Can of worms

Just to remind you, this is the week my splendid anti-Left polemic How To Be Right is published and if you Speccie readers aren’t its natural constituency I don’t know who is. So buy it, please, or I’m never going to be able to put Boy through that brilliant prep school I mentioned a few weeks ago, and instead of Latin and Greek, all he’ll ever be taught about is Diwali, Mary Seacole and global warming.

Talking of which, I should like to thank two ideologically disparate institutions for having saved my bacon this week. The first  is the Centre for Policy Studies, which published Martin Livermore’s timely report on climate-change science rebutting the more hysterical claims of the eco-lobby. The second is Channel 4, which broadcast terrestrial British television’s first major exposé of the international ‘man-made global warming’ conspiracy.

Before these two lifelines appeared, I don’t mind telling you, I was absolutely bricking it. You see, one of the major strands in the book is that all this talk of impending man-made eco-disaster is a load of old guff. What worried me was that it seemed for a time — especially when all the newspapers went big on the shock findings of the latest IPCC report — as if almost nobody out there in the big wide world agreed with me. I just couldn’t stop thinking about the hideous radio interviews and round-table debates I was bound to find myself embroiled in as a result.

‘So, Mr Delingpole, despite having had no scientific training whatsoever, you think you know better than the 2,500 international experts on the International Panel for Climate Change, do you? And how, pray, do you explain the melting icecaps and shrinking glaciers? And what about the polar ice-bores showing an intimate relationship between CO2 levels and temperature?’

Those ice-bores had been bothering me a lot.