In the mean time I’ve been keeping tabs on the whole ‘Climategate’ saga which thankfully blew up a few months ago before the Copenhagen Climate talks. Much of the foot work was done by the blogs both in this country and in the United States as the mainstream media sort to bury their heads in the sands and managed to turn a collective blind eye.

Today has seen heavy snowfall right across the country causing disruption to traffic networks and business. However, predictably the usual suspects have been quick to claim that what is predicted to be the coldest winter in thirty years is not, in any way whatsoever, in conflict with man-made global warming.

If you haven’t read it already, Dr Richard North wrote an excellent article for the Mail on Sunday about how the Met Office has been so wrong about its long term forecasts. I am also about to start reading Christopher Booker’s latest tome on the subject of Global Warming and Climate Change which comes highly recommended.

As I write, it is beginning to snow again, so I leave you with a photograph of all that Global Warming in my garden this morning. Clearly I had absolutely nothing better to do…

The talk acted as somewhat of a preview to his forthcoming book titled The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the obsession with ‘climate change’ turning out to be the most costly scientific blunder in history? which is out soon, and laid out the case against anthropogenic Global Warming.

Having read Richard North and Christopher Booker’s The Great Deception, Scared to Death, and both the Booker column and Richard North’s EU Referendum, much of the content of the speech was pretty familiar. However, it is always appreciable, as Booker noted in his speech, to be able to meet other people of likeminded opinions in warm and friendly surroundings.

A video of the event should be available on the internet at some point in the near future. There were also amusing speeches from TFA Chairman, Roger Helmer MEP and the Democratic Unionist Party MP Sammy Wilson. All in all a very enjoyable night, and a welcome opportunity to finally meet Mr Booker before he, in his own words, is ‘tucked up safely in the church yard across the way’. Hopefully such an event will not be for many years hence!

As he points out, when the snow cover on Snowdonia fell between 2003 and 2007 the mass media crowed that this was of course evidence of global warming caused by human activity. But now that Snowdonia has experienced abnormally deep snowfall this year, guess what, it has rarely if ever been mentioned by the same ‘concerned’ media.

NumberWatch, in a humorous ‘rebuke’ of Christopher Booker’s latest article points out that:

The snows of Snowden are a case in point. They were news while they were shrinking, but when that goes into reverse, the rules of modern polite society require the quiet turning of a blind eye.

Equally interesting is the way in which the eco-lobby and the green left have begun to noticeably shift their rhetoric and focus from ‘Global Warming’ to ‘Climate Change’ when it turns out that the facts don’t suit their warming theory. Amusing if it were not so serious is the recent suggestion by some more ‘scientists’ that the recent large increase in Antarctica ice is down to (yes, you guessed it) global warming. Once again it is apparently man that is causing the Arctic to warm while Antarctica to cool.

Christopher Booker finishes his article with the following statement:

It won’t do for believers in warmist orthodoxy to claim that, although temperatures may be falling, this is only because they are ‘masking an underlying warming trend that is still continuing’ – nor to fob us off with assurances that the ‘German model shows that higher temperatures than 1998, the warmest year on record, are likely to return after 2015’. In view of what is now at stake, such quasi-religious incantations masquerading as science are something we can no longer afford. We should get back to proper science before it is too late.

Since the political issue of ‘Climate Change’ has now become almost entirely devoid of any scientific merit or research that may now be occurring, it is imperative that calls for us to all to immediately wreck our economies, consume less and allow government to tell us what to do to an even greater extent be refuted at ever opportunity.

Yet, for the organisers to call the speaking event a debate was incredibly (and probably purposefully) misleading because in fact all members on the panel of so-called ‘experts’ were in complete agreement and therefore there was no actual debate of any kind at all. Not once did they disagree.

This point was starkly illustrated within the first five minutes of the ‘debate’ fully beginning. The first question put to the panel by the Chairman of the event, Roger Nunn, was something along the lines of ‘where are we in the Climate Change debate’ and could the panel briefly explain Climate Change.

This was put first to Professor Anil Markandya who is, it should be noted, a lecturer in Economics at the University of Bath (ie. not an environmental scientist) and also a member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Professor Markandya proceeded to tell the assembled audience that Climate Change was caused by human activity in releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that there was a consensus among the scientific community on this supposed ‘fact’. The other three panellists unsurprisingly agreed entirely.

Yet, how exactly can something firstly be called ‘fact’ when it is scientifically disputed, and secondly where is the consensus when many scientists still profoundly disagree with the theory (for it is only a theory) that man-made CO2 production is the main component of global warming?

There was in fact only one dissenting voice on this point during the night which came from my friend Matthew. In his question (which was more of a statement really) he pointed out that of fundamental importance is whether or not humans are causing ‘Climate Change’ or ‘Global Warming’. If humans, through industrialisation and CO2 output are not the cause of what can loosely be called ‘Climate Change’ or ‘Global Warming’ then there is absolutely no reason for humans to massively reduce CO2 output as was the constant suggestion by the assembled panel of ‘experts’.

Matthew highlighted that there was not a complete consensus on this issue, shown by the fact (amongst others) that five hundred leading scientists had signed The Manhattan Declaration recently which specifically declared that:

Global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and that carbon dioxide CO2 is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life … and … that there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.

Equally there had been a number of relatively prominent reports and documentaries including The Great Global Warming Swindle which have starkly disagreed that humanity is causing catastrophic climate change. Matthew also pointed out that the Chairman and joint organiser Roger Nunn had received numerous emails asking that he place a sceptical voice on the panel so that an actual debate may take place, but that Roger Nunn had continually refused.

Andrew Pendleton, who is the Climate Change adviser to Christian Aid was given the opportunity to reply to Matthew’s point. He immediately dismissed the Manhattan Declaration as ‘bad science’ that should not be allowed to cloud the ‘way forward’. The Great Global Warming Swindle by Martin Durkin, not without its errors like all reports, was again casually dismissed by Mr Pendleton. The reason? A few of the scientists on the programme had received funding from the Oil Industries. While this is entirely true, this of course does not tackle the point of whether the evidence or the science these scientists have put forward is correct or not. In fact Mr Pendleton seeks to bypass that altogether.

In much the same way the IPCC and those who wish to perpetuate the man-made causes of Climate Change orthodoxy, such as the UN, Governments and the EU have huge vested interests in doing so and are funded by those who have equally large vested interests. Everybody has biases. That is the point. The IPCC was set up to specifically find that man causes climate change through use of CO2 – and guess what, it surprisingly found them.

Mr Pendleton also took the opportunity to smear those in what he called ‘climate denial’ to those who did not agree that there was a link between smoking and lung cancer, or HIV and Aids. However, he and others like him have deliberately used the word ‘denial’ do so because it purposefully invokes undertones of the only other time the word ‘denial’ is used in such context: Holocaust denial. This is the sort of level to which Mr Pendleton and his ilk unfortunately stoop.

‘Climate Change’ has now become almost entirely a politicised issue and separated in most part from any scientific research that may be occurring. In that sense I suppose the political belief in man-made carbon causes of global warming or climate change is much like religion in a way. Whatever contrary evidence is placed in the way is ignored or dismissed as ‘bad science’ or biased in some way or other. This brings to mind something Martin Luther is said to have written:

Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and … know nothing but the word of God.

Despite evidence and research to the contrary, the political agenda of man-made causes of climate change steams ahead undeterred.

At the end of the ‘debate’ we stood outside the Abbey entrance and handed out to those leaving a double-sided A4 reproduction of an article by Christopher Booker and Richard North printed in the Telegraph in November last year called ‘The deceit behind global warming’. On the sheet we also included a few website links to videos of The Great Global Warming Swindle, and other sceptical websites and blogs.

We managed to give out all of our one hundred or so leaflets and we hope that those people we gave them to will take the time to read the article and have a look at the opposing opinions that have been put forth to the current orthodoxy of man-made causes of Climate Change.

During his recent column in The Sunday Telegraph, Christopher Booker highlighted how our Government (the EU Commission) has become involved in actively colluding with the Chinese authorities to deny aid relief in Tibet. Booker tells us:

On the country’s northern edge, six months of snow and record low temperatures have created a catastrophe in the Chinese province of Chingai. According to China’s official news agency, 500,000 animals have died and three million people face starvation. When a similar if much smaller crisis 10 years ago hit Ladakh, in northern Kashmir, thousands of lives were saved by the expert intervention of a British charity, ApTibet, working with the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan Relief Committee.

It should be noted at this point that we have seen extraordinarily low temperatures across the globe this winter ranging from blizzards in Texas to snow carpeting Jerusalem, Damascus and Amman – all of which Christopher Booker has actually reported on in previous weeks. However, as Booker observed at the time, this has gone ‘virtually unreported in Britain’. This of course strongly and vividly contrasts with reporting from the BBC and many other British news agencies which persist in predicting global warming disaster and catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.

Once again regarding Tibet, one would have thought that right now the charity work carried out by ApTibet would be vital and much appreciated by the international community. Not so in the European Union. Booker continues by informing us that:

Two years ago, after China and Europe became ‘strategic partners’ under an agreement signed by Tony Blair, the EU’s acting president, in December 2005, the Commission suspended ApTibet’s operations because of its link to the Dalai Lama. Since then, it has done all it can to close the charity down…

The whole Booker column is well worth reading, as he describes the way in which the European Union has attempted to bankrupt ApTibet by suspending outstanding contracts with the agency and calling for immediate repayment of funds that it had readily given before the 2005 Blair agreement with China. Booker ends by commenting that:

Doubtless in Beijing, the EU’s ‘strategic partners’ are happy. Meanwhile, its troops are again shooting at Tibetans in the streets of Lhasa, while to the north, three million people are starving, without any hope of assistance from the outside world.

Of little surprise is the fact that you just don’t hear about this on the BBC or indeed from any other British news outlet. Research and analysis would be required to reach these conclusions – something that modern media is none too fond of; that, and it doesn’t fit the ‘official’ narrative of events.