Today's climate scams rival a Monty Python sketch

"Recent events have seen the scare campaign over global warming descend to the level of

• a Monty Python sketch.

Much publicity was given, for instance, to Lewis Gordon Pugh, who set out to paddle a kayak to the Pole to demonstrate the vanishing of the Arctic ice. At 80.5 degrees north, still 600 miles short of his goal,

• he met with ice so thick that he and his fossil-fuelled support ship had to turn back....

Then there was the much-publicised speech to Compassion in World Farming by Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the

• UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, pleading for people to give up meat, on the grounds that the

• digestive methane given off by cattle contributes more to greenhouse gases than all the world's transport.

Although hailed by the BBC as "the UN's top climate scientist", Dr Pachauri, who holds PhDs in economics and engineering,

• is nothing of the kind, but just an apparatchik.

• A vegetarian Hindu, Dr Pachauri not only used highly tendentious figures to promote his cause but said nothing about the contribution made to global warming

• by India's 400 million sacred cows, which presumably would still be free to vent wind even if the rest of humanity

is converted to eating veggieburgers.

There has also been an acclaimed new paper by Michael Mann, the creator of the

• iconic "hockey stick" graph, purporting to show that the world has recently become hotter than at any time in recorded history, eliminating all the

• wealth of evidence to show that temperatures were higher in the Mediaeval Warm Period than today.

After being used obsessively by the IPCC's 2001 report to promote the cause, the "hockey stick" was comprehensively discredited, not least by Steve McIntyre, a Canadian computer analyst, who showed that Mann had built into his computer programme an algorithm (or "al-gore-ithm") which would produce the hockey stick shape even if the data fed in was just "random noise"....

It is high time, however, that we took all this chicanery and wishful thinking seriously - as was evidenced in Maidstone Crown Court last Wednesday,

• by the acquittal of six Greenpeace campaigners tried for criminal damage to Kingsnorth power station.

They were attempting to stop a new coal-fired power station being built, to produce 1,600 megawatts of electricity (two and a half times as much as is generated by all the 2,300 wind turbines so far built in Britain).

• As gleefully reported on the front page of The Independent, and at length by other promoters of warming alarmism such as the BBC and The Guardian,

• the jury agreed that the damage they had perpetrated was lawfully justified - because the damage done by the new power station, in raising global sea levels

• and contributing to the extinction of "a million species", would be far worse.

The court was swayed to this remarkable verdict by the evidence of two "expert witnesses" for the defence: Zac Goldsmith, one of David Cameron's envrionmental policy advisers and a prospective Conservative MP, and James Hansen, head of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

• Dr Hansen, who has been the world's leading global warming campaigner for 20 years (along with his ally Al Gore), claimed that the proposed Kingsnorth power station alone would be responsible for
• the extinction of "400 species".

It is extraordinary that two such partisan witnesses were accepted by the court in this role, since the rules, as defined by Mr Justice Cresswell in 1993, insist that the function of an "expert witness" is only to give "objective evidence". He must not be an "advocate" for one side or the other on any issue on which experts are divided.

• This should have ruled Dr Hansen out at once. Question marks are raised over his institute's temperature data.

• Last year he was forced by Steve McIntyre to revise his figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as Hansen claimed,

• but the 1930s. He has also campaigned tirelessly for the scrapping of all coal-fired power stations."...

As always, follow the money. Carbon offset scams--tailor made for back-room criminal hacks-attract cowards operating in the dark,

• from Goldman Sachs on down

• to Major League Baseball. (sm)

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