Retreat of the warmists begins to accelerate
Just as we begin to see the colossal price we are being asked to pay for measures to combat climate change, ever more of the evidence adduced to support the global warming scare crumbles away.
A key article of faith for the "warmists" is a supposed increase in the incidence of extreme weather events, such as droughts. As Al Gore claimed to a US Senate committee in March, "droughts are becoming longer and more intense".
But US researchers, led by Gemma Narisma, have now shown that, far from becoming more frequent in recent decades, serious droughts have in fact become rarer than they were a century ago.
In a paper (reported on the website CO2Science.org) they identified the 30 most "severe and persistent" drought episodes of the 20th century.
Seven of these occurred before 1920, seven between 1921 and 1940 and eight between 1941 and 1960, dropping to five between 1961 and 1980.
The last two decades of the century, when the world was supposedly hotting up more than ever, saw just three. The worst drought affecting the developed world was the US Dust Bowl disaster of the mid-1930s.
This corresponds with the recently revised figures for US surface temperatures published by Gore's leading scientific ally, James Hansen of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
Last month, when Steve McIntyre, an expert statistical analyst, spotted a fundamental flaw in the method Hansen had used to calculate his figures, GISS was forced to publish a new graph, showing that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998, as generally accepted, but 1934. Of the 10 hottest years since 1880, four were in the 1930s, only three in the past decade.
This in turn followed the latest satellite figures from the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration showing how global temperatures in recent years have flattened out at about 0.2 degrees below their 1998 level, and that this summer's figures have been lower than they were in 1983, despite a continuing rise in CO2.
It is clear that 2007 is proving quite a turning point in the climate change debate.
Only last year one of the fathers of warmist alarmism, Professor James Lovelock, predicted that, by the end of this century, climate change would have been responsible for billions of deaths, and that the only habitable places left on Earth would be the polar regions.
Last week, however, significantly retreating from his apocalyptic view, he told the World Nuclear Association that, even though temperatures might rise by a further five degrees, nature and humanity would learn to adjust. The Earth was in "no danger".
Yet it is at this very time that, to combat the supposed threat, our political leaders are upping the ante in all directions.
At the recent UN conference in Vienna to discuss "Kyoto Two", the EU stood conspicuously alone with its plan to cut carbon emissions by up to 40 per cent, and its ruling that by 2020, 20 per cent of our energy must be generated from renewables, such as windpower and biofuels. British civil servants have advised ministers that these targets are wholly unreachable.
Already, not least in response to the new pressure on farmland to grow biofuels, wheat prices have soared to record levels and world grain stocks are plummeting, pushing the price of a loaf of bread for the first time over £1.
The Taxpayers Alliance last week calculated that "green taxes" now cost us £21.9 billion a year, equivalent to nearly £1,000 for every home in the country.
Yet scarcely a single politician in Europe dares question this collective flight from reality.
China, now building a new coal-fired power station every four days, last year added 102 gigawatts of new generating capacity, 25 per cent more than the entire capacity of the UK. As ever more pointed question marks rise up over the global warming thesis, who is to say it is the Chinese who are mad?
MPs cling to their final power, to pretend that they're in power
Our politicians continue to show an extraordinary reluctance to admit that there is an "elephant in the room" in the matter of how we are governed.
Boris Johnson makes the disaster of Ken Livingstone's scrapping of Routemaster buses in favour of ridiculous, Continental-style "bendies" the flagship issue of his bid to become London Mayor.
Yet, as he coyly admits in The Daily Telegraph, "alas, I don't think that current legislation would permit me to reintroduce the Routemasters as they were".
What he is too lily-livered to explain is that the law that would make it illegal to bring back the much-loved, user-friendly Routemaster is the EU's Bus and Coach Directive, 2001/85.
"The government," we are told, "plans to introduce new pictorial health warnings on cigarette packets," showing close-ups of diseased lungs and the corpses of those who have died from smoking-related diseases.
What we are not told is that "the government" that ordered us to do this is not the one we used to have in Westminster, but the new government we now have in Brussels, which laid down through directive 2001/37 just which shocking pictures we must place on our fag packets.
Again, when we are told that "the government" plans to introduce compulsory water metering, we are not told that the government proposing this is the EU - any more than that the reason our ministers cannot scrap their absurd Home Information Packs is because this would put them in breach of directive 2002/01 on the "energy performance of buildings", issued by the EU to combat global warming.
Finally last week, just to bring home where our seat of government now is, there was the campaign to stamp out food additives.
When the Food Standards Agency was asked to introduce such a ban, to stop our children behaving badly, it had to admit that it no longer has the power to make laws on food safety, because this has been handed over to head office, the European Food Safety Authority.
Presumably the reason that our MPs are so reluctant to explain how little power they have left to make our laws is that this might make us wonder why we bother to elect them at all.
Europe's advance bogs down in Flanders
The EU's leaders are clearly set on ramming through their new "Not the Constitution" treaty with as little consulting of their people as possible, even though in the case of Gordon Brown this means telling a brazen lie in order to avoid keeping the pledge on which he was elected.
But a potential fly in their ointment is the curious situation which has arisen in Belgium.
Thanks to growing enmity between the French and Flemish-speaking parts of its population, Belgium now has only a "caretaker government", because its constitutional court has ruled that the two groups must be equally represented.
There are all sorts of things a caretaker government is not authorised to do, such as sign treaties. But to redress the parliamentary balance between the two groups requires major legislation, which a caretaker government is again not empowered to introduce. Hence complete impasse.
Until this is resolved, Belgium will not have a government entitled to sign the EU treaty.
So Mr Brown and his colleagues cannot get the new government they want in Brussels until there is a new government in Brussels. At the moment, so bitter is the hostility between the Flemings and the Walloons, that prospect seems remote.
