I couldn’t stop myself from smiling at Ruth Wishart’s heart-rending tale in last Thursday’s, 9th January, Helensburgh Advertiser, of the recent ravages of ‘man-made climate change’ on the Helensburgh sea front.
Metaphor, pathos, hyperbole, it’s all there; her closing paragraph says it all.
‘Every serious player is now singing from the hymn sheet which tells us that we are trashing the planet we live in and that if we don’t take action on carbon emissions and other man-made contributions to these unpredictable weather events then, by the time our grandchildren are adults, there won’t be much of a planet left to save.’
She’s right about ‘singing from the hymn sheet’, at least. Global warming and associated greenery (‘Church of the Latterday Gore’) have certainly superceded Christianity as the ‘religion du jour’ of the West’s ‘right-thinking bourgeoisie’ from whose ranks our ‘beloved leaders’ are increasingly drawn.
If it isn’t already too late to avoid being labelled one of Ruth’s ‘climate change deniers’, may I point out that ‘climate change’ has been ongoing, spectacularly, for about five billion years. I do not and have never, denied that.
It’s reasonably well-established that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), in the absence of other influences, has a modest warming effect and it’s possible that increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could result in damaging effects at some time in the future. It’s also quite possible that modest warming will be beneficial, leading to the suspicion that global warming fears fears have, themselves, been over-cooked.
It’s surprising that a writer of Wishart’s experience failed to research her, frankly, ‘Chicken Little-esque’ views and consider them more carefully before going to print with such an evidence-free diatribe. Some questions she might have asked herself first include:
Q1. Are theoretical climate predictions flowing from current computerised climate models borne out by observations of reality?
Answer: No. Contrary to alarmist theoretical predictions, rising global temperature has paused for more than fifteen years and global sea ice, far from reducing, is as high as it has ever been since records began. Mother Nature is, indeed, both obstinate and recalcitrant.
Q2. Will ‘other effects’ – ‘feedbacks’ – amplify or reduce the well-known moderate warming effect of increasing levels of atmospheric CO2?
Answer: Nobody knows. Some people think they know and their alarming predictions are being seen to fail with ever-increasing regularity.
Q3. Will such amplification of warming as may occur cause significant climatic change?
Answer: Nobody knows. There is a multitude of variables, the climate system is mind-bogglingly complex and the science is nowhere near sufficiently developed.
Q4. Will such climatic change be damaging or beneficial?
Answer: Nobody knows. Climate science is in its infancy so there are no reliable forecasts on which to base cost-benefit analyses.
Readers might be forgiven for thinking this isn’t much help. However, it is actually, because, had our politicians considered such questions prior to committing us to spending hundreds of billions of pounds ‘tackling climate change’, one hopes they, surely, would not have done so?
Had Ruth Wishart researched her own proclamations on climate she would have found them well out of kilter with those of both:
- the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who say there is little evidence of increasing frequency or severity of extreme climate events;
- and the UK Met Office, according to whom there is no evidence to link this particular storm to man-made ‘climate change’.
Ruth Wishart, unfortunately, is stuck in the past, a past in which Blair and Brown’s profligate management of the country’s finances permitted them – aided, abetted and outbid by Alex Salmond – to open the throttle on the global warming bandwagon, accelerating it to ‘runaway train’ status, fuelled with the fantasy that spending hundreds of billions on ‘carbon reduction’ in the UK would ‘save the planet’.
Wishart’s past is:
- a past in which the exotic claims of ‘band wagon-master’ Al Gore and his scientific sidekick, James Hansen, could be uttered, safe from the scourge of observed reality;
- a past in which people believed what they read in the Daily Record [for which she used to write], a past from which we have, at least, temporary respite, thanks to humanity’s, arguably, most wonderful invention to date, the ‘blogosphere’.
Had a fraction of the money already spent on ‘carbon reduction’ been spent instead on bolstering the nation’s sea and flood defences, Helensburgh and for that matter Lochgilphead, Ardrishaig, Tarbert, Rothesay, Southend and many other places would have stayed high, dry and secure during the New Year storm.
Andrew Argyle
The image above shows the Russian research ship, Akademik Shokalskiy, berthed in better times in 2007, at Ushuaia. The image is © Benutzer:DiedrichF and is reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.
The Akademik Shokalskiy is the ‘ice hardened’ research vessel that became stuck fast in Antarctic ice at what is the warmest time of the year where open water passages are expected – and saw a Chinese icebreaker sent to help her itself get stuck.
