Diary

Wednesday, 10th February 2010

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley opens his diary

London: Professor Ian Plimer, an eminent geologist who reads God’s log-book in the rocks, called me and said: ‘Would you like to do a speaking tour of Australia to explain why “global warming” is not a global crisis?’ Yes, I said. Case Smit and John Smeed, two retired engineers from Noosa, had watched Prime Minister Rudd ranting for 45 minutes at my expense and wanted to give me the right of reply. They dug deep into their superannuations to fly me to Australia before Rudd’s emissions trading scheme, like a drowning man, came up for the third and last time.

Sydney: Two feet of snow at home in Scotland, 40 degrees of sunshine over Botany Bay. I had to hit the ground running: interviews with the inimitable Alan Jones and just about everybody who was anybody in national journalism, followed by three hour-long lectures in an afternoon, and the phenomenal Australia Day fireworks at Darling Harbour. For the main lecture, we crammed 1,000 people in and had to turn away another 300. They had come from up to four hours away. Some had stood in line from 10 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. The queue snaked down three floors and out into the street. Alan Jones took the chair. Ian Plimer did his rock-jock thing and told the audience the world had begun 4,567 million years ago, on a Thursday, and that the climate had been changing ever since. Sea level had once suddenly risen 1,500 metres. ‘Now, that’s a sea-level rise!’ The audience loved it.

Newcastle: The room was too small for the crowd. Here and elsewhere, the majority of the audience were working-class. Miners terrified for the future of their industry came in such large numbers that we grabbed the vast town hall itself. When that filled up, we flung open the gallery. Then we had to turn people away. So what’s wrong with an ETS? If you set a low price for the right to emit a ton of carbon dioxide, you don’t deter anyone from emitting it and you have no effect on the climate. If you set a high price, you send your jobs and industries to China and India, which are not going to have ETS schemes, and global carbon emissions increase, because third-world countries emit more CO2 per thing produced than we do. Lunatic.

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