I have returned from holiday to find that the British Conservative party has passed beyond parody. While lesser political beings were doing tedious things like preside over the disintegration of the health service, have their collars felt by the police over political corruption, fail to deal with the fact that people are being murdered by those notionally being supervised by state-funded officials and other boring little things like that, the Tory party leader David Cameron dressed as a polar explorer and posed with a sled drawn by huskies on the Scott-Tuner glacier in Svalbard in Norway to show how cool he was... er, sorry, the grievous effects of global warming in shrinking the Arctic ice. Alas for Mr Cameron – he was indeed sledging on thin ice, but not in the way he thought. As Michael Hanlon wrote in the Daily Mail last Friday:

...while there are many places in the world where the ice is disappearing, Svalbard, where Cameron has trekked to, doesn’t appear to be one of them. In fact, the relationship between climate change, the weather in the Arctic and the shrinking of its glaciers is far more complex than many people realise. Paal Myrvold, second in command on a Norwegian Navy icebreaker which patrols the seas around Svalbard, knows the mountains, glaciers and ice of his home islands rather better than the back of his hand. ‘When these scientists talk about glaciers retreating,’ he told me, ‘they always forget about Svalbard.’

Yes, many of the glaciers on these remote, beautiful islands are in retreat, but by no means all. The Negribreen glacier, Bakaninbreen and Fridjovbreen glaciers have all surged forward in recent years, bucking the general trend.

Not only are some glaciers increasing while others are retreating, thus suggesting a far more complex picture than the icy apocalypse he intended to dramatise, but the Tories’ eco-evangelist flew to Svalbard in a private jet, thus disgorging a further 20 tonnes of evil carbon dioxide into the atmosphere upon which he claims it is having so catastrophic an effect.

Oh dear.

Today he was proudly showing off his new environmentally friendly official car, a Lexus, which he boasted produced fewer carbon emissions than his previous model (so much for the bicycle, ridden for precisely one photo-op at the start of his leadership for the iconic image, and then discarded). Alas again for Mr Cameron – his new car apparently produces more carbon emissions than the Prius favoured by government ministers.

Oh dear oh dear.

And while others see disaster in global warming, Mr Cameron only sees a radiant future in the apocalypse. We all have to ‘get positive’, apparently, about ecological meltdown.

‘When I think about climate change and our response to it, I don't think of doom and gloom, costs and sacrifice,’ he said. ‘I think of a cleaner, greener world for our children to enjoy and inherit, I think of the almost unlimited power of innovation, the new technologies, the new products and services and the progress they can bring for our planet and all mankind.’

No carbon, no pain! We can still have our consumer society and save the planet!

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

And to make this totally surreal, all this effort is to promote something that is not even true. Mr Cameron claimed that the nineties were the hottest years on record. Eh? The world was two degrees hotter in the Middle Ages. Today he went further still and claimed that scientists had proved that global warming was happening. Excuse me? Not even the deepest Green claims that it’s been proved.

The fact is that not only has man-made global warming not been proved but it remains extremely unlikely; the major research underpinning the claim (the hockey-stick curve, for example) has been shown to be fatally flawed; and the whole absurd scam is based on computer modelling which is no more than manipulated guesswork which does not take account of the literally millions of bio-feedback mechanisms (such as the behaviour of clouds) which make such supposition worse than useless.

There’s nothing particularly unusual about Greenland melting, as this article suggests. Moreover, the calving of glaciers is said to be a sign that they may actually be expanding. As mathematical ecologist Dr. Craig Loehle has written:

How do we reconcile one report showing increased dumping of ice from Greenland into the ocean (which supposedly means the ice is melting) with another showing the ice sheet thickening? Simple. Glaciers move because of increased pressure from above. If you increase the amount of snow in the interior, it will increase movement downslope. It can be simultaneously true that there is more loss at the ocean and more build up in the interior because the snow input is large enough for both. We would not conclude from increase river flow that an upstream lake was draining--usually both lake levels and river levels rise together (in extreme cases we call this a flood). The same is true for rivers of ice.

Meanwhile, a sign that maybe a degree of rationality is at last being allowed to creep into the global warming debate was provided by a recent BBC Radio Four programme, Battle for Influence: Overselling Climate Change. As can be seen from the related article here on BBC Online (with a facility to listen to the programme again), scientists who believe that man-made global warming is happening are nevertheless alarmed that its supposed effects are being exaggerated and misrepresented. Although the programme emphasised that it would provide no comfort to global warming sceptics because all the scientists who took part firmly believed that the phenomenon was occurring, the evidence it unearthed of wholesale distortions and myth-making by global warming proponents revealed nothing less than a totally anti-science, anti-evidence and anti-rational mindset among so-called scientists who simply fitted ‘facts’ to support their prejudices.

For example, the programme examined how climate change was being blamed for an increase in malaria in Africa. Upon discovering there was simply no evidence for this, the claim boiled down – incredibly – to the belief that because the increase couldn’t be measured, it was undoubtedly happening. The global warming scientists were so convinced that climate change was causing malaria, they were certain that one day it would be proved. They therefore made their claim on that basis -- ie, on the basis of nothing at all.

Then there was the decline of the golden toad, said to be the first victim of climate change. This claim was based – risibly – on a correlation between rising temperatures and the decline of these frogs. It is of course an elementary howler to confuse correlation with cause and effect. Nevertheless, global warming was blamed for creating the conditions for a fungus to thrive which killed off the frogs. But other scientists pointed out that this fungus didn’t need high temperatures to kill the frogs, because it was doing so in different areas with different climates.

The programme also said that it had spoken to many climate scientists who agreed that climate change was being exaggerated but didn’t want to say so publicly – because the issue was so ‘polarised’, which seemed to mean that to admit it might hand a moral and intellectual victory to the Americans. Horrors! No worse fate could there be, clearly. What the programme did not do was to follow its own logic and subject the central claims of climate change to the same empirical analysis. That might have led the programme–makers to the same ghastly, unthinkable fate.

But hey, what are mere facts compared to the politics of image? Even Gordon Brown is now desperately trying to paint himself green. So what if the whole thing is rubbish on stilts? Since the middle classes have alighted upon green politics as the latest painless path to moral virtue for the happy denizens of our most complacent circles, politicians must follow.

Who among them would dare say that suckers are green?

Posted by melanie at April 24, 2006