The global warming guerrillas

coniston

Very nice article. Came here from the Bishop's. It would be great to have a followup with some of the smaller but good blogs such as The Air Vent and Lucia's which are very technical or Parliament of Things with always good commentary by Philip Stott.

Nicholas Hallam

"Like being relieved after living behind enemy lines". Brilliant.

Matt, thanks so much for this. Many who have been following McIntyre's work for 5 years and who have experienced the disdain of RealClimate, will be feeling relief now that this breath of fresh air has started to blow through the fetid swamp of Climate Science

djw2009

Does Cameron real the Spectator, I wonder? Surely he must be wondering whether his lurch into environmentalism is such a good thing?

terence patrick hewett

Disappointing really. I was looking forward to watching the Guardian relocating to Stoke-on-Trent after the glaciers melted.

Christopher Chantrill

Notice how this is an Anglospheric effort, with Brits, Canucks, and Yanks all in on the action.

ignatz

Thousands of e-mails were stolen, and some made the scientists look bad. Others were outrageously taken out of context to make them look bad. Who could look good under such scrutiny of ostensibly private emails? Yes they should have responded better to FOI. But nothing changes the fact that the overwhelming scientific consensus says global warming is happening, in fact, it's happening faster than expected. The skeptics are combing data to prove their head in the sand thesis, and point to any flaws as confirmation. The big picture is very, very scary, and skeptics should be ashamed at the twisted logic being touted as fact. How will you explain to your children and grandchildren how you left our world?

coniston

ignatz. If the authors had published their data in the first place as science demands, there would have been no FOI requests, and the pro AGW scientists stonewalled the FOIs for YEARS. I believe you to be well meaning but I also believe your logic is twisted. In the same vein you could say that the pro-AGW people do not care about the world they will leave to their children as they are robbing many of the resources (especially ££) that could help children today (as well as tomorrow) to live longer healthier lives with clean water, clean air and better medical attention.

Stuart Seacole Smith

I think Caroline Lucas can rest easy under her natural fibre fair trade duvet. The BBC is nicely back on message, with IPCC chief Pachauri allowed on World Service this morning to get away with saying that there was "just one mistake" in the IPCC report. No counter point was offered. The reporter summed up by uncritically repeating Pachauri's comments, and adding for good measure that the only other issue was "...some controversy between academics at East Anglia University". If that's worthwhile reporting then I'm a pickled egg. Our family cocker spaniel would have done a better job of savaging the truth out of him.

As for ignatz (9.34am), it will indeed be interesting to look back in some years' time and see how the whole AGW furore is viewed. Quite possibly as nothing more than a nice bit of catastrophe hysteria - something to which mankind has been addicted ever since agriculture took away the immediate worry of where the next meal was coming from. But now, thanks to global news networks, instead of amounting to no more than a local shamen's prediction of apocalypse in some backward far-flung corner of the world, we sometimes get truly global uptake. Quite phenomenal in its way. I have to admire the warmist marketing machine, but then again, it's always easier to pedal scare stories than it is to spark interest in balanced and nuanced pieces.

Don't forget that AGW scaremongering is a very lucrative business for: NGOs (more subscriptions), academics (grants), developing countries (aid), Western governments (tax), some sections of industry (hardware sales), energy suppliers (miscalculated carbon trading costs), journalists (bad story is good story).

There are also compelling reasons for various other players to throw their lot in with the warmist agenda: the Church; loony-tunes Charles; various charities that ostensibly have little to do with the environment; and "young" activists of every hue. The motivations here are not about money. They're more to do with bandwagon jumping, seeking to get your interests tied onto the apron strings of an issue that generates a lot of attention. It's also about wanting to seem "nice and caring". Who wants to do the dirty work of insisting on rigour, and challenging the politically correct enviro-mantra? This works for the church. It is also an excellent way of getting in with the chicks for the unwashed masses of ethnic-style baggy-trousered natural-dye dreadlock-toting white boy student types.

All of this is not to say that we shouldn't be doing all we reasonably can to be more efficient with our use of resources - food, energy, water. With the global population set to grow by 40% by 2050, and the need for agricultural production to grow by 70% in the same timeframe (FAO figures - not that you can believe everything they say...), we truly are facing some monumental challenges. Europe will need to become a net exported of food rather than a net importer as it is now if the world is to be fed.

So sure, let's try to be efficient, but let's do it on the basis of fact and logic. The AGW movement has so many special interests tied up with it that I can never buy into it. I for one am fed up with being spun the lefty-greenie-liberal agenda under the cloak of AGW. I'm fed up with being lied to and manipulated.

But I can even accept that most of the warmists (Uni of East Anglia excepted) are not deliberately lying. They believe their own hype, which is what gives them that dangerous aspect of religious zealots.

So, I'll do my bit for the future, but not on the terms of these control-freak carrot-munching left-wing fascists.

Rhoda Klapp

Stuart Seacole Smith, bravo!

Neil McEvoy

Ignatz,

"overwhelming scientific consensus" is not the same thing as "correct". Please google "Thomas Kuhn" or "paradigm shift". A good recent example of a scientific consensus that has been dramatically overturned is that peptic ulcers are caused by stress. A widely ridiculed Australian researcher had to drink helicobacter to refute the consensus.

Ricky

Timely article.

Looks like the global warm mongers are in retreat. Unlike the Antarctic ice sheet.

I look forward to a new age of reason and enlightenment, where politically correct nonsense is replaced by rationality and empiricism. Where the "intellectual gulag" advanced by that chancer Blair and his bully boys will be replaced by rational debate, discourse & argument.

Emoting is everywhere. Everyone is "passionate" about some self obsessed little interest these days from cooking to cleaning. Intellect is despised and mediocrity is king.

It's interesting to note that almost all of the advocates of AGW are self serving chancers with little or no qualifications in the traditional sciences.

Ned Ludd

Man-made climate change is no longer a fantastic hoax it's just one great big lie!!!

Dr Parthasarathy KS

In the heat of the recent unfortunate developments, Matt Ridley and other skeptics and naysayers conveniently ignore scientific evidence that many glaciers and icecaps worldwide are in retreat.For details see the following:

http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/thscrip/print.pl?file=2010020450051400.htm&date=2010/02/04/&prd=seta&

The URL is unduly long