. To engage in this debate, we need to establish the facts and provide references. This is why it is better to debate these issues in writing; ideally, as Plimer’s critics have done, in electronic format, so that people can follow the links. Attempting to resolve these issues in person is likely either to become extremely boring or to degenerate into a slanging match. The Guardian’s website is open to him, and we look forward to his responses. Is he up to this, or will he keep ducking our challenge?

The floor is his.

George Monbiot”

Now does that read to you like the letter of a man who is happy to venture his reputation in the cut and thrust of open debate?

Or does it read like the squirmy, weaselly get-out of a no-good, snivelling, yellow-bellied, milquetoast loser quite terrified of having the massive holes in his puny argument mercilessly exposed in public by a proper scientist who actually knows his subject inside out?

Plimer, meanwhile, has imposed no conditions on the debate. All he asks is that it be conducted in public and that Monbiot turns up.

The ball’s in your court Monbiot and let’s have no more of that legalistic wriggling. Are you up for this debate?

Or are you – as I strongly suspect – going to bottle it?

ManBearPig: the world’s deadliest threat. Well, if you’re Prince Charles

In the Spectator today, I interview an Australian geology professor called Ian Plimer whose brilliant new book – Heaven And Earth – is rightly being hailed as the one that is going to nail once and for all the crazy myth that man’s contribution to “climate change” is remotely significant, let alone something we should worry about or waste money trying to stop.

As Professor Plimer observes with characteristic Aussie bluntness: “CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is plant food.”

Yet so many of the ruinously expensive policies being formulated on our behalf by everyone from Barack Obama to EU president (and former Maoist) Jose Manuel Barroso to Ed Miliband to (God help us) David Cameron’s Conservatives are based on the scientifically groundless urban myth that human generated CO2 (quite minuscule, anyway, compared with the quantities of greenhouse gases volcanoes belch or even cows fart) is the most dangerous substance on earth.

Prince Charles is fond of telling us that we only have 100 months left to save the earth. (Apparently down to 96 now, or so he claimed in his recent Dimbleby lecture). But I’d say the time we have left to save the world is quite significantly less than that. Not from the perfectly natural process of climate change, of course, but the far far greater threat of climate change alarmism.

Unless those of us with more than half a brain cell unite and act soon, the earth is going to fall prey to  the most destructive, expensive, suicidally pointless taxation and regulation and protectionism in global economic history. We simply cannot afford any longer to allow the likes of the Prince Of Wales, Al Gore, NASA activist James Hansen, Lord Stern and their amen corner in the mainstream media to go on pushing their ludicrous scare story unchallenged.

Right now, out there in the real world, are numerous genuine ecological challenges that urgently need addressing: the decline of fish (thanks European Union fisheries policy!); pollution; diminishing water tables; deforestation; overpopulation; and the great eco-disaster that are bio-fuels. The Quixotic quest to arrest “climate change” – something that has been happening for 4,567 million years regardless of man’s input – is a silly and expensive distraction.

What’s particularly galling about the most outspoken supporters of climate change taxation and regulation is that many of them either are rich enough not to be affected by it or – worse – stand to make vast fortunes as a result of it.

The Prince of Wales is a case in point. When you’re on a salary of £18 million, as he is, you’re probably not going to be bothered overmuch by tiny details such as your gas and electricity bills doubling because of green taxes on carbon emissions. You’re not even going to mind, that much, that if Barack Obama’s new $7.4 trillion cap and trade tax on carbon emissions is introduced the global economic recovery is going to be set by a generation. Indeed, it’s probably very much in the Prince’s interests that we should all be rendered so poor that we can’t even afford to run our cars any more. It will leave Britain’s roads free for Charlie to pootle about as freely as he wishes in his bio-ethanol-powered Aston Martin.