A Convenient Lie

Finally, after being called a ‘crackpot’, a ‘flat earther’ and, most sinisterly and despicable of all given the connotations it raises, a ‘denier’, it turns out that I, along with countless others, was right to be sceptical about climate change.

And I’m pretty darn smug about it.

I’ve had countless arguments with the vegetarian mafia on this issue. Over dinners and drinks, in the newsroom and the living room, even in the street. Never in my life have I seen such effective brainwashing.

To those who likened me to a Nazi sympathiser by labelling me a ‘denier’, I say this - this worldwide epidemic of disinformation, telling us to cough up the dough or the earth will die, is the closest thing to Third Reich propaganda I have experienced.

We’ve been told for years that the science is ‘settled’, that the only scientists who don’t believe it are mad or on the payroll of Big Evil Corporations, that if you don’t believe in it you’re some kind of neo-fascist. The argument has been presented as being as black and white as a zebra (an endangered one, of course).

And now we learn the whole thing is, if not utter rot, a very grey area. Emails leaked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have revealed that for years and years top UK and US scientists have been completely over-blowing the whole situation. They’ve been skewing statistics, utilising ‘hockey stick’ graphs that will make any data you like spike sharply and alarmingly.

Now, let me get this straight, I am not for any minute saying that climate change is not a serious issue. It is. It needs attention. It needs it sooner rather than later. However. We are paying through the nose for something which, let’s be honest, is still just a theory. Las year our government passed, without a flicker of doubt, the most expensive law in British history (£18 billion a year, as you ask - that’s nearly a grand per household).

I am not, get this right before you slate me, against tackling this problem. If it needs money throwing at it, so be it. This is the future of our planet we’re talking about, for heaven’s sake. I can scarcely imagine a more important way for my taxes to be spent.

But please, please, can we get the science right first? I can’t pretend to know the nitty gritty, and no one expects me to, but we know now that temperatures worldwide have dropped this decade, sea levels haven’t risen anymore than they have for the last 200 years and we have same amount of ice at the poles as we did 30 years ago.

It’s hardly a climate catastrophe, is it?

Here’s an inconvenient truth for you - we’ve been lied to for years. We’ve been told to dig deep into our pockets on the say-so of a handful of scaremongers and doom merchants.

Climate change is a massive issue but it‘s not, as we’ve been told, the end of the world.

@2 years ago