Safe Speed Forums

Yes maybe, but more likely the world's politicians plotting how to control their populations by using the "environmental stick".

So you won’t, by definition, see climate change from one year to the next - or even necessarily from one decade to the next. But look at the change in the average over the long term, and the trend is undeniable: the planet is getting hotter.

These are the periods when global warming ‘stopped’ for a whole 8 years (on average), in the flawed Whitehouse definition – although, as astute readers will have quickly spotted, the crucial thing is what year you start with

In scientific parlance, this is called ‘cherry picking’, and explains how Whitehouse can assert that "since [1998] the global temperature has been flat" – although he is even wrong on this point of fact, because as the graph above shows, 2005 was warmer.

Hence the announcement by the World Meteorological Organisation on 13 December, as the Bali climate change meeting was underway, that the decade of 1998-2007 was the “warmest on record”.

just because all the experts agree doesn’t make them right – it just makes them extremely unlikely to be wrong.

Experts including Sir John Houghton, one of Wales’ most eminent scientists, say the Bill, which commits the UK to at least 60% reductions in greenhouse gases by 2050, is out of date.

Based on the latest science, including the most recent assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientists believe a reduction of more like 80% is necessary.

Lynas is just a typical media "environmental" journalist. His academic qualifications IIR are in History and Politics. Whereas, of course, Dr Whitehouse is an established and respected solar scientist.

I know who I'd bet my money on to be correct!!

For example, Jonathon Porritt, chairman of the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission, rejected King’s advocacy of nuclear power precisely because of its technological emphasis: ‘Pulling a technological megafix, like nuclear power, out of the hat is easier from a political point of view, but it misses the essence of climate change which is transforming people’s lives.’ (4) For Porritt, then, technology gets in the way of the moral project - telling us how to live.

today some environmentalists openly call for a recession which will have the effect of people losing their jobs and becoming poorer

Surely using nuclear power is a good thing, no smoke, no nasty CO2. Wasn't part of the debate of climate change that we could solve the problem with technology? We should all go back to living in huts and having 9 children because only 2 of them will survive untill adulthood.

Not a week seems to go by these days without some report or other being issued branding biofuels as the very spawn of the devil for their ineffectiveness in reducing carbon emissions, or their impact on food prices, or the environmental destruction that is supposed to follow in their wake. So when I was asked to speak at a public meeting in Wadebridge last week on the subject of how agriculture can successfully adapt to the decline in oil production, I approached the biofuel situation with some trepidation.

It had occurred to me long before I got to my feet that this was an audience which was unlikely to warm to an enthusiasm shared by George W Bush.

But I was still taken aback by the sheer hostility of the response, when I broached the subject. Not even a tentative endorsement of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) attracted quite the onslaught of critical comment as did my heavily qualified defence of biofuels. Whatever the opposite to flavour of the month may be, biofuels are it.

I find this slightly odd, given that biofuels are virtually the only renewable alternative to oil in transport fuels, that they do (so far as I can see) yield genuine savings in CO2 emissions when compared to petrol and diesel, that environmental safeguards can and are being applied to how they are grown, and that higher food prices may not be such a bad thing. Besides, if you are looking for ways in which agriculture can successfully adapt to a decline in oil production, they can hardly be ignored.

One would have expected the general response to have been something along the lines of: "Well, they won't make a huge difference, but they are a step in the right direction; any environmental damage can be prevented; and if we don't invest in first-generation biofuel technology we shan't be in a position to reap the much greater benefits of second and third generation biofuels when the time comes."

But not a bit of it. The received wisdom seems to be that biofuels are worse than useless, not only because they fail to deliver any real benefits, but because they are seen as an attempt by big business and big government to subvert the climate-change agenda.

The true green believers are not interested in technological solutions. They want to use climate change to drive a whole series of fundamental changes in human behaviour, taking us back to a world in which economies have been relocalised, personal travel has been severely restricted and farming operations are small-scale and organic.

This dawned on me when I attempted to use the argument that biofuels are the only way of reducing the 25 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions produced by road transport.

It rapidly became apparent that to a significant proportion of the audience, the only sensible way to cut the emissions is to cut the transport. People should learn not to drive, still less to fly. I received the strongest possible impression that if a vast new oil reserve were to be discovered somewhere in the world that would guarantee our energy security long into the future, many of those in Wadebridge Town Hall last week would be dismayed to the point of desolation. They hate biofuels with such a passion, not because of the inherent shortcomings of the technology but because it offers the prospect of at least some people continuing with a way of life with which the eco-true believers are in profound disagreement.

They hate biofuels with such a passion, not because of the inherent shortcomings of the technology but because it offers the prospect of at least some people continuing with a way of life with which the eco-true believers are in profound disagreement.