Matt Ridley’s annual Global Warming Policy Foundation lecture at the Royal Society in London last night was great – and I do recommend you read the text in full, now that it’s available on the GWPF website.
I’ll just pick a few highlights, one of which was the moment at the end where he described “the maddest thing of all” about the climate change industry.
Essentially, everything it does is a total waste of money.
And here is the maddest thing of all. Current policy is not even achieving decarbonisation. Whatever your views on the urgency of reducing emissions, the policy of subsidizing renewable energy is not achieving it.
Switching to biodiesel or ethanol actually increases emissions. So does burning wood in power stations. So does solar power in cloudy Germany. So do wind farms because they prevent the replacement of coal by gas or nuclear.
In 2012 Bjorn Lomborg calculated that 20 years of climate policy had reduced global emissions by less than 1 percent. During that time the world had spent more than a trillion dollars to subsidise wind and solar power, yet between them they had still not achieved 1% of world energy provision. In this country, they have just passed 2%.
In Germany, a 20% increase in renewables between 1999 and 2014 has resulted in no change in emissions at all.
Testifying to Congress in 2014, Professor Judith Curry, chair of Earth Sciences at Georgia Tech University said:
“Motivated by the precautionary principle to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change, attempts to modify the climate through reducing CO2 emissions may turn out to be futile.”
Savour that one, greentards. All those bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes you’ve erected; all those banks of stupid solar panels turning agricultural land into a scene out of a bad sci-fi movie; all those forests you’ve chopped down for “biofuel”; all those old people you’ve forced to die in fuel poverty; all those natives you’ve displaced to grow carbon offsets; all those trillions of dollars which could have been spent on something beneficial – healthcare, education, anti-terrorism intelligence, clean water supplies for the one billion people without access to them… – have instead been squandered on white elephant projects which do precisely zilch for the environment.
Greenies don’t like hearing this kind of home truth which, of course, was why in their usual open-minded, free-speech-cherishing way they tried to get last night’s lecture cancelled.
Here, for example, is a delightfully pompous, priggish intervention from Joanna Haigh, a physics professor from Imperial College, London, often used by the BBC to endorse the alarmist “consensus”. (And who, in the alarmist way, is more than happy to cherry-pick her data in order to prop up her scientifically bankrupt thesis.)
Joanna Haigh, Royal Society fellow and council member who attended the meeting, told DeSmog UK: “The Royal Society has decided that cancelling the booking would give the event an unwarranted higher profile.”
She added that “some scientist experts will attend the meeting and keep check on the accuracy of the statements.”
The arrogance and presumption of it! This puffed-up missy would seriously have us believe that the “science” only exists on her alarmist side of the argument and that the likes of Matt Ridley – who, by the way, has a perfectly respectable PhD in Zoology from Oxford, and is one of the world’s bestselling science authors – can only make their case by playing fast and loose with the facts.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
What a bunch of disgraceful, money-grubbing, charlatans the climate alarmists are. They are to the scientific method what gangs of Muslim taxi drivers in Rotherham are to 13-year-old white schoolgirls.
Obviously Matt Ridley – or Viscount Ridley, to give him his proper title – can’t say this sort of thing because he’s a member of the House of Lords and has to rub shoulders with alarmist scientists and greenie Ecommunists and BBC journalists and make out that actually he has a modicum of respect for their dodgy science and their nauseating eco-fascistic Weltanschauung.
I can though. Tossers.
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