EnviroSpin Watch

In 2005: let's work hard to cut those carbon claptrap emissions.....

I end the year with a splendidly uncompromising letter from the physicist, Gerald E. Marsh, published in The Financial Times (December 29): 'CO₂ cannot be called a pollutant':

"Carbon dioxide is a minor greenhouse gas that occurs naturally in the atmosphere and helps to maintain the earth at a temperature suitable for life - the principal greenhouse gas is water vapour. Carbon dioxide is essential to the growth of all plants. Without it plants could not grow and all animal life would die. In no way is this gas a pollutant. To call it one is misleading.

Calling carbon dioxide a pollutant is a political statement, not a scientific one. Behind the politics is the claim that the small observed global warming trend is due to the burning of fossil fuels rather than being of natural origin....."

".....The uncertainties are so great that the claim by the IPCC that 'most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations' is 'likely' to be unfounded. We do not yet understand the earth's climate well enough to be able to assess the long-term effect of the carbon dioxide that comes from burning fossil fuels.

The earth has been warming erratically for 10,000 years. That has been good, up to now, because it is what made the non-equatorial latitudes habitable. We can expect that warming trend to continue, no matter what we do about carbon dioxide."

And my own New Year's Resolution: to fight the current PC carbon claptrap on 'global warming' with increasing vigour, especially in the light of Mr. Blair's G8 ambitions. We really must put an end to the nonsensical and dangerous emissions claiming that we can manage climate change predictably by fiddling at the margins with just one politically-selected variable out of the millions involved. Climate changes: that is what it does. The idea of a 'stable climate' is the oxymoron of a self-deluding 'Age of Ecochondria'.

Last, but far more importantly, I again repeat the Disasters Emergency Committee's (DEC's) 'Tsunami Earthquake Appeal' details for all who would like to help in this most genuine and most terrible of tragedies:

DEC Website: www.dec.org.uk
Donation telephone: 0870 60 60 900
Address: DEC Tsunami Earthquake Appeal, PO Box 999, London EC3A 3AA, UK.

Philip, wishing everyone an ecohype-free New Year (some hope!). Now where is that peaty malt?