Gotta love the Viscount

The climate bugaboo is the strangest intellectual aberration of our age

Christopher Monckton says that perspective was sorely missing at the Cancun climate conference.

By Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

"But don’t you realise," said the bearded, staring enviro-zomb with the regrettable T-shirt, “that global cooling is what we must expect because of global warming?”

"Don’t you realise," I replied, "how silly that sounds? The lowest temperatures ever recorded here in Cancun six days in a row; four extreme winters on the trot in the Northern hemisphere; more people dying in one three-day cold snap in little England in 2002 than Oxfam pretends died of ‘global warming’ worldwide throughout 2010; where’s your perspective, man?"

Perspective, the Olympian capacity to see events as they affect not just us and our mates but everyone, and not just in the excitement of the present but sub specie aeternitatis, in the long, calm, kindly shadow of eternity: this has gone from what passes for education in the West.

The climate bugaboo, the strangest intellectual aberration of our age, rampages because in the me and now we have cast aside three once-universal forms of learning that gave us perspective: a Classical education, to remind us that in reason and logic there is a difference between true and false; a scientific education, to show us which is which; and a religious education, to teach us why the distinction matters.

With perspective, no one would waste a single second of his own time or a red cent of other people’s money trying, Canute-like, to make “global warming” go away.

In the me and now, even eminent professors lack perspective. Last week one such wrote to the Daily Telegraph to say that Roger Helmer, the jovial Tory MEP, ought not to have gone to Cancun for the latest big-carbon-footprint UN climate junket. Instead, said the Prof, Mr Helmer should have used the time learning that “global warming” of 0.7C in a single century was unprecedented in the last 600,000 years.

No. As Mr Helmer wrote in his reply, 11,400 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age, temperatures in Antarctica rose by 5C in just three years. That’s global warming. Thermometers in central England showed warming of 2.2C during just 40 years from 1695-1735 – eight times faster than 20th-century warming.

Another headline last week shrieked that Viscount Monckton had admitted global warming is happening. Again, where’s the perspective? The author had aimed to suggest that if even a notorious recusant was now confessing, in the words of Dr Heinz Kiosk, that “We Are All Guilty”, no one could deny that “global warming” is, like, I mean, jolly bad stuff, man.

Nice try, but no. Four years ago, I wrote in the Sunday Telegraph that: “There are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit, but that’s as far as the consensus goes.”

Yes, there is a greenhouse effect. Yes, CO2 contributes to it. Yes, it causes warming. Yes, we emit CO2. Yes, warming will result. But not a lot.

Even if CO2 were as bad as some think, pietistic extravagances like Boris’ Bikes in London would solve nothing. The cost of this lunatic scheme – I kid you not – is £16,400 per bike. But it’s “green”, so no one did the maths. So heroically cost-ineffective are schemes like this that it would cost £4 quadrillion to forestall the 3 C of “global warming” claimed for this century.

While I’m at it, I wasn’t “forced to leave a high-level business summit” in Cancun, either. The organisers, Climate Change Ltd, said they would take my $1000 entrance fee provided that, unlike other paying delegates, I raised no points from the floor: they said only believers in man-made apocalypse could speak up. (my emphasis).

Another failure of perspective. One of the two ancient principles of natural justice long recognised in British law is audiatur et altera pars. Hear the other side too. It’s certainly cheaper, and it’s probably right.