A guest posting from Fred Langan
In March, I travelled 1,800 kilometres on an icebreaker from Quebec City to Voisey’s Bay, Labrador. The icebreaker is a Polar Class 4 with a 30,000 horsepower engine and reinforced bow shaped like an upside down soup spoon to ride over the ice.
We first got stuck in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, surrounded by seals. A year ago there was lots of open water here. Dining with the crew, men who spend six weeks on six weeks off battling through the ice, I asked them their thoughts on Global Warming. They voiced their scepticism in rather earthy language.
Anyone who speaks like that in the city is almost always derided as a “Climate Change Denier”, the phrase Global Warming long since parked. The denier name is particularly nasty since it is picked on purpose from Holocaust Denier, to give anyone who disagrees with the new green religion the stain of a truly mortal sinner.
What follows is an excerpt from a piece by Matt Ridley, who writes on the subject often in the British Conservative weekly, The Spectator and the Times from which this is plucked. His main argument is that the world is over-reacting to climate change. This is about the recent floods and hurricanes in Britain.
Floods and Gales in the UK Are Not Evidence of Climate Change
In the old days we would have drowned a witch to stop the floods. These days the Green Party, Greenpeace and Ed Miliband demand we purge the climate sceptics. No insult is too strong for sceptics these days: they are “wilfully ignorant“ (Ed Davey), “headless chickens” (the Prince of Wales) or “flat-earthers” (Lord Krebs), with “diplomas in idiocy” (one of my fellow Times columnists).
What can these sceptics have been doing that so annoys the great and the good? They sound worse than terrorists. Actually, sceptics have pretty well all been purged already: look what happened to Johnny Ball and David Bellamy at the BBC. Spot the sceptic on the Climate Change Committee. Find me a sceptic within the Department of (energy and) Climate Change. Frankly, the sceptics are a ragtag bunch of mostly self-funded guerrillas, who have made little difference to policy – let alone caused the floods.
What’s more, in the row over whether climate change is causing the current floods and storms, the sceptics are the ones who are sticking to the consensus, as set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – you know, the body that the alarm-mongers are always telling us to obey. And it is the sceptics who have been arguing for years for resilience and adaptation, rather than decarbonisation.
And a bit of background from Wikipedia on the author:
Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley, DL, FRSL, FMedSci, known commonly as Matt Ridley, is a British journalist who has written several popular science books. He is also a businessman and a Conservative member of the House of Lords.
Eric Koch’s new book, New Beginnings, was launched on September 20. The book is available from 
Decarbonisation and resilience/adaptation are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps both are necessary, or at least desirable. Why either/or? Perhaps both/and is the preferable response.
Climate Change and the concept of God have in common that we only really will be sure of their existence when we actually will be confronted by them. In the meantime it is prudent to hedge our beds and invest wholeheartedly in alternate energy which will create jobs and make us breathe easier. As far as God is concerned, leading a decent life has its own benefits.
What a pity that the general lack of a good education in science leads people to make easy, faulty conclusions: global warming is not contradicted by all that ice. Just because it’s still winter-like here in New York City is no proof at all that Global Warming is a myth. Firstly, if you look at the overall global temperature, it has been steadily rising, whether it is colder in one part of the earth than is usual or not. The temperature of the seas is rising. It really is head-in-the-sand to ignore the reality. Anomalies of the jet stream, caused by the rising ocean temperatures, are, I think, the major cause of our weird weather (someone correct me if I’m wrong). But the main point I want to make is that the weather in any one part of the world doesn’t prove anything. One has to have a global picture to recognize the danger.
Why should an acknowledgement of global warming be taken as alarmist, rather than rational and sensible, and a call to action?
Several points made. The ‘denier’ tag is unfortunate. People that follow science and the way it works, with evidence and peer review are, in the main, so impressed with the evidence they sign up to reports and do their best to warn us. Those that pick and choose which science to follow may not be wrong, but they operate on a logical plane that excludes peer review. Man made global warming (for that is the real issue) is ‘obvious’ from the overwhelming evidence but not provable.
We do know that we’re helping to poison and warm the planet. But as even James Lovelock wrote recently, we don’t know the pace of warming and shouldn’t get too locked into a truth or false position. But perhaps we should do the obvious. I have house insurance, not because of science or probability, but because the cost is acceptable against the incredible result of a fire.
Matt Ridley wants to take the risk of no insurance. Unfortunately the rest of us, in all probability, will have to pay.