Dr Peter Gleick provides more evidence that the supporters of the Cause will stop at nothing.
Magical thinking: a rainmaker in Kenya, whose credibility is being funded by British taxpayers
What a very odd situation we find ourselves in, due to the extraordinary
transformation in recent years of the so-called debate over global warming.
Last week, The Sunday Telegraph reported that, as part of Britain’s overseas
aid budget, the Department for International Development is well on the way
to spending £1.5 billion on a mass of climate-related projects across the
world. These range from helping Indian farmers to irrigate their fields with
foot-powered pumps rather than diesel-fuelled ones, to preventing the
authority of Kenyan “rainmakers” from being undermined by the onset of
“extreme weather events”.
This is bizarre enough – and it might be added that, according to the World Resources Institute, Britain is now spending far more on this kind of nonsense, under the UN’s $28 billion Fast Start Climate Change programme, than any country in the world apart from Japan. But even this is only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of billions Britain is hoping to spend, as a consequence of our Government’s unique obsession with global warming, on everything from climate-related research in our universities to building the 32,000 useless windmills that Chris Huhne was babbling about, before he ignominiously left office. We cannot recall often enough that our Climate Change Act commits us to spending more than £700 billion between now and 2050 – far more than any other country in the world.
Yet while successive British governments have plunged headlong into this madness, the “science” supposedly used to justify it has been falling apart in all directions. Global temperatures have signally failed to rise as the computer models, upon which the whole scare was based, said they should. And an endless succession of scandals has engulfed the senior scientists who did more than anyone else to promote the scare. These began with the exposure of the notorious “hockey stick” graph and then the Climategate emails which showed how they fiddled their data and stopped at nothing to discredit anyone who challenged what they called “the Cause”. The scandals continued with the revelations that much of the work of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the supreme champion of the Cause – had not been based on science at all but on scare stories dreamed up by environmental activists.
All this has left the debate over climate change in a depressingly fetid state, as supporters of the orthodoxy lash out with increasing desperation, forlornly trying to defend their crumbling faith. A further example of this was the strange little scandal that erupted last week, with the release on the internet of various documents from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think-tank long vilified by the warmists for organising conferences attended by hundreds of distinguished scientists from across the world who dare to be sceptical of the orthodoxy.
The documents were entirely innocuous except for one, which stood out from the rest because it purported to be a secret “strategy paper” that outlined Heartland’s plans to get the teaching of the science of climate change outlawed in America’s schools. This seemingly damning revelation aroused much excitement among warmists on both sides of the Atlantic. The Guardian published no less than nine separate items about it.
But the document’s peculiar phrasing, punctuation and other details soon led
some observers to suggest that it looked suspiciously like the work of one
Dr Peter Gleick, a prominent warmist and the head of a California-based
institute which campaigns on climate change and on the need for “integrity
in science”.
Within hours, the story was unravelling. Gleick confessed that he had obtained
genuine Heartland documents under false pretences, in an attempt, he said,
to verify that the “anonymous” strategy paper had come from the institute –
the document that he himself was already suspected of faking. Though his
statement made no admission in that regard, it unleashed mayhem. Gleick was
reprimanded by his own Pacific Institute, and then requested a leave of
absence. Heartland is threatening legal action in all directions – not least
against all those journalists who were so eager to believe his hoax that
they hadn’t bothered to check their facts.
When the history of the decline and fall of the world’s most damaging scare
comes to be written, l’affaire Gleick will only be a brief footnote. But it
does suggest how desperate those who wish to keep the scare alive have
become.
More importantly, however, it should focus our attention once again on the
fact that we are still being presented with by far the biggest bill in
history, to counter a threat that never actually existed.
