By Christopher Booker
A lunatic crop of laws for global warming
The cool wet summer of 2007 may be looked back on as the moment when global warming finally got serious: in two respects. First, we are beginning to see the scarcely credible costs of the legislation our politicians are dishing out, supposedly to change the world's climate.
At the same time, the latest climate data themselves begin to raise some rather serious question marks over the scientific basis for that legislation.
There has been no more vivid example of the mounting costs of our politicians' "climate change" policy than BP's announcement of a £200 million plant in Hull to turn a million tons of wheat a year into "biofuel". This is to help meet the EU's new diktat that within 13 years "CO2 neutral" biofuels must supply 10 per cent of all our transport needs.
The UK's current wheat production is 11 million tons (against our consumption of 10 million). To meet the 10 per cent target by 2020 from wheat alone would require us to grow 14 million tons of wheat a year, 3 million more than we currently grow. World demand for wheat is rising so fast that, in the past two years, a global surplus has become a deficit.
Soaring prices have already doubled. Yet it is at this very moment that the EU decides we must either turn our entire domestic wheat production into fuel (thus needing to import 13 million additional tons from the world market), or devote similar amounts of our farmland to growing other fuel crops.
By any measure, this is complete lunacy. Yet consider some other recent reports inspired by the political response to "global warming". Last week, some of our leading travel firms asked the High Court to declare illegal the £2 billion a year Gordon Brown is costing airline passengers with his tax of up to £80 on every UK-bought airline ticket.
The chief executive of ThyssenKrupps warns that EU climate change policy is likely to cost Germany alone 500,000 jobs, as industries relocate outside the EU to escape its requirements. And, as this newspaper reported last week, the Taxpayers' Alliance reveals that local councils are paying at least £102 million a year on a new army of "climate change-related" officials.
The list goes on and on. By 2050, the EU has decreed, we must reduce our output of CO2 by 60 per cent. As one step towards this, within two years the EU is to make it illegal to buy ordinary incandescent light bulbs.
This will force us (according to Government figures) to spend billions of pounds on new light fittings, to accommodate hideous "low-energy" compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), which to work to full efficiency, the experts point out, must be left on all the time, thus substantially eroding any savings in CO2.
Yet just when all this tidal wave of new costs is approaching, the latest scientific data, as I reported last week, are beginning to raise the largest question marks so far over the entire global warming thesis on which they are based.
A graph of satellite data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that, over the past eight years, average global temperatures have flattened out well below their peak in 1998. The 2007 figures to June show a dip to a level first reached in 1983, 24 years ago.
During this same period, however, the graph of CO2 levels from the Mauna Loa Observatory has continued a consistent rise. If rising CO2 inexorably means rising temperatures, what happened to those temperatures?
More importantly, what happened to the brains of all those panicking politicians who are now heaping on us an Everest of costs without bothering to check whether the simple little equation on which they are based actually corresponds with reality?
The cool wet summer of 2007 may be looked back on as the moment when global warming finally got serious: in two respects. First, we are now beginning to see the scarcely credible costs of the legislation our politicians are dishing out, supposedly to change the world's climate.
At the same time, the latest climate data themselves begin to raise some rather serious question marks over the scientific basis for that legislation.
There has been no more vivid example of the mounting costs of our politicians "climate change" policy than BP's recent announcement of a £200 million plant in Hull to turn a million tons of wheat a year into "biofuel". This is to help meet the EU's new diktat that within 13 years "CO2 neutral" biofuels must supply 10 per cent of all our transport needs.
The UK's entire current wheat production is 11 million tons (against our consumption of 10 million). To meet the EU's 10 per cent target by 2020 from wheat alone would require us to grow 13 million tons of wheat a year, 2 million tons more than we currently produce. World demand for wheat is now rising so fast that, in the past two years, a global surplus has turned into a deficit.
Soaring prices have already doubled. Yet it is at this very moment that the EU decides we must either turn our entire domestic wheat production into fuel (thus needing to import 10 million additional tons from the world market), or devote similar amounts of our farmland to growing other fuel crops.
By any measure, this is complete lunacy. Yet consider some other recent reports inspired by the political response to "global warming". Last week some of our leading travel firms asked the High Court to declare illegal the £2 billion a year Gordon Brown is costing airline passengers with his tax of up to £80 on every UK-bought airline ticket.
The chief executive of ThyssenKrupps warns that EU climate change policy is likely to cost Germany alone 500,000 jobs, as industries relocate outside the EU to escape its requirements. And, as this newspaper reported last week, the Taxpayers Alliance reveals that local councils are paying at least £102 million a year on a new army of "climate change-related" officials.
The list goes on and on. By 2050, the EU has decreed, we must reduce our output of CO2 by 60 per cent. As one step towards this, within two years the EU is to make it illegal to buy ordinary incandescent light bulbs.
This will force us (according to Government figures) to spend billions of pounds on new light fittings, to accommodate hideous "low-energy" compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), which to work to full efficiency, the experts point out, must be left on all the time, thus substantially eroding any savings in CO2.
Yet just when all this tidal wave of new costs is approaching, the latest scientific data, as I reported last week, are beginning to raise the largest question marks so far over the entire global warming thesis on which they are based.
A graph of satellite data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that, over the past eight years, average global temperatures have flattened out well below their peak in 1998. The 2007 figures to June show a dip to a level first reached in 1983, 24 years ago.
During this same period, however, the graph of CO2 levels from the Mauna Loa Observatory has continued a consistent rise. If rising CO2 inexorably means rising temperatures, what happened to those temperatures?
More importantly, what happened to the brains of all those panicking politicians who are now heaping on us an Everest of costs without bothering to check whether the simple little equation on which they are based actually corresponds with reality?
Dodgy phone-ins are nothing to the BBC's great wind scam
A feature of the row over the BBC's rigging of competitions has been the rush to protest that this is trivial compared with the much greater scandal of the BBC's generally biased world-view on a whole range of topics, giving almost everything it broadcasts a distorting spin.
It is not always easy to pin this down to hard, indisputable facts, but one small, telling example consistently demonstrates just how one-sided its coverage has become.
For some years, in all the BBC's promotion of the benefits of wind power, it has always concealed one central flaw. This is the fact that turbines are a highly inefficient and unreliable energy source because wind only blows on average for a quarter of the time.
The BBC betrays its systematic bias on this by invariably referring to the output of wind turbines only in terms of their "installed capacity", as if their blades were constantly spinning at maximum efficiency,
Last week, for instance, the BBC reported on three turbines, nearly 400ft high, being installed at the port of Bristol. These, it told us, will produce "all the electricity needed to run the port", while saving 15,000 tons of CO2 every year.
There was no mention of the fact that three quarters of the time the port will have to draw its power from conventional power stations, kept running to step in when the wind drops (let alone that those 15,000 tons of "CO2 savings" equate to 3 per cent of the yearly emissions of one jumbo jet).
Another tireless promoter of the wind scam is Sarah Mukherjee, the BBC's environmental correspondent, who recently reported on the Government's energy White Paper standing in front of the 36-turbine Gallow Rig windfarm in Dumfriesshire, which she excitably claimed produces "enough power for around 18,000 homes".
In fact, thanks to the Renewable Energy Foundation's website, we can now see exactly how much (or how little) energy is produced by every turbine in the land. This shows that claims such as this exaggerated Gallow Rig's output by about 400 per cent.
Because this sort of telltale error is so persistent in the BBC's coverage of wind power, perhaps it is time for the corporation to tell us exactly what it is up to.
Friends of the Earth is friend of EU
My sharp-eyed colleague Richard North, who runs www.eureferendum.com, spotted a fascinating admission by Siim Kallas, the EU's Estonian anti-fraud commissioner. In a speech in Brussels, Mr Kallas was referring to the lobby groups that play a key part in the way the EU is governed.
This is the process known to the EU as "participatory democracy", whereby it enjoys dialogue not so much with ordinary European citizens (heaven forfend!) as with bodies which supposedly speak on their behalf, representing what it calls "organised civil society".
Mr Kallas said that one of the more important such organisations in Brussels is Friends of the Earth Europe, adding that it gets half its income from EU member states and the EU itself, including £425,000 a year from the European Commission.
So the Commission actually uses our money to fund a supposedly independent organisation to lobby it, on issues where the EU and Friends of the Earth have pretty well identical views anyway.
No prizes for guessing which issue is currently number one on the FoE agenda. As its website proclaims: "Climate change: the biggest threat our planet is facing!"
