Breaking: British Member of Parliament Admits Climate Change Act ‘A Mistake’
Britain’s deeply unpopular Climate Change Act (2008) may be set for repeal as another politician joins the growing number of MP’s aghast at the damage it is having on the nation’s ailing economy.
Conservative Member of Parliament, Douglas Carswell’s mea culpa today (February 25, 2013) shows dignity and acceptance of the weight of evidence conflicting with the already scientifically dubious notion of human-caused global warming. “My biggest regret as an MP is that I failed to oppose the 2008 Climate Change Act. It was a mistake. I am sorry,” said Carswell on his blog.
The announcement comes hot on the heels of last week’s surprise admission by Rajendra Pachuari, the UN’s head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Dr. Pachauri conceded that we are now into a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, as confirmed recently by Britain’s Met Office. Even NASA’s most strident climate doomsayer, Dr. James Hansen concedes there has been “a pause” in any temperature rise.
The 2008 rush to enact the UK’s “carbon tax” is now dismissed by Carswell as “gesture legislation” and like other politicians he admits “this law has turned out to have real consequences.” Like others Carswell has woken up to the stark reality of just how much the UK’s Climate Change Act has pushed up energy prices and is “squeezing households and making economic recovery ever more elusive,” says the MP. Under the Act the government is currently legally committed to cutting CO2 emissions by 35 per cent by 2022 and 50 per cent by 2025. In contrast, the EU is only committed to cutting emissions 20 per cent by 2020.Skyrocketing energy bills have forced 6 million households in fuel poverty and the proposed Carbon Floor Price will increase this number to 12 million – that is 1 in 4 households
The rise in dissent in the corridors of power is matched by a new willingness among impartial observers to review the very cornerstone of climate alarmism, the so-called ‘greenhouse gas theory’ which researchers at Principia Scientific International (PSI) say is also refuted. One of PSI’s leading climatologists, Professor Ole Humlum of the University of Olso recently published a telling study in the respected Global and Planetery Journal that used only approved government-sourced data to prove that temperatures rose before levels of carbon dioxide (CO2). Professor Humlum and his team concluded: “Changes in ocean temperatures explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 since January 1980. Changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions.”
Professor Humlum and his 200+ PSI colleagues are now in the vanguard of exposing the flaws in “greenhouse gas” science, once discarded already by mainstream scientists over 50 years ago. The American Meteorological Society (AMS) had, at that time, thrown cold water on the notion that carbon dioxide could do anything to alter our climate. In one of it’s main publications the AMS concluded that idea that CO2 could alter the climate “was never widely accepted and was abandoned when it was found that all the long-wave radiation [that would be] absorbed by CO2 is [already] absorbed by water vapor.” [1]
It was political will rather than scientific endeavor that ressurected the discredited ‘theory’ decades later. In the 1980’s the British Government seized on CO2 as a useful political tool to raise tax revenues and invested heavily in the now discredited Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA). It was a keynote speech delivered to the Royal Society by Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, in 1988 that set our modern malaise in motion. Thatcher’s ‘science adviser’ at the time, Christopher Monckton had been most impressed by the CO2-hating science of NASA’s James Hansen that had swayed an impressionable U.S. Congress three months earlier.
Ironically, Carswell is a graduate of the UEA, made infamous by the Climategate scandal of 2009. He is also regarded widely as among the more principled politicians in Westminster hoping to turn the tide on this folly. Carswell was voted in 2009 by ‘Spectator’ readers as ‘Parliamentarian of the Year’ while ‘The Daily Telegraph’ nominated him a ‘Briton of the Year.’ He now takes his place among that fast growing band of dissenting Conservative politicians speaking out about the damage misguided ‘green’ policies have had on our economies.
Meanwhile, down in Australia the UN’s Dr Pachauri has been in Melbourne for a 24-hour visit to deliver a lecture for Deakin University. He admitted it was time for open discussion about controversial science and welcomed such “politically incorrect views” and that people had the right to question the science, whatever their motivations.
“People have to question these things and science only thrives on the basis of questioning,” Dr Pachauri said. The UN’s top climate expert said there was “no doubt about it” that it was good for controversial issues to be “thrashed out in the public arena.”
Professor Humlum and his PSI colleagues are now urging other politicians to join Carswell and engage in direct dialogue with eminently qualified dissenting PSI scientists such as Dr. Tim Ball, John Sanderson (immediate past president of the Royal College of Science Association), Professor Humlum and others who have no stake in foisting junk science on hard pressed taxpayers.
[1] Brooks, C.E.P. (1951). “Geological and Historical Aspects of Climatic Change.” In Compendium of Meteorology, edited by Thomas F. Malone, pp. 1004-18 (at 1016). Boston: American Meteorological Association. It shows the American Meteorological Society had refuted the concept of a GHE in 1951 in its Compendium of Meteorology. They stated that the idea that CO2 could alter the climate “was never widely accepted and was abandoned when it was found that all the long-wave radiation [that would be] absorbed by CO2 is [already] absorbed by water vapor.”
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