XPost: alt.global-warming, talk.politics.guns, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh   
   XPost: sac.politics   
   From: zinn@reno.us   
      
   In a startling new book, Christopher Booker reveals how a handful of   
   scientists, who have pushed flawed theories on global warming for decades,   
   now threaten to take us back to the Dark Ages   
      
   Next Thursday marks the first anniversary of one of the most remarkable   
   events ever to take place in the House of Commons. For six hours MPs   
   debated what was far and away the most expensive piece of legislation ever   
   put before Parliament.   
      
   The Climate Change Bill originally laid down that, by 2050, the British   
   people must cut their emissions of carbon dioxide by 60 per cent.   
   According to the government's own figures, the cost of doing this would   
   have been double that of its supposed benefits - yet, astonishingly, our   
   MPs voted for it almost unanimously.   
      
   On the Bill's final reading, this target was raised from 60 percent to 80   
   percent. Again, dozens of MPs queued up to speak in favour of the amended   
   Bill, with just two daring to question the need for it. This time It   
   passed by an even larger majority, by 463 votes to just three.   
      
   Only five months later did the Government produce revised figures to show   
   that, with the new target, the benefits would now be nearly ten times   
   greater than its original estimate, at over £1 trillion - while the costs   
   had now only doubled, to a total over 40 years of up to £734 billion (or   
   £18 billion a year). The MPs had of course not known this when they voted   
   for the amended Bill but at least the Government now had figures showing   
   that the benefits exceeded the costs. Even so, short of some unimaginable   
   technological revolution, such a target could not possibly be achieved   
   without shutting down almost the whole of our industrialised economy,   
   changing our way of life out of recognition.   
      
   One who voted against it was Peter Lilley who, just before the vote was   
   taken, drew the Speaker’s attention to the fact that, outside the Palace   
   of Westminster, snow was falling, the first October snow recorded in   
   London for 74 years. As I observed at the time: “Who says that God hasn’t   
   got a sense of humour?”   
      
   By any measure, the supposed menace of global warming – and the political   
   response to it – has become one of the overwhelmingly urgent issues of our   
   time. If one accepts the thesis that the planet faces a threat   
   unprecedented in history, the implications are mind-boggling. But equally   
   mind-boggling now are the implications of the price we are being asked to   
   pay by our politicians to meet that threat. More than ever, it is a matter   
   of the highest priority that we should know whether or not the assumptions   
   on which the politicians base their proposals are founded on properly   
   sound science.   
      
   This is why I have been regularly reporting on the issue in my column in   
   The Sunday Telegraph, and this week I publish a book called The Real   
   Global Warming Disaster: Is the obsession with climate change turning out   
   to be the most costly scientific delusion in history?.   
      
   There are already many books on this subject, but mine is rather different   
   from the rest in that, for the first time, it tries to tell the whole   
   tangled story of how the debate over the threat of climate change has   
   evolved over the past 30 years, interweaving the science with the   
   politicians’ response to it.   
      
   It is a story that has unfolded in three stages. The first began back in   
   the Seventies when a number of scientists noticed that the world’s   
   temperatures had been falling for 30 years, leading them to warn that we   
   might be heading for a new ice age. Then, in the mid-Seventies,   
   temperatures started to rise again, and by the mid-Eighties, a still   
   fairly small number of scientists – including some of those who had been   
   predicting a new ice age – began to warn that we were now facing the   
   opposite problem: a world dangerously heating up, thanks to our pumping   
   out CO? and all those greenhouse gases inseparable from modern   
   civilisation.   
      
   In 1988, a handful of the scientists who passionately believed in this   
   theory won authorisation from the UN to set up the body known as the   
   Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This was the year when   
   the scare over global warming really exploded into the headlines, thanks   
   above all to the carefully staged testimony given to a US Senate Committee   
   by Dr James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies   
   (GISS), also already an advocate for the theory that CO? was causing   
   potentially catastrophic warming.   
      
   The disaster-movie scenario that rising levels of CO? could lead to   
   droughts, hurricanes, heatwaves and, above all, that melting of the polar   
   ice caps, which would flood half the world’s major cities, struck a rich   
   chord. The media loved it. The environmentalists loved it. More and more   
   politicians, led by Al Gore in the United States, jumped on the bandwagon.   
   But easily their most influential allies were the scientists running the   
   new IPCC, led by a Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin and Dr John Houghton,   
   head of the UK Met Office.   
      
   The IPCC, through its series of weighty reports, was now to become the   
   central player in the whole story. But rarely has the true nature of any   
   international body been more widely misrepresented. It is commonly   
   believed that the IPCC consists of “1,500 of the world’s top climate   
   scientists”, charged with weighing all the scientific evidence for and   
   against “human-induced climate change” in order to arrive at a   
   “consensus”.   
      
   In fact, the IPCC was never intended to be anything of the kind. The vast   
   majority of its contributors have never been climate scientists. Many are   
   not scientists at all. And from the start, the purpose of the IPCC was not   
   to test the theory, but to provide the most plausible case for promoting   
   it. This was why the computer models it relied on as its chief source of   
   evidence were all programmed to show that, as CO? levels continued to   
   rise, so temperatures must inevitably follow.   
      
   One of the more startling features of the IPCC is just how few scientists   
   have been centrally involved in guiding its findings. They have mainly   
   been British and American, led for a long time by Dr Houghton (knighted in   
   1991) as chairman of its scientific working group, who in 1990 founded the   
   Met Office’s Hadley Centre for research into climate change. The centre   
   has continued to play a central role in selecting the IPCC’s contributors   
   to this day, and along with the Climate Research Unit run by Professor   
   Philip Jones at the University of East Anglia, controls HadCrut, one of   
   the four official sources of global temperature data (another of the four,   
   GIStemp, is run by the equally committed Dr Hansen and his British-born   
   right-hand man, Dr Gavin Schmidt).   
      
   With remarkable speed, from the time of its first report in 1990, the IPCC   
   and its computer models won over many of the world’s politicians, led by   
   those of the European Union. In 1992, the UN staged its extraordinary   
      
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