Andrew Watts

Alex Salmond’s wind farm delusion

Last year, in an interview with the Today programme, the chief executive of National Grid told the show’s no doubt stunned listeners that they would have to get used to not having electricity as and when they wanted it.

That here in the developed world we should be wondering whether the lights will be going out in a few years time, whether our children will go to bed in the cold or whether we will spend our evenings shivering around log fires is rather amazing. That our political leaders have achieved this — if achieved is the right word — in the face of the shale gas revolution with its promise of cheap and abundant energy for centuries to come is truly extraordinary. How have we come to this?

We all know that climate scientists have said their computer models show that the world is going to get warmer, and catastrophically so. And they are very sure of this. They are more reticent about their models’ almost unbroken record of overestimating future warming but, undeterred by these shortcomings, other scientists then take the model predictions as gospel truth and try work out what this warming might mean in terms of impacts on the real world. Then the economists get involved; they crunch the numbers even further, giving us the economic cost of the theoretical impacts of the hypothetical predictions of the unvalidated climate models. And through all this shuffling of numbers and through the fug of the associated hype and exaggeration, through the crushing of dissenting views and the fiddling of data and the hiding of adverse results emerges a single number, the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything: 43.

Forty three — about £30 — that’s the mean estimate of the damage caused by a tonne of carbon dioxide according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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