An Inconvenient Voice, Round Two

It seems that the first part of Christopher Monckton's assault on the conventional wisdom on global warming has started a major ruckus. Which is what I predicted, not that it was hard to foresee. But many of the emails he received over the past week have been from scientists who agree with his article and disagree with the much-vaunted consensus. In the second part of his article, he attacks the economic assumptions of the global warming activists. This should garner even more reaction. Because Monckton claims outright collusion in preparing the global spin.

Sir Nicholas Stern's report on climate-change economics says the world must spend 1 per cent of GDP from now on to avert disaster. The current draft of the UN's 2007 report says up to 5 per cent. Sir Nick's team tell me: "We are confident that the UN will publish a range for costs next year in which ours will be centrally placed." So some quiet high-level co-ordination is going on. The oddest thing about Stern's curious report was its timing. Publication of the UN's next major science assessment is only months ahead. Why not wait and base the economics on that?

The UN needed Stern more than he needed the UN. Its 2001 report had numbers more extreme than anyone else's, so sceptics abounded. This time, an international spinfest is shutting off dissent in advance. First, the damage done by the hockey-stick graph had to be repaired, so a series of papers supporting its conclusions quickly appeared, many written by associates of its authors.

Next, the failure of temperature to rise as the UN projected had to be explained. Hence another flurry of learned papers, this time about the "ocean notion" – the maritime heat-sink into which the missing temperature rise might be vanishing.

My calculations last week had to be rubbished. Separately, The Sunday Telegraph's letters editor and I received emails saying I'd wrongly assumed the Earth was a "blackbody" with no greenhouse effect at all (I hadn't). The www.realclimate.org website, run by two of the "hockey-stick" graph's authors, said the same in a blog entitled "Cuckoo science".

On Thursday, Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, compared climate sceptics to advocates of Islamic terror. Neither, she said, should have access to the media.

At whom is this spin aimed? At the Chinese, the Indians and the Brazilians. China has 30,000 coal mines. It is opening a new power station every five days till 2012. The Third World is growing. It won't be told it can't enjoy the growth we've already had. It wouldn't sign Kyoto till it was exempted, so, under President Clinton, the US Senate voted unanimously to reject Kyoto. Whatever the West does to "Save the Planet" is mere gesture unless the developing world agrees to give up its right to grow as we've grown.

Read the whole thing. Monckton pulls no punches. The obvious spin machine techniques of attempting to discredit him are right out in the open. The crushing of dissent is right there. There is much more going on here than meets the eye. There are political power plays going on, and a world carbon market controlled by the UN is a step in a direction that people had better understand.