Bad news at The Observer

Oh dear, most Britons are "still" not convinced that climate change is caused by humans, and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to a poll for The Observer.

That "still" is from the opening line of the paper's report, by the way, so we're hardly looking at a piece of straight news. Any report of a poll should include tables reporting the questions and answers so that we can see the unadorned facts for ourselves, but there is none of that here. The paper's environmental editor, one Juliette Jowit, in fact launches straight into the reactions of "shocked campaigners"

who hoped that doubts would have been silenced by a report last year by more than 2,500 scientists for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found a 90 per cent chance that humans were the main cause of climate change and warned that drastic action was needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Yes, get that in early, Juliette.

Her analysis is frankly dipsy.

The poll ... found widespread contradictions, with some people saying politicians were not doing enough to tackle the problem, even though they were cynical about government attempts to impose regulations or raise taxes.

Just maybe there is no contradiction here? Just maybe some people believe government is using eco-hype as a means to their own ends? Just maybe she should have let us see the answers for ourselves. But we're so short of space on the web, aren't we.

"Those most worried were more likely to have a degree, be in social classes A or B, have a higher income." Now if we take a few outlets, the FT and The Guardian believe in man-made global warming, whereas The Sun's Trevor Kavanagh doesn't and The Express has just published an anti-warming article by Ann Widdecombe.

And Newsnight is a believer, but (?James Whale) on Talk Sport is not, and Jeremy Vine's Radio 2 programme is balanced, and has from time to time featured Philip Stott. He's also appeared on Richard & Judy.

Now stop the sniggering at the back. This random sampling isn't scientific, but maybe it tells us something about media coverage.

However, some environmentalists blame the lower orders' doubts on a Channel 4 documentary and recent books, including the one by Lord Lawson (it's excellent, by the way). Oh please!

In response to these results (which we're not allowed to see in full) "the Department for the Environment" (would that be DEFRA by any chance?) nailed its colours to the IPCC mast. Oh dear, don't they know science doesn't work by counting votes? Did Newton, Galileo or Einstein believe in consensus in science?

So much for some shortcomings in the paper's reporting. As for the wider issue itself, you can do no better than read Philip Stott's fiercely libertarian debunking of the bien pensant philosopher kings, including the statement that

People with even a modicum of commonsense about science recognise that the very idea of managing climate by fiddling about at the margins with just one politically-selected factor is starking-raving lunacy.

Which - judging by the voting on the recent Climate Bill - excludes all but three of our MPs. "People with even a modicum of commonsense about science" are disenfranchised.

Master Cameron and government ministers should be required to commit Philip Stott's ringing cry to memory.

Here we are witnessing the true political danger, what I call the ‘Sin of Saruman’ writ large - “But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see.”

Hm! Always beware ‘the Wise’! What the political classes and media ‘environmentalists’ have yet to learn is that ordinary farmers are too aware that they have been battling with, and adapting to, climate change for over 7,000 years; that people with even a modicum of commonsense about science recognise that the very idea of managing climate by fiddling about at the margins with just one politically-selected factor is starking-raving lunacy; that people are not fooled by the attempts of the ‘wise’ to control every aspect of their lives; and, that the only way to deal with constant environmental change, whatever its direction, is to maintain strong, flexible economies, while aiding and assisting the poor.

‘The Wise’ - for which read our more dirigiste commentariat and political classes - are always seeking power and control over people’s lives - for the people’s own good, of course, and to erase false consciousness. As I write on the side bar of the ‘Home Page’: “‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices.”

It's not as if 'The Wise' are short of problems. Security of energy supplies, anyone?

Green goddesses

You've probably never heard of Alice Farr or Valerie Elliott. Alice works for The Woodland Trust, who describe themselves as "the UK's leading woodland conservation charity".

By acquiring sites and campaigning for woodland, we aim to conserve, restore and re-establish native woodland to its former glory. Currently we own and care for over 1,000 woods, covering over 50,000 acres.

A kind of woodland National Trust then? Not exactly. They urge us to take action now to stop climate chaos and "plant a tree to help biodiversity adapt to climate change"! We should sign up to "Icount". Yes, "we can stop climate chaos".

Hm, not just conservators of woods, then. But seemingly it still qualifies as a charity.

Commercial sponsorship and grants from charitable trusts and bodies such as The Heritage Lottery Fund and The Forestry Commission account for almost 25 per cent of funding.

It's up to shareholders how much of their money their companies give to greenies. (Incidentally, only 75% of the charity's money is spent on the charitable objectives.) But the grants aren't inconsiderable. In 2006 (information trickles slowly in greenieland) grants totalled over £3.8m.

Who are the generous providers of grants for the greenies? It looks like you and me. In 2006 over £1m came from the Forestry Commission. The Heritage Lottery Fund provided £800,000. The Department for Communities & Local Government chipped in £473,000. The Environment & Heritage Service, Northern Ireland provided £287,000, unnamed local authorities £255,000, DEFRA £178,000 ... the list goes on. Oddly, they got £99,000 from the North West Regional Development Agency - yes, that's right, Development Agency.

Out of this £3.8m of state money (our money, actually), £3.1m was "restricted grants", meaning the greenies could only use them for specific purposes.

The Trust is not short of ambition. Over the next five years they want to establish a further 5,000ha of new native woodland and involve 1 million children in planting 12 million trees. Over the next 50 years they aspire to double native woodland cover; "everyone to be within 4km of an accessible large woodland" (so presumably flattening tracts of towns and cities); "every child to have the chance to plant trees"; and "absolute protection of ancient woodland" (my italics).

This policy of absolute protection emerges in the Trust's recent statement on the decision by West Sussex County Council to approve planning permission for oil exploration in the South Downs. The BBC reports that -

Council officers told the committee there was a "clear and overriding need" for oil exploration and that the development accorded with the National Minerals Policy.

But this charity supported by taxpayers' money is having none of this. They describe the decision as "an act of vandalism on our natural heritage". Their release lists bodies which supported them. Not everyone did, as the report in the Telegraph makes clear. And the Maidstone News points out:

Alice Farr of the Woodland Trust still called the drilling “an act of vandalism” – even though no objections came from the Environment Agency or Natural England.

In explaining the Trust's opposition, Alice sets out the policy of this taxpayer funded charity.

Now is the time to move away from fossil fuels and put our efforts into the search for renewable energy. Climate change is the greatest long term threat to ancient woodland and this decision flies in the face of that.

Conservers of woodland, maybe, but conservers of woodland with a radical greenie agenda.

Valerie Elliott, the other one you'd probably never heard of, doesn't work for the Woodland Trust. She is Countryside Editor of The Times, and judging by this piece she would probably describe herself as a campaigning journalist. Her line that the "search for black gold is sweeping the country" boils down to the revelation that "The Government has received 60 applications from 54 companies to explore 182 plots". In a sinister move, however, it is "keeping the details confidential because they are commercially sensitive". Ooh.

Villages, hamlets or new estates will learn about a prospector’s interest only if permission is sought to drill or extract oil.

And what is wrong with that?

Worse follows. She reports that -

Conservationists and locals in West Sussex have expressed outrage at the county council’s giving approval for exploration Markwell Woods — an ancient woodland near Chichester, and part of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Er ... not all of them, Valerie, but don't let facts obstruct your bias. She calls these reactions "stirrings that could indicate the start of a nationwide resistance to Dallas-style entrepreneurs" - note the pejorative "Dallas-style"; do they wear cowboy hats? Or have all the hats been snapped up by cowboy journalists?

More significantly, Valerie Elliott provides no evidence at all of "nationwide resistance" - not a shred. Could she be hoping to stir some up and act as a co-ordinating point?

To be fair, though, nationwide resistance there will doubtless be, even if only from Alice and her fellow absolutists in national charities supported by taxpayers' money.

Picking the right questions

While the Spectator's Coffee House blog enthuses over the exquisite decorations at the Conservatives' Black and White Ball and its readers debate the merits of tielessness there, back in the real world Philip Stott offers a useful summary of his recent speech on Global Warming Politics.

We have been wrong about climate change in the past, he says, so how certain are we that our politicians have got it right now?

He distinguishes between ‘Global Warming’ - "a politico-scientific construct in which the human emission of ‘greenhouse gases’ is unquestioningly taken as the main driver of a new and dramatic type of climate change that will inexorably result in a significant warming during the next 100 years" - and the science of climate change. This is "concerned with the most complex, coupled, non-linear, chaotic system known", and it is "unlikely that climate change can be predicated on a single variable, or factor, however politically convenient".

So, he asks, will cutting carbon dioxide emissions at the margin produce a linear, predictable change in climate? No, he says. Climate is so complex and chaotic that we cannot manage it predictably by "fiddling at the margins".

We can’t stop climate change, or even aim to produce a predictable outcome for climate.

We need political realism -

The UK currently represents only 2 per cent of world electricity demand (1 per cent of world energy demand). These figures will fall to around 1.4 per cent and 0.8 per cent by 2020. Whatever we do in the UK will have no predictable effect whatsoever on climate. Indeed, if one accepts the ‘global warming’ construct, it is clear that the future of climate resides, above all, in China, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, and the rest of the developing world, not in the US and Europe. By 2020, China and India will produce more ‘greenhouse gases’ than the whole of North America.

As we can't affect climate change, we need to concentrate on adapting to it -

Perhaps of far more significance are population growth, the looming energy crisis, the continued success of farming in enhancing yields, the attack on poverty, and the world management of water.

Farming in the UK needs the scope and flexibility to produce more if necessary. And -

In the UK alone we are facing an energy gap of up to 50 per cent which no amount of wind, wave, and waffle will fill. Coal is going to have a great renaissance world wide, despite environmental concerns; nuclear will have another generation of plant; yet, ‘renewables’ will toil to achieve even 15 per cent.

In reading Stott's comments you realise just how ludicrous our politicians will seem with their vainglory that they can affect the climate. Canute, anyone?

As Stott says, we cannot stop climate change. "It is the great hubris of our Age to think that we can. We cannot even manage climate change predictably. But we can constantly adapt to inexorable change".

On the energy front, to take one example, slowly and in full view, the Russians are tightening the noose of gas supply around Europe, in a long game of naked "power" politics. More on this here from Helen. Putin has not decided to head Gazprom on a whim. He knows where the levers of power will be.

Down among the little people, Robber Conway is still an MP.

I don't believe it

As the Major government was drawing to its close, Cecil Parkinson appeared on Question Time. He cited a statistic as showing the government's good economic performance and drew jeers from the audience. "But it's true!", he protested, missing the point. You could almost feel through the screen the audience's refusal to believe anything the government was going to tell them.

Governments come into office with a certain amount of credibility, which they then proceed to draw on to bamboozle their electors. What they don't seem to understand is that it is extremely hard to top this store up again, except through a period in opposition. Every time Gordon Brown claims that "inflation" is running at about 2% a year, people will shake their heads as they think of their supermarket bills and their energy bills, not to mention their council tax bills.

Government can never admit it's wrong. So home information packs are an aid to faster property sales, the nationalised health service and state education are improving by leaps and bounds, the army gets the equipment it needs, people are abandoning their 4x4's and walking instead, crime is falling, sentencing is proportionate, energy policy is under our control, making unwilling children stay at school until they are 18 is progressive, your personal data is safe in our hands and any isolated accidents aren't a government failure, the Olympics will be splendid value for money, state spending isn't generally wasteful, and we're wriggling out of a referendum on the EU constitution.

And off they spin into their parallel universe, followed only by a few political groupies.

They can't even convince the increasing population of polar bears that we all need to act to prevent global warming. What then about the hundreds of thousands lately stranded in China by unseasonal snow? And British polls have consistently shown that the public doesn't buy the claim that man made global warming is endangering the planet, despite the best efforts of politicians of all hues, and environment correspondents across the media, including the BBC. Unaccountably the British public considers it a tax-raising ruse, though the truth is more sinister. When Mr Miliband combines two wrongs to claim that the new role of the European Union should be to fight global warming, he probably believes it! But out here we don't.

Back in the Commons, the media are starting to look more closely at the numbers with which McStalin spatters PMQs. The Spectator's Coffee House blog regularly picks up examples of claims which he can only have taken from a dodgy dossier. The Opposition have yet to get to grips with this - not even his most fanatical supporters could claim Mr Cameron as a policy wonk with a feast of figures at his fingertips.

Meanwhile the rest of us will continue to sigh as we get these broadcasts from the parallel universe - indignation long past, saying with a resigned sigh, "I don't believe it".

Just as Cecil's audience didn't.

What global warming?

What's going on above our heads? Global warming has stopped, says a qualified science writer in no less than the New Statesman.

The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 and every year since 2001.

It's a pity, says David Whitehouse, that they didn't discuss this at Bali.

Lord Monckton gives his separate account of what he experienced there.

Oops, this is just at the moment when, reports The Guardian, ministers have been ordered to assess the climate cost of all decisions. Would that be Nil, then? If so, doctrinaire miscalculations will lead to skewed decisions, which will leave us poorer.

Some climate change truths

A press release from "The Carbon Sense Coalition" (not on their site) reminds us that

• 1934 was the hottest year of the twentieth century.
  
  
• There was no global warming from 1940 to 1980, a time when CO2 emissions grew strongly.
  
  
• There has been no global warming since 1998.
  
  
• Current temperatures are not extreme or unusual.
  
  
• Past records and scientific evidence show that changing surface temperature is more likely to be a cause (not a result) of increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
  
  
• CO2 and water vapour have always been essential components of the atmosphere. Neither is toxic, both tend to retain some of the sun's warmth, and both are absolutely essential and beneficial to all life on earth.
  
  
• The most likely causes of variations in surface temperature are connected with solar cycles, variations in the heat output of the sun and eras of volcanic activity.
  
  
• More CO2, water vapour and warmth in the atmosphere would be a boon to most of humanity.
  
  
• There is empirical evidence to suggest that earth's temperature is more likely to fall than rise - ice ages are more normal than today's balmy climates.
  
  
• There is significant scientific opposition to the proposition that man's emissions of CO2 are causing global warming or any other harm.

Questions about global warming

Christopher Booker summarises some recent questions in the global warming debate, some already highlighted here.

- Al Gore claimed to a US Senate committee in March that "droughts are becoming longer and more intense". But serious droughts have in fact become rarer than they were a century ago.

- The hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998, as generally accepted, but 1934. Of the 10 hottest years since 1880, four were in the 1930s, only three in the past decade.

- Global temperatures are flattening out at about 0.2 degrees below their 1998 level. This summer's figures have been lower than they were in 1983, despite a continuing rise in CO2.

The Taxpayers Alliance say "green taxes" now cost us £21.9bn a year, equivalent to nearly £1,000 for every home in the country. Meanwhile, China is building a new coal-fired power station every four days.

BBC Climate Special decision not driven by impartiality

That's the line, but impartiality certainly should have figured. As Peter Horrocks has commented, "It is not the BBC's job to lead opinion or proselytise on this or any other subject."

It emerges that the concert was being developed "under the aegis of BBC Comedy". The BBC claimed the aim was not to campaign but to "raise consciousness" about the science of climate change - the difference being...? It seems concern about ratings may have been an issue.

An environmental activist claimed that "the only reason why this became an issue is that there is a small but vociferous group of climate 'sceptics' lobbying against taking action, so the BBC is behaving like a coward and refusing to take a more consistent stance."

Interestingly, the BBC piece concludes by focusing on blogs.

Many blogs run by climate sceptics groups regularly accuse the BBC of bias and of ignoring evidence which runs against the idea that elevated levels of greenhouse gases from fossil fuel burning and land clearance are raising temperatures around the world.

The BBC's attitude to climate change

What's the BBC's attitude to climate change? Of course it shouldn't have one. Of course it does. There's a good summary on Biased BBC.

The internet heats up the global warming debate

As Philip Stott concluded in his recent letter to the Telegraph

When will our politicians, especially David Cameron, recognise that carbon claptrap, not global warming, is the danger for our economic future?

The excellent Vaclav Klaus keeps making the point that eastern Europe have just broken away from Russian control, and he doesn't want the greenies taking away their new found freedom.

Actually it's always seemed a strange issue for politicians to adopt. Go beyond extra taxes (and Gordon doesn't) and you'll inevitably start curbing people's freedom. How popular would that be?

The most hilarious contribution recently was from the Henley Forecasting Centre, who have said that the weather will stop further evidence of global warming being apparent until 2009. So until then it will be faith-based in the Northern Hemisphere, while presumably the Southern Hemisphere will continue to cool?

Enthusiasts need to distinguish two basic questions -

1. Is the earth getting warmer? (arguably not)

2. If it is, is the cause CO2 (looking less and less likely), some other human-induced reason (unspecified), or natural (e.g. sun amplified by cosmic rays, earthly weather interactions [as suggested in recent chaos theory analysis], or some combination?

Meanwhile the lustre is coming off the Stern review's analysis pretty fast, except amongst scaremongers.

All in all, anthropogenic global warming is looking increasingly like an idea whose time has come - and gone. Just as it did in the 1930s, to be succeeded in the 1970s by scares about ... er ... global cooling.

In future years there will be a great book to be written about how the political, media and bien pensant classes were captured by this idea and tried to foist it on the rest of us, strictly of course for our own good.

Richard North has commented on the role of the internet in the debate about the law concerning the thug who knifed Philip Lawrence.

The interesting thing about all this is that the whole affair is another example of the subtle shift in the hierarchy of information gathering and dissemination. In pre-internet days, the founts of all wisdom were the media and the political classes – who were closer to the seat of power and thus better informed.

But, as information has gone on-line, there is now a small but growing band of "ordinary" people – remote from the traditional "gatekeepers" – who are better informed than those who would seek to inform them.

This is even clearer in the debate about global warming, where scientists and laymen around the world can quickly - and pretty easily - become aware that there is a vibrant debate casting doubt on the theory of global warming considered settled by (for instance) Al Gore, the BBC, David Miliband, and David Cameron.

Despite the views of these luminaries, doubting Thomases can take ringside seats as the orthodoxy is dealt blow after blow - news which you would be hard pressed to find in the mainstream media.

Nor does this apply only to reactions against establishment orthodoxies. The Taxpayers' Alliance is making use of the internet to get out its distinctive message about government inefficiency and cutting taxes.

There's a definite sense of a genie having escaped from a bottle.

What global warming?

Philip Stott in The Daily Telegraph -

Last week rain fell not only on the rag-bag of climate-change activists camped outside Heathrow, it also poured on the whole global-warming parade.

First, new research indicates that our climate may be only one third as sensitive to C02 as has been assumed.

Secondly, corrected temperature figures for America from Nasa indicate that the hottest year in the 20th century was 1934, not in the 1990s.

Thirdly, recent satellite figures from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration demonstrate no mean global warming since 1998. Indeed, the curve has flattened to below 1998 levels.

And finally, our British weather continues to contradict all predictions.

When will our politicians, especially David Cameron, recognise that carbon claptrap, not global warming, is the danger for our economic future?

An article of faith

Forecasts from researchers at the Met Office's Hadley Centre claim that "natural shifts in climate will cancel out warming produced by greenhouse gas emissions and other human activity until 2009", but from then on, temperatures will rise steadily.

"Temperatures are set to rise over the 10-year period by 0.3C. Beyond 2014, the odds of breaking the temperature record rise even further", reports The Guardian.

That's jolly convenient. Expect no evidence for another couple of years.

Major New Theory Proposed to Explain Global Warming

This via John Ray.

"Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt" --Washington Post headline, November 2, 1922.

If there was any doubt that fear-mongering has long been cherished by the media, the above headline should put the question to bed. But that 80-year old news story also illustrates two of the great problems for the global warming theory -- its inability to explain sudden climate shifts in the Earth's past, and to explain why the Northern and Southern Hemispheres are so unequally affected by warming.

A team of mathematicians have come forth with a startling new theory that solves both these problems. Led by Dr. Anastasios Tsonis, their model says the known cycles of the Earth's oceans -- the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, El Nino (Southern Oscillation) and the North Pacific Oscillation -- all tend to try to synchronize with each other.

The theory is based on a branch of mathematics known as Sychronized Chaos. The math predicts the degree of coupling to increase over time, causing the solution to "bifurcate," or split. Then, the synchronization vanishes. The result is a climate shift.

Eventually the cycles begin to sync up again, causing a repeating pattern of warming and cooling, along with sudden changes in the frequency and strength of El Nino events.

Better yet, their theory has predictive power. The model predicts past shifts in the year 1913 (explaining the strong warming of the 20s and 30s), 1942 (resolving the post-WW2 cooling trend) and 1978 (covering our current warming). The model predicts another shift to occur around the year 2033. Most shocking of all is their prediction for the year 2100 to be slightly cooler than present day, despite the assumption of a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels. Eye-popping indeed.

Is carbon-dioxide really so ineffective at warming? A new study by Belgium's Royal Meteorological Institute seems to think so. Its conclusion is that, while CO2 does have some effect, that "it can never play the decisive role attributed to it" in global warming, and that its effects have been grossly overstated.

More on recorded temperatures

I blogged before about surface recording stations. If urban growth has appeared around them over the years, the temperatures they record will become higher over time - hey, that's warming.

Now John Ray has picked up a report about Australia.

"Professor Lance Enderbee has published graphs of mean temperatures from 27 rural recording stations in Australia for 100 years from 1890 to 1990. The trend is horizontal, with mean temperature in 1990 below that for 1880. This has occurred during the century of the motor car, two world wars, and massive growth of coal burning for steel production and power generation. Rising carbon dioxide levels have had no effect on temperatures". "A similar data set for six Australian capital cities shows a generally rising trend in temperature since 1950 - that is, rising temperature in Australia is an urban effect, not a result of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."

John has added another comment about the Lockwood paper.

The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film but it is in fact an absolute gift to climate atheists. What the paper says was of course all well-known already but the concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years really is invaluable. And the one fact that the paper documents so well -- that solar output is on the downturn -- is also hilarious, given its source. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards.

So - if you believe in the greenhouse gas effect - maybe we should be pumping greenhouse gases out for all we're worth, to counteract the dip in the sun's output.

How reliable are surface temperature readings?

John Ray picks up a post by John Brignell. Satellite data show the southern hemisphere is the same temperature as 28 years ago, while the northern hemisphere has warmed slightly. On the other hand, land surface readings show temperature rising.

So how reliable are the land surface readings? The siting of this station suggests its readings should be reliable:


But this one now has been encroached on, with air conditioning units and exhaust fans near it:


So there is now a study to photograph all the surface temperature monitoring units, to see how reliable their readings may be.

It's not climate change, says John Kettley

"This year's apparently extraordinary weather is no more sinister than a typical British summer of old and a reminder of why Mediterranean holidays first became so attractive to us more than 40 years ago."

More here

John Ray on that climate change paper

John Ray writes -

I think I now get where the Lockwood paper fits in to our understanding of climate and there is no doubt that it is an absolute gift to climate atheists. What it said was of course all well-known already but the concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years really is invaluable. And the one fact that the paper documents so well -- that solar output is on the downturn -- is also hilarious, given its source. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! This month's unprecedented cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards.

Climate change and the sun

Comment on the recent paper about the effect of the sun on climate change seems to be homing in on the temperature data they've used - they preferred surface readings rather than satellite data - and the fact that the readings stop a few years ago.

If you work for the BBC and you think the science is settled, have a look at David Archibald's paper from a couple of weeks ago. He summarises his views:

1. The Sun drives climate change and it will be colder next decade by 2.0 degrees centigrade.

2. The anthropogenic carbon dioxide effect is real, minuscule, and too small to be measured.

3. Higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will boost agricultural production.

4. Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is wholly beneficial.

And if higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will boost agricultural production

It ... follows that if the industrialised countries of the world wanted to be caring and sharing towards the third world, the best thing that could be done for the third world is to increase atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Who would want to deny the third world such a wonderful benefit?

Whoever said the science was settled?

Solar radiation theory of global warming disputed

Recent global warming is not caused by solar radiation, according to a new scientific study, disputing a theory advanced by some researchers as an alternative to the UN view that temperatures are rising as a result of human activities.

Good. This is how science is supposed to work. The claim that the sun has been too cool to warm the earth enough seems so basic that it would be hard to understand if the solar theorists had overlooked the numbers.

Still, let's see the numbers put to the test. There remain, of course, huge holes in the theory that CO2 causes global warming.

And even if it does, combating climate change isn't necessarily the best way to spend money.

Global warming uncertainty and hypocrisy

Writing of the Live Earth concerts, The News of the World says that 7/7/07 was the day the earth moved. "We've got pics of the Gore-geous girls and boys who strutted their stuff around the world to save the planet."

All the hype makes it a good time to recall the recent survey reported by the BBC under the headline 'Scepticism' over climate claims.

The Ipsos Mori poll of 2,032 adults ... found 56% believed scientists were still questioning climate change.

There was a feeling the problem was exaggerated to make money, it found.

So people are noticing that green policies surprisingly often mean more money for the Treasury. Odd, that.

This is all the space that the report gives to the survey's findings (except to add that "terrorism, graffiti, crime and dog mess were all of more concern than climate change"). The rest is sage warnings from the great and the good that climate change is serious.

Certainly listeners to Radio 2 last week could have come away with the notion that scientists still had questions about climate change. They ran a balanced half hour discussion asking whether the recent floods were a symptom of global warming, with Tony Juniper from Friends of the Earth and Philip Stott of London University. Maybe the website team would be shocked. (Incidentally, Philip Stott also pops up on Richard & Judy, so viewers there might get the same heretical impression.)

The public might also wonder about "Greenland's lush past".

Armies of insects once crawled through lush forests in a region of Greenland now covered by more than 2,000m of ice.

DNA extracted from ice cores shows that moths and butterflies were living in forests of spruce and pine in the area between 450,000 and 800,000 years ago.

The BBC report concentrates on the suggestion that the ice sheet is more resistant to warming than previously thought. But what caused this warming? Surely not carbon emissions!

Back at the concert, The News of the World reports that Madonna, who starred last night, has a carbon footprint equivalent to 54 average Americans, 102 average Brits, and 14,548 average Malawians. These stars, they'll do anything for the publicity.