This is the first paragraph of a message from David Cameron posted on the Conservative Party website. Apparently it was also emailed to members:
In nine days time, representatives from 192 countries will meet in Copenhagen for the UN Conference on climate change. This summit is of historic importance. It is an opportunity for the world to take bold action to deal with the real danger of climate change.
http://blog.conservatives.com/index.php/2009/11/27/the-copenhagen-summit-is-of-historic-importance/
The rest is fairly predictable, but it is worth reading in full.
When I first looked at this page on Sunday evening there were just over two hundred comments, most presumably from the Conservative faithful – otherwise known as their core vote. As I ran my eye over them, I searched in vain for any that might support the leaders take on climate change. I did eventually find a few.
Most seemed to be written more in sorrow than in anger, explaining that the authors simply did not buy into their leader’s climate change alarmism. Some were from lifetime Tory voters who warned that they would be voting UKIP at the coming election because of the global warming issue. Most tried to explain that there was a perfectly rational alternative to that of the party leadership’s views on climate change, and that the debate is certainly is not over. The recently leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which seem to indicate a most unhealthy groupthink at the heart of the climate science establishment, are mentioned everywhere.
Presumably there will be people at the Conservative Party’s head office who monitor such comments for useful feedback on what voters really think. I certainly hope so.
In a recent interview on Newsnight, Al Gore smugly told an unusually restrained Jeremy Paxman that the UK was lucky because all the main political parties agreed about climate change. He was wrong. Democracy only succeeds when government policies are vigorously questioned and opposed by those who may replace them at the next election.
Britain is not lucky to have political unanimity on climate change because this only further indicates, if more evidence was needed after the MP’s expenses scandal, that our parliamentarians have lost touch with the electorate. In other word, once again they just don’t get it.
This is from an opinion piece by Anne McElvoy in the Evening Standard:
“Don’t you think it’s scary,” a minister said to me yesterday, “that 55 per cent of people don’t believe global warming is man-made?”
Well no I don’t, I think it is a thoroughly benign and very healthy situation, except that it means that the main political parties are out-of-step with more than half the electorate. Only UKIP and the BNP represent their views on this subject, and that is certainly scary when there’s an election just round the corner.
I actually drafted this post on Monday morning and then forgot about it until a few minutes ago when I saw the headlines in tomorrow’s Independent.
A tale of Two Think Tanks.
TonyN #24 links to the Global Warming Policy Foundation http://www.thegwpf.org/
whose director Benny Peiser is doing an excellent job of culling mainstream news articles on global warming. The story on Green Re-education for Tory candidates leads us to the The Green Alliance which is linked by Robin Guenier at #9086 on the New Statesman thread. I do recommend everyone to read the sites of these two think tanks.
The GWPF is Lord Lawson’s attempt to redress the balance of the Global Warming debate. The trustees are a roll-call of the great and the good and is admirably cross-party (seven out of nine are in the House of Lords!) and their academic advisory council are pretty hot stuff.
Now turn to the Green Alliance. Their trustees are considerably younger and obviously have considerable experience in running things (or advising others how to run things). There’s a Goldsmith and a Tickell. In any beauty contest (or TV debate / reality show) the Green Alliance would win hands down.
There are many interesting conclusions to be drawn from a comparison of these two organisations, I think. Here’s one for starters:
1) The Global Warming Policy Foundation is a typical British Establishment institution, deliberately cross-party, and aimed at improving the quality of debate.
2) The Green Alliance, though admitting no political alignment, is clearly pushing the programme of the Green Party, while selling their services to the Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Parties. (There are articles on its site giving advice to both major parties). They are a registered charity, but make no secret of the fact that they have a product for sale, which will aid all the major parties to improve their performance at the polls. (as if to emphasise their point, their site is written in managerspeak, and they even have a job vacancy section. (They’ve got a vacancy going for £34k. I recommend HS readers to apply)
I really don’t know what to make of this, but it seems to have political implications going far beyond the question of the temperature in 2050.
geoffchambers, I’m with you on wanting somewhere where we can comment on the political aspects of Climate change. The Tories are having their battle now, and just remember there is one thing they do better than any other Party, and thats replace the leader. Cameron needs to bear that in mind as he is being far too arrogant over his green stance.
But tonight is a very important night. There is an election in the US and it just maybe its a referendum on the Obama presidency and may turn negative for him. This has wide ranging implications for his agenda that will come to a halt. Its very interesting times.
There do seem to be some pretty fundamental political changes afoot, and we appear to be bound for some “interesting times” this year.
Just looked at the Green Alliance website. On their Political Leadership page: “The next parliament is likely to cover the period 2010-15, and as such, will be the last window of opportunity to get it right on climate change both domestically and internationally.”
That pesky window of opportunity, always about to close, never quite closing!
It’s late, and I’ll answer the very reasonable points in comments #25 onwards, about how this blog should approach political issues, in the morning.
On second thought’s the points raised here are worth a post and thread in their own right. I’ll try to do this by the end of the week.
Everyone has their favourite article, post Climategate, but this one is truly brilliant.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/climategate_analysis.pdf
When we had a mainstream media, this would have made a special edition of the Times or Washington Post. We haven’t, so it won’t, which (to me) is a subject almost as worrying as the Climategate Scandal itself.
Geoff – that’s a terrific article. I particularly like the ‘Church of Climatology’ phrase – I can see that being used again!
Jones’s description of Piers Corbyn as an ‘utter prat’ is telling. Clearly, Corbyn’s ability to predict the weather accurately months ahead is beginning to annoy ‘real’ weather men, who are pleased with themselves if they get it right two days in a row.
It will be interesting to see how the forecasts improve if the BBC takes its custom elsewhere, but I have a feeling they’re bluffing.
I’ve only glanced at Costella’s Climategate Analysis so far but it seems very readable and it is now getting exposure on a blog that the MSM watch. Given time – perhaps when the UEA or Penn State inquiries are in the news – I am sure that it will bear fruit.
Geoff, that’s a very good article indeed & will enjoy reading through it at leisure. It’s interesting that there are commentators still saying that all this proves is that scientists are human, or all that the recent glacier melt deadline error was only a single error and does not undermine the case for AGW (as Channel 4 TV news yesterday was at pains to point out – although their online news article here has more detail and is more damning).
But it’s the whole “climate” of climate science, not the “weather” of a single error. It’s ClimateGate, plus the glacier date error, plus the Hockey Stick illusion, plus the surface stations mess, plus the GISS thermometer migration, plus the UHI underestimation, plus the Yamal affair, plus the missing hot spot, plus the non-warming in the Noughties, plus the Argo readings, plus RK Pachauri’s conflict of interests, plus all the various other errors, omissions, collusions, fudges, fabrications, corrupt practices, etc., large or small, either already discovered or waiting in the wings.
Back on the politics theme, just seen this article in the Telegraph about the “raft of new green taxes” being considered by the Conservatives. A while ago, I would have said that this kind of news does not bode well for us, the taxpayers. In today’s changed climate, however, I think that this kind of news does not bode well for the Conservatives.
From the Telegraph article linked by Alex in #34:
This is certainly bad for the Conservatives; it goes well beyond mere muddled thinking. You don’t have to smoke, but travel by car is a necessity for most people, and the cost of road transport has an impact on almost everything we buy.
While Cameron may be able to sell this kind of greenwash to the soft liberal middle ground, whose support is essential for an election victory, convincing his own back benches is likely to be very much more difficult.
I wouldn’t expect to hear too much more about it after May.
TonyN
Will it really be difficult to sell to his backbenchers? Virtually every single one of them voted for the climate bill and with the green re-ecducation programme for propsective MP’s the Tories are in greenwash up to their necks.
The only ‘major’ party opposing the insanity are UKIP (big in our part of the world anyway)
As you say, raising the cost of petrol impacts on everything. Do our politicians think petrol is so cheap we deliberately go out and waste it by cruising round aimlessly?
I think we need a much bigger tax on heating as well to discourage its use. Probably like me you have the boiler going permanently full tilt then open all the windows!
I think our rulers are completly insulated from the realities of the cost of everyday life.
tonyb
TonyN, I think you’re probably right and that reintroducing the fuel-duty escalator will die a quiet death, as will (hopefully) the carbon credit card idea, floated by David Miliband in 2006 and mentioned again in the media by Lord Smith (as part of a Green New Deal) as late as November last year.
Do our politicians think petrol is so cheap we deliberately go out and waste it?
They seem to think that of alcohol!
TonyB, #36:
I wonder if it is as easy to face up to the electorate during an election campaign, in the expectation that your party will form the next government, as it is to be opposition lobby fodder mid-term? And I also wonder how many of those pretty little multi-coloured leaflets that keep cluttering up the doormat during an election campaign will have anything in them about global warming?
So far as Harmless Sky’s heating arrangements are concerned, I’m sitting in front of a nice log fire at the moment. Our central heating only runs from 08:00 to 12:30 and then 19:00 to 23:30, with everything very tightly shut and draft excluders for each door: a rather friendly looking velvet snake in this room. For ventilation we rely on the drafts between the floorboards which are capable of cutting your legs off at the knee when there’s an east wind. The central heating usually only operates in two rooms. The back corridor is locally known as the Beardmore Glacier and it is normal to run down it hoping to reach shelter before frostbite sets in.
You are right that a lot of people are profligate with heating, but if you try to solve that problem by increasing taxes how do you prevent the old and poor freezing to death in the winter? State handouts to help with the fuel bills? A centrally funded Good King Wenceslas Task Force?
Having been brought up in draughty vicarages where, in cold weather, you just put on extra sweaters and tried to keep moving, I tend to see being warm as a state of mind. If everyone adopted our life style it would ruin the energy industry and just think what that would do to the economy.
What we really need is a change in people’s attitude to the natural world, so that once again they appreciate that it is normal to be cold at times in the winter, and very pleasant to be warm in the summer. Instead we are trying to persuade them that we even have the earth’s climate on a thermostat. Is it surprising that they do daft things with their central heating systems?
Alex, #37:
Isn’t it funny how Lord Smiths name seems to keep cropping up at the moment.
TonyN
I was being facetious about heating. I know of few who are profligate with it-it is much too expensive for that already.
The point I was making was that energy in general is very pricey and the idea of it being even more expensive through extra green taxes in order to force people to use less of it is assumes the politicans believe we can readily cut down.
Extra taxes impact on everything-in the case of additional fuel duty it will force up prices, in the case of heating it will either bankrupt people or force them to use less and freeze. In our case we keep the house 2 or 3 degrees cooler than we would like even though we are cool weather rather than hot weather people.
I absolutely agree with you about people becoming disconnected from the natural world-we have thermostats for homes, offices, shops, and cars so why not on the Earth itself is the apparent thinking.
We have the latest carbon madness with our next door neighbours-Cornwall county council. They intend to sell off a 20 year old building HQ and build another one within seven miles of it in order to become more fuel eficient and reduce their carbon emissions. How long it will take to recoup the carbon costs of a new building, extra travel for staff and residents etc is anyones guess.
Tonyb
Do not confuse govt and politicians campaigns with serious attempts to solve real or imaginary problems.
For example the nagverts about driving 5 less miles every week – this would save a huge, err, 2.5% off the avge mileage of 10,000 per year.
If the world is going down the gurgler then we would go down 97.5% of the gurgler after this measure.
@TonyN #39,
Keep quiet about the idea of taxing fuel then hand-outs to pensioners and “vulnerable” people. This will resonate with all 3 big parties: taxing something “bad” plus being “compassionate” to the “vulnerable” – a politicians wet dream.