Delingpole on The Big Climate Lie
In the 1970s, catastrophic anthropogenic climate change believers were a tiny cult of tousled eccentrics. In the 1980s Climate Change became a global concern. By the mid-1990s it was a crisis. Now it is the world’s dominant religion.
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In September 1988, PM Thatcher declared:
“…we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of the planet itself… the increase in the greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons – which has led some to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability… a warming effect of 1 C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century… the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s…”
At Thatcher’s instigation, the UK Meteorological Office created the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction, which Thatcher personally opened in 1990. Under the leadership of ecstatic Warmist Sir John Houghton, the Hadley Centre selected lead authors for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s scientific working group and provided the IPCC with meteorological data.
Since 1990 the UK government has given $360 million to the Met Office’s climate prediction programme. Another $20 million went to East Anglia Universities’ Climatic Research Unit.
Two theories are offered concerning the Iron Lady’s motives:
- After the 1984 miners’ strike she wanted to disempower the National Union of Mineworkers. Framing coal’s phase-out as an environmental issue deflected resistance. CO2 reduction was a pretext for unpopular nuclear expenditures.
- Thatcher was mesmerized by Sir Crispin Tickell. She was ill-advised. Delingpole contends this motive is consistent with passages from Thatcher’s Statecraft (2003) wherein she reverses her position and accuses climate alarmists of distorting science to further an anti-capitalist agenda.
In the 1970s Tickell took a sabbatical from the civil service to study climatology at Harvard. This inspired his Climate Change and World Affairs (1977) about the perils of global cooling. In 1988, as Britain’s UN Ambassador, Tickell’s proposed remedy for global warming was a new UN agency missioned to persuade national governments to tax fossil fuels and subsidize renewable energy.
In November 1988, the IPCC was formed by the UNEP and the World Meteorological Organization. IPCC’s first chair was Swedish Professor Bert Bolin (1925-2007).
In 1959 Bolin had gone to Washington to alert the National Academy of Sciences about the CO2 emissions threat. Bolin sowed the acorn that if CO2 atmospheric concentrations exceeded 450 ppm, climate catastrophe would ensue. A 500-page paper by Bolin set the alarmist tone for the seminal 1985 UN-sponsored climate conference in Villach, Austria.
Sir John Houghton chaired the IPCC’s scientific working group before assuming Bolin’s position as top dog. In 1995 Houghton received recommendations from Tim Wirth (US Under-Secretary for Global Affairs and an ally of Vice President Gore) that: “authors should be prevailed upon to modify their text in an appropriate manner.”
These recommendations were relayed to Ben Santer, lead author for the key science chapter in IPCC’s 1995 Assessment Report and the final reviewer of its Summary for Policymakers.
Santer arbitrarily deleted passages from the draft Summary wherein the scientific working group had expressed doubts about anthropogenic global warming. Santer added passages such as: “The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.”
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was based on Santer’s doctored Summary.
From his mansion in Delhi’s most exclusive neighborhood, Houghton’s successor atop the IPCC, Raj Pauchauri, manages a web of enterprises which represent a clear conflict of interest. Pauchauri is a director of The Energy Research Institute (TERI) whose glaciology unit received funds from Carnegie Corp. to study Himalayan glacier melt. TERI people concocted the infamous vanishing Himalayan glaciers scare. (TERI’s golf course daily squanders 300,000 gallons of water in a parched district of India.)
Under Pauchauri’s watch the IPCC issued its Fourth Assessment Report (2007). Of 18,531 cited sources, 5,587 are enviro-organization propaganda. The Report’s ballyhooed 2,500 experts boils down to a much smaller number that includes many recent grads and persons affiliated with enviro-organizations.
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