ANYBODY intending to enter the debate on climate change should receive a health warning; you might lose touch with reality and it can send you mad.
The huge quantities of money going into job destroying, energy bill increasing renewables should be halted and spent on research into genuinely cheaper forms of energy production and storage
The previously well balanced come to resemble a religious fanatic who used to haunt Old Trafford and Maine Road, in the 60s and 70s, carrying a placard declaring ‘the end of the world is nigh’. He believed only Jesus could save us, whereas the proponents of catastrophic global warming believe salvation lies in the banning of the use of fossil fuels.
In both cases a doomsday scenario is simply a device to close down debate. If you don’t accept that the planet will be consumed in a massive conflagration, caused by carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels, then you are guilty of murdering your grandchildren. Of course you shouldn’t be listened to.
The activists from the extreme part of the green movement know exactly what they are doing. They have an undeclared utopian ideal of a future without industry and technology. They believe it is highly unlikely they will ever win this argument and so use fear and stealth.
What is surprising is that politicians and policy makers have swallowed this hook line and sinker. The current energy ministers probably top the list of the politically insane. Ed Davey, the Lib Dem Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, boasts how this country has led the way by cutting carbon dioxide emissions since 1990; declaring the 2008 Climate Change Act a triumph.
He conveniently forgets that while our emissions may be down, this country and Europe are now responsible for producing much more carbon dioxide than was previously the case. The reason is simple, the Climate Change Act imposes extra costs on industry’s use of fossil fuels forcing manufacturing to migrate to low cost centres like China and India. Producing the same goods less effectively and shipping them here creates two extra doses of carbon dioxide for the atmosphere.
China smog (thanks to http://www.china-mike.com)
The fact is that even if you believe in imminent climate catastrophe, caused by carbon dioxide, the current policies are exacerbating the situation not helping. There is a huge cost to this mistaken policy of changing from cheap energy sources to expensive and inefficient ones, the so called renewables.
Liberum Capital have estimated that the EXTRA costs of decarbonising our energy sources over the next 16 years at nearly a quarter of a trillion pounds or nearly £250 billion. This is why in a few years the extra hundred pounds or so we are now paying on our energy bills, for these alternative energy sources, will seem trivial. They will then account for nearly half the total of our bills.
The economics guru Lord Stern, when questioned at the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee recently, dismissed this sum of money as being relatively small. More misjudgement from one of the main architects of our climate change policies.
There seems to be no intellectual effort being made to understand on what basis we are formulating our energy policies. The science of climate change is complicated and must be understood before a sensible response can be worked out as to what is happening.
When I asked Gregory Barker MP, the Conservative Minister of State at the Department for Energy and Climate Change, what his definition of climate change was, he gave the following answer and repeated it; “climate change is climate change”. A six year old would have done better. Barker makes no attempt to understand his brief but a misinterpretation of the science of climate change is often used to further frighten people into supporting crazy policies.
The recent Haiyan typhoon in the Philippines brought out the usual catastrophists. They were certain that this was caused by global warming.
I am not a great respecter of the International Panel on Climate Change; they have made too many fundamental mistakes. Their 2007 report was so flawed that the Inter Academy Council, the leading scientific body in the United States, initiated an investigation. It found significant short comings in each major step of the IPCC’s assessment process.
Scout Moor wind farm above Rochdale
However in their most recent assessment on global warming, released in September, the IPCC said that there were no identifiable long term trends when it comes to tropical cyclones or typhoons. In fact the 2013 storm season has had fewer hurricanes than normal.
I have a scientific background and will not argue with the facts. The simple fact is however that the impact of the increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is poorly understood. None of the very sophisticated models processed super computers have predicted the lack of global warming over the last 15 years. The earth has warmed a little in the last 200 years, less than 1 degree centigrade, and there isn’t a scientist anywhere who knows how much of this is natural variation and how much is caused by the green house effect of the extra carbon dioxide.
The huge quantities of money going into job destroying, energy bill increasing renewables should be halted and spent on research into genuinely cheaper forms of energy production and storage.
There is simply no excuse to continue with the policies that are producing more carbon dioxide and making my constituents poorer. That really would be mad.
Graham StringerGraham Stringer is the Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton with a majority of 12,303. He was elected to Parliament in 1997 for the now abolished constituency of Manchester Blackley.
Prior to this he was the Leader of Manchester City Council from 1984-1996.
He is one of the few MPs to have science experience, as a professional analytical chemist. He is a member of The Science and Technology Committee at Westminster.
Confidential welcomes columns from all sitting MPs in the area regardless of political party as long as they are able to write interesting articles.
