Why the EU’s climate alarmism is both mistaken and dangerous.
The Bruges Group recently invited me to write an extended paper on Climate Alarmism, in the context of the EU’s Energy and Climate policies. I now have the first copy of the substantial 64-page booklet on my desk, hot from the presses.
In the book, I address a range of subjects that I have been working on in the last couple of years (during which I have sat on the EU’s Temporary Committee on Climate Change, and attended the UN Climate Conference in Poznan, Poland, last December). In particular, I deal with:
*** The way that unfounded scares can become accepted as “scientific consensus”
*** The way climate alarmism has become the new orthodoxy, with dissenters vilified
*** Why the IPCC is not a scientific consensus, but an alarmist pressure group with a clear agenda
*** The real history of the Earth’s climate, showing that recent minor changes are entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles
*** The science of global warming: Why I believe that the Great Carbon Myth is not only unproven, but disproven
*** The impact of the Sun, and the way climate alarmists ignore it
*** The egregious errors in Al Gore’s disaster movie “An Inconvenient Truth”
*** The extraordinary and elementary economic errors of the Stern Report
*** The failure of EU and international policies to curb climate change, even in their own terms, and the huge economic damage they will do. Special emphasis on the economic and environmental failures of wind power.
*** The real risks posed to our energy security by over-reliance on “renewable” technologies that cannot possibly deliver, and the failure to build sufficient new mainstream base-load generating capacity — especially nuclear and coal. The problem is exacerbated by the EU’s “Large Combustion Plants Directive” which threatens to close down half a dozen major (and perfectly viable) coal-fired power stations in Britain by 2015. We could see the lights go out as a result of climate alarmism and failing EU policies.
The book is avaiulable from The Bruges Group, www.brugesgroup.com, at £4. ISBN 978-0-9547087-8-8
Roger Helmer MEP 
Roger, you might also highlight how the EU’s agenda is a nuclear-powered-France-driven attack on the coal-powered-Britain.
Roger,
Excellent, couldn’t agree with you more and I wish you luck in moving the agenda forward. I know how hard it is to overcome public orthodoxy and institutionalised bad science having suffered myself in a smaller capacity.
As an IT specialist and management consultant at the time I was aware professionally ( as a working systems programmer)the so called Year 2 K millenium bug was a myth from start to finish. The Canadian consultant who at a mid 90’s conference made the throwaway remark that programmers that may have scrimped on their code by using a two date field would have some bizzare run time errors on millenium eve sparked a global panic that wasted 100’s billions of pounds and produced rediculous press about crashing planes and exploding power stations.
My consultancy business was virtually bankrupted by it as I stupidly refused to undertake unnecessary Y2k projects for my public sector clients as I felt it was a waste of taxpayers money. I was delisted as an approved supplier by them and because of that I also lost private sector work too.
Another day another scare. I was fascinated that the 1000’s of deaths due to a sweeping swine flu pandemic was averted only by our heroic MP’s cleverley working out that expense fiddles were the perfect cure.
Any way please keep up the good work, having found your blog and from there the Freedom Association I have now applied to join that organisation.
kind regards
Paul
I saw this first on TFA website. Congratulations on a superb tour de force on the subject. This report should go to all MPs and local councils. Common sense like this is sorely needed.
Very well done on producing this rounded response to climate alarmism.
A report should be sent to all shadow cabinet members pointing out that climate alarmism is not based on true scientific observation but is generated from a corruption of the scientific process – and surely they do not want to be associated with more corruption.
And the alarmists’ economic remedies are bizarre – compatible with the Gordon Brown school of long term economic sobatage.
Excellent work Roger. I was wondering why you’d gone so quiet for a while. It was well worth the wait.
Imagine the public outcry when they discover they have been duped out of £100s compared to a handful of £s for MPs expenses! It seems that politics might be brought back to reality with a bump.
I must comment on the Y2K bug. This was no myth, although it was hyped up out of all proportions. Where I worked, at the time, we had to change a lot of non-compliant code otherwise the results would have been disasterous. This was done at great personal cost to a lot of people in their time, and the millennium came without a problem.
Alfred May 26, 2009 @ 3:39 pm
Where I worked, at the time, we had to change a lot of non-compliant code otherwise the results would have been disasterous. This was done at great personal cost to a lot of people in their time.
I hope this wasn’t the same place where I worked, where on head office instructions an IT gestapo had everyone wasting so many futile man-years time and hundreds of millions of money going through every innocuous file and spreadsheet, even though we all knew instinctively it was madness. It was no surprise a few months later thousands were let go, including me, and the company got taken over.
Richard. No it wouldn’t be. We were combining a lot of out of sequence data from databases spread around the globe, that arrived at all sorts of unpredictable times so the time information was very important, so we just had to adjust those UNIX lines that had the two digit problem (or rewrite the code!) so that the problem modules would work with compliant modules. There was nothing so silly as you are suggesting. That suggests a head office that should have been sacked.
Congratulations Roger!
A superb, easy to follow summary of this new religion. As a UKIP county council candidate, I’m delighted to confirm that UKIP are the only mainstream political party that would appear to agree with your sensible views e.g. in their Energy & Environment policy it states “until the results of more and better climate research have led to agreement between scientists who are fully independent of political or commercial
sponsors, UKIP will remain sceptical of apocalyptic claims”.
I agree that Y2K was not a myth.
I worked as a software engineer during the period before 2000 and the way that much software was encoded meant that the date could have caused many problems for some applications, such as ticketing systems on public transport.
The problem with Y2K was poor long term planning from IT and management consultants. eg. it was known in the industry that some software design used a date storage method that would mean that some software would have problems. The fact was many software developers and consultants at the time were poor at specifying the code and when you combine that with short term profits on products that were supposed to only last a few years, then you got the Y2K problem.
There are similarities between Y2K and AGW.
Poor long term assessment and planning is the common feature, resulting in expensive fixes later down the line. In the case of Y2K it was the ‘bug’ fixes, in the case of climate change it is the requirement to cut emissions.
The issue in both cases is a lack of long term vision and a focus on short term aspirations and profits.
A lot of people made money out of the Y2K myth.
People always make money out of other people’s fears.