Westminster MP and former NI Minister of the Environment Sammy Wilson has launched an astonishing attack against the “hysteria around global warming”.
In his weekly website update, the MP for East Antrim said calls for action against climate change would condemn “thousands of millions of people to poverty”.
Wilson, the former Minister of the Environment at the Northern Ireland Executive, denounced the recent WWF Earth Hour, saying: “The simplistic view of climate that suggests we can turn temperatures up and down by varying CO2 emissions as if carbon dioxide were some kind of cooker knob is just plain nonsense”.
In his web blog, the DUP representative and current NI Minister of Finance, wrote: “One of my tasks every weekend is to reply to the scores of letters and e mails which I receive to my constituency office. On my desk as I leave the office each Friday evening after completing my weekly meeting with constituents there are usually three or four boxes containing correspondence to answer and phone calls to make.
“This week there was an unusual number of letters from pupils at local schools who were doing research and coursework on climate change and members of the public seeking my support on the WWF Earth Hour at the end of the month. This is an event which entails switching off all the lights in the house for an hour in order to save the world! The main concern seems to be that the lights on the face of Big Ben will not be switched off during earth hour, presumably causing the world to flood or the Amazonian rain forest to turn into a desert at some time in the future.
“I am all for saving energy and indeed as Finance Minister I have introduced incentives for people to insulate their homes and building control regulations to ensure the erection of more energy efficient buildings. Not because I believe that by doing so polar bears will be saved or storms will be calmed, but because I hope it will lower fuel bills, reduce fuel poverty, help deal with our dependence on imported fuel and stop the waste of finite fossil fuels.
“To all who have written to me I have tried to explain as gently as I can that I do not subscribe to the hysteria around global warming which sees human activity as the villain of the piece, demands that we all change our lifestyles, fork out higher taxes and higher prices for energy and renounce economic growth, condemning thousands of millions of people to poverty.
“I have also pointed out that the world’s climate has continually changed and a thousand years ago during the Medieval Warming world temperatures were considerably higher than they are today even though there was not global industry pumping out CO2. Indeed over the last decade while CO2 emissions have continued to climb global temperatures have ceased to rise and globally the last two winters have been very severe.
“Finally I have attempted to list the many factors which affect world climate including the sun’s strength, the earth’s tilt, water vapour, ocean currents, atmospheric circulation, albedo ie the reflection of solar heat, CO2 and many other drivers. The simplistic view of climate that suggests we can turn temperatures up and down by varying CO2 emissions as if carbon dioxide were some kind of cooker knob is just plain nonsense.
“I don’t know how some of the teachers take it when they see my letters and I hope I do not confuse the pupils who receive them rather my aim is to inject some objectivity into this important debate. There is no doubt in my mind that through the curriculum, publicly funded propaganda and scare tactics, this government has targeted young people in particular in order to sell their global warming message. In answer to a Parliamentary question which I posed the government has admitted to spending tens of millions of pounds on climate change propaganda and this week the Advertising Standards Authority have banned two adverts directed at children because they exaggerate the impact of climate change. The adverts broke the advertising code on three counts of substantiation, truthfulness and environmental claims.
“Of course it is not just the government who is at the exaggeration game. The International Panel on Climate Change which has driven much of the policy on the issue has also been caught out making wild and unsubstantiated claims on no less than four occasions in the last two months. The IPCC itself has had to admit that its claim in the run up to the Copenhagen Conference on Climate change that there was a relationship between global temperature increases and catastrophic losses was not backed up by evidence and that it had made the claim despite its own scientific reviewers warning caution about it.
“The IPCC also was embarrassed by criticism that its claim about reductions of ice on mountains due to global warming, were based on a student’s essay and an article in a climbing magazine despite its boast that all predictions and facts were rigorously checked by groups of scientists. Of course even when claims are checked by some of the top scientists in the IPCC they fail to spot real howlers. The IPCC published as scientific fact that a small drop in rainfall as a result of climate change would turn the Amazon into grassland. It was later discovered that this was the work of a journalist who was a green campaigner working for Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and contained no primary data to back up the claim.
“Even the Met Office which has in the past provided alarmist data about rising temperatures has dropped its long term seasonal forecasts after the embarrassment of a bar-b-que summer that never happened and a mild winter that saw the lowesr [sic] temperatures and the greatest amount of snow for thirty years. The Met office has admitted that forecasts beyond five days are notoriously difficult to get right yet it happily predicts what will happen to global temperatures one hundred years from now using the same computer which fails to predict accurately what will happen in one hundred days from now.
“It has been a bad few months for the high priests of global warming. Their arrogance and distain[sic] of any questioning, their self assured belief in their cause, their refusal to even permit and examination of their data and material by anyone they believe hostile to their religious fervour is coming back to bite them as the public and the press become bolder in their challenge to the increasingly discredited orthodoxy.”
jen, carmarthen around 1 year, 9 months ago