Roger Helmer MEP

Lord Turner (Adair Turner) is a busy man.  In January 2008, two years ago, he was appointed as the first Chairman of the government’s new Committee on Climate Change.  Then in September of the same year he was appointed Chairman of the FSA.
 
Leave aside for the moment the obvious fact that both these posts sound like serious full-time jobs, which a lesser man than Lord Turner might feel would justify his undivided attention.  My concern is the equally obvious conflict of interests between the two positions.  The FSA exists to ensure that the financial services industry performs as well as it can, and since that industry underpins our whole economy, it must also be generally concerned that the economy functions well.
 
But even those who support the Great Carbon Myth recognise that their efforts to mitigate climate change involve very substantial costs.  There is a certain amount of whistling in the wind about green jobs and economic opportunities in the green economy, but few deny that the costs of mitigation will be at least billions in the UK, and globally trillions, if anything like the plans proposed by campaigners gets implemented.  (I take some comfort from the fact that climate alarmism in Copenhagen was supported by much lip-service and grand-standing and hot air, but rather little commitment to real expenditure).
 
I cannot see that the same man can champion climate alarmism while at the same time championing, and regulating, the financial services industry on which so much of our economy depends.  Perhaps he should consider his position.  Or both of them.

Yesterday I broke the habit of a lifetime by speaking up for MEPs.  Today I speak up again, but this time in support of the Bishops (I promise that this practice does not represent a New Year Resolution, and I shall not make a habit of it).
 
The Daily Telegraph has scored a considerable success — and caused great offence in political circles — with its extended exposé of the MPs’ expenses scandal.  But they should know where to stop.  Today they are really scraping the barrel.  They have turned their attention to the Bishops in the House of Lords.
 
Their gripe seems to be that the good Bishops have been claiming an overnight allowance for attending to business in the Lords, despite the fact that they have free use of their official homes (or “palaces”) in their dioceses.  Excuse me, can anyone remind me how to spell “non sequitur”?
 
Anyone who is employed to do work away from home is entitled to look to the employer to reimburse the additional costs of staying away.  I have myself spent 33 years in business, and ten in politics, and I have never come across any employer who would disagree with this proposition.  It applies particularly to the Bishops in the Lords, as I understand that the work itself is unpaid.
 
It should be of no interest to the public, nor to the press, how an employee finances his main home.  He may own a home or rent.  He may have a mortgage or not.  It is entirely irrelevant.  The point is that he incurs additional expenses in the course of his work, and quite properly looks to his employer to reimburse those expenses.
 
I spent many years as an ex-patriate manager in South East Asia and elsewhere, and in most of those posts I was provided with “free” accommodation.  Yet when I travelled around the region, I expected the employer to meet the hotel bills.  This is the universal practice.
 
The arrangements between a Bishop on the one hand, and the Church as his employer on the other, are none of our business.  But it is clear that the accommodation offered to Bishops represents part of their remuneration package, and the Telegraph might just as well fulminate against their salaries as against their housing arrangements.
 
Should the Bishops be in the Lords at all?  I think they should.  We in Britain are entitled to a proper respect for our indigenous and historic culture.  The Church of England is an important part of our cultural heritage, and it is good to have views in the Lords from a different perspective — though I regret the way that the Bishops seem slavishly to follow the latest modish nonsense and politically-correct fads, like climate change.  I am reminded of the Telegraph’s own Peter Simple column years ago, with the go-ahead Bishop of Bevindon, Dr. Spaceley-Trellis.  But I should certainly not censure the Bishops for claiming perfectly proper expenses in the course of their work.

A 27 year old Somali man was injured by Danish police last night as he tried to attack Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist whose take on the Prophet (he was shown with his turban concealing a bomb) caused great offence amongst Muslims.
 
But the cartoonist was merely giving his own wry comment on current affairs.  He was reflecting public opinion.  Westergaard’s assailant should perhaps be asking why Islam is widely perceived as violent and intolerant — and the answer is not hard to find.
 
Yesterday a suicide bomber drove a car into a volley-ball match at the village of Shah Hassan Khan in north-west Pakistan.  He drove up to the crowd of spectators and exploded his bomb.  The death toll currently stands at 93, and body parts of the victims are still being recovered this morning from the sports ground and adjacent buildings.  It may be difficult to tease out the separate strands of motivation behind this shocking act, and no doubt politics and tribal loyalty played a part alongside religious zeal.  But there can be little doubt that the bomber saw himself as an Islamic Martyr, and expected instant access to paradise as a reward for his action.
 
I must of course include the compulsory caveat that terrorists acting in the name of Islam represent only a tiny minority of Muslims (although opinion polls indicate that a disturbing proportion of Muslims have some sympathy for propositions that the terrorists would support — such as doubting that the September 11th Twin Towers attack in New York was the work of Muslims).  It may be true that the vast majority of Muslims are pious and peaceful.  But while violent Muslims may be in a minority, they drive the vast majority of the headlines, and create the climate of opinion which Westergaard was reflecting.
 
We in Britain are celebrating the safe return of the hostage Peter Moore after two and half years incarcerated in Iraq (or possibly Iran).  But I was struck by the name assumed by his kidnappers: “The League of the Righteous”.  There is a degree of double-speak here that even George Orwell could scarcely have credited.  These men kidnapped five innocent civilians.  They illegally imprisoned them for years.  They tortured them, and four of them they murdered.  They even sought to trade the dead bodies of their victims.
 
Are these men so totally lacking in any moral sense that they see these deeds as “righteous”?  Are they perhaps trying to create a new genre of post-modern irony?  Or do they simply take us for fools?
 
There is only one way in which moderate Muslims can restore the reputation of their faith, and that is to root out and repudiate the terrorists.  In the meantime, Westergaard’s Somali assailant, currently recovering from his injuries in a Danish hospital, should reflect that he attacked the wrong target.  He should perhaps have attacked himself, for it is he, and others like him, not Westergaard, who dishonour their faith.

One of the slightly disconcerting things about Professor Tom Congdon of International Monetary Research is his uncanny habit of getting things right — although his recent remarks on banking, to which I wish to draw attention, are, to be fair, in line with what other commentators have said, and indeed what I have said myself on a number of occasions.
 
The received wisdom is that the current economic crisis was caused primarily by the greed, folly and profligacy of bankers, who lent money to poor-risk-borrowers, secure in the knowledge that they would be richly rewarded for any successes and profits, but would also be bailed out by the tax-payer if it all went pear-shaped.  I have separately made the case that this analysis misses the point, and that the primary failures were of policy and regulation, not of the banking industry, so I will not return to that debate here.
 
But the fact remains that a great deal of dodgy lending took place, and regulators and governments are right to call for more caution and prudence from the banks.  It is a good thing that we have seen the back of the 125% mortgage, and that 75% is more the order of the day — even if this incommodes first-time buyers and the housing market.  At the same time to provide a cushion against future crises, there are calls for banks to strengthen their balance sheets and build up their reserves.  And a third factor — banks have been given strong incentives to repay the emergency loans they have received from governments.  This is all well and good, and makes perfect sense.
 
The nonsense arises when at the same time and in the same breath, governments and regulators also demand that banks continue to lend.  In some cases they call for bank lending this year to match bank lending last year — and this at a time when demand for borrowing is reduced, as businesses and entrepreneurs pull in their horns and avoid excessive risk and excessive borrowing.
 
This brings me to Professor Congdon’s observation, and very pithy and focussed it is.  “This is becoming ridiculous.  How can banks raise capital asset ratios and lend more at the same time?  These people {i.e. the government} are barmy”.  Well said, Professor.  Our demands on the banks are self-contradictory.  They cannot do both things at the same time.
 
Professor Congdon has also had some rather harsh things to say about the euro and the ECB: “Fractures in the euro system are becoming clearer by the day”.
 
I wish it were possible to argue that Britain, with its own currency, was weathering the recession better than euro-zone countries, but at first sight that’s a difficult case to make.  We were earlier into recession and slower out of it than most continental economies, and we are weighed down by a savage level of government debt.  Many believed that the effective devaluation of Sterling (which of course would not have been possible had we joined the euro-zone) would act as a boost to exports, but at least initially, this did not seem to be occurring.
 
We need to understand why the recession hit Britain so hard, and there are two clear reasons.  First, the problem started in the financial sector, where Britain is relatively over-represented.  We were proud that our financial services sector was so dominant, but of course we were vulnerable to a financial-sector recession.  And secondly, we can thank Gordon Brown’s profligate spending.  Even Keynesians, who believe in spending their way out of recession, understand that you should not run a fiscal deficit throughout the business cycle.  Unfortunately, Gordon did not understand that.  Having been bequeathed a well-managed economy (thank you Ken Clarke) with low debt levels, he proceeded to spend like a drunken sailor.  When we needed money to underwrite the banks and to stimulate the economy, the cupboard was bare.
 
The government now faces problems with selling its debt, and the interest rates it is obliged to pay are edging up towards Italian levels.  That is not a weakness of Sterling.  It is a failure of Labour government policy.
 
These problems, serious as they are, are not directly currency-related.  Meantime, perhaps belatedly, we do seem to see some benefit from the Sterling devaluation, both in terms of balance of payments and in terms of outsourcing of manufacturing.  The BBC reports that significant numbers of UK manufacturers, who previously outsourced production to cheaper markets in the Far East or Eastern Europe, are bringing production back, for reasons that include quality, shorter supply chains, and the more competitive labour costs delivered by Sterling’s current level.
 
The problems of the euro-zone come from countries like Greece, Spain, Italy and Ireland struggling with debt while at the same time being in a currency union with radically different economies like Germany.  It is this fact that creates the “Fractures in the euro system” of which Professor Congdon speaks.  This is the fact that represents an existential threat for the euro, but which cannot represent such a problem for Sterling.  Even given the recession, we are still better off with our own currency.

The pretty village of Narborough lies to the south-west of Leicester in the East Midlands region.  I drive past it often.  It has a good rail service to Birmingham.  And I particularly recall that one of my former assistants Cat Bray came from Narborough — I think she’s now working for a conservative think-tank in Washington DC.
 
Narborough was not a name I particularly expected to come across in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but Sunday December 13th saw me arriving for a dry landing on Narborough Island in the Galapagos, almost on the Equator.  Narborough Island (known locally to the Ecuadorians as Fernandina) was named for the 17th century British sailor Rear Admiral Sir John Narborough, RN (born c.1640 — d. 1688).
 
For decades I have had a special interest in the work of Charles Darwin, and especially in human evolution.  A few months ago I visited Down House, his family property in Kent now owned by British Heritage.  In 2009, the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his “Origin of Species”, I decided to join a Cambridge Alumni study tour of the Galapagos, led by the Director of the Cambridge Botanical Garden Prof. John Parker. 
 
The islands had a powerful effect on the development of Darwin’s thinking.  It was here that he saw species on the different islands which were distinct, yet similar to each other and similar to South American mainland species, and was forced to the conclusion that the variations between the islands were the result of variability — that species were not immutable.  The alternative — that a Creator might have designed separate but similar species island by island — was too preposterous to entertain.
 
We now have a much better understanding of the geology of the islands, which are volcanic.  They are broadly no more that five million years old, and those at the west side of the archipelago much younger.  Narborough is one of the larger islands, and the most recent, with continuing volcanic activity.
 
It is fascinating to observe the colonisation of the new, sterile volcanic islands by early plant and animal colonists.  Narborough, as the newest Island, has very limited flora and fauna, but around the coast we found mangrove trees, which are very successful early colonisers.  These led to my only mishap on the trip.  The combination of lava trail with mangrove swamp and dead leaves caused me to slip over and dash my knee on the lava — which as I can attest is remarkably hard and rough.
 
The 1000-ton Isabela II on which we toured the islands had twenty guest cabins, forty guests and around 20 crew — more motor yacht than cruise ship.  Yet Darwin’s Beagle, in which he spent best part of five years circumnavigating the globe, was a mere 235 tons, and only 90 feet long — less than half the length of the Isabela II, at 186 feet.  And packed into that tiny ship was a crew of 73 men.  The crowding must have been appalling.  It is extraordinary to reflect on the privations suffered over so long a period in the interests of science.
 
The photos above show me on the Isabela II with Narborough Island in the background, and also the Ecuadorian national parks marker on the island (and the blood on my knee!).  It was nice to find in Narborough Island in mid-Pacific a link to a Leicestershire village.

Dec 11th, Galapagos, Indefatigable (Santa Cruz) Island. One of the best pictures from my short break in the Pacific

Let me break the habit of a lifetime and leap to the defence of MEPs.  A press report from Dec 31st speaks of subsidised skiing holidays in the Italian Alps for the children of MEPs and officials at the European parliament.  Apparently an MEP can expect a subsidy of 45% on the holiday.  And for good measure the article adds that “European Union officials including MEPs have been criticised for threatening legal action unless they receive a 3.7% pay increase in January”.  Earlier reports suggested that parliamentary staff had threatened to go on strike in support of a pay claim (which might be the best thing they could do in the interests of member-states — an extended moratorium on new EU laws would be an excellent thing).
 
Let’s leave aside the point that MEPs are not “European Union officials”, a term commonly used for staffers.  And let’s accept that the substance of the press report may be true — the holiday may well be taking place, and if so, it’s a scandal.
 
Let me just report from the coal face.  I have not threatened legal action in pursuit of any pay claim, and I do not know of any MEP who has.  I do not know of any MEP whose child is going on a tax-payer-funded a holiday — and I can confirm that no child of mine is going.  And none of my staff has demanded more pay, nor have they threatened to go on strike.
 
Just for the record, let me add that my holiday in December in the Galapagos, following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin in the 1930s (and where I took the above picture of a pelican) was paid for entirely from my own resources, and without any subvention from the tax-payer.  I suppose I might have argued that it was a fact-finding mission, or perhaps a personal study of sea-level rise, but I did not.
 
But the fact remains that the EU in general, and the European parliament in particular, is exceptionally adept at being profligate.  While national governments are seeking ways to cut spending in the recession, MEPs repeatedly argue for a higher EU budget.  For this reason, as for so many others, we should be Better Off Out.

For many years I’ve been in the habit of attending the Fernie Hunt’s Boxing day meet at Great Bowden, near Market Harborough, and this year was no exception.  The sun shone from a clear blue sky, and some hundreds of people gathered on the village green, with the riders and hounds.  A thaw was just setting in, although I suspect not soon enough to allow serious hunting.  But the tradition of the Boxing Day Meet was maintained.  Mulled wine, coffee and hot chocolate were available from the Shoulder of Mutton on the green.
 
Strange how historic dividing lines between the generations are becoming blurred in the 21st century.  For the first time in my life, I saw a man with an ear-ring and a hearing aid, in the same ear.
 
The enthusiastic crowd at this event, and at a couple of hundred Meets up and down the country, serve as a standing rebuke to the envious and embittered kill-joys of the Labour Party, determined to maintain their Hunting Act as long as they can.  Yet this was the day that Environment Minister Hilary Benn chose to launch an attack on what he called the Tory pledge to repeal the Act (of course we are pledged to a free vote in the House of Commons, not to repeal per se).  The Act was always about class envy and spite (“Getting our own back for the miners”), rather than animal welfare, and Benn’s attack was clearly a tactic designed to open another front in Labour’s increasingly desperate attempts to re-open a class war.
 
It is odd to reflect that Labour’s tactic is based on a misconception.  On the evidence of today’s crowd at Great Bowden, I’d say that ordinary folk were better represented there than the chinless wonders and county squirearchy.  Many hunt followers find it challenging to pay for their winter feed, but they hang in there because they love the sport, they love their horses, they love the countryside and they love the living tradition of hunting.  I used to be an enthusiast for hare coursing before the wretched Act outlawed it, and while some of the owners were well-heeled, the crowd at the Waterloo Cup was always predominantly working class.  Hare coursing has traditionally been popular with pitmen, so it is ironical that Labour’s leftist ideologues imagine that banning coursing is somehow compensation for the miners.
 
But the most remarkable effrontery of Benn’s attack was his suggestion that with the economic crisis bequeathed by Labour to the next Conservative government, it was an odd priority for the Conservatives to be promising a free vote on hunting.  It was his Labour government that wasted an extraordinary 700 hours of parliamentary time on this vindictive and unworkable Act — and even then they had to resort shamefully to the Parliament Act to get it through.  This is many times the amount of parliamentary time they allocated to debating the invasion of Iraq.
 
The free vote the Conservatives propose will take very little parliamentary time.  And we will do it, Hilary, because we gave our word to do it.  That seems a good enough reason to me.

Today (says the BBC), Serbia will submit its application for EU membership.
 
Serbia is a tragic country with a desperate history of civil war, ethnic violence, pogroms, massacres and terrorism.  We rightly feel sorry for it.  But do we think that these troubles are sufficient qualifications for EU membership?
 
Croatia is also expected to join the EU, perhaps next year.  I have spent some time studying Croatia — and some time in the country, talking to local and foreign businessmen, to foreign diplomats, to local media and politicians and lawyers.  Croatia is a country were the rule of law is not well developed.  The judicial system is in semi-permanent log-jam.  Corruption is endemic.  Crony capitalism is the order of the day.  Senior politicians are the beneficiaries of “unexplained wealth”.  The country is a centre or staging-post for drug smuggling, arms dealing, people-trafficking and so on.  The country’s major export is organised crime.  And EU membership will simply promote that export trade.  Do we think that this is a country qualified to join the EU?
 
There is still talk of Turkey joining the EU (though to be fair, the talk has gone on for decades, and may continue for decades).  Parts of Turkey are cosmopolitan and liberal and Westernised.  Other parts are dirt-poor, riven with mediaeval fundamentalism and separatist terrorism.  A relatively enlightened establishment struggles to keep the lid on an Islamic society which is inevitable informed (and perhaps inspired) by the resurgence of militant Islam elsewhere.  Is this a European country?
 
Already laws governing Britain are made in foreign institutions, where we have no control and little influence, by the French and the Germans and the Italians — and more recently by the Greeks, the Lithuanians and the Slovenes.  Are we content also to see our laws made by Serbs and Croats and Turks?  And remember that Turkey is already more populous than the UK, and by 2020 could be the most populous country in the EU (if it joins).  Not only will the Turks vote on our laws — they may well have the biggest vote of all.
 
For decades we in Britain have talked of reforming the EU from within.  But it keeps rolling inexorably down the road to statehood and ever-closer-union, aided now by the EU Constitution/Lisbon Treaty.  It is time to face facts.  Either we accept the destination, or we get off the bus.  Now, more than ever, we should be Better Off Out.

Have you noticed that when it’s extremely cold (as it is today, Dec 22nd); when road and rail and air transport are disrupted; when Eurostar trains encounter “fluffy snow” and are immobilised for many hours in the Channel Tunnel, then that’s just weather?
 
But when it’s warm, that’s Climate Change.  Hmmmmm.

I’ve never been at all sure about Tony Robinson.  I suspect he may be a socialist.  But he was good in Blackadder.  His Time Team shows are unfailingly interesting, if a little formulaic.  And his “Man on Earth” episode yesterday was a cracker.
 
Robinson has an interesting new take on climate change.  Rather than agonising about our current “unstoppable global warming”, he has looked back to see how previous human societies coped with a changing climate.  This in itself is something of a breakthrough, since it highlights the fact that the climate always changes, naturally, and that such changes have frequently posed serious challenges for earlier societies.  The alarmists invite us to believe that climate change is new and man-made, so it is salutary to be reminded that it is neither.
 
The programme looked at the Viking colonisation of Greenland around the year 1000 AD.  It made the point (which had rather passed me by) that there were two distinct populations in Greenland at the time — the in-coming Vikings, who were agrarians and traders, and the Inuit peoples who had a quite different life-style, as nomadic hunter-gatherers and fishermen.  The Viking colonisation seems to have been successful for several hundred years, but around 1400 AD, the Mediaeval Warm Period was giving way to the Little Ice Age.  The grass failed.  The livestock died.  And the colonists found that the trade routes — and their only escape route — were increasingly blocked by ice.  They quite simply died out from cold and starvation.  The Inuit adapted much more readily, and seem to have come through the cold unscathed.
 
This dramatically illustrates the fact that climate is naturally cyclical.  The world has got warmer in the last 150 years, and if you did not know about the Mediaeval Warm Period (or the Roman Optimum, around Zero to 400 AD), you might look for an anthropogenic explanation.  But if you know that similar warming took place a thousand years ago, and two thousand years ago, you will accept that the changes we have seen recently are natural and unexceptional.  Moreover you will dismiss talk of a “tipping-point” and “run-away global warming” for the nonsense it is.  No such effects were noted in those previous warm periods, despite the fact that temperatures were several degrees higher than today.
 
Robinson’s other example, the Maya in Central America, was perhaps even sadder, though no less instructive.  The Maya had flourished for several centuries, building great cities without metal tools.  The rains came in season, and the crops grew.  But the Maya believed that the rains came because they paid their taxes to their élites, and because their priests sacrificed virgins to the rain gods.  Then around 750 AD, the rains failed.  So in a desperate attempt to propitiate the gods, they sacrificed even more virgins, until thy realised how futile it was.  Then they assassinated the élites and the priests, and despoiled the palaces and temples.
 
Today we smile patronisingly at the naiveté of those simple peasants who believed that sacrificing virgins could affect the climate.  Perhaps in a thousand years time, historians will look back at our early 21st century society, and smile patronisingly at the idea that we should sacrifice our economies, destroy our productive capacity, and make drastic cuts to our CO2 emissions, in the absurd belief that we could prevent perfectly natural and helpful climate cycles.

History may look back to the 2009 UN COP 15 Conference in Copenhagen as the high-water-mark of the Great Climate Scam.  I have been campaigning for climate realism for years, and for much of that time it’s seemed like a lost cause: now I believe that the tide is turning.
 
The ponderous UN process of consensus and acclamation was clearly failing to deliver anything substantive in Copenhagen, so the USA, China and a few other countries cobbled together their own Copenhagen Accord, and presented it to the plenary session on a take it or leave it basis — you can have our text, or go home empty-handed.  But the Accord itself lacks substantive content.  No targets, no verification, no legal framework.  Just aspirations and wishful thinking.  Some weeks ago I predicted that the best they could hope for at Copenhagen was an agreement to keep talking.  That, in effect, is what they have achieved.
 
Of course Obama, and the Chinese PM, and other leaders, were only too aware that any deal they struck in Denmark had to stand the test of their domestic political processes.  Obama is clearly very conscious of the difficulties he will have in getting aggressive climate policies through the Senate.  He will recall that the USA signed the Kyoto protocol — but was unable to ratify it.  Some of the most aggressive commitments were made by our own Gordon Brown — happy in the knowledge that he will never have to deliver, but hoping that his legacy of extravagant promises will at least be an embarrassment for the next Conservative government.
 
And all those leaders are aware (or should be) that a majority of their electorates simply don’t believe the doomsters, and certainly aren’t prepared to pay the price of mitigation.
 
This all comes at a time when the scientific case on which alarmism is based is rapidly crumbling.  The implications of the leaked CRU memos are sinking in.  These were not just a few casual and thoughtless comments in an off moment.  No.  They are evidence of a deliberate and sustained campaign of misinformation, designed to achieve nothing less than a revolution in global governance.  The phrase “Hide the Decline” has come to be a short-hand for the scandal.  Yet it is poorly understood.  Many commentators seem to think it refers to the decline in mean global temperatures over the last few years.  But that decline is admitted (through gritted teeth), even by the alarmists.  The decline the e-mails were referring to is much more fundamental.
 
For temperature records back in the nineteenth century and earlier, scientists have to rely on “proxies”, since reliable measurements are not available.  These proxies may be tree rings, ice cores, sediment layers or whatever.  The issue is the overlap between the proxies and the measurements.  In the early and mid twentieth century, the proxy data matched observation pretty well.  But in the late 20th century, and especially from 1980, the proxies failed to show the sharp increases which were coming from the measured data (which may have been affected by the Urban Heat Island effect, and by some very creative selection and interpolation).  So they decided to “hide the decline” (in the proxy data) by simply switching from proxies to measurements at the best point to support their case.
 
An honest scientist at this point would have said “We have a conflict in the data sets, and no major policy decisions should be based on our temperature data until this conflict is resolved”.  But instead they continued to assert the Gospel According to Climate Change, and refused to consider or debate any criticism.  The fact is that if the proxies and the measurements disagree, then one or both must be wrong.  In which case claims that the rise in temperature is too rapid to be caused by anything other than human action is unsustainable (it was always nonsense — there are many examples in the records of more rapid natural changes).  And claims that we are now experiencing “the warmest climate for a thousand years” cannot be sustained either.  It was warmer in 1200.
 
I believe that the US Congress will now demand an independent statistical analysis of the data.  That is the least they can do before they agree to cripple the US economy and pauperise their grandchildren.  And the data will not sustain that analysis.  We have seen the reluctance of world leaders to commit to major emissions reductions even on the assumption that man-made global warming is an established fact.  As they come to realise that it is highly suspect, they will see that they cannot continue to press vastly expensive mitigation policies on their reluctant citizens.
 
On the BBC news summaries this morning (Dec 19th) the two lead stories were the failure of Copenhagen — and the disruption of road, rail and air traffic by exceptionally cold weather.  Who says that God lacks a sense of humour?
 
A few years ago, Britain and America were drawn into war on the basis of a “Dodgy Dossier”.  We are now being invited to undertake an even more expensive project, based on a new Dodgy Dossier, this time from the IPCC.  But I suspect that in the end, we will come to our senses and avoid making the same mistake again.

The non-majority government of Australian PM Kevin Rudd has been dealt a serious blow, the after effects of which may push him to call early elections.  After wrestling power from Liberal PM John Howard in 2007, much of Rudd’s initiatives have been met with reserved support from the opposition.  His party’s global warming bill, however, may have been the proverbial camel-breaking straw. 
 
The bill, which failed to pass the Australian Senate earlier this year, had undergone severe consensus building amendments prior to its reintroduction.   Its newest form included broad measures to make carbon-based energy (such as those derived from coal) more expensive by means of a tax.  Now, with its senatorial defeat, Mr. Rudd is off to Copenhagen empty handed.  Perhaps an energy policy based on higher taxes was never a wise approach. 
 
On the other side of the senate aisle a different type of climate change was occurring: a shift in power and political loyalties.  A coalition of Liberals and Nationals used this opportunity to define itself as an opposition to be reckoned with when they elected a new leader, Tony Abbot, and stood fast against climate alarmism.  Mr. Abbot was not only a critic of Rudd’s tax solution but is a sound proponent for Australia’s coal industry, an industry which is fast being realized as a domestic solution to energy security on both sides of the antipodes.
 
It seems the political tide may indeed be turning in favour of reason, though there are still severe obstacles to overcome.  Rudd´s failure, along with the emails of East Anglia and inaction in the UN’s climate summit prove that climate alarmism is never a sensible political course.  Unfortunately the revelations of the last few months will do little to correct years of panic-caused, unnecessary climate industry and infrastructure (such as Environmental Ministers in the highest levels of government).  There is hope, however, that these developments will serve as a reminder to those in power that irrational fear does little to build true political consensus.

By the time you read this I shall be winging my way to the Galapagos for a couple of weeks break.

Whilst I may get chance to do a few ad hoc blog posts and  possibly one or two podcasts on Tory Radio,  normal service will be resumed in January?

In the meantime can I wish all my loyal readers a very Merry Christmas!

I’ve just heard the news announced by the Met Office that this is the hottest decade since records began. Now that, of course, is exactly what you’d expect if, like me, you believe that the climate is cyclical, driven by solar and astronomical factors. We have seen a small rise in temperature over the last 100 years – less than 1°C. That’s exactly comparable to the conditions that existed at the beginning of the Roman Optimum around the year 0; it’s exactly comparable to what happened at the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period at about the year 1000, and if that cycle is continued, we would expect  the beginning of a new 21st Century Optimum somewhere around the year 2000. That appears to be what we are seeing.

So the Met office may well be right – that we’ve had the hottest decade since records began, although don’t forget that records don’t go back terribly far. It is certainly not as hot as it was during the Medieval Warm Period, it’s not as hot as it was during the Roman Optimum, and it’s not as hot as it was a few thousand years earlier in the Holocene Maxima.

So the message is this: that climate on earth is driven in a pattern of cyclical natural long term variations driven by solar cycles. We’ve seen it before, we are seeing it again. It’s business as usual. Nothing has changed. There’s no need to get excited. Copenhagen is a pathetic and misguided response to a perceived problem that doesn’t exist in reality.

There has been the most extraordinary breakthrough in the climate change debate.  For years sceptical views have been ignored or ridiculed by the media.  But in November we saw the first trickle of water through the dam, and during December it became a cascade.  On Nov 18th I hosted a major one-day conference on climate in Brussels, following up with a pre-Copenhagen briefing on Dec 2nd (pictures on the web-site at www.rogerhelmer.com).

First the BBC (of all people!) published a piece on its web-site “Whatever happened to global warming?”.  Days later, the Sunday Times ran a big feature “Everything you thought you knew about Climate Change is Wrong”.  A couple of weeks on we had Professor Ian Plimer, the prominent Australian sceptic, interviewed cordially on the BBC’s “Today” flagship news programme, and a fortnight later, Lord (Nigel) Lawson.

The reason for the Lawson interview was the most extraordinary scientific scandal of our era.  A hacker had released a huge trove of files and e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU).  The CRU works closely with the Hadley Centre in the UK and a handful of other meteorological institutes around the world, and is the source of the basic temperature data that underpins the “science” of global warming.  And it now appears that a small coterie of scientists, closely associated with each other and with the IPCC, has been fraudulently manipulating the data, applying “adjustments” to create or exaggerate warming trends, blocking the publication of contrary data and analysis, seeking the dismissal of the editor of a scientific journal that gave space to sceptics, and (perhaps a criminal offence) conspiring to delete data and e-mails which they feared could be subject to Freedom of Information requests.

It is now clear that the IPCC at the very least has failed in due diligence, and has not adequately verified the data it is using, if indeed it has not colluded in the fraud.  Accordingly, I and several colleagues (Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, US Professor S. Fred Singer, and Dutch Professor Hans Labohm), have written to the Chairman of the Nobel Prize Committee in Norway calling on him to withdraw the 2007 Nobel Prize awarded to the IPCC.

This is a worse fraud than the Piltdown Man.  The systematic falsification of data, and the loss or destruction of much of the database, means that we simply can’t know the truth — although independent satellite data have always shown a much smaller warming trend than CRU.  I have always taken for granted the relatively rapid warming from the mid-seventies up to 1998, but now even this is in question.  It may be merely a construct of the conspiracy.

But the story didn’t stop there.  In Australia, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tried for the second time to get a Cap’n'Trade bill through parliament.  He hoped to have the support of the Liberal (Conservative) Party led by Malcolm Turnbull, who supported the bill.  But thanks to a strong l lobbying campaign against the bill by Australian scientists, the Senate voted it down — and the Liberal Party, deeply unhappy with Turnbull’s ultra-green stance, sacked him and appointed a sceptic, Tony Abbott, in his place.  There is a warning here for leaders of centre-right parties who try to push their green credentials too far.

And right on cue, here in Britain former leadership contender David Davis MP published an article in the Independent, in which he set out his deep concerns at the political and economic implications of CO2 emission reduction programmes, while a poll published in the Times shows the majority of British voters (59%) do not believe that human activity causes climate change.  The wheels are well and truly coming off the global warming band-wagon.  For years I have ploughed a lonely furrow on this issue, so I hope you’ll forgive me if I say I am enjoying a warm glow of vindication.