The Daily Mail reports that David Cameron has slapped down Henry Bellingham, a Justice Spokesman, who proposed equal rights, including property rights, for co-habiting couples, after some qualifying period of co-habitation.  He is right to do so.
 
Tory traditionalists fear the proposal could undermine marriage.  They too are right.  Many of us have doubts about “Civil Partnerships” for same-sex couples, and for similar reasons.  It cannot be stressed too often that there are three parties in a marriage — and not the three that Princess Diana famously referred to.  The three parties are a man, a wife and society.  Society chooses to recognise the public declaration of commitment inherent in marriage, because society recognises that its future depends on the next generation, and that stable marriages are overwhelmingly the most promising environment for raising children.
 
That argument does not apply to same-sex couples — nor to the anomalous position of two heterosexual bachelors buying a shared house for economic reasons, nor to two widowed sisters sharing a home.
 
But there is more to it than that.  To insist that cohabiting couples must be bound by the same responsibilities as married couples is to deny choice to those who have freely chosen not to marry.  They may have their own reasons.  Certainly if they had wanted the privileges of marriage, they could have married.  They may for their own reasons prefer to be free of those responsibilities.
 
And this is by no means special pleading for men, who have traditionally been the breadwinners, and who may prefer cohabitation because it enables them to walk away without responsibility for their erstwhile partner.  In this brave new 21st Century world, it may well be the high-powered, highly-payed career woman who wants to keep her options open, and be able to walk away from a feckless house-husband.
 
At the end of the day this is an issue of freedom.  Today, a couple can choose to marry, and assume the responsibilities of marriage; or they may choose to cohabit, and retain their freedom and flexibility to break up a some future point untrammelled by responsibility.  Indeed if they wish they may ask their lawyers to draw up some sort of pre-cohabitation agreement.  That is their freedom to choose.  Let’s keep it that way.  Let’s not impose responsibilities on those who have not chosen to accept those responsibilities.

Tidal Generator

Regular readers of this column will know that I am not impressed by the theory of anthropogenic global warming.  But I am very concerned about energy security, so I am in favour of renewables if they meet basic tests of environmental and economic sustainability.  Clearly wind turbines do not meet these criteria.  But under-sea tidal turbines just might.
 
A current of water has a much greater energy density than a current of air, so you can generate more power from a much smaller device.  Tidal power, like wind power, is intermittent, but critically, unlike wind power, it is totally and entirely predictable, which is a huge advantage.  The managers of the grid will know exactly how much power they can expect, and when.  And tidal turbines, which work both ways (on the flow and on the ebb) can produce power perhaps sixteen hours out of twenty-four.  Under-sea tidal turbines also avoid the huge environmental damage that on-shore wind farms do, despoiling landscapes, and blighting communities, and homes, and lives.  Moreover while wind turbines have to shut down for safety reasons in very high winds, it seems that there is no limit to the current speed in which a tidal turbine can generate power.
 
Of course the sea-bed presents a very corrosive and challenging environment, together with problems of cabling, and accessing the grid, but these problems are arguably no greater than those being addressed for off-shore wind.  After decades of North Sea drilling, British engineers are well experienced in creating durable structures for under-sea environments.  The turbines will be sufficiently deep to allow ships to pass over them, although of course trawlers and submarines will need to keep clear.
 
So I was delighted to be able to visit Rolls-Royce in Derby on Nov 20th to learn about their tidal turbine project.  Of course Rolls-Royce have unrivalled experience with turbines, and indeed with propeller systems, and are well-placed to take a leading role in this endeavour.  They have a pilot project, with a trial turbine due to be located in the Orkneys next year.  I saw the plans.  They start with a large tripod structure which can be anchored to the sea-bed using a ship and a remote-control submersible.  Then the turbine, looking for all the world like a torpedo with an out-size propeller, is attached at the top.  This can rotate around a vertical axis through 180 degrees to face the tidal current either way.  The blades can be feathered to present the most efficient angle of attack for the rate of flow at the time.
 
Britain has one of the best tidal environments for tidal power of any country in Europe — and a world-class engineering company capable of developing and exploiting the technology.  Rolls-Royce estimate that up to 5% of Britain’s electricity needs could be generated in this way — and the technology could be exported around the world.  I wish them every success, and I hope to be able to visit the Orkney site in due course.

I have been hugely encouraged by the leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), which undermine the case for global warming.  The CRU is one of the world’s leading sources of climate data, and works closely with other similar units in the USA and elsewhere.
 
A hacker has recently broken in to the CRU, and made available a very large file of data and internal correspondence.  This material shows that scientists at CRU systematically altered data to exaggerate global warming; suppressed data showing a recent decline in temperature; urged the destruction of data and correspondence which they feared might have to be revealed under Freedom of Information requests; and conspired to prevent publication of dissenting opinions.
 
Former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson has demanded an investigation into the leaked material, and the behaviour of personnel at the CRU.
 
Governments and politicians from around the world are meeting in Copenhagen in December, aiming to achieve a new global agreement to “fight climate change”, which will involve swingeing reductions in CO2 emissions, and huge fund transfers from Western countries to developing economies like China and India to support so-called green technologies.  This will impose huge costs on Western economies.  It now seems that the science underlying these initiatives is deeply flawed.
 
I have been campaigning on this issue for several years.  Most recently I organised a one-day conference in Brussels, on Nov 18th, which was addressed by scientists from Europe and America — including two who are members of the IPCC’s expert review panel — the 2,500 scientists with the IPCC, who are often presented as “the scientific consensus”.  In fact a number of them profoundly disagree with the IPCC’s alarmist position.
 
It is clear that there has been a systematic campaign to exaggerate the global warming story and to prevent honest debate.  The small changes we have seen in mean global temperatures over the last hundred years are entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles.  It is outrageous that during the worst recession in living memory, British tax-payers are asked to pay for new green taxes, and for higher green electricity prices, and now they are expected to transfer billions of pounds for green technology to developing countries — all in pursuit of failing solutions to an increasingly speculative problem.
 
 
Links to the leak story
 
The New York Times:   http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1258981217-J7yhMhEJWdwLtqx9U3uQdQ
 
 
BBC:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/opensecrets/2009/11/hacked_climate_emails_and_foi.html

Link to Lord Monckton story on Climate Emails: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/viscount-monckton-on-global-warminggate-they-are-criminals-pjm-exclusive/

Last Thursday, Nov 19th, I got back to Birmingham Airport in time to hear the BBC’s “Material World” programme on Radio 4 as I drove home.  Yet again, they were banging on about Climate Change, this time because a group of scientists has insisted that we are “at the top end of IPCC estimates”, and that global temperatures “could increase by 6 degrees”.  Of course the alarmists are ramping up the rhetoric in the hope of scaring us to death ahead of Copenhagen in December.  The truth is that global temperatures are below the low end of IPCC predictions, and the alarmists are terrified of the truth getting out.  See James Delingpole’s excellent exposé of the shenanigans being practiced at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) to keep the Great Carbon Myth alive, at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/
 
They had a scientist called Louise Sime in the programme.  She had just undertaken research on ice cores in the Arctic, showing that during the Eemian Interglacial around 125,000 years ago, temperatures had been relatively high, and atmospheric CO2 levels had also been high.  Of course there is nothing new there.  We have had for some time the temperature and CO2 level records from the Vostok and other ice cores covering over half a million years, and they do indeed show a close correlation between temperature and atmospheric CO2.  And it is worth recalling that temperatures in that last Interglacial were higher than this time round, yet the polar bears survived, there was no runaway global warming, no tipping point, no disaster — at least until the end of the Interglacial, when the ice came back again.
 
The whole debate on the programme simply assumed that this was further evidence that CO2 causes climate change.  But hang on a minute.  There was no industry, no oil, no coal mining, no 4×4s.  So where did this elevated CO2 level come from?  It is of course just possible that a super-volcano eruption could have caused elevated CO2 levels 125,000 years ago, but I am not aware of any such event.  We know that Interglacials have occurred around every 120,000 years for over two million years, and just about everyone agrees that that regular periodicity can only be the result of astronomical cycles.
 
If you have two variables A and B, like temperature and CO2, that show a correlation, there are four possible conclusions:
 
1  A causes B.
 
2  B causes A.
 
3  Both A and B are caused by some third factor C (like the correlation between the number of murders and the number of Methodist Ministers in the USA over many decades — presumably both driven by rising population).
 
4  Or the correlation is purely coincidental.
 
In this case the correlation is too close, over too long a period, for coincidence.  And there is no very obvious “C” in this case.  So either temperature drives CO2, or CO2 drives temperature.  Which is it?
 
In fact if you look at the graphs of CO2 and temperature in high resolution, it becomes clear that the changes in temperature precede the changes in CO2 by around 800 or 1000 years.  This is conclusive proof that temperature drives CO2, not vice versa.  And it explains the elevated atmospheric CO2 discovered by Ms. Sime in the Arctic.  Why should temperature drive CO2?  Because there is a great deal more CO2 in the oceans than in the atmosphere, and warmer water can dissolve less CO2.  So rising temperatures cause the upper levels of the ocean to release CO2 into the atmosphere.
 
The whole global warming scare is driven by the wrong interpretation of this correlation.  Al Gore and the BBC jump to the conclusion that CO2 causes warming, without stopping to consider the obvious alternative.  And they threaten to bankrupt Western economies on the altar of their blind faith in the Great Carbon Myth.

For best part of a decade they have driven forward the EU Constitution/Lisbon Treaty.  They have ridden rough-shod over the people, over democracy, over election results, over public opinion, because the EU has no reverse gear.  They were determined to create powerful posts and institutions so that the EU could rival the USA on the world stage.  Especially they wanted global representation, with an EU President and Foreign Minister to set the pace.
 
And who have they ended up with?  Rumpy Pumpy.  A little-known Belgian Prime Minister with not much track record.  We all know the jokes about three famous Belgians.  Rumpy Pumpy is not one of them.
 
And even more extraordinary — Baroness Ashton.  A woman never elected, with very little experience of government, little or no public or international profile.  A chinless one who personifies the faceless bureaucrat, the back-room apparatchik.  An entirely worthy and blameless woman who might make a good number two in a remote County Council is now the Foreign Minister for 500 million “European Citizens”.  Remind me, how do you spell “bathos”?
 
And consider the selection procedure.  The role of the EU President is designed to emulate and “balance” (read “compete with”) the role of the US President.  But if you want to be US President, you start with a gruelling round of primaries merely to become a candidate — primaries in which your record and character are dissected, your weaknesses exposed.  And only after that do you get to run on the presidential campaign itself, in which every American citizen is entitled to a vote.  And in the EU?  A private dinner in Brussels, unknown candidates, horse-trading over the hors d’oeuvres.  And winners who have passed no tests, and received no public endorsement.
 
There is no attempt to select the best.  On the contrary, they select the one with the fewest black marks from 27 member-states, and the public wait outside in the cold to here what their betters may have decided.  They have engaged in a race to the bottom, to the lowest common denominator.  And at the end of the day, the new President emerges, lacking any public profile, lacking any democratic legitimacy, yet set to earn roughly double what the US President earns.  Welcome to European democracy.
 
This is a classic illustration of the way EU horse-trading works — “I do something bad for my country if you agree to do something bad for your country”.  Almost no one has got what they wanted.  The Federalists wanted powerful figures to strut the world stage and to “project Europe”.  They have got cardboard cut-outs.  Sarkozy and Merkel have got half a prize — at least they will not be upstaged by the new appointees.  But they got this at a cost, and the cost has been to vitiate their ten years of work on the Treaty that created the posts.  And while sceptics may rejoice that ineffective candidates have been appointed to these two potentially dominant posts, we nevertheless regret that the posts exist at all.
 
The whole project stinks.  It is the death of the dream, the death of any pretence of EU democracy.  A bad day for Britain, and for Europe.

“Al Gore didn’t invent the Internet.  But he did make up Global Warming“.  This is Maggie Thauersköld, Sweden’s most prominent climate-sceptic blogger, pictured after my Nov 18th Climate-Sceptic Conference in Brux.  Find her at www.theclimatescam.se

Have humans changed the climate?  That was the question posed on Wednesday Nov 18th in the European parliament, Brussels, at a Conference I hosted.
 
Nine eminent speakers from Europe and North America included Prof. Ross McKitrick, the man who demolished the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s “Hockey Stick” graph; Prof Fred Singer of the University of Virginia, author of the NY Times best-seller “Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years”; and British columnist James Delingpole, self-styled guerrilla blogger on climate hysteria.  They covered the science and politics of climate change.  The morning session was chaired by my good friend and colleague Giles Chichester MEP.  Giles is the Chairman of the European Energy Forum, and a former Chairman of the parliament’s influential Industry and Energy Committee.
 
The Conference heard that the UN’s COP 15 Climate Conference in Copenhagen, due to take place in December, is unlikely to produce any substantive outcome beyond an agreement to keep talking.
 
Several key themes emerged.  The small (+0.7 deg C) increase in average global temperatures over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.  The predictions of the IPCC’s computer models continue to be hopelessly at odds with observed data.  The “fingerprint” of predicted warming (in terms of latitude and altitude) is wholly different from the pattern observed by ground stations, meteorological balloons and satellites.  Samples of ancient atmospheres from half a million years of ice cores clearly demonstrate that temperature changes drive atmospheric CO2 changes, not vice versa.  The theory of man-made climate change is not only unproven, but disproved by these findings.  Global temperatures are as likely to decline as to increase in the next decade.
 
A number of representatives from both the European Commission and the IPCC were invited to speak, but declined to do so.
 
However, this did not deter the hundred-strong audience, which included a number of MEPs, scientists, journalists, and constituents from my East Midlands region.
 
I was delighted by the level of support for this conference.  It is clear that the tide of public opinion is turning against climate alarmism.  The public are sick of being harangued, and blamed, and taxed over climate issues.  Recent opinion polls show a majority of British (and North American) voters no longer accept climate hysteria.  This is testimony to the robust good sense of the Great British Public.

To watch me speaking up for the “Derby Two” click here.

During the BSE crisis I visited a local butcher, Mr Morris in South Kilworth, and was offered the opportunity to see his small abattoir.  In the small slaughter house, to my astonishment, I watched three men working, while four men, armed with clipboards, looked on and criticised.  This is surely an insane level of inspection — and indeed of box-ticking.  No wonder meat is so expensive,.  No wonder so many small abattoirs are closing.

Last Sunday, Nov 15th, I attended a meeting with the British Meat Inspectors Association at the Ram Jam Inn on the A1 in Rutland, and was interested to establish whether the over-inspection I had observed several years ago remained the norm.

I was informed that unfortunately it did. Apparently the over-manning could have arisen primarily from a misinterpretation of the word “vet” or “veterinarian” in EU legislation.   We choose to interpret this term as a fully qualified veterinary surgeon.  On the Continent, however, they expect a much lower level of qualification.  In the trade in Britain, many believe that a qualified British Meat Inspector is roughly what the EU legislation intends by the term “vet”, and that the employment of vets alongside Meat Inspectors is effectively redundant. 

Ten years ago, the vets were mainly British.  They were well-qualified and experienced, and they commanded the respect of the abattoir operators.  But today, many of the vets in our slaughter-houses are from other EU member states, such as Spain.  They are frequently less well qualified and experienced, are poorly paid, and often have problems with the English language.  They are unable to command the respect of Food Business Operators (FBOs) and so are potentially unable to ensure high standards are maintained or reached.  Moreover the vet is assumed to be senior to the Meat Inspector, so if the vet cannot command respect, then the advice of the Meat Inspector is devalued too. 

The Food Standards Authority (FSA) wants to change all this.  It is proposing a new, very limited set of qualifications for Meat Inspectors.  They will study a narrower syllabus in a short course, for example, white meat or red meat or offal, and not the complete range.  The FSA is also proposing that Meat Inspectors will no longer be independent but may be employed part-time by the FBO for inspection work, and the rest of their time will be spent in other capacities in the slaughterhouse.

This is a stark conflict of interest.  The employee of the FBO will be under huge pressure to concur, to maximise production and not to make difficulties.  With the current generation of vets having trouble holding their own against FBOs, it is obvious that a part-time employee/inspector will have no chance. 
These are very worrying developments indeed.
 
I am advised that in Ireland, the authorities have taken a different route.  They are seeking to enhance the rôle and competence of Meat Inspectors, while reducing the rôle of vets as far as possible within current EU law.  This seems to me to be a much more sensible route.
 
The FSA has declared its intention of influencing the development of EU policy in this area.  I believe it should be pressing for an independent, unified service in which one single operative — call him a Meat Inspector if you like — can do the whole job of ensuring that standards are maintained in abattoirs.  We could save costs, and raise standards at the same time, by cutting out the absurd duplication of work and division of responsibility, while maintaining the independence and integrity of the Inspectorate.

Last Thursday, November 12th, I was privileged to attend a lecture and debate in Church House, Westminster, sponsored by The Spectator and chaired by Andrew Neil, entitled “Global Warming: Myth or Reality?”.  The speaker was the prominent Australian climate sceptic, Professor Ian Plimer, author of the recently published book “Heaven and Earth”, which deals with the science of climate alarmism.
 
Professor Plimer (Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide) treated us to a thumb-nail sketch of 4½ billion years of Earth history.  He described how massive changes had taken place in the constituents of the atmosphere, driven by life itself, the introduction of oxygen to the atmosphere, the exchanges of gases between the atmosphere and the oceans, tectonic plate movement leading to massive changes in ocean currents (for example the isolation of Antarctica allowing for permanent glaciation on that continent).  He described six major glaciations or Ice Ages, and pointed out that during five of them, levels of atmospheric CO2 were higher or much higher than today — surely presenting a challenge to today’s warmists.  And at other times the whole earth, poles as well, enjoyed tropical conditions.
 
The Earth, in fact, has had periods when it was much colder than today (with CO2 levels much higher), and other periods when it was much warmer than today.  The IPCC tells us that an increase of 2 degrees celsius could be disastrous, leading to a runaway greenhouse effect, ocean acidification, the dissolution of all crustacea in the oceans, the death of coral.  They will need to explain why none of these disasters seems to have occurred at earlier periods of Earth history when the Earth was much warmer, and the atmosphere much richer in CO2.  As Professor Plimer pointed out, far from being a pollutant, CO2 is an entirely natural trace gas in the atmosphere, which is essential to life, and to plant growth.  Today’s atmosphere is in fact relatively impoverished in CO2 compared to most of the Earth’s history.  Higher levels of CO2 would increase crop yields and rates of biomass generation — perhaps an advantage as we struggle to feed a growing population.
 
As I learned recently, commercial market gardeners using greenhouses will release CO2 into their greenhouses to raise the level from 390 ppm to around 1200 ppm, simply to enhance crop growth.
 
Professor Plimer admitted that the causes of climate change over geological history are not entirely well understood, but the main factors appear to be solar irradiance, variations in Earth orbit, and oscillations in the orbit, leading to long-term climate cycles, other astronomical factors including gas and dust in space, volcanic activity including super-volcanoes (for example the Deccan Traps which may have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs), changes in cloud cover and cloud formation possibly linked to cosmic ray activity, and tectonic plate movement leading to major changes in ocean currents.
 
In the face of all these factors, said Professor Plimer, the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an absurdity bordering on madness.  Yet that, it seems, is where we are today as the world’s political processes grind on toward the UN’s COP 15 Climate Conference in Copenhagen in December.