Climate change

Saturday

Daniel Korski

Copenhagen dispatch

I make my second foray into the climate debate with trepidation. But visiting Denmark a few days before COP 15, it is impossible to escape the subject. Whether I speak to friends, family or strangers on the bus, everyone has a view and wants to share it. TV coverage of the forthcoming climate talks is relentless and there is even a separate passport queue for COP participants at Copenhagen’s stylish airport.   The latest “story” to emerge has pitted the new Climate Change Minister, the former commentator Lykke Friis against the Speaker of Parliament, Thor Pedersen. Though they are both from the same centre-right/liberal party, Mr. Pedersen has made himself

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The truth about global warming

Anyone interested in climate change should buy The Spectator today. We don’t normally make such naked plugs here on Coffee House, but our global warming special has a line-up of the variety and quality which I guarantee you will find in no other British magazine or newspaper. As the FT’s Samuel Brittan says: we dare to debate. You’ve seen the piece about why the Maldives aren’t sinking, from a world-leading sea levels expert who has made six field trips to the islands. We also have the Freakonomics guys showing how geo-engineering has such potential, even though the environmentalists don’t seem interested. We unearth a never-seen-before CIA file from 1974 which

Friday

Fraser Nelson

What happens when you try to debate climate change…

Sky News invited me around for what I expected would be a civil debate on climate change at 2:30pm today – but for people like Bob Ward, there’s no such thing. He is policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the LSE. The debate proceeded along the bizarre path that these types so frequently tread. I was asked about what the climategate emails mean: I said it shows people putting spin first and science second. And raised the prospect of data manipulation. Hope replied by saying, “it’s remarkable about how the so-called sceptics have been using this as a propaganda tool to promote political end… People

David Blackburn

“Saboteur” or realist?

Lord Lawson is Andrew Neil’s guest on this week’s BBC Straight Talk and, among other topics, the former chancellor rebuffs Ed Miliband’s accusation of climate change heresy. Lawson said: “I hope that all parties…take a good hard look at this, we don’t want a sort of Stalinist monolithic line in everything.  But I do think, because of the damage that will be done to the economy, that is why, and for very little good, if any, that is why we have got to take a good hard look at the fact that we can’t get a global agreement on this anyway, as will be seen in Copenhagen…So, I think you

Thursday

Nils Mrner

Why the Maldives aren’t sinking

The President of the Maldives recently held a Cabinet meeting underwater, saying his islands may be submerged. In an open letter, taken from the climate change supplement in the latest issue of the The Spectator, Nils-Axel Mörner assures him his country is safe: Dear Mr President, You are obviously very concerned about the effect that sea level rises may have on the Maldives. Your Cabinet has been photographed meeting underwater, and you have even declared that ‘we are going to die’ if the climate change summit in Copenhagen fails. I am now writing with what I hope will be some good news. The scientific side of the situation is quite

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Countdown to Copenhagen

How seriously are we to take Lord Stern on the economics of climate change? At the LSE yesterday, he rather hysterically claimed that the Copenhagen summit will be “the most important international gathering since the Second World War”. Crucially, he added that the cost of dealing with the problem may reach 5 percent of GDP. Even so, “it would still be a good deal,” he said. Really? Losing world economic growth condemns millions in the Third World to poverty: the globalisation of the last 15 years has been the greatest anti-poverty tool ever invented. So we should not be blasé about sacrificing growth, as if all it means is smaller

Sunday

David Blackburn

The political case for environmentalism weakens

The Politics Show conducted a fascinating poll into the concerns of voters aged under 20. The Recession Generation are primarily concerned with, well, the recession. Economic recovery, public spending and tax came top of their list of priorities, closely followed by health and education. It’s clear that younger voters have exactly the same concerns as the wider population, and encouragingly for the Tories, those polled prefer David Cameron to Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg by a clear margin of 8 percentage points. The Liberal Democrats attracted only 18% of voters, indicating quite how damaging their tuition fee u-turn has been. Popular myth dictates that younger voters are consumed by tackling

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Has dead aid taken on a green hue?

We’ve got £800 million to spare, haven’t we?  Don’t be so cynical – of course we do.  After all, it’s the amount of UK cash that Gordon Brown is prepared to sign over to a new £10 billion climate change fund that he’s proposing.  The idea is that the money can be used to encourage poorer countries to move towards greener economies.  Brilliant. More seriously, I’d have thought that the money would be better spent on developing those green technologies which could create jobs and clean up the environment, both home and away.  Especially as we don’t have much money to spare, and this fund contains so much potential for

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Osborne’s recycling giveaway is actually an Age of Austerity measure

I don’t want to be a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to an idea which is actually quite promising, but it’s worth pointing out that George Osborne’s plan to pay people to recycle – featured in quite a few of today’s papers – was first mooted by him back in July 2008.   The difference between then and now?  That this particular nudge was worth up to £360 a year for families who took advantage of it – whereas now the figure has come down to £130 a year.  In which case, it’s probably better to regard at least this part of Osborne’s announcement today as an Age of Austerity-inspired cutback,

Monday

Daniel Korski

Is the world cooling or not – and what is to blame?

The Financial Times supplement this weekend contained profiles of the world’s leading climate experts, including – the magazine promised – the world’s leading sceptic. I quickly leafed through the pages to see who had been picked as the whipping boy, expecting to see a Danish name. No, not that of Bjørn Lomborg, who became (in)famous for his book The Sceptical Environmentalist, but that of Professor Henrik Svensmark. In the end, it was Richard Lindzen. But it is Svensmark’s research that may prove the greatest challenge to the prevailing consensus on climate dynamics. The Danish scientist, author of The Chilling Stars, become noted because of his research into cosmic rays and

Wednesday

Rodney Leach

A wild goose chase

The conventional view of global warming originates in the environmentalism of the Sixties. Alone, the Green movement might have done little more than raise awareness among consumers and legislators of the need to limit pollution and conserve natural resources. But in the Seventies environmentalism joined forces with the continuing backroom campaign of international bureaucrats for world government. At the time, temperatures had been falling, sparking fears of a new Ice Age. By the Eighties the trend had reversed. Runaway warming and cities submerged by rising seas replaced the spectre of Chicago and Rome buried under miles of ice. No matter. Either prediction would suffice to justify demands for a supranational