Roger Helmer MEP

I thought you would all appreciate reading this excellent article written by my constituent Edward Spalton:-

 
Whilst the BBC supported Al Gore’s 15 hour propaganda media hype for the “consensus” view of global warming, interspersed with pop music, it also reported “…The Peruvian government has declared a state of emergency in the Andean regions hit by unusually cold weather…Meanwhile experts are forecasting that temperatures will plummet even further with the South American winter soon to begin in earnest…” However, these reports were not given the prominence accorded to events attributable to global warming.

Modern environmentalism is a sort of substitute religion with a highly paid priesthood, even at town hall level. Councils are now paying out £102 million per year for an army of officials to work on “green” issues. The Taxpayers’ Alliance took a sample of 25 councils in England and Wales and found that they had, on average, 8 employees dealing with such matters. If this is true across the country, then the 442 councils would be employing 3,494 such people and their average salary is £29,283 each.

The Supreme Pontiff of the religion of the environment is Al Gore and he is undoubtedly a persuasive preacher. However, he is very much a “Do as I say” environmentalist rather than a “Do as I do” leader. Preaching frugality in energy consumption does not prevent his home using ten times the average amount of power used in American homes, as was discovered by a Freedom of Information enquiry.  But this religion has an answer to that.  The well-heeled amongst the faithful can consume large amounts of polluting power as long as they balance it with “carbon offsets”.  These are pieces of paper which show that the purchaser has paid for somebody else to plant a certain number of trees, which will lock up a given amount of carbon. There is a direct parallel here with the indulgences sold by the mediaeval Church which bought so many days remission from purgatory – for cash down, no questions asked. 

Even Christian Bishops have jumped on the bandwagon. The Right Rev Graham Dow, Bishop of Carlisle, gave his opinion of recent floods “We are reaping the consequences of moral degradation, as well as the environmental damage that we have caused”. He thinks the floods are some kind of payback for disregarding the welfare of the planet. Almost everyone who refers to the earth as “the planet” is a devotee of this religion, one branch of which   holds that the earth in its totality is a goddess (“The Gaia hypothesis”). So the Right Reverend gentleman is in some distinctly anti-Christian company!

Compare and contrast this response to that of the preacher Thomas Hughes, following the Great Sheffield Flood of 1864 in which over 250 people died. “Sin has its punishment” he said “but not by these occasional calamities”. Following the tragic floods of 1953 in south east England (in which 300 people drowned), the then Archbishop of Canterbury told the House of Lords that “nothing revealed mankind at its best, so much as a disaster of this kind” and went on “Everyone has shown the courage and comradeship that they had prayed they would show in these circumstances. …  The disaster had a majestic honesty about it” as it encouraged mutual help and co-operation.  Whilst our present experience of the weather is unusual, it is not outside the experience of past ages. Many appear not to understand the difference between climate (which is an average over time) and weather (the day to day events which make up the climate).

The town hall employees represent only a small fraction of the jobs dependent on climate scares. The beneficiaries range from newspaper columnists specialising in “green” issues, carbon offset traders and quota brokers to the manufacturers of windmills and the scientists enjoying vastly enhanced career prospects in the billions of pounds allocated to climate research. All depend on maintaining an atmosphere of hysteria and on the hypothesis that climate change is largely driven by human activity. In fact, the climate has always changed. Greenland was called Greenland because it was once green. A thousand years ago, people were farming there and it was worth growing grapes as far North as Hadrian’s wall.

The world certainly warmed between 1975 and 1998 but the last decade shows no consistent warming trend –especially if temperature measurements from built-up areas are discounted. It is well known that the air temperature in a town will be slightly higher than the surrounding area (The “heat island” effect). The sun behaved differently in the last part of the twentieth century. Sunspots were stronger and more frequent and this shielded the earth from cosmic rays. The earth’s temperature rose as the sunspot cycle increased in intensity. After the peak in the late 1980s, average temperatures ceased to rise within a few years. A mere coincidence? Possibly but equally likely not.  Mars’s polar ice cap of frozen carbon dioxide was also observed to retreat. Was it the influence of the sun or were the little green men driving too many gas guzzling 4 x 4s?

Politicians, officials and scientists all enjoy greatly enhanced career prospects from the hysteria generated by the current orthodoxy.  President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic, on the other hand, takes an independent line.

“As someone who lived under communism for most of my life, I feel obliged to say that the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21 st century is not communism or its various softer variants. Communism (has been) replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism…… The environmentalists consider their ideas and arguments to be an indisputable truth and use  sophisticated methods of media manipulation and PR campaigns to exert pressure on policy makers to achieve their goals.  Their argumentation is based the spreading of fear and panic by declaring the future of the world to be under serious threat. In such an atmosphere they continue pushing policy makers to adopt illiberal measures, impose arbitrary limits, regulations, prohibitions and restrictions on everyday human activities and make people subject to omnipotent bureaucratic decision making… Man-made climate change has become one of the most dangerous arguments, aimed at distorting human efforts and public policies in the whole world”.

As they used to say in examination papers, “Discuss”.